Heart of a Killer

by David Rosenfelt

  Ammerman had spent the time that Janssen was on the phone alerting Homeland Security to an impending emergency, and the assistant director, Cody Schumacher, was on the phone with Janssen within seconds after Tammy’s call.

  “We need to stop every train in southern California, right now,” Janssen said.

  “I need to understand the situation before I can order that,” Schumacher said.

  “Here’s the situation. A train is going to crash in the Los Angeles area; it could be crashing while we’re talking. If a train is stopped, it can’t crash. So stop the fucking trains, or don’t and send a truckload of body bags to L.A.”

  Homeland Security has awesome power in an emergency, and is well set up to communicate with and direct local agencies when an extraordinary event has taken place or is about to. The rail system fits very comfortably into their domain; trains have long been considered likely targets of attacks, as they have been in Europe.

  So remarkably, within ten minutes, every train in southern California was stopped, literally, in its tracks. Passengers were told over loudspeakers that there was nothing to worry about, just a mechanical failure that would soon be corrected. The people talking on those loudspeakers did not have the slightest idea why they were directed to stop.

  Communications in the form of an open, secure line were set up between Janssen, Schumacher, the FBI director, the secretary of transportation, and the White House chief of staff. All except Janssen were relieved when Schumacher reported that the trains were by then halted and “no incidents of any kind have been reported.”

  Attention turned to how to now deal with the stationary trains; since they were packed with people, they could not sit there for any great length of time.

  Janssen was adamant. “Get the people off the trains,” he said. “Bring buses in; I don’t care what you have to do. But this was no false alarm.”

  The transportation secretary was uneasy with this. “It will be a mess. L.A. is a mess on a normal day.”

  “People will be inconvenienced,” Janssen said. “Take a poll. Ask them if they would rather be inconvenienced or dead.”

  No one on the call wanted to be responsible for the carnage that Janssen was envisaging, so the decision was made to get the people off the trains and do intense inspections on each. No train would be put back into service until it was cleared, which meant that the next day’s morning commute would be a nightmare, even by L.A. standards.

  While the others on the call were worrying about outraged commuters, meaning outraged voters, all but Janssen thought they had successfully dodged a terrorist bullet. He didn’t know where it was coming from, or why it hadn’t been fired already, but he believed they still were in the crosshairs.

  One of the many trains in southern California that was stopped was Rolling Thunder, the wild railroad ride at Disneyland. The only difference between that and the others was that Homeland Security had nothing to do with stopping it; that task was accomplished by Peter Lampley, at the direction of Nolan Murray.

  The twenty-eight passengers on the stopped train looked around in vain for someone to help them. There were no small children on the ride, since the high speed and sharp turns dictated a height requirement. So they were mostly teenagers and adults, and they calmly waited for the ride to start up again.

  That particular ride has two trains, and they run one minute and ten seconds apart. At that moment, the passengers on the second train were having a very different experience. They were traveling at an incredible speed, such that if they were not securely belted in, they would be thrown from the train. Those who had been on the ride previously knew that something was wrong; it was not meant to travel this fast. Everyone, whether a frequent rider or a first-timer, was panicked by what they were experiencing.

  Under Lampley’s computer direction, the second car rammed into the stationary one. Nineteen people were killed, seventeen critically injured, and many others badly hurt.

  Tammy had crashed her train, just like she promised.

  I did not want to have dinner with my parents. That would be a true statement pretty much every day since I was six years old, but on this particular night I was dreading it even more than usual.

  They live less than forty-five minutes from the city, and are there all the time, but once a month they have what they call their “New York vacation weekend.” That consists of checking into an exclusive hotel, they rotate among six of them, and doing New York things like taking in a show, going to fine restaurants, et cetera. All the things that they do almost every weekend, but this somehow feels different to them.

  Whenever we are going to have dinner, I invite them to my place so that I can cook a meal for them. I do this even though there is never the slightest chance that they would ever accept, or that I would ever want them to. But by making the offer, I’m able to amuse myself by imagining them working their way up my elevator-less building to my third-floor apartment.

  My mother once again declined the invitation, chuckling slightly at the prospect. Instead she chose Le Bernardin, a Midtown French restaurant specializing in seafood. It is widely considered among the best restaurants in New York, in fact in the world. And it is priced accordingly; four people could have dinner there with one of the better bottles of wine, or they could use that money to buy something with bucket seats.

  Restaurants like it are said to cater to the rich and famous, though I’d been there four times without actually seeing anyone I recognized. Then the weird realization hit me that to most Americans, I was the most famous person in the place.

  Once we were finished with the obligatory chitchat about what was going on in their lives, their work, their charities, and their friends, it was my turn. “Tell us all about this exciting case,” my mother said.

