Fate of the Union

by Max Allan Collins

  The night-shattering report was in his ears as Reeder dove for the asphalt, then rolled onto snowy ground and scrambled into the trees, ducking behind the nearest one, which took a shot meant for him, spewing fragmented bark and splintered wood.

  When Reeder eased out for a look, red brake lights signaled the Nissan’s hesitation just before the vehicle turned onto the road, and was gone.

  For perhaps thirty seconds, Reeder—his shoulder screaming louder than the sirens—leaned forward with his hands on the knees of legs whose muscles were burning with an intensity to rival the buildings, and he breathed slowly, slowly, slowly, trying not to die.

  Rogers came trotting up through the trees. “And you gave me shit for trying to save somebody in a burning building?”

  “You can’t . . . can’t . . . save . . . a . . . corpse.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know it was a corpse. And you knew that was a guy with a rifle. You aren’t armed, are you?”

  He stood erect. Shook his head.

  She came over and took his arm and squeezed. “You okay?”

  “Let me ask you something,” Reeder said.

  “What?”

  “Metal detectors, security people, how did our ex–Ohio state trooper get into Constitution Hall?”

  “This came to you now?”

  “Just now.”

  Her eyebrows lifted as her breath smoked. “Well, I imagine Bohannon and Wade are all over that. We can check with them. But let’s deal with this first.”

  Walking between trees, Rogers supported Reeder by the arm, and back across the snowy ground and then snowy cement to where fire trucks and police cars were parading into the lot.

  Rogers had her cell out. “I’ll make sure Bohannon and Wade are as smart as you are, and then I’ll let Miggie know what happened here.”

  While she did that, Reeder went over to speak to the first uniformed policeman on site. He still had the FBI consultant’s ID in his billfold from last year, and he hoped that would suffice.

  The cop climbing from the first squad car was well scrubbed and wore a navy-blue winter jacket with a Charlottesville badge on the left and “CHANEY” on a patch on the right.

  As Reeder approached, the young cop’s eyes grew wide and his steamy breath came more quickly.

  “You’re Joe Reeder!” he said, amazed, extending his hand.

  As gloved hands shook, Reeder thought, About damn time this hero crap paid off.

  “It’s an honor, Mr. Reeder.”

  Reeder nodded. “Officer Chaney. First name?”

  “Tim, sir.”

  “Tim,” Reeder said, jerking a thumb toward the destruction around him. “You’ve arrived in the middle of an incident relating to a federal investigation. It’s going to be a very long night for all of us. But first we need a BOLO out on a Nissan Altima. And I have plates for you.”

  As he continued to fill Chaney in, firefighters were hard at it, spraying down the twin blazes. The fiftyish chief—an obvious veteran, cool and in command—supervised and quickly called for reinforcements. EMTs were putting the corpse on a stretcher, with no pretense of trying to save an obviously dead body. Rogers was with them, getting pictures of the deceased with her cell.

  “You need your detectives out here, Tim,” Reeder advised the young uniform. “The FBI will be handling the investigation, but your people will be in on it. This is arson and murder, for starters.”

  The kid was doing a good job tamping down the celebrity worship. He said, “Yes, sir,” and called dispatch on his shoulder radio.

  Her pictures taken, and seeing Reeder was no longer talking to the cop, Rogers headed back over, shaking her head.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Bohannon and Wade had the same thought you did, only about four hours ago. They’ve been watching security video.”

  “Lucky them.”

  “Not a single damn frame of Stanton coming through the metal detectors.”

  Reeder thought about that, briefly. “If he didn’t come in the front, then he came in the back.”

  She nodded. “Inside job, then.”

  “Was the security a mix of Constitution Hall’s own people and Benjamin’s?”

  “Yes, but mostly Benjamin’s.” She frowned. “Did one of them let somebody in to take out their own boss?”

  “That’s a good solid maybe,” Reeder said. “Nasty as that is, at least we have somewhere to start.”

