Murder on the Metro

by Margaret Truman

  Instead of aiming her fire at the enemy gunmen, she spun and dove in the direction of a phalanx of automated loaders positioning themselves to lift more of the shiny steel drums into place in their slots. She aimed at the loaders themselves, the controls made obvious by the rows of colored LED lights, and opened fire, the burst indistinguishable from the others exploding around her. Almost immediately, the machines began spinning wildly, stripped of purpose. Their memories and databases damaged, they charged wildly about, slamming into each other and upending the enemy gunmen who strayed into their paths.

  The upper hand lost by the enemy gunmen when they fell for the subterfuge engineered by the Israeli commandos was further squandered, those Israelis’ lithe motions timed to coincide with the chaotic paths of the loaders for cover. For his part, Brixton lunged inside one of the forklifts positioned to remove the deadly cargo from the train cars. He twirled the machine around, facing the opposite direction, while raising the fully adjustable pincer apparatus five feet in the air, steadied with the prongs flush with the floor. Then he wheeled into motion, taking out one enemy gunman, then another, and then a third before a barrage of fire forced him to lurch from the cab.

  He hit the floor just as the forklift burst into flames, the coarse black smoke providing cover for what he needed to do next.

  The explosives! The explosives were everything! Without them, there could be no disaster, no millions of lives lost. Without them, there could be no suspension of the election or of the Constitution itself.

  The explosives.

  Chancing enemy gunfire determined to thwart his efforts, Brixton ran along the side of the train, feeling bullet after bullet pinging off its steel frame. He was suddenly conscious of Lia Ganz directing her fire to cover him, tying up as many of the enemy as possible, to free him to race toward the train’s front engine and spirit the deadly cargo away.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  The tears brimming in First Lady Merle Talmidge’s eyes were genuine, not out of grief for the loss of the vice president but out of wonder and awe for her husband’s performance. It was as if time had rewound nine months, back to when the first symptoms of his rapid mental decline had begun.

  The first lady listened to her husband’s cadence and tone, amazed by the power and forcefulness of his words, the best and strongest of him captured in one last shining moment.

  “For in the darkest moments of our greatest despair, a light will shine through the darkness as our guide to avoid the abyss that lies in our path.”

  CHAPTER

  76

  OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE

  For Lia Ganz, the battle was the same as all the others she’d lived her life in, and yet different. It was the same in that firefights came with their own set of tangled emotions and twisted thoughts. It had been so long since she’d been engaged in one like this that the shattering gunfire and wild rush of bodies seemed surreal at first, until muscle memory kicked in. Then the battle became the same as all the others, with proximity, positioning, distance, and the merits of the opposition as the driving factors.

  Lia quickly fell into the practiced rhythm she had known so well, through so many years, years that had left her a bit slower, a bit more laggard in her response, but still a crack shot, thanks to the regular practice to which she’d committed herself. Her initial foray of fire had achieved the desired effect of turning the automated loaders into battering rams to strip the enemy fighters of the advantage their superior numbers would otherwise have provided. She used those loaders for cover, dipping and dashing behind and then before them to steady her fire.

  She’d just emptied her final magazine when one of the loaders rolled over a downed body of one of the fighters, sparing his assault rifle any damage. Lia slid across the floor, taking hold of the weapon, but the strap was still pinned beneath his frame. Unable to easily free it, she fired from the floor, her initial spray taking down more of the men clad in dark tactical gear. She noted that one of her own men was down and another was crawling aside across the slick floor, leaving a bloody trail behind him.

  Lia was vaguely aware of Brixton charging away from the scene, toward the head of the train. She realized his intentions in time to train her fire on the gunmen who were concentrating theirs on him, and she breathed easier when he disappeared inside.

  * * *

  Brixton emptied most of his Glock into the doors at the head of the train and crashed through the remnants of the glass. The train’s driver rushed toward him, Brixton turning to shoot the man—who kept right on going, with escape instead of heroism on his mind. He’d left the sliding security door leading into the cab open and Brixton surged through, facing a bevy of high-tech controls that reminded him of piloting a simulated flight on the space shuttle.

  Foremost among those controls, though, was what looked like a gearshift or throttle, green light glowing over it. Brixton clutched its top knob and eased it forward. The train bucked briefly, then settled into the same easy glide with which it had come into the station. He pushed the knob gradually farther, gathering more speed before he finally shoved the throttle all the way forward.

  The train jerked mightily before rapidly picking up speed with a steady electric whir, accompanied by the whoosh of the tunnel speeding by around him.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  In his famed Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien wrote, ‘The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it’s no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won’t come.’ But if we are to take one thing, one vital thing, from the life and work of Stephanie Davenport, it’s that tomorrow always comes. It comes carried on the backs of faithful, selfless public servants like her, willing to put the country’s needs above their own, knowing the needs of the many vastly outweigh the demands of a few.

