AHMM, June 2007 Read online

  "But it doesn't do us any good.” Her voice broke in frustration. “You said it, there's a million possibilities. Where do we start? Here?"

  David looked out the window. Across the curb a barbed-wire fence guarded a metal shop lot, with scrap iron and half empty cable spools rusting on the pavement. Farther down, Jersey barriers enclosed a fleet of graffiti-ridden panel vans. Seagulls cawed and fought each other at a dumpster. Old track laid between cobblestones curved around the nearest building.

  He swung open his door. “As good as any,” he said. “I'll walk, you drive."

  But before he could get out of the car, Lizbeth's cell phone rang.

  "It's Sean.” She clicked it on, grunted, listened, made a sound of surprise, and said, “No, wait there. We're only a few minutes away."

  David pulled his foot back in and slammed the door. “What?"

  "The missing locomotive.” She squealed into a U-turn and turned on the siren. “It never left the yard at all. Sean's looking at it right now."

  * * * *

  The MP15 sat stained and dusty and cold and quiet, by itself on a spur halfway down the backside of the classification yard. A row of silver tankers hid it from the tower. When the sheriff skidded to a stop, they saw the special forces team spreading out along the cars at a jog, weapons ready, a handful of yardmen looking on astonished.

  "Are those it?” Lizbeth made a rapid gesture at the tankers. “We need a bomb squad out here. Maybe Newark can send us theirs."

  "No, no. Those are dairy cars, not the same type at all. Look at the diamond placards—they're only carrying milk."

  Sean appeared down the row as they got out of the cruiser.

  "Where's the end of the train?” Lizbeth yelled. “Where's the bomb?"

  "Not here. Nowhere close by, we've looked.” As he strode up, his radio squawked loudly, and he turned down the volume. “The CEO hightailed it as soon as the call came in, but he's ringing in every few minutes from that stretch SUV of his. How about you talk to him next?"

  David ignored the question. “We have an hour. Lenny and Joe and you, plus Lizbeth, and maybe we can borrow some of those guys from the black helicopters. More than enough. With ATVs we can cover all the tracks."

  "There must be a thousand cars here!"

  "We're looking for tankers, and they'll be placarded red and orange. Who has that printout of the cut?” Sean pulled the folded paper from his shirt pocket. “Share it around and let's get going."

  "Wait a minute.” Lizbeth looked at them both. “Why do they have to be in the yard? Maybe he hauled them out, dropped them off in one of those warehouses or old plants or who knows where, and brought the locomotive back to confuse us."

  "He's a computer guy.” David spoke with assurance he didn't feel. “Not an operator. I don't think he could have done all sorts of complicated switching. He just shoved the cars out of the way and let someone else pick up the locomotive."

  "It doesn't make sense!"

  "Why would he bother going all the way to Hoboken? He could detonate the consist here and kill just as many people.” David made a broad gesture toward the yard. “It's like that story about the stolen letter. What better place to hide a train than right in among all these other cars?"

  "But—"

  "Yeah.” He cut her off. “It's weak. But it's the only chance we have."

  * * * *

  At seventeen minutes before noon, they came back together at the dispatch tower. Sean slammed his ATV to a halt and vaulted off just as Lizbeth pulled up. David drained the plastic bottle of water he'd been handed by Lenny, one of the other on-duty railway agents.

  "Nothing,” said Lizbeth. The others shook their heads.

  "I'm sorry,” David said slowly. They looked at him. “We don't have enough time to get away."

  Inside, the tower was almost deserted, only Special Agent Mattingly still there. He sat on one of the dispatchers’ chairs, cell phone in one hand and a landline receiver in the other. His jacket sat crumpled on another chair. He looked up as they came in.

  "They're going to pay the ransom,” he said.

  Lizbeth glanced around the empty room. “The CEO finally ordered evacuation?"

  "No.” Mattingly shrugged. “Word got out anyway. I'm surprised the news teams aren't here yet ... actually, maybe I'm not surprised, come to think of it."

  "When did everyone leave?” David asked.

  "That computer guy bailed a half hour ago, and the others all disappeared pretty soon after that."