  Rogers’s cell phone vibrated in her hand. She looked at the caller ID and put it on speaker so Reeder could hear.

  She said, “What do you have, Miggie?”

  “Like to know why those two buildings blew?”

  “We’re on the scene, standing in the glow of two fires, and you know why the buildings blew?”

  “I do,” he said with a smile in his voice. “We got lab results on Bryson’s clothes. Either of you ever hear of something called Senkstone?”

  She gave Reeder a raised eyebrow look.

  He said, “That’s s-e-n-k Senkstone?”

  “Surely is,” Miggie said. His voice was crisp and confident coming from the tiny cell speaker. “Five years ago, Senkstone was a failed plastic explosive—real next-gen stuff, but unstable as hell. So the company responsible shut down. Well, there were traces of the stuff on Bryson’s clothes.”

  “Judging by the fires around us,” Rogers said, “it may still be unstable.”

  “More likely,” Reeder said, leaning in for Miggie to hear, “someone figured out how to stabilize it, and for some as yet unknown reason, decided to cover up that discovery.”

  Rogers said, “I’m sending you some pictures, Miggie. See if you can ID the guy before we get back.”

  “Can you send me his prints?”

  “Can’t. Burned off.”

  She sent the pics and ended the call. Then she looked at Reeder and said, “So this is what date night is like with Joe Reeder, huh?”

  “Now you know why my ex divorced me,” he said.

  She shrugged. “At least it’s not boring.”

  “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States of America, Senator and Representative from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1947–1960.

  Section 45, Grid U-35, Arlington National Cemetery.

  FOURTEEN

  Dawn arrived with them as they hit DC, the sun making picture-perfect postcards of the Capitol and its majestic neighbors. Rogers, behind the wheel, thought about nudging Reeder awake, but decided against it, though she knew he had a sentimental streak for the city and its history.

  After a long night into wee-hours morning, dealing with efficient but dogged local cops, she’d caught an hour’s catnap while Reeder spelled her; snoozing in the passenger seat, arms folded, he seemed to have finally found a comfortable compromise between his sore shoulder and the seat belt.

  He asked from behind closed eyes, “Who knew we were going to Charlottesville?”

  “We made the decision in the conference room, remember,” she said, “and left from there.”

  His eyes remained closed. “So most of the task force team knew . . . including Miggie.”

  “Right. Excluding Bohannon and Wade, over at Constitution Hall.”

  He opened his eyes, tasted his mouth, didn’t like it, straightened, grimaced, readjusted his seat belt, asked, “What about the motor pool guy?”

  “I signed out the car without a destination.”

  “That narrows the suspect field by one, anyway.”

  “You think we were set up?”

  “You don’t? Our best lead, so far, blows up in our face, and not metaphorically. You can’t think that’s a coincidence.”

  She was a few blocks from the Hoover Building. “I don’t, but I trust my team. I vetted them personally.”

  He gave her a sideways glance. “You and I have less than spotless records in that regard.”

  Rogers di
dn’t need to be reminded that the Supreme Court task force had included a betrayer.

  “I was very damn careful,” she said, “when I put this team together.”

  “You didn’t select Detective Woods,” Reeder said.

  “He’s not one of us.”

  “In a way he is.”

  “But Woods wasn’t around when we decided to go to Charlottesville.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe somebody on the team filled him in about our road trip. Maybe somebody called Bohannon and Wade, just keeping them up to speed, and then they told Woods. We need to check, first opportunity.”

  “All right.”

  “And even if Woods didn’t know about Charlottesville, what do we know about the man? Just that he’s new, was assigned the Bryson investigation, initially bobbled it, and then was on the scene right away at the security office break-in.”

  “You might be reaching, Joe.”

  “Probably am. But just the same, let’s have Miggie check him out—discreetly.”

  “Then you do trust Miggie?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Even though he sent us to a couple of buildings that exploded in our laps?”

  Half a grin cracked his placid mask. “You’re starting to sound like me.”

