Checkmate_The Bowers Files

  It just doesn’t work that way.

  Not in real life.

  There would be no bringing back Corrine.

  There would only be avenging her death.

  It wasn’t much, perhaps, but it was at least a step in the right direction.

  Using the iPad he’d brought with him, Richard went online and began his search for the identity Kurt Mason had told him about in their last conversation three weeks ago.

  If he couldn’t find the information he needed, he knew one person in the city who could.

  62

  Tessa arrived at the hospital.

  The parking was insane because a construction crew was setting up shop across the road from the parking lot. They were pouring concrete and fixing a patch of sidewalk that’d been jackhammered away. It looked like they also had some sort of water line they were working with.

  After she found a spot and parked, she walked to the family birthing wing.

  Since she anticipated being here most of the day, she’d brought along her journal and a couple of books to pass the time.

  Agent Priscilla Woods had driven behind her to the hospital.

  The woman seemed overly paranoid and uptight and it made Tessa a little uncomfortable. Agent Woods had been planning to come in with her, but Tessa asked her to call Lien-hua, who explained that she could leave.

  So at least there was that.

  Ralph’s flight was supposed to be landing within the hour.

  Although Tessa wasn’t too excited to be at a hospital, at least the reason she was here was a good one.

  The arrival of her friend’s baby.

  There wasn’t a reception desk per se, just a nurses’ station with three people working it. Hanging on the walls were paintings of baby animals—lambs, colts, puppies, and kittens. Tessa found it a little sophomoric, but whatever.

  The nurses directed her to Brineesha’s room, where she gave the door a slight tap and Brineesha called her in.

  She pressed open the door.

  Entered.

  Inside the room: muted lights, soft pastels, a hospital bed for the mom, monitors, a bassinet for the baby, and a flat pull-out couch-thing that Tessa assumed was for the dad to rest on if he had to stay overnight. A television. A window.

  Brineesha had an IV. She was propped up in bed, reading a Tosca Lee novel, and had a sheet pulled up to her waist. The pink hat she’d knitted for her baby was lying on the bedside counter, ready for the newborn.

  Lien-hua liked flower arranging, and when Tessa saw the bouquet on the counter near the window, she figured it was probably Lien-hua’s handiwork.

  Lien-hua was seated at the far side of the room on one of the backless swivel chairs that the doctors and nurses use when sitting down to check their patients. She had her notebook computer balanced on her lap.

  When Tessa saw Lien-hua, she couldn’t help but think of what had happened earlier when she’d accidentally-on-purpose left her phone behind with Beck’s cell number on it.

  Tessa still wasn’t sure what to make of all that.

  “Hey,” she said to the two of them.

  “Hi, Tessa.” Brineesha sounded a little uncomfortable, which made perfect sense. Lien-hua greeted her as well.

  “So, how’s it going?” Tessa asked Brineesha.

  “Well”—she pointed to her stomach—“we’re mostly just watching and waiting at this point. They keep asking if I want an epidural, but I’m trying to do this with . . .” She cringed. “As little . . . intervention as poss—”

  She stopped midsentence and clenched her teeth, tightened her fists, and then drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly in short bursts.

  “Okay,” Tessa said. “That was enough right there to make me never want to have a baby.”

  “The end result makes it worth it.” She was still cringing when she said that. “At least most of the time.”

  “In Tony’s case?”

  “Definitely worth it.”

  “I’ll let him know you said that.”

  Brineesha offered her a faint smile. “Please do.”

  Tessa found a seat on the couch. It was stiff and uncomfortable and she was glad she wouldn’t have to be the person who was forced to sleep overnight on it. “Did your water break yet?”

  “No,” Brineesha replied. “It’s not like in the movies where your water breaks and then your contractions start—well, it can be. But it’s more common for things to happen the other way around.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Being here really wasn’t easy. It made her think of her real mom and her own birth and how it almost never happened.

  63

  Overall, the campus was pretty much deserted, but there were obviously some summer camps or programs running, because a group of students who looked younger than Tessa were walking in a clump between two buildings. Some of the kids were carrying band instruments.

  Insects twittered at me from the blooming pink and white crape myrtle trees lining the sidewalks as I walked toward the library.

  A student kick-coasted his way past me on a longboard.

  Even though it wasn’t quite ten yet, here on a summer Saturday, the doors to the library building were open and the woman at the front desk asked me, “Are you Agent Bowers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Good. Professor O’Brien told me to let you know he’d meet you in the special collections area. Top floor.”

  In contrast to the rest of campus, which seemed to be recently built or renovated, the elevator was annoyingly old-school and slow, pausing and beeping at every floor.

  When the doors finally opened, I found my way to the research room, where O’Brien was waiting for me.

  I guess I was expecting an elderly, professorial man in a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows—something along those lines—but he was the opposite of an aging academic.

