Checkmate_The Bowers Files

by Steven James

  + + +

  Glenn waited while Louis finished inspecting the manifest. Then, when he said they were ready to roll, he throttled forward on the route through Charlotte that he’d taken so many times over the years.

  + + +

  As I drove toward the hospital, I checked the scanner and saw that the nanobot signal had stopped transmitting.

  I tapped at the sensor’s screen; no change.

  What’s going on?

  I tried it again.

  Nothing.

  No signal.

  That doesn’t make any sense.

  Using my newly acquired cell phone, I called O’Brien to see if there was a setting I needed to adjust or recalibrate.

  He didn’t pick up.

  I left a message for him to check Basque’s location by using the unit he had on campus; however, I realized it would take precious time for him to get to his equipment.

  Time we didn’t have.

  I ended by telling O’Brien to call me immediately at this number, then I phoned the hospital’s security office to make sure they’d gotten word from dispatch to look for Basque.

  While I had them on the line, I asked about the young man Basque had envenomated and found out his name was Andy Mitzner and that he was being treated and was currently unconscious but was in stable condition.

  Then a thought: What if that’s why Basque went to the hospital? To finish the job he started?

  Does Mitzner know something? Could they have been working together?

  Was he a victim here or a partner?

  “Get some officers to Mitzner’s room,” I told the chief of hospital security, who was on the line with me, a guy named Housman.

  “We have an officer stationed there, sir.”

  “This is Richard Basque we’re talking about. One’s not going to be enough.”

  + + +

  Kurt Mason had barely managed to get out of the neighborhood before the officers arrived.

  So, Richard and Patrick were working together. Well, he hadn’t seen that one coming.

  He’d had just enough time to destroy the laptop back at the house.

  The Bureau’s computer forensics techs would be able to retrieve data from it eventually, but it would be far too late to stop the dominoes from falling.

  Everything was in play. The clock was ticking.

  The car he’d been using was still back at the house.

  At least he had his phone and could track M343’s movement through his cell’s Internet connection.

  But before anything else, he needed a vehicle.

  And then he needed to get out of the city before the authorities tried to evacuate Uptown, or he was going to get stuck in traffic, and that was the last thing he could afford.

  + + +

  A CMPD officer met me at the hospital’s front entrance. Housman was with her. The officer was a stout, stern-looking woman; the security chief was wire-thin and had quick, intelligent eyes.

  “What do we know?” I asked them.

  “Come on.” Housman signaled for me to follow him. “It happened in the room where they do MRIs.”

  74

  2:50 p.m.

  40 minutes until kickoff

  “So what happened, exactly?” I said as the three of us ran down the hall.

  “He was here,” Housman said in between breaths. “Basque was. We’ll show you.”

  I’ve had a couple of MRIs in the past, so I knew that the magnet of the machine is always on and you don’t want to enter the room unless you’re certain you don’t have any metal on you. I’d heard stories about oxygen tanks being drawn through the doorway and flying toward the magnet so fast that they exploded on impact.

  We met in the lobby just down the hall. Another officer was there, trying to comfort a distraught woman whose hands were trembling. “He made me do it.” Her voice faltered. “He made me let him in. He had a butcher knife.”

  A butcher knife?

  Probably from Mason’s house.

  But he couldn’t have taken it in the room with him there, so—

  Right now I was much more interested in where Basque was than in what he’d done with the knife.

  “A man about my height?” I described his clothes to her. “Dark hair? Athletic build?”

  “That’s him.”

  “You’re the radiologist?”

  She shook her head. “I’m just a tech.”

  An MRI could last anywhere from ten minutes to several hours—but that was to get accurate images, not simply to be in the presence of the magnet. That would only take a matter of seconds.

  Could the electromagnetic field in the room have short-circuited the nanobots?

  Well, it was enough to fry a cell phone or wipe the magnetic strip on a credit card.

  I wasn’t sure if the magnet would have pulled the bots right through Basque’s body or just fried them where they were in his bloodstream, but either way it could not have felt good.

  The MRI tech shuddered. “What he said he would do to me if I didn’t help him. I can’t even . . .”

  Knowing Basque, I could only imagine the kinds of threats he might have made.

  I checked the sensor again, found no readings.

  Cursed.

  The security cameras.

  “Where’s your office?’ I asked Housman. “We need to see where and when Basque left this building. Or if maybe he’s still here.”

  * * *

  On our way to the hospital’s security suite we confirmed that Mitzner, the young man who’d been envenomated, was protected.

  He was still unconscious.

  The security center was outfitted with an array of eight screens, each showing a half-dozen camera feeds. Cutting-edge.

  Yes.

  Good.

  We had something to work with here.

  I gave the staff a description of Basque’s sedan and told them the license plate number. “I want to know where he parked, if his car is still here, and where he went after leaving the MRI room.”

