Under Pressure: A Lucas Page Novel

by Robert Pobi

  Knechtel leaned back in the sofa. “It’s not as uncommon as you would think.”

  “So the Hockneys make a lot of money on the IPO for Horizon, but they make a fucking fortune by beating out the Chinese and financing the infrastructure deal?”

  “Yes.”

  Whitaker shook her head. “I’m starting to resent that my parents were poor.”

  “So who benefits from the Guggenheim bombing?” Lucas asked. “Cui bono?” It was one of the first questions they taught cadets to ask at Quantico, from the Latin, meaning To whom is it a benefit?

  Whitaker shook her head. “I don’t see anyone smiling in this mix. Not the Guggenheim; or Horizon’s personnel; the Hockneys; the Paraguayans; potential investors in the IPO; the people who owned the artwork that had been on display at the gala; the insurance companies—everyone loses.”

  Lucas reached out and put his hand on the flank of the massive bear. There was nothing cute or cuddly about the beast—it looked like it could chew through an entire town in about five minutes. He stared up into the glass eyeballs and said, “Tell that to the people who blew up the Guggenheim.”

  19

  Midtown

  “Your pal is very un–Gordon Gecko–like,” Whitaker said as she switched lanes like she was auditioning for a gig in Bullit.

  “He’s still a banker.”

  “So he’s not your friend?”

  Lucas was too tense from Whitaker’s driving to shrug. “Bankers can’t help themselves—they are motivated by money, which means they can’t be trusted except for that one single driver.”

  “Are you saying we went there to bait him?”

  “We went there to get some information. If there’s something in it for him, he won’t be able to help himself from finding us some answers.”

  “But he seemed so nice.”

  “And therein lies the irony.” Lucas’s aluminum fingers were threaded through the holy-shit handle and he relaxed his shoulder, which transferred weight to his arm, mechanically tightening his grip. He had to force himself to keep his eyes open. “You know, I’d be happy to catch a cab.”

  “Scared of a little speed?”

  “It’s the rapid deceleration caused by a crash that has me worried.”

  Whitaker smiled but kept her foot to the floor as she threaded the big Navigator through the afternoon traffic blipping up Broadway. “For a guy interested in the speed of light and the relationship between time and human life, you sure seem to be unadventurous.”

  “My interest has always been academic.”

  Whitaker’s smile broadened. “Which brings us back to my missing you.”

  Lucas gave her the only expression that felt natural—a scowl.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not getting all weepy or anything, but everyone else I meet on the job is nice. Some are even friendly. You? Hell, I don’t even have to talk to you.”

  “I like to think of it as an antidote.”

  “An antidote to what?”

  “Toxic positivity.”

  “Is that even a thing?”

  “You don’t hang around young people, do you?”

  “I’m still surprised that they let you hang around young people.”

  “Someone has to be the old guy in the park screaming at the sandwich in his hand. Might as well be me.”

  Whitaker nodded. “Noted.” She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. “So what was that back there?” She pulled off Broadway, heading east.

  Lucas watched the city outside—any piece of which could instantaneously disappear in an explosive flash. “No system—and that includes a series of crimes—is intrinsically random; the observer just has an imperfect understanding of how said system operates. If you see something that appears to be random, you’re missing data. And hidden inside larger seemingly organized structures, you can find smaller ones that look like they’re nothing—statistical noise—but they’re not. They’re just part of a different pattern.”

  They came to a stop, and Lucas watched the people moving by. There was something different about them, as if their software had been updated with a patch. His fellow New Yorkers were more resilient than any other urban population in the world, but even they had their limits. And the bombing of the Guggenheim was exacerbating all kinds of tension. It wasn’t as bad as it had been following 9/11, but the same miasma of malaise was present in the semiochemical signals.

  Whitaker pulled through a light, then cut in front of a taxi before glancing over at him and smiling. “I know you’re a private man. And I generally don’t poke into other people’s lives. But I was wondering.” She side-eyed him and her mouth cracked into a grin that rivaled Calvin-Wade Curtis’s. “What’s with the Chev Chelios hair?”

  Lucas told her the story of Maude’s Halloween experiment, as he had named it.

  “And you believed her?”

  “I did, yes.”

