Chapter 1 #3
“I can’t get past the damn feeling that we have a bigger problem here than we’re actually looking at,” he shared. “Yet I really hate to see half my team go one way and half of us go the other.”
“Yeah, but we often have to split up on these things,” Oakley pointed out. “So it’s really not a biggie.”
He understood what Oakley was saying, and he was right.
They often split up to cover more ground, but this felt to be a biggie.
Something major was going on here. Once Rubin and Oakley were seated in their private car, Rubin asked him, “Where the hell could somebody hide on a train that you wouldn’t see? ”
Oakley grinned. “That’s easy. Come with me.” And, with that, he quickly led them away from the caboose and managed to get them into a luggage compartment.
Rubin looked around, frowning. “And all this is just gathered here, unattended?”
“Yeah, it sure is. They’re not trying to hide it.”
“This is just luggage,” Rubin said, looking around the room.
“You’re missing the point, boss. It’s not the luggage of any of the people on the train. This is freight,” he clarified, “not luggage.”
“It’s freight,” Rubin repeated after him, “and that makes a difference?”
“Yeah, it sure as hell does,” Oakley replied, turning to him, “because this isn’t checked the same as everything else is being checked all the damn time.
This goes from point A to point B, so, anyplace where the train stops, some freight could have gotten off, and that is what’s important,” he stated.
They waited in the freight room, and, sure enough, the first stop was only about fifty miles down the road.
As the train came to a stop, a porter ushered Oakley and Rubin out of the freight compartment with little ceremony, being told that area was not for them and to get their asses out.
Rubin understood, but he was not prepared to abide by that rule.
They waited until the freight was taken off the train and then checked out the unloading area, but it looked to be just a small checkpoint. Plus, these freight containers were small.
Rubin shook his head. “Where would the freight go from here?” he asked Oakley.
Working furiously on his laptop. Oakley was already tapping into the communication networks, cameras, and anything else he could find. “It’ll be picked up by locals around the corner.”
“Anything there?”
“A warehouse,” he stated, “but lots of these are up and down the rail line. Therefore, Tricia could have been sedated and put in any of one of those larger freight containers, being picked up or dropped off at any number of these places.”
“Great,” Rubin muttered to himself.
The next stopping point was about one hundred miles up, but they made it fairly quickly.
By the time Oakley got into the maps of the railways, checking on exactly how far somebody could secretly travel this way, sharing all that with Rubin, he realized the kidnappers could have dropped off Tricia in a freight container at any number of spots.
“So, all these places you are showing me are all possible locations where she could have been dropped off. And when you say, dropped off …”
“Yeah, dropped off, as in they didn’t necessarily have to stay with her.
Like those terrorist groups, where nobody is connected to anybody in the same terrorist cell?
Here, it’s all about some random drop-off location, provided by burner phones used for one call and then disposed of.
Some local hire is paid in cash, again at some designated spot to pick up the container, not knowing what’s inside, and takes it to the next drop-off spot.
And they keep on going like that. These kidnappers have managed to stay a step ahead of us for a while now and may still be on the same train.
Maybe that’s how they’re doing this. There will be no straight lines to follow Tricia’s trail. ”
Rubin didn’t want to hear this and really didn’t want to contemplate it, yet Oakley’s theory made sense.
As soon as they reached the next train stop, he watched as the workers rushed in, and more freight was taken off, larger containers this time.
Again that same nagging resurfaced in the back of his mind, pushing Rubin to do something, … anything.
He stood here, and that pull grew stronger. The doors were about to close, but something ever-so-slightly suspicious crawled around in his mind. At the last minute, he looked over at Oakley and ran to the door. “I’m getting off.”
Oakley was right behind him, his feet hit the ground running. He halted after a few strides and patted Rubin on the shoulder. “You always make decisions like that?”
“Only when I’m following my instincts,” he muttered.
“You want to let me in on what you’re thinking?”
“In a minute.” Rubin sauntered around a bit and had gone barely twenty feet before he circled back, near Oakley. “See that vehicle over there?”
Oakley turned, caught sight of it, and nodded. “Yeah, black truck. What about it?”
“A young woman is sitting in the front passenger seat,” he pointed out, “and SOS is written on her side window. Let’s follow them.”
As they turned around to do just that, the vehicle was gone.