Murder on the Metro

by Margaret Truman

  Something made her cover the boy’s eyes when al-Bis landed just steps ahead of the speeding car, before it rolled over and crushed him. The coaster thumped back down, its front cars separated from the track and skewing wildly to the side as Lia Ganz held on tightly, with the boy pinned beneath her.

  CHAPTER

  16

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Brixton had replayed his entire conversation with Flo Combes over their early dinner at Novita the whole train ride home. Funny how different he’d felt when meeting with Kendra Rendine and then the professor—informational sessions as opposed to introspective ones. The scope of his problems didn’t hit him until he’d voiced them all out loud to Flo.

  Well, maybe not funny so much as obvious. His work had always been all-consuming, often because lives could be lost if he let himself be distracted for even a moment. He had always marveled at the professionalism and dedication of the Secret Service agents assigned to the presidential detail. But they had a virtual army of personnel at their disposal and operated almost exclusively on the friendly turf of the homeland. This was in stark contrast to Brixton’s missions for SITQUAL, overseas in foreign lands and often in hostile territory.

  Reflecting on that again now left him thinking back to his conversation with Flo earlier in the day, to the reasons she’d decided to leave him and return to New York. He realized that stepping away from SITQUAL hadn’t changed anything, that he was merely continuing the descending spiral that had begun with the bombing. It was one thing for a parent to lose a child, but he had borne witness to Janet’s death, watched it unfold in real time in abject helplessness. He thought he’d healed, but the blood had only slowed, not stopped. He’d already lost Flo, and he realized how dangerously close he had come to losing himself.

  And now he was coming home again, albeit to entirely different circumstances. No job, no income, no girlfriend, no prospects he could point to for the future. Certainly not the kind of life changes any grandfather needed. In fact, he’d long promised his daughter that he would foot the bill for his grandson’s education, both secondary and college. He’d made that promise when financial security was a given. Brixton had gotten back off the mat before, but as a much younger man, with more of his life ahead of him than behind. He dreaded going back to his Arlington, Virginia apartment; spending a few fleeting hours with Flo Combes had reminded him of how much he missed her.

  But life, in all its vast peculiarities, had given him a chance to reboot. First he’d done on the Metro what he couldn’t do five years ago in the restaurant. And now he was fitting together the pieces of a deadly puzzle that suggested the vice president of the United States might well have been murdered. Beyond that, there was the mystery of Detective Rogers and where he fit into all this. Brixton was struck by the feeling it was leading someplace big and bad.

  He’d sat in one of the rearmost cars, and he turned his attention back to what he’d learned from the professor, as he walked the long length of the platform toward the escalator leading up into Union Station. He knew he needed to be extremely cautious about how to bring Kendra Rendine up to speed. If her suspicions about Vice President Stephanie Davenport having been murdered were correct, it figured that whoever was behind the deed would stop at nothing to keep the truth from ever getting out. That could potentially place him and Rendine in grave danger, and they needed to plot their next steps forward with extreme caution, keeping that possibility in mind.

  Brixton continued toward the escalator, moving farther into the brighter lights, where passengers were funneling up toward the station. He glanced briefly back at the train as he walked, glimpsing the reflection of a vaguely familiar figure in the window glass, maybe fifteen feet behind him.

  Vaguely familiar because the last time Brixton had seen him had been on a murky Metro platform in the wake of the explosion.

  It was the man he knew as Detective Rogers.

  CHAPTER

  17

  WASHINGTON, DC

  At that point, Brixton had no idea whether the man who’d impersonated a detective had been on board the train or had been waiting for him on the platform. He shrugged off either of those scenarios for now in favor of focusing all his thinking on how to lose this man whose motivations were as nebulous as his true identity.

