Murder on the Metro Page 4

  “Excuse me?” Brixton posed, as Mackensie Smith shouldered his way alongside him.

  The bigger detective, who had a bald pate, shiny with perspiration, flashed his badge. “Detectives Lanning and Banks, Mr. Brixton. A uniform placed you away from the other passengers in triage and told you to wait for us.”

  Brixton realized the bald detective, Lanning, had been part of the team that had investigated the suicide bombing five years ago, the local liaison. “Yes, that uniform told me to wait for a detective, who would be questioning me.”

  “But you left anyway.”

  Brixton exchanged a glance with Mac Smith. “Only after the detective showed up and questioned me about my actions and what I witnessed on the train.”

  “After who questioned you?” Lanning asked him.

  “Detective Rogers.”

  Now it was Lanning’s and Banks’s turn to exchange a glance, before Lanning resumed. “I don’t know who you spoke with, Mr. Brixton, but there’s no Detective Rogers on the force.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  TEL AVIV-YAFO, ISRAEL

  The location of Mossad headquarters remains one of the world’s best kept secrets. Any number of structures have been “positively” identified as the spy agency’s home over the decades, but confirmation has always remained muffled. Whether due to subterfuge, distraction, clever disinformation, or a combination of those and more, the upshot has been to shroud the organization’s headquarters, along with its very existence, in secrecy. There were even tales of three separate buildings, with personnel regularly shifted from one to the other, to confuse would-be attackers and infiltrators.

  Lia Ganz knew this to be the product of myth as much as anything. The one true headquarters of Mossad, where the day-to-day business of protecting the Jewish state took place, was located in the Yafo section of Tel Aviv, in a slate-colored cube of interconnected slabs of buildings that were practically invisible to any form of overhead surveillance. There were just enough neighboring structures to offer camouflage and render the complex utterly innocuous and practically undetectable by drivers cruising past along the nearby roads. In fact, the placement of those buildings was strategic down to the last inch, to create that precise effect. Tens of thousands of Israelis must have looked in the direction of Mossad headquarters every year, taking away no recognition or acknowledgment that anything was there at all.

  The meeting she’d requested had finally been granted, a full week after the drone attack that had killed more than fifty Israeli beachgoers at Caesarea and wounded twice that number. Many of the dead and wounded were children, and Lia had woken up every night since in a cold sweat, plagued by visions of her and her granddaughter being on the beach, instead of in the water, at the moment of the attack.

  Moshe Baruch, chief of Mossad, was standing by a window that looked out over greater Tel Aviv, hands clasped behind his back, maybe regarding Lia’s reflection in the glass and maybe not. Standing behind him skewed the perspective, still leaving her, at five foot nine, clearly taller than one of her true mentors, by three inches. Her eyes fell over her own reflection, making her think for a split second it was someone else’s.

  When did I get this old?

  But it wasn’t that so much as a drawn look of fatigue and weariness, visible even in this skewed version of her reflection in window glass. In point of fact, the wan reflection staring back at her now had only taken form after she left Mossad, as opposed to being fostered by so many years of built-up pressure. It was as though losing the purpose that had so long defined her had sapped her strength and left her too much time to ponder the death of her own husband, a captain in the Israeli Defense Forces, during a never-reported enemy incursion into the Golan Heights a decade before.

  “We anticipated a drone attack. We planned for it, prepared for it.” Baruch finally turned from the window toward her, regarding Lia with the same blank expression he’d worn while looking out into the expanse between here and downtown Tel Aviv. “But not like this. No detectors at such a beach, no advance warning systems or defensive measures. No place to hide.”

  Baruch’s voice was flat and monotone, but laced with an undercurrent of suppressed tension that left Lia thinking he might erupt at any moment.

  “Of course, it should have been anticipated. I should have anticipated it.” He seemed to regard Lia for the first time. “You were there.”

  “With my granddaughter.”

  The Mossad chief’s eyes flashed. “One of the worst attacks we’ve ever suffered, and our sources have gone quiet on the possible perpetrator. No actionable intelligence, Colonel,” Baruch continued, referring to her by her Israel Defense Forces rank. “Nothing at all.”

  “Ballistics?”

  “Ordinary five point five six load. Available pretty much anywhere in the world. The weapons systems were modified, shaved-down heavy machine guns, internal drum fed, a hundred rounds each.”

  Lia did the math. The saturation of bodies occupying the beach had made for an easy kill box. Almost literally like shooting fish in a barrel, as the Americans might say. A hundred and fifty dead and wounded in total from three hundred rounds fired. The thought made her shudder. And when the shudder passed, the same series of sensations that had followed the initial sleepless nights since returned: frustration, rage, and the desire for revenge.

  It was a combination that Lia Ganz, and all who had fought so passionately to preserve the State of Israel, knew all too well. It was the emotional core that defined their very being, the very basis of their efforts in standing as an eternal David against an equally eternal Goliath. There were some in the political and social arena whose view of that had changed, to the point where Israel had become too much the Goliath over the years and had lost sight of life from the perspective of David.

