by Brian Nelson
Bud hoped he was right. Rogers certainly deserved the credit for getting them here. Just watching him work over the past four weeks had been inspiring. From one tiny piece of evidence in Senator Peck’s office, Rogers had tracked the bomber to this very spot. It began with the melted remains of a transmitter and cell phone they’d found in one of the heating vents. Despite being mangled and charred, the forensic lab had gotten a lot number off the circuit board. That had led them to an RC model shop in Middlebury. Then, by interviewing the employees and other townspeople, they’d created a profile of an old bearded hermit that lived up in the hills. After four days of checking dozens of summer cabins in the area, they’d finally hit pay dirt.
Rogers gave Bud a smack on the shoulder. “We got ’em on the run! Who knows, we could have that bitch Finley by the end of the week!”
Bud tried to give him a reassuring smile. It would soon be over . . . but then he couldn’t help but wonder, where would that leave him? Back at his desk in the bureau.
“What’s wrong?” Rogers asked.
“I’ve been trying to figure out why you picked me.” Bud asked. “There are dozens of other guys you could have chosen . . . was it because of Carol? Did she say something to you?”
“No, not really. She comes over to the house a lot. I try to leave her and Joan alone, but sometimes I hear her talking.”
“And?”
“Let’s just say I don’t agree with her assessment of you.”
Bud nodded. “Thanks.”
“Forget it. Let’s just say that—in the balance—this job is more likely to push us down than lift us up. That’s just the way it is when your job is to deal with death and crime. But sometimes it gives you the purpose you need to keep going. So I took a chance on you, thinking maybe this case would be one of those that does more good than harm. And now I’m thinking I was right.”
Just then the robot operator called from the back of one of the FBI trucks, “Agent Rogers, can you come take a look at this?”
“Gotta go!”
Rogers jogged up the slope to the truck.
Brown looked around. It was a crisp, sunny November afternoon, and even though it was in the high forties, patches of snow lingered in the shade of many of the trees. There really wasn’t anything for him to do other than keep out of the bomb team’s way, so he headed down the logging road past the cabin, then cut into the woods again. He figured the bomber probably buried his trash somewhere near the house and finding it would yield a lot of evidence. It was Police Academy 101: you can learn a hell of a lot about a person from their trash.
He searched in vain for about twenty minutes then something strange happened—he lost his footing on a dense patch of pine nettles. Flailing, he grabbed a sapling for support. Much to his surprise, he fell all the same. The sapling hadn’t snapped, it had merely rolled over. As he picked himself up, he saw that the roots were still encased in a burlap bag. The tree had been camouflaging a small cave under an outcropping of rock.
He immediately pulled out his Beretta and a pen light. As he shone the light inside, he could see that the natural cave ended about five feet in, but the light danced off something brighter. Another two-foot wide cement pipe, similar to the one Rogers had shown him.
It was a second escape route. He searched the area around the opening of the cave and sure enough, he found an impression of man’s shoe, though very faint.
Bud realized that the dogs and their handlers were going in exactly the wrong way.
From the cabin he heard Rogers yell, “All clear!” They were about to go in.
Bud was about to go up to tell Rogers what he had found, when the call of a crow made him jump. He looked up to see it atop the pine tree to his right. The bird cocked its head and looked at him, cawed once more, then alit with a loud flutter of its wings.
As the crown of the tree shook from the crow’s flight, he noticed the flicker of something metallic. He squinted but couldn’t make it out. Holstering the Beretta, he began to climb. It was a miserable task. The tree was old and overburdened with dead branches, which scratched him every foot of the way. When he was about two thirds up, he paused for a better look, but the object—whatever it was—was still obscured by the branches. He looked out and saw the rolling mountains spreading out in every direction, a seemingly endless sea of pine green with an occasional splash of fall copper and red. About eighty yards in front of him was the cabin, the FBI trucks on its East side. Looking down on it, he saw something he hadn’t seen before. Completely encircling the cabin at a distance of about five feet was a slight indentation. It was only a foot wide and a fraction of an inch deep and the brown grass had grown over it, but it was definitely noticeable from above.
He had no idea what it meant—perhaps a septic system? He pushed the oddity from his mind and continued to climb. After ten more feet of progress he could finally see the object: it was a small camera pointed toward the cabin, as well as a battery pack and a small concave box.
“Oh no!” he thought. Rogers had told him that the SOP for a raid like this was to have all cell phone towers in the area shut down to prevent anyone from remotely detonating a bomb. But what he was looking at was the bomber’s own makeshift cell phone tower.
He remembered Rogers’s words from Senator Peck’s office: These people knew us. They knew our security. They exploited our weaknesses.
He rushed upward in an effort to dismantle it, but the higher he got, the slower he climbed because the branches were everywhere and very thin. He shouted out, “Get out! Get out of the house!” Some of the agents looked up, trying to find him in the trees. One saw him and pointed. He waived a hand. “Get everyone out of the house!”
Rogers emerged from the cabin and shaded his eyes to look for him.
