Public Enemy Zero (36 page)
Authors: Andrew Mayne
Mitchell pulled out his screwdriver and got ready to slam it into the back window of a brand-new silver Land Cruiser when he got the impulse to actually check if it was locked. He reached down and squeezed the latch for the rear hatch. It popped open. Of course. Mitchell threw his duffel bag into the back.
He looked at the sticker on the windshield of the rearmost Land Cruiser and tried to decipher the symbols. Origin was listed as MIA. Destination was listed as ATL. Atlanta. He tried to remember what was going on in Atlanta at that time. He knew the CDC had headquarters there. But there was something else.
Of course
, thought Mitchell. His endgame was in sight. First, he needed to make several hundred copies of the files while the train drove through the night. Then he could plan out how he was going to cause a commotion.
Of course
, thought Mitchell. His endgame was in sight. First, he needed to make several hundred copies of the files while the train drove through the night. Then he could plan out how he was going to cause a commotion.
55
Mitchell was sound asleep in the passenger seat of the Land Cruiser when a commotion not of his design shook him awake. He felt his body lurch forward and then opened his eyes to see sunlight momentarily flicker from outside the carrier and then suddenly get blacked out. Something pressed up against his face and he could smell a sharp pungent smell like battery acid. All around he heard the sound of twisting metal and explosions as the entire world seemed to be shaken apart.
He felt a moment of weightlessness and then was thrown to the right as the world shifted around him. His brain tried to make sense of what was happening. Parts of a half-remembered dream still threaded through his consciousness.
The smell. The pressure on his face and the explosion he just felt to his side. Airbags.
The smell. The pressure on his face and the explosion he just felt to his side. Airbags.
He was in a car. The car was in a train. The train had crashed.
Mitchell could feel the rumble of metal sliding across gravel and hear the impact as cars hit each other. The train was still crashing.
Mitchell could feel the rumble of metal sliding across gravel and hear the impact as cars hit each other. The train was still crashing.
The airbags began to deflate. The windshield was cracked from when the impact sent the cars in the carrier into the air, bouncing into the ceiling. His car and the carrier were now on their side. For a fleeting moment, he thought he was back in the tractor-trailer truck he’d stolen what seemed like ages ago.
Mitchell could hear the sound of the railroad cars in back of him shudder and fly off the tracks as the impact that hit him rolled from the front of the train to the back like a giant wave. Twenty million pounds of steel cried out as the train was brought to a stop.
Mitchell regained his senses. He did a quick pat-down to see if anything was broken. He was already bruised and banged up from the past several days; all he cared about was if any bones were sticking out of places where they shouldn’t. Everything seemed to be where it was supposed to have been. It was dumb luck that he’d found the safest place on the train: inside a car with front and side airbags. If he’d found the open rail car like he’d been hoping for, he was certain his body would have been bounced around like a jelly doughnut inside a blender.
On top of everything else, thought Mitchell, now he was trapped in a train accident. He unfastened his seat belt and shifted his back to the side door so he could kick out the windshield.
Accident?
He cursed himself. There were no accidents of late. This was deliberate.
Accident?
He cursed himself. There were no accidents of late. This was deliberate.
He thought for a moment. If it had been the cops and the feds, they would have just stopped the train. This was someone else. This was the work of the people who’d sent the helicopter after his boat. Somehow they’d tracked him. Mitchell had shut off the phone he’d taken from the pier and made sure that Steinmetz’s laptop’s wireless connection was turned off.
Damn it.
It was a government computer and undoubtedly had some kind of computer tracking system in it. The fact that the people who tracked him had used train derailment as a means to stop him meant that Steinmetz’s bosses hadn’t told the feds where he was at.
Damn it.
It was a government computer and undoubtedly had some kind of computer tracking system in it. The fact that the people who tracked him had used train derailment as a means to stop him meant that Steinmetz’s bosses hadn’t told the feds where he was at.
