Tommy shook his head. "Are you kidding? Downtown? No way. Those guys are always lurking down here. They have speed traps set up all the time."
"That's what I was afraid of."
"What should I do?"
"Just be cool. If he pulls us over, just relax."
"Easy for you to say."
The squad car sped toward them, closing the gap rapidly.
"He sure is in a hurry," June said, glancing in the right-side mirror.
Tommy eased off the accelerator and flipped the blinker on, merging into the far right lane. He prepared to pull off into the emergency lane as soon as the cop was right behind them.
Suddenly, the car with the flashing blue lights surged by them in the next lane over and zipped by. He kept going, chasing down a black Ferrari about a tenth of a mile ahead.
The luxury sports car slowed down and pulled off on the side of the road with the cop right behind him.
Sean, Tommy, and June breathed a collective sigh of relief as they passed the routine traffic stop and kept going. Once they rounded the curve where I-75 and I-85 split, the blue lights disappeared from view.
"That was close," Tommy said, his voice still trembling.
"The sooner we get to Mac's, the better," Sean said.
"How do you know they haven't gotten to them, too?" June asked.
"I don't, but it's our only play right now. We need to get out of the city. Once we're at their place, we can figure out our next move."
"Which will be what, exactly?" Tommy said. "You said yourself, no way you or I can get close enough to the president."
"We won't have to. I've got someone else who can."
"Adriana?" Tommy asked.
"Yeah. She's on her way back from Madrid as we speak. I reached out to her father and asked him to relay the message. She's going to meet us at Mac's. Adriana is the only one that can reach Dawkins. He knows her and trusts her. If she tells him something is going on, he'll know what to do."
"What about us? What do we do? Lie low until he can clear up this mess?"
"No. If we hang around too long, eventually these guys will check all our connections. You need to get in touch with your parents. Make sure they're safe. Then we'll need to keep moving."
"Mom and Dad are in Aruba."
That was information Sean hadn't heard yet.
"Aruba? What are they doing there? I thought they were getting acquainted with IAA, you know, learning about what their son has been up to for the last twenty years or so?"
"They did all that. Said they needed some time to decompress, preferably in a warm place with beaches. So I sent them to Aruba."
Sean raised his eyebrows. "Okay then. Good. Check that off the list. That still doesn't take care of us, though. Those guys back there, the ones who came after me, they'll find us again. It's only a matter of time."
"I guess that only leaves one thing for us to do," Tommy said, reading Sean's mind.
"Yep. We have to figure out what these guys are hiding. The letter from Seward was pretty cryptic."
"The one Dawkins gave you? I don't understand."
"The very same. In the letter, Seward suggested to Lincoln that they buy Alaska, both to expand our borders and to secure the area around Denali. Dawkins felt like there must have been something important for Seward to want to make such a purchase during a time of economic struggle. Heck, buying Alaska must have been a big contributor to the recession that plagued Johnson's presidency."
"It was, though no one talks much about it."
"So, all this has to do with a letter to Abraham Lincoln?" June asked, cutting in again.
"Seems that way," Sean said.
"Well, there's more to the story," Tommy said as he swerved around a semi. "Those guys back there, the ones who were trying to arrest me or whatever they were doing, they said something about you working with the Russians."
"Russians?"
"That's what I said. Where you suppose they came up with that?"
Sean thought hard for a minute. The men who'd tried to kill him in New York were definitely not Russian, at least not that he knew. Porter was American, and while the other men in his outfit hadn't said much — if anything — Sean didn't get the impression they were from the former Soviet Union.
"Looks like we may have gotten ourselves in deeper than usual."
"We always get ourselves in deeper than usual."
"Sure seems that way, doesn't it? So, we get to Mac's, meet with Adriana, tell her to warn the president, and then what?"
Sean looked out the back window. He'd been doing it intermittently since they got in the vehicle. If they were being followed, he wanted to know it. So far, he didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.
"We have to get to the bottom of this letter. And I think I know where to start."
"Where's that?"
"I was hoping you could help with that," Sean said with a devilish grin. "I didn't mention it to the men who tried to kill me, and I haven't told anyone about it until now. While I was at the Seward estate, I found an odd note. Couldn't tell who it was for or who wrote it, though it may have been Seward himself. It said something about proceeding with Operation Iron Horse. Got any idea what that might be?"
The car cabin fell silent once more. Tommy kept his eyes on the road, navigating the late night Atlanta traffic as they neared Marietta. He narrowed his eyes, thinking about his friend's question.
"Operation Iron Horse?" he asked, making sure he'd heard correctly.
"That's what the note said. It was faded, almost unreadable. Probably because the thing is over a hundred years old."
"If it was from Seward, more than 120 years old."
"Right. So, any idea what that could mean?"
Tommy thought for another minute, searching the archives in his mind for anything that came close. He'd absorbed history since he was young, as had Sean. Between the two of them, they had several dozen textbooks worth of information about the past memorized. The note had vexed Sean, however, and he couldn't think of anything concerning the mysterious Operation Iron Horse.
"Wait a sec," Tommy blurted. "I think I've got it."
The other two occupants stared at him, waiting with breathless anticipation.
"What if — and this is just a theory — but what about Andrews' Raiders?"
The idea punched Sean right in the gut.
"You really think that might be a possibility?"
"Would be crazy, right? I mean, all these years to have that right under our noses."
June was doing her best to follow along, but Tommy and Sean had clearly ventured into an area where inside information was required to continue.
"What are you guys talking about? What's Andrews' Raiders?" she asked.
"You wanna field this one, or should I?" Tommy said.
"Be my guest," Sean said.
Tommy cast a sidelong glance at June out of the corner of his eye. "We grew up in Chattanooga. Just across the Tennessee/Georgia border in the little town of Ringgold, there's a monument next to an old country road. The monument commemorates what was called the Great Locomotive Chase. There was a movie made about it in the 1950s."
He could tell she was trying to piece things together, so he went on. "During the Civil War, a civilian named James Andrews took a unit of undercover Union agents deep into the South. Their objective was to steal a train in Atlanta and make their way north, burning bridges and sabotaging the railroad as they went. The unit ended up being called Andrews' Raiders."
Sean took over the tale. "History books tell us that the objective of the operation was purely to undermine Confederate efforts to resupply the lines in Chattanooga while Union forces pushed farther into the South. Chattanooga was a critical railroad center. It was effectively the gateway to the entire Southeast, and even to the western parts of the Confederacy. The North knew that if they could cut off supplies from Atlanta and the rest of the South, they could establish a stronghold in Chattanooga from which they could begin to slowly strangle the rebellion."