Mason spoke without turning his head. “What’s your name?”
“Grace,” she said. Her voice sounded thin to her own ears. “Grace Bennett.”
“Mason.”
She waited for more, but he offered nothing. He was watching the aisle, the reflection of the front door, the uneasy movements of passengers who had sensed tension without understanding it.
“Grace,” he said after a moment, “did anyone follow you today?”
She stared at him. “Follow me?”
“At the station. On the platform. From wherever you were before Union Station.”
“I don’t know.” She tried to search her memory, but the day came back in fragments: fluorescent clinic lights, a paper cup of tea, a cab ramp that was too steep, the pain of moving through the station. “I was at my orthopedic appointment. I came straight here. I wasn’t looking at people. I was trying not to fall.”
Mason absorbed that. “Doctor in D.C.?”
“Yes. Dr. Alan Whitaker. He’s been handling my braces for years.” She looked down at Ranger. “Why are you asking me this?”
Before Mason could answer, the lights snapped out.
The darkness was total for one breath, then two. A woman screamed. Somewhere ahead, metal shrieked against metal, a long tearing sound that set Grace’s teeth on edge. The train bucked so hard that luggage flew from the overhead racks. People slammed against seatbacks. A laptop hit the floor and split open.
Mason moved before Grace could understand the motion. He came out of his seat and across her, bracing her head and shoulders with his arms so the force of the stop drove her back into the cushion instead of forward into the metal frame. Ranger dropped low over her legs, his body covering the braces.
The train ground to a halt with a final shudder that ran through the car like a cough.
Emergency lights flickered on overhead, dim and yellow. Dust floated in the air from the vents. The car filled with the harsh smell of overheated brakes. Outside the windows there was no station, no platform, no town. Only black trees crowded close to the tracks.
Grace tried to move and pain caught her by the spine. “What happened?”
“Emergency brake,” Mason said.
His face was inches from hers, but his eyes were already elsewhere, reading the car. People were crying, swearing, asking for signal. Phones glowed in shaking hands, useless. The glass in the sliding door at the front of their car had cracked across its lower panel. A backpack lay open in the aisle, its contents scattered under seats.
Ranger stayed over Grace’s legs, his growl so deep she felt it through her bones.
“Mason,” she whispered, gripping his sleeve. “Please don’t leave.”
His eyes came back to her. For the first time, there was something in them besides calculation. Not softness exactly, but recognition.
“I need to see what they did,” he said. “Ranger stays with you.”
“I can’t move.”
“I know.” He touched two fingers to the dog’s harness. “Ranger. Guard.”
The shepherd’s ears flicked once.
Mason stood, one hand low near his jacket, and moved into the aisle with the clean, efficient calm of someone who had trained for bad rooms. He did not shove past anyone. He stepped around a man curled on the floor, avoided broken plastic, and reached the front vestibule where the conductor had gone down against the wall.
The conductor’s name tag read BILL. He was in his late fifties, with silver hair and blood running from a cut above his eyebrow. He blinked up at Mason as if trying to decide whether he was part of the problem or the answer.
“Stay still,” Mason said, crouching beside him. “Who pulled it?”
Bill coughed and pressed a napkin to his brow. “Guy in a suit. Navy suit. There was another one waiting by the door. Big fella, leather jacket. They shoved me down, pulled the handle, then jammed the doors forward.”
“Toward the locomotive?”
“Yeah. Said the old rear cars didn’t have cameras.” Bill swallowed hard. “They asked that first. Asked if this car had working cameras.”
Mason’s jaw tightened.
A random robbery did not begin by checking for cameras. A drunk passenger did not coordinate with a second man. And anyone who wanted to take control of a train went forward, toward the engineer, not backward into older passenger cars.
“What else?” Mason asked.
Bill’s eyes watered. “The big one was looking at passengers’ legs. I know that sounds crazy. He was going row by row looking down.”
Mason went still.
Grace’s braces. Custom carbon-fiber shells. Titanium support struts. She had come from a specialist who had taken them out of her sight for part of the appointment. Mason did not have the whole map yet, but the shape was becoming ugly.
A vulnerable passenger. Medical hardware. A controlled stop in a dead zone. No cameras.
He left Bill where he was and moved into the darkened vestibule between cars. Through the scratched glass panel, he saw the man in the navy suit near the far end of the next car. The jacket was gone now. Under it, he wore a black shirt fitted for movement, not office work. He held a handgun low at his side.
The second man was closer. Big, square, and thick-necked, he moved down the aisle looking at people’s shoes and knees. A woman pulled her feet under her seat as he passed. He ignored her and kept searching.
Mason waited in shadow.
The big man entered the vestibule first, forcing the damaged door open with his shoulder. He had a compact flashlight in one hand and a hard case in the other. He did not see Mason until Mason was already on him.
The fight lasted only seconds, though to Grace, back in the car, the sounds stretched into something unbearable: a dull impact, a stifled grunt, metal clanging against the vestibule wall. Mason did not fire. He worked close and fast, using the cramped space against the larger man. The case dropped. The man’s knees hit the floor.