MURDER AT THE CDC

PROLOGUE

December, 2016

The tanker lumbered through the night, headlights cutting a thin swath out of the storm raging around it.

“I can’t raise them, sir,” said Corporal Larry Kleinhurst, walkie-talkie still pressed tight against his ear.

“Try again,” Captain Frank Hall said from the wheel.

“Red Dog Two, this is Red Dog One, do you read me? Repeat, do you read me?”

No voice greeted him in response.

Kleinhurst pressed the walkie-talkie tighter. “Red Dog Three, this is Red Dog One, do you read me? Repeat, do you read me?”

Nothing again.

Kleinhurst lowered the walkie-talkie, as if to inspect it. “What’s the range on these things?”

“Couple miles, maybe a little less in this slop.”

“How’d we lose both our lead and follow teams?”

Hall remained silent in the driver’s seat, squeezing the steering wheel tighter. Procedure dictated that they rotate the driving duties in two-hour shifts, this one being the last before they reached their destination.

“We must be off the route, must have followed the wrong turn-off,” Kleinhurst said, squinting into the black void around them.

Hall snapped a look the corporal’s way. “Or the security teams did,” he said defensively.

“Both of them?” And when Hall failed to respond, he continued, “Unless somebody took them out.”

“Give it a rest, Corporal.”

“We could be headed straight for an ambush.”

“Or I fucked up and took the wrong turn-off. That’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying we could be lost, sir,” Kleinhurst told him, leaving it there.

He strained to see through the big truck’s windshield. They had left the Tooele Army Depot in Tooele County, Utah right on schedule at four o’clock pm for the twelve-hour journey to Umatilla, Oregon which housed the Umatilla Chemical Depot, destination of whatever they were hauling in the tanker. The actual final resting place of those contents, Kleinhurst knew, was actually the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility located on the depot’s grounds, about which rumors ran rampant. He’d never spoken to anyone who’d actually seen its inner workings, but the tales of what had already been disposed of there was enough to make his skin crawl, weapons that could wipe out the world’s population several times over.

Which told Kleinhurst all he needed to know about whatever it was they were hauling, now without any security escort.

“We’re following the map, Corporal,” Hall said from behind the wheel, as if needing to explain himself further, a nervous edge creeping into his voice.

He kept playing with the lights in search of a beam level that could better reveal what lay ahead. But the storm gave little back, continuing to intensify the further they drew into the night. Mapping out a route the old-fashioned way might have been primitive by today’s standards, but procedure dictated they avoid the likes of Waze and Google Maps out of fear anything web-based could be hacked to the point where they might be rerouted to where potential hijackers were lying in wait.

Another thump atop the ragged, unpaved road shook Hall and Kleinhurst in their seats. They had barely settled back down when a heftier jolt jarred the rig mightily to the left. Hall managed to right it with a hard twist of the wheel that squeezed the blood from his hands.

“Captain . . .”

“This is the route they gave us, Corporal.”

Kleinhurst laid the map between them. “Not if I’m reading this right. With all due respect, sir, I believe we should turn back.”

Hall cast him a condescending stare. “This your first Red Dog run, son?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“When you’re hauling a shipment like what we got, you don’t turn back, no matter what. When they call us, it’s because they never want to see whatever we’re carrying again.”

With good reason, Kleinhurst thought. Among the initial chemicals stored at Umatilla, and the first to be destroyed at the chemical agent disposal facility housed there, were containers of GB and VX nerve agents, along with HD blister agent. The Tooele Army Depot, where their drive had originated, meanwhile, served as a storage site for war reserve and training munitions, supposedly devoted to conventional ordnance. In point of fact, the military also stored nonconventional munitions there in secret, a kind of way station for chemical weapons deemed too dangerous to store anywhere else.

The normal route from Tooele to Umatilla would have taken just over ten hours via I-84 west. But a Red Dog run required a different route entirely off the main roads in order to avoid population centers. The point was to steer clear of anywhere people resided to avoid the kind of attention an accident or spill would have otherwise caused, necessitating a much more winding route Hall and Kleinhurst hadn’t been given until moments prior to their departure. A helicopter had accompanied them through the first stages of the drive, chased away when a mountain storm the forecasts had made no mention of whipped up out of nowhere and caught the convoy in its grasp. Now two-thirds of that convoy had dropped off the map, leaving the tanker alone, unsecured, and exposed, deadly contents and all.

Kleinhurst’s mouth was so dry, he could barely swallow. “What exactly are we carrying, sir?”

Hall smirked. “If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be driving this rig.”

Kleinhurst’s eyes darted to the radio. “What about calling in?”

“We’re past the point of no return. That means radio silence, soldier. They don’t hear a peep from us until we get where we’re going.”

