Parallel Lies

by Ridley Pearson

  This was not a day anyone would soon forget—his public relations people had seen to that. The in-house cameras and video crew were recording every moment. Dateline was along for the ride, with the likelihood of their transmitting live footage over broadband data ports provided for passengers in each car. CNN awaited their arrival in Union Station. All the pieces were in place for a bang-up premiere.

  Goheen noticed the eyes of his audience shift. As a few heads turned, he sensed he might be losing them. For a moment he tensed, wondering if he’d written the wrong speech, but then, turning to see for himself, a father’s pride as well as a father’s annoyance pulsed through him as he caught sight of this late arrival. Gretchen wore a black cashmere overcoat—no controversial fur to stir the animal rights people—black Ferragamo pumps, and, as she timed the coat to fall open, a woven black cocktail dress that fit her like a thin sock. A pearl necklace. A pair of Tiffany, princess-cut, diamond earrings, weighing in at two carats each—Goheen knew them well, he’d paid twenty-two thousand dollars for those earrings for her twenty-first birthday. With her blonde hair up and just a touch of eye shadow, eye liner, and lipstick, she carried herself like royalty.

  Just days before, she had leveled accusations at him, and he had denied them all. They had fought for the first time in years, both losing their cool. In the end, he had forbidden her from attending this event. Yet here she was—in absolute defiance! He left his own script and made a fluid transition to welcoming his daughter, winning her applause. No matter what, she would not ride this train! He stumbled only slightly as he saw that on his daughter’s heels followed the tall, long-legged woman from his security division, Nell Priest, who wore a Japanese-influenced black wool pants suit with a wide tie at the waist and a plunging neckline that followed the tailored lapels. She wore a lined gray raincoat with epaulettes, the hem of which swayed with her rolling hips as she walked. The laced black shoes looked slightly out of place, but she pulled it off. The outfit, especially those shoes, told Goheen that she was on duty: ready to take off at a run at a moment’s notice. He forced himself back to the speech while thinking of her connection to the rogue Peter Tyler, who, according to Keith, was the one man who could throw a stick in their spokes. So damn many complications. He shook off these thoughts, never pausing, and jumped ahead in the text and worked his speech to its flag-waving conclusion.

  Complications or not, this day would be written in bold on his life’s calendar.

  Alvarez could hear Goheen’s speech from his hiding place beneath the dining car while he readied his thoughts for the five minutes of darkness as the F-A-S-T Track crossed beneath the Hudson River and into New Jersey. During these few minutes, dangling only a few feet above a railbed of crushed stone that would grind him to a pulp if he fell, he would have to climb out of his perch and up and into one of the four rear passenger cars, all peopled with mannequins and crash-test dummies. He needed to accomplish this extreme while in the tunnel in order to take advantage of the total darkness. Prior to the tunnel, but after the train’s departure, he needed to move one entire car length while still beneath the train—this, because internal records called for two maintenance men to ride in the front of the car immediately behind the second dining car, the car from which he was currently suspended.

  He had his work cut out for him.

  When Gretchen Goheen was introduced to the crowd by her father, Alvarez caught her name, wondering if she would be along for the ride, this woman he now knew in the context of a Plaza Hotel suite. In this moment of distraction, he briefly lost his balance, rolled to his right, and lost the headlamp—a camper’s light—that had been strapped to his head in preparation for his upcoming tunnel stunt. For such a small, lightweight device, it nonetheless fell loudly, first to the window shade below Alvarez, who reached for it but missed, and then sliding and plummeting unseen to the track’s concrete railbed.

  Alvarez held his breath and listened, pressing the Uniden radio earpiece firmly in place. “Tommy?” he heard. “It’s Keenan.”

  The voice of an NUS radio dispatcher replied, “Go ahead.”

  “Something just made a noise over here. Dining car two. Underneath, like. I heard it. You want me to check it out, or you want to send maintenance?”

  Alvarez now heard the man’s natural voice as well, as this same guard stepped closer to the dining car, up on the platform.

