“How many do you have?” he asked her.
“One.”
“Me too.”
“I know. And I’m sorry about your daughter.”
“My next question,” Brixton started.
“What am I doing here, why was I following you…”
“That’s two questions.”
“Let’s start with the latter,” Lia Ganz said. “I was following you for my own good as well as yours.”
“To make sure it was safe for you to approach me.”
“They couldn’t be allowed to learn we’re working together, Robert.”
“I didn’t know we were working together.”
“We started when I saved your life.”
“You’re here because of the Metro bombing,” Brixton said, taking a step back. “Although by all accounts, that woman was no suicide bomber.”
He could tell from Lia Ganz’s expression she was hearing that for the first time.
“A setup?”
Brixton explained it to her the way Panama had explained it to him, stressing the false flag designation.
“Makes sense,” Lia Ganz said matter-of-factly when he had finished.
“What doesn’t make sense is why they’ve tried to kill me twice now.”
“They must think you’re on to them, that your random presence on the Metro car might not have been so random at all. You’re a threat, Robert. This is how men like that deal with threats.”
“What about women?”
“What about us?”
“You killed those two men without your pulse rate even going up.”
“It had to be done. I explained that.”
“This isn’t Israel, Lia.”
“Really, Robert? Tell that to your fellow Metro car passengers.”
CHAPTER
39
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
How’s your hand?” she asked him, after removing the ice.
Brixton flexed his fingers through the swelling, found he could close them into the semblance of a fist without effort or pain. “Not broken.”
“That’s something.”
Brixton couldn’t say why he was starting to trust this woman, a stranger until barely an hour ago, so much. It wasn’t their common experience, given that hers undoubtedly made his look bloodless and boring by comparison. He figured the fact that they both were grandparents had something to do with it, how she’d almost lost her granddaughter in a similar fashion to how he’d lost his daughter. Such bonds tended to be indelible.
He laid out what he’d learned about Vice President Stephanie Davenport’s death, without mentioning Kendra Rendine by name, stressing the fact that the murder was connected to the Metro bombing through a now deceased special operator who’d been using the name Brian Kirkland. Brixton didn’t elaborate on the means of his death.
“Smart stents,” Lia Ganz repeated, after he’d finished his tale. “I never would have imagined.”
“Especially them being employed as the instruments of murder.”
“Not according to that postmortem report, from what you’ve told me. Someone must be covering their tracks, somebody very good at what they do—and very determined, Robert. In my experience, that makes for a dangerous combination. And you’re in touch with this Secret Service agent?”
“Who said anything about a Secret Service agent?”
“How else would you have come by such information?”
“The answer’s yes, Lia. We’re still in touch.”
“And you trust him?”
“It’s a her, but the answer’s yes again. Definitively.”
Lia Ganz weighed that briefly. “She’s in danger too.”
“She knows that.”
“But not from whom.”
“That’s what she’s trying to find out, just like us.” Brixton thought for a moment. “The men who attacked me…”
“They wouldn’t have been carrying any identification. Their fingerprints would have led nowhere, and there’d be no record of their DNA on file anywhere.”
“Ghosts, in other words.”
“Our world is teeming with them, Robert.”
“Your world, Lia, not mine.”
“Really? They’re keeping the circle tight on this,” Lia continued, “both here and back in Israel. When men like Winters and your friend Panama get involved, we’re nearing the top of the food chain.”
“He’s not my friend.”
“Yes he is, and for good reason.”
“What’s that?”
“He didn’t kill you.”
Brixton’s phone rang, “NO CALLER ID” lighting up.
“Yes?” he answered.
“It’s Kendra, Robert. I’ve found that federal prison inmate, but…”
“But what?” Brixton asked, eyeing Lia Ganz.
“She’s not what I was expecting.”
“She?”
CHAPTER
40
WASHINGTON, DC
You want to tell me what’s wrong or finish your drink first?” Teddy Von Eck asked Kendra Rendine.
Rendine swirled her glass before her, the ice cubes crackling against each other. She’d headed over to meet Von Eck as soon as she’d passed on the identity of the woman attached to the federal prisoner designation Brixton had given her.
“How about both, Teddy? You did teach me how to multitask, after all.”
“And you definitely mastered walking and chewing gum at the same time before I retired.”
“I need your wisdom, Yoda.”
Kendra Rendine sipped her drink: scotch and soda, with lots of soda and lots of ice. She’d chosen a table with clear view of the entrance to the Showtime Lounge, a small bar known almost exclusively to locals on Rhode Island Avenue. She’d long used it as an after-work meeting spot and was fond of observing the ever-growing murals of local musicians’ album covers that adorned the walls. The bar also featured a free old-fashioned jukebox that piped nostalgic music through the wall-mounted speakers whenever a band wasn’t playing. Oldies, mostly, like the Fleetwood Mac song “Don’t Stop,” which was currently into its chorus.
