Shadow Watch

THIRTEEN

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 would appear within minutes, chugging along at close to seventy miles an hour on the straight downhill gradient.

He watched the signal, which was now displaying a yellow “slow” aspect.

The clank and rumble of the train grew louder.

Closer.

Kuhl watched the signal. He thought he perceived a rise in the generator’s hum, a crackle in the air around him, but doubted it was anything more than his gaining anticipation.

The first pulse was initiated.

Kuhl watched.

The yellow light fluttered off, on, off. Then stayed off.

A breath hissed through his teeth. His jaw muscles tight, he whipped his head to the left and saw the approaching locomotive’s lights splash across the ties. Then it nosed into sight below him, the figure of the engineer visible through the windows of its raised cab, a long, streamlined set of passenger cars hugging the slope behind it.

The dish rotated silently on the roof of the van and released its second pulse.

She was tall, tan, young, lovely, and from Ipanema, just like the girl in the old song. Christina from Ipanema, could you believe even her name rhymed with the title?

Darvin had met her in a bar at Barra Funda station, where he had stopped for a martini while waiting for his train. He’d been sitting there sipping from his glass, thinking about the big-money deal he’d clinched for his company in New York — well, his father-in-law’s company, if you wanted to nitpick — when she came walking along, just like in the song, strutting right past the bar in this light, scoop-backed, flowery cotton shift — dia — mond earrings, black pearl necklace, chic mehndi lotus tattoo on her bare shoulder, her hips swaying to the rhythmic Afro-samba music blasting from the P.A. system, her hands loaded with shopping bags from the expensive boutiques downtown. Christina from Ipanema.

Darvin had scarcely been able to believe it when he’d found himself leaning off his stool to ask her if she wanted to join him for a drink, first because he was a married man — it had been six months since he’d tied the knot, not at all coincidentally the same length of time he’d been employed as a salesman for Rinas International Hotel Supplies — and second because he hadn’t had a pot to piss in before that, when he’d been hawking costume jewelry door-to-door at thirty bucks a ring and thirty-five a necklace for some Israeli gonif who had his office on 10th Avenue, getting a ten-percent commission on each piece of soon-to-discolor crap he unloaded, his assigned route running from 125th Street in Harlem to Washington Heights — try to earn a living wage that way, bro.

Back then, before he got hitched, before his wife’s father consequently became his boss and handed him the company’s plum Brazilian accounts, Darvin wouldn’t have had the cash or confidence to so much as dream of picking up a woman in Christina’s league, which was kind of funny if you thought about it, like something you’d expect to read in Penthouse Forum. Maybe he ought to send in an article, use one of those dumb pen names to protect his identity: Marrying to Score Babes, by Lucky Strike.

At this very moment, in fact, streaking through the inky South American night toward Rio and Darvin’s room at the Ritz Carlton, snuggled close together in the dimly lit coach of the express train — the fifth of six cars coupled to the locomotive — they were engaged in an activity that would itself make for a great opening teaser. Ten minutes earlier they had asked the attendant for an afghan and thrown it over their laps, not because either of them was cold, but because Christina from Ipanema, who had herself been waiting for the train after an afternoon shopping spree in Sao Paulo with a girlfriend — or so she said — had put her mouth to his ear and whispered a suggestion or two about how they might while away the long hours of the ride, provided they could keep from being noticed by prying eyes.

This being a luxury line, they’d already had a nice amount of privacy. Their high-backed, buttery leather chairs blocked the view of them from behind. The wall-to-wall carpeting muted most of the sounds around them and, more importantly, most sounds they might make. The fluorescent lights over the central aisle had been switched off for the benefit of passengers wanting to catch some shuteye, and many of those who weren’t asleep were in the buffet car having cocktails and canapes. Small incandescent lamps with rose-colored shades mounted between the windows gave off a subdued glow that was enough to read by, or whatever, and was also kind of romantic. The afghan, therefore, had niftily finalized yet another major deal for Darvin, giving them all the added cover they’d needed.

Now Darvin looked over at her and gasped. She looked back at him, her lips curling upward, and produced a soft, furry moan. Their faces were almost touching, their breaths mingling in moist little puffs. Their hands roved beneath the blanket like a couple of warm, burrowing animals, hers delving industriously into his unzipped and unbelted pants, his digging deep under the hem of her dress.

