Kang had dealt with pain before. He knew it would dull in time, but that time would not come soon. The cold only took the edge off. He needed antibiotics — pills, an injection. He slowed his breathing, washed down four more ibuprofen with another can of Coke he’d gotten with the ice, and stared out the window at the passing cliffs. They were climbing, somewhere northwest of Denver. He didn’t care. He needed to rest, to plan what he was going to do next.
None of this made any sense. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the man along the Riverwalk, but he felt sure that man was alone. Could it have been Li? That was absurd. Peter Li should be more worried about protecting his family than going on the offensive. Then Kang remembered how ferociously the man had fought when they’d invaded his home. The bastard had charged out with the shotgun where he should have cowered in the corner. Still… No. It couldn’t have been him. But if not, then who?
Kang lifted a bottle of cheap whiskey to his lips with his good hand, keeping the other pressed against the ice. The liquid cut a trench from his tongue to his gut, at once warming him and adding to his confusion. He used his knees and his good hand to replace the lid, then held the bottle up so light from the window backlit the amber liquid. He’d drunk more than half since the train had rolled out of Chicago some twenty hours before. Disgusted, he tossed what was left of the bottle on the blue seat across from him, far enough out of his reach he couldn’t drink absentmindedly. He needed it for pain, to blunt the anger, but he also needed a clear head, and whiskey didn’t help with that.
Neither did pain.
72
The eleven-car California Zephyr rolled out of Chicago’s Union Station on schedule at two p.m. Central Time. John Clark was on board, having purchased one of the few remaining roomettes on the train as soon as he’d ended the call with Gavin. He believed his target was in one of the two sleeper cars. He knew the man’s name, his background, and the names of his dead associates. Gavin had found the car and room number of Kang’s ticket, but that room turned out to be occupied by an elderly couple when Clark walked down the narrow corridor on the way to his own roomette.
One would think that searching a train would be easy. There were three sleeper coaches, all located aft of the baggage car and the two locomotives. The dining car separated the sleepers from the lounge/observation car and lower-deck café, along with the three coach-class cars bringing up the rear of the train. Clark discounted everything aft of the lounge car. Kang was hurt. He would want privacy. He’d be somewhere up front.
Each double-decker Superliner coach had five bedrooms, each with a cramped toilet and shower, along with ten roomettes on the upper deck. The bedrooms were all on the one side of the train. The much smaller roomettes were situated on the opposite end of the car, five on either side of a shoulder-wide passage that, apart from the carpet and semi-fresh air, put Clark in mind of a submarine. There was a stairwell located midpoint in the car, between the bedrooms and roomettes. Marked by the smell of self-service coffee, it led down to four lower-deck roomettes, a family bedroom, toilets, a shower for the roomette passengers, and a baggage rack. The forwardmost sleeper car was reserved for staff berthing and storage, allowing Clark to mark twenty rooms off the list. This left a total of forty rooms, where Kang might be hiding, thirty-nine discounting Clark’s. According to Gavin, Kang had originally purchased a roomette, but since someone was in that room, Clark suspected he’d upgraded at the station to a larger bedroom so he’d have his own sink to doctor his hand. If that were true, it narrowed his search to the ten full-size bedrooms, five on each remaining sleeper car.
Clark ruled out all the rooms on his car by the time they reached Omaha a little after eleven p.m.
The print from the pinkie finger Clark had liberated from Kang’s hand was a bust as far as leads went. The photos from the cameras he’d put on the street provided the breakthrough.
One of the downsides of all the facial-recognition programs in the People’s Republic of China — at least from the viewpoint of the Chinese intelligence apparatus — was that their own system was hackable. Once Biery had uploaded the images, it took just a few hours before he began to get possible hits. The first lead was for the woman. She was Zhang Zhulan, a PLA major. There was a Red Notice on her passport that noted she was wanted for murder in South Africa. She had several aliases, one of which was Rose. According to the Red Notice, she was known to travel with a man named Kang Jian. Kang turned out to be the mystery man. That name led Biery to numerous aliases, which he checked for recent activity. The Visa card for one of the aliases, Frank Lo of Temecula, California, had been used to buy a bedroom on Amtrak Number 5, the California Zephyr, between Chicago and Emeryville, California.
Clark suspected Kang didn’t have any support in Chicago. If he had, he would have brought more than a couple of people with him to whack Li at the river. They would have been expecting at least a couple of guards. Now he was wounded, probably alone, on the run. Clark knew all too well how excruciating a damaged hand could be. The last thing Kang would want to do is drive himself, even if he did have a driver’s license. Whereas airports had layer upon layer of security and ID checks, a person could buy a train ticket online with nothing but a credit card. The conductor required nothing but the scan code on a cell phone. It was illegal to bring weapons on board, but there were no metal detectors. Amtrak Police with bomb dogs patrolled the station, but they weren’t likely to hit on something as small as a sidearm.
Fortunately for Clark’s cover, he was on the youthful end of the average passenger’s age. Most were retired, traveling in pairs without the hassle of airports, meeting new people, watching the country roll by. Most had time on their hands. Some were afraid to fly. At least one was a spy, running for his life.
Clark was halfway through a short stack of buttermilk pancakes, chatting amiably with a couple from Boston, both retired from MIT, when Kang staggered through the dining car. Clark took another bite, waiting for him to push the button to open the car before standing to excuse himself. His seatmates obviously missed the captive audience of the lecture hall and protested that he was leaving in the middle of their conversation. He apologized, saying something hadn’t agreed with his stomach, left a five-dollar tip on the table, and strode quickly after Kang.
Clark made it through the first set of automatic doors in time to look through the windows of the next coach and watch Kang duck into the first door on the right.
Coach 531, Bedroom A.
Clark’s roomette was in the next car, closer to the engines, but the dining car gave him a plausible reason to go back and forth. He kept walking, reaching A as he heard the metal latch click into place. Inside the compartment, a hand reached up and moved the pleated blue curtains over the door and the small window to the right.
The basics of a simple plan already clear in his mind, Clark returned to his roomette. He needed practice defeating the lock on his own door.
Clark had thought Kang might come out for supplies or even to leave the train for good in Denver, but he stayed in his room with the curtains drawn during the fifty-minute stop. Clark and a few others stayed on the platform enjoying the last moments of mountain air until the whistle blew and the conductor waved them aboard. The Zephyr began to slog steadily upward after leaving the city, slowing periodically when wires along the tracks registered rocks or trees from the steep mountainsides that might have fallen across their path. Snow and evergreens covered the slopes, falling away to a winding river below. An hour and a half later, the conductor announced that they would soon cross the Continental Divide through the six-mile-long Moffat Tunnel. He asked that everyone remain in their assigned car during the ten-minute trip under James Peak.