Shadow Watch

Thus far the vacation had been spectacular. They’d spent five days in Copacabana, taken an air shuttle to Brasilia for a tour of the country’s western region that included a breathtaking hot-air balloon ride over a wildlife preserve in the Pantanal, then flown back east, making a two-day stopover in Sao Paulo before boarding the night coach back to Rio, where they planned to spend the final weekend of their vacation.

After sampling the buffet in the dining car about three hours into the ride, they had taken their seats in the middle of the train, Mary pulling a Danielle Steele novel out of her travel bag, Al settling in for a snooze beside her, when the fluorescent overheads flashed on and started buzzing like a nest of wasps.

Quizzically scrunching her eyebrows, Mary looked up from her paperback, then turned to her husband.

Her expression at once became frightened.

Al had awakened with a start and had both hands on his chest his face pale, his mouth wide open and pulling in shallow snatches of air.

“Al what is it?” she said, her book dropping from her fingers as she reached over and took hold of his shoulder. “Al, honey, Al, are you sick?”

He nodded, too short of breath to answer.

Terrified now, oblivious to the murmurs that had arisen throughout the car over the lights going on, Mary frantically looked around for an attendant.

“We need a doctor over here!” she cried. “Please, someone help us!”

But no one responded. A sudden, violent jolting of the train, followed by the loud blare of the emergency horn, had thrown the other occupants of the car into their own constricted spheres of panic. Mary heard cries of alarm all around her. Heard metal wheels grind over the tracks as the train’s jarring, bumping, swaying movement worsened, threatening to fling her off of her seat.

Beside her, Al was gagging, his hands still clutching his chest directly over the spot where the pacemaker was implanted. Acting on impulse, not knowing what else to do, she threw herself protectively over him, put her arms around him, and held him to her.

It was in this position that their bloody, broken bodies were found the next day when the search teams recovered them from the wreckage.

* * *

In the second car of the train, Enzio Favas was proudly showing off his UpLink Telecommunications pager/ wristwatch to Alyssa, one of the Australian runway models he’d hired to showcase his upcoming beachwear line at the fashion designers’ convention in Rio the following week.

“It send and receive E-mail, do you know? E-mail!” He pointed to the bottom of the readout display. “You touch screen and words appear right here!”

Alyssa glanced over at him. She’d been studying an unsightly calcium deposit under her fingernail and wishing there were a manicurist aboard.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“And it adjust to different time zone! Automateeek!” he enthused in thickly accented English. “Fly from New York City to Los Angeles, Paris to Tokyo, time never off by a minute! It all done by satellite, do you know?”

“Uh-huh.” A little girl giggled several rows back and Alyssa frowned. “You think those brats behind us are ever going to shut up and go to sleep?”

Enzio shrugged. The “brats” were actually three very adorable sisters who were being shepherded cross- country by their nanny. Enzio had chatted briefly with the woman earlier in the ride and gotten the entire story: Parents divorced, mother living in Sao Paulo, father in Rio, joint custody arrangement, the poor babies constantly bouncing between them like Ping-Pong balls. Enzio, himself the product of a broken home, sympathized. How could Alyssa be so icy? So vain and self-absorbed? And besides that, how could she not have any interest in his watch?

“It has twenty different kind of tone, some of them music! And — what it is called? — GPS feature!” he said, thinking that last would be certain to impress her. “Get lost anyplace, anyplace in whole world, you send message to UpLink operator. He send message back, tell you where you are! Do you know?”

Alyssa ran her tongue around the inside of her lips, trying to curb her annoyance. If Enzio’s rambling about the watch didn’t drive her bonkers, his verbal tics absolutely would. And those giggly kids, Jesus.

“Uh-huh,” she said, beginning to regret that she hadn’t sat across the aisle with Thandie, one of the other models… although all she ever talked about was how she could eat as much rich, high- calorie food as she wanted and stay thin, let’s not mention the diet pills and the fingers down her throat as her meals went straight into the toilet.

Beside Alyssa, Enzio decided to make a last-ditch attempt at awing her with his expensive new toy. He thrust his wrist out in front of her, the watch’s dial so close to her face it almost clipped the tip of her nose.

“You enter names, phone numbers, addresses! Up to one thousand people! Mark appointments on calendar! Download informacion to PC! Do you—?”

The fluorescents above them suddenly blinked on. Alyssa had no idea why — maybe one of the pint-sized monsters behind her had gotten up and fiddled with the switch. In which case, she was thinking she really ought to be grateful, since it had at least shut Enzio up for the moment.

The thing she didn’t get, though, was why the lights were so bright. And what was that weird humming noise they were making?

She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the three girls were all in their seats, looking this way and that in surprise along with the rest of the car’s passengers.

Well, almost all of us, she thought, noticing that Enzio was still staring adoringly at his goddamned cook-your-dinner-screw-your-significant-other-for-you Dick Tracy Superwatch, seemingly oblivious to everything around him.

“Enzio,” she said. “Do you know what’s going on—”

“Shhh!” he said. “Not now!”

Surprised by his unusual curtness — Enzio might be a royal pain in the ass, but he was always a polite one — Alyssa looked at him and realized that he was no longer admiring the watch, but frowning at it. Whatever he saw on its face was making him upset. Very upset actually.

She leaned over to check it out for herself, then raised her eyebrows, the reason for his distress becoming evident.

The display no longer showed the time, but was covered with rows of tiny, blinking ones and zeroes. Also, the watch’s alert tones all seemed to be sounding at once. Chirps, beeps, blips, trilly fragments of simple melody. She supposed she might have noticed it right away if her attention hadn’t been diverted by the buzzing lights and the confused, edgy vibe running through the car.

Even before the first jarring bump, she got the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong.

Then the train seemed to bounce off the track and she clutched her seat for support.

“Enz—?”

She stopped herself. He was just staring at the watch, shaking his head dolefully, concerned with nothing but the watch. Looking like his best friend in the world had just had a fatal stroke right in front of him.

The train was shaking and rattling now, swinging wildly back and forth on the track, the air horn emitting deafening blasts. A few people were screaming, the little girls behind her starting to cry, asking the woman who was sitting with them what was happening.

Allysa’s last coherent thought before the front of the car behind her smashed into the rear of the one she was sitting in, ramming it forward into the locomotive, crunching it between them like a wad of aluminum foil in an angry fist, was that those brats, those poor little helpless brats, were going to get hurt.

* * *

In the proverbial perfect world filled with perfect human beings, Julio Salles might have been able to reduce the loss of life that occurred that night. Though the fifty-five miles per hour that Salles was doing while still nearly two miles from the disabled “slow” signal fell within the limit of his authorized speed, it did so just barely, and slower would have been wiser on a downhill grade. Though he had been alert at his post and