  O’Brien appeared to be just a few years older than I was. He wore stylish glasses, with a black T-shirt and stonewashed jeans, and looked like he would fit in better in Silicon Valley than here as a scholarly professor in the South.

  But, then again, he did teach nanotechnology.

  “Agent Bowers?”

  “Yes.” He had a firm grip when I shook his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  He’d emptied a box of historical documents onto the table and now swept his hand toward them. “I just got here a couple minutes ago and I haven’t had a chance to look any of this over, but I found some papers that might at least get us moving in the right direction.”

  Though I wanted to get started, I gave in momentarily to my curiosity. “I have to ask—you teach nanotechnology and you’re a history buff?”

  “Interesting combo, huh? Both ends of the spectrum. And why here, right? And not somewhere like MIT?”

  “The thought did cross my mind.”

  “This university used to be known for its architecture program, but we’ve been shifting focus toward emerging technologies—nanotechnology in particular. Most recently in the medical and law enforcement arenas.”

  “Nanotech in law enforcement?”

  “My department has developed a way of injecting nanobots into the bloodstream. These can be used in the medical realm, of course, to track, treat, and diagnose diseases. However, nanobot beacons can also be used to monitor the location of the patient within the hospital or the community.”

  I’d heard about this type of thing but wasn’t aware of any actual breakthroughs in the area yet. “GPS on the molecular level.”

  “Something along those lines, yes.”

  I could see where this was going. “And that’s where the law enforcement application comes in: Inject the nanobots into a person on house arrest, or maybe a registered sex offender, and ankle bracelets become obsolete. And there’s no way
to cut it off, since the GPS is in your blood.”

  “Exactly.”

  I tried to think like a criminal. “What about a blood transfusion?”

  “No. You’d still have enough of them in you. They wouldn’t all be flushed out.”

  “And this is in development now?”

  “Development’s done. Patents pending. We’re working right now with different agencies to start distribution.”

  Interesting.

  I brought the conversation back on topic and pointed to the documents on the table. “Okay, talk me through what you know so far.”

  “Well, the Rudisill Mine was closed and sealed up for good in the late 1930s.” He unfolded a road map of the city and pointed in the general vicinity of the shaft I’d descended into.

  He drew a line on the map with his finger. “It ran along a mineral vein over here for about a half mile, extending up in a northeasterly direction, where it met up with another mine, the Saint Catherine Mine, which traverses under the current railroad tracks. They were the two most profitable mines in the area.”

  I wished I had my cell phone with the 3-D hologram function, but it was at the bottom of the very mine system we were examining.

  Before Kurt Mason had killed Corrine, he’d told me there was more than one way out of the mines. However, so far, despite teams searching the neighborhood, we had no evidence of other entry points or open shafts. “So, the two mines intersected?”

  “From what I can tell, yes.”

  “Do we know about the layout of the mines? The tunnels and so on?”

  He shook his head, then tapped the map. “But this whole area is riddled with shafts and tunnels.”

  As I looked at the maps, I noticed he’d taken some of the land plats from specially labeled boxes, and I had a thought. “Who else has access to this information? To these resources?”

  “Students. Staff. Visiting faculty.” He indicated a sign-in sheet near the front desk.

  I looked over the list from the past two months. There were dozens of names of people who had signed in.

  No Masons.

  No Everharts.

  After studying the list, I photographed it with my new phone and e-mailed the images to Voss along with a note asking him to have his team run the names. Maybe Mason had someone else helping him. Maybe we could catch a break.

  When I returned to Professor O’Brien, he was emptying out the contents of one of the boxes.

  “So,” I said, “at this point we know the general location of the two major mine systems but we have no diagrams of the tunnels or the exact locations of the shafts.”

  “Correct.”

  The other day, Angela had mentioned that the maps of the mines themselves, if they even existed anymore, would most likely be in land deeds or surveying maps that had never been scanned into computers or uploaded onto the Internet.

  Which meant we were going to have to go about this the old-fashioned way: looking at actual sheets of paper.

  I gazed at the table. This was going to be a lot of work. “Well, we need to see if there are any maps of the remaining shafts or tunnels that might still be out there under Charlotte.”

  O’Brien rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It’s possible there might be some original source material over in the Carolina Room at the library Uptown. I’ve been through their archives before, but I might have missed something.”

  “We can always check there if we need to, but let’s look over what we have here first.”

  The two of us took seats on opposite sides of the table and began analyzing the centuries-old land deeds, looking for one that might show us the actual layout of the Rudisill or Saint Catherine mines.

  64

  10:30 a.m.

  5 hours until kickoff

  Tessa listened as Brineesha spoke with Ralph using the room phone, since she’d misplaced her cell somewhere at home that morning before coming to the hospital with Lien-hua.

  Apparently, Ralph’s flight out of Charlotte had been delayed, but he’d finally landed here in DC.

