by Duffy, Sue
She pulled into the circular drive and parked in front of the school. Rudy’s music teacher, Mr. Palmer, taught private lessons after school and had taken particular interest in her son’s perfect pitch. Though Melanie had encouraged Rudy to choose a stringed instrument, which would afford greater access to a Russian orchestra one day, she supposed the French horn he’d chosen would suffice.
She was surprised to see no one milling about the front office, wrapping up the usual administrative duties of the day. A few familiar cars were still parked outside. She guessed there was a staff meeting going on somewhere.
The hallway to the music room was clad almost floor to ceiling with student art. She paused before a gregarious purple ape wearing a ball cap and holding a baseball bat. It was signed Rudy Thompson. Melanie was sorry her son would miss baseball season but confident he’d take to ice hockey with as much enthusiasm.
The music room was at the end of a long hall of classrooms. Melanie noticed that all the doors to those rooms, which usually remained open, were closed. She stopped in the hall and looked back toward the front desk. Still no one there. Just then, though, she heard a few notes from a French horn and continued on down the hall, her steps lighter now. Mr. Palmer always asked Rudy to perform for her, to play something he’d learned that day. She looked forward to that.
But when she entered the long room with the choir risers stretched across one wall, Rudy wasn’t there. Mr. Palmer sat alone near the piano, the horn stilled in his hands. Something was wrong. He seemed uncertain what to do with his mouth. The pasted-on smile went flat too soon.
“Where’s Rudy?” she asked, her mind beginning to hurtle toward full alert.
He didn’t answer. Just then, his eyes shifted to a point behind her, and as soon as she turned, two uniformed officers stepped forward.
“Melanie Thompson?” one of them asked.
She knew. No one at the desk. The doors to the hall closed. A nervous music teacher. They’d been waiting for her. There was a scurry of hard-falling footsteps in the hall, and quickly her escape route filled with more uniforms.
How did this happen?
Chapter 46
Travis, I’m sorry for what took place on the river yesterday.” Shelton Myers stood before President Noland’s desk. “That was a horrible death for them all. But if Hans Kluen hadn’t alerted us, think how many on that bridge would have died. Still, I should offer condolences to you for the death of Ivan Volynski.”
The president sat back in his chair and sighed. “For all I know, I’m the next of kin.”
“Now there’s a bit of intelligence worth keeping to yourself. That’s my advice, Travis. The man’s dead. You never knew him, not really. Let him lie.” Shelton thought a moment. “It was fortunate closure that the heliport guard watched him board that chopper.”
Shelton moved to a chair and sat down. “Odd, don’t you think, that Volynski never exposed your kinship to the media?”
“Oh, it was coming,” Noland said, getting up from his desk and taking a seat near his friend. “I always knew it was Ivan who smeared scandal all over my father. I suppose he was waiting for just the right moment to pick me off, too, probably in the aftermath of his attacks on us, when all the country was hollering for vengeance. At the right time, he would have claimed responsibility for the devastation and then dropped one more bomb—‘And, oh yes, your president is my brother.’”
Noland shifted uneasily in his chair, unable to shake the needling thing inside him, growing louder, more insistent. A burning prompt. He must evade it for now and refocus. “Shelton, I wish everyone could have witnessed what local law enforcement all over this nation did last night. How they scrambled to find and arrest every terrorist listed on that flash drive, including our Secret Service traitor. I don’t know how nick-of-time we were in each case. Only Ivan knew the signal hour. But his people were ready and waiting. Police apprehended one woman at her child’s school. And the guy who would have blown a hole in the Lake Jenowak Dam was plucked right out of his chicken coop. The local cops who nabbed him said he’d always been a loner who preferred chickens to people. But he was a top-notch engineer. Unlike our Ellis Island bomber. They found him roaring drunk in a pub on City Island. When they started questioning him, he asked if they’d like to see his new coat. Turns out it was stuffed with C4 and a detonator.”
“How many did you catch?” Shelton asked.
“Seven. The others were aiming for the New York Stock Exchange, Naval Station Norfolk, the Federal Reserve, a few more national monuments. I’m not sure what else.”
