Murder on the Metro

by Margaret Truman

  “When I heard the report, I had a feeling it was you. When I looked into the incident, I didn’t ask who. I asked if it had been Robert Brixton.”

  “You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s why I called you, Robert. I may have anyway, but I took that as a sign. I knew I had to go outside the family to see if my suspicions about the vice president are correct. The Metro bombing told me that outsider had to be you.”

  “Slow down, Kendra. What suspicions?”

  “The circumstances surrounding the vice president’s death.”

  “All the reports say a heart attack was the cause.”

  “Because it was.”

  “Then what are we doing here? What am I doing here?”

  Rendine took a deep breath, started to take a sip of her latte, but then, instead, checked the area around them again before lowering her voice. “The vice president had been acting strangely in the weeks leading up to her death.”

  “Strangely how?”

  “Like she was struggling with something, and…”

  “And what?” Brixton coaxed.

  “I think she was waiting for something to happen, Robert. Something bad.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  GEORGETOWN

  Brixton didn’t respond, and instead waited for Kendra Rendine to continue.

  “What was your longest protective posting with SITQUAL?”

  “Six weeks, I think. A couple months maybe.”

  “I’ve been with Davenport since the campaign trail. To do this job on a daily basis at the executive branch level, you can’t just follow and watch. You have to be in the president or vice president’s head. You have to know what they’re thinking as they think it, so you can be ready when they make the move. You know what all of us hate more than anything?”

  “Rope lines.”

  Rendine nodded. “Because they’re impossible to secure one hundred percent and place the protectee in a much too vulnerable position. If it was up to me, or any Secret Service detail head, we’d take them off the schedule, especially when they happen spontaneously before we have a chance to check the crowd ourselves.”

  “That’s a far cry from what you’re suggesting.”

  “There’s more. What I just said about thinking as our protectee thinks comes down to reading their emotions, knowing when they’re upset, angry, or anxious, because that’s when they let their guard down and mistakes happen. The vice president was all three of those things.”

  “Upset, angry, and anxious,” Brixton repeated. “She ever tell you why, at least give you a hint?”

  “No, and I never asked. It would be a breach of protocol to get involved in business that clearly wasn’t in my purview or, potentially, even my security clearance.” Rendine hesitated, her stare boring into Brixton. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t take note of the where and when.”

  “So, where and when?”

  “The White House, five weeks ago. A meeting with the president. Strictly routine.”

  “Or maybe not, based on what you’re insinuating.”

  Rendine leaned back. “You don’t believe me.”

  Brixton gave her a long look before responding. “I get the feeling this heart attack didn’t come out of nowhere.”

  “No, the vice president was suffering from coronary artery disease. She had three stents implanted just over a month ago.”

  Brixton leaned forward. “Hold on a minute. You’re telling me the media was blacked out on this, that it was somehow kept secret?”

  “The procedure was performed at Walter Reed, where the vice president was supposedly spending the afternoon visiting wounded soldiers. You should know she also suffered bouts of atrial defibrillation and was taking a beta blocker as well as a calcium channel blocker, along with a blood thinner.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. And you know what? The vice president insisted on visiting a few wounded soldiers after the procedure was completed. She hated lying to the public.”

  “How did she feel about lies of omission?”

  “If it was up to her, she would have come clean from the start, put the whole procedure up on Facebook maybe, for the public to see. The orders to keep this dark came from the White House.”

  Brixton’s eyebrows flickered at that. Plenty of what Kendra Rendine was telling him here would have passed for routine, but not that. Why would the White House impose a news blackout on what had become a vastly routine procedure?

  “You think that’s what she discussed with the president the week before the procedure?”

  Rendine shrugged. “I already told you I have no idea what she discussed with the president. But whatever it was doesn’t explain the White House order to go dark on this.”

  “Still, that meeting dates back to when you noticed the change in the vice president,” Brixton said, calculating the timeline in his head.

  “Yes, a week before she had the procedure.”

  “What was the meeting about, the agenda, Kendra?”

  “Routine weekly briefing. The weekly brief with the president was her opportunity to get caught up on what she didn’t get in her own briefings. The inside dope directly from POTUS.”

  “And Davenport met with him the day you remember her whole demeanor changing.”

  Rendine nodded. “I thought it might be over some information the president shared with her. But when nothing broke in the next couple days, I started to think otherwise.”

  “Maybe the information deals with something a bit farther off. Or, maybe, a change in policy. Maybe the president told her he was replacing her on the ticket because of that heart condition.”

  “It was none of those things, Robert,” Rendine insisted, shaking her head.

  “You can’t know that for sure.”

  “Maybe not. And that’s why I need you to find out what it really was.”

  “I thought you needed me to find out if Stephanie Davenport was murdered.”

  “For starters.”

  “Starters? Do I need to remind you that I’m a private citizen absent a portfolio?

  “That’s why we’re having this conversation; because anyone with one is inside the system.”

