Instinctively, Tyler shielded himself.
The bomb went off. And Keith O’Malley with it.
Chunks of tempered glass whipped through the air. Tyler fell to the floor as a massive rumbling swept through the car. In that moment, as he thought he might die, Tyler saw that in his life he was less a victim of a system gone bad and more one of just plain bad luck. Chester Washington had scared him, had frightened him to the point that once he began beating that monster he couldn’t stop. He vowed now not to repeat the same mistake.
The rumbling settled out of the chassis. Tyler stood slowly to feel the cold wind rushing through the empty window frame in the dining car’s bulging door and the warmth of blood on the back of his neck. He was cut, though not badly. Behind them, on the track, the last four cars had slipped away, and Tyler saw sparks rise from the tracks like fireworks as someone must have leaned on the emergency pull.
Alvarez, too, had come to his feet, his hand bloody from the bottle breaking in his grasp as he fell. Goheen remained down, as did the woman.
Both men fell again as the dining car swayed.
The cry of brakes sang through the steel.
Alvarez ran to the wall phone by the door, picked it up, and shouted into the receiver. “No brakes, you idiot! And no slowing the engine. If we lose speed, the stabilizers will roll the train!” He hung up, everyone looking at him.
He said to the gathering, “At the time, it seemed like a pretty good plan.”
The train shuddered again. Alvarez pulled the handheld GPS out of his jacket, glanced at it. “That’s the first curve. Three more to go. On the third, she won’t make it.”
The car settled back down.
Tyler felt his legs beneath him again.
Alvarez grabbed the woman by the arm and led her at a run to the front of the car.
Tyler decided that if Alvarez was heading to the front of the train, then so was he. The car’s front window had blown out in the explosion as well, and Tyler saw the forward dining car tilt, Alvarez halfway through it. A fraction of a second later, the car beneath him shuddered so hard that every item on every horizontal surface rained to the floor.
The vestibule and the accordion walls between the two dining cars tore loose and blew apart, carried off by the ferocious wind. The locomotive’s brakes screamed, and Tyler fell to his feet before standing, but as the destabilized cars buckled, the driver must have released the brakes. Without a progressive slowing of the whole train, the brakes, he realized, were more dangerous than useful.
Goheen, sobered by fear, followed Tyler. With the vestibule’s accordioned platform connecting the cars now torn loose, Tyler stepped out of the second dining car and lowered himself to the exposed coupler. He placed his left foot down, realizing there were no handholds with which to reach the car in front. It required a leap of faith: placing that foot down and pushing off the rear car while reaching through space for a handrail on the back of the next car. Before making that move, he glanced back. Goheen stood above him in the doorway.
“I’m not doing that!” Goheen shouted.
“Suit yourself,” Tyler hollered back. It was no time for heroes. He jumped, and his good hand found purchase. He was on the other side. He climbed toward the back door of this dining car.
Below them, he felt the tracks begin a long slow curve. The second curve. Again, Tyler felt a sickening weightlessness, as this time the cars actually lifted their right wheels off the welded tracks.
Goheen made the jump across the coupler, caught hold, but lost his balance. Tyler reached down with his injured arm and reeled with pain as he snagged Goheen by his wrist and stood him up. For an instant their eyes met, and Tyler felt nothing from this man. William Goheen looked dead inside.
Tyler hurried through the forward dining car as again he felt the right side of the carriage lift beneath him. It was a precarious, unstable feeling, this lifting and floating of thirty tons of steel. It began to settle but then lifted again. He ran harder and faster, through the forward door—Goheen now right behind him—and into the press car.
The car was trashed with spilled drinks and paper napkins with the F-A-S-T Track logo. Tyler ran down the aisle, the gray blur of a forest running past the windows. In the distance he saw marshland and the suggestion of a river.
Before he ever reached Alvarez at the front, Tyler intuited the man’s intentions. Alvarez had sabotaged the guidance system on the passenger cars. (No doubt had the back four cars not applied their emergency brakes they, too, would have rolled.) The locomotive, however—so thoroughly guarded and closely inspected—had never been a part of the man’s plans. So, if Alvarez could get himself onto the back of the locomotive, could disconnect the trailing four cars, they alone would jump track without taking the engine car with them.