  “You have a lot to learn about teenagers.”

  He tilted his head to the right so he could see his reflection in the passenger mirror. He looked like a kook. Or a guitarist out looking for a band. When he hobbled out of the hospital after the Event, vanity had been the first emotional casualty. Most of the world never really saw him anymore; all they saw were the replaced parts. It used to bother him, but a decade had helped iron out his expectations. “It’s just hair.”

  “Yes, it is.” She was gaining on a big Mercedes sitting in their lane when a pickup tried to pass them on the passenger side. Whitaker hit the gas and switched lanes, punching past the big Benz. There was a serial-killer stick-figure shopping list decal in the back window, representing a mother, two daughters, a dog, and two cats.

  Whitaker hooked around the Mercedes with a maneuver that pushed Lucas against the door and he once again had to resist the urge to close his eyes.

  “So where do we go from here?”

  Lucas almost ducked as they swerved around a gaggle of tourists rolling suitcases across the street, scattering them like a handful of dice. “We? There is no we. You can drop me at the next corner. I’ll be walking from here.”

  “You need to take more risks, my friend.”

  “Now that’s something no one has ever said to me before.”

  20

  The Upper East Side

  The house was unusually quiet without the kids. Even Lemmy—his one dependable greeter—was at the beach. The only sound was the high-pitched squeal of the alarm keypad.

  Lucas punched in his six-digit code, then stepped into the silence. He did a walk-through of the first floor and wound up in the kitchen, where he placed the new FBI-issue laptop down on the marble island and got himself a glass of milk from the fridge. He stood there for a few moments, listening to the nothing and working on the milk. When he finished it, he rinsed the empty glass and placed it in the dishwasher before stepping out.

  The backyard—a luxury in the city, even for this neighborhood—was a small space filled with a swing set, a barbecue, and a picnic table. He walked down the steps and heard the thump of whatever disenfranchised criminal noise Dingo liked to call music coming from the apartment over the garage. Lucas crossed the patio stones, then climbed the staircase.

  After knocking on the door to no response, Lucas used his aluminum knuckles to bang on the metal frame. A few seconds later, the music volume inside dropped precipitously, and Dingo opened the door, smiling. “Hey, mate,” he said in an Australian accent that ten years stateside had not been able to dull. “I thought you might be back.”

  Dingo waved him in and closed the door. “Erin and the kids come back with you?”

  “They stayed in Montauk.” The music was a lot quieter, but Lucas was having a hard time shutting down all the systems in his head and it felt like he was listening to someone kill chipmunks with a tuning fork set to glass-cracking mode. “Could you turn that off?”

  Dingo thumbed the screen on his iPhone, and the rodent murder soundtrack blipped out. “Not a fan of the Jesus and Mary Chain.”

>   “I’m not a fan of anything right now. Jesus. Or Mary Chain.”

  Dingo eyed him cryptically before turning and heading for the fridge. “You want a beer?”

  Lucas thought about the milk in his stomach and the work he had to do tonight. “No. Thanks.” He dropped into the leather sofa.

  “More for me.” Dingo got a Modelo and headed back. Like Lucas, Dingo had lost some of his original hardware. He had two prosthetic legs—both replaced below the knee—and today he was in his street feet, as he called them, not the carbon blades he usually sported around the apartment. He was in shorts and a T-shirt with his dojo logo embroidered over the left breast. He dropped into the club chair facing the sofa. “I take it you are back to deal with that business at the Guggenheim.”

  “That would be correct, yes.”

  Dingo’s eyes never left Lucas as he took a long haul off the bottle. When he was done, he said, “You know, you are one of the dumbest geniuses I have ever met.”

  “This isn’t like the last one. I doubt they’ll need me past tomorrow.”

  “Why? Will you be dead by then?”

  “You sound like Erin.”

  Dingo emptied the bottle and got out of the chair. “That’s what people who care about you sound like, I guess.” He headed back to the fridge. “Besides, you know how some guys grow into themselves and end up looking like aging prizefighters who have taken their lumps but somehow survived?”

  Lucas couldn’t jibe the description with the man he saw in the mirror, but he understood the inherent weakness in self-perception. “You think I look like an aging prizefighter?”