“And Liesl Bower.”
“Yes, Liesl.” The president hung his head. “And then there’s Ben Hafner.” Noland sat still for a moment, then looked up. “Shelton, thank you for your advice and your loyalty.”
“You’re welcome, Travis. But one more question. Is the FBI any closer to an arrest for the Charleston attempt on Liesl?”
“The postman? No.” He fastened on his friend’s face. “Shelton, that flash drive was incomplete. There are others still out there.”
Chapter 47
Pulling up at the hospital in midtown Manhattan, Mark Delaney avoided the crush of reporters near the entrance and parked in a restricted zone behind the hospital. Though accompanied by two uniformed officers, he had to present his badge when he and Liesl reached the NYPD security shield hurriedly installed around the hospital.
Ava met them inside and showed them to the elevators. She had just summoned Liesl to the hospital with little time for explanations.
Wasting not a second, Liesl reached past one of the officers inside the elevator and punched the floor number for ICU. When the doors opened, she darted out, leaving Ava, Delaney, and the two officers in her wake. “Liesl, wait!” Ava called. But Liesl slowed only to hit the wall button that activated the double stainless-steel doors. When they opened, ICU looked more like an NYPD precinct. Officers guarded the main entrance and lined the walls on either side of a glass-front room directly ahead.
She glanced back at Ava and the perennially irritated Delaney, who stiffly nodded approval for her to keep going. When she approached the two sentries at the ICU entrance, she expected them to question her, but what she heard was, “Go ahead, ma’am. They’re expecting you.”
A young nurse came alongside her. “This way, Miss Bower.”
The door to the glassed-in room was open, but the curtains around the bed were drawn. Liesl heard an unfamiliar voice behind them. The nurse motioned for her to wait. Just when Liesl didn’t think she could do that any longer, a white-coated doctor parted the curtains wide, and Ben Hafner’s eyes fluttered open.
Liesl stood transfixed by his ashen face, by the ponderous bandaging across one side of his neck and over his chest. Too many emotions battled for dominance. Chief among them was an anger that wouldn’t let go of her. She felt the sting of tears rise behind her eyes and a throbbing knot swell in her throat. She couldn’t move forward, not until Ben lifted a limp hand and motioned her closer. That’s when she stepped to the bed and bent over him. Her tears finally burst through and ran down her face. “You big idiot!” she sobbed. “Why did you do it?”
He reached for her hand and held it weakly. His words poured thin and ragged, as if strained through a sieve at the back of his throat. “Nobody messes with my girls.” He swallowed with pained effort. “Not my family. Not you.”
Liesl nudged a clump of brown hair off his forehead and kissed it lightly. This was the brother-friend she’d loved for so long. Now, he lay here gravely wounded. If not for the bulletproof vest he’d worn, the first rifle shot would have torn away most of his chest. But the vest only slowed the bullet’s entrance into his body. The second shot had nicked an artery in his neck. He would have bled out if FBI agents hadn’t been on him instantly and summoned the medevac on standby a short distance away.
“Ava just told me what you did, but not before I saw you at that house on City Island.” She swiped at more tears. “Do you know what
I thought?”
He nodded, his brows bunching with regret.
“But she understands now, Ben,” Ava said, approaching the bed. “That you jeopardized your life and career to infiltrate Ivan Volynski’s network.”
“Why you, Ben?” Liesl persisted. “You’re no secret agent.”
“But they invited me,” he teased, his words labored.
Ava filled in the rest for Liesl. “They tried to recruit him over a year ago, at the same time they were hunting you and the code. Ben reported it to Noland and the FBI, who asked him to accept should Ivan’s people make any more overtures. The CIA had picked up too much chatter on a rogue Russian threat to the U.S., but nothing solid. They had to get inside.”
Ben lifted a couple of fingers. “But it was the girl from Broadway and her stepfather who really stopped that tugboat … and the other attacks.”
Liesl considered the young woman whose plight had entwined itself with hers. She hoped they would draw closer to each other, both survivors. Then she thought of something else. “Who killed Ivan Volynski?” she asked Ava.