  “For if we let ourselves become prisoners of those demands and those few, we will be a lesser people for those we’ve forgotten and left behind. Stephanie Davenport never forgot or left anyone behind. She believed in the capacity we still hold to do something better and greater, refusing to accept that our best days were behind us and that a single person could do nothing against a system determined to best them. For Stephanie, the individual was always bigger than the system, and only in doing those better and greater things could that system be changed to better us all.

  “‘A bad system will beat a good person every time,’ wrote W. E. Deming. But he was wrong. Because the only person a bad system can beat is someone who’s already surrendered to it. Stephanie Davenport was never willing to surrender, because she believed that same good person could change a bad system and not be changed by it. She believed there was always hope, could see it shining through the despair, that no matter how long the odds, good will find a way to triumph over evil.”

  OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE

  In the end, the enemy force’s superior numbers were too much to overcome. Ironic, thought Lia Ganz, that her final battle would be fought not on the hallowed shores of her beloved country but across the world in the morally unhinged United States. Her men were all down, dead or clinging to life, their numbers too small to overcome the onslaught. Just her now, she thought, as she scooped up an assault rifle shed by the dead Israeli who’d just been run over, and then another from the grasp of one of the fake terrorists, now dead too. Kill as many more as she could before she fell was the best she could do now.

  In that moment, she had the odd feeling she was back in Caesarea, only on the beach when the drones came spitting fire instead of in the water. Protecting her granddaughter, knowing both of them were going to die.

  Her granddaughter …

  Lia wasn’t going to die then and she wasn’t going to die now either. Something lifted inside her, a confidence and surety that slowed her heartbeat and turned her breathing normal. One of the out-of-control loaders whirled by and she leaped upon it, feeling what it must be like for a rider atop a bucking bronco.

  The loader spun and rolled. She spun and rolled with it, firing with both assault rifles,
a crazed circular spray of fire that cut down everything in its path. The world sped past in a dizzying blur around her. She felt separated from herself, separated from the world, one with the machine, until her assault rifles locked up, empty in the same moment, with no targets left to shoot.

  * * *

  Brixton held fast to the control board of the train, which now seemed to tremble underfoot. He could feel the sensation in his gut as it continued to pick up speed through the final stretch of tunnel, the throttle engaged all the way forward.

  He knew he was closing fast on the point where they’d originally boarded, nothing but the end of the concrete and steel tunnel beyond. He didn’t know if the train had safeguards in place, and he wouldn’t have known how to override them anyway. Nor was there any way he could jump free of the train before the looming crash against the concrete-reinforced earthen wall.

  Brixton thought of his daughter Janet, thought of joining her in moments, thought he felt her presence standing alongside him, before the controls in the train cab. He was secure in the notion that there would be no dirty bomb, no ten million deaths, no radical change from which the country would never recover. It wasn’t everything, but it was enough. He barreled forward instead of slowing, picking up more speed as the earthen wall finished in concrete rose before him like a vast monolith.

  At first it seemed, impossibly, that he had driven straight through it, that the train had just receded into the air around him. Then he realized he was airborne, banging up against glass and then steel, a numbness spreading through him in place of the pain he expected to feel.

  A blinding flash of light flared, before something jolted his very being and Brixton surrendered to darkness.

  WASHINGTON, DC

  First Lady Merle Talmidge didn’t have to manufacture the tears that spilled freely down her cheeks. Her husband was in the midst of the greatest speech she’d ever heard him give. There had been nary a fumble, twitch, stumble, or misstep; he had risen to the occasion. For this one shining moment in time, President Corbin Talmidge was himself again, the man who had captivated America, with whom the country had fallen in love and who would have soared to a second term virtually uncontested, if his tragic condition hadn’t intervened. For that one brief shining moment, he was again every bit the man with whom she had fallen in love.

  Then the president’s chief of staff sat down next to her, leaned closer, and whispered something in her ear. She listened, trying not to appear distracted or distraught, needing to hear the report from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, again to be certain she’d heard it right. She looked at him for confirmation and watched him nod.

  “So, in closing, I ask you to remember Stephanie Davenport not for who she was but what she was. I ask you to spend every day endeavoring to live up to her example and doing something every day to make the world a better place. Go with God, Madam Vice President.”

  A ripple of applause spread through the cavernous hall of the National Cathedral, growing into a tremor and then an all-out ovation as the audience rose to its collective feet.

  Merle Talmidge didn’t approach her husband until the president had acknowledged the response humbly, as if unsure who it was for. He finally turned toward her and she hugged him tight, tighter than she ever had before. There was no need for her to tell him that their plans at Y-12 had been thwarted, that no massive explosion was going to begin the process of transforming the United States forever while securing his administration’s hold on power, because he wouldn’t remember anything she said anyway. He’d played his part beautifully, done everything that had been expected of him today and more, making her prouder of him than she’d ever been.

  “How was I?” Corbin Talmidge asked her.

  “You were brilliant.”

  “I was?”

  “Never better.”

  “Then why are you crying? Did something bad happen?”

  “Yes,” the first lady said, her tears coming from an altogether different place now, “but it doesn’t matter.”

  OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE

  Brixton was climbing through the darkness, climbing toward the light. Just fissures of it, cracks in the obsidian world that had encased him. Was he pulling himself through air, sky, debris?

