Parallel Lies (36 page)

“What if I don’t want you on that train?”

“I thought you said Alvarez couldn’t roll it.”

“Even so.”

“Are you going to be on it?”

“I was scheduled to be Gretchen Goheen’s personal bodyguard. She was to be on Daddy’s arm for the event. But now word is that they’ve had a little falling out, and that he doesn’t want Gretchen on the train. I’m still planning to take the ride, but who knows? O’Malley likes to change things at the last minute, and I’m not sure what my standing is at this point.”

He couldn’t talk business anymore. With Rucker gone he wanted to get down to what mattered. “I missed you, for what it’s worth.”

“You just bought yourself a pass and a maintenance jumpsuit,” she said. For a moment, he thought she was teasing. But then she came into his arms, and the room spun, and he didn’t care about Alvarez or Rucker or even Chester Washington. He didn’t think it could be love—not this soon—but whatever it was, it felt pretty damn close.

The challenge was to derail a train carrying a hundred journalists and dignitaries, all moving 180 miles an hour, without any injuries or fatalities. Every teacher knew the importance of study, and Umberto Alvarez was no exception. His risky forays into NUR’s Park Avenue headquarters the past few months had armed him with data on the guidance and stabilizing systems, security procedures, and even the scheduling and routing of NUR’s vast freight fleet.

At 3:58 P.M., Thursday, December 18, the premature sunset of early winter cloaked the Meadows rail yard in a hazy dusk. Alvarez had selected the 4 P.M. shift change because of this gray light and the way the eye had difficulty picking up details in it. If he had any chance to slip through the front gate, it was now.

He had endlessly debated how to enter this well-guarded yard and finally decided deception outweighed stealth. He knew that all arriving trains were being thoroughly searched. He had risked placing his duffel on one of those trains but would not risk his life. Hiding a small black bag and a man were different altogether.

Posing as a security guard at shift change on a cold winter evening seemed a more unlikely way to enter the yard and therefore should be less expected.

To his advantage, O’Malley’s overtime rosters called for a dozen guards in the yard at all times, triple the usual. The
more the merrier—the easier for Alvarez to get lost in those numbers. Ironically, a smaller crew might have meant easier detection of an intruder.

Standing in an alley facing the yard entrance, Alvarez unzipped the black nylon jacket he’d bought at the Salvation Army, uncovering a navy blue security uniform. That, combined with his identification tag, were to be his passport inside.

Leaving the ski coat unzipped so that his ID tag showed, Alvarez took a deep breath to settle himself. There would be twelve guards heading home in the next few minutes, thirteen arriving. He carried a red metal lunch box containing a tuna sandwich, a Coke, and a small bag of chips. The steel thermos held Blue Mountain coffee, perhaps the only clue to the man’s true identity.

If anything went wrong, he had contingency plans. This, too, was why he chose to enter on foot. If caught on an arriving train, he would have been inside the fenced yard. If busted at the gate, he could run a carefully planned route to a waiting cab, the driver of which had been paid fifty bucks for a ten-minute wait that was about to expire.

The plastic laminated ID, clipped to his breast pocket, flapped with each step, rhythmically clicking against a button. Still twenty yards away, he looked on as two entering guards grabbed hold of their IDs, displaying them for someone unseen who occupied the entrance booth. Clearly, there was no formal inspection of these tags going on; they passed through without breaking stride, without saying a word. His surmise had been accurate: this was not where they anticipated a penetration. It appeared, too, that the rank and file was simply going about its job in the way a mason or garbage collector does. Security guards were, for the most part, former college athletes who had bet too hard on professional sports advancing their minimally educated lives. Brawn, but not a lot of brain. If NUR management was concerned its train might
come under attack, the guards here appeared more concerned with clocking in on time and staying warm. All the new arrivals were heading straight to an elevated office trailer.

The combination of the ID tag and the proper uniform appeared to be enough to get him through. He swallowed dryly, reached to hold up his tag toward the booth’s window, avoiding looking in, and kept walking as if he’d entered here a hundred times.

No one stopped him. No one called out. No one was counting heads.

As two arriving guards in front of him headed for the trailer, Alvarez turned right, into the yard and the endless lines of train cars. Sodium-vapor lights burned a bluish glow over the yard, struggling against the dusk. At a distance, in the haze, Alvarez saw a mangy dog duck under a freight car and take off. Fifty yards down the tracks, Alvarez himself disappeared.

Over these past months he had spent countless hours in rail yards just like this one, and yet this one was like no other. He believed it would be his last. Here, he’d board the bullet train for a first and a last time. From here he’d launch a final blow to Goheen and his corporation, one from which they could not recover. If all went well, not a single person would be hurt, but a billion-dollar corporation would fall.

It took Alvarez nearly two hours to locate train #717, in part because he felt obligated to act out his role as an NUR security guard, to be seen patrolling, in part because of the daunting enormity of the Meadows yard. The handheld radio scanner clipped to his waist, a Uniden BC245XLT, was barely larger than a cell phone. It scanned three hundred channels, including those used by the dozens of limousine and taxi dispatchers. After nearly a half hour of scrutiny
through an earpiece that ran the sounds continually, he had finally identified the channel in use by the NUS guards and had locked into this frequency. Each guard checked in with a dispatcher referred to as “Control” on a regular basis—every ten minutes—and reported his exact location within the yard. Alvarez found the regularity of these reports surprising, and disturbing. It meant the dispatcher was well organized; she could map out the deployment of their team for the best possible coverage of the site.

So, even after identifying 717 on the outskirts of the yard—nearly a half mile from the bullet train—Alvarez walked this freight train in its entirety two full laps as he attempted to role-play dispatcher and track the movements of the guards. The last thing he needed was to be spotted hauling that duffel out from underneath.

After about twenty minutes, he picked out a short window of time when no guards were in his immediate area. But his nerves were rattled by this impressive coordination of O’Malley’s guards. While communicating with each other the guards also used two flashes from their flashlights to acknowledge one another. These looked like huge white fireflies in the cold night.

Seizing the moment, Alvarez rolled under the freight and felt his way along the underside of the car. As he touched the duffel bag, energy sparked through him. He would have to move carefully now, one train to the next, bearing that duffel along with him. If a guard closed in, he hoped to cover himself by leaving the duffel behind and returning to it later. It was all a dance now, a fragile choreography. He watched for flashes. He listened for locations. The map of the yard—so carefully studied that he had even memorized Internet satellite photographs of it—remained imprinted in his brain. The dispatcher moved her chess pieces. Alvarez moved one train to the next, ever cautious, ever closer to the bullet. He’d waited eighteen months for this. He couldn’t blow it now.

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.

“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.”