Nuclear Winter First Strike Page 6

  To confirm it wasn’t all in his head, he felt the woman run her fingers across his broad shoulders, briefly touching the nape of his neck, causing the tiny hairs to rise in response.

  More familiar.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he inhaled her scent.

  Even more familiar.

  Not perfumy. Salt water.

  “How’d you know I was here?” he asked without taking his eyes away from the last swig of bourbon.

  She set her phone next to his on the bar, drawing his eyes to study its display. On the map, there were two red dots blinking nearly on top of one another.

  “I used the where’s my husband app,” she replied as she hoisted herself onto a barstool.

  Jessica Albright, Mike’s wife of fifteen years, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, savoring the slightly scruffy feel of his five-o’clock shadow on her lips.

  With Jessica’s arrival, the bartender managed to pull himself away from the vacationing college girls to take her drink order.

  “I’ll have a Tanqueray and tonic with a splash of Nellie & Joe’s,” she said, pointing at the yellow plastic bottle with the green flip-top. The Florida-bottled lime juice was an essential ingredient in many recipes and a favorite complement to a gin and tonic.

  Mike pushed his empty glass toward the bartender. “I’ll have another, and don’t be a stranger next time. Okay?” His demeanor was slightly surly.

  “Um, yes, sir,” the young man replied sheepishly.

  Mike and Jessica sat in silence until the bartender returned with their drinks and a mango wood bowl full of fortune cookies.

  Mike leaned back on his stool and glanced at Jessica before addressing the young man. He pointed at the bowl of cellophane-wrapped treats usually found in Chinese restaurants.

  “Seriously?” he asked.

  “Um, yes, sir. The Sysco salesman dropped off a case this morning. I guess China Garden ordered way too many or something like that. He gave it to us for nothing.” He reached for the bowl to remove it from the bar, but Mike raised his hand.

  “Nah. Leave it. It fits right in with the screwy day I’m havin’.”

  They each took a sip of their drink and opened a fortune cookie.

  “Me first,” said Jessica as she broke open the packaging and cracked the fortune cookie in two. “‘Luck helps those who help themselves.’ I like it. Time to play the Mega Millions Powerball game.”

  Mike smiled as his wife tried to drag him out of his melancholy mood. She knew they both thought the lottery was a way to tax the poor. He opened his fortune cookie and read it.

  “Your life is a dashing and bold adventure,” he read aloud. He shook his head. “No thanks.” He slid the small piece of paper in front of Jessica and took hers instead.

  She immediately protested. “Hey! Fortune cookies don’t work like that. You can’t just pick and choose your good fortune.”

  “I need luck, and you like adventure. Sounds like a fair trade to me.”

  “Mike, you can’t trade fortunes.”

  “Why not?”

  “Um. Well, it’s against the rules or the laws of good fortune or something.”

  Mike started to laugh and immediately felt better. He reached over and squeezed her hand before kissing her on the lips.

  “Why can’t you just let me be miserable?” he asked jokingly.

  “Because, Detective Albright, that’s not who you are,” she replied. “I heard about it on the radio. Was it that bad?”

  Jess also worked for the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department as a member of their WET team, an acronym for Water Emergency Team. She was a trained scuba diver as well as a paramedic.

  Mike nodded. “Much worse than the first one, Jess. I just don’t understand people.”

  “Same MO?” she asked, hoping that by talking about it, Mike would feel better.

  “Yeah. Vic was a young male. Stabbed to death. The first murder weapon was a butcher knife. This time, the killer used a spring-assisted knife.”

  “Like a switchblade?”

  “Sort of, but shorter by law. The max length is three and a half inches, I think.”

  Mike and Jessica had met in 2017 when he was investigating several brutal murders in the Middle Keys. In the spring of that year, a woman lost control during her birthday party and went on a bloody rampage, stabbing her boyfriend to death. The couple’s four children were in the house at the time. A month later, a man was arrested for stabbing his friend to death after the victim made unwanted sexual advances in a trailer they shared. In late summer that year, a man got into a dispute with his landlord over an eviction notice. Four lethal stab wounds later, the landlord was dead, and the killer had dumped the body in the brackish water off the Upper Keys. Jessica’s team had recovered the corpse, and Mike had been assigned to investigate the murder.

  A murder a year was the norm, and they almost always involved a domestic dispute or an argument between transients. Because of the significant tourism levels in the Florida Keys, the crime rate was twenty percent higher than the rest of the country. While the rate of violent crime was much lower than the state’s, property crime was nearly thirty percent higher.

  The two continued to talk about the murders, which Mike was prepared to identify as the work of a serial killer. Jessica asked a logical question. “What’s your gut tell you?”

  Mike sat back again and glanced over at the television, which was airing CNN. It was the top of the hour, and as was their custom, the breaking news graphic was displayed on the screen. There was always breaking news of some kind as far as cable news networks were concerned.

  “In a way, they resemble a crime of passion. Well, at least the first one did. Killing someone with a knife is very personal. The vic and the killer are necessarily in close proximity to one another. The killer can feel the life of their victim being extinguished.