  “You hold your position on the platform, Keen. I’ll have maintenance take a look.” The dispatcher reconfirmed it as being under or about the second dining car.

  Maintenance! Alvarez tensed, cursing himself. It seemed possible, even likely, that maintenance might crawl under the car to inspect it, and whereas his carefully painted window shade might trick a security mirror extended into the car’s shadow, it would not pass the scrutiny of close inspection. He had either to abort or advance his plans, and he had only a few seconds to make that decision. No matter what, he had to get out from under this train. And fast.

  When Coopersmith, with whom Tyler was sequestered in the locomotive’s engine room, was summoned by dispatch to have one of his men check out an errant noise overheard by a guard, there was great reluctance and contempt on the man’s part to follow up on it.

  William Goheen’s speech was drawing to a close. Tyler interrupted Coopersmith’s assigning of one of the two other maintenance men in the locomotive, asking if he might tag along.

  This further aggravated Coopersmith, who then felt obliged to go himself. As a result, all three men climbed out of the locomotive, using the door away from the platform, and walked the gloomy space between the F-A-S-T Track and an Amtrak passenger train adjacent to it.

  “Probably nothing more than condensation,” Coopersmith speculated.

  “Chunk of ice. Absolutely,” the other maintenance man, a man named DeWulf, said. He had a French accent and he walked more slowly than the other two.

  Coopersmith explained to Tyler, “Any condensation that forms underneath the dining cars freezes en route, thaws here in the tunnel, and sloughs off. The Frenchies warned us about that from the get-go.”

  “Ice in August,” DeWulf said. “I remember thinking that was crazy.”

  “What’s crazy,” Coopersmith said, “is bothering us about it now.”

  There was loud applause from the other side of the train. A jazz trio started into “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

  The three stopped in front of the second dining car. Coopersmith pointed out small metal plaques attached to the cars indicating data connection points, manual overrides, and emergency controls, written in both French and English. “If there’s one problem with this whole setup,” Coopersmith said, “it’s that this damn train is bilingual.”

  “You got that right,” DeWulf agreed. “It should all be in French,” he teased.

  Tyler remained concerned that one of the security guards might confront them and identify him. He kept constant watch for approaching trouble. Amid the litter and debris, he saw a rat the size of a raccoon scamper out from under the bullet train and cross to the Amtrak. Behind them, he also saw a line of tracks left by the three of them—shoe prints in the dirt and dust. These ran from the locomotive down to where they stood.

  Coopersmith slipped an oddly shaped key into a hole in the frame of the car and released an air-locked door that opened. “Fredo,” he said to the Frenchman, “check for ice or a small puddle.”

  “How about our new friend here?” DeWulf suggested, believing Tyler was a new maintenance man, which was how Coopersmith had introduced him.

  “You gotta go under there,” Coopersmith informed him.

  “They have us chasing ice in winter,” DeWulf complained.

  “I gotta sign off on this now that dispatch is involved. Yes, they have us chasing ice.”

  DeWulf said, “Whoever catches that rat gets to eat him.” He dropped to his knees and crawled underneath.

  Tyler heard the opposite doors, those accessed from the platform, spit air as the s
upertrain was opened for preview. Not all of the guests would make the trip to Washington. Like a departing cruise ship of yesteryear, the train was taking on guests for a brief visit—in this case a champagne cocktail party in advance of the actual departure. All cars were opened for viewing, including the dining car where Tyler’s maintenance team was currently working. Looking up at the trailing passenger cars, Tyler saw the static faces of the many crash-test dummies and mannequins, erected in eerie fashion to resemble passengers.

  With this aisle-side door open, he could see up and into the area where the two dining cars connected, to the legs, male and female, of the boarding guests. He caught a glimpse of Nell Priest in profile, wearing a long black pantsuit and a gray overcoat, and his pulse quickened. He didn’t want her on this train.

  “What the hell?” he heard DeWulf call out from under the dining car. The man crawled out holding a backpacker’s headlamp in his gloved hand. It was clean—no dust or dirt on it.

