Something was dreadfully wrong. Alvarez had studied the specifics of the bullet train from top to bottom—inside Northern Union’s own offices reviewing blueprints of the mechanicals and electronics. After nearly three hours of crawling track to track, the duffel in tow, the engine he now faced matched none of those specifications.
The train itself held half as many cars as NUR had scheduled for the test. The engine might have fooled someone less studied than he, but despite the aerodynamic nose, the sleek lines, and the silver paint, its modified coupler revealed its true identity. That coupler was a trademark of the early prototype locomotive, installed so that a variety of American-manufactured train cars could be connected to the French-built locomotive. That coupler had been abandoned in the latest model as the lightweight, guidance-controlled passenger cars had arrived from plants in France and Belgium. This engine he was looking at was a descendant of France’s TGV turbo diesels—a beautiful specimen but not the Japanese powerhouse that would drag the country’s fastest manned test run from New York to Washington.
This train was a ruse. His heart nearly stopped. All the guards, all the lights, the radio traffic: all in place for his benefit, and his benefit alone. Dumbfounded, he crawled out, leaving the duffel, and looked down the length of the train. O’Malley had tricked him, had moved the real F-A-S-T Track to another location.
“If you’ve got nothing to do, help load the test dummies.” The voice came from a big guard behind him. The man had caught an agitated Alvarez flat-footed. This guard had a dark beard and shoulders as wide as a doorway.
Alvarez said, “My dinner didn’t agree with me. Maybe it’s time for a visit to the blue box.” He’d seen the Porta-Potties when entering the yard.
Tricked! Heat flooded his face. Where the hell had they hidden an entire train?
The guard said, “Just get back here and put yourself to use. This thing rolls in a couple hours.”
Even the guards had been tricked! This man didn’t know the train he was guarding was a fake. And then, looking closer, Alvarez reconsidered. The guards were filling the cars with mannequins and crash-test dummies. The cars were, in fact, the ones Alvarez had expected to see. Only the engines were different. But the Japanese locomotives and their guidance computers were essential to him. So what the hell was going on?
“Back in a minute,” Alvarez said, walking up toward the locomotive.
He glanced back toward the duffel bag, lying in shadow. He needed that bag. He would leave on the next shift change. Who would stop him from bringing a bag out of the yard? he wondered, a headache creeping into the front of his head and seizing him at the temples.
CHAPTER 28
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Nell Priest asked from the other side of a white Formica table in a turnpike rest area McDonald’s south of Newark. Both she and Tyler drank black coffee from white Styrofoam cups. They shared a large order of fries.
Tyler answered sarcastically and a little nervously, “The worst that can happen is they beat me to a pulp and attribute it to Alvarez.”
“The man murdered his own attorney, don’t forget,” she chided. “Don’t make him out to be Robin Hood.”
“He’s a suspect in that murder. The crime is alleged,” Tyler corrected.
“You’re defending him? I’m trying to warn you. If you go under O’Malley’s radar and you happen to find Alvarez, you’re on your own. And he has absolutely nothing to lose.”
Tyler savored the coffee, surprised at how good it tasted. But even more satisfying was the company. “Don’t you see the problem O’Malley created for himself?”
“Maybe I don t,” she admitted.
“He offered explanations for those early derailments—drivers on booze, on pot, maintenance problems. He issued reports to the NTSB and made it all official. At the time it probably seemed like a good idea, clever even, a way to throw Rucker and the NTSB off Alvarez’s scent, because O’Malley didn’t want Alvarez caught by anyone but his own people. But the upshot is that legally Alvarez isn’t responsible for those derailments. It would have been one thing if O’Malley had worked with the NTSB to go after Alvarez while putting on a different face to the press, but that’s not what happened. Those derailments, those bearing failures, are not going to be blamed on Alvarez. For O’Malley, that means he has to solve it himself; he dug himself into a hole.”
“So why didn’t he want him caught? Why not involve the Bureau, you guys, whoever he could?” she said, more thinking aloud than asking a question.
“That’s the big, unanswered question,” Tyler said. “The obvious answer is that he didn’t want Genoa coming to the surface again. But that’s what keeps it interesting.”
“It’s a game to you?” She sounded disappointed. Angry even. “You know, just as I’m thinking that this thing between us, whatever it is, is worth pursuing, you come out with something like that.”
“Well, then I wish I could take it back.”
“You can’t,” she said. “You’re too smart, Peter. I like smart.”
“And I thought it was my dashing looks,” he interrupted.
“See? There you go again!”
“Dumb,” he filled in for her. He appreciated her honesty, wasn’t sure why he reacted sarcastically.
“Listen,” he said, “I was hired because O’Malley had picked me for this job, not Loren Rucker. O’Malley needed someone who could take the fall, someone new to NTSB and therefore untested, unknown.” She was shaking her head, but Tyler wouldn’t allow her to interrupt. “Believe me, I know all this now. I’m not making this up. My point is that it is about something else for me. It’s about proving my worth, about taking the job seriously. Taking it farther than the original assignment called for. I got shafted in the Chester Washington thing. And yes, I carry a chip on my shoulder about that. And if Harry Wells and Keith O’Malley give me a leg up, a chance to win back some of what I’ve lost, then screw it: I’m taking it.”