  “Problem being that the people I need to talk to won’t see me, and if they did, they’d never entrust me with anything as serious or dire as you’re suggesting this might be.”

  “I never said it was going to be easy, Robert…”

  “And that’s the rub, isn’t it?”

  “We’re having this conversation because you’re the best special operator I’ve ever worked with. I’ve seen your skills firsthand and heard plenty about the work you did for SITQUAL that I wasn’t around for. Sniffed out quite a few plots and smoked out more than your share of foreign bad guys in the process.”

  Brixton shrugged. “I had some luck.”

  “It was skill. And I need that skill now. I need to know what Stephanie Davenport was so riled about, what had her up in arms. You should have seen her, Robert. The calmest, coolest person I’ve ever known spending her downtime fidgeting, checking her phone over and over again.”

  “Like she was waiting for something to happen, as you said.”

  “I suppose. Expecting it even.”

  Brixton studied Kendra Rendine from across the table, through the thin layer of steam still rising from their matcha lattes. He could tell the woman was scared, could tell her suspicions went well beyond the personal or some quest to absolve herself of guilt for being on duty when Stephanie Davenport had been stricken. The annals of Secret Service history were ripe with tales of presidential disease and deaths. But Brixton couldn’t name one similar tale passed along about a sitting vice president.

  “I’m not sure that, as an outsider without standing, I’ll be able to do much with that part of the mystery. Whether it was really a heart attack that killed Stephanie Davenport, though, that I might be able to handle.”

  Rendine’s expression didn’t change, b
ut Brixton could sense a weight being lifted off her shoulders, relieving her of the burden she’d been bearing.

  “Now,” he said, between steamy sips, “tell me everything you remember about the night the vice president died, and don’t leave anything out.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER

  10

  AR-RAMLAH, ISRAEL

  So what can I do for the Lioness of Judah?” the Arab woman spat at Lia Ganz from the other side of the table, inside the infamous Nitzan prison.

  Lia Ganz looked Samir Ibrahim in the eye, ignoring her tone. “I have a message from your parents. And I left a package from them for you with the guards.”

  The young woman’s expression tightened into a scowl. “I never get them.”

  “I arranged for an exception to be made in this case.”

  Ibrahim swallowed hard. “And this message?”

  “They said ‘Abaq gawiaan.’”

  Another swallow. “It means ‘Stay strong.’”

  “I know.”

  “That’s right, you speak fluent Arabic. Better to interrogate us with.”

  “I have something else to offer you, if you help me today.”

  “Please don’t dangle false promises of an early release before me.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of arranging for a visit from your children.”

  Ibrahim’s eyes moistened. “No one receives visitors at Nitzan.”

  “I know,” Lia said, leaving it there.

  “I appreciate you looking after them, getting them resettled and all.”

  “The State of Israel appreciates your cooperation, Samir. We like to help those who help us.”

  “Only because my suicide vest didn’t work,” the young Palestinian woman said, with the biting yet sad edge Lia had come to know in her voice.

  She was only nineteen, already the mother of two, when her suicide vest had failed to detonate inside a crowded Tel Aviv shopping mall. While Samir had survived, Mossad tracked down and killed the Hamas members who’d trained and equipped her. Although she had refused to give up their names, word was leaked that she had, providing the spy organization with unique leverage over her. With Samir branded a traitor, the only chance her family had to survive was resettlement by Israeli authorities within friendlier confines, under new identities. This had fallen under Lia’s domain while she was recovering from the wounds she’d suffered in Gaza and was still contemplating her next steps.

  Continuing to look after Samir’s young children, though, was not in her purview at all. Nor was retaining an active interest, or even management, of Samir’s case after stepping away from her day-to-day duties with Mossad.

  Nitzan prison was reserved for the most high-profile prisoners, with scant attention paid to either conditions or, especially, treatment, since the prisoners would never see the outside of those walls again. All that was known of Nitzan came from leaks, some of which had been selectively arranged by Israeli officials themselves to discourage future attacks by advertising what would happen to those who were captured.

  Depending on whom and what you believed, that treatment centered on an infamous torture chamber called Cell 9 and may or may not have included prisoners being hung from the ceiling and beaten, wearing a black bag over their heads for days at a time, and being left naked at all times, along with the frequent incursion of both dogs and mice to make anything that passed for rest impossible. All this done during years spent in solitary confinement, during which the only notion of an outside world with sunshine and fresh air was from memory. Prisoners slept on dirty, old, insect-infested mattresses that were as hard as concrete.

  Samir once told Lia the story of how she’d seen a tiny cat walking the prison halls outside Cell 9. One day the cat wandered into Samir’s particular boxlike chamber and she began sharing her meager portions of food with it, to finally make a friend. Eventually, the cat effectively became hers, spending hours at a time inside her cell, until the guards found out and slit the cat’s throat in front of her.

