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  “Go, Mickey!” Kate shouted. “Before they figure it out!”

  Mickey stared at her as they shared an understanding that eluded me, then addressed Gordon Light. “Open the door!”

  The driver pushed a button. The front and rear doors whooshed open. Mickey looked at us. “Sorry it had to come to this.”

  He climbed out.

  I waited two seconds before I ran forward, saying, “Everyone out the back, and move away. Now.”

  The other passengers lunged for the rear exit. I went out the front door, and watched Mickey Hawkes go toward the barrier that blocked access to the Capitol, his jacket open, exposing the vest.

  Officer Larson was aiming her rifle at him. “Not a step further, Mickey.”

  He stopped at the thick, solid steel barrier, which came up to the bottom of the vest, and stood there squinting as the cameras and lights came within yards and formed in a ragged semicircle facing him. Kate climbed from the bus and stood by me.

  “You should get out of here,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  One of the journalists shouted, “Who are you?”

  “What do you want to tell the senators?” another cried.

  We watched silently, transfixed. Mickey put one hand on the bomb vest and showed them the cell phone with the other.

  “My name is Michael Hawkes,” he said in a wavering, emotional voice. “I am seventeen years old. When I was eight, my father, my hero and my best friend, was blown up by an IED on his ride back to Kabul to muster out of the Special Forces for good.”

  “Shit,” Kate said under her breath.

  “Maybe he should have died,” Mickey went on. “Most of the time he says he should have. He lost both legs and an arm, and suffered a closed head injury. When I went with my mother to see him at the hospital in Germany, he wouldn’t let me into his room.”

  His shoulders heaved, and I knew he was crying. “My dad said to forget him. He told my mom the same thing. But I wouldn’t forget my dad. No matter how many times he swore at me, no matter how many times he told me to never come back, I went to see him in every hospital he’s lived in since the explosion.”

  Mickey paused, and looked around at Officer Larson, who had lowered her gun.

  He glanced over at us. I nodded. Kate said, “Keep going. You’re doing fine.”

  Mickey turned back to the cameras, and said, “I finally started to get through to my dad two years ago. There are daily support group meetings for IED survivors and their families at Veterans Affairs Medical Center. I go every day I can because I want to be there for my father, and because it’s the only way I really get to see him when he doesn’t get angry, and it’s the only way he stays sane, and…”

  His voice cracked as he said, “If I don’t…”

  Mickey looked at the sky, coughed, and cleared his throat before pointing toward the Senate.

  “The politicians in there owe my dad,” he said. “They made a promise that if he risked his life for his nation, his nation would stand by him. They made a promise that his nation would not forget him, that his grateful nation would help and provide for him.”

  Mickey took a deep breath, and said, “But those senators in there aren’t standing by their promises, and they’re not standing by my father. They’ve forgotten him, and every other vet. They’ve forgotten to be grateful to those who served. If they don’t pass this bill tonight, the funding for veterans stops. The VA hospitals shut down. The programs halt. The help my dad needs is gone. The help every wounded warrior in the country needs is gone. And I…I can’t let that happen.”

  He paused and then said in a strong voice, “Pass the bill, senators, or I’ll blow myself up, and the blood’s on your hands.”

  Chapter 34

  The rain picked up. So did the wind. And so did the pressure on Mickey Hawkes to give up his demands and surrender.

  But Mickey stood resolute at the gate, holding his cell phone and staring beyond the cameras at the lights burning over the steps of the Senate. I didn’t like his tactics a bit, and yet the more I watched him, the more I admired his guts and conviction.

  Bree arrived ten minutes into the standoff, Ned Mahoney a few minutes later. She’d watched Mickey’s speech streaming on her phone, and told us the cable news networks were going crazy with the story. It was irresistible, a David versus Goliath showdown, the teen versus Congress.

  “What can we do?” she asked, peeking around me to look at Mickey.

  “We can wait him out,” I said. “There’s been no vote yet.”

  Mickey’s mother, Deborah Hawkes, a disheveled-looking woman in her early forties, arrived on the scene shortly after nine, climbing from a patrol car that had been dispatched to her apartment blocks away. She appeared not only frantic, but possibly drunk.

  “Mick!” she yelled when Ned Mahoney led her up alongside the bus. “Oh, my God! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  He ignored her.

