by Andrew Mayne
“Too bad they didn’t search you for this when you got inside,” said the man.
He reached to the floor and pulled out a small bag. He produced a syringe. Mitchell recoiled.
“Don’t worry, it’s for me, not you. We need to switch places, you in my suit, me in the casket, but in order to do that, I’m going to have to be unconscious, unless you want to fight me off. I’d rather we didn’t do it that way.”
“What do I do then?” Mitchell asked.
“When we come to a stop, they’ll unload me thinking I’m you. That’s when you need to get out and make it to my car. The keys are in the bag. From there you need to get away as fast as possible. In my car, you’ll find my laptop. There’s a file called ‘Great Wall.’ It’s what you want.”
Mitchell tried to put all of it together. “Is that a cure?”
The man laughed. “No. The only cure right now is transparency. You’ll need to share that file. It’s got everything in there about what happened. The problem is you can’t just e-mail it to people or upload it to Google.
“Ever since Wikileaks, we’ve taken some extreme measures to filter and protect sensitive information. Filters on e-mail servers. Worms on storage servers that cause disk failures when certain phrases show up. There’s even rooms full of people that do nothing now but create credible-looking forgeries of government documents to confuse and waste the time of people trying to find the truth.”
“So what do I do?” asked Mitchell.
“Keep doing what you’ve been doing. Run. Stay alive, and when you find a way, tell people everything. Broadcast it. The only safe place for you is in plain sight.”
The man opened the wrist of his suit and injected himself. “Place my body inside and cover my head with the pillow. Then move. You’ll have maybe two hours before they realize I drove my own car and my lab assistant is using the rental with the tracking. Then find some other way to keep going.”
The man’s eyes began to get droopy. Mitchell tried to think of anything else to ask him. A million questions came to mind.
“What’s your password?” asked Mitchell.
“Password … almost … for … got ...” The man’s body began to go slack. Mitchell had to grab his shoulders to keep him from falling over. “Password … is … Lovestrange.”
53
The van came to a stop. Mitchell was convinced the moment they opened the doors they’d see he’d made the switch and the jig would be up. He did his best to look down at the plastic casket at the face of Dr. Lovestrange, or whatever his name was, covered with the pillow and a towel, and act as casual as could be. Four more men in spacesuits were at the back of the van waiting to unload the casket.
Mitchell helped them move it out while avoiding eye contact. He kept his eyes down on his “patient” while trying to scope out where he was. Four sets of work lights illuminated the area where they were unloading the van. Directly ahead was a large plastic door, the kind of thing you saw in movies before you saw the bodies of crashed aliens behind it.
In and around the work lights were several other people in spacesuits watching the proceedings. The whole area looked like some kind of improvised processing facility.
What looked like a hundred police cars with their lights still flashing surrounded the area beyond the lights in a perimeter. The police were staying inside of their cars to avoid “contamination,” or whatever they were calling it.
At first, he panicked at the thought of moving through them and then he realized all the attention was on the casket. Mitchell allowed the men pushing it to move away from him as they headed toward the big plastic door. Once they got close to it, Mitchell stepped to the side and walked between two of the huge work lights into the shadows where other people in spacesuits were watching from behind a barrier.
Acting like he had business elsewhere, he walked right past the line of police vehicles and nobody looked twice.
Past them he could see a parking lot filled with cars, various government vehicles and trucks. That’s when he realized that the processing facility was actually the Park Square Mall. Mitchell knew criminals often returned to the scene of the crime. For him it wasn’t a choice.
He moved out into the parking lot and toward a cluster of cars. Nobody stopped him, so he kept moving. Off to one side there was a small encampment of trailers with people in and out of suits walking around. Somewhere, he was sure, there was probably a decontamination booth and lockers for the suits, but since nobody stopped him, he kept walking toward the cars. There was no time to waste acting guilty.
Mitchell fumbled the key from a pouch and clicked the unlock button. A dark blue Ford Explorer’s lights blinked a dozen cars away.
He wasn’t sure how suspicious he’d look getting into the car with the suit on, but he was even more afraid of what would happen if he were approached with it off. Mitchell also didn’t know if it would be possible to drive with the bulky oxygen canister strapped to his back.
Mitchell waited until the last second as he got to the car and quickly stripped the suit off and tossed it into the passenger side on top of the laptop bag. He’d put it back in its duffel bag later. For the time being, he just needed to get out of there.
Mitchell started the SUV up and headed toward the exit. All of the entrances to the mall had police cars at them making sure that no unauthorized people entered. He hoped that they assumed anybody inside there had business in there and could leave without having to show any identification.
Even so, Mitchell’s face was the most recognizable one in South Florida. He looked around the interior and found a pair of reading glasses in the center console. Mitchell put them on as he headed toward the exit where a cop with a flashlight was standing.
Act casual, thought Mitchell. He reached down and picked up a cell phone Lovestrange had left behind. He put it to his ear and had a pretend conversation when the cop looked over at him. Mitchell nodded. The cop pointed toward the main highway and waved Mitchell on.
Mitchell pulled out of the mall for the second time in three days in a car that wasn’t his own with no idea where to go next.
