Parallel Lies (42 page)

“And this new technology?”

“So, Goheen worked with an existing system where the cars tilt to hold them down onto the tracks. Similar systems are in place in Japan and Europe, but Goheen refined it. A crude version of the technology was used in this country between Boston and New York in the sixties. Now, it’s all controlled by GPS technology. We don’t get the European or the Japanese speeds, even with the stabilizers—as we call them—but we can more than double what we used to get.”

“These stabilizers,” Tyler said over his shoulder, reaching the end of the car. “They’re GPS?”

“Synched to GPS, yes. The engine car, all the passenger cars, all clock-synched, one to the other. Pinpoint technology. Computers monitor the exact location of each car several times
a second
and send signals to the stabilizers that then compensate real time, physically tipping the cars. The change in the center of gravity drives the weight and the force down, instead of out, and the cars stay on track.”

They passed into car seven, Tyler’s heart thumping painfully from adrenaline.

He’d gotten Coopersmith started, and now he couldn’t shut the guy up. “Ten years ago, the GPS technology wasn’t accurate enough, not for commercial use. Military controlled it all. Even today most commercial GPS devices are manufactured for less accuracy, though the technology does exist to make them pinpoint perfect.”

Tyler had heard enough. He thought he understood now what Alvarez had in mind.
A science teacher,
he reminded himself. “Here,” he said, stopping at the mechanical closet in seven. He groped for keys, but Coopersmith beat him to it, unlocking the door.

The closet was empty, as he’d expected.

Coopersmith snapped sarcastically, “So how was this worth our time?”

Tyler asked him to open the interior wall, the one behind which Coopersmith had earlier suggested he hide.

Coopersmith couldn’t stop lecturing. “There’s triple redundancy involved in the GPS tracking
for each car
—all the computers double-checking each other. As F-A-S-T Track approaches an area where excessive ground speeds would throw it offtrack, the stabilizers compensate, one after the other, car after car. And the passengers never even feel it.”

Tyler stepped out of the way. Coopersmith unfastened and opened the panel, confirming the rear part, too, was empty. Tyler said, “And if you could corrupt the stabilizers?”

“Forget about it. No way. Too many backups, too much redundancy. And if any one of them fails, the driver is signaled and the locomotive begins an automatic shutdown. If all of them fail, even the driver can’t override that shutdown.”

“But if you could,” Tyler pressed, “somehow trick the system.”

“I’m telling you: you can’t.”

“Theoretically,” Tyler tried.

Coopersmith locked the closet. Tyler was already scanning the lengthy array of mannequins. Coopersmith answered, “Then she would hit a turn and either roll or just keep on going.”

“At a hundred and eighty miles an hour.”

“I’m telling you: it can’t be done.”

“And I’m telling
you,”
Tyler answered, “that it’s about to happen.”

Alvarez sat still as the two men approached him down the aisle of car eight. For the past five minutes he had watched them from not twenty feet away, and yet they had no idea of his presence. The train rode so smoothly that at times it gave the illusion of not moving at all. A glance out the window dispelled that fantasy as the foreground blurred and even distant lights tracked past with alarming speed. Goheen had his prize.

Alvarez was dressed, not as a maintenance man, nor as security, but in a crash-test dummy costume he’d bought a month earlier from a mail-order catalogue. He’d loaded this outfit into the duffel—the two halves of the plastic head being the largest pieces he’d had to carry. This costume had been the key to his invisibility. People had blithely walked right past him for the better part of the last thirty minutes.

But panic filled him as these two men walked past, now only three feet away, and then continued on toward car nine, the last car. He clutched as he recognized one of them as being from the Amtrak—the fed who’d been able to delay that train so he could get aboard. Seeing that face set him wildly on edge. He had heard the two talking about the technology, including the GPS guidance. So he needed to act quickly now, before this agent—whoever he was—pieced it together. And they were heading back to car nine, where he’d hidden the duffel.

Thankfully, inside the costume, he was carrying all that
he needed: the digital video camera, the computer card, and McClaren’s explosive. But the duffel, now at risk, was also his escape. That damn headlamp had made him change things—and now, like dominoes, those changes were forcing others.
If they find that duffel
…he thought, already searching for an alternate way off the train.

Time now was everything.

The crash-test dummy slowly turned its head until the man inside it confirmed car eight was empty. Then he pushed a child dummy off his lap, sat that child in the seat he’d occupied, and hurried down the aisle to seven.

These moments of movement, dressed as a test dummy, were the riskiest. He had a few pat answers down, if confronted: “part of the show—don’t tell anyone!” “undercover security, and it’s important it remain undercover.” But if real security or maintenance stopped him, it would get ugly.

He hurried to the lavatory, shedding the costume in favor of the black pants, white shirt, and tie he wore underneath. To this he clipped the all-important NUS identity tag that from a distance at least looked a decent replica. Under scrutiny it might not hold, and this thought caused him to flush with unwanted heat.

He used his set of keys—the shapes and dimensions stolen from NUR corporate—to unlock the lavatory’s trash disposal bin, and he hid the uniform along with the two halves of its plastic head. If needed, he might resort to this costume again. With this change in clothes he could move freely through the train. With each new step in his plan, he felt closer to the end. He stretched for it now, knowing these next few minutes represented a lifetime. Maybe many lifetimes, if things went poorly.

As a security man, Alvarez crossed into car seven and walked its empty aisle, the eerie mannequins staring at his back. He headed straight for the mechanical closet. He opened
it, unlatched and opened the divider, and quickly stepped inside, pulling the unlocked door closed.