Darvin was about to reach the unquestionable high point of his journey — or this leg of it, at any rate — when the fluorescents running over the middle aisle abruptly flickered on, flooding the train with their stark radiance. Startled from her rapture, Christina from Ipanema straightened beside him, her hand becoming frustratingly still under the afghan, then slipping all the way out of his pants. She looked around in distracted confusion. Most of the dozing riders had been awakened by the sudden surge of light and were doing the same. Though Darvin remained dug in under her dress, figuring he’d stay there until explicitly asked to leave, he likewise found himself glancing about the coach. It wasn’t just that the lights were on. It was that they were buzzing loudly and seemed much too bright, as if their wattage had been turned up to a hot, glaring level. And the attendant, who was staring up at the ceiling of the car, looked as bewildered as everyone else.

“O que e isto?” a guy behind him asked loudly in Portuguese. “Tudo bem?”

What is this? Is everything okay?

Seconds later, the speeding train jolted on the track and the emergency horn in the locomotive burst into clamorous, ear-splitting sound, making it clear that everything was very definitely not okay.

Minutes after that, Darvin, the woman who called herself Christina, and twenty-five other passengers aboard the car were dead.

When they were young and struggling to meet the rent in the Baltimore rowhouse apartment where they’d raised their four children, Al and Mary Montelione had played a silly little game with each other virtually every time they went to the supermarket. It had started soon after their next-to-youngest, Sofia, was born. Because they’d been living exclusively off his modest postman’s salary and had needed to cut comers wherever possible, they would very carefully compare prices on grocery items, household supplies, really anything and everything they purchased.

One Fourth of July weekend during a particularly lean spell, they’d decided to treat the family to some ice cream, but standing at the dairy freezer, had suddenly realized they could scarcely afford even that meager indulgence, given that they’d had not a cent in the bank and about ten dollars cash between them to stretch over the holiday. Seeing the crestfallen look on Al’s face as he’d read the price labels, Mary had grabbed him by the elbow and exclaimed: “Come on, mister, go for it! Whoever finds the cheapest quart wins a free trip to Rio!” It was one of those situations when you either had to laugh or cry, and her mock announcer’s voice had pushed Al’s precarious emotional balance toward the former. Cracking up hysterically, he’d plunged into the freezer as if he actually had been a contestant on a game show, all at once a whole lot less depressed than he’d been a moment before — which, of course, had been Mary’s intent. Though she’d outscrounged him by twenty-two cents that evening, they had bought the ice cream for the family and he’d come home feeling like a winner for a change. From then on, the “trip to Rio” bit had become a standard tactic they’d used to relieve the strain of their constant financial woes. After a while even the kids had gotten in on it.

Four decades later, living simply but quite comfortably on Al’s postal supervisor’s retirement pension — things had gone well for them after his promotion, except for a health scare three years earlier, when he’d developed a severe cardiac arrhythmia that required normalization with an artificial pacemaker — Al and Mary were celebrating their Golden Anniversary with a real trip to Rio as well as other sight-seeing locales in Brazil, the travel and hotel reservations fully paid for by their now grown and married children, who had cooked up the idea as a surprise gift. 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 looking out for the signal, and had no reason to suspect anything might be wrong with the signal, it would have been an intelligent precaution to use geographic landmarks as he neared the place where the track looped around the hillside in the unlikely event that it did fail.

But there can be such a thing as overfamiliarity with a route, particularly in country where the terrain rolls along with a dulling sameness, one stretch of track bleeding into the next. Anybody who regularly drives to work in a rural area knows this; after taking the same roads day in and day out for several months or years, you begin to ignore the scenery and depend on a general sense of your bearings rather than its specific features, until coming to a sign or stoplight that marks a necessary turn. The building, brook, farmyard, radio tower, or cherry ’63 Mustang in someone’s driveway that once caught the eye on every trip will be passed unnoticed along the way. You feel free to straddle the speed limit, and perhaps even slightly exceed it without risking a traffic stop, knowing the police will in most instances tolerate a person going, say, sixty-eight or seventy in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour speed zone.

Salles had been driving railroad trains for three decades, and made the Sao Paulo-Rio run over five hundred times in the two years since it had been assigned to him. Never in his career had he come close to having a mishap. The night of the derailment, he was watching in anticipation of a signal that had ceased to function, and relying on equipment that no one had thought to harden against the sort of destructive black technology with which it was targeted. He was performing his job in compliance with the rules, and his response to the first indications of a problem was rapid. If blame had been apportioned by a judge possessing complete, objective knowledge of the facts, Salles’s slice of it would have been truly inappreciable. Moreover, his public and courtroom accounts of the incident were, from his available perspective, a hundred percent candid and faithful to the truth.