  “One of yours?” Tyler asked the leader.

  Coopersmith shook his head, his mood suddenly sour. “We use goosenecks that clip to a pocket. Everyone’s issued the same gear.”

  Tyler snatched DeWulf’s flashlight from the man, quickly opened his own coveralls, and reached in, producing his handgun—a Beretta 9mm semiautomatic.

  Keeping in mind that guests were swarming the train, Tyler bootlegged the weapon. He then squatted, edged toward the darkness beneath the car, lowered his voice, and aimed the weapon and flashlight below the undercarriage. “Whoever is hiding under here, I’m a federal agent, I’m armed, and I’m coming under this car! If you do not make yourself known to me this instant, I will shoot on sight. So make yourself known to me.”

  He felt his body rush with heat, almost as if he were kicking in the door and seeing Chester Washington beating that crying baby’s head against the wall. The indignation. The rage. It all came rushing back to him. Tyler had called out a warning then too, only to have the gun knocked from his hand a moment later by an arm that somehow reached inhumanly across the distance of the room.

  Coopersmith stared at him.

  DeWulf proclaimed, “Federal agent?” in astonishment.

  Tyler felt sweat drip down his rib cage. Fear of the unknown parched his throat. He needed Alvarez alive.

  “No person is under there,” DeWulf advised.

  “Notify security. You two spread out and cover this immediate area,” he indicated the aisle between the two cars.

  Coopersmith got on the radio and told of the headlamp and that “one of his men” was going under to take a closer look.

  Tyler appreciated Coopersmith protecting his identity. He ducked and, gun extended in his right hand, flashlight in his left, slipped beneath the train.

  Tyler trained the flashlight’s powerful beam left, right, up, and down. The barrel of his handgun followed that light, his index finger outside the trigger guard but ready. He knew something no one else did: Alvarez had dropped that headlamp. He believed it absolutely.

  From behind him, DeWulf called under the train, “If there was anyone under there, he would have already taken off. Yes?”

  Tyler instructed the man to move farther down the train—DeWulf seemed to play by his own rules. Tyler then aimed the flashlight’s beacon up at the car’s undercarriage.

  “Fredo!” he called out, stopping the man. “I need you under here.”

  “Moi!?”

  “I don’t know what the hell I’m looking at,” Tyler said. “Get under here and help me, would you?”

  DeWulf reluctantly crawled under. Accepting the flashlight from Tyler, DeWulf waved the beam and said, “That’s part of the backup system for the brakes. This is the sewage collection tank… fresh water… mechanicals…. Wait just one second!” The wide circle of light reversed direction, and DeWulf scampered backward, away from where the headlamp had fallen. He thumped the back of his head against the undercarriage and dropped the flashlight.

  Tyler picked it up and immediately spotted the false floor of the extended window shade. “I’m armed,” he repeated sharply.

  The jazz trio started into a rendition of “New York, New York,” up on platform seven. Champagne bottles popped, and in a nervous reaction Tyler nearly pulled the trigger. There was a surreal quality to the juxtaposition of the caviar-and-champagne party overhead and the litter-strewn filth and feeling of danger here below.

  Tyler signaled for DeWulf to hold the light while he moved forward and reached overhead. He took hold of the camouflaged shade and, in one motion, tore it loose. It ruffled like a flag and fell to the concrete floor. The space above held nylon webbing, like a hammock.

  “Empty,” DeWulf said. “Gone.”

  “Wouldn’t be so sure,” Tyler replied, working the flashlight in all directions.

  “What’s going on under there?” Coopersmith called out.

  Tyler called out from underneath, “Can security seal the tunnel?”

  “With all the trains coming and going? Not possible.”

  “Besides, he is long gone,” DeWulf speculated, studying the arrangement left behind. “Clever bastard, this one.”

  Tyler heard Coopersmith making the radio call. He said to DeWulf, “I need to get started right now. Your boss and I are going to start at the back of the train and work our way forward. You,” he said to the man, “are going to get a message to someone.”

