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.