  “What bothers me the most by this second murder is the escalation in the attack. Jess, it was sadistic. Angry. It makes me want to gather up all of our family and hide on Driftwood Key where the monsters can’t get us.”

  Jessica nodded. “I’ll be honest. I was worried for Lacey when she moved to California with Owen. I look at that place as a cesspool. Did you know many of the nation’s serial killers began in California? After what I’ve seen here, maybe she’s better off out there?”

  “Maybe,” replied Mike in a soft tone of voice. His eyes suddenly became affixed on the television when the chyron read Secretary Sanders unharmed. The video footage of the carnage caused him to jump off his barstool and scream at the bartender, “Hey, turn that up!”

  “Mike, what is it?” asked Jessica.

  He turned back to her abruptly and replied, “Peter is over there.”

  Chapter Seven

  Friday, October 18

  McDowell Residence

  Hayward, California

  “Tucker McDowell! Let’s go!” shouted his mom, Lacey, from the bottom of the stairs. “Do you wanna walk to school?”

  Her son had the perfect solution, at least in his mind. “Just leave the keys to the Bronco. I’ll drive myself.”

  Lacey shook her head and rolled her eyes. She turned around to check the time on the grandfather clock in the foyer.

  “Not a chance for two reasons! One, you’re fifteen and only have a learner’s permit!” Lacey paused. She couldn’t think of reason number two right off the top of her head. She went with the old standby used often by her mother. “And because I said so!”

  “You don’t have to yell, Mom,” Tucker said calmly as he stepped off the stairs into the foyer.

  Startled, Lacey swung around to address her son. “Where did you come from?”

  “Duh, upstairs,” he replied sarcastically, pointing his thumb over his shoulder. “Are you ready?”

  He’s just like his father, she thought to herself. Why couldn’t I have had a sweet adorable little girl? Because they grow up to hate their mothers, that’s why.

&n
bsp; “Jesus!” she exclaimed as she tried to stop the debate raging in her head.

  “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I was just pullin’ your chain. I’m ready.”

  Lacey took a deep breath. “No, I wasn’t yelling at you. I was only—”

  “Yelling at Jesus,” Tucker interrupted. “You know, Mom, prayer works best in silence sometimes.”

  Lacey playfully swatted at her son, who easily dodged the blow. “Come on, kiddo. You know this is a big day for your dad. I wanna get there early, that’s all.”

  “Who’s opening the store for you?”

  “Carlos is coming in. I should be there to relieve him by two.” She swept her key fob off the foyer table and picked up her handbag, which waited for deployment in a chair. It was rare for her to carry one, opting for a shoulder-sling backpack most of the time.

  They made their way to the car when Tucker commented, “You look really nice, Mom. I’m sure the muckety-mucks will be impressed.”

  Lacey appreciated the comment from her son. “Thanks, honey. As long as your dad is proud and confident during the presentation, that’s all that matters.”

  “Do you think he’ll get the job?”

  Owen McDowell was a marketing executive with Yahoo in Sunnyvale, California. The tech giant had just hired its fifth chief executive officer in the last nine years. The new CEO, an accountant and marketing executive by training, intended to bolster Yahoo’s presence in the lucrative online display advertising market by competing with Google AdWords.

  Yahoo had been experiencing declining sales and market share for years until Owen used his formidable technical skills and marketing intuition to give the brand a makeover. Over time, Yahoo had failed to generate a brand identity geared toward the younger generation of users. Owen had instituted a number of marketing programs that yielded inroads into Google’s market share.

  Today, he was making a pitch to corporate executives focusing on the Yahoo! portal as a starting and ending point for users’ web visits. He’d led the charge on a more privacy-oriented search function, much like upstart DuckDuckGo, which differed significantly from the overly intrusive Google search engine.

  “We’ve got our fingers crossed, son,” Lacey replied. The two headed toward Hayward High School, which was only a few miles from their home. The sprawling campus taught nearly two thousand students. Tucker had just begun his junior year and was an above-average student.

  A few minutes later, Tucker was off to class, and Lacey gave herself one last look in the mirror before she headed for Sunnyvale. She turned on the radio to listen for a traffic report.

  The Nimitz Expressway was bumper-to-bumper. “No surprise there,” she quipped as she considered her alternatives. She decided on the Bayfront Expressway over San Francisco Bay into East Palo Alto. As she drove, her mind wandered to her husband.

  They’d met at the University of Miami. Owen had been a graduate student pursuing his master’s in science in the management of technology curriculum. Lacey had been a junior when she and a group friends went scuba diving at John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park near Key Largo. Owen and some of his guy friends were on the same dive, and the group got together for beers that night at Snapper’s. They immediately hit it off and began to date.

  Three years later, the two were married, and Tucker was on the way. Owen had accepted a lower-level management position at Yahoo but quickly impressed his superiors. Lacey, who graduated with a business management degree because she hoped to run the Driftwood Key Inn someday, opened up a boutique store in Hayward called Jefferson Outfitters.