“We can’t be sure at this time,” Ava said flatly.
“That sounds like official talk.”
“That’s exactly what that is,” Ava said, then turned to Ben. “When do Anna and the kids arrive?”
“They’re not coming,” he whispered, trying to reposition himself in the bed, then giving up the struggle. “I won’t let them. Anna’s endured enough.”
Ava looked at Liesl. “We had a wire on Ben. While he was still on the ground, he talked to Anna. He thought they were his last words. We thought so too, so we immediately transmitted them to her in Israel.”
Liesl felt new tears spring to her eyes, imagining the moment Anna heard his dying voice. She looked up at Ben with pleading. “Let her come, Ben. She needs to see you.”
Ava moved closer to Ben. “Do you think they’re still in danger?”
“Don’t you?” he asked with knowing eyes.
“It’s possible,” Ava answered. “You know that one of our saboteurs is talking. It seems we didn’t get them all.” She turned to Liesl. “And you may not be in the clear yet, either, Liesl. President Gorev, once again, is having to deal with subversives in his midst. We believe Pavel Andreyev and Vadim Fedorovsky are on a short list for execution now. Until they, like Volynski, are gone, you may not be entirely safe.”
“Who is?” Liesl asked bitterly. “Certainly not all those people on the bridge yesterday. They were just going home from work, thinking about what to fix for dinner. They might have noticed the tugboat heading their way—like the postman coming down my sidewalk on a calm Saturday morning—but never suspected they might not make it off the bridge. So who among us is safe?” She paused. “I prefer to live like someone who’s never been shot at.”
Ben reached up and stroked Liesl’s arm. She leaned over and laid her cheek on his head. “I’m so sorry about Jeremy.”
Ben released her hand and picked up the call button. “Anna and I have known a very long time that Jeremy’s days were numbered. I’m just sorry I ushered in the last one.”
The nurse arrived with a syringeful of relief that she inserted into Ben’s IV. It was potent enough to extinguish his words, slow his breathing, and lower his eyelids. Liesl and Ava moved quietly toward the door, where Liesl stopped and looked back at her sleeping friend. She returned to his side, laid a gentle hand on his head, and prayed, “Lord, please heal him. And make him know it was you.”
Chapter 48
The national address had been called for seven o’clock Wednesday evening. President Noland would speak from the Oval Office on a matter of national security, his press secretary had announced that morning. After the arrest of Hans Kluen, the aborted attack on the Brooklyn Bridge simultaneous with the mysterious explosion of a private helicopter over the river, the Inauguration Day attack, and the attempt to bring down the Supreme Court Building, the nation staggered under the weight of its own fear. Every news outlet in the country had stoked that fear until it was white hot. And they didn’t even know about the contents of Sonya Tretsky’s little flash drive. Not yet.
Cass and Jordan had just finished the dishes and moved into the living room of the Southampton house, its undraped windows overlooking the night sea. The following morning, they would accompany Jilly Kluen on her first visit to the prison where Hans awaited trial. It promised to be sensational, the media had drooled. Cass would liken it to an elaborate stage set where drama and pathos would play out to the end of the third act. Then the audience would go back to their normal lives, and a stagehand would turn off the lights. After the spectacle of Hans Kluen’s trial, though, there would be no normal life for his wife and daughter to return to.
Even now, they had already lapsed into something like an altered state—like those Titanic survivors Cass had recalled after finding her apartment ravaged.
And so it was that Cass had come to pull two fleece throws from a cabinet, spreading one over her mother, who’d just come down from her bedroom and curled into a recliner near the television, with little more than a smile in greeting. Jilly Kluen had seldom spoken since her husband’s arrest on Monday. For two days, she’d puttered silently about the house, cleaning out closets and drawers, rearranging accessories, polishing the silver service, and hauling withered houseplants to the garbage. One might consider such mindless chores mere distraction from the ruin, but Cass knew better. As Jilly had done her whole life, she was systematically shedding an outer layer of blighted skin. How many times could she do that before she discovered nothing new growing beneath? Had that time now come?
