“No argument there.”
“Tell me your nearest airport,” she said. “I’ll call the flight crew in St. Louis.”
The security firm hired to police Greyhound’s Chicago terminal proved surprisingly capable and cooperative. Tyler’s standing as a fed may have put off the state troopers, but civilians treated him like God. Priest’s King Air had been met at Midway by a black, chauffeur-driven Town Car, also courtesy of Northern Union Security. On the ride to the bus station, Tyler had shown Priest still photocopies of their suspect lifted from the McDonald’s security video as well as those of three other possible suspects, two of whom had been taped at convenience stores, one from a rifle shop in Marshall. Both the convenience store shots showed men using their credit cards, and Tyler believed their killer was too smart for that, though he didn’t mind the idea of passing these suspects along to the FBI for follow-up. “Throwing them a bone,” he called it. The plaid shirt from the rifle shop weighed in well over two-fifty and just didn’t have the look that Tyler envisioned.
“We’ll want to get this picture at the McDonald’s to our Mrs. Gomme,” Nell said. “Hopefully she’ll recognize her husband’s shirt.”
“Already ahead of you. McCaffery, at the university, is faxing this to Marshall at state police. They’ll send a car out there and run it by her.”
“If they’re going to that trouble, then we should fax all the photos we’ve got,” she said.
“Point taken.” Tyler used his cell phone as it recharged in the armrest cigarette lighter. He made the call to McCaffery and arranged it.
When Tyler hung up, Priest asked, “What, if anything, have we found out about the victim?” Her voice sounded tentative, and it drew his attention.
“They’ve thawed him out slowly for the sake of tissue preservation. They printed him and are running those prints through every known database. Nothing criminal kicked.”
“What do you mean by every database?” she asked, slightly irritated.
“You know, federal government employees, military, state employees—every state east of the Mississippi. Anything to ID him,” Tyler clarified. “If that gun was registered, then some state could have his prints on file.” Until that moment, Peter Tyler had never seen a black person go pale. He’d seen his colleagues on Metro PD flush, even blush, but never pale. This in turn forced a second realization: he’d stopped thinking of her as black, or African American. He’d been constantly aware of her color in their early dealings, had even altered his own demeanor—walking on eggshells to avoid committing a faux pas—but somewhere in the blur of the past twenty-four, or thirty-six, hours, her skin color had lost its impact. Only now, as she paled, was he once again reminded of her color, and for no explainable reason, he felt embarrassed.
“You’re staring at me,” she complained.
“You’re hiding something from me,” he said, digging. His instincts rarely failed him. “You’ve been a changed person since we found that body along the tracks. Why?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she fired back, but weakly. She wouldn’t make eye contact with him.
Tyler felt hurt, and he realized Nell Priest and her friendship now owned some small part of him. Or maybe not so small. “Am I being ridiculous?” he asked. He felt ridiculous.
“I tried to tell you,” she whispered.
“You tried to tell me what?” he asked, unable to conceal the concern in his voice.
The Town Car pulled to the curb and hit the brakes. Tyler felt a pit in his stomach that had nothing to do with the driving. Nell Priest thanked the driver, completely ignoring Tyler, and popped open her door. “We’re here,” she declared, hurrying toward the bus station and away from him and his prying eyes.
“Tell me what?” he asked her on the run through Chicago’s bus terminal.
“Later,” she whispered in a gravelly, sexy voice, an obvious attempt to try to mollify him.
“Tyler?” a loud male voice called out from across the cavernous station.
Tyler whispered at her, “You can’t leave me hanging.”
“Sure I can,” she answered.
Tyler fumed.
The inquiry came from a gray suit. Maybe a football or hockey player once upon a time. If so, it had been a long time ago indeed. He had buzz-cut gray hair, a round face, and spongy jowls. Probably not his own teeth, judging by the bite and their whiteness. They stood near a water fountain, not far from the men’s room. Tyler would have preferred an office to the bus station’s central concourse, but he took the lack of any such offer as a good sign. Perhaps time was of the essence.