  Outside, the yard lay silent under the bright sun, no cars moving anywhere, no vehicles, no one walking around. To David, accustomed to the constant ebb and flow of clanking freight, the stillness was eerie.

  "It really was an accident,” said Lizbeth. She'd been murmuring into her own radio, its volume just loud enough for her to hear, and she now clipped it back onto her belt. “The truck last night, that blocked the tracks, remember? The detectives checked the driver's story—he was drunk, coming out of one of those bars on Southside. Lots of witnesses, blood alcohol point-one-nine. He was too intoxicated to have planned anything."

  "Bad luck,” said David thoughtfully. He stared out the window. “But good luck for our hacker, perhaps."

  Lizbeth caught his eye. “What?"

  "It could have been just one guy all along. That's why he didn't actually take the train—he didn't have the resources.” The puzzle assembled itself in his head, as fast as he could talk. “The technician—I don't even know his name."

  "Nick ... something,” Sean said.

  "He did it.” David spun to Mattingly. “Your people are probably fastest. He won't be at home. His car, maybe? Travel reservations? You know better than me how to run him down."

  Mattingly looked at his two phones, chose the landline, and dialed rapidly. “You're sure?” he said, eyes on David.

  "One guy,” David repeated. He was certain, intuition running ahead of his ability to reason it out. “He had to have inside information, deep, detailed information—I've been here for thirty-eight years and I couldn't figure out half of what he did. He needed access to the yard, at least once, to capture the AEI signatures."

  "Access logs,” Sean said suddenly. “He probably signed in and out last night."

  "Sure.” David nodded. “And if we get someone external to audit the computer systems, they'll find all sorts of evidence."

  "Half an hour,” said Lizbeth. “He's still in the radius."

  "Exactly. He was here the whole time, keeping tabs on us. He's not suicidal, so he won't blow it up. We're fine."

  Mattingly broke off his first call, dialed another, and held his hand over the mouthpiece. “What do you think,” he said. “Cancel the eleven mil?"

  Of one mind, they all swung to stare at the big, old-fashioned clock on the center wall, and they watched the last minute tick away.

  * * * *

  "You couldn't be sure,” Lizbeth said late that afternoon, sitting with David on a pedestrian bridge over the choke point of tracks funneling into the departure yard. The spot was a favorite for switchies on break, plastic crates to sit on and the deck littered with cigarette butts. The setting sun burned red and orange through the New Jersey haze, illuminating the yard in a mellow glow. Everywhere cars were banging and bumping around, as multiple crews worked to clear the congestion that had stacked up through the night and day.

  "The engine,” said David. “Why was it all the way back in the yard? Either he moved the whole train out and concealed it somewhere outside, or he didn't. But we didn't find the cut. There was no obvious reason for the engine to be there."

  "He had them build the train up, and then he had them break it down. And no one noticed."

  "It was the hazmat placards. He waited until the train was assembled, ready to go, and then he swapped them all out. Assigned them all perfectly innocuous numbers—vinegar, soda ash, beet pellets, whatever. When orders went out to breakdown the block, it was after shift change, so different guys were doing
the work. All they remembered was moving around some standard agribusiness freight. The cars ended up scattered, the MP15 got parked after the last shove, and train 432 was on its way to glory."

  Security lights began flickering on around the perimeter. A mainline freight rumbled beneath the bridge, three locomotives pulling a long line of double-stacks. The lead engineer saw them and waved, his hand a brief flash outside the cab window.

  "I wonder why he did it,” said Lizbeth.

  "Eleven million bucks isn't a good enough reason?” David shrugged. “Maybe he got a lousy performance review. Maybe the CEO was rude to him in the hallway. It doesn't matter."

  "I guess not.” Lizbeth leaned back against the bridgeway's railing. “You know, that was a mighty big risk you took there, at the end, telling Mattingly to halt the wire. We could all be dead now."

  "I took my best shot,” said David.

  Copyright © 2007 Mike Wiecek

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  REEL CRIME by Steve Hockensmith

  Don't be fooled by the upcoming CBS TV movie Jesse Stone: Sea Change. Despite the title, it's not an adaptation of the Robert B. Parker novel Sea Change. Or so says Robert B. Parker.

