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  A necessary evil in today’s political climate, but advancing the real agenda at HomSec required a core of competent individuals, regardless of party affiliation. There were other ways, darker ways, of assuring allegiance.

  If Becker’s effusive praise was warranted, then this girl would add a welcome dollop of both brains and ability to his bailiwick. He saw it as a bonus that the brains came in a very attractive package.

  She saw he was waiting for an answer. “O.K., as soon as I can lay my hands on my doctorate I’m good to go.”

  Edgerton looked at Becker. “And that will happen when?”

  “Ahh, well, she still has to defend—”

  “Remind me again of how much this Administration sent here last year. In the neighborhood of half a billion dollars? Some of which, I assume, went into educating Ms. Sinclair?”

  Becker cleared his throat and rearranged his desk set. “I suppose I—the committee—could—”

  Edgerton heaved himself out of the chair, removed a card from his vest pocket. “Use this to find us, Ms. Sinclair. Kathy, if I may.”

  “You may not. It’s Kat, Mr. Edgerton. What am I going to be doing to earn all that money?”

  He was surprised, and a tad miffed, that she didn’t know who he was. He had, after all, been a regular on the Sunday Circuit since his Senate confirmation eighteen months ago. “Actually, it’s Secretary Edgerton, dear. And your task is to ferret out the wicked.”

  Chapter Four

  The teenaged girl jumped off the A4/DC Village Metrobus and hurried along Shepherd Parkway, paralleling the Potomac River. Safely away from school, she pulled off her necktie and stuffed it in her book bag. Blue, like her skirt, with the Saint Anne’s Academy emblem in white, and Elizabeth Paloma in black laundry marker.

  Liz undid the top two buttons on her blouse. At breakfast Aunt Patty had said come straight home from school. Yeah, right. The Vandals had her number. You’re Not the Boss of Me.

  It had recently rained. There were puddles on the sidewalk, and the dirty water splashed her shoes. She’d have to polish them tonight, or tomorrow she would catch H E double hockey sticks from Sister. School uniforms sucked. School sucked.

  A quick look over her shoulder told her she was alone. She stepped off the sidewalk, ducked through a narrow tear in the rusting chain link fence, and left the Washington of tourists. This was a section of the city visitors only saw from above, from Interstate 295, at sixty miles an hour.

  The empty buildings, part of the old Cannon Works, were relicts of the last century. Now the area was the home to recycling operations, automobile shredders, railcars filled with newsprint, glass, aluminum. And home to the Blue Plains Impoundment and Storage Facility.

  She hurried between a pair of abandoned foundries, each five stories high, a hundred yards wide, and a quarter of a mile long. The overhead cranes were silent, the machinery rusting away with frozen gears, the shafts painted with seventy years of pigeon droppings.

  Overgrown railroad tracks ran down the center of the narrow space. She stayed close to the wall; the burrs would leap onto her pleated woolen skirt like living things, and she’d have to pick them off one by one.

  Furtive movement at the end of the building caught her eye. One of the homeless crazies, pushing a shopping cart filled with cans and bottles toward the recycling center, where he would trade a day’s collecting for a night’s respite from his demons. She paused until he passed from view. Daddy called them the Mumble Men, said keep your distance.

  The shadows were lengthening, and the deep doorways were dark pools. She didn’t see the tattooed man, still as death.

  Most days she came this way, used this short cut after school, instead of taking the longer, more public route to the Blue Plains Impoundment and Storage Facility.

  She stopped short of the doorway, listened. She could hear the steady roar of the traffic high above on the Interstate, the whoosh of jets across the river at Reagan.

  But she also felt a closer presence. What some people called your Sixth Sense Aunt Patty called your Chakra. She said they have an extrasensory function, playing a part in empathetic and instinctive responses.

  Sister Mary Margaret said Eastern religions were the temptations of Satan, and nice Catholic girls concentrated on their catechism.

  Liz shivered, and the hairs on her neck stood on end. Then the feeling passed, and she gave her head a little shake as she hurried past the doorway.

  An arm snaked out, an arm covered with serpents and spiders and dragon scales in red and green and black. It slithered around her neck, pulled her back, pulled her off balance.