  “Paranoid you mean?”

  “Patti,” he said, “if after all we’ve been through together, you aren’t paranoid? You’re just not trying.”

  She laughed. “Okay, you’ve made your point. But looking at our team, and its extended family? It’s hardly the only possibility.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Miggie says whoever removed Bryson from the equation had skills enough to turn on the GPS on that burner phone, and track him with it, with your friend none the wiser.”

  He gave her a sharp look. “Then they weren’t following Chris—they were ahead of him.”

  She nodded. “I think we’re up against some seriously professional big-leaguers who we need to get a bead on, before we start accusing our own.”

  He thought about that.

  Then he said, “Consider me on the same page.”

  She smiled, trying not to look too proud of herself.

  “But, Patti, let’s still be careful about what we say in front of our people . . . till we know who your big-leaguers are.”

  The number of media vehicles outside the J. Edgar Hoover Building had tripled by the time Rogers pulled into the underground garage. Some were waiting on foot next to the ramp, catching Rogers and Reeder arriving on camera; but uniformed officers kept the reporters and camera crews back and out of the garage.

  Upstairs in the Special Situations Task Force bullpen, she and Reeder found every desk vacant but for the one that had recently been assigned to Miggie. Before they’d left for Charlottesville, Rogers had encouraged her team to work for another hour and then go home for some rest and cleanup; it would be late morning before they’d be back in.

  As for their Latino computer expert, he had obviously been glued to his chair all night, no doubt mainlining free-trade Sumatran, at least judging by the way his fingers were still flying at the virtual keyboard.

  Reeder went right to him and pulled over chairs for himself and Rogers.

  He said to Miggie, “Once upon a time there was something called Senkstone . . . do you know the rest of the story?”

  Miggie grinned, obviously ready to be asked. “Okay if I skip the fairy-tale framework and stick to the facts, Mr. Reeder? ’Cause there’s no happily ever after.”

  “Make it ‘Joe.’ A coffee guy like you oughta be able to remember that.”

  Another grin. “Let’s start with the SIM card pic of that black what’s-it. I’m pretty sure Senkstone, Senk for short, is what our solid-black Rubik’s Cube consisted of. Now, from the outset you need to understand something—none of the net hits we got on ‘senk’ referred to any kind of explosive. Not one.”

  Reeder’s smile was faint but there. “So how is it you found out that’s what it was?”

  “I’ll get to that. But next let’s look at Chris Bryson and Jay Akers—two smart guys who used to be in the Secret Service, both of whom had long since developed a good, experienced feel for big-time dangerous.”

  “Fair statement.”

  “Both of them are concerned about Senk. Both of them got recently made dead—the first after expressing concern about Senk to his wife, the other killed on the job, but making Senk one of his last words.”

  Rogers asked, “What do we make of that?”

  “We come up with two smart guys who mention a word that refers to something that, I think we can safely extrapolate, both of them considered incredibly dangerous.”

  Reeder said, “Let’s so extrapolate.”

  “Fine,” Miggie said, sitting forward, “but this incredibly dangerous thing called Senk doesn’t exist . . . at least, not if you ask the net about it.”

  “Everything that exists is on the net.”

  “Right, Joe. That’s why I started searching places that don’t exist.”

  “Miggie,” Rogers said, half smiling, “maybe you need to knock off for a while. Catch some sleep like the other humans.”

  He waved her off. “Joe . . . Patti . . . there are entire networks not open to the public: the Silk Road for illegal drugs, the Armory for guns, dozens of others on the Dark Web. Nucleus, Agora, a slew of ’em used for all kinds of illegal activities.”

  Reeder said, “And that’s where you found out about Senkstone.”

  “Not quite. I found rumors of a compound that was said to be the next generation of plastic explosives . . . but at first it was like a sea creature said to inhabit a certain loch in Scotland—lots of talk, no proof. Then, at the Armory site, I found a chat room where guys were talking about how cool this compound would be if it did exist.”