  Sure, the telefilm (set to air during May sweeps) is based on one of Parker's popular Jesse Stone mystery/thrillers. But it's still not an adaptation. Parker prefers the term “approximation."

  "It's barely recognizable,” he says.

  Not that the best-selling author's displeased with Jesse Stone: Sea Change, which finds police chief Stone tackling some very big trouble in his very small town. Nor does he have any complaints about the three other Stone TV movies that have aired on CBS. Quite the contrary.

  * * * *

  Tom Selleck. Photo © CBS

  * * * *

  "Tom Selleck has got Jesse nailed,” he says of the former Magnum, P.I. star, who first played Parker's brooding, alcoholic hero in the 2005 ratings smash Stone Cold. “When I watched the first one, I was close to actual tears at hearing my language so artfully interpreted."

  That was a welcome change of pace for Parker, since in the past Hollywood's had him on the verge of tears for all the wrong reasons. Take Spenser: For Hire, for instance. The 1985—1988 series starred Robert Urich as Parker's beloved Boston private eye ... or did it?

  "Bob came directly from Vega$, where he played [P.I.] Dan Tanna, to Spenser: For Hire, where he played exactly the same character,” Parker says. “[The show] had very little to do with my work, other than using some of the characters’ names. I didn't think the people involved understood Spenser at all."

  Even when he got the chance to script Spenser projects himself (as he did with a trio of A&E TV movies that swapped Urich for Joe Mantegna), Parker came away dissatisfied.

  "We didn't have enough money,” he says. “They didn't turn out as well as I would have liked."

  Strike three came a couple of years later, when Parker tried to interest Tinseltown in Double Play, his thriller about Jackie Robinson's historic (and risky) season as major league baseball's first African-American player.

  "I did about ten pitches in five days and at the end of the fifth day I went back to the hotel, had a drink, and retired from show business,” Parker recalls. “I had one person say to me after the pitch, ‘Who's Jackie Robinson?’ Everything you've heard about Hollywood is true, if not worse. So I went home."

  * * * *

  Robert B. Parker. Photo courtesy Penguin

  * * * *

  But though he was done with pitches, Parker was still willing to let someone else take a swing at his books. Especially if that someone was named Tom Selleck.

  "I'd worked with Tom on a couple of his [TNT] Westerns, sort of play doctoring,” says Parker. “And we have a mutual friend, Michael Brandman, with whom he's in a producing partnership. So when Brandman called me up and said, ‘Tom wants to do Stone Cold,’ I just said, ‘I bet we can make that work.’”

  And work it did—so well that (according to some reports) CBS chieftain Les Moonves would like Selleck to commit to a Stone series. But Parker says that's not going to happen anytime soon.

  "That's tough work,” Parker says of producing a TV show. “The star is in every shot, there are twelve-hour days, twent-two episodes. Ick. Tom doesn't want to do it. And I don't blame him. I wouldn't do it either."

  In fact, there's only one chore related to TV or movie projects that Parker's still happy to perform: walking to the mailbox.

  "The thing I liked best about Spenser: For Hire was that every week the check came,” Parker cracks. “Someone once asked me why I sell the rights to my stuff to television and film, and I said, ‘For money! What other possible reason would there be?’”

  * * * *

  At first blush, it seems like director Robert Harmon's as fed-up with Hollywood as Robert B. Parker.

  "Making a film is very, very difficult,” says Harmon, whose first feature was the 1986 cult-fave thriller The Hitcher. “In particular, I find shooting a film very unpleasant."

  Yet he's still willing to drag himself behind a camera every so often—which is a good thing for Tom Selleck and Robert B. Parker fans because Harmon deserves a lot of the credit for making the Jesse Stone TV movies so successful.

  Harmon directed all four Stone telefilms (and a fifth, currently in the planning stages, will most likely be his to helm if Sea Change nets the same high ratings as its predecessors). A former photojournalist and director of photography, Harmon brings a cameraman's eye to everything he directs. As a result, the Stone movies have a more cinematic feel and darker palette than your usual TV fare.