  The man had twenty years and twelve inches on her. Liz's knees buckled. She dropped; a dead weight, and suddenly it was the man who was off balance, his size advantage now a burden.

  She twisted her head, pulled free. Reached in her knee sock, pulled out what looked like a forbidden tube of lipstick.

  “DIE, MOTHERFUCKER,” she screamed and sent a blast of pepper spray toward his face.

  He threw his hands up, caught most of the stream before it hit his eyes. Then reeled back, hit his head against the brick wall. Slumped, sat, wept. “Liz! Such language!” He raised his hands to his eyes.

  “Oops.” She knelt in front of him, dropped the canister, grabbed his hands. “No, don’t rub them, you’ll only make it worse.” She opened her book bag, took out her water bottle. “Tilt your head back, dummy.” She emptied the bottle on his face.

  The water mingled with tears and phlegm, darkening his uniform shirt. “Ow, that stings.”

  “Serves you right, Daddy. You scared the sh-; you scared the pants off me.”

  He struggled to his knees, started to stand, then lost his balance and sat back down. She peered into his eyes. “Daddy?” He had that faraway look. “Have you been taking your meds?”

  He cleared his throat, swallowed. Smiled, stood, put his hand against the wall. “Hoo boy. Dizzy there for a sec. Let’s go inside.”

  “Daddy.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. ‘Take your medicine’. I’ll stop by the clinic tomorrow. Meanwhile, young lady, how about you button your shirt.” He put his arm around his daughter, pulled her close. Her hair smelled of shampoo, a link to way back when. No More Tears. If only it were that easy. Buy a bottle of some magic potion to protect your child.

  “You did good, Sweetheart. Nobody better mess with my little girl.” He pushed open the steel door to the abandoned factory, and she followed him inside.

  Her eyes adjusted to the vast emptiness. The afternoon’s pale rays, filtering through the skylights, always reminded her of a church. “Does that mean now you’ll teach me some Less Than Lethal responses?”

  “Pepper spray is LTL, Liz.”

  She gave him a wan smile. Life was so easy for grownups. Cut and dried, yes or no, virgin, whore. “It’s not that simple, Daddy. Suppose some boy gets frisky, tries to cop a feel. And I’m not sure if I want him to stop, or not.” She hunched her shoulders. “I don’t think pepper spray is the answer.”

  He felt a queasy lurch in his stomach. When he’d first started his daughter’s lessons in self defense he’d been having flashbacks of the Bosnia Girls. Twelve, thirteen; gang raped, then butchered in front of their father’s eyes. Boyfriends copping a feel was a different ball game. “Oh, Liz, honey, that’s beyond my expertise. I wish Mom were here.”

  “So do I, Daddy, so do I.” She dropped her book bag on one of the worn wooden work benches and headed to the locker room.

  During the height of World War Two a hundred men in three shifts had toiled in the building, forging the naval guns that helped win that war. The time clock was still there, and the card racks. A yellowed 1952 calendar was on the wall.

  The locker room had forty urinals, ten toilets, and a communal shower. One of the tow truck drivers was also a midnight contractor, and had tapped into Washington’s vast utilities network. Electric, water, steam heat. Now the abandoned factory had all the comforts of home.


  Liz opened a locker, took out her coveralls, and her mother’s custom .223 rifle. Her days were filled with schoolbooks and boy talk with girlfriends, but her favorite time was still the tomboy hours she spent with her father. She pulled a pony tail through the back end of a Redskins ball cap, and carried the rifle out to the shop floor. “Daddy, can we go up on the roof, and shoot rats?”

  From one end of the building to the other there was a four hundred yard line of sight, clear of obstructions. A secluded indoor shooting range. With an old, but functional machine shop, refurbished over the years her father had been working at the Blue Plains Impoundment and Storage Facility next door.

  The army had trained him as a 45B: Small Arms/Artillery Repairer, then cut him loose after the Bosnia fiasco. Now he dispatched wreckers for DC Metro DPW and built guns for select clients.

  “Not today, Honey. I have to reload a couple of hundred rounds of training ammo for the Metro SWAT guys. You can help me do that. Want to tumble some brass?”

