by Joseph Flynn
“Even if the government wants to take a look?”
“Good-bye, Mr. Halston.” The museum chief ended the call.
Halston woke up his desktop computer and Googled “Super Chief Troubles.”
A link to that morning’s online edition of the Las Vegas Review-Journal displayed the headline “Super Chief Unable to Make Scheduled Stop Here.” Halston clicked on the link but the story was short and offered only one additional bit of information. No reason was given for the classic train’s failure to make its scheduled stop in Las Vegas on its way to Chicago. Promoters of the event here said they were told it was unclear whether the train would make any of its other interim stops.
Looked to Halston like the damn thing had, what? Gone missing?
With Edward Danner’s personal journal hidden somewhere aboard?
A chill ran through the attorney, almost as deeply as the fright he’d felt last night in the helicopter. Danner knew he disliked flying in airplanes and hated the very idea of flying in helicopters. Nonetheless, Danner had coerced Halston into accompanying him to his vineyard in Sonoma, taking the long way by first heading south and then looping back over the ocean.
At night. Into a fog bank that rolled in.
Halston had been a wreck by the time the pilot made a feather-soft landing.
Danner had laughed at what he’d called Halston’s misplaced anxiety.
The attorney’s older, beloved brother had been an Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam. His aircraft had been shot out of the sky when Halston had been in middle school. He’d had nightmares for years, lurid imaginings of how horrible Richard’s death must have been. They’d faded eventually, but last night, after reaching home, the horrors had returned with a vengeance. He’d been in the co-pilot’s seat next to his brother. Their chopper was hit by an enemy rocket. Richard reached over and took his hand.
Told him, “The crash is where the pain ends.”
The all-consuming fire, Halston saw, was where it began.
He had awakened screaming.
Now, the unexpected jangle of his telephone produced a yelp.
It took a long enough time for him to find his voice that the party on the other end asked, “Are you there, Arthur? This is Brian Kirby calling.”
That left Halston nearly as breathless as the helicopter flight had. Kirby was the main enemy. The Soviet Union to the U.S. during the Cold War. It would have been possible for either Kirby or Danner to destroy each other if they’d wanted to go all out, but they, too, would have been subject to the trap of mutually assured destruction.
So far any impulse to kill the other guy had been restrained by a reluctance to commit suicide.
Brian Kirby had never called Halston before, and the lawyer was sure he wouldn’t be the bearer of good news.
“How did you get my number?” he asked.
“My chief counsel gave it to me, after Edward Danner tried to subvert him. Danner promised him your job if he sold me out. Gave him your number so he could fire you personally.”
That news shook Halston to his core — but was it the truth?
Just then, after being made to endure the helicopter flight, he was inclined to think it was.
“Are you offering me the job of being your chief counsel?” Halston asked.
“Don’t be foolish. My guy’s loyal and ten times the lawyer you are, but I’ve always thought you were much too decent a man to be working for Eddie Danner.”
As far as Halston knew, Kirby was the only man who dared to use the familiar form of Danner’s first name. “What do you want then?”
“Just giving you a heads-up. Merritt Kinney told me what’s in Eddie’s journal, and you’re not going to like it. Your damn fool boss has teed himself up for prosecutors from … well, from San Francisco to L.A. I’m sure the feds will be looking for a handle on him, too, and I bet they’ll find one. Now, you could spend the next five years trying to keep Eddie out of prison and lose, maybe even raise a suspicion or two that you’re party to his crooked plans. Or you could bail out now while the bailing’s good.”
Halston had no idea of whether Kirby had learned how his brother Richard had died, but the metaphor of escaping a doomed aircraft resonated for Halston.
He almost asked what alleged crimes Kirby was talking about, but his legal training asserted itself and told him he didn’t want to know. It was enough for him to understand that Kirby wasn’t simply doing him a favor, he was trying to hurt “Eddie” by denying him the assistance of his senior lawyer.
Nonetheless, Halston said, “Thank you.”
He hung up and tried to remember the name of the BIA man who’d come by last night.
John Tall Wolf, that was it.
Halston drafted a letter of resignation.
Then he called the BIA to see how he might contact Tall Wolf.
Chapter 26
San Francisco
John called FBI Deputy Director Byron DeWitt from the Bureau’s office at San Francisco International Airport. The special agent on duty was initially reluctant to let John use the dedicated land line. He’d have more than egg on his face if he let someone without the right federal weight dial out from that phone.
Admitting to John that he’d never worked with the BIA before, he said, “It’s nothing personal, you know. Just being careful.”
John believed him. “No offense taken. Why don’t you place the call? I’m sure the deputy director will take it.”
DeWitt did. He also told the special agent where John rated in the federal hierarchy. Instructed him to give John any privacy he might request.
The FBI special agent acquiesced, but now he gave John a look.
As if to say, “You might have told me what kind of clout you have.”
“I don’t like to throw my weight around,” John replied to the unspoken rebuke.
He’d found it much more effective to let others establish his power and perks.
He asked DeWitt, “You find any terrorist angle to the Super Chief’s disappearance?”