  * * * *

  Robert Harmon

  * * * *

  "We try to make them as much like theatrical films as we can,” he says. “We do big, wide shots and try to establish a certain mood, and nothing ever takes place in a new building. Though these are contemporary stories, we want them to feel timeless. We don't want an obvious retro feel—the characters don't drive around in ‘70s cars. But it has something to do with the Jesse Stone character. Almost a refusal to join the modern world."

  That's something Harmon can relate to, at least in terms of Hollywood. Although The Hitcher made him a hot property in the ‘80s, he let years pass before he made another project, admitting that he “basically didn't want to go back and make another movie.” (One movie he had nothing to do with, by the way, is the dud Hitcher remake that landed with a thud in theaters this winter.)

  Harmon eventually got back in the saddle with the 1991 John Travolta action-drama Eyes of an Angel—only to get knocked back out of the saddle when the film tanked. After one more big-screen effort (the 1993 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Nowhere to Run), Harmon turned to television work, eventually directing Selleck in the Emmy-nominated A&E movie Ike: Countdown to D-Day. That lead to the Jesse Stone projects—and, for Harmon, the perfect work pace.

  "It's fairly rare to have a series of television movies [instead of an episodic show],” he says. “And we've got a really nice family of crew people, and Halifax [where the TV movies are shot] is a really fantastic town—a great place to spend a couple months a year. So it's pretty unique. I like it."

  Copyright © 2007 Steve Hockensmith

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  TO HONOR ICHIKO AND DEFEND JAPAN by ALAN GRATZ

  We silently arranged ourselves around the dirt infield, the scratched foul lines forming an invisible wall none of us dared to cross. A paper lantern hanging from a pole on the pitcher's mound illuminated the five members of the Mainstream Society, with Tetsuo on high. The strange light made his eyes gleam like blank obsidian orbs, and no one could tell who Ichiko's self-appointed enforcer had in his sights. Around the diamond, my schoolmates looked half scared, half excited.

  "Who are you?” Tetsuo called to us.

  "We are sons of Ichiko,” we answered.

  "What is your name?"

  "Our name is Ichiko."

  "Where do you come from?"

&nb
sp; "Our bodies and souls were formed in the womb of Ichiko."

  "Why are you here?"

  With all the fervency of the guilty, we cried out as one: “To honor Ichiko and defend Japan!"

  Tetsuo let the windless night lay heavily on our shoulders before he continued.

  "Let no man here believe we perform this ceremony for a common criminal,” he told us. “This is not some eta we condemn tonight. He is one of us. Our brother. He is Ichiko. This is not a punishment, but a cleansing, and you here will be witness to a rebirth. With your help, we will set our brother back on the path to manly virtue."

  Two rows behind me, a boy whimpered.

  "One among us,” Tetsuo announced, “has left Independence Hall by night and scaled Ichiko's sacred Wall of the Soul. Worse, he has abandoned his brothers to seek the pleasures of a woman."

  The stillness was perfect, as if all six hundred boys held their breath at once. Here was the cardinal sin for an Ichiko boy—not only to think about but speak to, to touch a girl! The very idea was both horrifying and electric.

  "Haruki Ichikawa, step forward!” Tetsuo cried.

  Every eye searched the crowd for the accused boy. I heard Kenji gasp at my side.

  I stepped forward.

  Another time it might have been more difficult. Like other boys before me, my legs might have failed. I might have stumbled to the ground, or had to be dragged to the center of the circle where my punishment awaited. But in truth, my first step toward this line had been taken days ago, and I was just now arriving. What's more, I now knew my path was true.

  I moved near the center of the circle and stood my ground as Tetsuo spoke.

  "As evidence,” he said, “I present a page from the register of a vulgar brothel from two nights ago, a register with our brother's name upon it!” Tetsuo turned his dark face to me. “Haruki Ichikawa, it is the verdict of the Mainstream Society that you have violated the Ichiko code of honor, and that you must therefore receive the clenched-fist punishment."

  Confident as I was, my heart raced as I took my place on the mound. There, where I stood every day during baseball practice as Ichiko's number-one pitcher, I had never felt so afraid. Six hundred eyes glimmered in the darkness like hungry wolves.