“Peter, you can’t undo that stuff, the negative stuff. It’s what people remember. And if you allow it to stick in your throat like some fish bone, it’s going to choke you and kill you. Booze. Ulcers. Whatever. You let go, and you move on. And if you do, you’re a survivor, and if you don t, you’re a victim.” She added, “Whether he’s caught or not, by you, by O’Malley, by the Bureau, a week later no one will remember.” She shook her finger at him. Her nails were painted a metallic deep purple, an eggplant, that went beautifully with her skin. “And don’t go sappy on me,” she scolded. “Don’t tell me you’ll be the one to remember, because that makes it about you, and only you.”
As she’d predicted, Tyler had been about to tell her that he’d be the one to remember, so he held his tongue on that. “The point is,” he said, “O’Malley has been unwilling to share Alvarez’s identity with law enforcement. He doesn’t want him caught, he wants him dead.” He lowered his head sheepishly, wondering if he dare share his inner thoughts. “For a few short hours, after the motel in Baltimore, I was Umberto Alvarez. On the run, hanging on to a train, my hands and toes half frozen. A fugitive. Nowhere to land. I felt like I was in some parallel universe—don’t laugh—where I was given a chance to feel some of what he must feel. As ridiculous as it may sound, I connected with him. And it was fear. Pure, visceral fear. No place was safe. This kind of disconnection, detachment, that I don’t think you, or anyone, can understand until you’re there, and hopefully you’ll never be there.”
She said nothing. She ate another French fry and finished her coffee. Finally she said, “Why sneak onto that train if you’re convinced he’s going to derail it? I just don’t get that.”
“But you’re convinced he won’t. Can’t. Whatever.”
“Maybe I’m less convinced than I was.”
“This time, there are passengers. This time he will be blamed. Everything O’Malley has created about this guy will be justified. Whatever is supposed to happen on this train can’t be allowed to happen.”
�
�You’re just trying to impress me,” she said, allowing a smile.
“How’m I doing?” asked Tyler.
CHAPTER 29
12 Hours
Raritan Center Parkway. Some called it Red Root for the creek that ran through it. Some referred to the rail yard as New Brunswick, or Edison, the nearest towns of any size. It was a vast stretch of former wetlands, absorbed into industrialized America, where dozens of sidetracks and spurs ran out from a central line like needles on an evergreen branch.
Alvarez wasn’t sure who controlled the miles of track there any longer, but he hung up the pay phone convinced that the bullet train was hidden there. The deception had been simple enough, and he never would have been able to dope it out without his prior subterfuge at corporate headquarters, where he had obtained the necessary phone numbers. He had called the private internal number for the bullet train project, reporting that he had a truckload of crash-test dummies and that no one at the Metuchen yard would sign for them.
“That’s because they’re supposed to be delivered to Raritan,” the woman had said disapprovingly, asking him to hold while she connected him. Alvarez had hesitated only seconds before hanging up, the new location written in ballpoint in the palm of his hand.
Slipping out of Meadows yard had required a diversionary tactic he would have preferred not to use, but with time being of the essence, and unwilling to wait for another shift change, he had burned a cigarette as a delayed fuse to ignite a signal flare he’d set between trains. By the time the flare lit up, Alvarez was across the yard. The resulting commotion allowed him to strap on the duffel as a backpack and hurry out the yard’s front gate.
Now, standing in the cold outside an Airstream diner on Route 1 in Edison, Alvarez faced a mile walk to reach Raritan. With twelve hours until the bullet train test, he felt rushed. He’d lost nearly half a day to O’Malley’s cunning. Worse, his duffel was no longer secreted beneath a train but on his back. He couldn’t afford any inquiries as to its contents, so he’d have to enter Raritan on foot, and without being seen. Crawling, if he had to. With dawn quickly approaching, he had to rush.
Fortunately, the mapping software on his laptop revealed several ways to cross the New Jersey Turnpike from Route 1. Both Meadow Road and Woodbridge Avenue were shown to have underpasses connecting to the Raritan side. More important, a dead-end spur of rail track, south of Martin’s Landing, clearly crossed under the divided highway. It was this route that Alvarez took, and at 4 A.M., he entered the enormous Raritan complex from its south end.
Reading a map and seeing over fifty quarter-mile stretches of railroad track in person were two entirely different experiences. With the winter sun beginning to pale the morning sky, with seagulls swooping aimlessly over Crab Island and the Raritan River, Alvarez observed the 150 acres of remains of disused passenger cars, their wheels nearly welded to the tracks in their unmoving decay. Windows broken. Graffiti encrusted. Dead weeds poking through a thin slush of last week’s snow.
Seeing sterile electric light reflecting off the low clouds, his fatigue washed away. He stashed the duffel beneath a rusted car and made note of its location. Fingers cold. Cheeks stinging. He wore the uniform. He had an ID clipped to his pocket. He steeled himself, knowing he needed the right attitude above all: slightly hostile, cold, tired. It wasn’t so difficult a stretch.
