by Tom Clancy
Darvin had scarcely been able to believe it when he’d found himself leaning off his stool to ask her if she wanted to join him for a drink, first because he was a married man — it had been six months since he’d tied the knot, not at all coincidentally the same length of time he’d been employed as a salesman for Rinas International Hotel Supplies — and second because he hadn’t had a pot to piss in before that, when he’d been hawking costume jewelry door-to-door at thirty bucks a ring and thirty-five a necklace for some Israeli gonif who had his office on 10th Avenue, getting a ten-percent commission on each piece of soon-to-discolor crap he unloaded, his assigned route running from 125th Street in Harlem to Washington Heights — try to earn a living wage that way, bro.
Back then, before he got hitched, before his wife’s father consequently became his boss and handed him the company’s plum Brazilian accounts, Darvin wouldn’t have had the cash or confidence to so much as dream of picking up a woman in Christina’s league, which was kind of funny if you thought about it, like something you’d expect to read in Penthouse Forum. Maybe he ought to send in an article, use one of those dumb pen names to protect his identity: Marrying to Score Babes, by Lucky Strike.
At this very moment, in fact, streaking through the inky South American night toward Rio and Darvin’s room at the Ritz Carlton, snuggled close together in the dimly lit coach of the express train — the fifth of six cars coupled to the locomotive — they were engaged in an activity that would itself make for a great opening teaser. Ten minutes earlier they had asked the attendant for an afghan and thrown it over their laps, not because either of them was cold, but because Christina from Ipanema, who had herself been waiting for the train after an afternoon shopping spree in Sao Paulo with a girlfriend — or so she said — had put her mouth to his ear and whispered a suggestion or two about how they might while away the long hours of the ride, provided they could keep from being noticed by prying eyes.
This being a luxury line, they’d already had a nice amount of privacy. Their high-backed, buttery leather chairs blocked the view of them from behind. The wall-to-wall carpeting muted most of the sounds around them and, more importantly, most sounds they might make. The fluorescent lights over the central aisle had been switched off for the benefit of passengers wanting to catch some shuteye, and many of those who weren’t asleep were in the buffet car having cocktails and canapes. Small incandescent lamps with rose-colored shades mounted between the windows gave off a subdued glow that was enough to read by, or whatever, and was also kind of romantic. The afghan, therefore, had niftily finalized yet another major deal for Darvin, giving them all the added cover they’d needed.
Now Darvin looked over at her and gasped. She looked back at him, her lips curling upward, and produced a soft, furry moan. Their faces were almost touching, their breaths mingling in moist little puffs. Their hands roved beneath the blanket like a couple of warm, burrowing animals, hers delving industriously into his unzipped and unbelted pants, his digging deep under the hem of her dress.
Darvin was about to reach the unquestionable high point of his journey — or this leg of it, at any rate — when the fluorescents running over the middle aisle abruptly flickered on, flooding the train with their stark radiance. Startled from her rapture, Christina from Ipanema straightened beside him, her hand becoming frustratingly still under the afghan, then slipping all the way out of his pants. She looked around in distracted confusion. Most of the dozing riders had been awakened by the sudden surge of light and were doing the same. Though Darvin remained dug in under her dress, figuring he’d stay there until explicitly asked to leave, he likewise found himself glancing about the coach. It wasn’t just that the lights were on. It was that they were buzzing loudly and seemed much too bright, as if their wattage had been turned up to a hot, glaring level. And the attendant, who was staring up at the ceiling of the car, looked as bewildered as everyone else.
“O que e isto?” a guy behind him asked loudly in Portuguese. “Tudo bem?”
What is this? Is everything okay?
Seconds later, the speeding train jolted on the track and the emergency horn in the locomotive burst into clamorous, ear-splitting sound, making it clear that everything was very definitely not okay.
Minutes after that, Darvin, the woman who called herself Christina, and twenty-five other passengers aboard the car were dead.
* * *
When they were young and struggling to meet the rent in the Baltimore rowhouse apartment where they’d raised their four children, Al and Mary Montelione had played a silly little game with each other virtually every time they went to the supermarket. It had started soon after their next-to-youngest, Sofia, was born. Because they’d been living exclusively off his modest postman’s salary and had needed to cut comers wherever possible, they would very carefully compare prices on grocery items, household supplies, really anything and everything they purchased.
One Fourth of July weekend during a particularly lean spell, they’d decided to treat the family to some ice cream, but standing at the dairy freezer, had suddenly realized they could scarcely afford even that meager indulgence, given that they’d had not a cent in the bank and about ten dollars cash between them to stretch over the holiday. Seeing the crestfallen look on Al’s face as he’d read the price labels, Mary had grabbed him by the elbow and exclaimed: “Come on, mister, go for it! Whoever finds the cheapest quart wins a free trip to Rio!” It was one of those situations when you either had to laugh or cry, and her mock announcer’s voice had pushed Al’s precarious emotional balance toward the former. Cracking up hysterically, he’d plunged into the freezer as if he actually had been a contestant on a game show, all at once a whole lot less depressed than he’d been a moment before — which, of course, had been Mary’s intent. Though she’d outscrounged him by twenty-two cents that evening, they had bought the ice cream for the family and he’d come home feeling like a winner for a change. From then on, the “trip to Rio” bit had become a standard tactic they’d used to relieve the strain of their constant financial woes. After a while even the kids had gotten in on it.