  He didn’t know.

  It didn’t matter.

  What mattered was that it was done, over, the horrific plot to murder millions finished.

  He was still climbing, hand scraped raw by the steaming rubble in his path. It was like being trapped underwater, with no surface to reach, just a black void.

  Then more pinpricks of light formed, widening as they joined up, seeming to burn away the darkness. Brixton pushed, stretched, imagined someone pushing from beneath him as the light grew brighter. He felt bony hands grasp him in a grip of steel, pulling and yanking. And then the light was his, shining through the refuse of the collapsed structure that had once housed the American Museum of Atomic Energy.

  The small, bony hands eased him to the side, to someplace reasonably whole and flat, as his eyes cut through the light to gaze at the figure stooped over him.

  “Praise God,” said Sister Mary Alice Rose.

  EPILOGUE

  The meeting was held in the conference room of Mackensie Smith’s soon-to-be-shuttered law firm’s offices. The table itself was decorated with chips and dings from the many cases that had been discussed and disseminated here, this one being the last.

  “I’m going to lay things out as plain as I can and need to, on behalf of my client, Mr. Robert Brixton, who is seated to my right,” Mac started. “I fully expect this to be our one and only meeting, because if we need to have another, it will not be in the interests of anyone at this table. It won’t just be heads that roll but entire bodies, careers, and reputations, as I will make it my life’s mission to bring down anyone who pursues this matter beyond these walls. Let’s take things by the numbers, shall we?”

  Three days had passed since Brixton, Lia Ganz, and company had thwarted the plot that would have changed America forever at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. No news source, credible or otherwise, was reporting anything about the gunfight that had claimed the lives of four Israeli nationals and briefly hospitalized a fifth. Lia Ganz, it turned out, had been shot twice in the battle, but she had already been released from the hospital and was expected to make a full recovery, the role she had played in saving millions of American lives to remain forever buried beneath the very rubble from which Brixton had climbed.

  After being pulled the last stretch into the light by Sister Mary Alice Rose, Brixton was treated for a number of bruises, contusions, and strains, but nothing that promised any lasting damage. He’d refused to speak to anyone in authority while being treated, referring all questions to Mackensie Smith, who again proved himself to be as good a lawyer as he was a friend. Brixton had no idea what had become of the eight hundred drums of high explosives that had never been triggered, though he suspected they had been removed from the train cars in clandestine fashion; a security perimeter had been established almost immediately around the former museum turned way station for deadly nuclear waste.

  It was Mac who managed to bring together those gathered around the table. He hadn’t told Brixton what he intended to say, and he spoke without benefit of notes. His gaze rotated among the others at the table, none of whom had introduced themselves and none of whom Brixton recognized. His arm was in a sling and he needed a single crutch to maneuver about, all of which went with a face that looked like a boxer’s after a fight that had gone a full twelve rounds.

  “Let’s start with some news you haven’t heard yet,” Smith continued. “This evening, President Corbin Talmidge is going to step down as president and will be replaced immediately by the Speaker of the House, in the absence of a sitting vice president. Shortly thereafter, the secretaries of the departments some of you work for—State, Defense, and Homeland Security—along with the attorney general, will be stepping down as well and taken into custody by Jus
tice Department officials, along with the first lady herself, to face multiple charges. You should know that some argued for a more discreet resolution, with the perpetrators permitted to walk away, but saner heads prevailed, rightfully convinced that the damage to the country would be far worse for concealing the truth than exposing it.”

  Smith waited for shocked, befuddled stares to be exchanged. No one said a word, but Brixton thought he detected at least two audible gasps.

  “To tell any of the story, we have to tell all of it,” Mac offered, by way of explanation, “lest we risk putting the country in front of another set of crosshairs down the line. In other words, an example must be set that this is a country of laws and procedures, both written and otherwise. We don’t want to tear this country apart figuratively after so narrowly escaping having that happen literally, but at the same time, we must ensure the truth comes out on our terms instead of its own.”

  Mackensie Smith waited for any questions or points to be raised, resuming again only when there were none of either.

  “As I said earlier, my client, Robert Brixton, is sitting to my right. As you may have noticed from the injuries he suffered, we have Mr. Brixton to thank for being the primary cog in a machine that prevented the worst disaster and crisis this country has ever seen and would likely never have recovered from. We all owe him a great debt of gratitude. He’s a security professional by trade who knows how to keep a secret, which he has every intention of doing.”

  Smith ran his eyes around the table to let that sink in.

  “In the event, however, the departments associated with the people seated at this table seek their own retribution or do Mr. Brixton any harm whatsoever, heads will roll, with all of yours being the first. As Mr. Brixton’s lawyer, I can tell you I will make sure he’s protected by every means available, and woe be the man or woman who decides to challenge that. That’s a message you should take back to your respective departments, and it’s a discussion you should plan to have as soon as you leave this office, so today may officially mark the end of this most sordid chapter in American history. So,” Mackensie Smith finished, leaning forward across the table, “are we clear?”