Murder on the Metro

by Margaret Truman

  “Then maybe I didn’t make clear how high up my contacts go. The deep state personified, Robert. I’m talking career officials who won’t take kindly to someone rewriting the Constitution and turning the East Coast into a graveyard. And, if you let me, I think I know the strategy to pursue.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Make sure word gets out, through the right sources, that the president has literally lost his mind.”

  “You don’t think the first lady would be prepared for that?”

  Smith flashed his phone again. “I’ve got her in my contacts list too.”

  “Nobody would dare touch this and you know it, Mac. Corbin Talmidge’s approval rating is higher than it’s ever been, and the only thing stopping him from coasting to a second term is the fact that he can’t string two coherent sentences together unless they’re written down before him. Even if they believed you, they’d never risk their careers on coming forward, on the chance your information it wrong or faulty. Or, this being paranoid Washington, if they think they’re being set up.”

  Smith nodded. “You raise a good point, Robert, so let me make another of my own. Do you really think I’m going to just stand by and let you and your Israeli friend handle this alone?”

  “We’re not going to be alone, Mr. Smith,” Lia Ganz said, seeming to have materialized out of nowhere, just to the right of the porch steps.

  CHAPTER

  71

  CHESAPEAKE BAY

  She flashed her cell phone in a manner identical to the way Mackensie Smith had just flashed his. Neither Smith nor Brixton had any idea where Ganz had come from or how long she’d been standing there.

  “There are people I can reach out to,” Ganz continued.

  “Who? Your own government recalled you,” Brixton reminded her. “That’s not a strong recipe for requesting backup.”

  “Then I suppose I should make a phone call.”

  * * *

  “You need to come home, Colonel,” Moshe Baruch said, by way of greeting, as soon as he answered the phone.

  “And you need to listen to what I’ve got to say.”

  “I thought I had, prior to your ignoring my instructions and then refusing the orders of the escort team who tracked you down.”

  “Did they file a report?” Lia asked,

  “They didn’t have to. They claimed they weren’t able to locate you. I can read between the lines.”

  “Israel already has enough widows, Commander. The country didn’t need two more.”

  “It also doesn’t need any more grandmothers turned heroes who think they know better.”

  “What I know is what’s coming, and what’s coming is bad, as bad as it gets.”

  “So you hinted at before.”

  “No more hints, Commander. Millions of Americans are going to die and the Middle East is going to be reshaped. Where we fit into that is up for argument. All bets are off.”

  Lia heard Baruch utter a deep sigh. “What do you want from me, Colonel?”

  “Two things, starting with permission—”

  “Which you know I can’t give.”

  “Nor do I expect you to. You didn’t let me finish: Permission to make some phone calls.”

  “To who, exactly?”

  “That’s the second thing I need from you.”

  * * *

  “How many men can you get?” Brixton asked Lia Ganz, after she’d explained what she was asking Moshe Baruch for.

  “The commander says he’ll get back to me. How many do you think we’re going to need?”

  “You mean, short of an army? Why don’t we ask the resident expert?”

  * * *

  Sister Mary Alice was in the living room, seated in silence amid the falling darkness, as if waiting for them to come to her.

  “We need to know everything you do about the site, Y-Twelve,” Brixton said.

  “That would take until my next birthday.”

  “We’ll settle for the condensed version,” interjected Mackensie Smith, as Lia Ganz looked on.

  Smith’s phone came complete with a projection feature that allowed them to project onto a wall a series of photos of Y-12 pulled off the internet. They chose a white, unfinished wall in the same downstairs great room. They also found a pair of thick Magic Markers to better designate areas of interest—their primary target as well as means of entry and exit marking up Mac’s freshly painted wall.

  “Wow, that’s big,” Smith commented, noting the sprawl of the fenced-in compound, which was obvious even in the projection.

  An overhead shot captured the facility in all its scope. It was more like a small city, given the number of buildings and the hundreds of people working in, or responsible for securing, each. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the construction or relative placement. The buildings were long or squat, multiple or single storied, small or large. Parking lots were nestled amid the sprawl. In this particular shot, the cars and trucks looked tiny, but not a lot of pavement was visible.

  “You can ignore all of the structures except for that one,” Sister Mary Alice said, rising to point out a structure set off by itself and enclosed by heavy chain link fencing topped with barbwire.

  Smith enlarged that section, the projection growing blurrier.

  “That’s the dedicated highly enriched uranium facility where I was arrested,” Sister Mary Alice followed. “It hadn’t been opened long when I broke in. They spent a billion dollars building it. This is where they relocated the reserves of HEU that had previously been divided up among five other existing structures that had fallen into disrepair. Those five underground levels were constructed secretly at the same time, the square footage at least equal to the aboveground storage capacity. The United States is, regrettably, not lacking in nuclear waste.”

