Gates Of Hades

Chapter Forty

Amtrak

Somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Atlanta

1430 EST the previous day

Rassavitch had wanted to fly from New York to Savannah, but being subject to scrutiny both when he boarded for Atlanta and when he changed planes for Savannah was putting too much credibility in the Americans' insistence on nonethnic profiling. That a post-9/11 United States would decline to detain someone speaking heavily accented English to check his background and purpose for being on the aircraft more closely rather than offend someone was simply beyond belief. The Americans were polluters and despoilers but not idiots. Their much-proclaimed willingness to search and inquire of an equal number of blond Scandinavian and abaya-wearing, dark-skinned women who might well conceal anything under their loose-fitting robes was not egalitarian; it was suicidal.

Rassavitch didn't believe a word of it.

With Rassavitch's poor language skills, flat, Slavic face, and ghostly white skin, the authorities would surely study the New York driver's permit he had effortlessly obtained.

They would question him for hours. Somehow they would know he was here to destroy them.

So, he took the train, where there were no security precautions.

The cars were clean, quiet, and mostly empty. At first he wondered why more Americans did not use this mode of transportation. His answer came at every place the tracks paralleled a highway: automobiles sped by far faster than the train. So did the buses he saw.

He would have an opportunity to ride one of those buses from Atlanta, where the train would go on to New Orleans. From the bus to Savannah, he was to go to an address he had been given by a man who had sought him out yesterday and handed him a copy of Chekhov's plays with the correct passages underlined. In the book had been ten one-hundred-dollar bills and an address in Savannah.

There was no indication as to what Rassavitch should do when he reached the Georgia port city, nor instructions as to how the money should be used, although it was obvious some of it would be spent reaching his destination. Once he got there, he would figure out what to do next.