Murder on the Metro

by Margaret Truman

  The address in question, she learned next by running a search, housed the office of a psychiatrist named Elinor Marks, of all things. It made Rendine wonder whether a deeper check of the vice president’s log would reveal more such visits, but that wasn’t foremost in her thinking right now.

  She called Dr. Marks’s office, but it went straight to voice mail.

  “Dr. Marks,” she started, “this is Kendra Rendine, head of Vice President Stephanie Davenport’s security detail, and I have a few questions pertaining to a routine investigation I’m following. If you could please call me at…”

  As soon as she hung up, Rendine thought about heading over to Marks’s office in Georgetown, but her latest burner phone ringing with the very number she’d just dialed saved her that bother.

  “Agent Rendine, this is Elinor Marks. I got your message.”

  “Thanks for such a quick response, Doctor. I was wondering if I could steal a few minutes of your time.”

  “I’m between appointments right now, if that’s convenient for you.”

  Rendine had hoped to meet with the doctor in person, but this would suit her just as well. “According to the logs, the vice president met with you just over a month ago.”

  “She did, for the first time in several years. I treated her for a time, well before she became vice president, around the time of her husband’s death. As a matter of fact, before she was added to the ticket, I was interviewed as part of the vetting process.”

  Rendine let that remark hang in the air. “A delicate question next, Doctor: Did she come to you seeking treatment of any kind again?”

  Rendine waited for Dr. Marks to respond, continuing when she didn’t.

  “Since Vice President Davenport died of a serious health issue, we want to make sure we didn’t miss—I didn’t miss—any health-related issues.”

  “I can definitely say you didn’t in this case, Agent,” Dr. Marks told her. “The vice president didn’t come to me seeking treatment, at least not for herself.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Her mother, just past eighty now, with her health rapidly declining.”

  Rendine was glad they were speaking over the phone so Elinor Marks wouldn’t be able to see her reaction to what she’d just heard.

  “Mental health, I’m assuming, then,” she managed to respond.

  “I’m afraid so, yes. Her questions were specifically related to symptoms of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but they weren’t all related to her mother’s condition. She was interested in the genetic prevalence of mental deterioration.”

  “So the vice president could gauge whether she was a candidate as well.”

  “She mentioned her father, too, Agent, specifically that he had begun displaying symptoms at a much earlier age. Late fifties, I believe, but I might be able to pin that down further if I check my notes.”

  “No need,” Rendine said, through the heaviness that had settled in her chest, making her feel short of breath. “I’m just filling in some general holes here.”

  “The vice president was most interested in the specific symptoms of early-onset dementia and how the disease generally progresses. I told her it doesn’t ‘generally’ progress, that everyone is different and the only thing all patients have in common is it never ends well, although the mental deterioration can be slowed, sometimes significantly, by medication and mental exercises aimed at retraining the mind for its new reality.”

  New reality indeed, Rendine thought, that phrase frozen in her mind.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you, Agent?” Dr. Elinor Marks resumed, when Rendine failed to respond.

  “Sorry, Doctor, I was just making some notes,” she lied. “No, I think I’ve got everything I need. Thank you for your time.”

  “A pleasure. Stephanie Davenport’s death is a terrible blow for this country.”

  “I do have one last question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Did anyone else contact you about your meeting with the vice president, either from the Secret Service or another agency, even an individual?”

  “No,” Marks told her. “The conversation was so mundane, if it had been held with anyone else, I would probably have forgotten it by now. But since this was the vice president…”

  “I understand, Doctor.”

  “Well, if there’s anything else I can do…”

  “Thank you. Of course.”

  Rendine ended the call without realizing she’d done so. She was still staring at her now darkened burner phone, a layer of cold sweat starting to slip through her shirt.

  Stephanie Davenport’s Green Beret father had been killed in the latter days of the Vietnam War, when she was a child, having never made it to his thirtieth birthday. And her mother was still alive, a spry eighty-three-year-old. The vice president had lied to Elinor Marks, after making an off-the-books visit to her office to inquire about a problem that didn’t exist, just three days after her fateful meeting with the president.

  Because there was a problem, all right, and if the suspicions that had left Rendine trembling were correct, it was bigger than she or anyone else could have possibly imagined.

  Far bigger.

  CHAPTER

  50

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  Ever heard of it?” Sister Mary Alice asked Brixton, after a pause that seemed longer than it was.

  “This Y-Twelve facility? At some point. Nothing that sticks, though.”

  The nun folded her arms atop the school desk in which she was seated across from him. “Don’t feel bad, Robert. Most people haven’t, even though it’s a nuclear facility.”

  “Did you say nuclear?” Brixton said, knowing he was about to learn the nun’s connection to all this.

  “The largest nuclear storage facility anywhere in the world,” Mary Alice Rose elaborated. “Specifically, radioactive fuel for the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile.”