Kleinhurst watched the rig’s wipers slap at the pelting rain collecting on the windshield, only to have a fresh layer form the instant they had completed their sweep. “Even in an emergency? Even if we lost our escorts miles back in this slop?”

“Let me give it to you straight,” Hall snapped, a sharper edge entering his voice. “The stuff we’re hauling in this tanker doesn’t exist. That means we don’t exist. That means we talk to nobody. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Kleinhurst sighed.

“Good,” said Hall. “We get where we’re supposed to go and figure things out from there. But right now . . .” His voice drifted, as he stole a glance at the map.

Suddenly Kleinhurst lurched forward, straining the bonds of his shoulder harness to peer through the windshield. “Jesus Christ, up there straight ahead!”

“What?”

“Look!”

“At what?”

“Can’t you see it?”

“I can’t see shit through this muck, Corporal.”

“Slow down.”

Hall stubbornly held to his speed.

“Slow down, for God’s sake. Can’t you see it?”

“I can’t see a thing!”

“That’s it, like the world before us is gone. You need to stop!”

Hall hit the brakes and the rig’s tires locked up, sending the tanker into a vicious skid across the road. He tried to work the steering wheel, but it fought him every inch of the way, turning the skid into a spin through an empty wave of darkness.

“There!” Kleinhurst screamed.

“What in God’s name,” Hall rasped, still fighting to steer when a mouth opened out of the storm like a vast maw.

He desperately worked the brake and the clutch, trying to regain control. He’d been out in hurricanes, tornados, even earthquakes. None of those, though, compared to the sense of airlessness both he and Kleinhurst felt around them, almost as if they were floating over a massive vacuum that was sucking them downward. He’d done his share of parachute jumps for his airborne training and the sensation was eerily akin to those first few moments in freefall before the chute deployed. He remembered the sense of not so much being unable to breathe, as being trapped between breaths for an absurdly long moment.

The rig’s nose pitched downward, everything in the cab sent rattling. The dashboard lights flickered and died, the world beyond lost to darkness as the tanker dropped into oblivion.

And then there was nothing.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Washington, DC

“Are you sure about this, Mac?”

“No, Robert,” Brixton’s best friend Mackensie Smith said, “I’m not. That’s why we’re having this conversation.”

Brixton adjusted the notepad in his lap and readied his pen. “Tell me about her.”

He knew the bulk of the associates in Mac’s law firm used iPads these days, but Brixton still favored pen and paper. Mac made it a practice to almost never close his office door, Brixton watching him do just that now and then retake the leather arm chair in the office’s sitting area.

“She’s twenty-five, beautiful, and whip smart.”

“In other words, nothing like the man she claims is her father. And you’re forgetting something.”

“What?”

“Her name, Mac. I will need that, you know.”

Mac returned the smile Brixton hoped might put him more at ease. “Alexandra, Alexandra Parks. Parks being her mother’s name.”

“Next question: Have you considered using an investigator with more objectivity?”

Mac looked thrown by that for a moment. “Not even for a second. It has to be you, Robert. You’re the only one who understands what this means to me. Like another chance at something I never thought I’d experience again.”

Mac had been one of Washington’s top criminal lawyers for years, a go-to guy when a case seemed hopeless. But after losing a son and his first wife to a drunk driver on the Beltway—and seeing the drunk get off with what Smith considered a slap on the wrist—he closed his office and accepted a professorship at the George Washington University School of Law, where he’d taught fledgling attorneys about the real world of being a lawyer.

While his stint in academia had been satisfying, the call of the courtroom became too loud to ignore. After many long, heated discussions with his second wife, Annabel Reed-Smith, herself a former attorney and, now owner of a pre-Columbian art gallery in Georgetown, he resigned his post at the university and hung out his shingle again.

Not surprisingly, his modest return to the law ballooned into a booming practice once more. A single office and reception area gave way to a suite of offices for associates, then an entire floor as those associates multiplied followed by a second floor with connecting stairwell to accommodate partners, junior partners, with additional office space reserved for the likes of the firm’s top investigator—Brixton himself.

Mac had considered downsizing the year before, only to change his mind. He had started to scale back when word leaked of his involvement, along with Brixton’s, in destroying the most dangerous conspiracy in the nation’s history. Though the actual facts of that conspiracy were known to extraordinarily few, rumors of Mackensie Smith’s involvement in its destruction were known to many. The result was an unprecedented number of calls and inquiries looking to hire his firm. Although Mac had earned the right to be discriminate about which cases he took on, the client load necessitated an expansion, and the firm had relocated to the vacant and newly renovated top two floors of the city’s Warner Building located on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest.

Brixton knew Mac loved the work, loved the action, loved the fact that the firm had license to avoid the kind of lobbying efforts and representation of politicos that had so soured Mac on the law in general and backroom politics in specific. The latest infusion of cash from hourly billings and retainers was substantial enough for the firm to take on more than its share of pro bono work. And when COVID-19 had forced the closure of Annabel’s art gallery, she had returned to the law to head up that department with the firm in its new space.

