Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Tom Doherty Associates ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on Margaret Truman, click here.
For email updates on Jon Land, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For Margaret Truman, trailblazer
and
Bob Diforio, who helped me walk by her side
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts … perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
—JOHN STEINBECK
PROLOGUE
CAESAREA, ISRAEL
I’m not scared, Nana.”
Lia Ganz held her three-year-old granddaughter, Meirav, in her arms in waist-deep water. “You’re not?”
“I want to go higher! Make me go higher!”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m brave, Nana, just like you.”
“All right, then.”
Lia tossed Meirav higher into the air and watched her splash down into the warm, crystal-clear waters off Caesarea’s Aqueduct Beach. The Israeli schools were currently on spring break, accounting for crowding more typical of the weekend on this weekday, beneath the midday sun amid a piercing blue Mediterranean sky. Never a fan of crowds, Lia cringed as more beachgoers packed in around them, and she resolved to take her leave as soon as this swim was complete, assuming she could coax her granddaughter from the water.
The beach had been named for the ancient structure that adorned the sand, forming a natural barrier between modern civilization and this ancient site. The seacoast grounds of Caesarea, halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa had been proclaimed a national park. The site had been reconstructed over a long stretch of years to create one of Israel’s most attractive and fascinating archaeological locales, featuring an easy mix of the old and the new. The restored Caesarea amphitheater hosted modern-day concerts during the summer months, while the Old City featured a range of boutiques and restaurants. The new town of Caesarea itself, meanwhile, comprised luxurious neighborhoods, dominated by seaside villas, that claimed this beach as their own.
Lia watched her granddaughter bob below the surface and pop right back up, thanks to the arm floaties that her parents insisted she wear at all times if she was anywhere near the water. Lia found herself musing how handy those puffy blue things might have been when she was doing water training for the elite special ops Yamam team she’d joined after serving in the Israeli army as one of the most decorated female soldiers in the country’s storied history. For forty years, Yamam commandos had operated under a veil of total secrecy. Only recently had Israel even acknowledged the existence of the country’s most elite antiterrorism force, around the time the government had wanted to recognize her in a public ceremony after she had suffered wounds in a bold attack launched on a Hamas stronghold in Gaza. But she had declined, since it was all about being honored as a woman and not a soldier. And she didn’t believe in heroes anymore, because all of her heroes were dead.
“One more time, Nana,” Meirav pleaded, throwing herself back into Lia’s arms.
Reflexively, Lia’s gaze scanned the beachfront. Force of habit, she supposed, watching for anything in the scene that stood out, something different from the last time she’d checked. She couldn’t say exactly what she was looking for, only that she’d know it when she spotted it.
The Americans had an expression that went “If you see something, say something.” The phrase originated sometime after the infamous 9/11 attack, but seeing and saying had been part of the Israeli way of life for a half century prior to that. You learned to live defensively or, sometimes, you didn’t live at all.
Today, the unseasonably warm spring temperatures and tepid breezes had brought a flood of people to the golden sand, which was all but invisible beneath all manner of chairs, blankets, towels, and shade cast by the sprawl of beach umbrellas. Lia hated those for how they limited range of vision in the area they covered, either obscuring or obliterating her view. Still, she spotted no more of note on this scan than on the last one or the one before that. The lifeguard chairs were still manned by the same young men and women—one of Lia’s prime concerns, given that their height would make them formidable shooting platforms, from which any number of victims could be claimed by a decent marksman before some pistol-toting Israeli zeroed them in their sights.
“Nana?” Meirav said, pulling her grandmother’s hair.
“I’m too tired, little one. My arms have nothing left.”
And yet, at forty-nine, she felt too young to be a grandmother and was in as good a shape as she’d been on her last day as a field operative with Yamam. After her wounds suffered in the Gaza raid ruled her out of future missions, they’d wanted to put her behind a desk. But Lia found coordinating missions from the group’s secretive headquarters in the Ayalon Valley between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem far less fulfilling than leading them, and the process left her with a helpless feeling. The Xs and Os, literal marks on a dry erase board or a chalkboard, represented operatives in harm’s way, who could die or be captured if the plan failed in any way. If she missed the slightest sign or signal, or neglected to consider some random factor, some of Israel’s best and brightest would pay with their lives. In the field, she missed nothing. Working behind a desk to dispatch others there in her place, though, left her fearing she’d missed everything. When her request to return to active duty was summarily denied, Lia announced her retirement to become a full-time grandmother.
“But you’re so strong, Nana,” Meirav said, snuggling up against Lia’s breast and letting her arm stray to the fleshy skin over her shoulder. “I found a hole.”
Lia felt her granddaughter’s tiny finger pushing and pressing. “It’s a scar.”
“What’s a scar?”