  As casually as possible, Brixton glanced toward the long, nearly unbroken line of train window glass. He didn’t spot Rogers again and began to wonder if the initial sighting had been no more than the product of his imagination. But then Rogers’s reflection reemerged in Brixton’s line of vision, holding the same distance behind him—a classic tailing maneuver when a single man had been tasked with the effort. Rogers had neither lost nor gained ground, was holding still about fifteen feet, three window lengths maybe, back.

  Brixton fought against the urge to turn around, feeling safe enough under the circumstances to delay any offensive or countermeasures at this point. Slowing his pace slightly, he weighed his options. His first thought was to report the man to a DC Metro cop he spotted standing vigil on the platform. Smoke Rogers out and see how he reacted. Maybe tell the cop the guy had a gun and that Brixton had heard him engaged in a conversation that could have been interpreted as a threat to the president. Nothing got the wheels of law enforcement turning in this town faster than that, and Brixton would deal with the ramifications of his lie after Rogers was in custody.

  He confirmed the fake detective was still there fifteen feet back, and he checked again one last time before angling for the DC Metro cop.

  To find Rogers gone.

  Or maybe he’d never been there. Maybe Brixton had turned some stranger into the phantom he hadn’t been able to cleanse from his mind since Monday’s Metro attack. That possibility grew in likelihood when there remained no further sign of Rogers in the reflection off the window glass. Brixton still hadn’t turned around to double-check, figuring the best he could do now, under the circumstances, was to take flight from the station and head back home to contemplate his next move.

  He was twenty feet from the escalator, standing near the end of a line that stretched upward as far as his eye could see, when something hard pressed against his back through his jacket.

  “Keep walking,” a voice Brixton recognized as Rogers’s ordered, as the man pushed the pistol tighter against him.

  “Now,” the voice added for emphasis, even though he didn’t have to.

  Brixton felt himself being pushed past the escalators, hidden from the DC Metro police officer’s view by the throngs of disembarking passengers that enclosed them. But the man he knew as Detective Rogers pushed him swiftly beyond the clutter, into the darkness of the tunnel, where the platform narrowed to virtual single file.

  “Who are you?” Brixton found enough voice to pose.

  He knew the man wouldn’t risk shooting him here, not with the echo of the gunshot certain to alert the cop on the platform, who’d be equally certain to alert others.

  So where was the man taking him?

  “What do you want?” Brixton tried.

  “Up there on your right, that door. Open it.”

  It looked like a fire door of some kind, covered with graffiti. Brixton had glimpsed doors like it from time to time from inside the Metro, always figuring they no longer led anywhere.

  It turned out he was wrong.

  The door opened onto a set of grated steel stairs descending into a dull haze of light below. Enough to tell Brixton where he was.

  Residing beneath Washington, DC, proper was a warren of tunnels laid out like some kind of hive. Some were the product of never-completed sections of the Metro itself, abandoned due to the water table, too much rock to safely blow through, or redundancy. But most of them were the product of the long-discontinued trolley and streetcar system that had been built partially underground.

  For nearly a century, a network of streetcars had ferried Washingtonians around the city, originally drawn by horses and later powered by elevated electric cables. The Dupon
t Circle station, constructed in 1949, was unique in the streetcar system for being the only station that was built underground. It was in operation until the system was shut down and replaced by bus lines in 1962, with plans for building the Metro train system on the horizon.

  This tunnel must have been part of an unfinished spur of that underground trolley line from another era. It smelled of rot, mold, and rancid standing water. At the bottom of the grated stairs, the so-called Detective Rogers shoved him forcibly forward, Brixton swinging to find the pistol aimed straight at him.

  “Go,” the man ordered, gesturing toward a door that matched the one leading onto the steel stairs.

  Brixton shouldered his way through this one, too, finding himself on a trolley platform overlooking a nonexistent track bed that had been abandoned before reaching this spur. He heard the rattle of the heavy door closing behind him and felt the man he knew as Rogers shove him forward.

  “What did you and the Secret Service agent discuss?”

