Smith finally realized where Brixton was going with this. “Do you have a dollar on you?”
“I think so.”
“Then let’s make this official.”
Brixton found a five in his pocket and handed it to over.
“I owe you four dollars in change,” Mac told him.
“Our next drink’s on you.”
“And now that we have established confidentiality…”
“I wasn’t mugged, Mac, I was attacked. By the same man who called himself Detective Rogers.”
Mackensie Smith rose and came out from behind his desk, angling the chair next to Brixton’s closer to him. “Since you’re sitting here, I assume he got the worst of it.”
“Oh,” Brixton said, “most definitely.”
* * *
Smith listened to the story without interruption, Brixton sparing him for now the real reason why he’d gone to New York, instead just saying it was to see Flo Combes.
“What can I do, Robert?” Mac said, leaning even closer to him, once he’d finished the tale about the man who’d taken him captive being crushed to death.
“For starters, I’d like to know who he really was. I imagine the police would have that information in hand by now.”
“I didn’t even know that trolley line ever extended that far underground.”
“Apparently, there were stations built that were never linked together. Taking down your shingle hasn’t robbed you of your police contacts, I trust.”
“Not at all,” Smith said, easing his cell phone from his jacket pocket.
Brixton watched him press a number from his saved contacts, then listened to Mac’s side of a terse conversation that was no more than a request for information. Judging by the speed of the call and the lack of response or argument from whomever Mac had called, Brixton guessed it was an officer or detective Smith had worked with over the years, who may or may not have owed him a favor.
“He’ll get back to me as soon as he’s got something to say,” he said, pocketing the phone again. “Now, I’d like to hear what you’ve been leaving out up until this point.”
“You know me too well, Mac.”
“I get the feeling this is bad, Robert.”
“Worse,” Brixton elaborated.
* * *
Brixton laid it all out for him, every bit, starting with the suspicions Kendra Rendine had raised with him about Vice President Stephanie Davenport’s death and proceeding to what he’d learned from the professor. He finished with the conclusion he and Rendine had reached about the Metro bombing and the possible murder of the vice president of the United States being somehow connected through the man they knew as Detective Rogers, whom he’d left dead on the old trolley platform the night before.
“Connected how?” Smith wanted to know, having again remained quiet through the whole of the tale.
“I have no idea, Mac. Neither does Kendra.”
Smith leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. “I don’t know what your Secret Service friend expects to find, Robert, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. If the vice president was murdered, especially this way, whoever was behind it would never have left any clues behind.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Rendine knows how to be discreet, I assume.”
“I hope so.”
“Because if she reveals her intentions in any way and the wrong people find out…” Smith let his thought dangle there, no reason to complete it. “What else can I do, Robert?”
“Nothing for now, at least not until we find out who this Detective Rogers really is.”
As if on cue, Smith’s cell phone rang and he drew it from his pocket. He checked the number and nodded toward Brixton, their eyes locking through a brief conversation with the person on the other end.
“Say that again?” Mac requested … “And you’re sure?” … “No, don’t bother with that for now. I’ll get back to you.”
He ended the call but kept the phone clutched in his hand this time, looking both mystified and befuddled.
“The police responded last night immediately after receiving your call, Robert, though they had a hell of a time actually finding the platform.”
“I can see why.”
“What they didn’t see was a body. The remains of this Detective Rogers, whoever he really is, weren’t there.”
CHAPTER
22
WASHINGTON, DC
Who just told you that?” Brixton heard himself ask Mac Smith, as if it were someone else posing the question.
“A source at the Washington PD, a trusted source, who didn’t bother asking any questions he knew I couldn’t answer.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised, Mac. It was abundantly clear that whoever this Detective Rogers was, he was waiting for someone else to show up—maybe multiple someones.”
“So when he, or they, did and saw what happened, they removed the body from the scene.”
“What about blood?” Brixton persisted. “Did they find any blood?”
“They didn’t say and I didn’t ask, as you heard for yourself.”
“Okay. Did this source say anything about security cameras?”
“That trolley tunnel was built before they were even a thought in anybody’s mind.”
Smith’s point was fair, and given that they were toting a body from the scene, it was a safe bet that whomever Rogers had been working with wouldn’t have dared to resurface through the same access point in Union Station above. In fact …
“Can you ask them, Mac?” Brixton blurted out, before he had a chance to fully complete his thought.
“The police? Ask them what?”
“To check the platform again, a wider circle. How did they get the body out? What if it was only one or two men? Maybe they hid it someplace, figuring they could come back to retrieve it later.”
“Makes sense,” Smith conceded. “Might have to provide more information explaining the basis of my suspicions, though.”
“Maybe not a good idea.”
“That was my thought, Robert. But let me see what I can come up with, some half-baked cover story that’s just enough to make them move on this.”