  Lia Ganz joined the others in front of the wall, though she seemed to be seeing something entirely different in the projection. “These underground levels, that’s where they’ll set the charges. It’ll take a dual explosion, the first with enough force to the implode the aboveground structures so they collapse downward, the second to blow the debris into one massive deadly, toxic cloud. Not a mushroom cloud, but the next best thing.”

  “Or worse, depending on your perspective,” Brixton noted.

  “I think your friend in New York was wrong about the size of the resulting cloud, Robert,” Ganz told him.

  “On the high end or the low?”

  “The low, unfortunately. He said the cloud would stretch between a half mile and a mile in radius. But judging by what I’m seeing in this picture, the size of the facility, the resulting debris field would be closer to two miles.”

  “A two-mile-wide cloud promising death all the way up the East Coast,” Brixton summed up. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  Ganz nodded. “And I think the casualty numbers will definitely top out closer to ten million than five over time. The question being, How do we get inside the complex in order to stop them?”

  “Simple,” Brixton said, joining the two of them at the wall. “The same way Sister Mary Alice did. We take the train.”

  “I might be able to be of service there,” offered Mackensie Smith.

  “You’ve done enough, Mac,” Brixton said stridently. “I can’t let you expose yourself to further risk.”

  “Can you let me make a phone call, Robert? Because the firm has represented the Department of Energy in a number of cases and I still have pretty high-up contacts there. I represented a few of them individually, and one has a rather large outstanding bill.”

  “I believe we must have stood on opposite sides a few times, Mr. Smith,” said a smiling Sister Mary Alice.

  “I’m sure we did, Sister, but not today. Let me make a few phone calls, Robert, and report back on what I come up with. What’s the harm?”

  “I assumed that about a whole bunch of things until a week ago.”

  * * *

  Nearly an hour later, Mackensie Smith returned from
another room, visibly shaking over whatever he’d just learned. He seemed excited, even fervently so.

  “The call turned out to be much more productive than I thought it would. Turns out my contact has suspected something awry at Y-Twelve, particularly thanks to some new security forces that were brought in recently. The man’s got three kids and a wife sick with cancer. He needs the medical, so he did he as he was told.”

  “But he talked to you.”

  Smith nodded. “He’s also a patriot, and I promised to keep his name out of this, as well as erase his legal bills. I think he was waiting for the opportunity, so much so that he also came up with tickets for us.”

  “Tickets?” Brixton repeated.

  Smith nodded. “In the form of Department of Energy inspector credentials that will get you on that train tomorrow, the same one likely to be carrying the explosives intended to re-create the Big Bang. He’s going to call me to arrange pickup as soon as he has them in hand, likely in a few hours.”

  Lia Ganz took the floor. “These new security forces your friend mentioned will be playing the role of the Islamic terrorists who are going to be pinned with the blame for this. The first lady and the other conspirators have thought of everything, haven’t they?”

  “Except us,” Brixton told her.

  CHAPTER

  72

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Merle Talmidge sat in a chair before her husband in the media room of the White House residence, where they’d set up a podium so he could practice the eulogy he’d be giving for Stephanie Davenport the next day. Such visuals were vital in establishing the kind of connections his failing mind could still grasp.

  Corbin Talmidge could no longer read a speech off paper, because he inevitably lost his place. Nor could they use a teleprompter, since the colored stream of lit letters distracted him to the point that he’d forget where he was and what he was doing. The amazing thing about his mental decline, though, was that it had seemed to leave him with a savant-like ability to memorize what he was supposed to say. And as long as he was reciting the words from memory, he was able to stay on task and focus only on what had been stored in his mind through multiple practices.

  When he finished his third try at the speech without a single flaw or slipup, the first lady burst to her feet, clapping.

  “I did well?” her husband asked her.

  “It was brilliant.”

  He was grinning now, beaming. “I did well.”

  Merle Talmidge hugged him tightly, felt him trembling slightly under her grasp. And when they separated, she could see his eyes were moist with tears.

  “The things I’m going to say about this woman, the vice president, they were true, weren’t they?”

  “She was a good woman,” the first lady said, leaving it there. “And she served this country well.”

  The president nodded at that, his mind working to make sense of what was in his mind. “Can I practice the speech again?”

  “If you’d like, but you don’t have to.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You’re ready. We’ll practice again tomorrow before we leave for the church.”

  “I’d like that,” he said, smiling, but the smile slipped from his face as quickly as it had appeared. “I liked the vice president, too, didn’t I?”

  “Very much.”

  “I wish I could remember more about her. I remember her smile.”

  “She was a pleasant person, but tough when she had to be.”

  “Like you,” her husband said. “You can be tough when you have to be. I’ve seen that.”

  “We all have to be tough right now.” The first lady hesitated, ready to test the waters again on something else. “That’s why you need me by your side.”

  “Like you are now,” Corbin Talmidge said, speaking literally.