  Brixton turned to face him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He barely recorded saying that. Whoever this man was working for, they must’ve been following him. How else could they know about his meeting with Kendra Rendine? And, more to the point, why would that be of interest to someone potentially involved with the would-be suicide bomber?

  “Who are you working with?” he challenged, before Rogers could resume. “Who was behind that suicide bomber?”

  “Nice try,” the man said, his expression tightening. “Now tell me about New York, what you were doing there.”

  The tunnel shook with a stinging vibration caused by a Metro car thundering along an adjacent tube. The vibration left the man before Brixton a bit unsteady on his feet, a moment of vulnerability that passed as quickly as it had come, pellet-sized debris dropping from the ceiling above and showering the air with dust.

  “Seeing my ex-girlfriend,” Brixton said, choosing to answer the latter of his two questions at the same time, needing to stall for time.

  “You met with someone else prior to going to see her. If you lie again, I’ll shoot you in the knee. Lie a third time and it’ll be your other knee.” He made a show of aiming his pistol low. “Now, what does the Secret Service agent know?”

  “About what?”

  The man curled his finger around the trigger. “Don’t try my patience.”

  “The Secret Service agent and I are old friends. You already know I worked for a private security contractor called SITQUAL. That’s where I met the Secret Service agent,” Brixton insisted, not wanting to use Rendine’s name, because his captor hadn’t. “You also probably know that I’m looking for work right now, and I was hoping my friend might be able to help me find some. Satisfied?”

  Brixton still couldn’t fathom the man’s interest in Rendine. He could hear the distant rumble of another train thundering through the adjacent tube, and he pretended not to hear Rogers’s response in order to have an excuse to move another step closer. The train’s rumble approached a crescendo, about to pass their position in the adjacent tunnel. Brixton tensed his lower legs, propping himself on the balls of his feet. So when the vibration again left the man a bit wobbly, he was ready.

  Brixton had one chance to get this right or he’d be dead, simple as that. He lunged forward, arms outstretched before him to jerk the pistol upward as soon as he impacted the man’s hands. A shot rang out, close enough to his skull to make the side of his head and ear feel like they’d been scorched by an open flame.

  Brixton and the gunman twisted and twirled atop the long-abandoned trolley platform. It was riddled with debris from the crumbling ceiling overhead, which threatened to trip them up at every turn. The result was a bizarre pirouette, free form as opposed to choreographed, that left both men fighting for control of the weapon while remaining careful to tread lightly amid the precariously placed husks of concrete.

  The gunman was as big as Brixton, but stronger, and younger by twenty years or so. Instead of trying to wrest the pistol free of the grappling, he slammed Brixton back against the platform wall, kicking up a cloud of dust that enveloped them like a shroud. Before Brixton could respond, the man had jammed his free hand under Brixton’s chin and was pushing it upward, wrenching his neck and stealing his focus from the pistol.

  Brixton was losing, and if he lost he was dead.

  Jerking his head back had angled Brixton’s gaze up toward the patchwork ceiling, with its jagged gaps where the concrete had given up and given way. So maybe, just maybe …

  Brixton threw all of his attention back on the pistol the gunman still held but that he had neutralized. The barrel was aimed straight up. Instead of continuing to try to tear it from the man’s grasp, Brixton closed his finger on the trigger and pulled.

  Once, twice, three times … Then four, then five, then six and seven …

  With that, he pulled his hand away, let the man have the pistol, and struck him hard enough to tear free of the hand trying to snap his neck. The gunman had just steadied the pistol’s squarish barrel toward him when a rumble turned his gaze upward.

  A thick shower of rubble, loosened by the bullets’ impact, was cascading downward like mini asteroids falling from the night sky.

  Brixton heard the crunch that could only be human bone and skull cracking upon impact. The gunman he’d known as Detective Rogers was left silent and still in the pile of rubble that had virtually entombed him. Brixton didn’t need to check for a pulse to see whether the man was dead; the condition of his face and what remained of his skull told him.