Four decades later, living simply but quite comfortably on Al’s postal supervisor’s retirement pension — things had gone well for them after his promotion, except for a health scare three years earlier, when he’d developed a severe cardiac arrhythmia that required normalization with an artificial pacemaker — Al and Mary were celebrating their Golden Anniversary with a real trip to Rio as well as other sight-seeing locales in Brazil, the travel and hotel reservations fully paid for by their now grown and married children, who had cooked up the idea as a surprise gift. Thus far the vacation had been spectacular. They’d spent five days in Copacabana, taken an air shuttle to Brasilia for a tour of the country’s western region that included a breathtaking hot-air balloon ride over a wildlife preserve in the Pantanal, then flown back east, making a two-day stopover in Sao Paulo before boarding the night coach back to Rio, where they planned to spend the final weekend of their vacation.
After sampling the buffet in the dining car about three hours into the ride, they had taken their seats in the middle of the train, Mary pulling a Danielle Steele novel out of her travel bag, Al settling in for a snooze beside her, when the fluorescent overheads flashed on and started buzzing like a nest of wasps.
Quizzically scrunching her eyebrows, Mary looked up from her paperback, then turned to her husband.
Her expression at once became frightened.
Al had awakened with a start and had both hands on his chest his face pale, his mouth wide open and pulling in shallow snatches of air.
“Al what is it?” she said, her book dropping from her fingers as she reached over and took hold of his shoulder. “Al, honey, Al, are you sick?”
He nodded, too short of breath to answer.
Terrified now, oblivious to the murmurs that had arisen throughout the car over the lights going on, Mary frantically looked around for an attendant.
“We nee
d a doctor over here!” she cried. “Please, someone help us!”
But no one responded. A sudden, violent jolting of the train, followed by the loud blare of the emergency horn, had thrown the other occupants of the car into their own constricted spheres of panic. Mary heard cries of alarm all around her. Heard metal wheels grind over the tracks as the train’s jarring, bumping, swaying movement worsened, threatening to fling her off of her seat.
Beside her, Al was gagging, his hands still clutching his chest directly over the spot where the pacemaker was implanted. Acting on impulse, not knowing what else to do, she threw herself protectively over him, put her arms around him, and held him to her.
It was in this position that their bloody, broken bodies were found the next day when the search teams recovered them from the wreckage.
* * *
In the second car of the train, Enzio Favas was proudly showing off his UpLink Telecommunications pager/ wristwatch to Alyssa, one of the Australian runway models he’d hired to showcase his upcoming beachwear line at the fashion designers’ convention in Rio the following week.
“It send and receive E-mail, do you know? E-mail!” He pointed to the bottom of the readout display. “You touch screen and words appear right here!”
Alyssa glanced over at him. She’d been studying an unsightly calcium deposit under her fingernail and wishing there were a manicurist aboard.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“And it adjust to different time zone! Automateeek!” he enthused in thickly accented English. “Fly from New York City to Los Angeles, Paris to Tokyo, time never off by a minute! It all done by satellite, do you know?”
“Uh-huh.” A little girl giggled several rows back and Alyssa frowned. “You think those brats behind us are ever going to shut up and go to sleep?”
Enzio shrugged. The “brats” were actually three very adorable sisters who were being shepherded cross-country by their nanny. Enzio had chatted briefly with the woman earlier in the ride and gotten the entire story: Parents divorced, mother living in Sao Paulo, father in Rio, joint custody arrangement, the poor babies constantly bouncing between them like Ping-Pong balls. Enzio, himself the product of a broken home, sympathized. How could Alyssa be so icy? So vain and self-absorbed? And besides that, how could she not have any interest in his watch?
“It has twenty different kind of tone, some of them music! And — what it is called? — GPS feature!” he said, thinking that last would be certain to impress her. “Get lost anyplace, anyplace in whole world, you send message to UpLink operator. He send message back, tell you where you are! Do you know?”
Alyssa ran her tongue around the inside of her lips, trying to curb her annoyance. If Enzio’s rambling about the watch didn’t drive her bonkers, his verbal tics absolutely would. And those giggly kids, Jesus.
“Uh-huh,” she said, beginning to regret that she hadn’t sat across the aisle with Thandie, one of the other models… although all she ever talked about was how she could eat as much rich, high-calorie food as she wanted and stay thin, let’s not mention the diet pills and the fingers down her throat as her meals went straight into the toilet.
Beside Alyssa, Enzio decided to make a last-ditch attempt at awing her with his expensive new toy. He thrust his wrist out in front of her, the watch’s dial so close to her face it almost clipped the tip of her nose.