  “I meant in a different way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “As your vice president, like we discussed.”

  “I’d like that.” Her husband beamed.

  “It’s what’s best for the country.”

  “We could work together.”

  “Yes.”

  “You could keep helping me do things.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d like that,” the president repeated, tensing suddenly. “Did we kill her?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman who died, the vice president. Stephanie Davenport—that’s her name. Did we kill her?”

  It was that way with the president sometimes. Out of nowhere, his mind would latch on to something he’d gleaned but couldn’t always keep track of. It was like a remnant, a shadow in his mind that he couldn’t stop following.

  “We had to,” the first lady said, surprising herself with the honesty.

  “Why, if she was a good person?”

  “Because she meant to do us harm. Because sometimes even good people can do bad things, the wrong things. She didn’t believe in what we were doing.”

  “Did we have to kill her? Couldn’t we have just asked her to stop?”

  “She wanted to hurt you,” the first lady said, also honestly.

  “She did?”

  “She wanted to hurt you badly.”

  “I don’t remember wanting to hurt her.”

  “Because you didn’t,” Merle Talmidge told her husband, rubbing his shoulders in a way that comforted him.

  He looked sad, almost mournful. “She must not have liked me all of a sudden.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Why? What did I do?”

  “You believed things needed to happen that she didn’t agree with. She didn’t want you to be president anymore.”

  “But I’m a good president.”

  “You are.”

  “I’ve done good things.”

  “You have,” Merle Talmidge said, hugging her husband again. “But the best one of all is still to come.”

  CHAPTER

  73

  CHESAPEAKE BAY

  Brixton spent much of the night working with Sister Mary Alice Rose to familiarize himself with every inch of the complex. He was no stranger to such a process—far from it, thanks to his protective work on behalf of the State Department during his tenure with SITQUAL. Site intelligence was crucial to manage when it came to planning routes and positioning detail personnel in static locations. This was little different than that, though it had been a long time since his memory had been tested to this degree. When working the field, you never had time to consult a written note. Everything had to be available on instant recall, and in this case that meant committing to memory both the available photographs of Y-12 and the details Sister Mary Alice was able to add from her own amazingly sharp recollection.

  “I think time has been frozen for me these past few years,” she said, by way of explanation. “I feel like I was arrested in Oak Ridge yesterday.”

  “Here’s hoping you don’t face a similar fate tomorrow, Sister,” Brixton told her.

  * * *

  Lia Ganz was waiting outside Mackensie Smith’s unfinished home when the four Israeli special operators she’d been expecting arrived in a pair of SUVs. She immediately recognized the two who emerged from the lead vehicle as the same pair who’d pulled her over on the road the night before.

  “No hard feelings, Colonel?” the bigger of the two asked, smiling.

  “Of course not. You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

  * * *

  Mackensie Smith returned from his rendezvous with his contact at the Department of Energy, toting proper clothing for Ganz, Brixton, and Sister Mary Alice, having been advised that the Israelis would be bringing their own. He also had the proper badges, passes, and authorizations in hand, along with actual equipment provided by his Department of Energy contact, in keeping with exactly what site inspectors would be expected to bring along with them.

  They worked through the remainder of the night, hollowing out portions of the inspection equipment to create space to conceal
weapons. As expected, sidearms were all that would fit, along with a number of extra magazines.

  That process complete, they painstakingly reviewed the pictures and intelligence on the massive storage facility on the outskirts of the complex, a base within a base. As Department of Energy inspectors, it was crucial that they at least appear to enjoy a general familiarity with the logistics and protocols. The Israelis, of course, were more interested in the logistics from an operations standpoint, asking questions about areas of concealment, what might blow up if impacted by a bullet, the lighting, noise levels, size, scope, distance—no detail was omitted from their preparation. And when that was completed, they disappeared out into the darkness of Mac Smith’s one acre of land to prep physically.

  While the Israelis were off training somewhere on the property, Brixton walked to the end of the private pier, where he found Lia Ganz gazing out into the night.

  “Grandparents shouldn’t have to do what we’re about to do,” she said, without turning his way. “Such work should be left to the young.”

  “We were young once.”

  Ganz looked toward Brixton through the darkness. “I tell myself I’m doing this for my granddaughter. But I’m not. I’m doing it for myself.”

  Now it was Brixton staring straight ahead over the softly rippling waters of Tangier Sound. “I think I’m doing it for my daughter Janet. I think a lot of the things I’ve done these past five years have been about her, not all of them good.”

  Ganz let that remark pass. “You know what Israelis are good at more than anything? Living with the past instead of trying to change it.”

  “You can’t change the past, Lia.”

  Their eyes finally met.

  “Figure of speech, Robert. Maybe I should have said relive it.”

  “A comment aimed at me.”

  Brixton felt her take the hand that had been dangling by his side. She squeezed, and he squeezed back.