Tyler reached the vestibule of this forwardmost car. He and Coopersmith had boarded through here only thirty minutes ago. The back door to the locomotive stood open, the woman crouching on her knees looking shell-shocked. Alvarez stood ready to shut that door, and presumably to lock it.
The vestibule began to feel incredibly cramped to Tyler.
The two men stood ten feet apart. “Don’t shut that door,” Tyler called out to Alvarez. Goheen was slowly catching up. “I know what you want to do, and I can help you.”
“Help him?!” Goheen thundered from behind. He stepped forward, but Tyler restrained him. When Goheen struggled, Tyler turned and wrestled him down. He slugged him in the jaw, collapsing the man. His hand ached, but no punch had ever felt as good.
“You want to uncouple the engine,” Tyler shouted at Alvarez. “The engine’s stabilizers are intact. It won’t roll, unless dragged over by these trailing cars.” He added, “Can we fix these cars?”
Alvarez simply stared.
“You don’t want to kill anyone,” Tyler reminded him.
“I’m staying on this train,” Goheen announced, recovering and coming to his feet.
Alvarez shouted, “And what, you’re just going to hold the two cars together while I turn the key and uncouple them? I don’t think so. It can’t be done.”
Tyler glanced backward. “I have your duffel. I have the come-along.”
Alvarez’s face lit up. Then it hardened. “You’re lying. You just don’t want me locking this door.”
“I’m not lying!” Tyler knocked Goheen off his feet and warned him not to get up. He raced to the first of the dining cars, painfully leapt over the bar, and searched the storage areas. No duffel. He tore out at a run, dared a jump across the exposed coupling, and again checked behind the bar. One of the storage closets was locked. He scrambled for a pry bar—something to force it open—and came up with a bottle opener. It bent on his first try and he chucked it. His eyes settled on a fire extinguisher, and he ripped it from the wall, immediately bashing the lock. Thankfully, the dining car storage bins did not carry the same hardware as maintenance closets. With the fifth blow, the door sagged open. Inside, he spotted it. He tore through its contents and came up with the come-along, the levered winch and cable.
Seconds later, he was facing Alvarez once again, this time holding up the come-along. With a sturdy hook on either end, the metal cable was coiled around the hand-levered winch.
Alvarez checked his watch and barked, “Hook your end there!” He pointed through the vestibule to the edge of the car.
Tyler ran off a length of cable.
“Give me the other end!” Alvarez shouted.
Tyler pulled out slack and stepped forward tentatively, growing cautiously closer to Alvarez with each step. The two men nearly touched hands as Tyler passed him the hook.
Tyler secured his hook to a steel edge on the passenger car. Alvarez secured his to the back of the locomotive.
With his one good arm, Tyler worked the winch handle, taking up the slack in the cable, one ratchet at a time. As the slack came out and the cable tightened, it raised in the air to waist height. Then, as hard as he pulled, Tyler could not budge the lever h
andle. He couldn’t get another inch out of it. “I need some help here.”
Alvarez crossed the no-man’s-land of the open vestibule that separated them. He indicated for Goheen to move back and then tripped open the flanged flooring so he could see the coupling. He shook his head. Nothing. The purpose of the come-along was to move the car closer to the locomotive, to remove the tension between them so that they could be uncoupled.
Together, the two men grabbed hold of the lever meant to tighten the winch. Their blood mixed on its handle. Together, they leaned into it. The winch tightened a single notch. Then, no more.
“It’s no good,” Alvarez shouted. He and Tyler stood face to face, both sweating, their fists gripping the come-along’s lever.
Alvarez reached for Tyler, who reacted defensively, lifting his arms to deflect a blow. But Alvarez merely slipped the walkie-talkie off Tyler’s coveralls. He turned and tried to hand the radio to Goheen, finally tossing it at the CEO, who caught it. “Call the driver. Tell him to tap the brakes. But gently!”