  I had absolutely no desire to do that. “I really can’t talk about it; it’s confidential.” When my mother looked wounded, I said, “Attorney-client privilege. Pretty much all I can say is what’s being reported in the press.”

  “Is your firm willing to lose you for this long?” my father asked.

  “I think they’ll get by.”

  It was Mom’s turn. “I think this could be good for your career, especially if you win. Though I have to say, based on the people I have spoken with, it seems as if you’re in a difficult legal position.”

  I nodded. “Very difficult.”

  They asked me to tell them what Sheryl was like, and I said that she was the strongest woman, actually the strongest person, I’d ever met.

  “But she committed a murder,” my mother pointed out, and I didn’t correct her.

  For some reason I was interested in knowing their opinion. “If you were in charge,” I said, “if you could make a ruling and that would be the end of it, would you let her give her heart to her daughter?”

  “I would,” my mother said instantly, surprising the hell out of me. “She’s stuck in that prison, and her daughter has a whole life that could be ahead of her. It’s her body, it’s her choice, and I think she should be allowed to make it.”

  “I would tend to agree,” my father said. “But as a doctor I would never participate in it, and I doubt you’d find a doctor who would.”

  “But once she had died, even by suicide, there are doctors that would perform the transplant. Right?”

  He nodded. “Without a doubt. And they should; at that point there would be a life to save.”

  “Would they stand by, passively, while she took her own life? Maybe with her daughter already there, prepped for the transplant?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “That’s coming too close to the line.” Then he laughed. “Although Bud Jenkins probably would.”

  “Who’s Bud Jenkins?”

  My mother answered the question. “He’s a colleague of your father’s, a heart surgeon, very talented. But very opinionated.”

  My parents thinking someone else was opinionated was chock-full of its own ironies, but I avoided pointing them out. The
rest of the dinner was fairly uneventful, actually borderline pleasant. I even let them order me a brandy that they described as their favorite, and which probably cost more than my monthly rent.

  It was delicious, burning a very pleasant path straight down to my core. I ordered another, which my parents seemed to note with delight, as if the brandy was the long sought after tool they could use to transform me into someone of whom they could heartily approve.

  I got up to leave before they were ready, mainly because if I stayed I would order another brandy and be too drunk to work and think about Sheryl’s case when I got home.

  I apologized for my abrupt departure, and shook hands with my father and kissed my mother on the cheek. I said truthfully that I had work to do, and that I had to drive to the prison early in the morning to see my client.

  “I’ll bet she’s always happy to see you,” my mother said. “She’s completely dependent on you.”

  Her comment sort of stopped me in my tracks, and it took me a moment to answer. “In some ways I’m dependent on her,” I said. “Actually, I think I’m falling in love with her. Good night.”

  I wish there was a way that I could have both left and heard the rest of their conversation. I’m sure they were stunned by what I said. Hell, I was stunned by what I said, and even more by the realization that it was true.

  I was falling in love with my client, whose death I was trying to arrange.

  Just another day at the office.

  The only thing Sheryl was certain of was that she was not certain of anything.

  That was what she told the prison chaplain when he came to see her, asking if she wanted to talk.

  He nodded and smiled, as if that made perfect sense and was all part of some grand plan. “Certainty. That’s a tough one,” he said. He was probably younger than Sheryl, so she thought that being wise beyond his years wouldn’t be that difficult.

  “What are you grappling with?” he asked.

  “Two things,” she said. “I don’t want to die, and I want my daughter to live. Not necessarily in that order.”

  She felt some relief in showing her weakness and vacillation to this man. She felt it was safer doing so with him than with her mother, or Jamie Wagner. She didn’t want them to hone in on it, feeding her doubts and pressuring her to change her mind. Because she wasn’t going to change her mind, no matter what anyone said.

  They talked some more, and Sheryl admitted that she had put herself in this position. “I’ve made bad choices in my life,” she said. “Pretty much every one I’ve ever made was wrong.” Which of course, led to an ironic question, which he asked.

  “If you are so poor at making choices, what makes you think that this one is right?”

  She wouldn’t answer that, couldn’t answer that, and extricated herself from the conversation. But after he left she thought about how she had never really believed in God, never thought much about the concept either way. But some really smart people, much smarter than her, did.

  She couldn’t really figure out where He would come down on it, though if He existed she guessed she’d know soon enough. She just figured that what she was going to do was good, and right, and if there was a God He’d probably approve of it for just those reasons.

  Of course, if there was a God, He just demonstrated a hell of a sense of humor in sending Jamie Wagner. He was everything Sheryl never wanted, everything she always scorned. A Harvard guy, rich family, probably went to operas and played touch football at family outings in Connecticut.

  But scorning didn’t seem to cut it anymore, or get her anywhere she wanted to be. She liked him; he was funny and smart and he understood her. She even thought she understood him, and she liked to keep him off balance.

