by Matt Brolly
Mallard.
Mallard was the name of a family legacy. The current heir, Wilberforce Mallard the 6th, was an enigmatic billionaire. Lynch had come across him in his investigation into the Railroad. The original Wilberforce Mallard had been one of many to invest in the Railroad system laid on American soil in the 1830’s. The Mallard family fortune had been built from those beginnings. Lynch’s knowledge and investigation went no further than that and he had no way of determining if Razinski had just given him a name he wanted so he would end his life. He wanted to discuss the matter with Rose, but at that present moment felt unable to trust anyone; even the agent who’d helped him escape.
‘Land ahoy,’ said Rose.
Lynch blinked and focused on the perimeter they were approaching. The steel chain link fence was covered in barbed wire. At its heart was a gantry post. The reinforced gate separating the compound from the wider world was blown open. Lynch lifted his gun as Rose slowed the van to a stop.
A now familiar sight greeted them as they disembarked. The bodies of three agents lined the exterior of the gantry, each with a single bullet wound to the forehead. ‘Take cover,’ said Lynch, fearing the sniper who’d executed the agents could still be at large.
They waited within the reinforced gantry building, each hunched on the ground, the bodies of the agents meters away. Lynch tore his gaze from one of the men whose face was inches from his, eyes wide open, a red tinged yellow substance dripping from his mouth.
They waited in the stifling atmosphere of the shelter for five minutes. Lynch’s clothes soaked with sweat, his body on edge waiting for action.
‘What do you think?’ said Rose.
‘I think they’re long gone. We’re sitting ducks. If they were still out there we would have been attacked.’
Rose nodded and they both got to their feet. Rose tested the guards’ walkie-talkies. ‘Still no reception,’ she said.
‘The sooner we’re out of here, the better,’ said Lynch, heading towards the van. He glanced back on the desolate land they’d retreated from, the compound somewhere beyond the horizon. He was about to enter the van when a sound assaulted his ears.
A spilt second later, a rising plume of smoke became visible as the full extent of the explosion became apparent.
10
It was an hour before they reached the beginnings of civilization, Rose’s phone receiving signal as they drove through a second check point leading onto the dirt track of a back road. They stared at the mobile device Rose had stuck to the dashboard as message after message filtered onto the screen.
‘You going to answer that?’ said Lynch, as another batch of messages pinged onto the screen.
Rose pulled the van over. With the engine still running, she took the phone from its handle and studied the information. ‘They’re all from head office, complaining of radio silence from the compound. They are generalized, nothing specific for me.’
The red circle had disappeared from Rose’s face replaced by a sprinkling of freckles around her nose and cheeks Lynch hadn’t noticed before. ‘They would have latched onto my signal by now,’ she said.
They sat in silence considering what that meant. ‘Who can you trust?’ said Lynch.
‘Good question.’
‘They may see you as a suspect unless they hear from you.’
‘It had crossed my mind.’ Rose furrowed her brow, a set of white lines cutting into the pale flesh of her forehead. ‘I think they’d be more concerned by your presence.’
‘That had crossed my mind too,’ said Lynch.
Rose gripped the steering wheel. Lynch watched the steely determination in the Agent’s eyes as she came to a decision. ‘I know a safe place, two hours from here. We can regroup, make a decision. In the meantime…’ Rose snapped off the back of the phone and withdrew the battery and Sim Card, and handed the remains to Lynch. ‘Let’s get something to eat.’
Thirty minutes later they were on the I-37 heading south of San Antonio. The landscape a never-ending roll of green-brown fields dissected by the concrete of the interstate.
‘Here we go,’ said Lynch, spotting a sign for a truck stop two miles in the distance. As Rose rounded a corner, she pointed to the outline of a Railroad track running parallel to the road. Lynch closed his eyes and pictured the spot. Using techniques he’d acquired over his years in the FBI, he’d created a mind map of the Railroad lines covering the wall of his office. He moved around the mind map and pinpointed their exact location. He saw the pins on the map as if he was back in his apartment. Four red pins, five greens pins. One yellow. Four girls, five boys, one adult female. He moved further into the labyrinth he’d created and located the files of each of those missing people who had disappeared along this stretch of Railroad.
