Parallel Lies (39 page)

“What makes this work for you,” Coopersmith, the maintenance crew chief, informed Tyler, as the two stood in front of a passenger car’s mechanical closet in the forwardmost passenger car, “is that this space can only be locked and unlocked from the outside, the aisle side, meaning that the security guys will simply check to make sure it’s still locked. They won’t bother opening it. I’ve seen their routine.”

The French-built passenger cars housed a mechanical room adjacent to the wheelchair-accessible lavatory. This mechanical space was itself divided into two sections by a thick plastic floor-to-ceiling barrier protecting a rack of sensitive electronics. Behind that divider there was just enough room for a man to stand.

Coopersmith continued, “These goons? I doubt they’re even aware of these electronics compartments.”

“So essentially I’m locked inside.”

“Until me or one of my guys comes along and unlocks you. Yeah. But that’s the beauty of it, right? I mean, who would think to look?”

“I’m claustrophobic,” Tyler explained. He wondered if Alvarez might know about these spaces. “This just isn’t going to work.”

“Then you tell me,” an annoyed crew chief stated.

“You passed my message along to the woman agent?” Tyler checked.

“Yeah.”

“Will you, or any of your team, be aboard the train during the test?”

“Me, plus four. Two up front in the engine room, two back in car five. In case we’re needed.”

“Can a person get between the locomotive and the passenger cars once under way?”

“Sure. No problem.”

Tyler suspected security would not pay much, if any, attention to a couple of on-duty maintenance men riding in jump seats in the engine room. Added to that, they were looking for Alvarez, a Latino, not an ex-cop working undercover, whereas anyone in the passenger cars—even maintenance men—were likely to come under more scrutiny. Tyler said, “Can you put me with your guys up in the locomotive?”

“Claustrophobic or not, you’re way better off in this mechanical closet. It’s small, loud, and hot up in that engine room.”

“Just the same, it’s the engine room,” Tyler said with finality.

The crew chief viewed him oddly. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Tyler was tempted to give a snide answer, but he kept his mouth shut.

“I hesitate to attempt to rework well-worn clichés about breaking new ground or ushering in the new millennium, but the fact is, clichéd or not, this is an historic moment. We—all of us—stand on this platform, Pennsylvania Station’s track seven, about to embark on a journey made possible by a new technology that could revolutionize train travel both in the United States and abroad, for decades to come. I’m proud to say that Northern Union owns patents on the GPS gyro-stabilizing mechanism in the new F-A-S-T Track system, and that this technology, which allows high-speed trains to run on existing track, is, and will remain, uniquely American. But at the same time, I must tip my hat to our French consultants and manufacturers,
Vitesse,
as well as to the hundreds of Japanese designers who conceived of, and carried out, the dream of electric high-speed train travel decades ago.” Goheen’s voice reverberated into the chilly cement bunker in the bowels of Penn Station, furious that at the last minute the rail station manager had decided against letting his speech be delivered in the central concourse upstairs, where it belonged. The media, the mayor, the senator and her aides, the New York secretary of transportation, and a host of investors all shivered, pretending to look toward the podium
with interest. Goheen realized brevity ruled the day and cut his speech short by nearly two-thirds.

Keith O’Malley stood just behind Goheen and to the man’s left, his eyes roaming the crowd.

Long ago, when William Goheen had realized the president of a national grocery distribution network could not rely upon public law enforcement to tend to the needs of private commerce, O’Malley had been called in to “be effective.” Collectively, corporations spent tens of millions on private security, and not all of it was clean. Lines blurred. Laws failed to protect. The Keith O’Malleys took charge. On occasion, people got roughed up, threatened, blackmailed, their private lives dragged in front of the media, but the trains kept running and thirty thousand miles of track remained open, just as the stockholders, the consumers, and the politicians demanded. Goheen intuited what went on without knowing the details. He had a railroad to run. From their inception, railroads had been tough. Not much had changed.

For Goheen, this moment in Penn Station was the realization of a great dream, never mind that his speech was being given in an ugly, underground space. He felt shivers, and it wasn’t from the cold. He had brought his dream to fruition, overcoming a dozen obstacles that his critics had once claimed were insurmountable. Excitement stirred within him, and he saw it in a few of the faces out there as well. A rebirth. A reinvention. It had not been so very long ago that as a boy he had stood over a Lionel train set and had played with it to his heart’s content. Now, thanks to him, the dying industry of passenger rail travel was to be revitalized. Someday soon, people would ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just under two hours; Portland to Seattle in forty-five minutes. Chicago to New York in five hours. A joint marketing program with Ford and Honda would put ticket-carrying passengers into electric cars in their destination city at a rate of ten dollars a day. Slowly—he knew it wouldn’t happen overnight—rail
travel would regain acceptance, the commuter traffic on highways would lessen, and air quality would improve in major metropolitan areas. And all thanks to his wonder train.

This was not a day anyone would soon forget—his public relations people had seen to that. The in-house cameras and video crew were recording every moment.
Dateline
was along for the ride, with the likelihood of their transmitting live footage over broadband data ports provided for passengers in each car. CNN awaited their arrival in Union Station. All the pieces were in place for a bang-up premiere.

