Page 83 of Surge

She’d jump out of the car as soon as whoever it was got past. Back to her and Surge just “taking a walk.” She peeked out the container door just enough to see the whistling man wearing a railroad employee uniform. He walked toward the car they were in. She was ready to jump out the instant he passed and went around the back of the train. But when he whistled his way to the door, he looked in, made notes on his tablet, reached up, and clanged it shut.

Darkness fell over them. She was rooted to the spot. Frozen.

Oh no.

She leaped up and ran over to the door, tried to open it. Nothing. She pried with her pocketknife at the edge of the door, and the knife broke. Surge scratched at the bottom of the door.

How on earth was she going to get out?

14

JAKARTA, INDONESIA

“Surge’s signal disappeared,and I can’t get her on comms.”

Garrett looked at the MWD Tracker app on his SAT phone screen as Zim negotiated the SUV through the crowded Jakarta traffic.Rogue, where are you?He closed his eyes for a split second, hoping he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing. But when he opened his eyes, her signal hadn’t appeared.

Delaney and Surge had vanished in the trainyard.

“Where do we need to go?” Zim sounded tight as he straddled the SUV on the line between the lanes to pass the motorcycle in front of them.

“Trainyard is all we know.”

“Copy that.” Zim kept zooming through traffic in that direction.

Garrett turned in the passenger seat and eyed Caldwell tapping away on his phone. Maybe his intel . . . “Got anything?”

The spook shook his head. “Some stuff about hydrogen cyanide,” he answered without looking up.

Garrett clenched his jaw. Delaney gone, LD3s missing, and the spook looked for chem intel. Doing his own thing as usual. Eager to jump through his phone to Delaney and Surge, Garrett looked down at his screen. A slow smile spread across his face. “The tracking signal reappeared. Northeast, Zim.”

The tires screeched as Zim steered around a car pulling out of an office parking lot in front of them.

He eyed his screen again for the tracker and stilled. “What . . . this can’t be right.” He frowned, watching Surge’s tracker sliding across the screen. Fast. Too fast. “The tracker is going nearly two hundred miles an hour now! Southwest.”

“That’s strange.” Zim squealed into a parking lot, spun the SUV around, and drove southwest.

“What is going on? It doesn’t make?—”

“Pull over,” Caldwell said.

“Are you insane? Those chems, not to mention Delaney?—”

“Nobody can catch a train going three hundred fifty KPH.” Caldwell held up his phone to show a picture. “She’s on Whoosh, the Indonesian bullet train they just extended all the way to Surabaya.”

“You sure?”

“Nothing else in Indonesia goes three hundred fifty kilometers an hour.”

“Augh!” Garrett banged the dash as he felt the SUV slow and pull to the curb.

A new problem to work. Garrett tapped fingers on the console. Delaney was with Surge. But they needed to find her now. It made sense that she’d followed the LD3s onto a bullet train.

“Wait. Passenger or freight train?”

“Freight,” Caldwell said, reading from his phone. “They started a freight bullet train once a week last month. With security, but otherwise, only freight. A piece of technology worth more than seven billion dollars.”

Garrett ground his teeth. The intel of that lone wolf Caldwell was . . . almost . . . perfect. He didn’t trust the man. Hated to trust him. But he had to. He twisted in his seat. “Can you reach out to Damocles?”

---