Right now, Rendine was thinking about today, specifically about how to handle the quickly evolving conspiracy she believed she’d uncovered, with Robert Brixton’s help, which suggested not only the assassination of the sitting vice president of the United States but also something much worse in the offing. Toward that end, she’d put in a call to Teddy Von Eck, a retired Secret Service agent who’d been her first field supervisor and had headed the presidential detail she had worked before she was promoted to detail head for the vice president herself, on Teddy’s recommendation. Everybody needed a “rabbi,” and he was hers.
“Can I order a drink first?” Von Eck quipped, looking for a server.
He was a tall, rangy man with a close-cropped haircut that hadn’t changed in the twelve years she’d known him. In fact, Teddy hadn’t changed in those twelve years. His build was the same, complexion was the same, grin was the same, even his suits were the same, despite no longer showing the telltale bulge of a concealed weapon, now that he was retired. Rendine wondered if the continuity in appearance might have been due to the old urban legend about Nixon firing an agent after he’d gained an appreciable amount of weight, or Bill Clinton having one reassigned for smiling too much on the job.
“You’re going to need it, Teddy,” Rendine told him.
“In that case, I better go to the bar.”
He came back with a beer and a shot of something dark—bourbon, Rendine guessed.
“Which one should I start with?” he asked her.
“The shot.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
Von Eck took the shot in a single gulp, a wince stretching into a brief grimace that vanished when he chased the bourbon with a swallow of beer, sifting through the foam. “Okay, I’m ready.”
Rendine took a sip of her own. “I believe Vice President Davenport was murd
ered.”
He looked at her, dumbfounded. “I think I need another shot.”
* * *
He came back to the table with two more, instead of one.
“Two, Teddy?”
“Only because I didn’t want to carry three. The hands, you know,” he said, holding both of them up.
Rendine did know. Von Eck had left the Secret Service on a disability pension after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It hadn’t been his choice; he believed he could continue to do detail supervisory work while on medication. But the agency wouldn’t bend their policies on his behalf, and Von Eck had finished out his career behind a desk at headquarters on H Street.
“I’m not seeing any tremors,” Rendine said to him, hopefully.
“Any shaking you see will be the result of what you’re about to tell me.”
She didn’t see any shaking as she laid it all out for him in blow-by-blow fashion, chronologically, with her visit to Patty Trahan forming the climax.
Von Eck looked about the bar before responding, to satisfy himself no one was sitting within earshot. “Somebody switched the stents, that’s what you’re saying.”
Rendine nodded. “Replaced the standard variety that had been ordered with the smart variety that can transmit signals.”
“And apparently receive them as well, if your theory is correct.”
“It’s not my theory.”
“Whose then?”
“An expert.”
“In stents?”
“In killing.”
Von Eck thought about that for a moment. “Not someone who’d normally travel in the same circles as you.”
“No, not me.”
“You’re working with somebody else on this,” Von Eck concluded, the concern giving a nervous edge to his voice.
“I am.”
“Secret Service?”
“A professional.”
“But not Secret Service.”
Rendine shook her head. “State Department,” she said, taking a bit of a liberty, since SITQUAL was actually a private contractor. “And he’s following this up along a different line entirely.”
“And what line is that?”
“He was on the Metro car with the suicide bomber on Monday. His actions saved dozens of lives.”
“Okay, Kendra, so this man’s a pro. But what has he—what has the bombing—got to do with why I’m about to have another shot of Jack Daniel’s?”
This one seemed to go down even faster than the first, and Kendra waited for the wince to abate before she resumed.
“We think the same people behind the subway bombing were behind the assassination of the vice president.”
“And I’m sitting here with you getting drunk because you don’t think they’re finished yet.”
“There’s more,” Kendra confirmed.
CHAPTER
41
WASHINGTON, DC
You’re saying the entire surgical team was compromised,” Von Eck said, after Rendine had laid out what had transpired in the four weeks since Vice President Stephanie Davenport’s procedure, finishing with the fact that different stents altogether had been removed from the vice president’s chest during her autopsy.
“That’s a mild way of putting it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do, Teddy, and the answer’s yes. They’re all off the grid, some permanently.”
Von Eck glanced down at his third shot of bourbon but didn’t reach for it. “Except for this Patty Trahan. Under the circumstances, I’m going to assume you didn’t leave her in place.”
“She’s staying at a motel on my dime.”
Something changed in Von Eck’s expression. “So you haven’t reported on this, on any of it.”
Rendine shook her head. Slowly.
Von Eck drank his third shot. “The woman know the drill? Not to answer her room door or phone, all the usual?”
Rendine nodded. “And I got her a burner phone to use.”
“But not with her family.”
“I know the drill, Teddy. You taught me well.”
Von Eck moved to his beer. “Not well enough, apparently, unless one of the lessons was on going rogue.”
“I haven’t gone rogue.”
“What exactly do you call not reporting your suspicions up the ladder?”
