One would think that searching a train would be easy. There were three sleeper coaches, all located aft of the baggage car and the two locomotives. The dining car separated the sleepers from the lounge/observation car and lower-deck café, along with the three coach-class cars bringing up the rear of the train. Clark discounted everything aft of the lounge car. Kang was hurt. He would want privacy. He’d be somewhere up front.
Each double-decker Superliner coach had five bedrooms, each with a cramped toilet and shower, along with ten roomettes on the upper deck. The bedrooms were all on the one side of the train. The much smaller roomettes were situated on the opposite end of the car, five on either side of a shoulder-wide passage that, apart from the carpet and semi-fresh air, put Clark in mind of a submarine. There was a stairwell located midpoint in the car, between the bedrooms and roomettes. Marked by the smell of self-service coffee, it led down to four lower-deck roomettes, a family bedroom, toilets, a shower for the roomette passengers, and a baggage rack. The forwardmost sleeper car was reserved for staff berthing and storage, allowing Clark to mark twenty rooms off the list. This left a total of forty rooms, where Kang might be hiding, thirty-nine discounting Clark’s. According to Gavin, Kang had originally purchased a roomette, but since someone was in that room, Clark suspected he’d upgraded at the station to a larger bedroom so he’d have his own sink to doctor his hand. If that were true, it narrowed his search to the ten full-size bedrooms, five on each remaining sleeper car.
Clark ruled out all the rooms on his car by the time they reached Omaha a little after eleven p.m.
The print from the pinkie finger Clark had liberated from Kang’s hand was a bust as far as leads went. The photos from the cameras he’d put on the street provided the breakthrough.
One of the downsides of all the facial-recognition programs in the People’s Republic of China — at least from the viewpoint of the Chinese intelligence apparatus — was that their own system was hackable. Once Biery had uploaded the images, it took just a few hours before he began to get possible hits. The first lead was for the woman. She was Zhang Zhulan, a PLA major. There was a Red Notice on her passport that noted she was wanted for murder in South Africa. She had several aliases, one of which was Rose. According to the Red Notice, she was known to travel with a man named Kang Jian. Kang turned out to be the mystery man. That name led Biery to numerous aliases, which he checked for recent activity. The Visa card for one of the aliases, Frank Lo of Temecula, California, had been used to buy a bedroom on Amtrak Number 5, the California Zephyr, between Chicago and Emeryville, California.
Clark suspected Kang didn’t have any support in Chicago. If he had, he would have brought more than a couple of people with him to whack Li at the river. They would have been expecting at least a couple of guards. Now he was wounded, probably alone, on the run. Clark knew all too well how excruciating a damaged hand could be. The last thing Kang would want to do is drive himself, even if he did have a driver’s license. Whereas airports had layer upon layer of security and ID checks, a person could buy a train ticket online with nothing but a credit card. The conductor required nothing but the scan code on a cell phone. It was illegal to bring weapons on board, but there were no metal detectors. Amtrak Police with bomb dogs patrolled the station, but they weren’t likely to hit on something as small as a sidearm.
Fortunately for Clark’s cover, he was on the youthful end of the average passenger’s age. Most were retired, traveling in pairs without the hassle of airports, meeting new people, watching the country roll by. Most had time on their hands. Some were afraid to fly. At least one was a spy, running for his life.
Clark was halfway through a short stack of buttermilk pancakes, chatting amiably with a couple from Boston, both retired from MIT, when Kang staggered through the dining car. Clark took another bite, waiting for him to push the button to open the car before standing to excuse himself. His seatmates obviously missed the captive audience of the lecture hall and protested that he was leaving in the middle of their conversation. He apologized, saying something hadn’t agreed with his stomach, left a five-dollar tip on the table, and strode quickly after Kang.
Clark made it through the first set of automatic doors in time to look through the windows of the next coach and watch Kang duck into the first door on the right.
Coach 531, Bedroom A.
Clark’s roomette was in the next car, closer to the engines, but the dining car gave him a plausible reason to go back and forth. He kept walking, reaching A as he heard the metal latch click into place. Inside the compartment, a hand reached up and moved the pleated blue curtains over the door and the small window to the right.
