Shadow Watch

inaccuracies rather than getting out the information she’d wanted to present. And despite her repeated clarifications, dismissals, and denials, it was now almost certain that tomorrow would kick off with a swarm of Stokes-derived headlines about the UpLink retreat — adding more quick-to-solidify layers of nonsense to the story, while increasing the self-perpetuating momentum that had allowed it to snowball over the last twenty- four hours.

And it’s going to keep rolling over me unless I start being a lot more careful choosing my words, Annie told herself. This isn’t like anything I’ve dealt with before, and I need to get real about the sort of media glare I’m under.

Perhaps subconsciously, then, another reason she’d come here was to let the reality of the task confronting her fully sink in. Perhaps her initial awkwardness — and occasional defensiveness — in publicly dealing with the aftermath of Orion stemmed from a reluctance to entirely acknowledge what had happened in her own mind. She had assumed a responsibility that would not permit her the shock or denial that were the normal early stages of grief, and had compelled her to take a wrenching shortcut to acceptance. No sense condemning herself for that, but her future effectiveness demanded that she understand and confront her mistakes.

She walked slowly around the room, working her way between the mutilated fragments of what once had been Orion. On this side of her were some cracked thermal tiles, on that side a skeletal mound of aluminum ribs and spars from its airframe, over there an almost unrecognizable chunk of the pilot’s console with a thatch of fused cables dangling from its blown-out rear panel. At her feet, she could see an elevon that must have become detached from the edge of a wing in one of the explosions that had rocked the firing room where she had been a hapless witness to the disaster.

Here, in this place, acceptance was inescapable, and that was also largely what had steered her along past home, the kids, and the chance to get some much needed sleep. And there was one final motivation for this self- guided tour of Hell, one last thing she’d needed to contemplate in absolute solitude… one last thing, while she’d known she would be willing and able to lay herself open to the worst of possibilities.

Amid all the noise pollution that had bombarded her throughout the day, all the half-baked theories she’d heard and tried to deflect, all the craziness, there had been a single burr of speculation that had attached itself to her thoughts and defied her persistent attempts to brush it off. It had first been put to her by the sharper-than-he-seemed Gary Honey Vanilla near the end of their interview.

“… given the nearly simultaneous timing of the two incidents, and knowing that Orion’s primary cargo was a lab element of ISS, has a connection between what happened in Brazil and the shuttle blaze been considered?”

Not by her, not until that moment. But she had been considering it on one level or another ever since.

What if there were proven to be a link between Orion and Brazil?

What if someone had intentionally caused the disaster?

What if Jim Rowland had not perished because of some accidental failure of construction or technology, but a willful, murderous act of destruction by someone who wanted badly enough to keep the launch from taking place?

She stood there in the mortuary silence of the bay, her hands laced behind her back, the crescent-shaped lines around her mouth deepening and deepening as these questions proceeded along their dark, ceaseless orbit through her mind.

What if?

THIRTEEN

SOUTHEASTERN BRAZIL APRIL 21, 2001

In the months after the catastrophic derailment of the Sao Paulo — Rio de Janeiro night train that left 194 passengers dead or seriously injured, there would be many separate investigations with respect to its surrounding conditions and circumstances. To no one’s particular surprise, their findings proved contradictory and disputatious, and led to a prolonged blizzard of litigation. The railroad line and its insurers would blame the company from which it leased the track, citing as factors a plethora of signaling, switching, and maintenance problems. The track owner and its insurers would point their fingers right back at the rail line, alleging a laxity of safety precautions overall, and specifically accusing the engineer, Julio Salles, of job dereliction. Attorneys for the victims and victims’ families would side with the track owner following a computer analysis by accident- reconstruction experts who were hired in support of their class action lawsuit.

Upon Salles’s suspension without pay pending settlement of the various torts, his personal lawyers argued that he was being scapegoated by the rail line and the track owner for their own negligence, while also dragging the corporation that had designed the train’s new electro-pneumatic braking system and Doppler speedometer into the legal cross fire with claims that both systems had malfunctioned in the moments preceding the wreck.

The Brazilian government commission charged with reviewing the incident would take eighteen months and three thousand pages to tamely state their opinion that the facts were inconclusive and endorse an arbitrated agreement between the host of plaintiffs and defendants. With issuance of this white paper report as impetus, deals were cut between nearly all the opposing camps — the sole holdout being Julio Salles, who remained adamant that he was without culpability and insisted his reputation had been irreparably sullied by the allegations leveled against him. Yielding to advice from counsel, he eventually accepted an offer of retirement with full pension and back pay in exchange for a halt to court proceedings and public contention, but would privately continue to feel embittered toward the company to which he had given thirty years of his life, and sink into a deep depression.

Two years to the day after the disaster, Salles would mark that tragic anniversary with a lethal, self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head in the one-bedroom Sao Paulo flat he shared with his wife, making him in a very real sense its 195th human casualty.

In the end, what happened to the train in the hilly darkness along the line between Barra Funda station and its intended destination would remain a mystery.

* * *

It was 11:00 P.M. when the plain gray van pulled onto the roadside embankment a quarter of a kilometer west of where the railway track took a sharp bend along the steeply descending valley wall. The driver immediately cut the ignition and headlamps, then sat behind the wheel studying the rail bed. Although the night was moonless and starless, its darkness untinctured by village lights here in the sparsely populated hill country east of Taubate, he could see the signal post up the tracks through the lenses of his NVGs.

He briefly lowered his goggles and turned toward the rear of the van to give the order. A pair of men dressed in black, balaclava masks over their faces, emerged from the vehicle’s side door. They untied the fastening cords of the tarpaulin that bedecked its roof, then pulled the tarp to the ground to expose a twelve-inch-diameter dish antenna mounted atop the van.

They folded and stowed the tarp, climbed back inside, and made some final calibrations. The dish rotated ninety degrees to the east and spotted on the automatic railway signal. Behind them in the van’s cargo area, a small mobile generator hummed faintly in the dead quiet.

Facing front, the driver put the NVGs up to his eyes again and glanced to his left, westward, the direction from which the train would come rolling down the hillside. Then he shifted his attention to the signal post. When the moment came, the dish would bathe it with a wideband pulse lasting several hundred nanoseconds — less time than it took to blink — then turn on its axis and emit another short, pulsed beam as the train entered its line of sight. According to the Russian, Ilkanovitch, that was all that would be required.

What was the clever little message he had asked the Albanian to deliver with the rest of the material?

A test and a taste.

Soon Kuhl would see for himself whether either was to his pleasure.

At five before midnight he heard the rumble of the train in the distance. While he knew the open acoustics of the valley would make the train sound closer than it actually was, Kuhl’s teeth came together with an eager click. It