“Eleven cameras in all,” the private security guy said, rushing his words and failing to introduce himself. “The system is old but competent.” He began dishing out photocopies of stills from the security system like a man dealing impossibly large playing cards. “We have him disembarking—” Another photocopy. “Pulling a dark duffel bag from storage bin two-seventeen.” Another. “Entering the men’s room. Nearly lost him here but caught the duffel bag going back over things. That’s him. Leather jacket, pretty sharp dresser, you ask me.”
“Same guy?” Priest asked.
Tyler didn’t trust the lousy photocopies, but his heart raced at the prospect of their suspect being caught on tape. He inquired, “Are the video images any clearer than these?”
“Not much better, no. The cameras and recorders are old and we reuse the tapes. Kodachrome, this ain’t.”
If it was the same guy, Tyler realized he had wetted and combed his hair, switched clothes, and reappeared as a very different man. “He looks more comfortable as this guy,” he muttered, believing they no longer needed the farm wife’s confirmation of the plaid shirt. They had their suspect. Who but their suspect would have entered the men’s room in ill-fitting clothing that matched the description of the stolen clothes, only to leave a few minutes later, rid of the costume? Again, Tyler felt elation. But at the same time he kept an open mind. The worst thing they could do was waste time chasing the wrong guy. “Could have handed off the duffel bag to an accomplice. We’d follow the bag then, instead of the guy.”
“No,” Priest contradicted, leaning across him and affording too much contact. She pointed to the boots. Only a woman would notice the guy’s shoes, he thought. She tapped Tyler’s pocket as if he would understand the signal—and then of course he did; he withdrew the folded photocopy from the McDonald’s.
“Same boots in both shots. It’s the guy,” Tyler said under his breath. He wasn’t sure he ever would have caught that.
“That’s all I’m saying,” Priest said confidently. Repeating, “Same boots, both photos.”
“The guy changed everything but his boots.” To Priest he said, “Nice work.”
“Thank you.” That time, it was a blush for sure.
“We’ll need the tapes,” Tyler told the security agent.
“Already arranged,” the man informed him.
“So he’s in the Windy City,” Priest surmised.
The big man asked Tyler somewhat sheepishly, “If I may?”
“Go ‘head.”
He handed Tyler a series of four more shots. None revealed a face, nor did they come any closer to identifying the man—no accomplice, no pay phone. The security man pointed to the suspect’s back pocket—the only shot of his ass in the whole group. “That right there,” he said strongly, as if of great importance to him.
Tyler studied the back pocket, Priest leaning over his arm. She said, “A notebook?”
“A timetable?” Tyler guessed.
The big man waited until he had their undivided attention. He looked first to Priest and then to Tyler.
The security man said, “You ask me, it’s an airline ticket.”
This time Tyler’s strides matched hers as they raced through the bus terminal for the Town Car. “Midway or O’Hare?” he asked.
“Divide and conquer?” she inquired.
“I’ll take O’Hare,” he said, glancing toward the
waiting taxis.
“You could spend a month at O’Hare looking at one day’s videos.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“A black leather jacket and blue jeans? It’s a wild goose chase.”
“A black leather jacket, jeans, and those boots. He’s going to step off that airporter bus,” he reminded her. “Unless he thinks to change clothes en route, we’ve got him. It may take us a couple hours, but we’ve got him.”
“Do we tell the FiBIes now?” she asked, meaning the FBI.
Tyler’s recharged mobile phone rang and he answered it before replying. He listened a moment and stopped dead in his tracks. “Repeat that,” he said.
Priest stopped, too.
His eyes bore into her, hard and distrustful. And judging by her wounded expression, she knew what this call was about.
Tyler closed the phone, his jaw muscles tight, his eyes burning. “You kept that from me?” he asked her.
“I was going to tell you….” A whisper. A shudder. A trembling lower lip. “I was on orders not to, but—”
“Northern Union Security, LLC,” he stammered. “The dead guy—the pleasant guy with the hatchet and the temper—was one of your company’s security agents.” He looked her up and down. “And you knew it all along, didn’t you?”