Mitchell needed to get away before the scene was flooded with emergency personnel. He grabbed the duffel bag and climbed through the front windshield. There was a crevice of space between the top of the SUV and the carrier ceiling. Mitchell squeezed his body into it and moved toward the bright light streaming from the back of the car hauler.
It probably would have been easier if he’d just crawled through the back window, but he didn’t feel like going back into the SUV. The airbag smell and broken glass would only depress him even further. If he stopped to think of himself as an accident victim waiting for help, that would just make him vulnerable.
Mitchell pushed himself through the tiny space and then froze. Outside he could hear the sound of feet on gravel. Someone was walking toward the car carrier.
56
Tracking Mitchell Roberts had been easy. As soon as Baylor called Mr. Lewis to tell him that Dr. Steinmetz had been overpowered and injected with his own sedative, the first thing he did was put a trace on Steinmetz’s cell phone and laptop. He ignored Baylor’s suggestion that he focus on the rental car. Baylor was cunning in his own right, but he didn’t get people like he did. The whole story sounded fishy to Mr. Lewis, but he kept his opinion to himself. His target was Roberts.
Once he tracked him within 10 meters of a railroad line, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. A charter jet flight courtesy of Baylor and he was able to beat the train north of the Florida border on the Georgia side by a few hours.
The real problem was getting to Roberts before the real feds did. Mr. Lewis couldn’t afford to wait for the train to pull into a yard or have the kid jump train before then. He needed to stop him in his tracks in the literal sense of the term.
Mr. Lewis had spent the two-hour travel time trying to figure out how one goes about stopping several million tons of steel while making it look like an accident or at the very least a crude form of sabotage.
He had enough plastic explosive in his travel bag to do the trick, but that would leave too many questions. He needed what his trainers back at The Woods had called an “organic” solution. Mr. Lewis looked up every rail disaster he could to see what would be the most practical for him to pull off. For the small part of him that felt anything like excitement or enthusiasm, this kind of improvisation was his favorite part of his job. It was one thing to arrange for a Turkish scientist to have his tires get blown out on the autobahn or to create a propane explosion in a medical facility at Oxford that would only take out one troublesome biologist. It was another to do something so spectacular that it would dominate the national news for days. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d put on his resume, but it certainly would give him a source of pride.
If it killed that asshole Mitchell Roberts in the process, that was an even bigger plus in his book. Mr. Lewis still chafed from letting the kid get the drop on him and making him and Travis out to be buffoons when he hooked the helicopter. Telling himself it was a one-in-a-million shot didn’t solve the problem.
What was most frustrating with Roberts was that he wasn’t any kind of professional. It’s one thing to get thwarted by someone who has been trained to avoid assassination and kidnapping attempts. It was another to be chastened by a kid who hadn’t even served in the military let alone had any kind of special training. Roberts had only one skill and that was running away from danger like a scared rabbit. Most people were easy to catch because they had a moment of panic before they decided to take flight. That was when you went in for the kill. Roberts was like a twitchy rodent that didn’t stop to think. He just kept moving and tried to figure out where he was going afterward.
It was an admirable instinct. It was the kind of thing men trained for years to learn how to do. The trick was learning how not to think. Thinking took time. Thinking got you killed. Roberts had made it this far because he just didn’t stop.
Mr. Lewis’s sole mission in life at that point was to make sure that he did get stopped. His organic solution was a tractor-trailer truck loaded with a 50-ton steel crossbeam destined for a highway overpass. He’d found the solution at a truck stop a mile outside of Waycross, Georgia -- ten miles from the narrow trestle where he was going to put it to use.
He’d stopped the driver in the parking lot and showed him one of his more official-looking badges. He punched the ruddy faced man in the nose when he got within striking distance, stunning him. He then slipped him into a sleeper hold and snapped the man’s neck as he pulled him into the cab.
The entire altercation took only four seconds, not that anyone was counting.
