Armageddon Conspiracy (9 page)

Brent sucked down about half his beer and let out a silent belch. “These conversations are always a pleasure.”

“You know, before you went off to that phony-ass west coast business school, you were gonna teach. What ever happened to that?”

Brent finished his beer and crumpled the can. “You and Maggie,” he said sourly. “I’ll do it when I’m ready.”

Fred shook his head. “You think you gotta have ten million bananas first.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Never stopped me before!”

“That’s for sure,” Brent said as he started into the house for a fresh beer.

“Get me one, too,” Fred called.

They worked in the yard until six when Fred lit the grill, and they cooked burgers and ate on the old backyard picnic table. Fred had run
out of verbal steam, and by the time they finished dinner, he seemed to be in a reflective and melancholy mood.

“I give you a hard time, but I worry about you in that place,” he said after a long silence, during which they each worked on bowls of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce.

“You shouldn’t.”

Fred shook his head, his eyes turning inward, giving a brief hint that he wasn’t as tough as he liked to pretend. “Nobody’s fine in New York. It either kills people or turns them into assholes.”

“People die out here, too, “Brent said. His father had raced into a burning building when Brent was twelve. Fred had been pulling hose off the truck and watched it collapse.

Fred nodded. “But lemme tell you, I put out fires in these people’s houses for thirty years. I know what these Wall Street bastards’re like, with their slicked back hair and German cars and wives that look like they been chained in the basement and starved. They don’t say ‘Thank you’ when you risk your ass saving their stupid house; they ask why you didn’t get there faster.”

Brent stood up, wiped his mouth, and picked a load of plates to take into the kitchen. “I’ve got it under control.”

“That’s what your mother said after your dad died,” Fred said with a scowl. “Anyway, you look like a goddamn lump.”

Brent straightened up as if he’d been slapped. “You know, Fred, I’m not my mother!” He went into the house then came out a moment later and collected the bowls. “It’s just my job.”

“Not everything it’s cranked up to be?”

He shrugged.

“You just remember something,” Fred said when Brent came back outside again. “When you need help and those city assholes don’t
know you no more, you know where to come.”

“I know where to come.” Brent went over and put an arm around his uncle’s shoulder. “Thanks for dinner.”

Brent didn’t drive straight back to the city. Instead, he took a detour across town to a neighborhood of similar bungalows, turned onto a familiar street, and slowed toward the middle the block. To his surprise all the lights were burning in Maggie’s house. Cars were parked in the driveway and along the curb. Tightness gripped his chest, a sudden wild fear. Maybe she’d met someone else. Maybe this was some kind of celebration. He knew he should simply drive away, but he had to know.

Feeling like a fool, he pulled out his cell phone and punched in her number. It rang five times, and he was about to hang up when a man answered.

“Is Maggie there?” he asked, surprised by his hot surge of jealousy.

“Is this Brent?” the guy responded. He had a hoarse voice, New Joisey accent, and sounded older, maybe forty for forty-five.

“Yeah.”

“Hey, kiddo, it’s Spud,” the guy said with a laugh. “Where you been? How come we don’t see you ‘round the station no more?”

Joe Spedowski, or “Spud” as he was known on the Morristown PD, was Maggie’s best friend on the detective squad. “Ask your partner,” Brent said.

“Women don’t know shit. Ain’t you figured that out yet?” Spud said. “I’ll get her.”

The phone clattered on the kitchen counter. In the background, the refrigerator door opened and closed, and beer bottles clinked in the door racks. The back door creaked, and over the sudden wash of
other voices came the shout, “Brent’s onna the phone.”

A second later footsteps approached, and then Maggie’s voice. “Brent?”

“Yeah,” he said, finding himself at a total loss, everything he wanted to say trapped behind a wall of reserve.

“What’s up?” she asked, already sounding distant.

“Nothing. I just wanted . . . sounds like you’re having a party.”

“Some people from work.”

Another voice suddenly called out, “Call him back, Maggie. You’re missing your going away party.”

“Be there in a second,” Maggie replied.

Another touch of panic. “You’re moving?” Brent asked.

