“But they don’t know what you discussed.”
“With Flo?” Brixton asked wryly.
“I was thinking more like this professor friend of yours.”
Brixton shook his head. “No. I wasn’t about to reveal any of that without consulting you first.”
“So what now?”
“You tell me, Agent.”
Rendine took a deep breath. “If we’re on the right track here, whoever switched those stents at Walter Reed did so with killing the vice president in mind. That means the key to all this is whatever happened when Stephanie Davenport met with Corbin Talmidge the week before her procedure. I need to find out what they discussed, what the vice president learned.” She paused and took a deep breath. “What about you?”
“I’m going to ask you for a favor,” Brixton told her. “Six six five four three zero seven six.”
“What’s that?”
“The numerical sequence that was jotted down on those schematics at the UPS Store. I told Panama I didn’t recognize them. I lied.”
“Because you do recognize them.”
“I think the eight-number sequence is a federal prisoner ID designation. I need you to find out who it belongs to, Kendra.”
CHAPTER
36
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Why’s the book called that, Catcher in the Rye?” the inmate in the third row asked Sister Mary Alice Rose.
“It’s a metaphor,” Sister Mary Alice, who’d celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday the preceding week, told him.
“What’s a metaphor?”
“Saying something other than what you mean, to make your point.”
“That’s more fucked up than a black man trying to ice skate, woman.”
“That’s a metaphor, too,” Sister Mary Alice followed, drawing a ripple of laughter from the classroom. “But in the case of the book we’ve been reading, the title comes from a poem by Robert Burns called ‘Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,’ which is about preserving the innocence of childhood.”
“This Holden dude,” commented another inmate, “he don’t seem so innocent to me. That boy knows how to sling the shit, and he don’t take no shit from nobody.”
“The dude’s cold, man,” a third voice chimed in. “Like this place was when the power went dead last winter.”
That drew a smattering of chuckles from the inmates squeezed into school desks too small to accommodate their bulk, aligned in neat rows before Sister Mary Alice. They were neat because she’d straightened them out herself prior to the beginning of class.
The Metropolitan Detention Center was located on Twenty-Ninth Street in Brooklyn, a ten-story processed slab of a building housing prisoners who had pending cases in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. MDC Brooklyn was also a potential stop for prisoners serving brief sentences. Only within the past few years had it begun housing prisoners interned for longer stretches, many for drug-related crimes, violent and otherwise.
A nun for some sixty years now, Sister Mary Alice had no idea what crimes the inmates seated before her had committed or how long their respective sentences ran. She knew the bulk of them only by the eight-digit ID numbers displayed on their khaki prison jumpsuits, the only exception being those inmates she saw regularly for tutoring sessions.
“It’s drugs that fucked him up,” a new voice, attached to a face and ID number Sister Mary Alice had never seen before, chimed in. “His parents loading him up on this shit and that. Fucked him up good.”
“He grows up, I can sell him the good shit,” an inmate who invariably sat in the back row said, high-fiving the men on either side of him.
“I don’t get where he’s going,” the inmate who’d started the conversation put forth. “Dude’s running away, but where’s he running to, exactly?”
“Maybe that’s the point,” Sister Mary Alice said, aiming her words in his direction.
“Everybody’s running from something,” a new voice agreed from somewhere in the middle of the makeshift classroom.
“Mostly the cops,” said the same inmate who’d drawn chuckles a few moments before, drawing all-out laughs this time.
Sister Mary Alice joined in.
“So what you running from, Sister?” a man in the front row asked her. “How is it you come to be here with a bunch of lowlifes like us?”
“You think you’re a lowlife?”
“I’m here, ain’t I?”
“Which would make me a lowlife, too, wouldn’t it?” Sister Mary Alice challenged him. “But I don’t consider myself that any more than I do you, any of you. I think you’re all victims.”
“Hey,” came the booming voice of an inmate standing in the back because the school desks couldn’t accommodate his vast bulk. “Don’t lay any of that societal bullshit at my doorstep.”
Sister Mary Alice held her gaze on him. “You know who you sound like?”
“Not off the top of my head.”
“You sound like Holden,” she continued, holding up her tattered paperback copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “He thought society was bullshit too. Maybe that’s what he was running away from, not his school or his parents.”
“Dude got no friends, no homies,” said the same inmate who’d referred to Holden Caulfield as “cold” before. “What’s up with that? You ask me, he ain’t running from nobody but himself, ’cause the dude ain’t got no clue. You know what happens in the sequel? He end up with us, in a place like this.”
“Was there a sequel?” a voice wondered.
“Second’s never as good as the first,” from another.
“Oh yeah? You check out The Godfather lately?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of Jaws and Jaws shit Two.”
“Hey, don’t forget Aliens,” the inmate in the back noted, “you wanna talk about how good a second film can be.”
“Hey, Sister,” came a fresh voice, the inmate waving his own paperback copy. “They ever make this book into a film?”