  Brixton thought back to the blueprints that had been spread out on the counter of the Reston, Virginia, UPS Store when he and Panama had entered, how Sister Mary Alice Rose’s federal prison ID number had been scrawled beneath plans for something Panama had yet to identify.

  Largest nuclear storage facility anywhere in the world.

  So the man calling himself Brian Kirkland, who’d orchestrated a suicide bombing in the Washington Metro, might well have been in possession of blueprints that provided everything he needed to know about the Y-12 facility from a structural standpoint.

  “And that’s where you were arrested?” he asked, the unimaginable nature of that conclusion still numbing his thought process.

  Sister Mary Alice lifted her arms from the table and leaned back, crossing them before her. “Are you in a rush, Robert?’

  “Not at all.”

  “Good, because I have a story to tell you…”

  * * *

  Sister Mary Alice Rose started closer to the end than the beginning, with the fact that she had been charged with sabotage, trespassing, and destroying government property as part of what she called a peaceful protest not so much against the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, facility in question as against the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal.

  “Why this particular facility?” Brixton asked, interrupting her.

  “Because Y-Twelve stores hundreds of thousands of pounds of radioactive fuel, meaning highly enriched uranium, for the country’s aging nuclear weapons stockpile.”

  Brixton felt the same chill go up his spine at mention of that. “Did you say hundreds of thousands?”

  She scolded him with her eyes. “I’m the one who’s eighty-five, Robert. I think you heard me just fine.”

  “And, just so I’m clear, we’re talking about weapons-grade uranium here.”

  “Hundreds of thousands of pounds of it,” Sister Mary Alice reiterated. “Shocks you to the core, doesn’t it?”

  She went on to explain that she had gained entry to the facility armed with only paint, candles, a hammer, and a Bible
. Once inside the perimeter, she wrote passages from Scripture on the side of the facility and chipped at its white concrete walls with her hammer. When security guards finally closed on her position, they found her singing “Take Me to the Mountain,” and she proceeded to offer the officers Communion bread.

  In response, they handcuffed the then eighty-three-year-old nun and left her sitting on the ground for hours, under watch by a bevy of security guards wearing body armor and brandishing assault rifles. When Sister Mary Alice was arraigned the next day, she was ushered into court in shackles. Federal prosecutors charged her with intent to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense of the United States, along with the more serious charge of sabotage. Sister Mary Alice was sentenced to ten years in prison and fined tens of thousands of dollars, which she was unable to pay, thanks to her vow of poverty rendering her basically penniless.

  “Okay,” Brixton said at that point. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why risk your freedom?”

  Sister Mary Alice’s expression turned reflective. “My father fought in World War Two. He was in Nagasaki six weeks after the bomb. The stories he told when I was a young girl … Let’s just say those words never left me. He made me feel like I was there, witnessing the devastation firsthand. You know the biggest problem with time, Robert?”

  “It passes,” Brixton tried.

  “Exactly. And with the passage of time, as I grew older, the world forgot the horror a nuclear world can unleash. Even Chernobyl didn’t make enough of a dent in the world’s psyche.”

  “And you thought breaking into a secure government installation with a hammer and some song lyrics could change that?”

  “I think I had to try. Words, op-eds and the like, were all meaningless. Somebody had to make a difference.”

  “You.”

  “Me.”

  “And did you make that difference? Was it worth it?”

  “No, to the first question,” Sister Mary Alice told Brixton. “Yes, to the second, because it drew attention to the fact that over the years hundreds of millions of dollars have been slashed from nuclear nonproliferation programs. That money has been funneled into maintaining stores of bomb-ready enriched uranium and plutonium. Y-Twelve, for example, is operating with three hundred less private security contractors than were employed when they were storing half the fissionable material they are now.”

  “Wait, did you say private contractors?”

  The old nun nodded. “The Y-Twelve National Security Complex may be umbrellaed under the Department of Energy, but it’s actually managed by a private concern, and I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to the level of training their security personnel receive.”

  “Not enough, compared to the pros, it’s safe to say.” Brixton paused to stare into Sister Mary Alice’s crystal-blue eyes. “And that’s why you staged this one-person protest, to draw attention to all this.”

  “Do you know how many times over those hundreds of thousands of pounds of fuel could destroy the world, Robert?”

  “No.”

  “Just short of three hundred, conservatively.”

  “Not a figure you drew out of a hat.”

  Sister Mary Alice smiled at that. “I did a master’s thesis on future nuclear proliferation and studied nuclear isotopes under some of the best minds in the world.”

  “All because of your father.”

  “The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can never be repeated, Robert. But if we don’t do something about it, they surely will. It’s inevitable. The Y-Twelve facility isn’t the only one that stores enriched uranium, just the largest. And there’s no way to even estimate how much more of the stuff there might be out there these days, what with Israel, North Korea, India, and Pakistan not exactly being up-front about the size and scope of their nuclear arsenals. How long do you think it will be before an ISIS or al-Qaeda get their hands on enough bomb-grade material to kill millions? And, unlike the nations long stopped from using nuclear weapons by the old mutually assured destruction mandate, you can’t bomb a cause the same way you can a country.”