  He made her feel like she hadn’t felt since high school, or maybe ever. And maybe it was just a coincidence that he showed up, or maybe God had sent him to test her, or just play with her mind a little.

  That God must be a funny guy.

  The meeting was held at 8:00 A.M. at the Department of Homeland Security. Present were the directors of both Homeland Security and the FBI, the White House chief of staff, a total of nine staff members under those three men, and Mike Janssen.

  Janssen hated attending meetings like this; he would much prefer to have been video-conferenced in, since by definition coming to Washington was taking time away from doing his job.

  The reason he came was that not being present in the room would make his job harder. Janssen felt that stupid decisions often came out of meetings among panicked people, especially those not out in the field. He saw himself as a counterbalance, someone who could bring reason to the process.

  Reason-bringing, in Janssen’s experience, was far more effective when done in person. It was a dynamic that Janssen couldn’t fully explain, but which he had seen time and again. Someone physically present in the room had far more influence over the process than someone brought in through technology.

  Since he was the one that was going to have to live with the decisions that were made, it seemed easily worth his time to make the trip to Washington. And the traveling itself was not exactly a major inconvenience; an Air Force jet was dispatched to bring him to Reagan International, from where a helicopter brought him to the meeting.

  It was left to Janssen to bring everyone up to date on the investigation’s progress, which he was unfortunately able to do in a brief presentation. “We’re nowhere,” is how he candidly began, much to the consternation of his direct boss, FBI director Edgar Barone.

  “We have conclusively determined that the voice has gone through a synthesizer, but common sense told us that anyway. We have traced each call, but not only has the caller successfully hidden his tracks, he has sent us on a wild-goose chase to places from which the calls did not originate.

  “In both cases, the plane and the amusement ride, the perpetrators have penetrated the computer systems that operated them. They were essentially hacked into, but in an ingenious way that gave the hackers total control. Our experts think it is possible that the control could have been regained, but not nearly within the time frame we were given. In fact, as you know, we were given no time at all on the amusement park ride; we didn’t know the target until it was hit.”

  The White House chief of staff was the first to interrupt. “So they’re demanding money, and then not giving anyone an opportunity to pay.”

  Janssen nodded. “That’s one of the many puzzling aspects of this. My view on it, and psy-ops agrees, is that they’re demonstrating their power and their ruthlessness. Probably setting us up for the big one.”

  The Homeland Security director asked, “And what might that be?”

  “There is absolutely no way to know that, and the possibilities are limitless. When it comes to computer crime of this type, it’s fair to say that the United States is a target-rich environment. The country is run by computers. All of our mass transit, many of our weapons systems, our dams, power plants of all kinds, you name it.”

  Everyone in the room was stunned by the implications of this statement, even though they had all been briefed on most of this before the meeting. The Homeland Security director then took the floor, and outlined emergency measures that were already being taken to ensure security of computer systems throughout the country, starting with what were considered the most vulnerable, and most devastating if compromised, targets.

  “As I’m sure you understand, a project of this magnitude can take months, if not years. Even then, our cyber-security people tell us there’s no guarantee that we can effectively stop them, even on a system that we recheck. These guys are beyond good, and if they’ve penetrated a system, they could most likely stay hidden in there as long as they want.”

  Janssen nodded. “They could have been preparing this for years, and they can sit back now and hit us wherever and whenever they choose. And make no mistake, they will hit us again. I understand that we need to play defense, to make the systems as secure as possible, but if we’re
going to stop them, it will be by catching them.”

  “And we have no suspects?”

  Janssen shook his head. “No. We’ve been identifying and investigating everybody we can find that is known to have extraordinary capabilities in this area. But while probably less than half the people in this country can point to North America on a map, computer geniuses are on every street corner.”

  Until that point the meeting was just a briefing; law enforcement and security efforts were already well under way, and not waiting for any decisions to be made by this group. The real purpose of the gathering was to contemplate a key decision, how to deal with the public.

  This was the White House chief of staff’s area, because this was a presidential decision. Until that point the public was in the dark. While there was rampant speculation that the airplane crash was a terrorist incident, it had not been confirmed by anybody of authority. The amusement ride was viewed as a tragic accident, and the two tragedies were not considered connected by the public.

  As the conversation began, Janssen could smell the whiff of politics in the air. He jumped in, though he was not expected to; this was definitely not his domain or responsibility. “You need to tell people,” he said. “They have a right to know, and to protect themselves as best they can.”

  The Homeland Security director said, “Protect themselves against what? We can’t even tell them where the danger is. How can they protect themselves?”

  “Let me ask you something,” Janssen said. “Are you going to put your son on a plane this week to go down to Florida and visit Grandma? Of course not, because as little as we know, you’re in on it, so you know better.”

  The chief of staff said, “The country will grind to a halt. It would do more damage to the economic underpinnings of this country than fifty terrorist attacks.”