Chapter 33 - The Ghost Train to Vienna
"David, stop!" I screamed, shielding Lucas’s entire torso with my body.
"Hang on!" David roared.
He didn't hit the brakes. He aimed the Audi straight for the rear bumper of the blocking vehicle, but at the absolute last second—ten yards before impact—he yanked the emergency handbrake and slammed the steering wheel hard to the left.
The Audi whipped into a violent, controlled three-sixty slide across the ice-slicked stones of the bridge. The heavy steel rear bumper of our car collided like a battering ram into the side of the blocking SUV, shoving it three feet across the slick road and wedging it hard against the stone parapet. The men outside scrambled backward to avoid being crushed.
Gunfire erupted. Rounds shattered the outer laminated layers of our bulletproof side windows, turning them into spiderwebs of white cracks, but the glass held.
David slammed the gear into reverse, floored it, bounced violently off the parapet, shifted back to drive, and squeezed the Audi through the narrow gap between the damaged SUV and the sheer rock face of the mountain. Metal screamed against rock, tearing the side mirrors off in a shower of plastic and sparks, but the car punched through.
Behind us, the pursuing G-Wagon slammed directly into the wreckage of their own roadblock.
We rocketed off the bridge, diving down the steep forest road toward the valley floor, leaving the flashing brake lights and smoke behind.
"Mama... Mama, I want to go home," Lucas whimpered against my chest, his small hands clutching my sweater so hard his knuckles were white.
"We are going home, baby," I whispered, tears spilling hot down my frozen cheeks, though I had no idea where "home" was anymore. Arthur had taken my dignity; his family had tried to take my life; and now, the shadow monsters Arthur owed money to were hunting my child across the continent of Europe. "I swear to you, Lucas. Nobody is taking you."
Ten minutes later, the Audi skidded to a halt inside a cavernous, rusted industrial shed surrounded by overgrown pine trees and rusted rail tracks.
The air was freezing, thick with the smell of diesel, creosote, and rotting wood. A massive, unmarked freight train sat idling on the center track, its heavy diesel engines rumbling with a rhythmic, subterranean thrum.
David killed the Audi’s lights and engine. Silence descended, broken only by the tick of the cooling manifold and our ragged breathing.
"Out. Now," David commanded, stepping out and scanning the perimeter with his weapon drawn.
I climbed out of the footwell, carrying Lucas against my hip, his legs wrapped tightly around my waist. I grabbed my purse from the seat, my hands trembling violently.
"David, how did they find us so fast?" I asked, looking around the shadowy train depot. "We left Zurich under false identities. We paid cash at the toll booths on the way up. The Swiss bank transfer was supposed to be encrypted!"
David stopped dead in his tracks beside the iron ladder of a rusted boxcar. He slowly turned to look at me, his gaze dropping to the floor of the Audi, then to my purse, and finally to Lucas.
"The beacon wasn't just digital, Elena," David said quietly, his voice hollow. "When you put your thumb on that scanner in Zurich... what did the system do?"
"It... it calibrated," I stammered, thinking back to the cold silver plate in the private vault. "It ran a full biometric synthesis. It checked my retina, my thumbprint, and..."
My breath stopped.
My hand moved involuntarily to the collar of Lucas’s winter coat.
"And Lucas’s medical emergency card," I whispered in horror. "The micro-chip medallion Arthur gave him when he was six months old. The one Arthur swore was a medical tracker for his severe asthma."
"Arthur never gave him a medical tracker," David said, his voice laced with cold fury. "Arthur implanted a passive RFID military transponder into the silver casing of that medallion. The Zurich vault didn't just verify your identity, Elena. It activated the transponder’s global satellite ping."
I looked down at the tiny, intricately carved silver medallion resting against Lucas’s chest—the one he had worn since he was an infant, the one Arthur had insisted he never take off because it was 'a Vance family heirloom.'
Arthur hadn't given his son an heirloom.
He had put a tracking collar on a hostage.
With a scream of disgust and fury, I grabbed the silver chain around my son’s neck and snapped it with a violent yank of my bare hands. The metal dug into my palm, drawing blood, but I didn't care. I hurled the silver medallion onto the concrete floor of the rail depot and smashed my heavy winter boot down upon it again and again until the casing cracked, exposing a green micro-circuit board the size of a fingernail.
"They’ve been tracking his every breath," I choked out, tears of unadulterated hatred blinding me. "Arthur set this up four years ago. He knew he was going to lose, and he marked my baby like an animal!"
"Then we make them track a ghost," David said. He picked up the mangled circuit board with the tip of his knife and threw it into the open bed of a logging truck parked on the far side of the siding. "That truck is heading south to Italy in twenty minutes."
He pushed open the heavy sliding door of the freight boxcar. Inside, stacked high between crates of raw timber, was a narrow, insulated compartment fitted with two sleeping bags and a satellite communications terminal.
"Get in," David said. "This train is cleared directly through to Vienna. We have six hours before Novikov realizes the tracker is on a timber flatbed heading to Milan."
"And what happens in Vienna?" I asked, stepping into the dark, cold belly of the train, holding Lucas close.
May you like
"In Vienna, Elena," David said, sliding the heavy iron door shut until only a crack of gray daylight remained, "we stop running from Arthur’s ghosts. We dig up the one person who knows how to kill them."
***
