Kurt flipped the radio back on, switching channels until he heard someone speaking.
* * *
Four cars back, the impact had felt like a sudden application of the brakes. Kirov and his partner had to grab the handholds to keep from being thrown to the ground. They saw the remnants of the truck thrown off to the side and felt the train continuing on, accelerating smoothly once again.
“How are we going to get into that locomotive now?” his partner asked. “They’ll be waiting to pick us off the second we open the door. If we can even get there, that is. There’s no door between the two engines. They’re separate units.”
“Maybe we could go on the roof,” Kirov said.
Even as he suggested it, Kirov considered the insanity of the attempt. He’d seen it many times in the movies, but he doubted it was really possible. To walk on a swaying train roof in a fifty-mile-per-hour slipstream was not really feasible. Crawling might work, especially if they got up there before the train picked up too much speed.
Before he came to any conclusions, the sound of an announcement came over the public-address speakers.
* * *
In the forward engine, Kurt, Joe, and the engineer were celebrating as the
NUMA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Dirk Pitt stepped from the elevator and onto the tenth floor as soon as the doors opened. Unlike the other floors of the NUMA building, the tenth had no receptionist to check people in or workers busy with different tasks. In fact, the only real noise in the open space came from the hum of exhaust fans and the climate-control unit that kept the computer servers and other processers cooled to the correct temperature.
Walking at a brisk pace, Dirk passed through the symmetrical stacks of computing power. Somewhere in the center, he found the goal of his search: a man with a long ponytail, wearing blue jeans and a corduroy shirt.
The lanky figure stood in the middle of three rectangular glass screens that were the size and shape of full-length mirrors. In fact, the arrangement was somewhat like that of a department store fitting room, which allows the customer to view his or her potential clothing purchase from all angles.
In this case, the angled glass screens did not reflect much, except perhaps the obsessive nature of their designer and chief user: one Hiram Yaeger.
Yaeger was a certified genius. He’d been designing and building computers since he was twelve years old. At NUMA, he’d been given almost unlimited resources to build his own systems, collect his own data, and apply it how he saw fit. The tenth floor of the NUMA building had long been given over to Yaeger’s machines. In recent years, he’d expanded, taking over portions of the eleventh, much to the chagrin of the meteorology group, who were moved to the basement.
In a constant search for the most efficient human/machine interface, Yaeger had redesigned his system countless times over the years. He used multiple keyboards, voice activation, even virtual reality and talking holograms. This setup was his latest.