  “What would make it ‘cool’ to a chat room like that?”

  The lightness went out of Miggie’s tone: “For starters, it could be made into anything.”

  “Molded,” Rogers said, “like plastic explosives?”

  “No,” Miggie said. He tapped his desk. “I could use Senk to make this desk or that tablet or anything in this office. The chairs you’re sitting on could be fashioned from this explosive material, and you’d never know it . . . till it went off.” Miggie’s eyebrows went up, then down. “Well, actually, you still wouldn’t know, because you’d be dead.”

  Reeder’s brow furrowed. “Sounds like a geek fantasy. How could that even be possible?”

  “Because,” Miggie said, “you could theoretically put liquid Senk into a 3-D printer and just ‘print’ yourself a desk, a chair, whatever, and it would also be a bomb. A very lethal one.”

  “How lethal?”

  “A pound of the stuff would take out a three-story building.”

  Reeder and Rogers exchanged slow glances.

  “And,” Miggie was saying, “because Senk was deemed unstable, and never went to market, there are no dogs trained to sniff it. Airport-style puffer machines don’t work on it. It’s plastic, so metal detectors won’t pick it up. There’s just no good way to know for sure what it is you’re sitting on.”

  Rogers shifted in her chair. “If this Senk stuff got out into the world,” she said, feeling a little sick, “it’d make terrorists unstoppable.”

  Miggie just nodded.

  “But you said it was unstable,” Reeder said, “and research was shut down . . . ?”

  The computer expert’s excitement, at sharing what he’d discovered, had vanished. He was coldly serious now, even somber.

  He said, “After I left the Armory site, I got into some secure DOD files . . .”

  “What?” Rogers said.

  “. . . which might, technically, be above my clearance and pay grade.”

  “You hacked the Department of Defense?”

  Miggie shrugged, smiled sheepishly, but Reeder gave him a grin and a nod and said, “Good man.”

  Rogers knew that Miggie’s actions co
uld come back on her, but—like Reeder—she cared more at the moment about moving forward than worrying about trifling repercussions, like losing her job or going to prison.

  She asked, “What did you find?”

  Very quietly, Miggie said, “A company called Senkian Chemicals developed Senkstone eight years ago, on a DOD contract, working on it for three years and a few months. Five years ago, the DOD shut down Senkian’s research when an explosion killed three employees, including one of the company’s main partners.”

  “If they were shut down five years ago,” Rogers said, “why is Senk a topic of discussion now? Even if it’s just limited to the Dark Web.”

  Miggie said, “For a year after the Pentagon shut them down, Senkian was in limbo. The company was built strictly around that one area of research—this new breed of explosive. Then, four years ago, an obscure firm called Chemical Solutions, Inc., bought Senkian out.”

  Reeder frowned. “And the DOD didn’t stop it?”

  Miggie nodded. “Why that’s the case, I haven’t found out yet—it’s all very hush-hush. Payoff to someone high up to sign off, maybe. An elaborate black op, possibly. Anyway, after that, Senkian dropped off everybody’s radar.”

  “Absorbed,” Reeder said, “into Chemical Solutions.”

  Rogers asked, “What do we know about Chemical Solutions? What’s the ownership?”

  “That’s just it,” Miggie said, with a shrug. “They’re a shell within a shell within a shell—if the trail has an end, I haven’t found it yet.”

  Reeder asked, “A shell that owns the two buildings that blew up in Charlottesville?”

  “No—that’s a company called Barmore Holdings. Who and what that is, I don’t know yet.”

  “Any sign of Barmore Holdings in the ownership chain of Chemical Solutions?”

  Miggie shook his head. “Not that I’ve found. Haven’t tracked down the actual owners of any of these companies, but this kind of entity is created to protect the anonymity of owners. These aren’t exactly publicly held companies. I know it’s a familiar refrain I’m singing, guys, but it’s going to take time. I could have a team on this for months, and it would still take time. Doing it by myself, it’s slow going.”