  “Sure. And then you can help me with a school project. I have to write a program in Linux, for computer science.”

  His cell rang before he could display his ignorance. “Paloma here.”

  “Hey, Nick. It’s Jerry. I’m sitting here on 495, at Tyson’s Corner. It’s wall-to-wall, major disaster time. Total gridlock, six by six. I can’t even get over to the breakdown lane.”

  “What happened?”

  “Truck crash. Gas tanker. Fire, multiple fatalities. It’s not on the radios?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not at the Facility.”

  “Yeah, well, you better get there, ‘cause Virginia’s gonna be calling Metro for trucks. And rollbacks. There must be ten, twelve burned out vehicles. Nick, there’s no way I can do the four o’clock University sweep.”

  “I’ll grab a hook, do that myself. Sit tight, Jerry.”

  “Oh, man, like I have a choice.”

  Nick Paloma shoved his phone in his pocket. “Liz, sweetheart, there’s been a bad accident, over in Virginia. I’ll drop you at the Metrorail Green Line. Tell Aunt Patty I’ll be home when I can.”

  —o—

  After Secretary Edgerton departed, Kat Sinclair addressed what she hoped was her soon-to-be Former Professor. “So, Sir. About that doctorate. . .” Two years of blood, sweat and tears, on top of teaching remedial math to nitwit freshmen, all on a steady ramen noodle diet, meant she wasn't leaving the department without it.

  Soon-to-be Former Professor Becker pursed his lips and tented his eyebrows. “I’ll assemble the committee this afternoon. You can pick up your parchment in the morning. I hope that you will remember us fondly, dear, as you go about you new job, defending us from terror.”

  Kat circled the Professor’s desk to give him a brief one-armed hug and a kiss on his cheek. “I hope so, too.”

  The sidewalks were wet, but the sun was shining as she left the campus. Across the street a big man in a DPW dayglo green vest was shoving the wheel lift of a wrecker under the Bug. “Hey!” she yelled, dodging traffic. “Hey dickwad! That’s my car.”

  Brawny forearms tattooed from wrist to elbow, and probably beyond, folded themselves across his chest. “And your car is impeding traffic flow in curb lanes posted NO PARKING/4PM-6PM.”

  “So, I’ll move it!” She shook her car keys at him.

  He palmed a spool handle at the tail board, his truck whined, and her little car rose on its haunches. “Too late. You can pick it up at the Impound.”

  Traffic whizzed past. She stepped closer, and grabbed his arm, yanked it away from the lever. He dropped his hand to his belt, and she noticed the pistol clipped inside his waistband.

  He reached in his hip pocket, came up with a pair of shiny handcuffs, and rattled them at her. “Play nice.” He tore off the top copy of a triplicate form. “Pay the fine and towing fees at the Adjudication Office. 301 C Street, NW. Monday through Friday, 8:15 am to 5:00 pm. Then bring your receipt and photo ID to the Blue Plains Impoundment and Storage Facility at 5001 Shepherd Parkway.”

  She read the pink form. “I don’t have three hundred dollars!”

  “You’ve got twenty-eight days to come up with it. After that, it’s abandoned, and will be sold at auction.”

  “You’re a real prick, you know that?”

  “I hear that a lot. There are troubles way worse than yours, kid.” He pointed to the southern skyline. “See that smoke? That’s a disaster in Virginia that makes your problem a fart in a cyclone. Have a nice day.”

  Chapter Five

  The swarthy man left Washington's Dulles as Ramon Chibas. When he landed at Boston's Logan he thumbed through his wallet, searching for Angel Ruiz's Massachusetts driver's license.

  He used the AutoShopper website to find another F-150 with a cap, and drove it to Brookline, where an ex-Special Forces contact fixed him up with a rifle and a few other equally illegal supplies. Buying a gun in Massachusetts is tougher than finding a virgin in Vegas.

  After they swapped war stories over a couple of beers he headed back to the airport, with stops at Walmart and Home Depot. When something works, why change it?

  On his return trip he crossed the Leonard B. Zakim Bridge. With its dramatic inverted wishbones, and pearl colored supporting cables, it's a favorite backdrop for Boston newscasters.

