Four portable diesel generator light towers had been positioned along the right-of-way, casting harsh white beams across the double-track mainline. Parked on the industrial siding was Grinder 109—a massive, thirty-ton yellow steel consist mounted with twenty-four high-velocity hydraulic grinding heads, its diesel powerplant rumbling with a deep, floor-shaking vibration that sent ripples across the puddles of frozen slush.
Idling on the access apron was Deputy Brett Kallen’s marked cruiser, parked bumper-to-bumper with the black heavy-duty flatbed pickup. Strapped into the bed of the pickup, beneath a torn canvas tarp, sat my heavy steel fire locker, its exterior padlock sheared off by bolt cutters.
Standing on the crushed granite ballast at the edge of the switch frog was Garrett Vance.
He had traded his travel overcoat for a heavy fleece work jacket, but he was still wearing his tailored wool trousers and polished dress shoes, completely out of place against the mud and iron ore of the track bed. He stood with a corporate maintenance supervisor and a private technician from Apex, holding an illuminated yellow clipboard. Ten feet away, Frank Delvecchio stood in a grease-stained canvas coat, his arms crossed over his chest, his face red with fury as he blocked the manual signal lever with his body.
"I don't give a damn what your local switch book says, Delvecchio," Vance was shouting, his voice carrying clearly over the rumble of the grinder's engine. "I hold regional operating authority. The track occupancy window was signed off by executive waiver. Throw the manual points and drop the grinding head on frog 14, or you will be off the company payroll before your relief shift arrives."
"You don't have an operating clearance, Vance," Frank shouted back, standing his ground on the ties. "The signal circuit is showing an open interlock. If I drop that derailer without an FRA line clearance, every wheel that rolls over this switch is on my conscience."
"The line clearance is in my hand," Vance snapped, thrusting the clipboard toward Frank’s face. "The head touches the steel at 11:30 sharp. Grind the crown down an eighth of an inch, polish the flange, and clear this block for the ethanol unit train."
I slammed the Subaru’s door shut, grabbed the Pelican case by its steel handle, and walked past Kallen’s idling cruiser directly onto the ballast.
The crunch of my boots on the frozen granite cut through the argument. Vance turned, his eyes narrowing as he recognized my canvas work coat through the driving snow. A slow, arrogant smirk spread across his face, the smug confidence of an executive who believed every chess piece was already in his pocket.
"Marcus," Vance called out, shaking his head with theatrical pity. "You drove three hundred miles through an ice storm to watch us perform routine maintenance? You should have stayed at the Radisson in Chicago. Breaking an administrative leave directive and following company management onto a secure right-of-way is criminal trespassing."
He gestured toward Deputy Kallen, who stepped forward from the cruiser, resting his gloved hand on his duty belt. "Deputy, remove Mr. Cole from the right-of-way. We'll file the formal charges in the morning."
"Touch that holster, Kallen, and you'll be answering to the United States Department of Transportation before your shift ends," I said, walking past him without slowing down until I stood three feet from Vance on the switch ties.
Vance laughed, a dry, dismissive sound that was swallowed by the roar of the diesel engine. "Still bluffing, Marcus? We know what was in your basement. Your testing equipment and your personal hard drives are secured in the back of that truck as company property pending forensic audit. You don't have a single byte of admissible data."
"You stole the field backups, Garrett," I said, setting the Pelican case flat on the steel railhead of the lead track. "You broke into my home, tore my utility door off its frame, and left an off-duty deputy to stage a burglary so you could destroy the evidence before Omaha convened."
I popped the dual latches of the case. The heavy lid swung open, revealing the portable laser spectrometer and its digital interface.
"You didn't get the primary unit," I continued, lifting the optical scanner from its molded cradle. "The raw metallographic scans, the microscopic fracture propagation records, and the chemical composition logs of the resin you used to patch this track were uploaded to the National Transportation Safety Board's emergency investigative docket from Davenport two hours ago."
Vance’s smirk froze. The paper on his yellow clipboard fluttered violently in the subzero wind. "You can't file an emergency docket without corporate division countersignature. The filing is void on its face."
"It's not void," I said. I stepped onto the diamond of frog 14, dropped to one knee on the ice-covered ties, and pressed the optical head of the spectrometer against the gleaming silver surface of the railhead. I switched the unit to high-intensity ultraviolet luminescence.
A brilliant beam of blue-violet light sliced through the darkness, washing over the switch frog.
Beneath the beam, the silver paint Vance’s maintenance crews had sprayed over the steel vanished under the optical wavelength. Glowing bright neon orange beneath the surface was a terrifying web of polymer resin—thick, spiderwebbing veins of cheap industrial epoxy filling four separate micro-stress fractures that ran straight through the structural web of the eighty-pound manganese casting.