Baylor couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to follow the motorcade surrounding the ambulance or keep a careful distance away. He’d gotten Steinmetz onto the processing team. But all he could hope for from him was information. He wasn’t a team player. Steinmetz had trouble with the difficult choices. Baylor couldn’t count on him do the really hard stuff. For that he needed Mr. Lewis. By this time he should be finishing up cleaning the mess he and Mr. Travis had made.
A little arson and an incriminating letter about trying to stop “The Islamic Traitor Roberts” and they had a credible Jack Ruby in Travis. Helicopter pilots were kind of nutty to begin with. Baylor could make sure that a record of post-traumatic stress was available on the man and he’d just be an odd footnote in the Mitchell Roberts story.
The next step was making sure that story ended in the next day. The longer the CDC and others had a live specimen, even worse, a lawyered-up specimen, the more problems for Great Wall.
Baylor decided his next step would have to take place somewhere after Mitchell left the South Florida area. The CDC was pushing to have him brought to Atlanta. That would be too problematic for Baylor. If he could get the Pentagon involved, he could have Mitchell sent to an Army base where they dealt with bioterrorism. There he could count on fewer civilians and more people tied into his own network.
He pulled out his phone and called his contact in the West Wing. He would follow the motorcade back to the mall at a more leisurely pace while he strategized on how to get who he needed on the committee that would actually be overseeing Mitchell’s care.
54
The idea for everything had come to Mitchell when he realized he’d have to ditch the car sooner rather than later. He was 20 minutes north of the mall when he saw police cars behind him begin to line up on the exits on the highway. He took the nearest exit before a Highway Patrol car came to a sto
p in the middle of the off-ramp.
Steinmetz, aka Dr. Lovestrange -- Mitchell had found the name on a letter in the console -- had meant well. But even he had no idea how intense this manhunt was going to get once they realized Mitchell had slipped away.
The escape made Mitchell appear far more resourceful than he was and also more sinister. The negotiation and the surrender seemed like some kind of mastermind plot. Now that the authorities weren’t treating him like a hospital patient on the run, his actions had implicated him in something much more global.
He had to tell the world about Great Wall or else his actions would never make any sense. There was no way he would survive for very long at the center of such a massive hunt. He was in a race to get the word out before they caught him.
Everything came into focus for Mitchell when he realized he had one and only one goal: get the word out before they got him. To do that, he needed a way to spread the message. He entertained the idea of breaking into a copy shop and holding them hostage while they printed out the contents of the computer files. But he knew that would take too long. He’d find himself surrounded before the first printout was finished collating.
Steinmetz’s computer was going to have to be his printing press, if not online then by making copies onto USB sticks and CD-ROMS. That meant one more stop before he dropped off the car and took an alternate means of transportation.
Mitchell pulled the SUV into a Walgreens several miles from where he exited. He had a bold idea, but given the state of panic everyone was in, it could work.
He donned the spacesuit and walked in through the front door. The small Indian woman behind the counter gave Mitchell a curious look.
Mitchell turned to her. “He’s been spotted in this area. Do you have a back room where you can hide?”
The woman nodded.
“Go there, but don’t touch anything electrical, like a phone.” It sounded stupid as he said it, but the woman was too scared to point that out. She ran off toward the back of the store.
Mitchell grabbed a shopping basket and walked over to the side of the store where they had USB memory sticks and blank CD-ROMS. He began piling them into the basket. Once it was full, he headed back out the front of the store and got into the car with the spacesuit still on.
He got the helmet off but had to drive with the seat pushed back at its farthest setting to accommodate the backpack. His silly trick wasn’t going to last for very long and he needed to get to where he could ditch the car as soon as possible.
Back when Mitchell was hiding out on the island, he’d played around with the scanner, listening to different frequencies. On one cluster of bands, he found different voices talking about dispatching police cars, ambulances and other emergency vehicles. That was the one he paid the most attention to. While scanning around, he found another band he couldn’t understand at first. It took him ten minutes to realize that the talk of “knuckles,” “drawbars” and “gas cans” was railroad chatter. He was listening to rail yard workers somewhere not too far off getting trains prepped.
He remembered them talking about “the 10:15 North Atlantic.” At 10:40, he could hear the sound of a train passing somewhere not too far away from where he was hiding across the Intracoastal.
Mitchell pulled into the parking lot of a Best Buy not too far away from where he’d thought he remembered seeing the rail yard the calls had come from. He parked in the far side by a beat-up Ford Focus and stripped off the spacesuit. He shoved it into the duffel bag. His fingers touched the screwdriver Steinmetz had given him, which he realized he was supposed to have left behind, and had an idea. He took the license plate from the Ford Focus and shoved it into his bag. It worked before. Maybe it would work again.
Mitchell then climbed through the hedges and ran toward the railroad tracks that snaked around the back of the Best Buy and toward the rail yard. Ahead he could see the tail end of the “10:15.” By his watch, it was already 10:17 p.m. He’d heard trains rarely left on time, so he hoped he’d just had a bit of good fortune.