Goheen noticed the eyes of his audience shift. As a few heads turned, he sensed he might be losing them. For a moment he tensed, wondering if he’d written the wrong speech, but then, turning to see for himself, a father’s pride as well as a father’s annoyance pulsed through him as he caught sight of this late arrival. Gretchen wore a black cashmere overcoat—no controversial fur to stir the animal rights people—black Ferragamo pumps, and, as she timed the coat to fall open, a woven black cocktail dress that fit her like a thin sock. A pearl necklace. A pair of Tiffany, princess-cut, diamond earrings, weighing in at two carats each—Goheen knew them well, he’d paid twenty-two thousand dollars for those earrings for her twenty-first birthday. With her blonde hair up and just a touch of eye shadow, eye liner, and lipstick, she carried herself like royalty.

Just days before, she had leveled accusations at him, and he had denied them all. They had fought for the first time in years, both losing their cool. In the end, he had forbidden her from attending this event. Yet here she was—in absolute defiance! He left his own script and made a fluid transition to welcoming his daughter, winning her applause. No matter what, she would not ride this train! He stumbled only slightly as he saw that on his daughter’s heels followed the tall, long-legged woman from his security division, Nell Priest, who
wore a Japanese-influenced black wool pants suit with a wide tie at the waist and a plunging neckline that followed the tailored lapels. She wore a lined gray raincoat with epaulettes, the hem of which swayed with her rolling hips as she walked. The laced black shoes looked slightly out of place, but she pulled it off. The outfit, especially those shoes, told Goheen that she was on duty: ready to take off at a run at a moment’s notice. He forced himself back to the speech while thinking of her connection to the rogue Peter Tyler, who, according to Keith, was the one man who could throw a stick in their spokes. So damn many complications. He shook off these thoughts, never pausing, and jumped ahead in the text and worked his speech to its flag-waving conclusion.

Complications or not, this day would be written in bold on his life’s calendar.

Alvarez could hear Goheen’s speech from his hiding place beneath the dining car while he readied his thoughts for the five minutes of darkness as the F-A-S-T Track crossed beneath the Hudson River and into New Jersey. During these few minutes, dangling only a few feet above a railbed of crushed stone that would grind him to a pulp if he fell, he would have to climb out of his perch and up and into one of the four rear passenger cars, all peopled with mannequins and crash-test dummies. He needed to accomplish this extreme while in the tunnel in order to take advantage of the total darkness. Prior to the tunnel, but after the train’s departure, he needed to move one entire car length while still beneath the train—this, because internal records called for two maintenance men to ride in the front of the car immediately behind the second dining car, the car from which he was currently suspended.

He had his work cut out for him.

When Gretchen Goheen was introduced to the crowd by her father, Alvarez caught her name, wondering if she would be along for the ride, this woman he now knew in the context of a Plaza Hotel suite. In this moment of distraction, he briefly lost his balance, rolled to his right, and lost the headlamp—a camper’s light—that had been strapped to his head in preparation for his upcoming tunnel stunt. For such a small, lightweight device, it nonetheless fell loudly, first to the window shade below Alvarez, who reached for it but missed, and then sliding and plummeting unseen to the track’s concrete railbed.

Alvarez held his breath and listened, pressing the Uniden radio earpiece firmly in place. “Tommy?” he heard. “It’s Keenan.”

The voice of an NUS radio dispatcher replied, “Go ahead.”

“Something just made a noise over here. Dining car two. Underneath, like. I heard it. You want me to check it out, or you want to send maintenance?”

Alvarez now heard the man’s natural voice as well, as this same guard stepped closer to the dining car, up on the platform.

“You hold your position on the platform, Keen. I’ll have maintenance take a look.” The dispatcher reconfirmed it as being under or about the second dining car.

Maintenance!
Alvarez tensed, cursing himself. It seemed possible, even likely, that maintenance might crawl under the car to inspect it, and whereas his carefully painted window shade might trick a security mirror extended into the car’s shadow, it would not pass the scrutiny of close inspection. He had either to abort or advance his plans, and he had only a few seconds to make that decision. No matter what, he had to get out from under this train. And fast.

When Coopersmith, with whom Tyler was sequestered in the locomotive’s engine room, was summoned by dispatch to have one of his men check out an errant noise overheard by a guard, there was great reluctance and contempt on the man’s part to follow up on it.

William Goheen’s speech was drawing to a close. Tyler interrupted Coopersmith’s assigning of one of the two other maintenance men in the locomotive, asking if he might tag along.

This further aggravated Coopersmith, who then felt obliged to go himself. As a result, all three men climbed out of the locomotive, using the door away from the platform, and walked the gloomy space between the F-A-S-T Track and an Amtrak passenger train adjacent to it.

“Probably nothing more than condensation,” Coopersmith speculated.

“Chunk of ice. Absolutely,” the other maintenance man, a man named DeWulf, said. He had a French accent and he walked more slowly than the other two.

Coopersmith explained to Tyler, “Any condensation that forms underneath the dining cars freezes en route, thaws here in the tunnel, and sloughs off. The Frenchies warned us about that from the get-go.”

“Ice in August,” DeWulf said. “I remember thinking that was crazy.”

“What’s crazy,” Coopersmith said, “is bothering us about it now.”