Code of Honor

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.

Two of the roomettes in 531 were vacant, allowing Clark to leave his roomette in 532 and step next door five minutes before they entered Moffat Tunnel from the east.

The train slowed some inside the narrow tunnel but still moved fast enough to double the noise level from what it had been outside now that they were in the belly of the mountain.

Clark waited a full minute, then made his move.

Peeking out the door of the roomette, he looked up and down the corridor one last time before he committed, then made his way quickly past the stairwell to the end of the car with the bedrooms, where he paused in front of Bedroom A. He knew the layout. The couch would be facing forward. A single chair near the window would face aft. He didn’t know where Kang would be sitting, but consoled himself that the room was so small it would hardly matter. He’d wrapped his handkerchief around the knuckles of his right hand, then held the Glock in his left, shooting two quick shots at the glass on the door, just above the lock. There was a chance he’d hit Kang, but he didn’t have a problem with that.

Moving purposefully once he began, Clark punched the glass away with the wrapped hand. The locking mechanism was relatively simple, a hooking metal latch with a second metal piece that swung down over the top, jamming the latch in place. Clark put two more rounds through the door to keep Kang on his toes as he pushed the metal tab out of the way. In less than three seconds from the time he first pressed the trigger, he stood to the side, pulling open the door and curtain in one movement.

Kang was seated on the couch, facing forward, which put his left hand nearer the window, forcing him to scramble for the pistol with his nondominant hand and bring it across his body to engage Clark. Still, he was incredibly fast for someone dazed and startled at the sudden attack. Fights in a room not much larger than a phone booth unfolded quickly. Clark rolled in, on top of Kang by the time he put a round in the top of the man’s knee. Kang tried to bring the Beretta around, but Clark’s left hand deflected it as he knelt on top of the injured hand. Kang let loose a ragged scream, almost too high-pitched to hear.

The Beretta slipped out of Kang’s hand, bouncing on the couch before falling to the floor.

Clark pushed off the couch cushion with his free hand and stood back, bracing himself against the curved swell of the bathroom door, his own pistol tucked in tight against his side.

“You speak English, Mr. Kang?” Clark asked, throwing in the name to keep the man guessing.

Kang nodded, chest heaving. His gun hand was busy clutching the bloody stump of the other.

“What’s your problem with Peter Li?”

“Who are you?”

Clark ignored the question. “Why attack the man’s family?”

Kang shook his head. Thinking. Stalling. Catching his breath.

The roaring noise of the train passing through the tunnel had covered the suppressed gunfire, but they were more than halfway through by now. The window was shot out, there was glass in the hall, and passengers would start to move around again as soon as they came out.

Clark tried again. “Who sent you?”

Kang shook his head.

Clark nodded to the bandaged hand. “I can get you some help.”

“A scratch,” Kang said.

“Are there more of you?”

Silence.

“Listen, pal,” Clark said. “Your friends are dead. You’re done. I can get you something for the pain, but I need to know who else is coming after Li.”

Kang glared, seething rage flashing in the otherwise dark pools of his eyes. “I have nothing to say.”

“You know,” Clark said, “I believe you.”

Kang was a germ, a bacterium that if not absolutely destroyed would only come back stronger. Still, to some — most, really — killing an injured man who was sitting, blinking up at you, was the act of a brutal barbarian. It was a point of fact that Clark could not argue. At the same time, he admitted another truth that civilized people almost always chose to ignore: Sometimes, the world needed a few barbarians.

Clark kicked the broken glass that had ended up in the hallway back inside the compartment. He slid the door shut behind him as he padded quickly to the vacant roomette, reaching it just as they exited the Moffat Tunnel back into the light of day. He knew one thing: If there were people coming after Peter and his family — there would now be one less.

John Clark could live with that.