  For those like her, though, the perspective never changed, because it was based wholly on the mission before her at any given time, a transaction to be completed expeditiously and successfully. The evil she had pursued over the course of her long career was no different from that revealed during the War of Independence in the wake of World War II, or the Six-Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, or any of the other wars, named and unnamed, that had followed. It all made for a mind-numbing experience with years, eras, and causes growing indistinguishable from one another, joined together by the singularity of the moment, in which nothing changed but everything was different. The distinction was often lost on those who lacked appreciation for the Israeli mind-set.

  “There must have been a targeting system,” Lia said, picking up where her thinking had left off.

  “Two working in tandem, actually, both motion and heat. The mechanisms were damaged, but not enough to stop us from tracking down their source. Little solace at this point, I’m afraid.”

  “Only one thing will give us solace at this point,” she told the head of Mossad.

  They stood facing each other, with the sun’s angle through the darkened windows brightening the room. It remained a mystery to Lia how such glass could keep others from seeing in while allowing those inside to see out with crystal clarity. She found that an apt metaphor for how Israel had managed to survive all the bloodshed it has endured.

  Baruch’s expression tightened. “Is that why the Lioness of Judah has come here today?”

  It had been Baruch who’d given Lia that moniker, a play on the national Israeli symbol of the Lion of Judah, named for an ancient tribe formed of the descendants of the fourth son of Jacob and drawn from a blessing Jacob had once made over the favorite of his sons. Baruch had been her shepherd since 2000, when Lia had been chosen to serve in the Caracal Battalion, the first ever in which female soldiers served in combat. It was named Caracal after a small cat whose gender was indistinguishable, and the battalion ultimately was 70 percent women.

  She had risen to commander in 2009, when a platoon she was leading responded to a terrorist incursion over the Egyptian border, which resulted in a firefight that climaxed when Lia
herself had shot one of the terrorists who was wearing a suicide vest, detonating the explosives. The terrorists who survived fled back over the Egyptian border. That was the first time they’d wanted to give her a medal, but Lia opted instead for a transfer to the elite special operations division Yamam, becoming the first and still the only female to have served in that unit. And only Baruch knew the extent of her exploits, which had finally ended with the wounds she’d suffered in the ill-fated Gaza incursion three years before.

  “Because,” Baruch continued, “this clearly isn’t a social call.”

  “I need to come back in,” Lia told him.

  “You need,” he mimicked.

  “What I heard, what I saw, how close I came … Whoever was behind this has to pay.”

  “And you’d like to be the one to make them, even though you’re out now.”

  “Because I’m out, and not for that long either. Whoever’s behind this has inevitably left cracks too small for even your best active agents to slip through. They won’t be expecting an old grandmother to come knocking.”

  Baruch scoffed at her remark. “You’re not old, Colonel.”

  “No, but I am a grandmother. And my granddaughter was with me on that beach, in the water at the time, which was the only thing that saved our lives.”

  “An early introduction to the ways of Israel for Meirav.”

  Lia nodded reflectively, impressed that Moshe Baruch knew her granddaughter’s name. “Just before it … happened, she’d poked her finger into one of my old scars. This attack, being there to feel those moments, opened up an old one. Scar tissue may not bleed, but the thing I can’t get out of my mind was the smell of blood drifting out over the sea. I go to bed smelling it and I wake up smelling it.”

  “With not much sleep in between, I’m guessing.”

  “No,” Lia affirmed, “not much. Not much at all.”

  Baruch continued to regard her, his blank expression keeping his thoughts from her while urging her on.

  “I think about a lot of things in those hours, but mostly about how I’ve never felt more helpless. How there would have been nothing I could have done, nothing at all, had one of the drones turned over the water. I never want to feel that way again, and I know only one way to assure that I don’t have to.”

  Moshe Baruch stepped back, so that the fresh shaft of light illuminated only her, leaving him in the shadows. “Last time I checked, Colonel, you were retired.”

  “No one ever retires from service to Israel.”

  “Then tell me,” Baruch continued, “what does the Lioness of Judah need from me, from Mossad?”

  “This twin targeting system interests me.”

  Baruch flirted with a smile. “I knew it would.”

  “We find its maker and we find our target.”

  Baruch nodded a single time and moved for his desk. The clear protective blotter on it was empty save for a laptop computer and a single thumb drive, which Lia hadn’t noticed until that moment. Wordlessly, he picked up the drive and brought it to her, squeezing her hand into a fist around it.

  “You had this prepared for me,” Lia realized.

  “Yes.”

  “You knew I’d be coming, didn’t you, Commander?”

  This time a slight smile broke over Baruch’s expression, the sun between them again splashing up from the thin carpeting. “It’s just ‘Moshe’ now. You’re retired, remember? A grandmother, with time now for bedtime stories and fairy tales with happy endings. But be warned, Colonel, not all stories have empty endings.”

  Lia Ganz held his stare, looking at him with the same determination and gritty assurance as she had in the years she’d been under his command. “This one will.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  WASHINGTON, DC

  I don’t know who you spoke with, Mr. Brixton, but there’s no Detective Rogers on the force.

