Here, in this place, acceptance was inescapable, and that was also largely what had steered her along past home, the kids, and the chance to get some much needed sleep. And there was one final motivation for this self-guided tour of Hell, one last thing she'd needed to contemplate in absolute solitude ... one last thing, while she'd known she would be willing and able to lay herself open to the worst of possibilities.

Amid all the noise pollution that had bombarded her throughout the day, all the half-baked theories she'd heard and tried to deflect, all the craziness, there had been a single burr of speculation that had attached itself to her thoughts and defied her persistent attempts to brush it off. It had first been put to her by the sharper-than-he-seemed Gary Honey Vanilla near the end of their interview.

"... given the nearly simultaneous timing of the two incidents, and knowing that Orion's primary cargo was a lab element of ISS, has a connection between what happened in Brazil and the shuttle blaze been considered?"

Not by her, not until that moment. But she had been considering it on one level or another ever since.

What if there were proven to be a link between Orion and Brazil?

What if someone had intentionally caused the disaster?

What if Jim Rowland had not perished because of some accidental failure of construction or technology, but a willful, murderous act of destruction by someone who wanted badly enough to keep the launch from taking place?

She stood there in the mortuary silence of the bay, her hands laced behind her back, the crescent-shaped lines around her mouth deepening and deepening as these questions proceeded along their dark, ceaseless orbit through her mind.

What if?

THIRTEEN - SOUTHEASTERN BRAZIL APRIL 21, 2001

THIRTEEN

SOUTHEASTERN BRAZIL APRIL 21, 2001

IN THE MONTHS AFTER THE CATASTROPHIC DERAILMENT of the Sao Paulo--Rio de Janeiro night train that left 194 passengers dead or seriously injured, there would be many separate investigations with respect to its surrounding conditions and circumstances. To no one's particular surprise, their findings proved contradictory and disputatious, and led to a prolonged blizzard of litigation. The railroad line and its insurers would blame the company from which it leased the track, citing as factors a plethora of signaling, switching, and maintenance problems. The track owner and its insurers would point their fingers right back at the rail line, alleging a laxity of safety precautions overall, and specifically accusing the engineer, Julio Salles, of job dereliction. Attorneys for the victims and victims' families would side with the track owner following a computer analysis by accident-reconstruction experts who were hired in support of their class action lawsuit.