  From what Tessa could discern from listening to one end of the conversation, he was on his way to the hospital right now.

  After they’d hung up, Lien-hua asked Brineesha, “So Ralph’s going to be here soon?”

  “Should be any minute.”

  Tessa found it a little odd that he wouldn’t have called immediately when he landed, but it was certainly possible he might have waited until he saw how traffic was before touching base.

  It would be way too awkward talking through any of what she had to say when Ralph was here.

  She deliberated the right way to do this but finally realized she should just get on with it, or Ralph was going to arrive and she would miss her chance.

  “How well did you know my mom?” Tessa asked Brineesha.

  “Not all that well, I’m afraid.”

  “Did she ever tell you the story about when I was born?”

  “No.”

  “Did Patrick?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  She’d never gone through any of this with Lien-hua and she didn’t know if Patrick had ever shared the story with her, although she doubted it. Despite being overly protective, Patrick did respect her boundaries and he knew this whole thing was a sensitive issue.

  Lien-hua sat quietly and listened.

  So did Brineesha.

  Oh, this was going to be even harder than Tessa thought.

  “She was single when she had me,” Tessa said to her. “You knew that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she . . . um . . .” She just went ahead and said it: “Before actually deciding to keep me, she’d decided not to.”

  A pause. “She was going to get an abortion?”

  “Yeah. I mean, she was in college, she wasn’t married. She didn’t really have . . . It’s kind of a long story, but basically, yeah. She decided to end the pregnancy.”

  To “get it taken care of,” Tessa thought, but kept that to herself. It was such a crass and unfeeling way to put things, especially when you were the one who was going to get taken care of.

  Brineesha had a contraction, but it passed relatively quickly and when it had, she asked Tessa softly, “What changed her mind?”

  “She was at the clinic and she was waiting to get seen. She started paging through the magazines that were sitting there on one of the end tables, and she kept noticing ads with kids in them, maybe with moms having to get grass stains out of their clothes, or kids eating cookies, or for life-insurance policies—I don’t even know. But she started thinking about me being around. The good and the bad—whatever. I know it sounds dumb.”

  “It doesn’t sound dumb.”

  “Well, one real estate ad had this picture of a little girl who was maybe five years old or so and she was trying on her mom’s high heels and necklace. I don’t know what the text said exactly, but my mom ripped that page out of the magazine and the part that’s left just says, ‘Homes are not just.’ Whatever else it was supposed to say, that’s what did it—seeing that ad, thinking about having a baby around, having me around. I’m only alive today because of a real estate ad.”

  Brineesha was silent.

  “After my mom saw that ad, she left the abortion clinic and went ahead and had me. I found the ad in her things one day. When I first learned about it, I hated her for it. Just the idea that she was going to . . . well . . . She was twenty weeks along.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. At that point . . . Well, you’re a nurse. You know what they have to do to the baby in order to . . .”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “But the thing is, she changed her mind. It took me a while to stop judging her, you know, for wanting things to be easier, for not wanting to have me, but I have a lot of respect for her for taking . .
. I guess for taking what wasn’t the easy route. So, I know your situation is totally different—I mean, you have Ralph and everything—but I just wanted you to know . . . well, just that I’m excited for you. That’s it.”

  After a long moment letting Tessa’s words settle, Brineesha said, “I can’t begin to imagine how hard that must have been to find all that out—and to forgive her. I think you’re as brave as your mother was.”

  Tessa had never thought of herself as being brave about any of it and wasn’t sure how to respond. She was sorting through what to say when there was a knock at the door.

  Ralph had arrived.

  So, now Tessa had gotten one big thing off her chest, but she still had one more thing that she needed to tackle: getting up enough guts to at least clear the air with Beck.

  * * *

  Spartanburg, South Carolina

  Kurt Mason parked beside the strip of woods parallel to the rail yard where M343 was resting expectantly on the tracks.

  He slipped into the underbrush and made his way through a thick mesh of kudzu to the other side of the hedgerow, where a six-foot-high metal fence ran along the edge of the railroad company’s land.

  It was obviously more of a property marker than a fence designed to keep people out, and after making sure the coast was clear, Kurt was able to easily climb over it.

  The rail yard appeared to be deserted, but he had learned that even during off-hours they were often manned, so he was cautious as he approached M343.

  From his research, he knew that on a train, air is compressed in the locomotive. It goes through an air hose, through the whole line. In addition to the dynamic brakes, the engineer uses that compressed air to slow down the train, car by car, backward from the engine.

  But there’s also an end-of-train device, or EOT, and in emergencies when you need to brake fast, you can engage that and the train will begin braking from the rear toward the head end at the same time.

  By closing the angle cocks, Kurt would disrupt that airflow so only the cars up to that point would brake. And if he was able to do it both near the head and the rear of the train, those cars in between would not have any brakes. They wouldn’t derail, but they would keep the rest of the train from slowing down.