At that moment, the cabin and all the agents near it dropped into the earth. It took a second for the sound to reach Bud’s ears—six quick detonations, like a rapid string of gunshots. Then came a massive explosion. Later he would learn that the weight of the house—suspended at six points—had collapsed onto a pressure plate in the subfloor, triggering a massive explosion.
Bud watched as the entire hilltop jumped and an ethereal shockwave erupted outward in a perfect circle of expanding force. The FBI trucks that were broadside to the house were knocked over, as was every agent on their feet. Dozens of trees were blown over, too. Bud heard the thundering detonation followed by the crack of splintering tree trunks. When the shock wave hit him, he was almost thrown from the tree and had to hold on for dear life. Once the tree righted itself, he looked down to see a mushroom cloud. As it dissipated, a massive fire raged where, only a moment ago, the cabin had stood.
We know from her other bombings that she doesn’t like mangled body parts tarnishing her public image.
The flames reached over forty feet into the air, and a huge black funnel of smoke was rising into the clear November sky.
He looked at it for a moment, completely dumbstruck. Two dozen bodies lay in the clearing around the house. He scrambled down the tree, as fast as he could, not caring for the cuts and scrapes on his face and hands. When he reached the clearing before the cabin, he froze. There were no screams for help, no agents giving orders. The only sound was the roar of the fire and the popping of burning wood. Some of the downed agents were struggling to move but they were only semiconscious.
He saw a woman, rolling on the ground and rushed to her. It was Aileen Michaels, one of Rogers’s bomb techs. She was struggling to breathe. “Help,” she gasped.
“Just lay back, Aileen.”
She gasped for breath then began to spit up blood.
Things did not look good. He knew that few of these agents, even the ones who were still moving, would survive. That’s because it wasn’t really the explosion that killed people, it was the sudden compression and expansion of the shock wave—overpressure—that ruptured any part o
f the human body that was filled with air: eardrums, eyeballs, lungs, stomach, colon, heart. While most of the injured agents appeared merely stunned, many were hemorrhaging inside, which meant there was little Bud could do to help them.
He held Aileen’s hand. “Try not to move. We’ll get those choppers in here as soon as we can.”
She looked at him desperately and gripped his hand tight. She seemed to want to speak, but it was taking all her effort to breathe. She opened her mouth. More blood.
He looked her over, perhaps a piece of shrapnel had entered one of her lungs and he could patch the hole. If he rotated her onto the side with the punctured lung, maybe she’d make it long enough to survive. But after a thorough check, he realized there was no entrance wound, it was all internal, and probably both lungs. By now he figured that Aileen, being a bomb tech, knew full well that she would not survive.
Brown had a decision to make: he could leave her and try to help the others or he could stay with her. His training told him he had to leave her. He had to triage the wounded and focus on those he could save. Yet as he looked down at her, that decision felt criminal.
He looked around, unsure of what to do. He heard the moans and pleas for help from six or seven wounded agents. Luckily, two other agents were assisting the wounded. One of the techs had been lucky enough to be wearing his bomb suit, as well as another agent in SWAT gear who appeared unscathed.
“Somebody help me,” he heard a man say.
“I’ll be right back,” he said to Aileen, “someone else needs me.”
But as he tried to pull away, she held his hand tight.
He looked over at the wounded man then down at Aileen. The fear and helplessness on her face was almost too much to bear. He sat back down and kept holding her hand.
It was just as he heard the sound of the approaching helicopters that her hand went limp.
Jack Berhmann noticed how quickly Bill Eastman paused the video as he came into the study. Then, rather guiltily, he set the iSheet down on the coffee table. Jack picked it up and checked the video. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d say you were in love.”
Bill pursed his lips in annoyance. “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s a terrorist. Twenty-seven agents died.”
“Fine, but you have to admit, you’ve become obsessed with her.”
Bill shook his head. “Not obsessed. Just acutely interested.”
Jack gave him a wry look of skepticism then sat down in the opposite chair. “Very well, my friend, can you explain your acute interest.”
Bill considered his friend for a moment, then leaned in, suddenly glad to have an audience for his thoughts. “I’m not completely sure, but I have this feeling that she’s trying to tell me something.”
“She is,” Jack said. “She’s trying to tell you that the human race has a serious problem—its resource consumption is unsustainable. Have you looked at the data? It’s seriously depressing. Most of the climate models show we’re facing a mass extinction—everything from coral reefs to rain forests to penguins.”
“No, that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s actually more immediate that that. I feel like history is repeating itself.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Bill shook his head slowly. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but Finley is like the reincarnation of an archetype. A modern iteration of the radical revolutionary, like Thomas Paine or Che Guevara. But at the same time she’s different . . . because the technology is different.”
Jack nodded. Bill’s “acute interest” was starting to make more sense. And Jack was relieved to know that his old friend was not as far out in orbit as he had thought.
“You’re afraid that Finley could get her hands on our technology and do something unprecedented.”
“That’s part of it, but the thing I’m worried about even more is how the government will respond to Finley. Let me ask you this: How did the US government react the last time it faced a major terrorist threat?”