As Cass settled onto the sofa next to Jordan, she pulled the other throw over them both, warming to the soft spread of fleece and the symbolic bundling of two friends into one couple. When he stretched his arm around her and pulled her against his side, she fit. As if molded together in another time, predetermined by an unseen hand, they fit to each other. Is that possible? she wondered as she looked up at the contentment on his face. Did God do this? If he did, will he now pull me and Jordan closer to him? And Mom, too? Cass believed he would.
Jilly turned in her chair, her eyes lingering on Cass and Jordan, something fearful in her face.
“Mom, can I get you anything? A cup of coffee maybe?”
“No, dear. I just need to see you.”
Cass got up and went to her mother. She knelt beside her and slipped an arm around her shoulders. “We’ll get through this, Mom.” Jilly stared into space. “And don’t forget—it was Hans who warned the FBI about the bridge. It was Hans who dared to sneak that flash drive out of that woman’s purse. Without the names of all those terrorists, imagine what might be happening all over the country right now. And it was … my father who positively identified the man responsible for all this.” She searched her mother’s stricken face. “We can be proud of him for that. Can’t we?”
Jilly looked into her daughter’s eyes, but only for an instant. It was long enough, though, for Cass to read her mother’s dismissal of such a notion. “I will visit him every weekend, but there will be no pride.”
She motioned for Cass to turn on the television. It was time.
Travis Noland watched the cameramen scurry around the Oval Office to connect their cords and test the lighting. His press secretary stood by with a copy of the speech in his hands and the pallor of doom on his face. The president had waited until just moments ago to issue the speech he’d written himself. There was no time to assuage the press secretary’s misgivings or alter the message. Travis Noland had finally reckoned with that burning prompt inside him.
At the end of the 3-2-1 countdown, the president looked straight at the camera. “Good evening, my fellow Americans. I trust I have the ear of the nation at a time when everyone needs to listen and understand the truth about recent assaults on our country. Too much misinformation has compounded the harm. I hope to reverse that course tonight.
“Once again, our nation has withstood
acts of terrorism within our borders. We suffer, yes, but we don’t succumb. Terrorists interrupted our inaugural tradition. They didn’t eliminate it. What they did was prove the necessity for it, lest we fall to their brand of tyranny.
“Whether to destroy the seat of this land’s highest court or merely demonstrate that they could, the terrorists who bombed our Supreme Court Building only demonstrated their pathetic need for something they’ll never have—power over the American people.
“Monday afternoon on the East River off Manhattan, a man charged the Brooklyn Bridge with a tugboat full of explosives, a man bent on revenge for his army son’s death while serving our country in Afghanistan. You’ve seen the footage shown repeatedly on all the newscasts. While filming the FBI and NYPD’s battle to stop the tug, one cameraman inadvertently captured the midair explosion of a helicopter just downriver. We believe the man responsible for all these acts of terror was on that helicopter. We are now certain his name was Ivan Volynski, a former Russian KGB officer who sought to intimidate us, to frighten us into submission, and to warn us away from interfering with his grab for power in Russia. It was his agenda to return that nation to its glory days as the USSR. But there is no glory in brutal tyranny or cowardly acts of hit-and-run violence.
“What hasn’t been reported to you is the network of subversives this man left behind in our country, a sabotage network that would have brought widespread destruction upon us. Through the cooperation of two such saboteurs, others in that network have since been captured.
“Are we safe now? No more than we’ve ever been. Are there others out there who this moment are assembling their devices of destruction? Yes. Whether they act alone or within a terrorist cell such as we just uncovered, our greatest defense against these people is you, the private American citizen. When you practice situational awareness and report what rouses your suspicion, we’re all safer. Terrorists must live somewhere. Maybe near you. Maybe they send their children to school with yours. They must gather materials for explosives and other devices and weapons, perhaps in your store or business. They must scout their targets. If they aren’t lone wolves, they must gather with the rest of their cell. Be observant. No, don’t spy on your neighbors or bring unfounded accusations. We won’t tolerate McCarthyism again. But wherever you are, observe your surroundings and those who operate within them.