“No. The author wouldn’t allow it.”
“He nuts or something?”
“He didn’t believe a director or studio was capable of doing it justice,” Sister Mary Alice told him. “And that includes filmmakers like Elia Kazan and Billy Wilder, who both tried their utmost to acquire the rights.”
“Elia … what kind of name is that?”
“I’ll bet that Wilder was a wild dude. Can’t have a name like that without living up to it.”
“Hey, Sis,” boomed the big man standing in the back, who looked as wide as he was tall. “What we gonna be reading next?”
Sister Mary Alice held up an equally dog-eared copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “Huck Finn.”
“Who’s that?”
“Not another kid.”
“Hey, check out the cover—that’s a kid, all right.”
“This boy Huck must be running from something, too, Sister, like all the rest of us,” said the big man in the back. “But you still haven’t told us what you’re running from, why you wearing the same jumpsuit we got for a wardrobe.”
“That blue color they give the broads beats the shit out of khaki.”
“That’s because it’s powder blue,” another inmate elaborated.
“Let her answer the question, will ya?” snapped the big man, accompanying the statement with a stare that could melt ice.
“I’m here because there was something I couldn’t live with, couldn’t accept.”
“What’s that exactly?”
Before Sister Mary Alice Rose could answer, a bell sounded, signaling the end of class and the time to file straight out to dinner. The two federal prison guards, who’d made themselves as unobtrusive as possible in the room’s back corners, started to move forward to escort the prisoners to the cafeteria.
“Until next week, then,” Sister Mary Alice said to all of them. “Don’t forget to pick up your copy of Huckleberry Finn on the way out.”
“Just tell us one thing, Sis,” a familiar voice rang out, amid the inmates rising from their desks. “Does this dude ever get where he’s going?”
“I’m not sure any of us ever gets where we’re going,” Sister Mary Alice told him.
“Well, one way or another, we all ended up here, right? Whether it be for slinging drugs, doing dope, or some combination thereof. ’Cept for you, of course.”
“No,” interjected an inmate, as he filed past Sister Mary Alice in the front of the room. “She inside for fighting injustice.”
“I heard she blew up a building.”
That froze all the inmates in place.
“That true, Sis?” someone asked.
“You really blow up that building?” from another.
“Not exactly,” Sister Mary Alice told him. “But maybe I should have.”
“Hey,” started an inmate who was fighting against the determined efforts of the guards to herd them from the room. “You one cold bitch, Sis.”
“Amen to that,” said Sister Mary Alice.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER
37
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
As was his custom, Brixton walked the six blocks from the Metro stop to the Arlington, Virginia, apartment he could no longer afford. Real estate values and apartment rental costs hinged on many things, not the least of which was distance from the nearest Metro station. Inside a block was the benchmark, while more than five threatened to render you irrelevant. Nobody who was anybody had to walk that far.
Brixton normally enjoyed the walk for the time it left him alone with his thoughts. He made it a habit not to check email or texts and even avoided conversations—so as not to distract himself from his surroundings, as much as anything. Too many people these days ruined a leg on a broken sidewalk or, worse, walked into moving traffic while looking down. So Brixton always looked up to better focus his thinking, to let his mind wander toward where he needed it to end up.
Right now he was waiting for a call from Kendra Rendine on the identity of federal prisoner number 66–543076, adding the dash in his mind. Normally, this would have been a simple-enough process. But the connection to whoever was behind what was rapidly taking on the shape of a conspiracy that might well have led to the murder of the vice president of the United States meant she didn’t dare leave even a hint of a cyber trail. If Brixton were running the check himself, he’d exercise deep discretion by jobbing the task out to someone whose digital footprint would not attract any undue attention. A bureaucrat or administrator running a simple check—that’s what it had to look like, to avoid any bounce back on Rendine. They could take nothing for granted at this point. Nothing. This was too big, and getting bigger all the time.
Brixton’s one-bedroom at Exo Apartments was just over a half mile from the station, and he’d learned how to make the best use of side streets to cover that distance in the shortest possible walk. His gleaming apartment tower featured an array of amenities he never took advantage of—like the yoga lawn, pool and grill area, rooftop deck, and community garden—but it was still a better deal than the DC apartment he’d shared with Flo Combes. The building had just come into view at the next block as Brixton cut through a narrow side street used mostly for deliveries, servicing the rear entrances of buildings on both sides of it.
The two men must have burst out from the cover of one of those. But Brixton wasn’t thinking that when the punches began to land, before he could adequately defend himself.
I’m being mugged.
A fate he’d managed to escape for all these years living in cities had finally caught up with him. He hesitated before going for his gun, reluctant to use deadly force, and the hesitation cost him, as his attackers continued to show no interest in his pockets, only in pummeling him instead. He managed to unleash a flurry of blows that knocked one of the men off to the side. He turned toward the second in time to see a knife flash forward in his hand, angled on an upward slant toward his thorax in the kind of practiced thrust a mere mugger would never try.
