Under Pressure: A Lucas Page Novel

by Robert Pobi

  Lemmy went to his bowl by the fridge and rudely slurped down almost as much water as he spilled on the floor.

  Erin reached out and touched Lucas’s thigh—the original one. “You want to go for a walk on the beach?”

  He wondered how she was able to read his mind. “I don’t know—that leaf blower looks like a lot of fun. Or it would be if I could figure out how to turn it on.”

  Erin snorted her goofy little laugh. “You don’t turn a leaf blower on, you start it up.”

  “Once again I’m happy to go with the ‘less is more’ approach, and a big yes to a walk. You think the kids are interested?” He realized that there was very little ambient noise in the house. “Are they even here?”

  “They’re doing homework. And Alisha is playing with her dolls. I think they’re worried that you’re going back to work.”

  “Kids?” He yelled into the void. “Who wants to go for a walk?”

  * * *

  Half an hour later, they were below Bluff Lookout. Lemmy led the group, his pack mentality not letting him venture more than twenty or thirty yards ahead before bounding back. Stevie and Hector hunted for Montauk monsters down near the water, their sneakers soaked through and their jeans wet to the knees. Hector had found a sun-bleached crab shell that he insisted was the skull of an alien. Laurie and Alisha collected stones that they socked away in the big canvas tote that Erin had somehow been talked into carrying. Maude and Lucas closed up the rear.

  Lucas put two of his real fingers in his mouth and let loose with a sharp whistle, signaling that it was time to turn around; the tide was coming back in and Turtle Cove would soon be full of fishermen in waders and floats, all sporting ten-foot rods, in search of stripers. Sometimes he and the kids fished the tides, but mostly for whiting or mackerel off the beach in front of the house. Lucas hadn’t been brought up on outdoor sports and tended to learn along with the kids. But they all stayed away from the weekend fishermen, who came out from the city in hundred-thousand-dollar SUVs and outdoor clothing sporting expensive labels—those guys were wound way too tight.

  As they turned, Lucas swiveled his head, focusing out at the ocean with his good eye. “You have to admit, even with all the summer people, this can be a charming place.” Mrs. Page had summered out here her whole life, and she had introduced Lucas to the place when he was six. They had managed to spend ten summers on the point before her money ran out, and they relied on the invitation of friends for the occasional sybaritic weekend from then on. Later in life, when he and Erin had had the opportunity to buy the place out here, it had been like coming home. They used the house on weekends and holidays for three seasons a year, renting it out most of the summer, which helped pay a lot of the expenses.

  Maude shrugged. “I guess.” As much of a young woman as she was turning into, she reverted to the surly teenager act when it suited her. “Are you going back to work for those people?” She had on jeans with no knees and a homemade T-shirt that stated Eric Clapton Sucks!

  By the way she said those people, Lucas knew that she had been talking to Erin. “Not right now. I’m only useful for a very narrow bandwidth of problems, and what happened yesterday—”

  “The explosion at the museum?”

  “Yeah, the explosion at the museum. That isn’t my field at all. I can’t see being of much use to them. At least not like last time.”

  “Did terrorists do this?”

  Lucas shook his head. “I don’t know. No one does.”

  “The people on the television seem pretty convinced.”

  “There’s misinformed and there’s uninformed, and the problem is that most people don’t let either of those things get in their way when they have an audience—just look at the internet.”

  Lucas loved all the kids, but he and Maude had some kind of a special bond that he wasn’t able to understand. Maybe it was because he’d had to work so hard to gain her trust, or maybe it was because she reminded him most of Erin (which had no basis in genetics, since all their children were adopted), but he had an easier time talking to her than the other kids, as if maybe he understood her a little better.

  Maude stopped and picked up a stone that looked as if it might be perfectly round. She handed it to Lucas and said, “So?”

  He glanced at it and shook his head. “Elliptical.”

  Maude took it back and examined it skeptically for a few seconds.