“Nothing so far, neither foreign nor domestic. How’re you doing?”
“I’ve got the uneasy feeling this one does involve Native Americans.”
“Based on intuition or something more?” DeWitt asked.
“Intuition is a bit bloodless as a description. You’re a California guy, so you’ll understand when I tell you I’m feeling a bad vibe.”
DeWitt laughed, but he said, “Yeah, I know all about vibes. Place great faith in them, too. If native people are involved, what’s their point?”
“Well, it’s a bit late to derail the iron horse from intruding on their land. There’s probably not a lot of hope at this late date that the federal courts will compensate them for treaty violations either. Still, the feeling I get is some grievance is about to be aired.”
“Won’t look good if the train rustlers go public before we can grab them,” DeWitt said.
“Yeah, I might even get busted back to special agent.”
“Come on now. Even a salt-of-the-earth guy like you must take some joy in privilege.”
John said, “Well, I do like high-end hotels so my feet don’t hang off the bed.”
DeWitt laughed again. “What’s your next step?”
“Telling you about a complication,” John said.
He informed DeWitt what Brian Kirby had told him about Edward Danner.
That and the story of Merritt Kinney’s woefully short rooftop broad jump.
DeWitt summed up neatly the story he’d just heard. “So we have dueling billionaires here. One of them has committed a string of bribes to politicians the length of my home state to get advantageous rights-of-way to build his high speed rail line. The other guy, also striving to build his own high speed line has this motherlode of dirt on his competitor dumped in his lap by a guy now dead.”
“Uh-huh, that’s pretty much part one,” John said.
“The subsequent parts being?”
“Well, Edward Danner, m
y guess is, will do everything he can, legally or otherwise, to stop his journal from falling into anyone else’s hands. And it won’t be much longer before he finds out the Super Chief isn’t making its regularly scheduled stops.”
DeWitt said, “That ought to send a chill down his spine.”
“Maybe motivate him to send his own team out to look for the train, too, don’t you think?”
“Now that you mention it, yeah. Thing is, we government types are supposed to frown on competition.”
“Yeah, but you and I didn’t exactly come off an assembly line, did we?” John asked.
DeWitt had a serigraph of Chairman Mao hanging in his office at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
“I suppose we both have our quirks,” DeWitt admitted.
“So what I was thinking is why don’t you assign some people to keep an eye and an ear on Danner. If he hires some investigators, have your people follow them. They might find the train first. You know how some people in Congress think the private sector is so much more efficient than we are.”
“I like the idea,” DeWitt said. “It’s always a pleasure working with you, John. What’s the other thing you’d like the FBI to do for you?”
“As cooperative as Brian Kirby was, I think the man might actually be trying to play me.”
“A move I’m sure he’ll come to regret.”
“The one thing I didn’t buy was the reason for his breakup with Danner.”
John told DeWitt about Kirby besting Danner in the model train competition.
“Does seem a bit thin as a reason to start a feud,” DeWitt said.
“Yeah, but what if …” John offered a new slant on the situation.
DeWitt told him, “You are a devious thinker, John. I’ve never heard of anything like that, but I’ll have someone look into it.”
Chapter 27
Gila Bend, Arizona
Maj Olson had her crew pull their two-car train onto a siding on the outskirts of town. The line carried light traffic at that time of day. Pulling off the main rail, she’d figured, ought to give them an hour or two to just sit and chill — though the day in the Southwestern desert was hot as blazes. Well, they weren’t lacking for fuel and both the cab of the locomotive and Maj’s coach were air conditioned.
She looked out a window and saw a whole lot of nothing. Not that someone who understood the flora and fauna of the environment would see it that way, she was sure. Still, to her eye, it was humps of unwelcoming mountains, vast stretches of sand and sparse gray-green desiccated vegetation, including some of the most forlorn palm trees she’d ever seen. Even the pale, cloudless blue sky looked like it had been drained of all moisture.
Jeez, she could almost feel her skin drying out.
At thirty-one, she wanted to keep her dewy pink complexion a little while longer.
She’d like to keep her job, too, at least until she could find one that was more engaging. Her future with Amtrak looked as bleak as the outside world. She didn’t think she was going to find the Super Chief. The bad guys had too much of a head start, the country was so damn big and —
The flash of insight she’d had last night, the thought about track construction, suddenly gained a second element: Irish laborers. She knew from her academic research, of course, that Irish immigrants played a key role in the building of the first transcontinental railroad. They were among the most prodigiously productive workers on the eastern two-thirds of the project. Chinese labor did the heavy lifting on the western section.
But for some reason the Irish were the ones her subconscious was telling her were important. She didn’t know why. But she felt sure the two parts fit together and would lead her to the answer she wanted, or so she hoped. The fact that part of her mind, maybe the best part, hadn’t given up the chase encouraged her.
She was smiling when Don Prosser, the senior engineer of her crew, knocked and entered her coach. He had two bottles of root beer in hand and offered her one. Maj took it and said thanks.
Prosser said, “The guys and I would like to know how much more layover time we’ve got.”
“Let’s say another thirty minutes.”