Which meant this was man was no mugger; he was a pro, someone well schooled in such things, who’d stuck blade in flesh before.
Brixton tried to twist aside to retaliate, but a pair of powerful hands belonging to the attacker he’d thought he’d neutralized—another pro, clearly—grasped him from behind, pinning him in place, with the knife close enough that Brixton could smell the lubricant oil.
And that’s when the blur appeared, shape more than substance. A whirling dervish of blows wielded with a dexterity that seemed almost like a dance, hands and feet working in unison. One attacker down and then the other, before Brixton could form his next thought. The knife ended up by his feet, and he stamped on it for no real reason.
He didn’t remember looking down, but he must have, because when he looked up, a woman almost as tall as he was stood before him, her breathing even. The knife Brixton thought he’d clamped his foot on was somehow in her grasp, now dripping blood.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, taking him by the arm.
CHAPTER
38
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
Brixton pulled his arm from her grasp as they moved fast toward the head of the side street.
“You killed them,” he heard himself say, as if someone else had uttered the statement.
“No choice,” the woman said, eyes shifting about.
“They could’ve been muggers.”
“They weren’t muggers. And I couldn’t risk leaving them alive so they might identify me. We couldn’t risk it.”
“So you killed them to protect both of us.”
“After I saved your life.”
They reached the head of the street, and Brixton stopped in his tracks. “Who are you?”
“Time for that later. Right now we need to get to your apartment. There could be more of them.”
“You know where I live. You were following me…”
“Lucky for you, Robert, since you’d be dead otherwise. Can I call you Robert?”
“You just saved my life. You can call me anything you want.”
* * *
Brixton’s right hand had swelled up badly around the knuckles. The woman was filling a ziplock bag with crushed ice from the automatic dispenser built into his refrigerator.
“Do you have something I can strap this on with?”
He pulled his belt from his pants loops and handed it to her. “I need to make a tighter fist. What you did…”
“It’s called Krav Maga, a martial art I’ve been practicing for, oh, forty years maybe.”
“Israeli,” Brixton realized.
“I suppose the accent would’ve given me away soon enough.”
The woman placed the ice pack atop the swollen back of his hand and then fastened his belt tightly around it. She stepped away to inspect her handiwork.
“I once watched a bullet being removed from one of our commandos in the field.”
“I’m glad you didn’t have to go that far tonight.”
“Lia Ganz,” the woman said, extending her left hand toward Brixton so he wouldn’t have to use his right.
“Name rings a bell.”
“You were with SITQUAL for a stretch, meaning it’s quite possible that our paths crossed at one time or another.”
Brixton eased his hand away. “I guess I don’t have to introduce myself. You must have picked me up outside the Metro station.”
She nodded again. “To make sure nobody else was doing the same.”
“I’m feeling really stupid right now.”
“Don’t. Those men were pros.”
“And since you were following me…”
Lia didn’t nod this time. “We need to have a talk.”
* * *
She went first, laying out in detail what had brought her to Washington. She told the tale chronologically, starting with Caesarea and moving on to her visit to the young woman in the Israeli prison, and then the Kif Tzuba a
musement park in the Judean Heights, where Dar Ibrahim al-Bis had built a terrorist workshop beneath an old storage shed. She stressed the evidence of the link between the transmitter and camera recovered from that workshop and the ones worn by the suicide bomber in the Metro.
The bomber who, if Panama was to be believed, hadn’t been a terrorist at all but a stooge of the man who had rented a UPS Store mailbox under the name Brian Kirkland. Brixton laid all that out for her in similarly meticulous fashion, one professional to another, although the physical prowess of Lia Ganz far exceeded his own—and that of pretty much everyone else he’d ever worked with.
The Israeli mind-set and penchant for training their warriors, it seemed, hadn’t changed since 1948.
The more Brixton dove into the events that had begun that morning three days ago on the Metro, the more he realized how much his knowledge paralleled hers. He finished with meeting Panama at Georgetown Waterfront Park and then moved on to the UPS Store in Reston, Virginia.
“You want to give me a hint about what you’re leaving out?” Lia Ganz asked him, once he’d finished.
“What makes you think I left anything out?”
“Take a guess at how many Islamic terrorists I’ve interrogated—no, don’t bother. Suffice it to say I’ve learned how to tell when a man is lying.”
“I’m not lying.”
“No, only omitting. Same thing, in my book. By the way, remind me to tell you what I once did with a book to an especially vile enemy operator.”
“I’m hoping the same fate doesn’t await me.”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On you, Robert. Whether you want to come clean about what you’re not telling me. One grandparent to another.”
Brixton tried not to look surprised or unnerved by Lia Ganz’s knowledge of his personal history. He had no doubt she was also aware of the suicide bombing that had claimed his daughter’s life while he watched. Israelis were no stranger to misery, either.
Murder on the Metro Page 17