“Never,” Goheen hollered over the roar. “So you can escape?” He looked at Tyler threateningly. “With this turncoat?”
“I’ll stay with you on this side,” Alvarez bargained loudly. “He goes on the locomotive.”
“No way!” Tyler objected.
“Shut up!” Alvarez roared. He looked back to Goheen. “Call him. Remind him whose train this is!”
Tyler leaned in. “Do it!”
Goheen took up the radio, introduced himself—twice—and hollered into the device, “Hit the god damn brakes!” He added, “Gently.”
As the driver hit the locomotive’s brakes, the passenger car lurched forward. They worked the come-along’s handle together as a team and took out a good deal of slack. Alvarez inspected the coupler. It was working.
“Again,” he instructed Goheen, who briefly looked unwilling to cooperate.
“Again!” Now Tyler yelled at him.
Goheen repeated the order. The car lurched again. The cable tightened further. Alvarez checked the coupling, indicated a thumbs-up, and immediately began fishing for keys. The train cars were held together by the come-along, the coupler tension now slack.
“You have keys?” he asked frantically.
“Yes,” Tyler replied.
“Hurry! Find this one!” From a distance he indicated to Tyler which key to use. “You operate it from the engine side.”
“You are not staying on this train,” Tyler objected.
Alvarez checked his GPS. “No time to argue. Do it!”
Tyler jumped across, hurried to the panel, and inserted the key.
The woman called out to Alvarez, “You think you win by doing this?”
“No one ever wins,” Alvarez replied.
“Then why?” she cried out across the gap.
To Tyler, Alvarez, having inserted his own key, said, “Go ahead.”
Both men turned their keys. The coupling came open, the cars separated, and the cable instantly snapped, whizzing by Alvarez’s head and arm and missing by only inches. It would have sliced his head off had it connected.
The cars pulled apart. A foot. A yard. Ten yards. Moonlight poured down. Alvarez, standing, and Goheen, still lying on the floor, grew smaller and smaller in the lit car.
Alvarez shouted to Jillian, “Maybe I win after all.”
“No one wins,” she cried back defiantly.
Tyler felt the force of a severe turn in the tracks. The locomotive’s stabilizers countered to find a center of gravity. He and the woman watched as Alvarez disappeared from the doorway, jumping over the defeated Goheen, who swiped out to confront the man but missed. Goheen struggled to standing.
Five seconds passed. Ten. The trailing train rocked up on one side, then settled, then lifted again. Fifteen seconds had passed. It lifted and fell again. Twenty. Twenty-five. Then the car lifted high, rocked side to side, and broke clean off the tracks in the middle of the long sweeping curve. The steel rails tore like paper straws, and the four cars plowed into a sea of bulrushes, spraying a plume of mud and debris a hundred feet into the air. All four cars roared straight, aimed at the Susquehanna River a mile away. Then, in an eerie slow motion, they began to lean left, the steel trucks and wheels lifting out of the mud and dirt to where Tyler could see the underneath of the lead car.
Unexpectedly, a small, dark object rose briefly into the night, lifting skyward, and catching in the wind, and then ever so slowly floating, rocking back and forth, as it settled into the grasses.
Alvarez had located his duffel. His seemingly noble gesture to remain behind on the train now made sense to Tyler. He had escaped.
The front car rolled completely over, caught in the terrain, and stopped abruptly, throwing the remaining three cars into, up, and over it. They broke apart and scattered, rolled and tumbled, skidding as much as another quarter mile in a grinding, screaming, fevered pitch. And then they were still.
Five hundred ducks and geese lifted out of the marsh and beautifully filled the sky, as if part of some celebration, as if following that parasail.
Not long after, the driver again tested the brakes. This time the locomotive slowed without incident and came to a stop.
CHAPTER 41
Nell Priest’s mother owned a two-story clapboard Cape in suburban Maryland, most of whose residents commuted to the nation’s capital. After two full days of interviews, attorneys, and debriefings, Tyler was a public hero but a former government employee. Loren Rucker promised another job offer would be on the table in a few weeks, but he wanted “the heat to blow over.” Tyler wasn’t holding his breath.