  While the officers and security personnel reviewed the surveillance footage, I sorted through the case. Reviewed where we were at.

  Richard Basque was on the run.

  Kurt Mason was free and had something big planned for today, something climactic. According to what he’d told me it was coming tonight, but according to what Basque had said, something was supposed to happen this afternoon at three thirty.

  Less than thirty-five minutes from now.

  Time was ticking.

  Mason knew about the mines, he’d researched them at UNC Charlotte’s library, apparently while using the name Leroy Davenport.

  For the moment I decided to work from the hypothesis that he would’ve uncovered the same map I did, and I mentally reviewed the location of the sixty-three shafts of the Rudisill–St. Catherine Mine system, including the location of the shaft in that textile mill.

  I was reminded of the Semtex and the fragility of that area with all of those shafts and with those tunnels radiating throughout it.

  If Basque was right, Mason was going to make a memorable statement.

  The more I evaluated things, the more I began to believe that taking out a SWAT or HRT crew as they cleared a mine of explosives wasn’t climactic enough for Mason. He would go for something bigger—and, besides, as I’d noted earlier, he wouldn’t have known the time we might try to access the mine.

  It’s something else.

  The highway?

  The railroad?

  The stadium?

  It’s Fan Celebration Day. Is that what he has planned? He made a delivery there for NVDS. Could he have planted some sort of device?

  But then how does that fit in with all the work he went through to find the mines?

&n
bsp; No tunnels reached out that far or stretched under the stadium, so he couldn’t have—

  Wait a minute.

  There were photos of a rail line at Mason’s apartment.

  Basque had also mentioned the Cathouse Signal.

  Railroad tracks passed right by the stadium.

  Cathouse . . . Cathouse . . .

  A train signal?

  Yes. That fit—the Cathouse. The place where the Panthers play.

  That’s it. Mason’s going to blow a train as it crosses the Cathouse Signal.

  “Fan Celebration Day,” I said to the people with me in the room. “What happens at three thirty?”

  “Kickoff,” said one of the men. “My brother’s there with his kid. Goes every year.”

  I whipped out the phone I’d gotten from the officer at Mason’s house.

  “Sir . . .” Housman paused the video on the third screen from my left. “That’s him. In the hall on the south wing. Eight minutes ago.”

  “See if he leaves the building.” I confirmed that it was Basque even as I scrolled on the phone’s screen to find what I was looking for. “Listen, a railroad line goes right past the stadium. Do you know which company runs the trains on that track?”

  The security team members shook their heads, but the CMPD officer replied, “No, but CSX and Knoxville Southeast Railway have a lot of trains that go through the area.”

  Okay.

  A place to start.

  I pulled up Knoxville Southeast Railway’s site, called the emergency number, and got patched through to their dispatch center for this region.

  The security staff were following the footage as Basque moved from one exterior camera to the next toward the edge of the grounds.

  A dispatcher answered.

  “There’s a track,” I said after identifying myself, “one that runs right past the Panthers’ stadium here in Charlotte. Do they call it the Cathouse Signal?”

  “Yes.” She sounded surprised and a little leery. “How did you know that?”

  “Are there any passenger trains coming through this afternoon at three thirty?”

  “No, sir. Just a freight line. M343.”

  “What’s it carrying?”

  “I’d have to check the manifest to—”

  “Check it. Hurry.”

  “Well, the conductor has the most up-to-date shipping papers. I’ll radio him, but it’ll take a few minutes.”

  “I’ll stay on the line.”

  On the video footage, the team found Basque’s car and images of him leaving this wing, but once he got outside and skirted around the parking lot, he left the view screen and crossed the road toward a strip mall.

  “Get out there,” I said. “He’s on foot. Find him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Housman stayed with me, while the others took off in search of Basque.

  + + +

  Glenn thought it was a bit unusual for Louis to get a call from dispatch to verify the shipping papers while the train was en route like this, but he just chalked it up to a clerical error or a glitch somewhere in the system. God knows it wouldn’t be the first one.

  He throttled up from thirty miles an hour to his running speed of fifty and headed toward Charlotte.

  + + +

  “Sir,” the woman on the phone told me, “I confirmed the manifest.”

  “Are there any hazardous materials on that train?”

  “Yes, of course. This is a six-thousand-foot train. Nearly every freight train that length is transporting some hazmat cars. It would be unusual if they weren’t.”

  “Look over that list. Are there any chemicals that could . . .” I decided to play it safe. “Listen, can you just stop that train?”

  “Sir?”

  “Stop the train. Either that or reroute it until we know more of what we’re looking at here.”

  “We can’t just order a train to be stopped or diverted to another track.”

  “Of course you can. That’s what a dispatch center is there for.”

  “Um, you’re going to have to talk to my supervisor.”

  “Put him on.”