Here was where the headlamp was to have assisted him. Without it, he worked now in the gray haze seeping under the door and the limited light cast off by a few amber and green LED indicators from the guidance computer. He connected his video camera to the train’s audio/video feed without trouble. The timing of his showing that video would depend on Goheen staying on schedule; the tape contained ten blank minutes. Goheen—a man obsessed with staying on schedule—was supposed to greet his guests as the F-A-S-T Track crossed the Delaware, making reference to George Washington and to American ingenuity and glory.

Next, as he’d rehearsed, he used a Leatherman pocket tool to unscrew and remove the face plate from the GPS guidance device, a metal box about the size of a book. He faced a circuit board, a cream-colored resin epoxy board containing dozens of gray chips and other smaller, piggybacked boards, all connected by razor-thin silver lines.

For him, the beauty of the NUR design was the redundancy factor. There was not one GPS board but three, all in sockets next to one another and in the center of the circuit board. If one board failed, the next took over for it in nanoseconds. Had the system contained only one board, Alvarez could not have hot-swapped his replacement. The system would have crashed. But with three, he merely removed the second and replaced it with his own, a board programmed both to misdirect the car’s stabilizer and to trick the locomotive’s computer into believing all three cards were functioning normally. The replaced board functioned exactly as did the others and therefore would not pass the handling of the car’s guidance to the third, and final, backup card. More important, someone looking at this replacement would see no difference when compared to the others. If inspected, it would go undetected. The actual differences between the boards
were several: the NUR board was programmed to this train route, designed to anticipate and adjust the stabilizers as the car approached a particular bend in the track. Alvarez’s replacement was blank—its GPS memory erased—and yet it would send out a signal to the locomotive’s server that all was well. Without the route programmed in, this board would not signal the stabilizers of an impending curve. It would also displace the stabilizers if the train slowed more than ten miles an hour, removing the center of gravity and causing the car to derail. But the crowning achievement for Alvarez was his computer virus. This virus sent itself out over the diagnostics data port and corrupted each GPS board in succession, all of which would then report to the server that they were in perfect order. With the installation of this single board, he’d corrupted the entire guidance system in every car but the locomotive.

If on the outside chance Goheen met his demands, then this card could be identified and removed, the guidance system re-booted from the locomotive’s server, allowing the train to slow to a stop without incident.

In less than thirty seconds, it was in place. Alvarez withdrew the portable GPS device that showed him the train’s exact location, speed, and time to destination. In forty seconds, the southbound train would reach a straightaway that would be maintained for over ten minutes. Alvarez waited out those seconds in stomach-knotting tension and then ran the metal tip of his screwdriver to the base of the processing chip on the first guidance board, shorting it out. A tiny spark flashed, and the air smelled metallic. Handling of the car’s stabilizers passed instantaneously to the replacement board, where an LED continued to glow green, just like the others. At that same instant, the virus began to spread to the other cars.

Alvarez held his breath, waiting, his legs tensing. If the train suddenly began to slow—if his ruse had been detected
by the server—then the train would likely automatically shut down. But the vibration remained steady. The purr beneath his feet warmed him.

In the end, it was Northern Union’s quest for total safety that made this system vulnerable.

He marked his watch, pushed
PLAY
on the video, and then peered out of the closet. His ten-minute grace period began to tick off. Seeing the car still empty, he stepped out, replaced and latched the divider, and shut and locked the closet’s door. His final move was to fill the lock mechanism with an instant-dry epoxy that would set fully in less than five minutes.

He still had a lot to get done, including his own escape.

Umberto Alvarez prepared to crash William Goheen’s party. He grinned at the irony of that expression.

Alvarez gathered his strength as he advanced toward the backs of the two maintenance men, the gear heads, who occupied the two right front row seats of car six. He could approach this one of two ways, but he opted for the bold.

As he came up behind them he intentionally startled them by speaking loudly. “Okay, guys, I got the wonderful job of checking the coupler.” He walked right past them, reached the door, and popped the red panic bar that opened it automatically. He offered them only a piece of his profile, but enough to show them that he had a tag clipped to his shirt. “If you hear me yell, come looking.”

He stepped out into the vestibule, where casually dressed reporters sucked on cigarettes and shared vodka on the rocks and war stories. A woman looked up and checked him out. He felt her study of him clear down to his toes.

He said loudly, “Sorry, folks, but I’ve got to ask you to take the party forward for a few minutes. We’re getting ready
for the press conference. You can smoke in the vestibule between the next two cars.”

To his surprise, even the spoiled-looking guy with wet eyes didn’t object. They snubbed out their smokes and reentered the dining car. As the door shut behind them, Alvarez unlocked and opened the right-hand section of accordion wall that connected the two vestibules, and he reached outside. He tripped a release lever that allowed a flange of corrugated flooring to be lifted. This flange could move with the turning of the car through curves, but it connected cleanly, one vestibule to the other.

With this short piece of flooring lifted, Alvarez could see down past the massive coupler. Part rush, part terror, he kneeled just four feet above a railbed hurtling maniacally past at 180 miles per hour. For a brief moment he felt in awe of the technology that generated such speeds. For a moment he felt empathy for William Goheen’s dream.

Unlike the freight cars, and most passenger trains in the United States, the couplings on the French-built high-speed trains were controlled electrohydraulically. A keyed switch on each car—both of which had to be operated nearly simultaneously—allowed coupling and uncoupling. For safety, the tension between two moving cars prevented uncoupling. In theory, only while the cars were at rest, in a yard or a station, and pushed against each other with a tug or locomotive to remove that pressure, could uncoupling take place.