Parallel Lies (14 page)

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?”

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.

If he proved successful, that banner would never see the light of day. And not only the train—the high-tech marvel—but Northern Union itself would be in ruins.

He lived for that moment.

The pieces came together for Tyler just as the lights of Long Island appeared beneath the right wing of United Airlines, flight 670.

Priest’s demeanor had changed the moment they had seen the dead body. Tyler had taken this as a sign of a weak stomach—the guy’s face had been lacerated, badly burned, and then frozen. Now he understood that it hadn’t been a queasy stomach so much as her recognition of the dead man as a Northern Union Security agent. Tyler had also seen her at the hobo camp showing something to the men there. He had even asked her about it, and she had told him it had been her ID credentials. He suspected now that she had been showing them a photo of the dead agent. She had been withholding information all along. Northern Union had apparently rushed her to St. Louis because they had lost contact with one of their agents. Word of a bloody boxcar matched with their agent’s route. Her cover story of a copycat Railroad Killer had proved a clever invention because it dovetailed so well with Tyler’s own mission. Leaving her behind in the Chicago bus station, her words of apology trapped inside quivering lips, had done little to satisfy his outrage. He’d jumped a cab and left her on her own.