  “It’s three inches, twenty-three thirty-seconds on the longest axis—three inches, eleven-sixteenths on the shortest.”

  Maude scrunched up her nose. “If you say so.”

  “You can measure it if you want,” he offered, smiling. But he was never wrong. Not with numbers. And certainly not with measurements.

  Maude pitched it out at the water. “How do you do that?”

  “It’s just a stupid human trick. Like being able to turn your eyelids inside out.”

  She made her gross-out face. “No it’s not; you don’t have to be smart to flip your eyelids.”

  Lucas shrugged again; he had met plenty of what he thought of as stupid smart people, especially in academia. “Maybe.” He stopped walking. “Have you figured out what you’d like to do about school?” The school she was at now had succumbed to the classic trade-off between arts and commerce and there was very little in the way of right-brain stimulation—which was where her true interests lay. Everyone concerned knew she’d be better served attending another institution. They had interviewed at a school with an advanced arts program, and they were waiting for her to decide if she wanted to make the switch.

  “Am I allowed to have an opinion?”

  “Have we ever asked your opinion and not taken it?”

  She thought about that for a moment. “I guess not.”

  “So?”

  They had gone through the interview process, and after seeing her portfolio, the school had agreed to enroll her. But time was no longer an abstract concept—they had to decide before Friday morning. The decision was causing her a lot of stress, and Lucas suspected that she was looking at it as an ending instead of a beginning. “You’ll probably have to work much harder than you are now, but it’s less likely you’ll get tired as fast.” And he stopped—she knew all of this and it was time to stop selling her. She had to make up her own mind. “But you know all this.”

  “You said I had until Friday.”

  “You do.”

  “But you’re probably going away and—”

  “We don’t know that.”

  She squinted as she smiled up at him. “We don’t?”

  “No. We don’t.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “Well, a few more days won’t change anything. So okay. I’ll do it. I’ll go to LaGuardia.”

  Lucas turned around and waved at Erin with his prosthetic. “Maude’s transferring to LaGuardia,” he yelled.

  The whole family cheered.

  Their voices were still hanging in the air when Hector yelled, “Hey, a helicopter’s landing in front of our place!”

  Lucas looked down the beach, and the breakers flipped on in his head as a navy blue Jet Ranger touched down, three big yellow letters on the side. It conjured up a cloud of dust and sent subsonic shock waves out over the water.

  Lucas swung around to catch Erin in his line of sight. She gave him a soft smile filled with a million sad little meanings.

  He turned back to the helicopter. The doors opened and two standard-issue FBI copies emerged, one large, one an XXXL. When they had taken up positions on either side of the bird, the unmistakable form of Brett Kehoe came down the steps.

  He was sure the clown car routine was finished, but a fourth figure emerged from the aircraft, a tall black woman who even from two hundred yards out exuded the appropriate mix of pheromones denoting her as a force of nature—Special Agent Alice Whitaker. She was no doubt here as a prop for Kehoe’s attempt at emotional leverage.

  Beside him, Maude said, “Our day is F-U-K-T.”

  “Hey, kiddo, w
hat have I told you about that?” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t be lazy—use the correct spelling.”

  5

  By the time they got back to the house, Kehoe and Whitaker were on the patio. Three decades slumming with the FBI hadn’t smoothed out any of the old-money DNA that was as much a part of Kehoe as the charm, manners, and menace. He had updated his haircut since last time they had been in a room together, but he still looked like a spokesperson for some expensive lifestyle product. He wore one of his tailored suits with the pick-stitched lapels he favored, and even out here on the beach he appeared comfortable.

  Whitaker’s white linen shirt contrasted with her dark skin and darker eyes, and even in the Ralph Lauren duds, she looked like she could kill a pack of wolves with her bare hands. Like Kehoe, she had changed her hair, and she sported a tight ponytail of Predator braids that could have been designed by a satellite engineer. She wasn’t quite smiling, but Lucas could see that she was happy to see him and he grudgingly realized that he felt the same—old war buddies were like that.

