Congressman Peter Leighton, Democrat from Indiana, was dead, a suspected victim of the morning’s attack.
Sam was always amazed at how thorough the media could be when they wanted. Granted, Leighton was a public figure, and as such, packages were built in the event of an untimely death. But considering he was just one of four hundred and thirty-five serving members, there was quite a bit of material that had been collected on him.
The minute the news was out, the attack itself became secondary. Every station was giving their own eulogies of the congressman.
Leighton had been a classic dove for most of his career, using his own service record as an example of why the United States should stay out of foreign domains. He’d flip-flopped about a year prior, started fighting for the troops, for them to get more money, better equipment and better services when they mustered out, damaged and broken. A seismic shift, brought about by the death of his son, Peter Leighton, Junior, a battalion commander in the Army who’d gone to Afghanistan and been decimated by a roadside IED.
Grief changes you. Sam understood that. It mutates your soul, your emotions, your thoughts. Green becomes yellow, the sun disappears from the sky, and your lifelong convictions no longer seem to matter. As she watched the multitude of clips of the congressman defending his change of heart, she understood completely. He hadn’t done enough to keep his own child secure and protected, so he’d launched a campaign to keep the remainder of the soldiers on the ground and in the air safe. Too bad he hadn’t been fighting for them earlier. It might have meant a different outcome for his own son, not to mention countless others.
At least the media didn’t have the text message yet. Once that slipped out, the wolves would circle and all bets would be off. The congressman would stop being lauded and start being blamed.
And maybe he should. If the text was real, authored by the perpetrator behind the attacks, there was something to be discovered in the congressman’s very publicly private world.
Sam muted the television. The message was unmistakably clear. What she was trying to ascertain was why, if the attack was directed at him, had so many others been included.
Two hundred sick, some clinging to life. Two other deaths, random, people wholly unrelated to the congressman. She felt bad that their deaths were being overshadowed by the demise of someone more famous.
Even one death is too much.
Planes were flying overhead, the high-pitched roaring whine of the F/A-18s unmistakable. Helicopters chattered. There was talk of shutting down the bridges. There was a curfew in place, yet there were still news stories about chaos and absolute fear reigning in some neighborhoods. There’d even been a couple of reports of looting, down near Anacostia. But the congressman’s face was taking up ninety percent of the airtime.
And they still didn’t know what had caused the turmoil.
There were hundreds of people working on figuring out what the substance was. She knew that. But it was disturbing that nearly twelve hours after the event, they still had nothing more than speculations to go on.
That told her something unique was happening.
Sam shut the television off and went over her notes again. Fletcher had called to tell her that, yes, the congressman had been on the Metro this morning. But in looking at the maps, he was on the Blue Line, and it had been confirmed that the other two casualties had taken the Orange Line right through Foggy Bottom early this morning.
It made sense that people who were immunosuppressed would have a more severe reaction. The congressman was an asthmatic, so any irritant could trigger an attack. Without the proper medication to arrest the attack, he could very easily die, as he had.
The other two deaths weren’t as cut-and-dried. She had notes on them from the initial investigation Fletcher and his team had done when they’d come into the morgue. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were smokers.
Different parts of the city, different ages, different worlds, all affected by a single event. D.C. was a giant ecosystem, with thousands of moving parts, and each world was unique unto itself. Like species that couldn’t intermingle and breed, the people of D.C. found their comfort zones and rarely, if ever, deviated from course. Debutantes hung out with debutantes, jocks with jocks, politicos with politicos, lawyers with lawyers, lobbyists with lobbyists, teachers with teachers. There might be a Sadie Hawkins Day every once in a while, and a debutante would get it on with a politico, but that generally ended up in The Washingtonian, disguised as a society wedding, and the aftermath was full of fireworks and lawyers and mistresses and front-page news.