‘Wake up,’ said Rose, jolting him from his memory.
Lynch bolted upright, his eyes wide and alert. He felt the heat of Rose’s glare on him. ‘Must have dropped off,’ he said.
‘Dispose of that, will you?’ said Rose, pointing at the remains of her phone.
Lynch jumped from the van and moved around the various trucks until he found an open window. He glanced around, depositing the Sim card through the window, satisfied as the card fell into a heap of garbage on the passenger side of the truck. He deposited the battery and casing into two separate trashcans and joined Rose in the restaurant area.
The agent had taken a seat in the far corner near a second exit. She noticed him as soon as he entered the room, her head dropping an inch in acknowledgement. They ordered burgers and cups of black coffee, each devouring their meals within minutes, Lynch only now appreciating how hungry he’d been. He savored the juices of the meat, and various sauces, and drank heavily of the lukewarm coffee as if it was nectar.
‘You need to come clean with me, Lynch,’ said Rose, once they’d finished.
Lynch wiped a napkin across his mouth, nodding to the waitress offering him a refill. His last few years in the organization had taught him not to trust anyone, but he had no option now. Rose could never have masterminded their escape from the compound. There had been too many variables, situations when either of them could have easily lost their lives. Furthermore, he could see no logical reason why she would have helped him escape if she was part of the team responsible for the break-in and destruction of the compound in the first place.
He held Rose’s gaze, taken by the sprinkling of freckles spreading across her face. ‘You know everything there is to know.’
‘Everything?’
‘Until this morning, I was out of the game. Yes, I’ve been working on my own research ever since I left but from what Balfour admitted that was common knowledge.’
Rose recoiled at the mention of Balfour’s name. If, as they suspected, he was part of the team sent in to execute Razinski, it was possible he was alive and had escaped when Lynch had been listening to Razinski’s dying words.
‘You have to report Balfour, before he tries to turn the tables on you,’ said Lynch.
Rose’s eyes widened but she didn’t respond. ‘What did Razinski say to you?
The name Razinski had given him played in his mind but he didn’t speak it. ‘Much the same as before. Grotesque threats and comments about my son.’
Rose lent back in her seat, her face relaxing. ‘I can only imagine what you went through when he talked like that about your son,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry you had to endure that.’
‘Thank you.’
‘How old was he when he went missing?’
Lynch sucked in a breath, his nostrils filling with the smell of days old grease and fried onions. The scene at the house filled his mind’s eye, as vividly as the sight of Special Agent Rose sitting opposite him. Sally beating her fists at his chest, something missing from her eyes which would never return. The jumbled words of his colleagues as they updated him, consoled him, made soon-to-be broken promises about finding Daniel alive. ‘Seven,’ he said, unable to hide the croak in his voice.
‘W
hat was he like?’
Lynch smiled. The question seemed genuine, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Rose was still working, using standard techniques to get information from him. He didn’t care. He rarely spoke about Daniel. It was always too painful to talk to Sally, and there was no one else in his life. ‘He was a good kid. It’s easy to see him through rose tinted spectacles, but he was a good kid. Polite, intelligent, he was a beautiful little boy. He was still young enough to have that sense of innocence about him. He loved baseball,’ said Lynch, as an afterthought, his voice losing his composure.
Rose lent towards him and surprised him by placing her hand over his. For a second, he wanted to drag it away, the naked intimacy of the situation too much for him to deal with. Rose held it in place and smiled at him, her pale skin erupting into a cascade of freckles. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, breaking eye contact as she looked at one of the various television screens on the walls of the truck stop.
