Chapter 54

In the narrow glare of his flashlight, Adam could see that the Hart girl was terrified, the fear far eclipsing the pain. She was cuffed now to the cargo door of the second boxcar. The four body bags were at her feet, wrapped in a dozen or more cubes of the powerful C4 explosive.

Adam looked at her with a faint glimmer of pity. He wondered why her father had sent her alone tonight. Part of him also wondered why she wasn’t trying to talk to him. Perhaps it was the fear. It would have made no difference, but he was curious nonetheless.

He stood for a moment longer, running his conclusions a final time through the racecourse of his mind. After talking with Emerson and before the crew departed, he’d checked the gathered debris in each of the vehicles. Last year, he’d catalogued every bit of it himself. Based upon the lists he’d brought with him tonight, nothing appeared to be missing.

Which meant that Ryan Hart likely had no evidence. It had been a bluff. Though the man clearly knew where this pit was located, he had nothing to show for it.

Then why had the Hart girl come out this evening?

It didn’t matter, now that the debris was gone. It would be taken to the railcars Emerson had arranged at the Hanford railyard, and from there by special transport to New Mexico—as they’d always planned on doing eventually. The only catch was it was no longer possible to consider simply closing up the white train cavern again. It had to be collapsed—as Greg had rigged the charges to do. And with the explosions, they would also disintegrate and obliterate evidence of the scientists’ bodies.

And now, the girl’s too.

He had no choice about the Hart woman. It was impossible to let her go now. Of course, her disappearance would lead to a search—and form the basis for her father’s demand that this site be excavated.

If they were very fortunate, Hart’s demands would not be met. After all, he would have to acknowledge illegal access to the reservation grounds to even explain them. Then he would have to weave an involved story justifying them—after already having caused a reaction at LB5 by his incessant and off-base insistence on inspecting that location.

Even if the authorities agreed to dig at this site, there was a chance they would not excavate a full thirty feet of rock to the level of the white train before concluding there was nothing there. And if, in the last extremity, they dug all the way down, they would find the white train demolished and crushed—and the remains so reduced as to be unnoticeable in the depths of the excavation.

Adam had made a final set of contingency plans if he was wrong: new IDs, money in multiple foreign accounts, everything that access to almost unlimited Project funding could buy. Plus, his ultimate bonus should arrive eventually. After all, the lab and successful trigger prototypes were already on their way to other Covington labs. Cameron Foote valued loyalty and success; he’d keep his promise to Adam. Given Adam’s knowledge, Foote really didn’t have any choice in the matter.

Adam took the flashlight off of the girl’s frightened eyes. There was still one piece of evidence he had to deal with himself—one that neither the security crew nor anyone else knew about.

He walked to the locomotive, half buried in the nose of the shaft, and took the half a dozen steps up to the cab. There he pulled a key from his pocket, one that opened the heavy padlock and chain that sealed the cab door. Adam heard the girl cry out—in fear, he presumed—as the padlock released. Then he pulled the chain free and opened the door.

The bagged body of Lewis Vandervork lay on the cab floor where he’d placed it last October. Inside the bag, at his side, Adam knew his rifle lay.

If this man could have been silenced in any other way, Adam would have done so. But he knew in an instant of interviewing Vandervork that that was impossible. The idiot had even called his girlfriend the very night of the explosion, ignoring orders. This was the only silence possible for a person like Vandervork. Now he had to get the body onto the cavern floor with the others.

Setting the flashlight on the floor of the locomotive, pointed to the ceiling, he grabbed the end of the heavy bag and began to drag it to the door of the cab.

He heard the sound of metal on metal.

Adam twisted in his suit. A figure stood at the bottom of the stairs, faintly visible in the moonlight through the pit opening. Someone in a hazmat suit like his own.

Adam leaned across the body bag. He cursed his trembling fingers within the Demron gloves and the limited vision of his mask. He finally grasped the zipper and pulled it toward him—revealing Vandervork’s black shoes. Alongside the shoes lay the rifle butt.

Adam slid the rifle out and stood. The mask, already sweaty, was filling with a faint sheen of fog. Adam grabbed and yanked it off his head—then turned to shoulder the weapon, struggling to steady his hands.

Ryan took the metal steps as softly as he could manage in the foreign hazmat suit. The flashlight was in his pocket. The rifle he held at his waist.

The space below was illuminated in a ghostly white reflection. Halfway down the stairs, Ryan could see the source. His eyes followed a light that was moving from left to right, its glow illuminating the side of a train car painted white. It was held by a man in a black suit and hood—an image so bizarre that Ryan felt disoriented, as though he were watching a priest tending a modern Pharaoh’s tomb.

He slowed to a stop. The man and his light began to climb up the steps of what appeared to be a locomotive. The figure bent over and for a moment grew still. Then Ryan heard metal and the sudden rattling of a chain.

In that same instant, an anguished cry of pain and fear emerged from the darkness to his left. Ryan’s heart was pierced with recognition.

He fumbled in his pocket for the flashlight, turned it on, and pointed it to the source of the sound.

Emily was illuminated, kneeling on the ground beside the open door of another white railcar. At her feet lay four gray body bags, interlaced with wiring and a dozen cubes of what had to be C4.

Ryan turned and pounded down the remaining steps. The flashlight bumped the metal banister, slipping from his hand and clattering to the lowest step—just as he reached the floor of the cavern and looked up.

The figure was above him now, the light steadily pointing toward the ceiling of the pit. The suited figure must have heard him, because he was turning, rising from a crouch to a standing position. A rifle was suddenly in one hand. His other reached up and pulled off the covering over his head. Then he raised the rifle to a shoulder, pointing it in Ryan’s direction.

Even in the weak reflection of the light against the railcar, Ryan instantly knew the face. It was Larry Mann. It was Adam Worth.

Ryan raised his own weapon and dropped instinctively to one knee. He barely steadied the barrel at the figure before pulling the trigger.

The explosion of the rifle fire echoing in the confined chamber was ear shattering. Then Ryan realized there was more than one, that two echoes were overlapping, the gunshots chasing one another in a slowly fading rhapsody of sound.

Ryan felt a stinging in his side, but he ignored it as he prepared to pull the trigger again.

Except the standing figure was gone. In front of the light, Ryan could see that it had dropped again into a crouch mirroring his own, the weapon drifting down. Then it crumpled to a still mass on the floor of the cab.

Ryan picked up the fallen flashlight and turned frantically toward the source of the painful cry as the twin echoes of the rifle shots slowly faded away.