Mitchell ran along the side of the train that was in shadows. He was looking for an open railcar. He didn’t know how common they actually were, but Rookman had guests come on who talked about using them to travel around like 21st-century hobos. Up ahead he could hear the train blow a whistle and start up. There was the sound of metal hitting metal as the knuckles that connected the cars began to pull against each other from the front to the back of the train. The train would build up speed and begin to overtake him if he didn’t find a spot.
Car after car was either a tanker or a locked-up freight car. Mitchell was beginning to lose hope. If all else failed, he could just cling to a ladder and get off at some point farther on up the rail, but that meant being out in the open and risk getting caught.
The train was beginning to match pace with Mitchell’s jogging. He had to run faster in order to get to the cars that were farther ahead. He rounded another bend and could see the front of the train a thousand feet away. Closer to him he saw several car carriers loaded with brand-new Toyota Land Cruisers headed from the port of Miami to somewhere north. They had walls along the sides but the backs were open.
Mitchell ran up to the closest carrier and threw the duffel bag with the spacesuit and laptop onto the platform at the end of the car. He grabbed the metal frame around the back and pulled his chest onto the back of the car. He didn’t appreciate how high off the ground the backend was until he felt his feet dangle and drag in the gravel as he struggled to pull himself aboard.
He finally managed to get a knee and then both legs onto the carrier as the train picked up speed. Mitchell picked up his bag and climbed over the space between the hood of the last car and the top of the carrier. He didn’t want to break the window of the outermost car.
Mitchell pulled out his screwdriver and got ready to slam it into the back window of a brand-new silver Land Cruiser when he got the impulse to actually check if it was locked. He reached down and squeezed the latch for the rear hatch. It popped open. Of course. Mitchell threw his duffel bag into the back.
He looked at the sticker on the windshield of the rearmost Land Cruiser and tried to decipher the symbols. Origin was listed as MIA. Destination was listed as ATL. Atlanta. He tried to remember what was going on in Atlanta at that time. He knew the CDC had headquarters there. But there was something else. Of course, thought Mitchell. His endgame was in sight. First, he needed to make several hundred copies of the files while the train drove through the night. Then he could plan out how he was going to cause a commotion.
55
Mitchell was sound asleep in the passenger seat of the Land Cruiser when a commotion not of his design shook him awake. He felt his body lurch forward and then opened his eyes to see sunlight momentarily flicker from outside the carrier and then suddenly get blacked out. Something pressed up against his face and he could smell a sharp pungent smell like battery acid. All around he heard the sound of twisting metal and explosions as the entire world seemed to be shaken apart.
He felt a moment of weightlessness and then was thrown to the right as the world shifted around him. His brain tried to make sense of what was happening. Parts of a half-remembered dream still threaded through his consciousness. The smell. The pressure on his face and the explosion he just felt to his side. Airbags.
He was in a car. The car was in a train. The train had crashed. Mitchell could feel the rumble of metal sliding across gravel and hear the impact as cars hit each other. The train was still crashing.
The airbags began to deflate. The windshield was cracked from when the impact sent the cars in the carrier into the air, bouncing into the ceiling. His car and the carrier were now on their side. For a fleeting moment, he thought he was back in the tractor-trailer truck he’d stolen what seemed like ages ago.
Mitchell could hear the sound of the railroad cars in back of him shudder and fly off the tracks as the impact that hit him rolled from the front of the train to the back like a gia
nt wave. Twenty million pounds of steel cried out as the train was brought to a stop.
Mitchell regained his senses. He did a quick pat-down to see if anything was broken. He was already bruised and banged up from the past several days; all he cared about was if any bones were sticking out of places where they shouldn’t. Everything seemed to be where it was supposed to have been. It was dumb luck that he’d found the safest place on the train: inside a car with front and side airbags. If he’d found the open rail car like he’d been hoping for, he was certain his body would have been bounced around like a jelly doughnut inside a blender.
On top of everything else, thought Mitchell, now he was trapped in a train accident. He unfastened his seat belt and shifted his back to the side door so he could kick out the windshield. Accident? He cursed himself. There were no accidents of late. This was deliberate.
He thought for a moment. If it had been the cops and the feds, they would have just stopped the train. This was someone else. This was the work of the people who’d sent the helicopter after his boat. Somehow they’d tracked him. Mitchell had shut off the phone he’d taken from the pier and made sure that Steinmetz’s laptop’s wireless connection was turned off. Damn it. It was a government computer and undoubtedly had some kind of computer tracking system in it. The fact that the people who tracked him had used train derailment as a means to stop him meant that Steinmetz’s bosses hadn’t told the feds where he was at.
Mitchell needed to get away before the scene was flooded with emergency personnel. He grabbed the duffel bag and climbed through the front windshield. There was a crevice of space between the top of the SUV and the carrier ceiling. Mitchell squeezed his body into it and moved toward the bright light streaming from the back of the car hauler.
It probably would have been easier if he’d just crawled through the back window, but he didn’t feel like going back into the SUV. The airbag smell and broken glass would only depress him even further. If he stopped to think of himself as an accident victim waiting for help, that would just make him vulnerable.