Nora nodded her head excitedly, and then promptly called the Clarion morgue again. This time the search was not fruitless. “Royal Industries’ main office is in Pittsburg. I guess they buy a lot of steel.”
“Pennsylvania again. Maybe a coincidence, but like my old friend the Padre always said, ‘There are no coincidences.’ But that’s well beyond the range of those gyros, especially with the added weight of extra passengers.”
“Wait, there’s more. Royal Industries also has a hangar at Lakehurst, New Jersey.”
A grin split Hurricane’s craggy face. “Excellent work, Miss Nora.” He stood and headed for the door.
Nora was on her feet in a flash, and hastily interposed herself between him and the exit. “And just where do you think you’re going?”
“I should think that was obvious to a bright lady like yourself.”
“So you’re going to go crack some skulls until someone tells you where Rod and Dr. Newcombe are?”
Hurricane chuckled. “If it comes to that. I find the mere possibility of a cracked skull is often a better tool for persuasion.”
“And just how do you plan to get there?”
“Why I’ll just…” He frowned. “I guess I’ll have to hire a taxi.”
“We could take Rodney’s car! It’s parked at the Clarion Building.”
“We?” Hurricane’s brows drew together. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I’m going to talk you into staying here and minding the store. Dodge may try to contact us again, and it would be nice if there was someone here to pick up the phone.”
Nora put her hands on her hips in a defiant pose, as if bracing for a fight she had no intention of losing. “Not a chance, buster. Besides, I’m the one who’s done all the work so far.”
“You do have a point there, Miss Nora. But something tells me that very soon, we’ll be moving into territory where I’ll have a chance to be a bit more useful.”
Shortly after the train chugged out of Pennsylvania Station, Anya folded down the bed and stretched her tall frame out on its flat surface. She closed her eyes immediately, and judging by the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest, Dodge guessed that she had gone to sleep almost as quickly. Lying in repose, she reminded Dodge of a cat; sublimely confident, showing no sense of vulnerability, and able to fall asleep seemingly as she pleased. Though he was tired and felt like a mass of bruises, Dodge felt no similar inclination to let his guard down.
As the miles rolled by beneath them, the rhythmic rumble of the steel wheels made keeping his eyes open nearly impossible. He struggled to occupy his mind with the details of the attack on the Clarion Building and everything that followed. If Anya was telling the truth, then Newcombe and Lafayette were already in Barron’s clutches. But was Barron the villain Anya presented him as? Even if he was intent on building a “death ray” device, as improbable as that sounded, how was that any different than the ambition of gunsmiths and engineers the world over? Perhaps Barron intended nothing more than the construction of a weapon to add to the arsenal of the United States military.
By the same token, he had only Anya’s word that she was who and what she claimed to be. And if she was part of a worker’s revolutionary movement as she purported — anarchists, as Miss Holloway might say — then who was to say that she and her co-conspirators weren’t equally interested in possessing a fantastic new weapon.
He was pondering these riddles, or at least thought he was, when a flash of movement startled him back to wakefulness. It took a few moments for him to become fully alert, a moment to realize that he had fallen asleep, and another to make sense of everything that was different now. His last memory was of daylight — it was dark now.
“How long was I out?” he mumbled. He glanced at the pull-down sleeping berth, and felt a surge of dread as he realized what else was different.
Anya was gone.
Dodge bolted out of his seat and leapt for the door. He threw the sliding panel aside and burst into the narrow corridor, all the while berating himself for having let his vigilance fail. He glanced to the right first — saw a man in a gray suit hastening toward him — then left, where he caught a glimpse of Anya’s flaxen ponytail, visible just for an instant as the door at the end of the car swung shut. He immediately gave chase, passing through the same door a few seconds later.
As he stepped onto the landing, he was almost overwhelmed by the choking exhaust fumes and noise of the train’s progress along its steel highway. Beyond the guard rail that ringed the landing upon which he stood, there was only absolute black — not the velvet textured night sky, shot through with pinpoints of starlight, but the complete lightlessness of a premature burial.
We’re in a tunnel, Dodge realized, as he dashed nimbly across the articulated steel plate that joined the sleeping car to dining car. Maybe I wasn’t out for as long as I thought.
He opened the second door and immediately saw the object of his pursuit striding briskly down the narrow path that led between the tables. A few heads had turned to follow her, but as soon as Dodge noisily intruded, all eyes were on him.
No point in trying to be discreet now, he thought, and sprinted headlong down the length of the car. Anya never looked back, but she did quicken her pace and a moment later disappeared through the next door. At a near sprint, Dodge reached the door before the latch clicked shut.
He caught another glimpse of the woman as she crossed to the next car, but now she too was running. As he entered the third class compartment, Anya had dashed to its far end, once more widening the gap. Dodge raced down the aisle, ignoring the curious looks of passengers in the rows of bench seats, and threw open the rear door.
He half expected to find yet another door closing behind the fleeing woman, but to his dismay he discovered that he had run out of train. Only the brake car — more commonly known as the caboose — remained, and a heavy gate stretched between the rails of the landing at the end of the third class car. While the gate could easily be surmounted, Dodge suspected the door to the brake car would almost certainly be locked; it was firmly closed, suggesting that Anya had not utilized it moments before.
What did that leave?
He glanced to the side, into the impenetrable darkness of the tunnel, and realized where the woman had gone.
He felt a mixture of admiration and disbelief. Captain Falcon and his band of heroes had jumped from moving trains in the stories Dodge wrote, but it was almost unthinkable to him that anyone would actually choose to leap from a vehicle moving at close to fifty miles an hour, and into the total darkness of a tunnel, no less.
His next realization rode in on a wave of dread and apprehension; if he was going to bring Anya to heel, he would have to leave the train by the same route.
“Oh, boy,” he whispered gazing out into the darkness. He found that his breathing had quickened; he was almost hyperventilating. He felt rooted in place, as if some desperate animal part of him believed that by staying still, the problem might resolve itself. And it would, he knew; with every second that passed, the distance separating him from his quarry increased. If he didn’t act quickly, she would be lost to him even if he did manage to jump. Steeling his nerves, he grasped the side rail and started to climb over.
At that exact moment, the train burst out into the open. The sky was darkening; the sun had already dropped behind the hills to the east, but after the impenetrable black of the subterranean passage, the dim light was a welcome relief. Or rather, it was until he looked out at the passing landscape. Now that he could actually see what he would be jumping into, his dread only increased.