CHAPTER 12
Alvarez, the black duffel/backpack at his side, stood reading a People magazine beyond the security check in the lobby of the massive high-rise at 471 Park Avenue South, as if awaiting a friend. He eyed each and every person who departed from the bank of elevators marked for the floors twenty through thirty, acutely aware that these housed the Northern Union Railroad’s corporate offices and that therefore every person departing any of these cars was likely an employee. He waited for the right look, the right face, the right target. It wasn’t his first time here, though he hoped it would prove to be his last. With McClaren’s explosive in his possession, his final derailment was all but in place. He needed up-to-date information on the F-A-S-T Track to ensure success—this risky foray into the corporate headquarters of his enemy promised that information, and therefore an increased chance of success.
He had stolen into these offices on four previous occasions using a cloned NUR identification tag. This time would have marked his fifth visit on that tag, his first in December. He worried that given the start of a new month, the firm’s security computer might have detected these earlier visits, all in November. Afraid to push his luck, he lay in wait for a new target—a new ID tag to clone.
The encounter with Jillian remained in his thoughts, her phone number on a piece of paper in his pocket. If he needed something from her, if she could help, he would call her. Otherwise, he’d relegated her to the past, along with everything else in his life.
He took each minute separately, and though a compulsive planner, he had learned to adapt and adjust his plans to suit the moment. He rarely knew what the next hour would bring. The only constant is change—his personal mantra. He did not spend a lot of time worrying; he left that for others. Instead, he focused almost single-mindedly on bringing Northern Union to its knees.
For now, he concentrated on the task before him. His target should be a man, the closer to his own age, the better. He knew he ran a risk each and every time he penetrated the enemy camp, but ironically, their reliance upon the technologically advanced credit-card-like identification tags made them all the more vulnerable. One of the devices he carried in his backpack/duffel was a credit card read/write that connected to his laptop. Intended to accommodate retail sales on the road, the device needed only a single swipe of any credit card for the computer to read all the digital information stored on the card’s magnetic stripe. Alvarez’s expertise was computers. For eleven years he had taught the subject. He used to joke that if he hadn’t been a teacher, he’d have been locked up for hacking. The same slotted credit card reader was also capable of writing digital information back to the magnetic stripe, allowing Alvarez to clone any magnetically encoded card. A stolen ID tag was no good, as it would be reported and instantly made invalid. But a cloned card provided endless access—as he had proven in November—as long as the person to whom the ID belonged was not inside the building at the same time. If such an overlap were to happen, the security server would detect the double-up and alert the guards.
Alvarez finally spotted his target—an accountant or an engineer by his looks: bargain-basement suit, rubber-soled shoes, heavy black plastic glasses, cheap leather briefcase. He stood nearly six feet with dark hair, dark eyebrows, an unkempt beard, and little or no muscle.
Women tended to carry the plastic IDs in their purses or a handy pocket; most men preferred the badge look, hung around the neck on a strap or key chain necklace. They used the tags to log themselves in and out in the lobby, as well as to unlock doors on various floors. Alvarez selected the nerdy accountant because the man had carelessly slipped his ID into his back pocket after he’d logged out. A loop of the beaded-metal necklace spilled out of his rear pocket. Perfect for pocket pinching.
The next few minutes would dictate Alvarez’s tactics: what mode of transportation his mark selected—cab, foot, bus, subway. Alvarez strapped on the small duffel as a backpack and followed the man, keeping a decent distance, disappearing into the herd of rush-hour pedestrians. He unchained his bike and walked it along the sidewalk. Alone, in a sea of bobbing heads, Alvarez kept his attention carefully on his mark, knowing how easily he could lose him. At last, the mark crossed at a traffic light and headed for Grand Central Station—along with a few thousand others.
Alvarez quickly chained his bike to a post and followed.