He heard the distant hum of a power generator and knew beyond any doubt that he’d found the bullet train. Who else would be in this godforsaken place at four in the morning?
Nothing could stop him now. Or so he hoped.
11 Hours
Alvarez hid in a shadow of a rotting caboose, beginning to wonder if his uniform was more of a liability than an asset. Unlike the Meadows yard, where the uniform had helped him to blend in, Raritan was being watched by fewer guards.
This time there was no mistaking the bullet train. The Japanese engine car was pure elegance, space-age aerodynamics, smooth, sleek, even sexy. With just five cars total—an engine, followed by two passenger cars and then two dining cars—this configuration was four cars short of its scheduled size. This difference worried Alvarez. His plan had been devised around a longer train. He guessed that O’Malley had divided the passenger cars between Raritan and Meadows for the sake of stealth. The question remained whether or not the four at Meadows would be added back on to this train prior to its arrival at Penn Station. Alvarez believed they would be added, simply because the NTSB required a minimum of nine cars for the historic test run. He decided to count on it: the two dining cars at the back here would end up roughly in the middle of the train that would make the maiden run.
The crisp, wet air smelled faintly of fresh paint. The horizon shimmered in expectancy of the morning sun. The sounding of geese could be heard from out over the black swirling waters of Red Root Creek.
Alvarez studied the routine and movements of the few guards on duty. Nearing 5 A.M., he counted no fewer than eight maintenance men and six guards. He watched as a pair of them carefully inspected the exterior of a dining car—brakes, axles, cables—and then, apparently pronouncing it sound, stickered each of the car’s four doors. They then moved on to the next car, also a dining car.
Alvarez liked seeing those stickers being applied; they would go a long way toward convincing the team at Penn Station that the train had been properly inspected only hours before.
Alvarez concluded that the Raritan yard was meant to serve as a staging area for the final checks. The F-A-S-T Track was said to offer airphone service from every seat, Internet connections, and in-seat videos and entertainment consoles. It was here, at Raritan, that all that would be double-checked one last time. With the national media aboard, everything had to run smoothly. Perhaps there would be preparations made as well for the entertainment of the guests, although he knew from documents that the catered food and beverages were to be brought aboard only after the train had arrived into Penn Station.
He continued to track and to time the movements of the guards, and when the opportunity presented itself, he ducked and sprinted across the short open space, the duffel on his back. He ignored his uniform, fearing that the members of this small security team would all know each other.
Quietly, he slipped beneath the last car, a dining car, marveling at the elegant mechanics of the train’s undercarriage. Until that moment, he had only read blueprints.
Now, from memory, he worked quickly. He had practiced this procedure a dozen times, sometimes in virtual darkness, coming to know the tactile qualities of the various pieces of equipment. It came together for him, not like a dress rehearsal but like the performance itself. He executed it flawlessly.
Scooting forward and centering himself, he located the dead space created by the sewage holding tank and a compressed air reservoir used for braking. He hoisted the first of his two magnetic clamps to the car’s underbelly, threw the switch, and attached it to the car’s undercoated steel. Setting a second clamp roughly six feet down the length of the car, he then draped a webbed net, made of black nylon strapping, between the two. Within two minutes, Alvarez had created a hammock that held him and the duffel parallel to the railbed. Once inside it, he adjusted the two end straps, pulling himself higher, within inches of the car’s undercarriage.
A guard inspecting the car from either side would see only the bulkhead of the steel sewage tank or the compressed air cylinder. That security man would have to crawl all the way to the center of the car and look straight up to spot him. Within a few more minutes, he would have the camouflaged window shade in place as a screen, further concealing him. Carefully painted to look like the car’s underside, the window shade would hide him well. This, because NUS had plans to use boom-mirrors to inspect the train’s undercarriage. O’Malley had picked up the idea from military checkpoint security.
Tucked up in his hiding place, Alvarez now faced the most difficult task of all: waiting.
CHAPTER 30
Curled up inside the trunk of a Ford Taurus, suf
fering claustrophobia, Tyler feared he might pass out. Adding to his discomfort was that the ride had grown increasingly bumpy over the course of the last few minutes, leading Tyler to believe Priest had nearly arrived at Edison’s Raritan yard. The car’s trunk was unlatched, the mechanism rigged so that it could not lock. Tyler held it closed with his right hand, struggling to keep it from popping open on the bumpy terrain.
When the car stopped, he heard the purr of the engine followed by the hum of a window going down. In his cramped space he tensed, fearing discovery. He fought the claustrophobia, fending off the next wave of nausea, the next dizzy spell. The muffled voices he heard through the car body suggested a checkpoint, perhaps a gate, perhaps nothing more than a couple of orange cones in the road and a cold guard impatiently verifying IDs.
Nell Priest spoke to the guard, the window hummed, and the car rolled. Tyler closed his eyes and tried again to fend off his anxiety.
“Almost there,” Priest called out loudly to him.
He pounded on the steel in response. God, how he wanted out of there.
She hollered, “Bright lights to the right. Train cars everywhere. Mostly abandoned. The guard back there wore a uniform and carried a handgun. Unusual for our guys.” The car slowed. She was pulling over.
Parallel Lies Page 26