  “Mickey!” she shouted. “You answer me, now.”

  The teen never turned toward her. “I’m doing what you wouldn’t, Ma. I’m helping Dad, and every vet like him.”

  She started to sob quietly. “He left me,” she said. “He left you, too.”

  “I wouldn’t let him leave me,” Mickey said. “That’s the difference between us.”

  The cameras caught all of it. According to the live updates Bree was watching, the phones in senators’ offices were ringing off the hook with calls from vets and families, urging them to pass the bill.

  Apparently, Mickey’s threat was echoing in the Senate. For supporters of the bill, he was the dramatic proof they needed to argue that lack of support for veterans had gone too far.

  The senators opposed to passage called Mickey a terrorist and a blackmailer.

  “They do this after every big war, you know,” Mickey shouted at the cameras around 10 p.m. “Congress gets all gung ho to spend to fight. But when it’s time to take care of the vets, they claim poverty because of how much they spent on the war. It happened after the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

  “The Vietnam vets? They got screwed, too. So did the ones who fought in Desert Storm. And now it’s happening all over again for the soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. When is this going to stop? When are they going to fulfill their promises?”

  A cheer went up from behind the bus, back out on Northeast Drive where a crowd—many of them veterans, it seemed—had gathered to lend Mickey support.

  At 10:20, we heard that debate over the veterans’ bill had been closed. An up or down vote was underway. Fifteen minutes after that, with the ongoing vote leaning 44–40 against passage, a panel van parked on Northeast Drive. Thomas Hawkes rolled out the back in a motorized wheelchair.

  Officer Larson led him around the security bunker, lowered the steel barrier, and let Hawkes wheel toward his son.

  “Jesus, Mickey,” Hawkes said. “You sure know how to cause a shit storm.”

  Mickey smiled, but his jaw was trembling. “I learned from the best.”

  “No, son, I think you’ve got me beat by a long shot.”

  Mickey didn’t reply.

  “You gonna blow yourself up?”

  A long moment passed before Mickey answered, “If I have to.”

  Hawkes looked pained and used his remaining arm to bring his wheelchair closer.

  “I don’t want you to,” he said, quiet but forceful. “I want you to stay in this world. And…I’m sorry for all the times I pushed you away. I need you, Mick.”

  Mickey started crying again, but stood still.

  “You hear me?” his father said. “The whole goddamned world needs men like you, willing to take a stand. A warrior if there ever was one.”

  Back by the road, claps and whistles of approval went up from the crowd, many of whom were also watching live updates on their smartphones.

  Mickey wiped at his tears, and looked over his should
er at Kate Williams, who shook her head ever so slightly.

  “Give up, Mick,” his mother called. “I promise, I’ll be better. We’ll be better.”

  “Listen to her,” Hawkes said. “We both need you in our lives. And we both can change things, if you’ll just—”

  Suddenly a shout rang out from one of the broadcast journalists. “Passed! It passed by two votes!”

  “You did it, Mickey!”

  The kid hung his head and leaned on the barrier, sobbing. His father wheeled toward him while his mother tried to get around Mahoney, who held her back.

  “Not until my people have defused that vest,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kate said, wiping tears from her eyes. “There’s no bomb.”

  Bree, Mahoney, and I all said, “What?”

  “Sorry, Doc,” she said, laughing and shaking her head. “I know a real IED when I see one, and I knew right away he was wearing a fake. That hot-shit, nerves-of-steel kid just bluffed the whole goddamned thing!”

  Chapter 35

  Two days later, in the early evening, I was helping Nana Mama set the table for six. The aromas wafting from the oven were heavenly. Painfully hungry, I wished I’d eaten a bigger lunch.

  “What time did you say dinner was?” Nana said.

  “Six-thirty.”

  My grandmother nodded and checked her watch. It was just shy of six. “That’ll be fine then. I’ll start the jasmine rice, and you can finish up here?”

  “Seeing how you put this together on short notice, I’d be happy to.”

  That pleased her. She opened the oven to take a peek at the lamb shanks, bone in, braising in the oven. It smelled so good my stomach growled.

  “I heard that,” Bree said, and laughed as she came into the kitchen.

  “The whole neighborhood heard it,” Nana Mama chuckled.