  Lucas and Whitaker had been paired up last winter during his first stint back at the bureau in almost a decade. She was a field agent, and even though Lucas liked to think that he had chosen her to help him, he knew the truth was Kehoe had set him up—he had intentionally put them in the same general vicinity and let physics pull them together. They had begrudgingly liked each other from the beginning, and quickly developed a weird kind of chemistry that brought out the best in both of them. She was smart and not given to pain-in-the-assery—and she didn’t suffer his bullshit, which was a rare trait. They had gone the distance together and she had been added to the very short list of people he trusted with his life—which in a way made her family.

  Kehoe’s two other men went out front to deal with the twin Southampton police SUVs that arrived with the chopper. The entire performance was dramatic, especially for Kehoe, who was not generally given to theatrics. Or an unnecessary demonstration of force.

  Lucas sent Erin and the kids inside. The children ran upstairs, but Erin stayed in the kitchen, leaning against the island, arms crossed, intently watching them through the big window. Lucas wondered if lipreading was part of the superhero plan she was was enrolled in.

  The sun-bleached joists of the pergola cast weird rectangular shadows, turning Kehoe into a composite of several portraits, none of them happy. The ever-present Mark Cross briefcase sat on the seat beside him, conveying a sense of significance. Everyone wore sunglasses and looked like they would rather be someplace else.

  The pilot was on a folding chair down on the beach, grabbing a few bits of vitamin D and reading a paperback. Kehoe’s two extra men were back at either corner of the property, on the edge of the grass overlooking the beach, and the sheriff’s men had taken up positions on the other side of the house, up near the road.

  Lucas and Kehoe examined each other for a few silent moments, and it was Whitaker who finally cracked the frost with “Nice hair.”

  Maude had talked Lucas into bleaching his hair as a test run for her Halloween costume—she wanted to go out as Sting and the blond hair was a must. It was supposed to wash out, but that had been three days ago and he still looked like a punk-rock Frankenstein in expensive sunglasses.

  Lucas tried out a smile, and by the way that Kehoe shifted in his seat, he knew that his face was doing that scar tissue Karloff thing that scared the natives. “Thank you,” he said.

  Whitaker shook her head and smiled.

  Kehoe filled the empty space by answering a text—the twelfth since sitting down.

  The complicated nature of their relationship was no secret. There had been a ten-year span in which they hadn’t spoken. Both of them had used that decade to generate a little forgiveness for what had happened—for the things they had both lost. The Event, as Lucas called it, had recalibrated his life from the molecular level up and, in some lateral way, had no doubt done the same for Kehoe. But it was still there, in the background, like a deep space magnetic wave that was hard to detect but impossible to pretend didn’t exist.

  The Event had almost destroyed Lucas physically, and he spent the next few years discovering the new and improved Dr. Lucas Page. When he walked out the other end—with his body cobbled together with all kinds of experimental hardware, his first marriage in the shitter, his job gone, and no friends—he found a man that he didn’t recognize but could be proud of. He met and married Erin. They started putting a family together—with children who could not find a place out in the world. He accepted a job at Columbia. Accidentally wrote a book that put him on bestseller lists. And forgot that he had ever worked for the FBI. Until that night last winter when Kehoe had come calling, dragging all the old monsters along with him.

  Erin brought out a wicker tray with two mugs of coffee and a cup of tea. She placed it down on the table and went back inside without saying anything.

  After Erin was back inside, Kehoe went into lecture mode with his patented poetic cadence. “We won’t know the final toll for a few more hours, but right now we’re at seven hundred and two victims, including museum personnel, catering employees, and a few unfortunate pedestrians who happened to be walking by when things went south.” Kehoe lifted the porcelain cup of tea from the tray and took a sip.