Lynch withdrew his hand, noticing his heightened pulse rate as he glanced up to the screen showing an overhead picture of a building devoured by flames, below which read the headline, ‘Fire at local government building.’
They kept their heads down as they made their way through the restaurant area of the truck stop, even though the information on the television was limited to overhead views of the fire.
The sun was still high outside but the temperature had dropped. Rose drove the van to the filling station and filled the tank whilst Lynch purchased provisions including two six packs of beer from a local brewery. Rose joined him in the small shop area and handed him some cash. ‘Better not use cards,’ she said, her voice hushed. ‘Get two of those burner phones as well.’
Lynch avoided eye contact with the clerk as he paid. He wasn’t sure at the present time what concerned him most - the FBI finding him, or the Railroad.
‘Tell me about your research,’ said Rose, as they joined the traffic on the interstate.
Lynch took in a deep breath, accepting he wouldn’t be able to avoid the discussion forever. It made it easier that Balfour was absent. ‘It started with a missing person’s case I was involved in three years before Daniel disappeared. It started off routine. A missing teenage girl, thirteen years old. She lived in a trailer park in Brazos County. Alcoholic parents, and from what we could gather an abusive father. We were only called in as she was the fifth child to go missing in that area in a year. The trailer park was adjacent to a railroad line though I didn’t give that a second thought. The line was only used for industrial transit, three to four trains passing through a night.’
‘That’s a lot of missing children. How specific was the area?’
‘All from that trailer park. It was a sprawling place, some permanent structures spread over a number of acres, a community of ten thousand or so.’
‘Still, five missing children in a year.’
Lynch closed his eyes and accessed the photos of the five children from his memory place. ‘Not one word from any of them, to this day. Vanished without a trace.’
Lynch let the information settle in as Rose ploughed through the thickening traffic. She would know as well as he did what the disappearances meant.
Razinski’s taunts about his son played through his mind. The suggestion that he wouldn’t want to see Daniel now stung most, though it offered the briefest glimmer of hope. The first sign he’d had that Daniel was still alive since the day he’d gone missing.
‘What gave you the link to the Railroad?’ said Rose, bringing the van to a stop in the stationary traffic.
‘Like most of these things, pure coincidence,’ said Lynch. ‘There were far too many residents to interview, and too little manpower. We concentrated on the family, as you would expect, and interviewed the families of the other missing children. The way they lived their lives.’
Lynch shook his head. ‘You couldn’t have blamed any of those children for running away and I wish that’s what had occurred. Alcohol and drugs, suspected sexual abuse in at least three of the cases, it was tragic but I couldn’t imagine any of them having the wherewithal to pull off such a set of disappearances. Anyway, I was leaving the trailer of the father of an eight year old who’d disappeared. It was night, and the walk back to my car ran adjacent to the railroad line. As I was approaching the car, a man stopped me. He was the girl’s grandfather and I had interviewed him earlier that week. He must have been in his eighties but he had a hardness to his eyes of a much younger man. “It was them,” he said, pointing to the railroad lines. He’d been drinking so I didn’t push him, simply asked for clarification. That was when he said it. “The Railroad.” I didn’t pay much attention until the following day when his body was found hung from a tree outside his trailer.’
‘Jesus,’ said Rose, a look of genuine shock on her face.
‘Indeed. I was the last person to see him alive which didn’t help the investigation and when I included the Railroad in my report my career was changed irrevocably. And soon my life.’
‘They take you off the case for that?’
‘No, but resources dried up as soon as I started my research on the Railroad. I may as well have been starting an x-files investigation. As far as everyone was concerned, the Railroad were a myth and investigating them was career suicide.’
‘But you continued?’
‘Covertly. I read of the few arrests over the years. The tattoo you saw on Razinski I discovered on other suspects. I studied the contradictory conspiracy theories and agreed that it all sounded like so much hokum. And then I began investigating the railroad disappearances.’
The traffic had started moving again, Rose taking her time weaving through the vehicles not wanting to draw attention to them. ‘And?’
