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Orrin says, “I love my job. How about you?”
His smile stays right there. “I sure do.”
Orrin laughs, goes back to his manifest. He was lying to Miguel about loving his job, and the funny thing is—Orrin has a pretty good bullshit detector—he’s sure Miguel is lying, too.
But why?
At the Northern Terminal dispatch office for the Hudson Valley Railroad in Albany, Brian Lamott sits down near his conductor, Alvi Dudin, with that morning’s manifest for their trip south to Hoboken. Brian yawns, still not used to getting up at this ungodly hour, but happy in knowing that he’s exactly two months and three days from retirement. And at two months and five days he will take his wife, Elayne, on a long-promised second honeymoon across Canada aboard the TransCanadian Railway, relishing being a passenger on a train and not its engineer.
Elayne has been patient in waiting for this honeymoon, but Elayne being Elayne, she announced last night that their twin granddaughters—Bridget and Lindsay—would be coming along as well. Brian had protested at first, but Elayne set him straight: “The girls hardly know you, and you don’t know them. You still can’t tell them apart.”
“Not true,” he had said. “Bridget’s the one with the little birthmark on her forehead.”
“Wrong,” Elayne had said. “That’s Lindsay.”
Brian goes back to the paperwork for that day’s run, smiling to himself, content that Elayne would never know he had secretly wished she would do something exactly like that; the thought of spending a week with his wife and their granddaughters gives him a warm feeling indeed.
“Hey, Alvi,” he says.
“Right here, boss,” Alvi says, checking his phone.
“Have you seen the manifest?”
“Sure have,” he says.
“You see anything out of place?”
Alvi lifts his head from the phone, smiles. “You mean the fact we’re hauling more than we should, so Hudson Valley can squeeze more from us?”
“Nah,” Brian says. “That’s typical. Did you see who the last four flatbeds belong to?”
“Sure,” Alvi says. “Department of Energy.”
Brian is pleased at his conductor’s response. Alvi is a Russian refugee—hardly an accent to his voice—but he has a good work attitude and a sharp eye, and he can memorize practically any document placed before him. Alvi had looked at the manifest more than an hour ago, but the kid could still recall what was listed.
“What do you think the DOE is shipping to Hoboken?” Brian asks.
Alvi shrugs. “Beats me. What do you think?”
Brian makes sure they’re not being overheard. Paranoid, sure, but you didn’t want a reputation for being a gossiper. Even though Brian is pulling the pin in less than three months, he wants to go out as the pro he’s always been.
“I tell you what I think,” Brian says. “Department of Energy means more than oil and wind. It’s nuclear, too, and think about it: we got two nuclear power plants in the upstate, at Ginna and Nine Mile Point. That nuclear waste’s gotta be transported somehow. Why not put it on trains? I’ve seen it done before on other rail lines.”
Alvi says, “Isn’t that dangerous?”
Brian shakes his head. “Nah, I don’t think so. They’re packed in pretty secure casks. But still, you’d think they’d give the train crew a full brief before asking us to haul that dangerous crap a couple of hundred miles, right across from Manhattan.”
Alvi smiles. “Yes, you would think.”
Chapter86
IN HISoffice at One World Trade Center, Tom Cornwall takes a swallow of cold coffee and gets right back to work. It’s dark in the other offices, and with the pressure knotting his forehead and the burning feeling in his belly after drinking all that coffee and pulling this all-nighter, he knows he will pay a price later today.
But if he can help his wife, Amy, so what?
He’s done a lot of digging online during the past few hours and has gotten a few hits about properties in the Manhattan area owned by this Rashad Hussain. But in his gut, Tom knows there’s more. Tricky rich people got rich and stayed rich because of how they gamed the system, how they hid their assets, and at any other time, Tom would spend long hours in front of his keyboards and screens, gently untangling lines of property ownership and offshore accounts. But the tone of Amy’s voice earlier tells him he doesn’t have the time.
So he’s ventured into the dark web, armed with some cryptocurrency accounts that neither Amy nor his boss, Dylan Roper, knows he has. Tom has always been reluctant to wander the dark web—the favorite place for terrorists, drug dealers, and pedophiles to do their business—because he doesn’t want any three-letter federal agency to know he’s been in that nasty swamp.