  By the time Priest had been located and escorted to the empty side of the bullet train, Tyler and DeWulf had searched beneath the four trailing cars while Coopersmith and one other of his men searched forward. At the same time, security guards worked the interior, randomly checking the IDs of some of the guests while still others searched the tunnel and the various converging tracks. All this was done with as little commotion as could be managed, the consensus being that Alvarez had fled the scene, and whatever threat he had represented had gone with him.

  Tyler was not convinced. He and Coopersmith had already discussed how much time they’d need for a complete inspection of the train’s systems and mechanicals. He knew that O’Malley, who was leading his troops in the search of the train, would throw him out with the bathwater, so he kept his head and his profile low.

  His coveralls filthy, Tyler crawled out from under the last car as Nell Priest called out for him. “We’ve got ourselves a situation,” he told her.

  “So I’ve heard. O’Malley’s ordered every guest checked against the list.”

  “He was suspended up under a dining car. Who knows for how long? He apparently avoided the security checks at Raritan.”

  “That’s not possible,” she muttered. “I supervised most of that.”

  “He camouflaged space beneath a car. They would have had to have practically reached up in there to find him.”

  “He fled?”

  “May have,” Tyler answered. “Or he may be somewhere inside. Up there in the party with the others.”

  Priest lifted her head up toward the windows that were filled both with crash-test dummies and visitors.

  “Everyone wears a visitor’s ribbon.” She pointed to the purple one pinned to her chest. “Even Goheen. It was a lastminute decision by O’Malley. No matter what Alvarez knows about us, he couldn’t possibly know about these ribbons.”

  “There are a lot of guests. At this point, he could be hiding anywhere up there.”

  Again, she looked up. She shook her head. “No. He fled,” she said. Facing into the dark tunnel, she said, “He knew we’d blown his cover, and he took off.” She sounded almost convincing.

  Tyler said, “I need one of those ribbons.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know that I can do that. One ribbon per name on the guest list. That’s how O’Malley is controlling it.”

  “Then give me yours,” he pressed. “You tell them it must have fallen off. They’ll look for it, but it’ll buy me time.”

  She promptly unpinned the ribbon and handed it to him. Concern creased her otherwise smooth skin. H
e said, “We’ve already done this underneath, but let’s do it again. You’ll work the train front to back. I’ll start in the last car and work forward.”

  “Our people are already working the train, rechecking each guest against the guest list. And that’s not great for you. Most of them know your face by now,” she cautioned. “O’Malley will have you thrown off.”

  “Technically, he can’t. The NTSB has every right to be here. What he can do is delay me, tie me up with conversation, keep an eye on me. But in this crowd?” he asked. “It’s a zoo up there. I’ll be fine. What’s the schedule?”

  “Train rolls in ten minutes.”

  “Will they delay it, now that this has happened?”

  She shook her head. “O’Malley will probably try for that. Goheen won’t allow it. Trains leave on time. Company policy.”

  Tyler looked into her dark eyes and felt his throat tighten. He would never have guessed that he might feel the way he did about her. “I want to kiss you right now,” he said, “but I can’t.”

  “You most certainly cannot.” She read his face.

  “While you’re guarding Gretchen Goheen, guard your own backside as well,” he advised. “It’s a very nice backside.”

  “Some things are better kept to yourself,” she said, allowing a smirk as she turned and hurried toward the train.

  CHAPTER 33

  The train’s public address system announced, “Our guests wishing to remain in New York are invited to please depart onto platform seven at your convenience.” This was the first time Tyler realized that everyone in attendance was in fact invited to take the ride but that not everyone would. The crowd thinned, with passengers moving forward toward their assigned cars. Behind the locomotive came a VIP passenger car, followed by a second passenger car for press and media; next were two dining cars with open bars, then four cars of crash-test dummies and mannequins—required by the NTSB for the test run. In the first of these four mannequin cars were seats set aside for Coopersmith’s two maintenance men.