“Oh,” she said dismissively. “I just got kind of transferred.”

“To what?”

“This thing called Project Seahawk. It’s port security. FBI, Coast Guard, and different police forces, kind of a task force. They wanted another computer nerd.”

“It’s a
big deal
!” Spud shouted. “Don’t let her tell ya it ain’t.”

“Where?” Brent asked.

“Newark.”

He felt a flood of relief. “Now you’re a commuter!” he said, trying to sound hearty. “Well, congratulations. I’ll let you get back to your party.”

“We can talk some other time.”

He tried to sift her tone for some note of encouragement, but heard nothing. “Sure.”

He clicked off the line then drove through the sparse traffic, back to his empty apartment.

FBI AGENT ANN JENKINS GRABBED
an escaping strand of kinky red hair, stuffed it behind her ear, read several more paragraphs, and cursed. The document before her was labeled “Top Secret,” but as far as she was concerned it might as well have read “Transparent Ass-Saving Excuse.” It was typical CIA bullshit, full of double-talk and equivocation and void of a single hard fact. What pissed her off most was the tone, sort of a “You’re Extremely Lucky We’re Sharing This With You,” and its implication that the CIA was the REAL INTELLIGNCE SERVICE while the FBI was a bunch of bozos masquerading in dark suits.

The memo implied that some Russian-made Strella-18 missiles “might” have been stolen from a military base outside Kiev and “may” have been sold to some Middle Eastern terrorists associated with the Wahaddi Brotherhood. It concluded with the warning that what the
CIA termed the “package” “might” be headed for the continental U.S.

From long experience with CIA communications, Jenkins translated the “mays” into the certainty that the missiles had been stolen and sold to some crazed Muslims who wanted nothing more than to explode them on U.S. soil. The document was a political form of “tag,” meaning she and her team were now “it” and therefore responsible for making sure the “package” didn’t make it ashore along the northeastern coast between Maryland and Massachusetts. As Deputy Director of Project Seahawk’s New York office, that area was her bailiwick, and while responsibility wasn’t something she characteristically dodged, with her boss on medical leave recovering from open-heart surgery, the timing sucked.

She read the last sentence again and felt her stomach buzz with tension. Reflexively, she reached into the top drawer of her desk, grabbed some Peanut M&M’s from an open package, and tossed one in her mouth. This kind of crap made her
die
for a cigarette, but she was quitting . . . again. So, instead of smoking she was chewing through three packs of M&M’s a day.

The problem was that Project Seahawk was a fairly recent invention of Homeland Security—itself a fairly recent invention—and as such was an amalgamation of all the different state, local, and federal agencies that had anything to do with port security into one, theoretically, seamless entity. The key word being theoretical because, as Jenkins had learned after being assigned here from the FBI, the reality fell far short of the lofty goals. For starters Project Seahawk’s New York office was actually in Newark, a quick shot through the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan’s pricey real estate but a world away in terms of stature and prestige. During its short life, it had been perennially
under-funded and short staffed, and like any olio of agencies that lacked a true power base, it had become a regular source of manpower for other agencies whenever “special projects” came up in the region.

Right at that moment, Jenkins was looking at a forty percent staff reduction due to the President’s upcoming visit to New York. It pissed her off mightily that highly trained professionals responsible for keeping the nation’s ports safe from terrorism were sent out checking trashcans and mailboxes for bombs, especially when her staffing was pathetic to start with, but there was nothing she could do.

The CIA memo ought to be enough reason for the powers-that-be to give her back her entire team and cancel the upcoming POTUS visit, but she knew that wasn’t going to happen. Next year was a Presidential election, and when it came down to politics versus practicality, politics won every time.

Beneath the CIA memo sat a list from Homeland Security of personnel newly assigned to Project Seahawk. She glanced at the single name on the list—Maggie DeVito. One bloody person. Even worse, Jenkins noted, DeVito was coming from the Morristown Police Department, supposedly picked because she was strong in computers and relational database manipulation. She rolled her eyes. In her experience rural cops were smarter than morons, but just marginally. She once again suppressed her desire for a cigarette, popped another M&M in her mouth, and told herself that she was lucky for at least one thing—at least she was a skinny broad.