  Lia had listened sympathetically to that tale, even though she knew the cat had been a prop that had achieved exactly what it was designed to. When you ain’t got nothing, as the song says, you ain’t got nothing to lose, so the plan was to give prisoners like Samir something to lose in order to break them further, or to keep them broken.

  Lia could see how Samir Ibrahim perked up at the possibility of seeing her children for the first time since her incarceration three years ago. Born a year apart, they had been mere infants when she was sentenced here as a teenage girl. She was a young woman now, still showing a semblance of strong features, though they were virtually obscured by a sallow complexion, limp hair, scaly skin, and teeth chipped and degraded by a combination of torture and denial of hygiene for days and weeks at a time.

  “You can really do that?” Samir posed hopefully. “Bring my children here to see me? You’re not lying?”

  “Have I ever lied to you?” Lia asked, knowing that question to be based on semantics.

  “Not about something like that,” Samir replied diplomatically. “But what are you after in return? What has brought you here today?”

  “There was an attack last week on a beach in Caesarea,” Lia told her, knowing that since prisoners had no contact whatsoever with the outside world, it would be the first time Samir was hearing about it.

  “I have an alibi,” the young woman said, looking around the interrogation room to make her point.

  “Drones were used, along with a uniquely sophisticated targeting system. And there were cameras on all three drones—I suspect so the planners could watch as their bullets mowed down innocent civilian beachgoers.”

  “There are no civilians in this war.”

  “But there are casualties, and I need to know who was behind them this time.”

  “And why is this time so important to you? What separates it from all the other attacks?”

  “I was there, with my granddaughter.” Lia paused to let that part of her point sink in. “The two of us were spared only because we were in the water.”

  “And now you’re here.”

  The interrogation room was painted the same shade of drab gray as the cells. And the walls were just as plain, the floors just as cold. The overall effect was to make sure there was no respite or relief in being moved to these confines temporarily. Indeed, everything about Nitzan prison was gray, from floor to ceiling, and that included the prisoners themselves, whose complexion had the look of ash refuse from a fire.

  “I’m here,” Lia picked up, “because throughout your youth you were acquainted with the best technicians Hamas had to offer.”

  “Thanks to my uncle being one of them.”

  “The best, from what I understand, and it would take the best to incorporate weapons systems into those drones. How to minimize the weight of the weapons themselves and the ammo so the drones might still fly. How to account for wind and other elements, the flight of the targets, the spread of the fire.”

  “My uncle is dead.”

  “I know. I killed him, remember?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “But his son got away and has avoided capture. He’d be about your age, I believe.”

  “Older by a few years. Nearly thirty now.”

  “First name Dar, and he also went by Ibrahim, I believe.”

  “Ibrahim al-Bis. But you already knew that.”

  “I know he was the one who built your suicide vest that never detonated. I know he’s replaced his father, your uncle, as the preeminent terrorist bomb maker. What I don’t know is where to find him.”

  The young woman seemed to think of something. “You say the drones were equipped with cameras.”

  “Yes, two of them on each. Six in all. We recovered their remains, along with the remains of the targeting mechanism and transmitter. We assume the cameras were installed so the operator, or operators, could also use them to adjust their aim.”

  “What do y
ou want from me in return for a visit from my children?” Samir Ibrahim asked Lia, unable to disguise the pleading in her voice.

  “Where can I find your cousin, Dar Ibrahim al-Bis, Samir?”

  The young woman’s perpetually ashen expression softened a bit. “You’ve seen my son and my daughter?”

  “I checked in on them last week.”

  Samir looked relieved by that. “How old is your granddaughter?”

  “Three. Same age your son was when you first got here.”

  “And if I help you, you’ll bring them to me?”

  Lia nodded. “Personally.”

  She could see Samir weighing the prospects of that, looking what passed for dreamy and reflective in a place like this, which was utterly devoid of hope. “You promise not to kill my cousin?”

  “I can’t make that promise. I can only promise that I’m after information, not trophies.”

  “There can be no arrest. You need to promise me that.”

  Lia weighed her options, not finding very many at all. “It will be very difficult to convince my superiors to leave him out there to kill again.”

  “He does not kill; he designs. My cousin is a technician, a builder.”

  “Who builds weapons of death so others can kill. I fail to see the distinction, Samir.”

  The young woman leaned back, suddenly composed, even relaxed. “My terms are final.”

  “You’re not in a position to set them.”

  “And you’re not in a position to walk away from here empty-handed, are you? It could only have been desperation that brought you here to me today.”

  Lia felt her spine stiffen. “Like the desperation of a young mother who hasn’t seen her children in nearly three years?”

  Samir Ibrahim nodded in concession. “When will you bring them to me?’

  “After you’ve brought me to Dar Ibrahim al-Bis, Samir.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  NEW YORK CITY

  And what game are you here to play with me today, Robert?” the man tending to his pigeons said, barely looking up from his work cleaning their cage on the roof of his apartment building. “What riddle have you to pose to the professor?”