“What’s left when a boo-boo heals.”
The little girl seemed to ponder that. “I have boo-boos, but I don’t have scars.”
“Only bad boo-boos leave them, little one.”
Lia felt Meirav press deeper into the scar. It felt like a tickle.
“Was this a bad boo-boo, Nana?”
Lia hugged her granddaughter tighter, thinking of that final mission in Gaza. “From a bullet.”
Meirav cocked her head backward to meet her grandmother’s stare. “You were shot?”
“Yes.”
“Did it hurt?”
“It did.” Lia nodded.
“I found another,” Meirav said, pushing her finger into a depression of ridged, pocked skin above the shoulder blade.
“From the same bullet, little one. Where it came out.”
“Eww,” Meirav uttered, making a face. “Did it hurt?”
“I don’t remember.”
More poking and pushing. “Who did it?”
“I don’t know. It could have been any number of people.”
“Did you hurt them back?”
&n
bsp; “Maybe,” Lia said, honestly not knowing the answer. “I’m not sure.”
She’d suffered the wound in that nighttime Gaza raid on a Hamas stronghold where a meeting of the terrorist group’s cadre had been convened. The mission had been ill-timed and hastily prepared, an overly aggressive move undertaken by a government desperate for a major victory against an indefatigable foe. Lia was second-in-command of the ten-person team. Only six made it out alive, and she’d dragged two of the bodies out herself, shot-up shoulder and all.
The democratic world and the West exulted in Israel’s many successes in such missions but seldom learned of failures like this. Going back to Entebbe, Mossad had been celebrated for its dramatic strikes and never criticized for those that ended the way that night had in Gaza. That raid had been undertaken by Sayeret Matkal. Yamam was founded shortly after, to undertake missions that required the quick-strike capabilities of rapid deployment. Its superbly trained forces were originally umbrellaed under the Israeli National Police, but of late they were left answerable to Mossad.
Lia had struggled to return fire with her wounded arm, while with the other she dragged one of the downed men from the firefight. Another man fell when the squad was racing back to the extraction point, and she abandoned further fire to drag him along as well. By the time they reached the American stealth chopper, same type of Black Hawk the Navy SEALs had used in their raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, both men were dead.
Her granddaughter scrunched her face up into a scowl. “They must have been bad people.”
“They were.”
“Somebody should punish them.”
Lia couldn’t help but smile. Though she was hardly a biblical scholar, she knew her daughter and son-in-law had named their first child after the daughter of King Saul, which seemed quite appropriate for a child who was a bundle of energy forever in motion, given that the word meirav also meant “to maximize.” Yet, in that moment, she also feared that her granddaughter would follow in her footsteps—too much of the Ganz blood pumping through her veins, which would leave her eventually wanting to spill that of Israel’s enemies.
She shelved that thought for the time being and positioned herself to toss her granddaughter into the air yet again. “I’m sure somebody did.”
That’s when she heard the buzzing sound, something like a lawn mower growing louder as it neared an open window, a soft engine sound that Lia first took for a small motorboat or Jet Ski, until a sweep of her gaze showed nothing of the sort anywhere about.
Then what …
Insects, Lia thought, when she first spotted the drones. They look like giant insects.
Each was about four feet across, flying in a triangular pattern. The next sound, the staccato burst of gunfire, was accompanied by flashbulb-like spurts of light springing from the barrel of whatever automatic weapons had been rigged to the low-flying murder machines. Lia watched the carnage unfold with her granddaughter clutched tight against her, the sounds of shots and screams reaching her a millisecond after the initial line of bodies fell, drenching the golden sand red. The effect was like watching dominoes fall, the drones closing on the last wave of beachgoers who were trying to flee. A few had the fortune or foresight to rush toward the sea. The rest, who charged off down the open sands toward the ancient aqueduct that had lent this beach its name, did not fare nearly as well.
Lia clutched her granddaughter to her tighter still, ignoring the child’s whimpers. The cries of pain and anguish from the beach pierced her eardrums like a thousand needles. A few armed Israelis bravely chased after the drones, their own pistol fire clacking away. One of the dreaded machines went down, then a second, while the third continued its deadly flight, stopping only when its ammunition was expended and it dropped from the sky with the others.
“You’re hurting me, Nana, you’re hurting me!”
Her granddaughter had felt more like a piece of Lia Ganz than a separate body. She eased her from her breast almost surgically.
“I’m scared, Nana! I’m scared!” Meirav sobbed, fat tears rolling down her cheeks to mix with the salty waters of the sea.
Lia hugged her tight again, both of them shaking, the warm water suddenly feeling like melted ice.
“So am I, little one,” Lia said, as soothingly as she could manage. “So am I.”