‘The statistics were an anomaly. The amount of missing children in the country was staggering enough to comprehend, so I had to narrow it down state to state, county to county. Even then, the numbers were incredible. But the amount of children disappearing on or within a small radius of a railroad line was so statistically disproportionate that I had to investigate further. I made the evidence fool proof. Obviously, millions of people live near railroad tracks so, working first on my own district, I eliminated all but the most obvious cases. Incidents where children had last been seen playing on or within a small radius of a track, those children who lived within a hundred yard radius of a railroad line. Still the numbers beggared belief. I started looking closer at the Railroad myth. I stripped away the bullshit and investigated the possibility that there were a group of people abducting, for whatever reason, children close to railroad lines.’
Rose pulled off the highway onto a back road of a small town. ‘And what did you find?’
‘A number of dead ends, false leads, and then when I finally got close they took Daniel.’ Lynch closed his eyes, and inhaled deeply through his nose.
‘How were you close?’
‘I found one of them,’ said Lynch, eyes still closed. ‘That was why I was away. I uncovered an informant who’d given me a name.’ Lynch thought about Razinski’s dying words, Mallard, and wondered if that was another false trail. ‘I was on the way back when they took Daniel. The following day the informant was discovered with his neck slit, and the lead had disappeared. Or so I was told.’
‘And still they wouldn’t believe you?’
Lynch opened his eyes. ‘I thought they chose not to, but after today I’m not so sure.’
They drove for another thirty minutes in silence. Lynch felt as if Rose wanted to ask him something, and eventually she did. ‘Did Razinski say anything to you?’
He wanted to tell her but wasn't ready. ‘He asked me to kill him,’ he said.
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all.’
Lynch felt guilty for not revealing the truth but he had to analyze the information Razinski had given him. He needed to go over his research on Mallard and consider where that left him.
Rose didn’t push him further and he d
ecided to change the subject. ‘So two first names?’ he asked. ‘Ever cause confusion?’
‘Sure does. Half the people in my field office think my first name is Rose.’
‘What do you prefer?’
‘Well, I can’t stand the name Sandra.’
‘Sandy?’
‘Grease put paid to that. My high school staged a version and I didn’t hear the end of it for some time. People tend not to call me that now.’
Lynch held his hands up. ‘Understood.’
Rose smiled. Ten minutes later she pulled off the interstate, a secondary road leading to a dirt track surrounded on both sides by overgrown trees and bushes. She parked up and retrieved a key from under a rock. The safe house was little more than a trailer, reminiscent of those Lynch encountered during his initial investigation into the Railroad.
‘It’s not much, but it will do for tonight,’ said Rose, opening the door of the building.
The place was minimalist, clean and tidy. Lynch had set up a similar place during his time in the Bureau, a spot where he wouldn’t be reached, where he could prepare for an unexpected departure. He didn’t enquire, but was sure Rose would have a bug out bag somewhere in the vicinity with false identification and enough cash to help her survive undetected for a number of weeks.
‘I’ll charge these,’ she said, opening the phones they’d purchased from the gas stop.
‘Who are you going to call?’
‘Yet to be decided. There’s a shower through there, towels in the cupboard. I’ll see if I can find you a change of clothes.’
‘Thanks. I’m not sure I’d fit into anything you’d have though.’
Rose grinned. ‘I’m prepared for most eventualities.’
The bathroom was little more than a box room, big enough for a shower, toilet, sink and a small cupboard where Lynch found some towels. He sat on the toilet, exhaustion hitting overcoming him. He must have been awake for over twenty-four hours but felt too twitchy to sleep. He stripped and ran the shower. It took a while to heat up but soon a haze of steam blurred his vision. The hot jets soothed his aching joints. He tried to plan his next move but struggled to focus. He imagined his apartment was, or soon would be, under surveillance and as he had no transport of his own he had no way of getting back anytime soon.