“So that’s what this is about, revenge for a little human interest?”
“The only thing human about that piece was the cute shot of the dog, Wally! Otherwise you were going for PoodleGATE.”
“You know, Naomi, when we were back at 30 Rock, you understood how tight this business is…”
“Stop right there, Wally. We worked together back in New York 15 years ago. You have cashed that chip more than a few times, and now it’s done.”
“You can be so infuriating.”
“My husband tells me that all the time.”
“How’s Larry doing?”
“The doctors say as long as he walks the straight and narrow, his kidneys will be with him ‘til we own a place in Miami.”
“Say hi for me, and think about what you are going to do to make this up to me.”
“Up yours, Wally. I’ll tell him you said hello.”
“See ya round, Spence.”
“See ya round, Wal.”
As soon as he left, Naomi called her assistant. “Sue, pull the Scientific American file. I want to see last month’s request for access letter one more time.”
“Do you ever regret not playing in the NFL?” Carly asked a half-hour into her interview with Hiccock.
“I never connected with football the way I have connected with science. Football was a game, a diversion. I have always been a scientist.”
“Are you just saying that because we are doing a SciAm article right now?”
“No, I told the same thing to Sports Illustrated.”
“When?” she asked. “I didn’t see any article from S.I. in my research.”
“Exactly. I told them the same thing I just told you. Took all the fun out of it for them, I guess.”
Carly was smiling. “So then you learned from that, what to say to me?”
They both laughed.
Wally Smith was getting a cup of coffee when the laughter turned him around. As he looked at this girl, this blonde, very attractive blonde, with a great smile… he felt inspired.
CHAPTER SEVEN
There they are, right where Walter said they would be. Rusty and filthy, enough to beat the band, but they will do, Martha thought as she put the jumper cables into the backseat of the car. She returned to the garage and opened an old, dusty Army footlocker. She was inundated with the intense smell of mothballs. Again, there where her dear departed Walter left it, tucked under the heavy brown cloth of his sergeant’s uniform, lay his illegal war prize. It was still oily, situated next to a magazine. The magazine held nine bullets. When inserted into the German Luger, it would be transformed from a dead war relic to a deadly weapon.
She shut off the light in the garage and went out to her car as the setting sun drew long shadows on everything in her quiet little neighborhood. Walter needed her. Soon she would see him again and help him with the dead battery in his car.
Mr. Quimby was watering his lawn when he noticed Martha backing out of her driveway cautiously. “Eh, Martha,” he called out across the picket fence that separated these neighbors for thirty-five years. “Going to the grandkids?” He chalked up her lack of response to the widow Krummel being hard of hearing of late. As her taillights disappeared around the corner, he turned back to his meticulously manicured lawn. The last few days of Indian summer had been brutally hot and that meant lawn-browning weather if one wasn’t careful. Maybe he would water Martha’s as well.
She drove as dusk turned into darkness. When Martha got sight of the highway sign for the Waukesha Gap, new thoughts filled her brain. Her eyes fluttered momentarily, causing her to refocus on the dirt road and a farm stand just ahead. Making a left-hand turn onto the service road, she thought, big juicy strawberries will make an excellent jam. She followed the bumpy and dusty road for eight miles.
This was an access road for the railroad’s right-of-way maintenance crews. Ahead of her, lit by her headlights, she could barely make out the two big metal cabinets that sat on concrete footings alongside the track. As soon as these cabinets came clearly into view, new thoughts filled her head. There is a little baby in the big cabinet crying for its mother. She shut the engine off but left the lights on as she retrieved the jumper cables, crowbar, and a big old flashlight and made her way toward the control boxes. Her nose twitched from the pungent odor of creosote, a petroleum derivative with which the wooden rail ties were saturated. Not remembering how she knew this, she recalled that this tarlike goo was meant to dissuade termites and mushrooms from making homes in the vital wooden cross members.
Using all her effort, she managed to pry open the small hasp lock on the bigger panel. She then placed the crowbar on top of the smaller cabinet along with the Luger. After positioning the flashlight on the ground, the tiltable head pointing up at the box, she opened the cabinet. For a brief moment, she was befuddled by a wave of fear washing over her. Then, as quickly as it came upon her, it was gone. With the confidence of a veteran track-and-signals railroad man, she traced the circuitry, her hand hovering just above the copper-clad contacts and relays. She identified her first contact point and clamped one end of the jumper cable to it. She attached the other end of the cable a foot to the right and about four feet lower, which sent sparks flying. A solenoid began to clank as relays flipped.
Three hundred feet down the track, a switch machine cycled through its positions, first sliding the rails left with a metallic clunk, then slamming right back to the original position. Lights on a signal bridge above the switch followed suit, going from green to red and back to green. The lights on the dwarf signal beside the track alternated in an “L” configuration, first one over the other, indicating straight through, then side by side: turnout to the left. At this point the switch machine threw the rails left again, but this time the signal did not turn red. It stayed green. As the rumble of an approaching train echoed through the valley, Martha walked precariously down the track along the sloping loose-gravel roadbed to a point in front of the signal bridge. The dwarf signal displayed two lights, one on top of the other, indicating that the switch was set for straight ahead. She made sure the light was set on green and turned her back to the white fog created by the glow of the oncoming train’s headlight. As she walked back to the control boxes, two tracer-like bands of light raced toward her, the reflection of the train’s powerful headlight, first seen off the stropped-steel 155-pound main line rails, as the locomotive came around the bend and into view.
Having completed her task, a slight shaking overcame her body. She felt conflicted over the thing she knew she must do next. With a sense of dread welling up from somewhere deep within her, she turned and approached the cabinets again. She watched in stunned silence as her hand extended out into the night, on its own, reaching for something. The flashlight on the ground in front of her shone in her eyes, which darted to and fro. This degraded her night vision so much that, as she reached for the Luger, she smashed her head right into the crowbar she didn’t see. The old woman staggered, falling to the ground in the gap between the control cabinets.
Unconscious, with a deep gash in her forehead, her last thought was of her husband Walter, who died twenty years ago.
Train 7210, its consist made of only tank cars, was high-balling through the flat valley at sixty miles per hour. The lead engine, running short hood forward, being a General Electric C40-8W, was known on the road as a Dash 8 Diesel. It was coupled with four other Dash 8s, which gave her a combined pull of 20,000 horsepower, enough to pull the eighty cars across the country. Two additional locomotives, older Dash 7s, were hitched to the rear of the train and served as helpers in a push-pull arrangement that generated an additional 2,250 horsepower each, enough power to climb up and over the Waukesha Gap. Jim Crowley, a third-generation railroad man, was at the controls. One of his last living actions would be to ease his grip on the brake handle when coming around a banked-curve section of track at full speed. He did this secure in the fact that the signal at the Waukesha interlock was “clean and green.” The vertical lights of the dwarf signal indicated the switch was set for the straight. At seventy miles per hour, the two miles of arrow straight track ahead gave him just under two minutes to bend over and get his thermos to cut the chill of the night with some hot coffee. But before he was able to grab the thermos, his cab jerked suddenly, veering hard left as his engine raced over the thrown switch meant to be taken at five miles per hour.