The incident in the boxcar stayed with him, a nightmare he couldn’t shake. Northern Union Security—NUS—was run by a smart bulldog of a man, Keith O’Malley, a former Boston cop, and Alvarez put little past the man. He believed that O’Malley had attempted to corrupt Andersen, Alvarez’s attorney, into accepting a settlement in the lawsuit filed on behalf of his family, and that when this failed, for whatever reasons, accidentally or intentionally, O’Malley had murdered the man, framing Alvarez and leaving him no choice but to run. O’Malley had again shown his cleverness by assigning an NUS agent to the Terre Haute line. How many other agents were currently out there looking for him, he wondered. A dozen? A hundred? Were they on the New York streets? Around the next corner?
His mark surprised him as he walked right past the 42nd Street entrance to Grand Central and continued into the Hyatt next door. With a drink at the bar more expensive than the minimum wage, Alvarez had a hard time believing his eyes as this man pushed through the hotel’s doors. The lobby was white marble with brass light fixtures, a black registration desk at the far end, and a noisy bar to the right amid a jungle of potted plants. The bar was jumping. Alvarez had performed a break-in to steal his previous ID tag, so this effort seemed simple by comparison.
He hurried through the crowd—his black leather jacket and black backpack making him look enough like a New Yorker to draw no undue attention—and approached the mark with deliberate speed. He intentionally collided with the man—bumping into his back—and apologized as he reached out to steady himself. He pressed a hand down onto the man’s shoulder and gripped. The hand proved enough of a distraction for Alvarez to slip the ID tag from the man’s back pocket.
Tag in hand, Alvarez headed for the men’s rest room and locked himself in a stall, his heart racing, his hands busy. It was only a matter of minutes before the magnetic strip was read into the laptop. The ID card itself showed a poor photo of one Robert Grossman. Alvarez collected himself, his gadgetry repacked, and returned to the bar, again searching out Grossman. He saw him sitting at the bar, his hand wrapped around a clear drink of gin or vodka, his eyes on the overhead television and the Wall Street report. A drink and the market before heading home.
Like taking candy from a baby….
Alvarez approached the teeming bar, the voices at shouting level. He leaned in close to Grossman
and dropped the ID tag onto the floor while at the same time calling to the bartender for a book of matches. The overwhelmed bartender pointed to the end of the bar. Alvarez walked off in the direction of the hostess, grabbed a waitress by the elbow, and pointed out the fallen ID tag. “I think that guy may have lost something out of his pocket,” he said, making sure she identified Grossman at the bar.
She thanked him, the Good Samaritan that he was.
“No problem,” he answered. None at all, he was thinking.
Alvarez transformed the data into an ID at a high-tech copy shop nearby on 42nd Street. He worked sitting on a metal stool at a counter that looked out onto the bustling street. He first created a digital graphic image that matched the NUR format and copied it to a disk; he then transferred the data stored on Grossman’s magnetic stripe to a blank card; the copy shop printed his disk-based graphic onto the blank card for a total charge of three dollars. Within fifteen minutes, he had an NUR corporate ID tag bearing Grossman’s name but his own photograph. The man behind the counter barely spoke English and did not question any of this. He was nothing more than a hardware clerk duplicating a key.
At 6:20 P.M., knowing Grossman was in a bar or headed home, Alvarez reentered 471 Park Avenue South, now wearing a four-dollar tie beneath the partially zipped leather jacket, the backpack on his back. The security guard barely looked up as Alvarez ran his ID through the slot and the red light turned to green. Alvarez walked with increasing confidence to the bank of elevators and selected the twenty-second floor. Once inside the offices there, he would be greeted by a huge banner announcing Northern Union Railroad’s foray into the new millennium, the ultimate target of all of Alvarez’s striving:
Northern Union Railroad
THE F-A-S-T TRACK
Express New York to Washington, D.C.
2½ Hours!
Now Taking Reservations!
The banner was only an ad agency mock-up. The train, still in its testing phase, was approaching its final test—a glorified publicity stunt—an event that Alvarez intended to sabotage, now less than a week away.
Parallel Lies Page 10