Mr. Lewis pushed the body into the passenger seat and took off back down the highway to the trestle. It took him eight minutes to get to the service road that led up onto to the tracks and to the trestle. The chain barrier snapped like twine when he drove the tractor-trailer truck though it.
He pulled the tractor-trailer and its cargo halfway onto the trestle at an angle. That way, the train would hit it like a bullet through a blocked muzzle and be directed sideways. It would be hard to bring that much energy to a total stop even if he had a hundred trailers loaded with 50-ton beams. All he needed to do was to send it a few feet off to the side and then inertia and gravity would take care of the rest.
After the organic solution was in place, he checked his watch. He had eight minutes before the train was going to be coming through and meeting its immovable object. That gave Mr. Lewis plenty of time to get clear and to find his means of escape. He walked back the side road to State Road 84 and flagged down a car.
Rhonda Terrell was on her way to drop off a meal for her invalid mother before she went to work. She brought her Chevy Malibu to a stop when she saw a man in khaki slacks and a polo shirt wave her down. He had some kind of badge on his waist, so she figured he was probably a police officer of some type.
He walked up to her window and gave her a broad smile. She never noticed him pull the gun from his back and shoot two bullets through her forehead. The Tupperware container was sprayed with blood.
Mr. Lewis reached inside and popped the trunk lever. He looked both ways to make sure there were no oncoming cars and then unbuckled the woman and pulled her into the trunk. He turned the ignition off but left the keys in the car. He was fairly certain it wasn’t going to get stolen in the next four minutes. He opened the Tupperware container and took out a piece of fried chicken and then walked back to the side of the road where he had the best vantage point of the trestle.
He wanted to get close but not too close. Off in the distance he could hear the train whistle as it went through the town of Waycross. He imagined that most of the locals had learned to tune the sound of trains out entirely. It was just more background noise, like a honking horn, although that was a rarity in this polite part of the South.
Two school buses passed by. Mr. Lewis watched as tiny faces looked out through the windows back toward him. He was almost sad they were going to miss the show. He could feel the rumble of the train as it got closer. His balls began to tingle as he looked through the trees at the steel beam and trailer wedged into the trestle. He finished the chicken and threw the bone to the ground.
As the train reached the point of no return, he could hear the rolling sound of thunder through the trees. The horn blew as the engineer finally saw that the trestle was blocked. Then the sound of air breaks frantically being pushed into action raced through the air.
Mr. Lewis watched as the train engine slammed into the obstructed trestle. The trailer and beam bent inward as the engine hit them with full force. The front of the train derailed and ran square into the trestle beams, knocking the entire structure off its foundation and into the shallow stream below. The engine nose-dived into the ground and sent a bullwhip of energy backward, lifting cars off their tracks and into the air. They buckled and then fell onto their sides, skidding down the embankment and into the trees.
He watched with satisfaction as over a mile of steel and iron threw itself into the air and then against the ground like a giant serpent. He could hear the sound of groaning metal and small explosions as tankers ripped open, spilling their contents.
Mr. Lewis ran forward like a concerned bystander to inspect the carnage and to look for any survivors he needed to kill.
57
Mitchell slowly pulled his body back into the shadows of the crevice formed by the roof of the Land Cruiser and the ceiling of the carrier. It was such a tight space he had to control his breathing to avoid getting stuck. The duffle bag with the spacesuit hung in the air, squeezed between the two walls.
The footsteps slowed down. Mitchell had a pretty good idea who they belonged to. He knew the shooter from the helicopter wasn’t going to give up that easily. It just wasn’t in the cards for Mitchell that the man would have just drowned when he threw the air tank at him.
Mitchell tried to think of what he had for a weapon. The screwdriver was in the duffle bag along with the laptop and the thumb drives he’d copied the Great Wall folder onto. He reached a hand toward the zipper of the bag and carefully began to open it. He kept his eyes toward the bright patch of light at the rear of the carrier.
The footsteps moved closer. A voice called out. “Hello? Is anyone in there?”
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