The Einstein Pursuit (6 page)

A second later, the phone went dead.

Payne sat down at his desk and entered Sahlberg’s name into a program on his office computer. His company employed tens of thousands of people worldwide, in more than forty countries. This program could instantly list any and all employees, where they worked, and their entire histories with Payne Industries.

A few seconds passed before he got a result.

ZERO MATCHES
.

He broadened his search to include all employees, past and present. He also tried different spellings of Sahlberg’s name, just in case. But the result didn’t change.

ZERO MATCHES
.

Payne growled at his screen. Given what he was seeing, he didn’t know what to make of Sahlberg’s claim. The system had been designed by Randy Raskin, a trusted friend who also happened to be the Pentagon’s top computer genius. If
his
program said that no one by the name of Mattias Sahlberg had ever worked for Payne Industries, he knew it was true.

And yet …

Payne pushed back from his desk and raced to the conference room. The board was still there, still challenging each other on the best course for the company’s future. Payne ducked inside and interrupted the debate. ‘Sam, can I have a word with you?’

‘Can it wait? We’re right in the mid—’

‘Now, Sam.’

The request put McCormick in a tough position. He didn’t want to be seen as Payne’s lackey, at his beck and call – especially not in front of the entire board. However, he trusted the CEO’s judgment. He knew Payne didn’t care for the politicking in their board meetings but always respected the process. Excusing himself to take a phone call was one thing, but Payne had never asked anyone else to step away from the room. At least until now.

His curiosity piqued, McCormick nodded his agreement.

‘Excuse me,’ he said as he stood. ‘We’ll make this as quick as possible. Please, carry on.’ He followed Payne into the hallway and closed the door behind him.

‘Can they do any damage in there?’ Payne asked, only half joking.

‘To each other, maybe,’ McCormick answered, ‘but they can’t
vote
on anything. Not with the two of us out here.’

‘Good. Because this might take a while.’

McCormick’s office was on the same floor as the conference room. Payne entered first, followed by the flustered senior executive. Unsure of Payne’s intentions, McCormick closed the door for privacy then hustled to his seat behind his desk. Payne pulled a chair close. He sat down and leaned even closer, as if he were about to deliver a hushed threat, a whisper so that no one else could hear what he was about to say.

McCormick’s face turned red and he started to sweat.

‘Jonathon,’ he said defensively, ‘I thought we were of the same mind on this. Ultimately, there is nothing to gain by treading water. We
must
continue to push our research in new directions. Otherwise, this company will become stagnant!’

‘Relax,’ Payne said in a calming tone. ‘We’re on the same page.’

‘We are?’

‘We are.’

McCormick breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Then what did you need?’

‘You’ve been an executive here longer than anyone, myself included. How much do you know about my father’s involvement with the company?’

‘Not much. No more than what I’ve seen in the files. His name pops up every now and then when I’m running through the background on this project or that, but it’s never anything noteworthy.’ McCormick thought better of his last remark. ‘I didn’t mean that in the negative sense. I meant no disrespect. Your father was a brilliant man. He truly was. What I meant to say is that there’s nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘Ever heard of a man named Mattias Sahlberg?’

‘The name rings a bell, but I don’t know why. Who is he?’

‘He claims to be a former employee who worked with my father. But I can’t find any record of him in our system.’

‘If he’s a former employee, he might not be in the system.’

Now it was Payne’s turn to be confused. ‘I was told it covered everyone, even after they left the company. That’s not correct?’

‘It is, and it isn’t. It covers everyone who was hired after 1970. If they worked for us before that, their records haven’t been digitized yet.’

‘But do we have their records?’

‘We do. In fact,
I
do.’ McCormick spun his chair to face a wall of file cabinets. He patted his hand against the nearest drawer. ‘They’re all in here.’

‘Great. See if you have a file for him.’

McCormick stood, opened the drawer, and then flipped through the alphabetical files. ‘What was that name again?’

