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She held up the phone, and Chase saw a new text that had just appeared on his screen:
BOOM.
CHAPTER 6
CHASE SENT MADISON to her office—basically a computer lab—to run diagnostics on the phone. As soon as she was gone, he activated the screens in the conference room and pulled his laptop toward him. He began scrolling through Twitter. It wasn’t long before he saw the first notices from AlertDC hit his screen.
Explosion reported near Fort Dupont Park. Avoid area.
Chase brought up a map of DC on the 4K display screen. He typed in “Fort Dupont” and zoomed in on the Southeast neighborhood. At its center was a swath of green that denoted Fort Dupont Park, the grounds of a Civil War fort, now an urban greenspace with miles of hiking trails. To the west, the Anacostia River. To the north, Capitol Street. Finally, to the east, Chase found what he was looking for among the churches, community centers, and apartment buildings that populated his map.
The DC manufacturing plant for Avalon Communications.
He would bet a year’s worth of his exorbitant CityCenterDC lease that Avalon’s DC hub was where the explosion had occurred. The unease Chase had felt since the false alarm at Avalon Park congealed in the pit of his stomach. These texts—BANG yesterday and BOOM today—felt obviously connected to the phony shooter event and the apparently real explosion.
But why? And what did it mean?
“Hey,” said Madison, poking her head into the conference room. She tossed the phone at him. He caught it one-handed.
“Squared away?” he asked.
“L7,” she said, pausing to sneeze violently. “Ready to go?”
“You know, if you’re feeling under the weather, you can check out the fancy jumbotron later. Go home and get some sleep.”
“You think I’m going to cancel a date with an Echelon over the sniffles?” she said. “I’d like to think I’m a little tougher than that. I’ll see you at home later.”
“Now who’s acting the billionaire in a rage?” Chase asked.
Madison was the most capable young adult he knew, but she was still his daughter and he didn’t want to frighten her. He had his suspicions about the source of the texts, but decided to keep them to himself. For now.
Once Madison left for the stadium, Chase tuned each of the 4K screens to a different local station.I didn’t buy this equipment to watch daytime talk shows and soap operas, he thought ruefully.
It wasn’t long before WJLA cut in to a telecaster standing in Southeast in front of a yellow police tape cordon, a plume of dark smoke rising above a line of fire trucks in the distance.
The breaking-news chyron read:FIRE RAGES AT FORT DUPONT AVALON PLANT.
Chase watched as one by one, each network had a reporter on the scene to inform viewers that this was the second Avalon incident in as many days, and“Could they be connected?”
Chase mentally criticized the reporters for resorting to pure speculation to fill airtime, then conceded that they were probably right.
When every 4K screen along the conference room’s wall was flashing those red lights and that dark, towering plume, he reached for his phone. He found the last text and typed a reply.
You have my attention.
Within seconds, his phone rang.
CHAPTER 7
“THIS IS CHASE Weldon from FIRST,” Chase answered.
“I think we both know I’m not a potential client, Mr. Weldon,” the caller said. It was a digitized voice.
“You know my name and I don’t know yours,” Chase said. “That’s hardly fair.”
“Very clever,” said the Voice. “As advertised.”
“I’m too busy for a personality assessment,” Chase replied. “One of my high-profile clients is facing unexpected security concerns stemming from some unfortunate accidents.”