“Precautionary.”
“Against what?”
“Against the service reporting to someone who’s involved.”
Von Eck guzzled the rest of his beer. “We need to bring this inside. We need to bring you inside.”
“You think I have enough evidence to convince somebody who matters up that ladder?”
“The anomaly with the stents is more than enough there,” Von Eck told her, shaking his head. “To think: without your efforts, that would’ve gone undiscovered…”
Someone had cued up a new song on the jukebox, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” replacing “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas. Rendine found the lyrics, about nobody talking amid the darkness, oddly appropriate.
“That’s why I called my rabbi. I can’t take this in off the street on field level. I need to get through a bigger door, the door to someone they can’t get to.”
“They,” Von Eck repeated.
“I thought I’d drawn you a clear enough picture.”
“You have. It’s just that my buzz is starting to kick in.”
Rendine noticed that his right hand, the one more affected by the Parkinson’s tremors, was quivering now. She felt her insides tighten, wondering if she’d made the right move in involving Teddy Von Eck, potentially placing him in danger too.
“You didn’t tell anyone you were meeting me, did you?” she asked him.
“You think because I’m retired, all of a sudden I was born yesterday? Of course I didn’t. And who would I tell, anyway? My wife stopped paying attention to anything I told her years ago.”
“For once, I’m glad.”
Von Eck clutched his empty beer glass as if wishing it contained more than the suds riding the sides. “Okay, we need to get you inside, to someone big. I’m thinking the director himself.”
“You trust him?”
“He’s a lifer, like me.” He paused, just long enough. “Like you.” Von Eck held up his glass to a server to signal for a refill of his beer, not shots. “Tell me more about your source from the State Department.”
“He’s more than a source.”
“What is he?”
“Personally involved,” Rendine told him.
“Care to elaborate?”
“Not right now. I’ve gone as far as I can.”
“As far as you can?” Von Eck said, his speech starting to slur. “You know the one thing I never felt when I was in the field, Kendra?”
Rendine shook her head.
“Fear. Worry—sure. Concern—absolutely. But I was never scared, because I knew that so long as I did my job right, I’d have no reason to be scared. Follow procedure, follow the rules, play it by the book, and always assume there may be a base you’ve left uncovered so you’re ready when something bad happens.” Rendine watched Von Eck tighten his gaze on her. “My point is that everything we do is designed to stop threats from the outside. You’re describing one that’s clearly coming from the inside.”
Rendine swallowed hard, trying to keep her emotions at bay. “I think Vice President Davenport caught wind of what was happening. I think she tried to stop it, and that’s why they killed her.”
A server set a frosty, fresh glass of beer down in front of Von Eck, but he made no move to reach for or even acknowledge it. “Okay, I’m going to make some calls, maybe just one. In the meantime, get yourself a burner phone too. I’ll give you a number so you can text me yours.”
“You always keep a burner handy, Teddy?”
He smiled thinly. “Just a phone nobody knows about. I’ll contact you as soon as I’ve got something to say, either that a
meeting with the appropriate parties has been set…”
“Or,” Rendine prodded, having never seen Von Eck flash so grave an expression.
“Or it’s time to run for the hills.”
CHAPTER
42
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Brixton took the seven a.m. Amtrak Acela train from Union Station, which got him into New York just before ten o’clock. He ordered an Uber to take him to MDC Brooklyn, where prisoner number 66–543076 was being housed.
It’s Kendra, Robert. I’ve found that federal prison inmate, but …
But what?
She’s not what I was expecting.
She?
The prisoner’s gender was only the beginning of a nearly impossible story that Brixton wouldn’t have believed if his research hadn’t confirmed it to be the truth.
Beyond the fact that the Metropolitan Detention Center was located in the South Slope neighborhood, all he knew was that it had far exceeded its capacity, in large part because it had begun housing prisoners for longer stretches instead of serving purely as a way station for those awaiting trial. He had been there once before as part of SITQUAL, in an attempt to get a recently incarcerated prisoner to flip on the overseas drug dealers he was working with, and he remembered the complex as vaguely resembling an inner-city self-storage building. It was a drab ten-story structure that at any time maintained a prisoner population of between 1,600 and 1,800, which was several hundred above its stated capacity. There were practically no windows in evidence anywhere, but there also was no barbwire, just a high steel fence enclosing a portion of the building’s perimeter.
Brixton hadn’t called ahead to alert prison officials of his coming or the nature of his visit, since there was too much he couldn’t say and too many questions he’d be unable to answer. He’d opted for this strategy because it would give him less to explain and a more receptive audience to explain it to. The problem, of course, was that he had no active credentials or portfolio that would allow him to meet with a federal prisoner without prior notification. Instead, he was just a run-of-the-mill private citizen attempting to access a federal prison that, like all such facilities, was notoriously difficult for anyone not directly involved in a particular case to access.
Murder on the Metro Page 18