‘Mattias Sahlberg.’

‘S … SA … Here it is!’ McCormick opened the folder to make sure it contained the paperwork they were looking for before he handed it to Payne. ‘It seems kind of thin.’

Payne had seen hundreds of employee files. They typically included the applicant’s initial résumé, health records, performance reviews, and tax documents. They were
usually
a complete, comprehensive history of the employee’s entire time at Payne Industries.

Mattias Sahlberg’s file contained only two pages.

The first page was a copy of his work visa. It listed his full name and birth date, his Swedish personal identification number – the equivalent of the United States’ social security number – and his home address in Sweden.

The second page was his contract of employment with Payne Industries. Curiously, it listed a salary that was well above that of other researchers employed at the time. But what interested Payne even more was that his position was simply listed as ‘Research and Development’, and that it was Jon’s father’s signature on the contract, not his grandfather’s. The revelation should not have been surprising – after all, it was his father that had initially steered Payne Industries into the area of emerging technologies – but it had been years since Payne had seen his father’s handwriting.

‘That’s really not much to go on,’ McCormick said as Payne showed him the contents of the file. ‘It’s odd that his records have never been updated.’

‘It’s enough for now,’ Payne said.

So far, everything Sahlberg had told him on the phone had been true. He was a former employee of Payne Industries, and it did appear that he had worked with Payne’s father. If Sahlberg was being honest about everything else, it meant he really was in fear of his life.

Payne checked his watch. Sahlberg would be waiting for him at the Monongahela Incline in less than ten minutes.

If he hurried, he just might make it.

Nowadays, the Monongahela Incline is equal parts commuter railway and tourist attraction – like the cable cars in San Francisco or the streetcars in New Orleans.

But it wasn’t always this way.

When the steel industry took hold of western Pennsylvania, the lands near the riverbanks were the prime locations to establish the steel mills. The access to the waterway allowed supplies such as iron and coal to be shipped in on large barges. The steel produced by these mills could likewise be transported via the rivers to finishing plants that crafted the steel into girders, coils, or other needed forms, as well as cargo ships in larger ports.

The manpower that operated these factories lived high above the water’s edge on the bluffs that overlooked the rivers. In order to safely and efficiently traverse the hillside – the typical commute involved worn roads or footpaths that zigzagged to the mills below – German immigrants proposed the concept of an incline, based on the
sielbahns
of their homeland. But instead of traveling from peak to peak over treacherous terrain, these cable cars simply went up and down the hillside.

The Monongahela Incline was completed in 1870, and was a godsend for the weary workers. Its two enclosed passenger cars served as counterbalances on a continuous loop of cable. As one car traveled down the slope, its weight helped pull the other toward the top of the hill. Its primary purpose was to shuttle the mill workers between their hilltop neighborhoods and the factories below. It wasn’t glamorous – the soot and dirt from the workers fell from their faces, clothing and boots, creating an ever-present layer of filth – but it was spectacularly efficient. What used to take hours if the weather was poor now took only minutes in any conditions.

The incline system was such a rousing success that at one time the city of Pittsburgh had seventeen of them in operation. The Monongahela Incline was so proficient at moving people up and down the hillside that a separate system was built directly alongside it in 1883 to accommodate larger items. The Monongahela Freight Incline ran on a track that was ten feet wide instead of five. Rather than enclosed cars, it used covered platforms that could carry pallets, crates and even vehicles between the upper and lower stations.

Despite their prominence in the late 1800s and early 1900s, only two Pittsburgh area inclines remained in service today. The Monongahela Incline, the steepest and oldest in America, rose 370 feet above the river below. To cover this elevation, its tracks ran only 635 feet in length, resulting in a noticeably steep thirty-five-degree slope – and spectacular views.