  Detective Lanning’s statement back at the hospital had thrown Brixton’s senses even more out of whack. He had grown increasingly stringent about being able to explain everything around him—the product, he supposed, of being a control freak. Truth be told, though, he knew of no professional in his line of work who wasn’t. And getting thrown for a loop in this way left him grasping for answers and explanations about whoever this Detective Rogers might have been.

  Of course, it could be that Rogers was new to the department, either promoted or transferred in. Given that there were so many passengers and other witnesses to question, it was even possible he’d been loaned out to DC Metro from the Baltimore PD, even Bethesda, or possibly the Maryland State Police. Brixton recalled the apparent authenticity of the badge dangling by a lanyard from Rogers’s neck, but a combination of the Metro platform’s murkiness and the lingering effects of what he’d just experienced on the train had conspired to keep him from checking any more about the badge than that. An amateur mistake.

  Yup, I’m getting old, all right.

  That fact did nothing to mollify him, and nothing would until he figured out, first, who Detective Rogers really was and, second, what he’d been trying to learn from talking to him. The man could have been a journalist, but they were normally easier to spot.

  Because of the clutter and lack of available space in the emergency room, Brixton had adjourned with the detectives to a shaded area outside the medical center. They all sat down at a picnic table, where workers likely went to eat their lunch. Mackensie Smith had stayed with him through the detectives’ interview. Many of their questions were the same as those that Rogers had posed, some were not, and several were repetitive, phrased in varying ways to provoke a different response from the one Brixton had originally provided.

  Detectives Lanning and Banks were clearly suspicious about his presence on the Metro car, seeming to suggest concern over him taking on the role of some vigilante cruising the city in search of lives to save and punishment to dispense. The fact that he’d only drawn his gun but not used it, trailed the bomber up the aisle but not chased her, left Brixton baffled by an assumption they’d come to that wasn’t supported at all by the facts.

  Having used such an interrogation technique himself on multiple occasions, he knew this to be a means not only to stir new memories and potentially incite fresh thinking but also to trip him up. Brixton didn’t blame the detectives for their suspicions at first, though he quickly tired of their repetitive, redundant questions, which clearly indicated that their assessment of him was wrong, to the point of rendering the entire interrogation moot.

  “I believe, gentlemen,” Mac had said, finally intervening, “that we’ve accomplished everything we’re going to here today. You have my client’s contact information, as well as mine, and if you wish to speak with him again, I suggest calling me first to make the arrangements. Are we clear?”

  Lanning and Banks had no choice but to acquiesce, their expressions making their displeasure known.

  “So I’m your client now,” Brixton said to Mac, after they took their leave.

  “For five minutes anyway.”

  “Given that we have privilege between us, care to share with me what you wanted to talk about in the office this morning?”

  “Get yourself checked out first, Robert. We’ll have plenty of time to talk later.”

  * * *

  After Brixton was diagnosed, not surprisingly, with a mild concussion, Smith drove him back to his apartment in Arlington, saying that they could talk then. But those plans were waylaid when an emergency summoned the lawyer back to his office as soon as he dropped Brixton off, leaving Brixton to wonder if Mac might’ve called himself to put off their discussion further.

  Upstairs, he mixed himself a drink, even though the doctor had told him not to consume any alcohol, and switched on the television, even though watching any screen was prohibited as well. So was reading, which Brixton intended to do as soon as The Washington Post arrived tomorrow, as was his custom every morning.

  He hadn’t told the doctor about his previous ex
perience with terrorist bombers, because he knew—or at least feared—what to expect in view of that. And, sure enough, he found himself pacing the floor, unable to sit down and rest, the death of his oldest daughter feeling as if it had happened this morning instead of five years ago. Brixton knew he was suffering from a form of PTSD, in which a traumatic incident stokes intensely powerful memories of a similar event from the past. It was like losing Janet a second time.

  The concussion must have been worse than doctors originally diagnosed. They had not ordered a CT scan, with so many of the train’s passengers ahead of him, but Brixton found himself having bouts of disorientation through the night, as well as dizzy spells and some minor short-term memory loss. He would decide to do something and forget what it had been while he was moving to prepare whatever needed to be prepared. He kept trying to change the channels on the television, but to no avail, because he’d accidentally put the remote in the wrong mode by pressing a key he thought was a number.

  Brixton went through the night like that, but he felt much better the following morning and made some calls to sources to see how the investigation was going and if any further information on the bomber had turned up. By all indications, she was in the United States on a student visa and was enrolled at George Washington University, but she was currently on leave for unspecified reasons. The young woman’s fingerprints had drawn a blank with the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, and neither the name she went by—Ursa Raheim—nor her facial likeness received hits from any of the various terrorist watch lists floating around.

  He was between such calls when his cell phone rang. He recognized the number but couldn’t remember from where.

  Maybe I’m not doing better, after all …

  “Robert Brixton,” he greeted.

  “Robert, it’s Kendra Rendine,” said the Secret Service agent with whom he’d coordinated on several occasions while working for SITQUAL.

  “I’m so sorry about Vice President Davenport, Kendra. I know the high regard you held her in and how much you liked her.”