He was already dead from his head slamming into the throttle pedestal before his body crumpled to the floor. The half-ton wheels of the engine ripped through the frogs and railroad ties that made up the track-and-switch roadbed. Pandrol clips, which long ago replaced spikes, popped and sprung from the cleats below the rail. The massive force of the millions-plus tons of tank cars coupled behind it pushed the engine like a plow into the dirt as the other engines began to jackknife. With the pneumatic brake lines leading from the engines to the rest of the train severed, the cars had no way of slowing down and proceeded to derail and collapse, spilling their liquid contents out onto the countryside. The ruptured tanks were ignited by the sparks flying from the grinding metal, setting off a hundred fires in the vegetation and bramble along the right of way. The faster conduction of sound through the steel rails made each cry of bending steel and groan of folding iron sound as if it were a spring twanging underwater — the kind of pre-echo that one usually only hears in monster movies. It took a full minute for all the cars to come to a moaning, squeaky halt or to randomly explode. When they finally stopped, a quarter mile of devastation and destruction lay strewn about the woods of Waukesha Gap.
Amazingly, Martha had fallen between the two concrete footings, and the engines and cars piled up away from where she lay. Rescue workers were astonished and confused when they found her there three hours later.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bill entered his office and there on his desk was a huge, enormous gift basket. He pulled the card.
“Mr. Hiccock?”
Bill turned as he finished reading the card, “Yes.”
“Joan Duma, from the Office of Protocol.”
“Hello, Ms. Duma. What can I do for you? Would you like a dried fruit or nut, I seem to have a ton of them?”
“Actually that’s why I am here.”
He smiled as he read the signatures, Shelly and Mario Singorelli. “I’m sorry, I am not following you.”
“White House protocol forbids any member of the administration from receiving gifts without full disclosure and receipt of value authorized.”
“Wow.” Then Bill got deadly serious. “You’re talking forms to fill out, right?”
“Actually it’s more like a small booklet with addendums to the GAO, IRS, and eventually the Mitchell presidential museum.”
“Okay. So what’s the alternative?”
“Alternative?”
“Come on, Ms. Duma, all a terrorist would have to do is send spiced hams or fruitcakes to every member of government, every day. The whole thing would grind to a halt in forms and rigmarole.”
“I don’t think I like your tone, Mr. Hiccock.”
“Sorry. What’s my option? How do I get out of this nightmare?”
“Well, you could donate the basket to a food bank or to the homeless.”
“Done. They’ll be eating dried apricots and almonds by this afternoon.”
“Good. And, I assure you, we in protocol would never be party to any terrorist action.”
“You don’t laugh a lot, do you, Ms. Duma?”
“Seventeen events in two weeks,” Wallace Tate, the Director of the FBI said. “No credible group claiming responsibility. No rhyme or reason to the targets, no escalation. Seemingly isolated incidents.” A fifty-five-year-old, well-tanned, and taut-skinned former Boston police chief, he was a political survivor of two administration changeovers. Where former directors administrated their way through their tenures, Tate ruled over his bureau with a dictatorial style not seen since the iron-fist days of J. Edgar Hoover. The combination of his police training and his executive acumen made him a field agent’s worst nightmare: a boss who might be in your face or looking over your shoulder at any time.
Ray Reynolds, Press Secretary Spence, and Hiccock listened intently to the report.
“What about the terrorists?” Reynolds asked.
“Wrong handle, Ray,” the director said. “Terrorists have a cause, a common belief that binds them. All these acts were carried out by people posing as homegrown U.S. citizens.” He inserted a CD into his laptop and punched the pad. He preferred to use a laptop when he made these White House briefings. It was HASP and password protected and if someone tried to monkey with it, a program shredded everything on the hard drive, insuring FBI secrets wouldn’t be compromised. A screen came up containing Professor Holm’s uncomplimentary driver’s license photo, next to which appeared a black-and-white security video made virtually unwatchable by a blizzard of static.
“Prior to this mangled security tape, which provided enough evidence to prove him guilty in the destruction of the Intellichip building, this man’s most violent behavior was slamming the side of his computer when it locked up on him.”
He hit the touch pad, bringing up Martha Krummel’s photo. A picture of a smoldering freight train pileup was displayed in an adjacent box on the screen.
“Martha Krummel, a grandmother, derailed an eighty-car train. As far as we have learned, the only thing that seemed to make her angry was the weeds in her garden.”
Displayed next on the screen was Doris Polk. “This woman was a secretary and taught Sunday school. After she opened two valves as if she were a trained technician, the entire Mason Chemical Plant dissolved into liquid muck.”
Her photograph was replaced by that of a young boy. “This Boy Scout merit badge holder started a fire that destroyed the corporate office of the number two accounting firm in the country. On his FaceBook page he said he wanted to be president someday.”
Tate clicked repeatedly now, his point made. “And thirteen others, every single one of them exhibiting no known ties or sympathies to any group, real or imagined; just average citizens.”
“You said imagined?” Hiccock questioned.
“Mr. Hitchcock, I don’t have the time …”
“It’s Hiccock,” Ray Reynolds said. “I asked Bill to attend because he was there when Intellichip blew. Ever since, he has been weeding through any science issues and advising us on policy.”
“Very well,” Tate nodded to Ray stiffly. “Field agent reports have indicated …”
“Excuse me,” Bill interrupted again, “a moment ago you said ‘imagined.’ I would still like to know what that means in this context.”
Suffering fools was not the director’s strong suit, and he sized up this science whiz as being nothing short of a nuisance. “We have teams at Quantico that stay up all night thinking up the wildest scenarios, and this one’s got them stymied.”