  Brixton smiled. The nun was right at home, playing the role of teacher here in her prison classroom. “So you also broke into Y-Twelve to demonstrate how easy it was.”

  Sister Mary Alice nodded. “Now it’s my turn, Robert,” she said, before he could further press that issue. “You said you had reason to believe my life was in danger.”

  “Strong reason, Sister.”

  “Why?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “And have I?”

  “Maybe,” Brixton said, thinking again of those structural schematics pulled from Brian Kirkland’s UPS Store mailbox. “I’m not sure.”

  The old nun eyed him like an old-fashioned Catholic school teacher ready to take a wooden ruler to his knuckles. “What really brought you here, Robert?”

  “I told you.”

  Her eyes scolded him again, even harsher. “I haven’t had a visitor other than my lawyers in over two years. I don’t receive any mail. I’m not allowed to send any mail. You think I’m going to believe that a simple private investigator was able to get in here to see me?”

  “I’m not working alone,” Brixton said, leaving it there.

  “I suspected as much.”

  “And I think this Y-Twelve facility may be part of something much bigger.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Okay, then tell me what else has happened that brought you here. Was there another break-in? Was some of that bomb-grade material found missing?”

  Brixton could have told her about the connection between the murder of the vice president and the Metro bombing. How whoever was behind both of those was, by all indications, in possession of the plans for the largest nuclear storage facility in the United States and had clearly taken an interest in an eighty-five-year-old nun who’d managed to penetrate its security to gain entry. The forces behind Brian Kirkland clearly wanted Sister Mary Alice Rose out of the way so she couldn’t pass on what she knew to anyone else.

  “Robert?” Sister Mary Alice prodded. “You haven’t answered my question. Was there another break-in at the facility that calls itself the Fort Knox of uranium?”

  “No,” Brixton said, struck by the irony of her statement. “But I’m afraid one might be coming.”

  CHAPTER

  51

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  They kept Lia Ganz waiting for well over an hour. It was approaching three o’clock by the time a key rattled in the lock. The sky had darkened beyond the single grated window centered behind a large wooden desk kept meticulously neat, not even a telephone or computer atop it. The room was rustic, the walls wood-paneled, the bare wood floors stained dark. She imagined this to be the office of one of the former bank’s executives. There were slightly discolored rectangular patches of paneling where wall hangings had clearly been removed. Even the ornate bookshelves built into a portion of a side wall were virtually empty, save for a small selection of books with Arabic writing down their spines.

  Lia had, of course, set this course for herself purposely, wanting to arouse the kind of suspicion in the men guarding the mosque that would ensure she was brought to the imam for questioning. She’d learned over the years that those who believed they had the upper hand gave away much more in their conversations.

  The door opened and the man who’d originally accosted her entered first, his back against the open door as the imam of Masjid Us Salaam, Haussam Zimaar Alaf, entered. He was a bit portlier than the picture Mossad had texted her had showed, indicating it must have been an older shot, likely “borrowed” from the American FBI, since Mossad databases themselves would never have been that outdated. He had soft, warm eyes that bled compassion, his very stride reverent as he moved past the guard, who closed the door to leave the two of them alone.

  “My man tells me there may be a problem,” the imam began.

&n
bsp; “Not with me, I assure you.”

  Alaf seemed to be studying her words carefully. “My man told me your Arabic was far too precise for an American, and yet your appearance clearly indicates a convert.”

  “From Judaism,” Lia confessed, doing her best to sound ashamed.

  That caught the imam’s interest.

  “A mistake of birth that will forever be the source of embarrassment,” she continued, her voice humble and her eyes held downward.

  “You are Israeli, then?”

  Lia nodded reluctantly. “I married a man of Arab descent. We could not have children, but our love more than compensated for that … until the Jews came and took him away. To prison, where he died, where they killed him.”

  “You have my deepest regrets.”

  “And I thank you for them,” Lia said, amazed at how easily her mastery of Arabic had returned. “I’m new to this area and looking to make it home, starting with finding a place to worship.”

  “You understand we must be sure of all this before you can be welcomed.”

  “Of course.”

  “You understand your story must be checked out.”

  Lia nodded.

  The imam hesitated before resuming, his soft gaze hardening as his vision narrowed. “You understand that you speak our language exactly as Israeli spies and killers are trained to.”

  “No, I don’t, actually.”

  “You are not Mossad?”

  “No.”

  “You weren’t sent by the Americans on a fool’s errand?”

  “I was not, Your Holiness,” Lia said, just enough reverence in her voice.

  “You would claim not to be part of any setup, nothing like that, then.”

  Something scratched at Lia’s spine. “I know nothing of any of that,” she said.

  “It is difficult sometimes to tell our friends from our enemies.”

  “This I know all too well.”

  “The Americans seem to suspect we are harboring radicals within our walls.”

  “How terrible. How wrong.”

  “They did not send you?”