This is how he recalled it in deposition:

His train was proceeding normally along a series of climbs and dips in the large, undulating hills that are crossed by the Sao-Paulo-to-Rio intercity railway. The forested countryside east of Taubate being exceptionally dark and repetitive in its features, Salles had always relied on his instruments and track signals rather than terrain landmarks as visual aids. On his descent along the slope where the derailment took place, he had approximated that he was about five miles west of a blind curve that required the train to slow to between eight and ten miles per hour, his discretional latitude based upon factors such as weather conditions or the presence of another train on the opposing track. His usual practice was to begin gradually applying his brakes two miles west of the curve, where the continuously lighted yellow “slow” signal came into view, and he had been keeping his eyes open for it since starting along the decline. But Salles’s estimate of his position was off by three miles. He had already passed the signal without knowing it — and without being able to know it because its light had given out.

In the pitch darkness, the curve seemed to come up out of nowhere. Salles had spotted it in the arc of his headlamps from a distance of perhaps thirty yards and immediately glanced at his Doppler indicator for a speed check, but its digital readout was flashing double zeros and an error code. This first sign of a problem with the electronic systems whose reliability Salles would later challenge was accompanied by a peripheral awareness of the lights in his cab brightening as if with a sudden flood of voltage. Forced to guess his speed, Salles decided he was moving at about fifty-five miles per hour, and immediately took emergency measures to decelerate and warn any oncoming train of his approach, sounding the air horn and attempting to initiate his brakes. But the high-tech braking system — which used a network of sensors and microprocessors to emulate the function of conventional pneumatic control valves, and had been retrofitted into the train a year earlier — didn’t engage. Like the Doppler speedometer, the flat-screen display of its head-end control unit was flashing an error condition.

Salles was not only racing toward the curve at break-neck speed, but nearing it with his electronic brakes out of commission.

He knew right away that things were going to be very bad. The fail-safe mechanism designed to automatically vent the brake cylinder in the event of a power loss or hardware crash would deprive him of any ability to graduate the release of air pressure and smooth the stop. And at his accelerated rate of motion, descending from the summit of a large and rugged hill on a sharp bend, the hard, shaky jerks that would result from the train coming to a dead stop would make derailment a certainty. It was the worst circumstance imaginable and he was helpless to avert it. He was at the helm of a runaway train that was about to turn into a slaughterhouse.

It was just as Salles was reaching for the public-address switch to warn his passengers of the impending derailment that the train reached the curve. The fail-safe penalty stop initiated at that same instant. Before his hand could find the switch there was a sudden, rough jolt that threw him off his seat. He slammed into the window in front of him like a projectile fired from a giant slingshot. His last memory of what happened that night was his painful impact with that window, and the sound of glass shattering around him.

Upon regaining consciousness some hours afterward, Salles would learn the forward momentum that had propelled him into the window was also what had saved his life, for it had been powerful enough to plunge him through the window and onto the brow of the hill, with relatively minor physical injuries as the result — a concussion, a fractured wrist, a patchwork of bruises and lacerations. These would be easily detected and treated by his doctors.

Not so, however, the psychological wounds that would drive him to suicide two years later.

The rest of the crew and passengers were less fortunate than Salles. As their wheels locked up and derailed, the cars in which they were riding smashed into each other in a pileup that turned three of them into compacted wreckage even before they plunged off the tracks to go tumbling end-over-end into the valley hundreds of feet below. One of the coaches broke apart into several sections that were strewn across the slope to intermingle with a grisly litter of human bodies and body parts. Bursting into flame as its fuel lines ruptured and ignited, the locomotive slammed into the dining car to engulf it in an explosion that incinerated every living soul aboard.

Other than Salles, only two of the 194 people who had been riding the train survived the catastrophe — an attendant named Maria Lunes, who suffered a severed spine and was left paralyzed from the neck down, and a ten-year-old girl, Daniella Costas, whose two sisters and nanny perished in the tragedy, and was herself found miraculously unharmed, wrapped in the arms of a young Australian fashion model identified as Alyssa Harding.

According to the child’s subsequent testimony, Harding had sprung from her seat two rows in front of the girl moments after the train hurtled from the track, and shielded Daniella from the collapsing roof of their car with her own body as it rolled down the hillside.

It was an act of selfless, spontaneous heroism that had eliminated any chance Harding would have had at survival.