“They’ll have to move fast, Mac. Whoever’s pulling the strings here wouldn’t want that body down there for any longer than absolutely necessary.”
Smith nodded. “Anything else I can do for you?”
Brixton figured his friend was doing this out of guilt over needing to let him go, but he didn’t care. He retrieved the garment bag he’d draped over the chair and held it between him and Mac.
“I was wearing this jacket last night during my struggle with the man whose body has disappeared. It occurs to me we may be able to lift his fingerprints off it.”
“We?”
Brixton forced a smile. “Do you still have those kind of contacts?”
Smith grinned. “I’m downsizing, Robert, not dying.”
Brixton’s expression wrinkled. “Let’s hope so.”
CHAPTER
23
TEL AVIV-YAFO, ISRAEL
As a civilian, Lia Ganz came to Mossad headquarters when she was called. In this case, she was summoned back there the day after Dar Ibrahim al-Bis’s underground workshop at Kif Tzuba amusement park had been uncovered. She’d expected to find Moshe Baruch waiting for her in his office alone but instead was ushered into a conference room in which all the chairs were occupied, most by men and women she recognized, only a few by people she didn’t.
The room was silent and subdued, tension riding the air like smoke and raising the temperature by several degrees compared to that of the hallway. The men and women gathered around the table followed Lia’s entry into the room without truly acknowledging her presence. All knew of the exploits of the Lioness of Judah, and it was clear from their expressions they’d already been briefed on the reason for her presence.
“Sit down, Colonel,” Baruch ordered, indicating a chair adjacent to his at the
end of the table. “Things have turned rather complicated, and they’ve turned that way fast.”
As she sat down, Lia was struck by the feeling that she’d done something wrong, the tension in the room rooted in the reprisal and punishment that were coming. That said, whatever misstep she was about to be called out for didn’t require such an impressive gathering of high-ranking security and government officials.
Baruch touched a button on a notebook computer and a screen mounted to the wall at the front of the room filled with one of the drawings from the wall of al-Bis’s workshop. The next shot isolated drawings of two different devices laid side by side. The third shot showed either models or finished versions of those devices.
“You are looking, Colonel, at the transmitter and camera that were salvaged from the remains of the drones recovered at the site of the attack in Caesarea.”
Lia nodded, still trying to make sense of why she’d been called to what was clearly a vital planning session with operatives from both the intelligence and operations sections of Mossad, along with the kind of government officials capable of blessing major operations. The fact that Baruch had addressed her as “Colonel” in front of them suggested that she was present on an official basis, as if she weren’t retired at all.
“Which confirms the part al-Bis played in the attack,” she concluded, thinking again of his cousin, serving life in prison and so desperate to see her children that she’d given him up.
“That’s not why we called you here today, Colonel,” Baruch said, as if to confirm her assumption.
He held his gaze upon her as he touched the space bar again. This time the screen filled with the mangled and burned remnants of two similarly sized but virtually unrecognizable versions of that same transmitter and camera. Identical in all respects, as far as Lia Ganz could tell.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Neither did we initially, because at first glance what you’re looking at makes no sense.”
“What am I looking at, Commander?”
“You’re aware of the terrorist attack in the Washington Metro three days ago?”
Lia nodded. “Failed terrorist attack.”
Baruch seemed annoyed at her use of a qualifier, since in Israel a terrorist attack was defined by its intent and not its upshot, justice dispensed with equal fury in either case, given that the entire process was aimed, as much as anything, at preventing the next operation.
The head of Mossad gestured toward the screen behind him. “Those are remains recovered from the scene of that failed terrorist attack, side-by-side with virtually identical remains recovered from Caesarea. I hope you’ve kept your passport up to date, Colonel, because you’re headed to Washington.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER
24
ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
The president took the podium after the eulogies had been completed and the muffled sobs and sniffles had abated somewhat. He stood between two pictures of the teenage victim of a school shooting, which had left the boy dead after he had heroically saved the lives of enough classmates to fill a classroom. One was an action shot taken on the football field, beautifully framed by the sun and crowd, the boy flashing a smile from within his helmet as he charged unmolested toward the end zone. The other was a prom picture, capturing him with his date in full formal regalia, holding the corsage he’d yet to pin in place.
President Corbin Talmidge gazed from one picture to the other prior to commencing his speech. He cut an impressive figure, having retained the stature and build that had won him All-American Honorable Mention as a football player himself while he was in the air force, before he’d gone on to a career as a fighter pilot and then astronaut and then into politics. His hair had gone mostly gray, his gait was a bit slowed by deterioration in his hips and knees, but his blue eyes were those of a younger man, still radiant with hope and the kind of positive nature that was rare for a politician and even rarer for a president.