  The bridge carries ten lanes of Interstate 93 and U.S. Route 1. The Massachusetts Turnpike crosses the Southeast Expressway at the South Bay Interchange. It also intersects rail lines carrying 150,000 commuters into Boston’s South Station. Angel smiled at the clusterfucking possibilities.

  —o—

  The Walter Reed Hospital cafeteria was ready for the presidential visit. Doctors, nurses, psychiatric support staff, and non-denominational clergy lined both sides of the hallway, hoping for a glimpse of the Commander in Chief.

  A small, select group of Army, Navy, and Marine Corps patients were formed up on the mess deck, waiting for the president's arrival. They all wore their Purple Heart medals pinned to their pajamas, and a few walked with crutches, had arms in slings.

  They were lean and fit, if somewhat shorter than average. While all were above the sixty-inch requirement of the military, none were taller than SHORTSTOP.

  The president was known to say Napoleon and Stalin were also five-six, and had once quipped five-door-four President James Madison managed to draft the first ten amendments to the Constitution without a booster seat.

  He was trailed by a cable crew, print reporters, and Master Chief Petty Officer Calvin Bustamente, who wore his dress blues for the occasion. Between the red chevrons and the silver eagle on his rating badge was the insignia of a United States Navy Culinary Specialist.

  The president shook his hand, and told the food joke he'd prepared, then headed directly to the salad bar.

  Navy chow is the finest in the world, so when the morning’s air freight shipment of spinach from California’s Imperial Valley was delayed due to an overzealous ICE agent detaining a busload of undocumented field hands, Master Chief Bustamente sprang into action.

  He reached in his trouser pocket, and told his Chief of Stores to run to the Bodega Los Primo on Mount Pleasant Avenue, and buy a few crates of Hecho en Mexico broadleaf.

  Everyone in the culinary and celebrity worlds of Washington was aware the First Lady, and therefore SHORTSTOP himself, was a believer in the healthy aspects of raw vegetables.

  During a first term chat with the Food and Fashion Critic of the Washington Weekly Free News the First Lady had enthused not only were raw vegetables tasty in their own right, “They're positively overflowing with vitamins, nutrients, and the essential probiotics absolutely destroyed by cooking.” She was a Californian, which explained a lot.

  The President of the United States had added, “They keep you regular.”

  Chapter Six

  It was nearly nine o’clock when Nick finally made it home. The street lights gave the brick sidewalks a rich glow, and in the gloaming the row houses looked better than they rea
lly were.

  Aunt Patty was in the living room, reading the WaPo, and keeping an eye on the anchors warming up for the final presidential debate. Nick looked through the archway, saw Liz at the kitchen table with her laptop, and his father-in-law reading the sports section.

  His sister-in-law heaved her bulk forward and the recliner responded with creaks and groans. “There’s a nice piece of pork roast in the fridge. And mashed potatoes, green beans. I’ll heat you a plate.”

  “Sit. I grabbed a slice of pizza earlier. I guess you heard about the big accident. Half our trucks are still across the river. Any mail?”

  “Dad told me. He was in the air when it happened. Sky Six led the network news. A big envelope came from the Army. ‘Official Business. No Postage Necessary. Penalty for Private Use $300’.”

  “Mary’s records! Now I can go see the VA, try to get Liz some money for college.”

  “Well, let me iron a long-sleeve shirt for you. And do yourself a favor. Button the cuffs, wear a necktie. Not everybody is impressed by the Paloma art gallery.”

  “Hey; it’s what first caught your sister’s eye. Took her forty-five minutes to fill out the booking report. Needed two extra pages to describe the Scars, Tattoos, Distinguishing Marks. And I didn’t even take off my shirt.”

  He turned his eyes to the little table in the corner, the display. “Candle’s out. Liz. Bring Daddy a votive.”

  Liz handed him a small wax disc, and he put it in the red glass cup. Father and daughter stood silently for a minute, watching the yellow flame flicker, casting ruby light across the memory of her mother, his wife. High School graduation photo, group shot of her Guard unit, her MP armband, the folded flag. Guitar leaning against the wall below the framed citation. Bronze Star, Purple Heart.