PRESCOTT BIDDLE SAT ALONE AT
his dining table awaiting the soup course when an unexpected noise made him glance toward the entryway. It was Faith, his wife, leaning unsteadily against the wall. She stayed there for a time then seemed to gather resolve and made her way to her seat at the far end of the table.

“To what do I owe this surprise?” he asked in a mocking tone. On most nights his wife ate in the small room on the second floor where she spent her days smoking, drinking, and watching television.

Faith did not reply, but reached out and one-by-one adjusted her ashtray, the silver coaster where her vodka would be placed, and the crystal and silver cigarette lighter. Her inventory check complete, she finally looked at him. “You’ve been so excited,” she said, her voice rough as the hiss of sandpaper on wood. “I thought I’d find out what it’s about.”

How did she know, Biddle wondered? They slept in separate rooms. He sometimes went days without speaking to her. “Just some developments at work.”

“Oh,” Faith said. She stared pointedly at his left hand where it lay on the table, at the grayed webbing between the thumb and forefinger, the flesh permanently damaged by his snakebite a few months earlier. “Are you still playing with your little friend in the basement?”

Biddle felt his temper flare. He took a second to control it then folded his hands and spoke to her as he might to a child. “You used to love the Lord.”

“I was once a dutiful little girl who obeyed her family . . . but then they told me to marry you.” She picked up the bell beside her plate, rang it, and when the maid put her head into the dining room, she ordered vodka.

“Will you ever stop blaming other people for your lack of self-respect and devotion?” Biddle demanded, keeping his voice level.

The maid reappeared with the vodka along with two bowls of vichyssoise. Biddle bowed his head and spoke a blessing, but Faith ignored him. She sipped her drink and fished a cigarette from her pack. She lit the end, inhaled deeply, and then held it in the V of her nicotine-yellowed fingers. “You love to list my failures,” she said after another gulp of her drink. “You and God must talk together for hours and lay them all out.”

Biddle had started on his soup, but he dropped his spoon and brought his hand down hard enough to rattle the silver. “You
will
stop mocking the Lord!”

“I’ll say whatever damn thing I want!” Faith shot back.

“No!”

Faith’s gaze wandered as she sipped her drink and smoked. “When I married you, I didn’t love you,” she said, her voice heavy with self-pity. “I didn’t think it mattered because I thought children would make me happy. I didn’t realize that all you love is your money, and now that you’ve got more than you can ever spend, all you want is your snake and your tooth fairy.”

“Stop it!” Biddle snarled.

Faith waved his words away. “I know how your greedy mind works. You’re excited because you think your tooth fairy’s going to give you something!”

Biddle tried to ignore her, but her words ate into him. As much as he resisted, they undermined him and dragged him back to his boyhood, as if they were spoken not by Faith but by his father, Reverend Josiah Biddle. What was it about this drunken cadaver at the other end of the table? How could she do this to him? When he looked at her face, he pictured his father’s instead, a razor strop in one hand, Biddle’s thin arm gripped in his other. He remembered Proverbs 23:13: Withhold not correction from the child; for if thou beatest him with a rod, he shall not die. His father would recite the words, and the strop would slash again and again across Biddle’s back and legs.

In spite of all the years of abuse, he’d followed his father’s urging and married Faith. She had been seventeen, thin and frail, but Reverend Biddle had selected her for her extreme devotion. Immediately after the wedding, Biddle had taken her to Boston and his new life, away from everything she had known in their Tennessee mountain community. For a woman who’d expected life to revolve around keeping house for a man and raising children, his long hours in the graduate program at M.I.T. had left her feeling lost. It had gotten
worse when, suspecting God had bigger things in store for him than mere fatherhood, he refused to have children.

Now he stared down the table at her, slumped in her chair, the burnt stub of her cigarette in one jaundiced hand and her drink in the other. Because of him, because of his disregard, she had become bitter and disillusioned and had slowly drifted, first from their marriage, and then from God. Gradually her despair had led her to drink—at first secretly but then openly and constantly. He looked away and sipped his soup, trying to push away the guilt.