“You enter names, phone numbers, addresses! Up to one thousand people! Mark appointments on calendar! Download informacion to PC! Do you—?”
The fluorescents above them suddenly blinked on. Alyssa had no idea why — maybe one of the pint-sized monsters behind her had gotten up and fiddled with the switch. In which case, she was thinking she really ought to be grateful, since it had at least shut Enzio up for the moment.
The thing she didn’t get, though, was why the lights were so bright. And what was that weird humming noise they were making?
She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the three girls were all in their seats, looking this way and that in surprise along with the rest of the car’s passengers.
Well, almost all of us, she thought, noticing that Enzio was still staring adoringly at his goddamned cook-your-dinner-screw-your-significant-other-for-you Dick Tracy Superwatch, seemingly oblivious to everything around him.
“Enzio,” she said. “Do you know what’s going on—”
“Shhh!” he said. “Not now!”
Surprised by his unusual curtness — Enzio might be a royal pain in the ass, but he was always a polite one — Alyssa looked at him and realized that he was no longer admiring the watch, but frowning at it. Whatever he saw on its face was making him upset. Very upset actually.
She leaned over to check it out for herself, then raised her eyebrows, the reason for his distress becoming evident.
The display no longer showed the time, but was covered with rows of tiny, blinking ones and zeroes. Also, the watch’s alert tones all seemed to be sounding at once. Chirps, beeps, blips, trilly fragments of simple melody. She supposed she might have noticed it right away if her attention hadn’t been diverted by the buzzing lights and the confused, edgy vibe running through the car.
Even before the first jarring bump, she got the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong.
Then the train seemed to bounce off the track and she clutched her seat for support.
“Enz—?”
She stopped herself. He was just staring at the watch, shaking his head dolefully, concerned with nothing but the watch. Looking like his best friend in the world had just had a fatal stroke right in front of him.
The train was shaking and rattling now, swinging wildly back and forth on the track, the air horn emitting deafening blasts. A few people were screaming, the little girls behind her starting to cry, asking the woman who was sitting with them what was happening.
Allysa’s last coherent thought before the front of the car behind her smashed into the rear of the one she was sitting in, ramming it forward into the locomotive, crunching it between them like a wad of aluminum foil in an angry fist, was that those brats, those poor little helpless brats, were going to get hurt.
* * *
In the proverbial perfect world filled with perfect human beings, Julio Salles might have been able to reduce the loss of life that occurred that night. Though the fifty-five miles per hour that Salles was doing while still nearly two miles from the disabled “slow” signal fell within the limit of his authorized speed, it did so just barely, and slower would have been wiser on a downhill grade. Though he had been alert at his post and looking out for the signal, and had no reason to suspect anything might be wrong with the signal, it would have been an intelligent precaution to use geographic landmarks as he neared the place where the track looped around the hillside in the unlikely event that it did fail.
But there can be such a thing as overfamiliarity with a route, particularly in country where the terrain rolls along with a dulling sameness, one stretch of track bleeding into the next. Anybody who regularly drives to work in a rural area knows this; after taking the same roads day in and day out for several months or years, you begin to ignore the scenery and depend on a general sense of your bearings rather than its specific features, until coming to a sign or stoplight that marks a necessary turn. The building, brook, farmyard, radio tower, or cherry ’63 Mustang in someone’s driveway that once caught the eye on every trip will be passed unnoticed along the way. You feel free to straddle the speed limit, and perhaps even slightly exceed it without risking a traffic stop, knowing the police will in most instances tolerate a person going, say, sixty-eight or seventy in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour speed zone.
Salles had been driving railroad trains for three decades, and made the Sao Paulo-Rio run over five hundred times in the two years since it had been assigned to him. Never in his career had he come close to having a mishap. The night of the derailment, he was watching in anticipation of a signal that had ceased to function, and relying on equipment tha
t no one had thought to harden against the sort of destructive black technology with which it was targeted. He was performing his job in compliance with the rules, and his response to the first indications of a problem was rapid. If blame had been apportioned by a judge possessing complete, objective knowledge of the facts, Salles’s slice of it would have been truly inappreciable. Moreover, his public and courtroom accounts of the incident were, from his available perspective, a hundred percent candid and faithful to the truth.
This is how he recalled it in deposition:
His train was proceeding normally along a series of climbs and dips in the large, undulating hills that are crossed by the Sao-Paulo-to-Rio intercity railway. The forested countryside east of Taubate being exceptionally dark and repetitive in its features, Salles had always relied on his instruments and track signals rather than terrain landmarks as visual aids. On his descent along the slope where the derailment took place, he had approximated that he was about five miles west of a blind curve that required the train to slow to between eight and ten miles per hour, his discretional latitude based upon factors such as weather conditions or the presence of another train on the opposing track. His usual practice was to begin gradually applying his brakes two miles west of the curve, where the continuously lighted yellow “slow” signal came into view, and he had been keeping his eyes open for it since starting along the decline. But Salles’s estimate of his position was off by three miles. He had already passed the signal without knowing it — and without being able to know it because its light had given out.