  “It’s your fault,” I said. “My stomach’s just reacting to your latest masterpiece.”

  That pleased her even more. I saw her smile as she put the rice into a cooker. Bree gave me a kiss and picked up the napkins.

  “Good day?” I said.

  She thought about it and said, “Yeah, you know, it was. The pressure was off, and I could think about something other than the bomber.”

  “Mickey’s story shaking out?”

  Bree cocked her head and pursed her lips, but nodded. “So far, but he broke about fifty different laws. He can’t get around that, even if he is a juvenile.”

  “They’re making him sound awful sympathetic in the media,” I said.

  She shrugged. “They’re focused on the mitigating circumstances.”

  “What does that mean?” Nana said.

  Bree explained the latest: Mickey Hawkes had cooperated fully since his arrest. Kate Williams had been absolutely right that there was no bomb in his vest.

  The “plastic explosive blocks” he carried were actually large chunks of colored wax. The wiring was nonsensical, connected to no timer or triggering device whatsoever. Kate had recognized the wiring issues immediately, but wanted to see what Mickey was going to do with a fake vest.

  Once the veterans’ bill had passed the Senate, bound for the President’s desk, Mickey Hawkes had surrendered. As he was led off the Capitol grounds in handcuffs, the crowd of vets on Constitution Avenue and Northeast Drive broke into cheers and applause.

  “I watch the news. He’s got popular opinion on his side,” Nana Mama allowed. “But he did set off three bombs, and that plastic explosive at the Korean Memorial. And he did blackmail the Senate.”

  She wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t the whole story. It turned out that the bombs on the Mall were made from muzzle-loader black powder, tamped into thick cardboard tubes and wrapped in duct tape. With no ball bearings or screws inside, they were basically large firecrackers.

  Mickey had told Ned Mahoney that he found the small chunk of plastic explosive material buried in a locker sent back from US Special Forces in Afghanistan, shortly after the IED explosion that took his father’s arm and legs.

  Mickey had done enough research to know that the small amount of C-4 could not do any significant damage—so he decided to leave it at the Korean Memorial to raise the stakes, making us believe he had access to unscented plastic explosives.

  My grandmother seemed unconvinced.

  “We were stumped on this, too, Nana,” Bree said.

  I said, “But you have to hand it to him. He actually got Congress to act.”

  “Pigs fly every once in a while,” Nana said.

  “What?” Ali said, looking puzzled as he came into the kitchen. “They do not.”

  “It’s just an expression,” sighed Jannie, who followed him, looking at her phone mid-texting. “It means that miracles can happen.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, pausing to give Jannie a hug. “No phone at the table. No phone behind the wheel.”

  She scrunched up her nose, but put her phone in her pocket. “A deal’s a deal.”

  “Thank you for remembering,” I said, and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  Ali said, “I can’t believe she’s getting a car just for controlling her texting!”

  As I was leaving the kitchen, Jannie said, “Maybe you’ll believe it when you need a ride.”

  The doorbell rang again. I hustled down the front hall and opened it to Kate Williams.

  “Welcome!” I said.

  “Not too early?”

  “Right on time. I hope you’re hungry for a home-cooked meal.”

  Kate smiled. “It’s been a long time. It smells outstanding! I’m just happy to be invited, Dr. Cross.”

  “Upstairs, I’m Alex. And you do look happy.”

  Kate stopped in the hallway, grinning and lowering her voice. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I got a call from the lab at Quantico this morning. There’s a slot open in TEDAC, the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center. They want me to interview for it!”

  “Wow. That is great news! How did that happen?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe your friend? Agent Mahoney?”

  “I’ll ask him if you want.”

  “No, no, it doesn’t matter. I’m just…I can see a way forward now, Dr.…Alex, and I’m grateful.”

  “You deserve it. Want to meet the rest of my family?”

  “I’d like that. But…I wanted to say thank you. For all the help you’ve given me.”

  “Glad I could help, Kate,” I said. I smiled, and gestured toward the kitchen.

  Following her, remembering the near-suicidal woman who’d sat down in my office not two weeks before, I couldn’t help thinking—maybe that suspension wasn’t such a bad thing. Sometimes miracles really do happen.

  About the Author

  James Patterson has written more bestsellers and created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today. He lives in Florida with his family.

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