Shaw recalled the map of the Zephyr’s route. Elko, Nevada, would be the next stop. Five hours away. If the two killers wanted them alive, that would be where they’d force Shaw and Karla off the train. Likely making their move just before the train hit the station so they wouldn’t have to hold their captives at gunpoint for hours.
If the plan was to kill them, the men would still strike in the minutes before Elko. Shaw and Karla were alone on the upper level. No witnesses. The killers could off them in their compartment and make a quick exit before their corpses had cooled.
Better to guard the stairs—the only approach from the lower level of the car—than to wager on the two killers being cautious. Shaw stayed near the luggage rack and watched the corridor while Karla packed their things. Then there was nothing to do but wait.
“You’re sure?” she whispered. She had her shoes and jacket on and her shoulder bag over her back, poised as if to sprint from the room.
“I’m sure. They tailed me from New York. Maybe from the Paragon offices. I lost them in Ohio.” Shaw described the two. “You know them?”
She shook her head. “God. I’d remember men like that.”
He nodded. The bigger one with the beard looked like he could make a fair attempt at benching the train car. The other might slide right under the wheels without a scratch.
“Sit,” he said. “Rest. Odds are we won’t move for four more hours.”
“If they come sooner—”
“I’ll stop them.”
“How will we get past them?”
Shaw didn’t answer. He knew they wouldn’t. There was no way off the train without the two knowing. The killers would be watching as closely as he was.
At four o’clock in the morning, Shaw moved down the corridor to the center of the car. The narrow stairwell to the lower level was empty. He motioned to Karla, who walked with their bags down the row of bedrooms and past Shaw, into the nearest roomette in the front half of the car. She shut the roomette’s door and drew the curtain. Shaw stepped into the public toilet and hooked a finger over the handle to pull the metal door shut, but not latched.
He waited in the dark. The tight space smelled of antiseptic cleanser and a plug-in air freshener doing a sickly imitation of gardenias.
After forty minutes the sound of the train changed. Or its surroundings had changed. Closer to the tracks. Buildings instead of open air.
Shaw let the door ease open a millimeter. He could see only a dim sliver of the corridor, a line of light gray in the black.
Outside, the train rushing by the buildings created a hollow moan. Shaw remained as he was.
They had made no sound as they came up the stairs. Shaw’s only warning was the slice of gray light from the corridor going black and then gray once more, as someone moved past his door into the row of bedrooms. A second person passed.
Shaw opened the door another finger’s width. He found himself looking at the broad back of the Viking, still in his long coat, standing at the top of the curving stairwell. Visible over the Viking’s shoulder was the killer with the eyeglasses, moving silently away, toward the room where Shaw had placed the Ingram ticket tag.
Shaw stepped out from the bathroom. He put his left palm on the right side of the Viking’s head and his other hand holding the SIG against the man’s bowling-ball shoulder and heaved to his left with all his strength. The Viking toppled into the stairwell, a gun in his hand striking the wood-veneer wall and clattering to the floor at Shaw’s feet. The big man crashed into the side of the landing six feet below with an almighty bang. Shaw aimed his SIG at the one with the glasses, who had spun at the sound.
“Don’t,” Shaw said as the killer’s hand moved toward his jacket. “Turn around.”
The man complied. His expression had hardly changed.
“Back up to me,” Shaw said. Below him the Viking was clambering to his feet, not an easy maneuver in a stairwell barely half his width. When the one with the glasses reached him, Shaw quickly frisked him and removed a pistol from his raincoat pocket. He handed it to Karla, behind him.
“Cover that one,” he said, tilting his head toward the Viking, who had regained his feet on the tiny stairwell landing below them. His blueberry eyes, incongruous over the rage of black beard, glared murderously. “If he twitches, put four in his center mass.”
“You all right?” a voice called from the floor below.
“Yeah, thanks,” Shaw called back. “Just dropped my bag.”
“Easy, buddy,” said the guy with the glasses, craning his neck to keep Shaw in his peripheral vision. “Just a mix-up. We’re here to talk.”
Shaw rabbit-punched him in the back of the neck. The glasses flew off and the man dropped to all fours.
He saw what the Viking had fumbled by his feet. A KRISS Vector submachine gun. A squarish black chunk sixteen inches long without the stock and probably capable of killing every person in the train car with a single clip, doors and walls be damned.
Shaw scooped up the gun with his left hand. He looked at the Viking and motioned to his dazed partner. “Get him up.”
The man lumbered to the top of the stairs. Shaw stepped back, out of reach. He waited as the Viking placed his hands under the other man’s arms and hefted him to his feet with ease. The train was slowing now. Drawing into the station at Elko.
Shaw nodded to the toilet. “In there. Both of you.”
“Fuck off,” the Viking rumbled.
Shaw pointed the SIG at the man’s right leg. “Door Number Two earns you a prosthetic knee.”
The Viking sneered but moved. He and his partner squeezed into the toilet room, chest to back, like a compacted conga line.
“Romantic,” Shaw said. “Don’t fucking blink.”
He shut the metal door. As Karla covered it, Shaw used his picks to lock the toilet’s dead bolt through the access keyhole, there for the train staff in case some toddler locked himself in. He jammed the slim pick inside the lock’s workings and bent the metal until it snapped. He tried the handle. It barely budged.
“Let’s go,” he said, stuffing the submachine gun into his rucksack. Karla followed him downstairs. They were the first passengers off the train when the doors opened, and they beat the dawn to the streets of Elko, Nevada.