He got the helmet off but had to drive with the seat pushed back at its farthest setting to accommodate the backpack. His silly trick wasn’t going to last for very long and he needed to get to where he could ditch the car as soon as possible.
Back when Mitchell was hiding out on the island, he’d played around with the scanner, listening to different frequencies. On one cluster of bands, he found different voices talking about dispatching police cars, ambulances and other emergency vehicles. That was the one he paid the most attention to. While scanning around, he found another band he couldn’t understand at first. It took him ten minutes to realize that the talk of “knuckles,” “drawbars” and “gas cans” was railroad chatter. He was listening to rail yard workers somewhere not too far off getting trains prepped.
He remembered them talking about “the 10:15 North Atlantic.” At 10:40, he could hear the sound of a train passing somewhere not too far away from where he was hiding across the Intracoastal.
Mitchell pulled into the parking lot of a Best Buy not too far away from where he’d thought he remembered seeing the rail yard the calls had come from. He parked in the far side by a beat-up Ford Focus and stripped off the spacesuit. He shoved it into the duffel bag. His fingers touched the screwdriver Steinmetz had given him, which he realized he was supposed to have left behind, and had an idea. He took the license plate from the Ford Focus and shoved it into his bag. It worked before. Maybe it would work again.
Mitchell then climbed through the hedges and ran toward the railroad tracks that snaked around the back of the Best Buy and toward the rail yard. Ahead he could see the tail end of the “10:15.” By his watch, it was already 10:17 p.m. He’d heard trains rarely left on time, so he hoped he’d just had a bit of good fortune.
Mitchell ran along the side of the train that was in shadows. He was looking for an open railcar. He didn’t know how common they actually were, but Rookman had guests come on who talked about using them to travel around like 21st-century hobos. Up ahead he could hear the train blow a whistle and start up. There was the sound of metal hitting metal as the knuckles that connected the cars began to pull against each other from the front to the back of the train. The train would build up speed and begin to overtake him if he didn’t find a spot.
Car after car was either a tanker or a locked-up freight car. Mitchell was beginning to lose hope. If all else failed, he could just cling to a ladder and get off at some point farther on up the rail, but that meant being out in the open and risk getting caught.
The train was beginning to match pace with Mitchell’s jogging. He had to run faster in order to get to the cars that were farther ahead. He rounded another bend and could see the front of the train a thousand feet away. Closer to him he saw several car carriers loaded with brand-new Toyota Land Cruisers headed from the port of Miami to somewhere north. They had walls along the sides but the backs were open.
Mitchell ran up to the closest carrier and threw the duffel bag with the spacesuit and laptop onto the platform at the end of the car. He grabbed the metal frame around the back and pulled his chest onto the back of the car. He didn’t appreciate how high off the ground the backend was until he felt his feet dangle and drag in the gravel as he struggled to pull himself aboard.
He finally managed to get a knee and then both legs onto the carrier as the train picked up speed. Mitchell picked up his bag and climbed over the space between the hood of the last car and the top of the carrier. He didn’t want to break the window of the outermost car.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.