PART ONE
CHAPTER
1
WASHINGTON, DC; ONE WEEK LATER
Shortstop is in for the night,” Kendra Rendine said into her wrist-mounted microphone from outside the vice president’s bedroom door. “Repeat, Shortstop is buckled in for the night.”
As head of the vice president’s Secret Service security team, Rendine had personally led the detail that had accompanied Stephanie Davenport, America’s first-ever female vice president, from her event that evening back home to 1 Observatory Circle. As procedure dictated, she checked the bedroom where Davenport had slept alone since the death of her husband from cancer, and then moved to the door.
“Good night, ma’am.”
“You too, Coach,” Davenport had said, with a smile that belied how exhausted she must have been after an exceptionally long day that had seen her up and running from the virtual crack of dawn.
“Will do, Shortstop,” Rendine followed, grinning herself.
Davenport’s Secret Service code name had come courtesy of a stellar career as a shortstop on Brown University’s softball team the year they’d won an Ivy League championship. She’d managed all-Ivy honors, as well as honorable mention All-American. She’d attended Brown as part of the Marine Corps’ officer training program before knee and shoulder injuries washed her out. She’d gone to law school and spent the early part of her career defending the poor and indigent, while acquiring a disgust for injustice that knew no bounds and had ultimately drawn her into politics, where she believed she could have the greatest effect as an agent of change.
The rest of Stephanie Davenport’s life en route to the vice presidency included stints as both governor and senator, ample proving grounds even before her infectious charisma and fundraising prowess entered into the mix. Rendine had been put in charge of Davenport’s Secret Service detail from literally the moment she was officially added to the ticket, meaning that she’d been with Davenport through all moments good and bad, thick and thin, glorious and tragic. The woman unceasingly impressed her, never more so than when she refused to let a recently diagnosed heart condition derail her ambitions or affect her schedule. The vice president considered the whole matter a nonissue, and as of today, only a handful of people in and out of the White House knew the whole truth—how, a month earlier, stents had opened up a trio of nearly totally blocked arteries, after surgery had been ruled out because Davenport also suffered from atrial fibrillation.
Today was one of the few days since the vice president had resumed a full working schedule that Rendine could see the strain on her features after walking even short distances. Rendine found it sad, unfair, that such a magnificent athlete in her youth could be so hobbled in middle age. But it seemed to have been exacerbated in recent days. Rendine had initially passed that off as the lingering effects of the procedure. Earlier today, though, she’d peered into the vice president’s eyes and seen something other than fatigue:
Fear.
She’d been around Davenport long enough to trust her instincts, and today those instincts had told her something was bothering the vice president. It would be an unacceptable breach of protocol for Rendine to raise that issue, beyond the mundane utterance, “Is everything all right, Madam Vice President?” And she hadn’t bothered with even that, since the query would have provoked nothing more than a smile and a sigh, followed by, “Thanks for asking, Coach,” in typically disarming fashion.
The secluded twelve-acre compound that held the vice president’s official residence at 1 Observatory Circle sat amid the seventy-two acres of parklike grounds perched on a hilltop in a stately neighborhood about two and a half miles from the White House. B
uilt in 1893, the handsome three-story Queen Anne–style home was surrounded by a forest-like setting, complete with lush greenery, wildlife, and the serene sounds of nature that nursed Davenport to sleep on nights mild enough to leave the windows open. A kind of oasis set just footsteps away from the bustling traffic on Massachusetts Avenue.
Rendine knew the structure up and down, not a single nook or cranny escaping her attention. She’d walked every square foot on multiple occasions, to the point where she could do so blindfolded—not so much folly, since Secret Service agents were well schooled in maintaining their vigil even in the event of a blackout. This wasn’t her first detail, only the first she’d ever been in charge of, a duty made all the easier by the genuine high regard and affection in which she held Stephanie Davenport. Though her training had counseled avoiding the kind of relationship that bordered on friendship, Rendine never hid her admiration for the vice president or the genuine pleasure she took in their conversations on long overseas flights and in various green rooms before an event was about to start. She counted herself fortunate to have this be the first detail she’d ever led, typical of everything she’d been taught, with a single exception: Stephanie Davenport’s heart condition.
The one compromise the vice president had agreed to make was to wear a watch that monitored her heart rate 24/7, triggering an alarm in the event the slightest anomaly was detected. All Secret Service agents underwent vigorous emergency medical training, but the vice president’s detail was further supplemented by having a battle-tested medic manning a shift at all times. There were three of them in the rotation, and Rendine liked them all, especially the fact that all insisted on checking Davenport’s pulse, heartbeat, and blood pressure at regular intervals throughout the day. And the vice president had reluctantly agreed to give them final word on whether a trip to the hospital was warranted, on their say-so alone.
Murder on the Metro Page 1