  You’re working with whoever’s behind this.

  The dead man wasn’t alone, which meant others could be coming any moment.

  Which meant Brixton had to flee. Now.

  CHAPTER

  18

  JUDEAN HILLS, ISRAEL

  Lia Ganz was still on the grounds of Kif Tzuba amusement park when Moshe Baruch arrived, two hours after the roller coaster had crushed Dar Ibrahim al-Bis to death. The head of Mossad was accompanied by a full security and forensics team to take over for the national police, who had secured the scene in the meantime.

  “I see the police were wrong,” he started, “when they told me a Mossad agent was involved.”

  “I made clear it was former.”

  “Someone told me recently there was no such thing.”

  “Close enough,” Lia acknowledged.

  Baruch frowned. “I seem to have erred in giving you permission to return to the field.”

  “I don’t recall asking for it.”

  “Close enough,” Baruch said, using her own phrase against her. “Once a lion, always a lion. And like a lion you can’t stop hunting.”

  “Lions hunt to live, Commander. I acted so more Israelis don’t die.”

  “What did you have to promise that prisoner to make her give up the name, Colonel?”

  “A visit from her two young children.”

  “Which you knew to be impossible.”

  “In spite of which, I gave her my word.”

  “Which you lacked the authority to give.”

  “I’ve never broken a promise, Commander.”

  “There’s a first time for everything, including using a roller coaster as a weapon.”

  “You taught me to use whatever was available.”

  Baruch shook his head, looking like he’d swallowed something sour. “Too bad you didn’t pay as good attention to all of my lessons, like promising something you can’t deliver and undertaking a mission without proper authorization or backup. Even the Lioness of Judah can overstep her bounds.”

  “Why don’t we give the man’s workshop a closer look and then decide how far I overstepped?”

  * * *

  After an hour had passed, with Lia pacing nervously outside the old shed al-Bis had appropriated for his repairs and workshop, she had begun to fear that her suspicions had led her astray. More likely it was how close her granddaughter had come to falling victim to
the drone attack. Perhaps she hadn’t been thinking clearly in her rush to judgment. And now a man was dead—a man who, even if he hadn’t designed the deadly flying machines, might have proven an excellent source of information to Mossad.

  Then Moshe Baruch emerged alone, his expression dim and blank.

  “There’s something inside you need to see, Colonel.”

  She followed him through the fading afternoon light and back inside the dimly lit workshop. It was quiet, no sound of voices or movement. Then again, it had also been quiet in the park itself since the initial national police first responders to the scene had evacuated and closed the park. Lia had noted the noise first ebbing and then vanishing entirely, producing an eerie sense of stillness in her, while she’d waited for Mossad’s arrival. It should have made her feel more secure, but instead it had made her feel less so. Lia was left imagining herself taking her granddaughter here, happy and cackling as she rode the roller coaster on which her grandmother had just killed a man to save another child’s life.

  Inside the late Dar Ibrahim al-Bis’s workshop, the dim lighting revealed a rectangular hole in the floor where some shelving had been shoved out of the way. Lia imagined all the seams being covered or camouflaged to keep anyone from noticing the hatch’s existence. A ladder that smelled of fresh lumber extended downward into a darkness now broken by several floodlights that had been placed to provide illumination in the dark space. That was enough to tell her that the hidden room must have been some sort of subbasement and that the shed itself likely had been already standing when the rest of the park was constructed, making use of any number of preexisting structures on the sprawling grounds.

  Moshe Baruch preceded her down the ladder and then gestured for her to join him. Lia took the rungs agilely, despite the numbness in her now bandaged shoulder, where al-Bis had grazed her with a knife strike. She reached the bottom, which was formed by a flattened gravel floor, and found herself in a space little bigger than a decent-size closet. Except, in place of clothing was an assortment of the tools of Dar Ibrahim al-Bis’s true trade: weapons, and the materials required to customize them to the needs of this fighter or that.