Jack puffed out his cheeks and gave a long whistle. He immediately understood where Bill was going. “Let’s see . . . we went to war with two countries, one of which we invaded on false assumptions, which precipitated the death of almost half a million people and helped incubate a new generation of terrorists—ISIS.”
“Precisely! And don’t forget what else happened. That was the rise of the surveillance state, when the NSA began its massive data collection programs. My point is that when governments are attacked, they overreact on a massive scale. They want to prove their power and restore a sense of security. But in the end, their response to terrorism can be much more dangerous than the terrorism itself.”
Jack continued Bill’s thought. “So even if Finley doesn’t get our technology, the government might use it recklessly in the name of ‘keeping us safe.’ ”
“Yes. I’m afraid that unless Finley is caught quickly, they’re going expect us to help them.”
Jack nodded and sat back in his chair. He was relieved to hear Bill voice his concerns about their work. In fact, he’d been wanting to have this conversation for a long time. “Do you remember our last night in Sunnyvale? When we closed down AML, we went up on the roof and watched the sunset.”
“Of course,” Bill said.
“Well, I think about that night a lot. Because that’s when we decided to help Curtiss.”
“Are you asking me if I regret coming here?” Bill said.
Jack nodded.
“I don’t,” Bill said. “If we hadn’t come, then China would have won the race to replication. We made the right choice at that moment. And I’d do it again.” He paused to think for a moment. “You see, this isn’t about the past. It’s about the future. Coming here was an easy choice. We accomplished amazing things, but the riddle is this: Now that we have accomplished these things, what do we do next?”
Bill stood and began pacing the room. “Let’s assess our current situation. We’ve created a technology that will reshape the world in ways we cannot imagine. And we’ve handed it over to a military institution that wants to exploit it to its full potential. So far, most of the results have been positive, such as restructuring of the world toward greater freedom and democracy. But things are changing. Curtiss’s control is slipping. Just take Olivia Rosario and her Global Hologram, for example: she’s making it despite Curtiss and our objections.”
“Yes, I know,” Jack said, “which is why I think it’s time for us to go back to California.”
Bill nodded noncommittally. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? Fight or flight. It’s been on my mind, too. But I can’t make up my mind. If we leave, we’ll lose our clearance and our ability to guide the development of the very technology we designed. If we stay, we may become accomplices to making weapons and surveillance systems that will almost surely be used against civilians.”
“You’ve always known how I’ve felt about weapons research,” Jack said.
“Yes. And I also know that you came to DC more for me than for yourself. I haven’t forgotten that and I’m very grateful.”
Jack smiled and bowed his head. “We always stick together.”
“We have . . . and we will. But I still can’t make up my mind. I feel that even though our power here is diminishing, we have to stay if we want any chance of doing some good.”
Jack shook his head. “Be careful. If the old proverb is correct and a person’s reputation is made by a thousand deeds and destroyed by one, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. Do you understand why?”
Bill’s expression said he didn’t.
“Because the responsibility will lie on our shoulders for whatever weapons get made here under our watch. And that’s regardless of whether we make them or Rosario makes them or Walden makes them.” Jack let that sink in a moment before adding. “My advice is to get out while we can. There has
to be a better way for us to use our talents.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Porch
December 4, 2026
Bethesda, MD
It was 7:30 p.m. when Special Agent Bud Brown turned his Ford onto Howell Drive in Bethesda, Maryland. It was a pretty neighborhood with tall oak and maple trees and long lawns. The curbs were crowded with piles of autumn leaves. He eased down the street slowly, leaning toward the passenger side door and trying to make out the house numbers in the dark.
When he and Rogers had been partners, Rogers had lived in a small apartment in SE. Now he saw how much he’d moved up in the world.
He spotted the address, 1425 Howell Drive, on a brick mailbox and looked out to see a big Victorian house with a wide porch. He parked at the curb and was about to get out when he hesitated, glancing at the brown paper bag that sat in the passenger seat.
You don’t have to do this, you know. You could just go home.
He looked up at the house again. Going in was the right thing to do. He owed it to Rogers . . . and to his wife. If the roles had been reversed and Rogers had lived, he’d have wanted Rogers to tell his family how it happened.
But he didn’t want to do it. The memories were still too fresh and telling it again would be like reliving it.
Do the right thing.
When he’d been around Rogers, the right thing had felt easy. He’d made Bud want to be the best agent he could be, which was a something he hadn’t felt in years. Now Rogers was gone, and Bud felt that good influence slipping away.
He looked at the house, trying to summon his courage. That’s when he noticed the Lexus in the driveway. A glance at the plate confirmed his suspicion: Carol was here. As one of Joan’s best friends, he’d known it was a possibility, but he’d hoped . . .
He reached for the paper bag, twisted off the top of the bottle, and took a long pull. The bourbon immediately warmed his throat and chest. He wanted more but forced himself to put the cap back on and get out of the car. As he moved up the walkway, he cinched up his tie and pulled his jacket over his shoulders. When he reached the door he stood there a moment on the brightly lit porch, feeling exposed in the light. The heavy oak door had panes of glass on both sides, allowing him to see a foyer filled with warm amber light.