  Lucas leaned forward, meshing the fingers of his left hand with those of his prosthetic; even in the warm autumn air, the aluminum fingers were cold against his skin. “I don’t see how I can give you any added value on this one, Brett.” Kehoe’s one unerring rule of management was that he tasked only the right people to a job. And since he was here, he had no doubt worked out all the aspects of his ask.

  Kehoe took another sip and put his cup down. “With seven hundred and two victims, the math on this one is going to be a challenge. And then there are the rest of the unknowns: motive, suspect, ideology, logistics, and end game. Right now we don’t even have a starting point—no one has claimed responsibility.”

  That was odd—an exercise this public had to have a purpose, and more than likely it was for PR. “Nothing?”

  Kehoe quickly answered a text, then came back with “No one reliable. There were a few tweets from the usual suspects—two from factions of ISIS, one from Al-Qaeda, but it was obvious they had no idea what they were talking about. A few of the predictable nuts tried to get their fifteen minutes—anti-abortion groups, militia types, white supremacists, wrath-of-Godders—the usual dummies. But no official statement from a reliable organization or group.”

  Kehoe was executing all the proper tactics of investigative warfare. “And the news? How are the networks treating this?”

  Kehoe went back to another text and spoke as he typed out a response with his thumbs. “They were getting in our way ten minutes after the dust settled. I’ve got a good PIO on things, but she can’t tell them how to behave—they’re more concerned with entertainment than delivering facts, and they are going to be a very big pain in the ass on this one. More than usual, I expect.” He finished his text and put the phone back down, continuing without warranting so much as a semicolon in his dialogue stream. “And we have the added nightmare of the online digilantes and conspiracy people. Those hammerheads are making a lot of noise on social media, and they’re shaping public perception more than I am comfortable with. We hired a marketing firm to help us get in front of their static, but they are doing damage. Last night two Amish kids visiting the city from Pennsylvania were beaten into comas down on Bleecker because they were speaking German and someone thought they were Muslims. They had been tagged on Facebook as suspects because someone took a selfie in Central Park an hour before the bombing and they were in the background. Their photo circulated via social media and the message boards and the masses did what they do—misinterpret the data.” Kehoe took another sip of tea. “And there is going to be more of that kind of thing.”

  Lucas had nothing to add—he was busy absorbing all the moving parts. “You have your hands full, Brett.”


  “Which is why I’m here; very few people can guess the number of jelly beans in a jar like you can.” There was no emotion in his expression when he opened his briefcase and pulled out a brown evidence file that was as thick as a patio stone. He pushed it across the tabletop without opening it. “Just take a look.”

  Lucas reached out and put his aluminum hand down on the file. He understood what Kehoe was doing but felt powerless to stop him. When he opened the file, there would be photos of the victims—charred, destroyed corpses that would stir up all the things he had tried so hard to put behind him.

  Without meaning to, he opened the cover.

  And there it was—a photograph of … of … what, exactly? It had the general dynamics of a human head, but the skin had been burned to a rippled tar and the only contrast against the burned flesh were white teeth that looked like they had been installed after the fact. It could have been a man, a woman, or a Hollywood mock-up of a demon. Lucas closed the cover without looking at any others—he didn’t need to download any more nightmares onto his hard drive. “And?” But Kehoe had him.

  Kehoe took another sip of tea. “I need someone who can see patterns where there aren’t any. Or identify the correct ones when there are too many.”

  At that, Whitaker said, “But if you want to sit this one out, no one would point any fingers.”

  Lucas swiveled his head back out to the ocean and took off his sunglasses, taking in the HD image of the Atlantic. A couple of fishermen were walking the surf, life vests festooned with stainless steel tools, rods overhead. They were looking at the helicopter and the house, no doubt wondering if Snoop Dogg had come to the beach to smoke a little jazz cabbage and snack on Pop-Tarts. The world behind them looked like an old master come to life, heavy on the grays and blues, perfectly preserved with no cracks in the over-varnish. For an instant he wondered if the view held any less magic than when he had his old ocular setup.