“You understand what it’s like to lose a child, what it does to you, as well as I do,” Mac continued, referring to Brixton losing his own daughter Janet to a terrorist bombing.

“I was lucky in one respect,” Brixton told him. “I had another kid.”

“And now, maybe, I do too. I worry that’s clouding my judgment, not seeing all this clearly. I want it to be true too much.”

“What’s she like?”

Mac cast his gaze out the window, a tell Brixton knew that indicated he was uncomfortable addressing the subject. The Warner Building’s detached location from the cluster of government offices, iconic and otherwise, left it without much of a view to offer, but the building was a mere five-minute walk from the Federal Triangle Metro stop which featured access to the Orange Line, Silver Line, and Blue Line, assuring easy access for both the firm’s lawyers and clients. Much of the world might have moved on-line for meetings, but initial client meetings went much better in person and, being old-fashioned, Mac always suggested coming in as opposed to logging on.

“Charming, charismatic, full of personality, and beautiful. In other words, you’re right, Robertm, nothing like me.”

Brixton made some more notes. “Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, Mac.”

“The way everyone was looking at her in the Capital Grille, there must be a lot of beholders.”

“That’s where you met the first time?”

Mac nodded. “Her choice. Turns out it’s her favorite place to eat in the city, too.”

“Like father, like daughter.”

“I didn’t know restaurant choice was genetic.”

“Tell me more,” Brixton urged.

“Did I mention how bright she is?”

“’Whip smart’ was the term you used,” Brixton said, without consulting his notes.

“Neuroscience and organic chemistry major at MIT, if you can believe it. That’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

“I think I heard that someplace.”

Mac smiled and shook his head. “I sound like a doting father, don’t I?”

Brixton nodded. “You do.”

“For a daughter I’ve known for all of a week.”

Brixton weighed his next words carefully. “Tell me about Alexandra’s mother.”

“Beverly Parks. New York socialite and head of the family’s magazine empire.”

“The name sounds familiar.”

“Beverly or Parks, Robert?”

“Parks, for sure.” Brixton hesitated. “And this was twenty-five years ago?”

Mac met his gaze. “The answer’s yes, Robert.”

“I didn’t ask a question.”

“You wanted to, something like ‘It was an affair, wasn’t it?’”

“I would’ve been more tactful in my phrasing.”

“I was married at the time. My wife and son were still alive. It was the worst mistake of my life—at least that’s the way I’ve always looked at it.”

“Until a week ago.”

“Do you blame me?”

“Not at all, Mac. We all have a right to be happy and fulfilled. I know that better than anyone.”

Mac nodded, smiling. “Speaking of which, have I told you recently how wonderful it is to see you and Flo back together. Annabel and I feel like we have a social life again.”

Brixton smiled back. “Not that I’m much fun anymore.”

“You mean, since you quit drinking.”

“It snuck up on me, Mac. Sometimes you don’t know how far you’ve fallen until you can’t look up and see the light anymore.”

Brixton had blamed his breakup with longtime girlfriend Flo Combs on the malaise that had overtaken him. He’d gotten too accustomed to doing business over dinner and drinks, until the two became virtually indistinguishable. And when the business dried up, the dinner and, especially, the drinks remained. That had all changed a year ago when Brixton had climbed back on the horse: almost literally, given that he had proposed to Flo outside her New York clothing boutique after clip-clopping up the street in a horse-drawn carriage. She had dropped down to the pavement, where Brixton knelt on bended knee, and hugged him tight.

“Can I take that as a yes?” he’d asked her.

She’d moved back to Washington. COVID had led Flo to close her New York boutique, leaving her clinging to the DC venue for dear life. Fortunately, Brixton had remained steadily employed through the pandemic, living in Arlington instead of the city proper, a location far friendlier to their finances. The truth was Brixton had found himself happy to be able to provide for Flo while retail continued to struggle. It felt like redemption to him, a means to make amends after a breakup that had been entirely his fault.

“I know that feeling,” Mac said, shocking Brixton back to the present and the matter at hand. “I fell into a pit for a time when my wife and son were killed.”

“That wasn’t your fault.”

“But I’ve never stopped replaying that night in my mind. What I could have done differently, what might have happened if I hadn’t been out of town? Maybe they’d still be alive.”

“Have you ever heard the word ‘maybe’ used in a positive light?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

“What about in terms of whether Alexandra Parks is really your daughter? Have you confirmed all this with a DNA test?”

“I don’t have to. I know she’s my daughter.”

Brixton weighed not just his best friend’s words but also the veil of certainty through which he’d said them. “But you don’t know her, do you?”

“That’s why you’re here, Robert. There’s something I haven’t told you yet.”