“We all face the devil at some point in our lives,” he began, speaking from memory rather than using a teleprompter or paper speech, “and often, how we handle that confrontation defines who we are and what we will be. Most of us turn away, or run, and there’s no shame in that. Once in a while, though, a true hero rises up to confront the devil head-on. A hero who, faced with his own death, seeks to prevent evil from claiming others. A hero who embodies everything that is great in us and achieves his greatest potential in the last moments of his own life.”
From the darkened shadows off to the side of the church, First Lady Merle Talmidge stood reciting the words from memory in cadence with her husband. The habit relieved her of the stress over a potential flub of the speech the president had rehearsed the night before, his capacity for that kind of recall having remained intact. She needed to be prepared to join him behind the podium, should that flub or stumble devolve into a moment where the world froze up around him to the point that he was aware of only himself, amid a church packed standing room only, in a ceremony being broadcast live across all the news stations.
Merle Talmidge hadn’t approved this, of course—would never have approved it, under any circumstances. And normally she would have overridden whatever aide had arranged for the president to speak in front of millions. But in this case, before she could intervene, the president had accepted the invitation to speak at the funeral of seventeen-year-old Joseph Hobbs, who’d rushed a fellow classmate turned school shooter as bullets from an AR-15 tore into him. The boy had been pronounced dead at the scene, but among his classmates, only five others suffered gunshot wounds at all, and none of these were deemed to be life-threatening, meaning Hobbs had saved dozens of his classmates from the fate he’d suffered himself.
So far, so good, the first lady thought, continuing to mouth the words that were coming from her husband’s mouth. And then it happened, something entirely unpredictable, off script.
President Corbin Talmidge began to cry.
He stopped his words long enough to swipe a sleeve across his eyes. The first lady of the United States heard sniffles and quiet sobs beginning to spread among the mourners squeezed into the church. She looked back at her husband to see dollops of tears running down his face, making it seem like he’d been caught in the rain. The moment she’d feared above all else was upon her, and there was nothing she could do. Approach to comfort her husband and the president would look weak, a big strong man who needed a woman to support him, instead of the rugged American hero with the right stuff the country had fallen in love with. Then it got worse still.
He started to speak again, pushing the words through his sobbing, hopelessly off script now. He was lost in a fugue of his own making, the memorized words no more than a jumble of letters in his mind.
“My son was a good boy! He didn’t deserve this—no child deserves this! Those kids he saved were all my children, too, all our children, and we let them down. I let them down. I let my own boy down. I wasn’t there when I should have been, didn’t realize how precious the time I had with him was, because I always figured there’d be more. Until one day there wasn’t and he was gone and the call came and my life changed forever.”
First Lady Merle Talmidge felt her heart skip a beat when her husband’s face turned blank, his wide-eyed gaze making her wonder if he’d suddenly lost track of where he was and what he was doing there. Then he resumed, his words bathed in incoherence to an audience that desperately wanted to believe in what he was saying.
“When was it?” he asked, as if expecting someone to give him the answer. “Was it yesterday? Last week? Last month? Last year? When did this happen?”
He squeezed the sill of the podium with his big hands, hard enough to force the blood from them. He cocked a gaze behind him, looking at the twin pictures of Joseph Hobbs, football and prom, a befuddled look falling over his expression.
“What’s his name?” President Corbin Talmidge posed to no one in particular, a forlorn look of fear spreading ov
er his features. “Why can’t I remember his name? My own son and I can’t remember his name!”
His voice quickens in cadence, in panic. Merle Talmidge watched the president of the United States falling apart before her, unable to recognize a boy he’d taken for his son just moments before. But the mourners squeezed into the pews saw something else. They saw a man uniquely in touch with exactly what they were feeling. The sense of loss, hopelessness, desperation, helplessness. This could have been any of their sons too, and in that dreaded realization they grasped the point of the president’s feigned confusion because their confusion was real. He spoke to them in a way that struck them like a gut punch, moving the most hard-hearted among them to tears and sobs.
President Corbin Talmidge, crying over a lost son whose name he couldn’t remember.
Except that their son was quite alive, a happily married thirty-year-old lawyer who, along with his similarly successful husband, had promised to give them grandchildren through adoption or a surrogate.
The moment destined to become legend in the annals of American political history deepened even more when, in front of the crowd that had been utterly silenced, save for those sobs and sniffles, the president moved to the football picture and touched it in loving fashion with a trembling hand. He turned back to the mourners hanging on his every word, his every action.
“It’s me,” he said, his face squeezed in confusion. “That picture is of me. That’s my helmet, my uniform. I must have scored a touchdown that day. Why can’t I remember? I need to remember. Please help me remember.”
The first lady knew the break had been made, no choice left now. She strode across the church dais purposefully, not too fast and not too slow. Her husband, the president, spotted her coming and flashed an instant of recognition before she embraced him. She felt his tears soaking into the jacket of her dark designer suit, which she’d selected specifically for this day.
“Our boy,” Corbin Talmidge moaned. “Our boy…”
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