Sahlberg couldn’t possibly remember how many times he had traveled up and down the hillside on the incline. Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? It wasn’t an unreasonable guess. He had lived above the city and commuted into it for over sixty years, and while he occasionally drove himself to work, he actually preferred public transportation because it gave him time to think.

During all those trips, he had never worried about what might happen to him once he stepped aboard the cable car. Not once. Not even for a second.

Today that streak would end.

Omar Masseri was furious.

After retiring from the Egyptian army, he had made quite a name for himself as a mercenary/assassin/bounty-hunter. If it involved money and guns, he was willing to listen. Over the past decade, he had tracked and killed guerrillas for kidnap and ransom companies in South America, he had found deadbeat gamblers for the crime lords in Hong Kong, and he had shot two Mafia informers in the witness protection program.

He could find anyone … for the right price.

And yet, an eighty-year-old man had managed to elude him.

How could that possibly happen?

On the surface, his assignment could not have been simpler. He had been given a complement of additional soldiers – presumably mercenaries like him, though he had never met them before that day – an SUV full of weapons, and a state-of-the-art tracking system. Their goal was to capture an elderly scientist named Mattias Sahlberg and to seize any work materials at his house, preferably without being noticed.

The delivery truck had been Masseri’s idea. It was a gambit he had used before, one that had been highly effective in the past. People got packages all the time. The United States Postal Service, United Parcel Service, Federal Express and several other companies used box trucks to route their packages. Their appearance was so commonplace that people rarely gave them – or their employees – a second glance.

Cops had been known to stop suspicious vehicles out of curiosity.

He had never known them to arbitrarily stop deliveries.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t counted on Sahlberg’s departure. Masseri had been warned that the video surveillance of the neighborhood had a ‘slight’ data lag while being streamed to his phone. In actuality, that delay was fourteen minutes long. He had expected to find Sahlberg inside the house because that was where he had appeared on the satellite image, but by the time Masseri and his team had arrived, Sahlberg had left for his walk and hadn’t returned.

Facing a tight deadline, Masseri was forced to alter their plans. The delivery truck was parked on a side street. The deliverymen changed from overalls into business suits before they jumped into two SUVs. The uniforms had helped them blend into the background at Sahlberg’s house, but they would do the opposite if they had to chase him on foot. A man in a suit was just another white-collar worker on his way to a meeting. If necessary, they could even pose as detectives if anyone witnessed Sahlberg’s capture. It would be much harder to convince a bystander that the old man was being detained for insufficient postage.

Masseri had scouted the area in advance of his mission. For him, it was a habit as common as brushing his teeth at night. After calculating the length of the satellite delay by tracking his own movements, he returned his focus to his target. From the looks of things, Sahlberg was headed toward the Monongahela Incline, which would give him access to the city below.

If that happened, Masseri’s job would be much harder.

He rushed to prevent that from happening.

Sahlberg had been waiting inside the doors of the incline’s upper station for several minutes. The small area to the left of the ticket booth was hardly a lobby, but it did provide shelter from the elements for the passengers awaiting the next cable car – though he only used it when it was raining or cold enough to see his breath. In the summer, he preferred to stand outside in the warmth until the arriving passengers had exited, then he would duck inside and find a seat.

Today, he was grateful that he could see people on the street before they could see him. It gave him a minute’s warning before he would have to face the men from his house or explain himself to Payne.

Unfortunately, it was his pursuers who arrived first.

Sahlberg saw the black SUV as it crept along Grandview Avenue. Its slow, deliberate speed was the first indication that something was wrong. The driver was looking for something … or someone. When the SUV inched past the station and rounded the sharp bend near the incline, he felt a glimmer of hope that he was mistaken. His feeling was crushed when the SUV pulled to the curb and two men exited.

Sahlberg recognized them both.

They were the men who had entered his home.

Thinking fast, he turned toward the ticket counter to see who was working that day. He was pleased to see a familiar face smiling back at him.

‘Darla, my sweetheart, I didn’t notice it was you.’