The FBI search of the crash site had produced Goheen’s body, found inside the wreckage of the forward car, and an abandoned, camouflaged parasail found a half mile into a forest east of the tracks. Forty-eight hours, and still no sign of Umberto Alvarez. The press was teeming with stories of investigations by a myriad of government agencies into Northern Union’s F-A-S-T Track train, improper accounting, maintenance violations, and misuse of public trust.
Priest knocked as she entered the room where Tyler was reading from a stack of newspapers. “Well, there goes my retirement,” she said. “If you were thinking about marrying me for my money,” she teased, “you had better look elsewhere.”
Tyler, reading from the paper, said, “It’s being reported that O’Malley killed Alvarez’s attorney, Andersen. One of his guys cut an immunity deal. O’Malley may have tried to cut a deal with Andersen to settle. No one’s clear on that. But it went south, and the attorney ate it. The guy who’s talking was part of a cleanup crew that staged the office to implicate Alvarez. With both Goheen and O’Malley dead, no one will ever know for sure, but from Jillian Barstow’s statement of what she overheard in that bar car, Alvarez is basically in the clear.”
“I have this feeling,” she said, “like you’ve been given another chance, a second chance. That we have. It could have been you in that car with Goheen, you know?”
Tyler replied with a look, attempting to convey his happiness.
“It’s good, isn’t it,” she declared.
“It’s very good,” he agreed. “I’ve lost the house—for good, this time—my Norton, my job, and I’ve never been happier.”
“My biggest regret is that the F-A-S-T Track never proved itself,” she said. “Goheen may have mismanaged things, but he was a visionary. It’ll be years, if ever, before it runs again, and that’s a loss to everyone.”
“It was a hell of a ride,” he agreed. “But Alvarez got his wish: the press barely mentioned the technology. All the focus has been on the abuse of power.”
“It’s a shame.”
She sat down on the arm of his chair, ran her long fingers along his shoulder, and pointed to the newspaper. “With Andersen’s homicide cleared, do you think he’ll come out of hiding?”
“Not with the derailments squarely on him. No. Besides, who cares?”
“You do. You’re beating yourself up over this
, Peter. Is it worth it?”
Tyler answered, “I should have remembered that parasail. He certainly did. I thought he was sacrificing himself. What the hell was I thinking?”
“So, go find him,” she encouraged.
“Yeah, right. The FBI must have five hundred guys on this, and they haven’t found him.”
“But they don’t know what we know,” she said.
Tyler looked up at her. “What do we know?” he asked.
“We looked at what he was doing. We didn’t look at how he managed it,” she said obliquely.
“Do I have to beg?”
“How did he finance these last eighteen months?” she inquired. “It didn’t occur to me until I realized how much I’d lost in stock options.”
“But you still have a job. That’s better than some of us.”
She ignored his complaint. She had insisted the job offers would come in for him. He’d been painted in the press as a hero. She said, “What occurred to me was how much money I would have made if I’d thought to sell short, if I’d bet on the stock falling instead of rising.” She snatched the paper from him and leafed through sections of the New York Times, extracting the business pages.
“The thing is,” she said, “we weren’t paying attention to the money. Follow the money,” she recited, quoting a law enforcement rule. Pointing out a headline, she smacked the paper loudly enough that he jumped. “Here,” she said, leaning toward him and spreading the open paper between them. “They printed the two-year historical today. See?”
“I’m not exactly a business major,” he told her.
“Alvarez was a teacher. What, if anything, would he have accumulated in his four-oh-one-K? Twenty thousand? Thirty?”
“If that.”
“Exactly. And we know he turned down the settlement, never received a dime because he wanted to take us to court.”
“What’s that get us?” he asked, clearly frustrated by his lack of understanding. “He was broke?”
“But he wasn’t broke. He managed a war against a major corporation for well over a year.” Again, she indicated the stock chart. “Look at these dips! The dates. Every time a train derails, NUR’s stock tanks. The street reacts to news. You can bank on it.”
Parallel Lies Page 33
