BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Good morning to you, too, Sister.”
“Don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” Sister Mary Alice said to Lia Ganz, not missing a beat when the big SUV screeched away from the curb, tearing into traffic amid the horn-honking protests of impatient drivers.
“Lia Ganz,” Lia greeted from behind the wheel.
“Your accent…”
“Israeli.”
“Oh, my. What have I done now?”
Brixton ignored the joke. “When did you learn you were being transferred?”
“This morning, when they woke me up in the pod I share with three other women. Told me to get dressed while they waited. Then they brought me downstairs. Wouldn’t even allow me to brush my teeth.” She glanced toward Lia in the driver’s seat, then back toward Brixton. “Were those men really federal marshals?”
“Yes,” Lia answered, before Brixton had a chance. “But this was no ordinary transfer.”
“Apparently not,” the nun said, managing a smile.
“We need your help, Sister,” Brixton said to her.
“You made that plain yesterday, Mr. Brixton.”
“There’s going to be an attack on Y-Twelve,” Lia Ganz picked up. “A big one.”
“Oh, my,” Sister Mary Alice repeated. “Not by federal marshals, I trust.”
“No, by some of the people they work for.”
“Oh, my, indeed.”
Brixton explained it all as well as he could while Ganz careened the big SUV through the congested streets. Even the summary was terrifying as he told it. How a shadowy government cabal led by First Lady Merle Talmidge had chosen to strike, both to secure indefinitely a mentally ailing president’s hold on power and to pursue a world-changing agenda that was to begin with a staged terrorist attack against the homeland.
“And I was the one who ended up in prison,” Sister Mary Alice said at the end, as Ganz squeezed the SUV into a no parking zone directly across the street from a parking garage, a block over from the Barclays Center. “So you’re saying that there are no terrorists.”
“The cabal behind this made them up. A straw man for what’s to come.”
“Come on!” Ganz ordered, lunging out of the SUV.
Brixton led Sister Mary Alice across the street in her wake, the three of them taking the nearest garage stairs to the fourth level, where they’d left Ganz’s rented Chevy Cruze, now complete with pilfered plates in case anyone was looking for the car. That would do for now, although Lia suspected they’d need another vehicle to complete the drive south.
“We’re headed to Y-Twelve, aren’t we?” Sister Mary Alice asked them both.
“Eventually,” confirmed Lia Ganz, as they reached the Chevy.
“We need to make a stop in these parts first,” said Brixton.
He gave Lia the address and explained where they were headed.
“You trust this man?” she asked him.
“I trust that he can provide the answers we need.”
“Like what?”
“Exactly how blowing up Y-Twelve is going to kill five million people. That’s what the professor will be able to tell us.”
Sister Mary Alice looked across the seat at him. “The professor?”