“That long enough for you to show us a little shooting?”
Maj glanced out a window. Decided that, yeah, it would be safe to let off a few rounds.
Wasn’t anything to damage out there that she could see.
“Sure, why not?” she said.
The grizzled train driver grinned like a kid who just got the car keys.
Maj picked up the case holding her M-4. She brought her Beretta along, too, and formed up the crew, facing south, away from any sign of civilization. She looked out at the desert landscape for a target. She saw cacti in various sizes and shapes. There were even a few yellow and red blossoms on low-lying plants. But she didn’t want to kill any vegetation that might be meaningful to local people or protected by federal law for all she knew.
There weren’t any animals moving in the heat of the day that she could see. That was okay. She didn’t want to kill any critters either.
She spotted a rock about the size of a family pizza pan about ninety feet out from where she and the guys stood. The interesting thing about it was the rock was mostly a pale orange but right in the center the color condensed to a deep red. Giving the effect of a bull’s-eye.
Maj didn’t think anyone could object to their shooting a rock, and she thought it was distant enough not to have to worry about a ricochet of rock chip or bullet fragment coming back to bite one of them.
She said to Don, “You guys are more interested in the M-4 than the sidearm, right?”
Prosser, Dean Spaneas and Ed Fenwick nodded.
Leo Taylor told Maj, “I’d rather shoot the handgun.”
Maj found that interesting, but agreed to give each man the weapon of his choice. She pointed out the rock in the distance. All the men agreed they could see it clearly.
She said, “I want each of you to aim for the red spot, okay?”
Prosser seemed a bit daunted, being asked to hit the smaller area.
“Aren’t we kind of far away to go for that?” he asked.
Maj told him, “The effective range for the M-4 is six hundred meters. What I’m asking you to hit is a gimme. Here look.”
She pulled the bolt to clear the weapon, seated a loaded magazine in its well, pulled back the operating rod, fed a round into the chamber, brought the stock to her shoulder, set the weapon to individual shots and released the safety.
Maj told the others what she was doing at each stop. Then she emphasized, “You do not put your finger on the trigger until the moment you are ready to shoot. The rule is —”
“Off target, off trigger,” Leo Taylor said.
Looking at him, Maj said, “Yeah, exactly.” She turned her gaze to the rock and continued, “Tilt your head until your eye closer to the gun is looking straight down the barrel. You want to look straight past the rear sight, not to either side of it and — ”
She squeezed off a round. A chip of rock flew out of the middle of the red spot on the rock. The sounds of the weapon firing and the round hitting the rock echoed in the heated air. In an even voice, Maj said, “And that’s how it’s done.”
There was no hint of boastfulness in her voice. The shot was an easy make for anyone who’d had even a bit of training. But she didn’t relinquish the weapon to anyone else yet.
“Now, before you guys try your hands, let me hear any ideas you might have had about what happened to the Super Chief.”
Prosser said, “Dean and me, we think it could be in Mexico.”
“Why Mexico?” Maj asked. The thought had occurred to her, too, but she couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for it.
“Well, it’s close,” Dean Spaneas said, “and being a foreign country, getting it back could be damn hard.”
“Lotsa cars stolen in border states wind up there,” Prosser added.
“But you can resell cars,” Maj said. “Who’s going to buy a clas
sic locomotive?”
Ed Fenwick cleared his throat.
“Yes?” Maj asked.
“I hadn’t really thought about Mexico or any other place yet, but what Don and Dean said makes sense to me, only I don’t see the Super Chief being resold. What if it was grabbed for one of those drug cartel bosses they’ve got down there? He wants the train to move his drugs or whatever. From what I know, that engine could pull ten or twelve cars. That’s a lot more freight than any semi could haul. It’d be an economy of scale, you know.”
Maj thought about that. She supposed a big-time drug boss in Mexico could bribe his way down any rails he needed to run. Put a lot of guys with their own assault rifles on board to deal with any would-be train robbers. Maybe even arm them with Stinger missiles to defend against an air assault.
“Okay, I can admit that might be a possibility,” Maj said. “But why not buy any old locomotive? Why take the risk to snatch the Super Chief?”
Fenwick said, “Well, they’re pretty superstitious down there, aren’t they? And they’ve got their own Indians, I believe. An engine with that ‘full headdress’ paint job and the name Super Chief could be big magic. Nothing scares people more than their own imaginations.”
Shrewd psychology from a train driver, Maj thought. And the guy hadn’t even needed to go to grad school. She turned to Leo Taylor.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I think the guys have part of it right, but they’re taking things a little too far.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think the Chief is in a foreign country, all right, but one we’ve got right here in our country.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Prosser asked.
Maj answered for Taylor, “By federal law, Native American reservations are sovereign territories.”
“That’s right,” Taylor said, “and whatever magic the Chief might have south of the border could be even bigger on our side.”
Her head bobbing in agreement, Maj liked the idea.
It seemed to work as an element with the puzzle she was working out in her subconscious. Track construction, Irish laborers and an Indian reservation. Somehow, they all fit together for her.