  “Her.”

  “Her, then.” I was losing my patience here. Every second we spent talking, that train was getting closer to the mines that ran right under its tracks. “And hurry,” I added.

  While I waited on the cell phone, I asked Housman to make a call on the landline.

  Right now I didn’t have time to waste trying to sort through who to contact, which local authorities might be best to get in touch with and in what order. I decided I could cut through all the red tape with one phone call.

  Since 9/11, the Bureau’s official capacity has been steadily shifting from law enforcement to counterterrorism. And this would definitely count.

  I told Housman the number.

  “Who am I calling?”

  “The Director of the FBI.”

  75

  3:00 p.m.

  30 minutes until kickoff

  “What is this I hear about you meeting up with Richard Basque?” Director Wellington asked me sharply.

  “Later, Margaret. There’s something a lot bigger going down right now.”

  I was still on hold on the cell phone, waiting for the Knoxville Southeast Railway dispatch office’s supervisor to reroute M343.

  As quickly as possible, I brought Margaret up to speed.

  “But you don’t know yet what’s on that train?”

  “It’s carrying hazardous materials. That’s all I have at this point. I’m trying to see if they can redirect or stop it.”

  She thought for a moment. “And how close is this to the textile mill where Ingersoll and his team are?”

  “A quarter mile away or so.”

  “I’ll have them inspect the tracks for explosives, any sensors, any detonation materials. In the meantime, we have how many people in harm’s way?”

  “There’s an open-air stadium nearby. They say twenty thousand people are there.”

  “Alright, I’m going to make a call, see if we should evacuate that stadium.”

  I didn’t always agree with Margaret, but we were on the same page right now.

  The tracks crossed under I-277 at the Carson Boulevard exit ramp. The mine extended out under that area. I told her about it. “Everything converges at that point.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  + + +

  Margaret Wellington hung up with Patrick Bowers and called the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

  She’d worked with FEMA before and, from what she could tell, Director Adler was a sharp guy and he wasn’t afraid to stick his neck out if he needed to.

  After she’d told him what was going on, he said, “Our number-one priority is getting potential victims to safety in a cautious and defensive manner. In this case our response will depend on the chemical released, the humidity, wind conditions, the size of the spill.”

  “Think worst-case scenario.”

  “Start by evacuating everyone within a sixteen-hundred-meter radius.”

  She hung up and phoned the mayor of Charlotte to have him evacuate that stadium and Uptown Charlotte.

  And to shut down I-277.

  + + +

  Kurt Mason was in his newly acquired Lexus SUV, the body of the previous owner stowed in the backseat.

  As he found his way out of the city, he used his cell to monitor the train’s progress.

  It was in signal territory and was running at about fifty miles per hour. He knew that a train that size, going that fast, on a level track would take nearly a mile to stop.

  That is, if the air brakes were working properly.

  Without the normal braking capability, it would take at least twice that far.


  A local radio station was carrying a live feed of the pregame festivities. He tuned in to monitor things as they progressed.

  + + +

  I heard back from the woman in charge of the Knoxville Southeast Railway dispatch office.

  “Hello?” She did not sound excited to be on the phone with me. “Who am I speaking with?”

  “Patrick Bowers, FBI. Who is this?”

  “Deanna Lambert.”

  “Ms. Lambert, listen to me, there is a very real possibility that your train that’s heading for Charlotte—M343—is the target of a potential terrorist attack. We need that train rerouted or stopped.”

  “Under whose authorization?”

  I decided to go straight to the top. “The Director of the FBI.”

  “I’ll need to speak with him.”

  “Her.” I rattled off Margaret’s cell number. “In the meantime, e-mail me the manifest. And who can I talk to about the chemicals?”

  “That would be Benson.”

  “Put him on.”

  I gave her my e-mail address, then used one of the computers on the desk beside me to go online and pull up my account so I could read the file.

  Seconds later, the e-mail from Ms. Lambert arrived.

  Benson came on the line as I was scanning the document. I didn’t recognize most of the chemicals or different hazmat designations. “Talk me though this.”

  “Well, it lists the contents and location of all the cars on the train. You can tell which ones are hazardous because there’s a boxed-in set of asterisks on the left of the manifest for that car. There’s always a five-car buffer between any loaded hazmat cars and an engine.”

  I held the phone against my ear with one hand, used the mouse with the other. I scrolled through the pages. There were dozens of boxed-in sheets. This was not helping.

  “Think like a terrorist,” I said. “You want to blow this train knowing there are lots of people close by. What chemical would you be hoping to release?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t— You really think someone is going to try and blow this train?”

  “It’s possible. Look at the list. What jumps out at you?”

  I checked the time.

  3:07 p.m.

  “Well, there are a couple boxcars of dynamite. It’s also shipping hydrazine, which I’m not too excited about.”