  The family enjoyed all things outdoors, including hiking, camping, skiing, and various water sports. Owen’s salary was easily able to sustain their household while Jefferson Outfitters, which more than broke even, provided Jessica an outlet to pursue her dreams of working in the outdoors while managing a business.

  She waited at the security entrance to the campus of Yahoo’s corporate headquarters. The architecture of the buildings was unique. They were made of precast concrete, glass, and metal with Yahoo’s signature bright yellow and purple accents. The abundant green space and outdoor seating made for a casual, relaxed work atmosphere.

  Lacey parked the car and checked herself once again. She was glad they were relaxed, she thought to herself. She was a nervous wreck. This opportunity meant a lot to Owen and would have a profound effect on their financial future.

  She walked with confidence along the sidewalks traversing the artificial turf that had been installed to replace the grass that used to lie there. The turf, made of one hundred percent recyclable materials, was a testament to Yahoo’s interest in preserving the environment. It was, however, often used against them in the corporate shareholder meetings by those who thought the company should focus more on profits and less on environmental issues. Regardless, Lacey thought the artificial turf was pretty, and hey, you never had to mow it.

  Her phone indicated a text message had come through. She rifled through her bag and saw that it was from Owen. She quickly checked her watch to see if she was late. She wasn’t.

  Owen: I see you.

  Lacey searched the campus for her husband. She texted him back.

  Lacey: Show yourself, creeper. Or I’ll call the law!

  Owen: Behind you.

  Lacey swung around, and there was her husband, dressed in his best power suit, standing with one hand in his pocket. He was wickedly handsome, and she loved him more than life.

  Part II

  One Week in October

  Day two, Saturday, October 19

  Chapter Eight

  Saturday, October 19

  Oval Office

  The White House

  Washington, DC

  President Carter Helton was the son of a coal miner who’d labored for decades in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where coal was still king. President Helton’s father wanted a better life for his five kids. He was the oldest of the five and was the first member of the Helton family to attend a university. His grades had earned him a partial scholarship to Slippery Rock University, and his excellent work ethic, along with his father’s savings, propelled him to Penn State, where he got his law degree.

  In addition to being book smart, he was a streetwise individual who possessed the gift of gab, an almost perfect trifecta for becoming a politician. He rose through the ranks of Pennsylvania politics, from the local level in his hometown of Waynesburg, to the State House in Harrisburg.

  He paid his dues. Made the right friends. Rubbed elbows with the rich and powerful. Now here he was, well into his first year as president and rushing down the hallways of the West Wing, his security team and a handful of staffers in tow. His new administration was being tested, and the pressure was enormous.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” said one staffer nonchalantly as she struggled to keep up with the boss. “Sir, they’ve changed the meeting to the Roosevelt Room.”

  As President Helton continued down the hallway, he addressed the young woman. “Who’s here?”

  “All of them, sir,” she replied, referring to the top brass of the Pentagon.

  The meeting in response to the Abu Dhabi terrorist attack had been delayed several hours at the president’s request. He wanted the best possible intelligence available to make a decision. He was not interested in supposition laced with agenda-setting motives. He’d learned in his first hundred days in office that those permanent residents of the DC political apparatus had their own opinion of how the government should be run. Presidents came and went.

  Just as he strode past the chief of staff’s suite, Harrison Chandler, former congressman from Pennsylvania and longtime friend, dashed out with his computer tablet stuck in his left armpit.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” he greeted. “We’ve got a full house.”

  “So I’ve heard. Is there anything new to add since they delivered the PDB early this morning?”

  From the moment he’d been declared president-elect by the media, Pres
ident Helton was made privy to the same tools given to the former president, such as intelligence reporting and analysis. Known as the President’s Daily Brief, the binder created was in essence a toolkit of information that overlapped with that of the president.

  Producing and presenting the daily brief was the responsibility of the director of National Intelligence, whose office was tasked with fusing intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other members of the U.S. intelligence community.

  President Helton asked that economic issues be included in the PDB, as the nation was in the throes of an economic and trade war with China. He believed gaining insight into the capabilities and intentions of America’s global competitors was every bit as important as keeping an eye on hot spots around the globe, such as the Middle East.

  The recent mass assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientists and yesterday’s terrorist attack in Abu Dhabi had brought tensions in the Middle East to their highest level in decades. The media was demanding answers from the president’s communications team. His White House spokesman had held them off thus far, but many were already looking at the president as weak and indecisive because of the delayed response.

  Chandler filled the president in on what to expect. “Here are the highlights. Yemeni rebels. Funded by Iran. Their target was the Israeli delegation, but they came in a little heavy-handed and killed a lot of innocents unrelated to the peace conference.”

  “A little heavy-handed, Harrison? That’s an interesting choice of words.”

  “Well, sir, I think you’ll hear from the Pentagon and intelligence heads that their plan was ill conceived. If their goal was to gain revenge for the attack on the nuclear facility at Isfahan, they could’ve sent in a suicide bomber or two. Instead, they destroyed the entrance to the conference center and randomly murdered anyone in their path. It was senseless.”