Bentley Little - The Burning

"Thank God," Wes breathed, brushing back his hair.

They looked at each other, and Henry thought that they would talk about what had just happened, finally have a heart-to-heart about why they were here and what they were going to do and ... everything.

But they didn't. Either of them. They fiddled with their sleeping bags, they got cans of beer out of the ice chest with Milton, Antonio and Jack, and all of them stood or sat there silently as the night deepened around them.

And they waited for the train.

Thirty

Washington, D.C.

Promontory Point.

Rossiter watched the DVD of spliced-together stories from four network newscasts and six local stations that Agent Saldana had quickly burned and brought to him. Pathetic, he was thinking as a bland man with blond hair reported from the site. With all of its massive intelligence-gathering capabilities, the FBI was relying for information on Cal Perkins, third-string feature reporter for one of Salt Lake City's independent television stations?

So much for the conspiracy theorists who imagined the FBI as a monolithic well-oiled machine with unlimited resources that was secretly and effectively compiling information on every individual in the United States-although this did give ammunition to the other side, those critics who saw the FBI as a bunch of ineffectual know-nothings who falsified evidence to justify incompetent investigatory work and who couldn't solve a crime if it bit them on the ass.

Shit.

They just couldn't win.

Rossiter forced himself to smile at the junior agent.

"Good work, Saldana. You're thinking out of the box. I like that."

"Thank you, sir." The agent beamed as he walked back to his desk.

Rossiter had been honing his interpersonal, organizational and leadership skills over the past several days. It was still too early to know for certain, but he had the feeling that a promotion might be in the offing after this. Smiling while offering encouragement and words of praise did not come naturally to him, but putting on a happy face was a small price to pay if it meant moving up the ladder.

Although with all of the speculation in the press about the physical damage to the White House and the president's questionable decision to stonewall rather than deal honestly and publicly with the situation, the pressure was on. If he didn't wrap this up and quickly, his ass was out.

He replayed the DVD, watched it again. He had no idea why all of those men from all of those tribes were gathering at Promontory Point-no outsiders did, and the men who were there weren't talking-but the fact that that was where the two sides of the transcontinental railroad had met meant that it was an important site in the history of trains.

And though Lincoln had signed the Pacific Railroad Act, the railway had actually been completed during Grant's tenure.

Trains.

Everything was coming together.

Sort of.

He sifted through printouts of other reports that had been gathered for him, incidents that might be related, might not. One group in particular stood out.

In several states for the past month or two there'd been sightings of mysterious black trains speeding by on disused rails or even on Amtrak routes. Concurrently, in quite a few of those towns, ghosts had been heard, mysterious disembodied voices in homes or stores or, in one instance, a gas station restroom. They were always described as speaking gibberish, some incomprehensible babble that one churchgoing woman in Missouri said sounded like "a gay man speaking in tongues."

Only yesterday, in Bear Flats, California, a police officer had come across just such an incident in a house where a gruesome murder had recently occurred. He'd had the presence of mind to record it on his cell phone, and the recording had buzzed instantly around the Internet, catching the ear of Ron Banks, one of the agents on Rossiter's team. Banks had conducted a follow-up interview, filing a report, and Rossiter looked over the printout now. He'd glanced at it less than half an hour ago, just before Saldana had brought in the DVD, but something about it nagged at him, and he read through Banks' summary again.

Chester Williams.

That's what it was. The name Chester Williams rang a bell, although he'd been so overloaded with reading and bogged down with research since being assigned to this case that he couldn't remember where he'd read or heard the name before. He circled it on the page so he'd remember when he came back to it.

He hadn't had a chance to actually hear the recording of voices that the police officer had made, so Rossiter went over to his computer and called it up. The sound was muffled and crackly at first, with ambient noise from the officer's breathing and footsteps that was louder than anything else, but gradually the voices came to the fore. Two of them: a man and a woman.

The ghosts were speaking Cantonese.

He recognized the language instantly. It had been over ten years since he'd made a name for himself in Rio Verde, Arizona, but those few weeks had been etched upon his consciousness with a razor, and one of the things he remembered clearly was the unique cadence of Cantonese. He had no idea what they were saying, but he knew what language they were speaking.

A lot of Chinese had worked on building the transcontinental railroad.

Again, everything seemed to be tied together. If he could just figure out the connections ...

He decided to call the Wings. The family had been very helpful to him in Rio Verde-the grandmother had been a veritable sourcebook of arcane lore-and maybe they could assist him here as well.

Very helpful'? Assist him? Who was he kidding? He'd merely been tagging along on that venture. If it hadn't been for the grandmother, his bones would probably be bleaching in the desert right now-along with those of the entire population of the town. He owed his career to the Wings.

He made a few phone calls.

The Wings, it turned out, had flown away. Their restaurant was closed, and the family no longer lived in town. Rio Verde itself was thriving. There were two new gated communities, both with man-made lakes, one with a golf course, and the rebuilt downtown featured all sorts of trendy eateries and boutiques. The dude ranch was long gone, but in its place was a resort and spa that catered to wealthy Phoenicians. With the influx of new money, though, must have come a new attitude, one that rendered obsolete the old-fashioned Chinese restaurant of the sort the Wings had owned.

Or maybe they'd just wanted to get out of town after everything that had happened.

He expected that sack-of-shit police chief to be a little more help than he turned out to be, but either the man knew nothing, or more likely, he wasn't willing to divulge what he knew, and after a short conversation Rossiter hung up the phone angry.

He would just have to track the family down. He had all of the resources of the bureau at his disposal, and not only could he learn their various addresses fairly quickly, but he could probably download satellite photos of their houses. Indeed, in a matter of minutes he learned that Sue Wing was an English teacher at a Chinese school in Irvine, California. Her parents and brother lived in Tucson.

The grandmother had died.

Rossiter was sorry to hear that. And not just because it put a roadblock in his path. As hard as it was to believe, time had softened him, and over the years he had come to not only respect the old woman but admire .her knowledge, skill and bravery. In the back of his mind, he supposed, he'd always assumed she would be around, a source of information he could consult whenever need be. It was something of a shock to learn that she was gone.

He decided to call Sue Wing. She was the one he had dealt with, his go-between with the rest of the family, and it was she who seemed to have been the closest to her grandmother and the most interested in supernatural phenomena. Besides, her parents barely spoke English. And her brother had been too young when it happened; it was doubtful he would know much.