“Can you try that in English,” Kurt said.
“The Earth isn’t going to be vaporized or anything,” she said. “We’re not going to start floating out of our chairs like astronauts in zero g.”
“What will we see?”
“The first and most
“What are you talking about?”
“Australia has the beginnings of a rift valley,” she explained. “Like the Great Rift Valley in Africa. Ours runs from Adelaide northeast toward the Great Barrier Reef. It began to form a hundred and fifty million years ago and then stopped for reasons unknown. The crust is thin and fractured in this section, and the pressure built up by a hundred million years without movement is waiting to be released.
“If Thero can direct his weapon toward this point and create a gravitational distortion that wedges the plate apart even fractions of an inch, the pressure that’s been built up over the millennia might be released all at once. We’re talking about a series of earthquakes, hundreds even, all in quick succession along the rift. What normally takes ten thousand years might happen in a day, or a week, or even hours. The devastation from that kind of tremor will not be measurable on the Richter scale, or any other scale ever devised. Every city, every town, every village in Australia will be reduced to rubble. Not a single building will remain standing.”
Kurt considered her point quietly. It was a grim scenario.
“I know,” she said, taking his silence for disbelief. “I’m a silly academic pointing out the worst-case scenario.
Kurt’s face was dark. A new thought occurred to him. “I have to ask why you?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.
“The informant sent the papers to you,” Kurt clarified. “Why not send them straight to the authorities?”
Hayley shrugged. “I can only guess it’s because of my background. The claims and calculations would seem like gibberish to someone else. Had the package been sent directly to the ASIO, I can only assume it would have ended up in the wastebin.”
“Okay,” Kurt said, “but why not some other scientist?”
“It’s a very obscure field,” she explained. “We’re a tiny group.”
“Tiny but not infinitesimal,” Kurt said.
“No,” she agreed, “not infinitesimal.”
“So I have to ask you one more time: if there were other options, why do you think they picked you?”
She paused for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she said finally. The sadness had returned to her voice. There was a tinge of weariness to it, and a stronger hint of guilt. “I don’t know.”
She looked away, averting her eyes and staring out into the night. And, in that instant, Kurt knew that she was lying.
He considered pressing her for the truth but held back as he felt a subtle change in the train’s motion, like the engineer had taken his hand off the throttle.
Hayley looked up. “Something wrong?”
“Not sure,” Kurt said. He stood just as the brakes went on at full pressure.
The car lurched. Kurt braced himself and caught Hayley’s arm, keeping her from falling as the dinner plates and wineglasses flew off the table. The screech of the steel wheels sliding on the rails overrode all other noise as the quarter-mile-long train began skidding to a halt.
Still holding Hayley, Kurt glanced out the window. The train itself was in a turn, on a slight uphill grade. Looking forward, Kurt saw two other passenger cars and the twin diesel engines. Sparks were flying from the wheels as they dug into the track. But something else caught his eye: tiny points of crimson burning in the night, flares along the track bed and, a little farther on, the outline of a tractor trailer stalled across the rail line at a crossing. Two men stood in front of it, waving their arms frantically.
The breaking continued until the
At this point, Hayley could see the truck as well. “Lucky we were able to stop,” she said.
Kurt glanced around. “Somehow, I don’t think luck’s got anything to do with it.”
Before Hayley could reply, he spotted just what he expected to see: men in ski masks, coming out of the night and headed straight for the motionless train.
NINETEEN
The masked men came aboard the train at several different points, climbing onto the couplers between cars and forcing the doors.
“What’s happening?” Hayley asked in a panicked voice.
“I’ll give you one guess.”
Hayley’s mind quickly grasped the truth. “They’re after us.”
“Either that or this is a Butch Cassidy reenactment no one told me about.”
Hayley grabbed her cell phone and dialed out in an attempt to call for help. “I have a signal, but I can’t seem to get through.”
“Waste of time,” Kurt said. “They’re probably jamming the tower.”
He glanced outside. Two car lengths down, another man stood out away from the train, scanning back and forth.
“They’ve got a guy outside,” Kurt said. “Probably watching for anyone who might make a break for open ground.”
A voice came over the public-address system. It had a bit of an accent, one that Kurt couldn’t place immediately. It certainly wasn’t the conductor.
As the announcement ended, Kurt cracked the cabin door a fraction and glanced down the narrow corridor.
He saw two men down the hall, pushing their way into one of the compartments. They were wide-bodied brutes, with thick arms and legs and faces hidden by ski masks. They moved without a hint of elegance or remorse. Kurt pegged them as street thugs hired for money.
A third man trailed behind them. He was thinner and taller. Even with the man’s ski mask, Kurt could tell he had a narrow face and sunken eyes. Though not as imposing physically, there was a more menacing air about him. Kurt guessed he was the headman.