  “Not at all. I said some guys. You? You look like a crash test dummy someone pulled the leg and arm off of, then threw in the ditch.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, well, I just want you to be aware that you’re not twelve anymore.”

  “The bureau has plenty of people to do the legwork on this one—I’m strictly there to look at some numbers. I’m a spreadsheet guy.”

  “Try to remember that.” He took another cold one from the bottom shelf.

  “Why did you run around Africa for ten years while people threw grenades at you?” Dingo, whose real name was Martin Hudson, had been an award-winning combat photographer before a dance with a land mine in the Sudan had ended his career of documenting humanity’s madness.

  Dingo dropped back into the seat and opened the second bottle. “That’s easy: I was a moron.” The legs of tripods reached up from the umbrella stand behind him, the one incongruous item being the hilt of a broadsword that he’d found in the garbage last year and kept around for sentimental reasons. He was a photographer by trade, but his main energy was put into teaching Brazilian jujitsu to other amputees. “Okay. I’ll drop it.”

  Lucas pushed himself out of the sofa.

  “Where you off to?”

  Lucas had a hard drive full of data to sift through. “Work.”

  Dingo eyed him with that weird look again before taking a sip of his beer. “Spreadsheets, right?”

  21

  West 52nd Street

  The bar at the 21 Club could as easily have been located in Madison, Wisconsin—the decor was a cross between rural steakhouse and strip-mall sports bar, put together before irony was a thing. The walls were paneled in stained mahogany and the booths were upholstered in leather, but the tablecloths looked like western shirts minus the buttons, and sports equipment and model airplanes hung from the ceiling. The place had a man cave–cum–Disney set vibe, but the food was consistent (though predictable) and the service exemplary. The patrons came for the history and the implied status, not for the football helmets and plastic fighter planes.

  As always, Paul Knechtel was five minutes early for his meeting, a space he filled with his usual pre-dinner snack of Johnnie Walker Blue Label with H2O croutons. Unlike a lot of people in his profession, he was not welded to his phone and would not answer it while eating any more than he was willing to sleep with it under his pillow. Other people did that for him.

  Knechtel was at his usual table, a booth at the back that he knew many other businesspeople, movers, shakers, and Wall Street types considered to be theirs as well. He worked on his scotch while he people watched. The place was emptier than it should have been at this hour. And everyone displayed the forced calm that can come only from alcohol. Evidently the bombing last night had induced communal PTSD, and everyone was trying not to think about it. Knechtel didn’t understand the victim mentality, and fear wasn’t a big part of his emotional lexicon, but it was understandable that most people were averse to being blown up for no reason other than someone else thought it might be fun.

  He was almost finished with his drink and was about to signal the waiter for a second when Zaritski appeared in the door. Even though he had spent a lot of time with the man—and he was staring at him right now—Knechtel had no idea how tall he was or how much he weighed.

  Zaritski spoke to the maître d’, nodded at Knechtel’s table, then came over.

  Knechtel finished his scotch in a single throw, then stood up, extending a hand. “How are you, Sasha?”

  “I got whiplash from the news. But a call from you means I get to keep busy, so there’s that,” Zaritski said in heavy Brooklynese.

  They sat down and Knechtel nodded at the waiter for two more Blue Labels before stepping into business. “I need you to look into Horizon Dynamics.”

  Zaritski had been an investigator for the SEC before jumping ship for the private sector. He had no official title, no business card, and no known address. What he had was a new cell phone number every day, a list of connections that he needed an external hard drive to store, and the ability to find the unfindable. “I assume you want this before the markets open in London tomorrow?”

  Knechtel waved the question away. “It’s not like that.”

  The waiter came back with their drinks and took the empty highball away. When he was gone, they sat in shared silence for a few moments, working on their scotches.

  Zaritski thunked his glass down on the table. “So what am I looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”

  “You’re not an I-don’t-know-maybe-nothing kind of guy, Paul.” Zaritski eyed him suspiciously. “Is this proactive or reactive?” Meaning information gathering or damage control.

  “See if you can find anything unusual in their story arc. Try to see if there is anyone behind the scenes that is there for a reason.”

  “The kind of reason that might lead to their entire executive branch being wiped out in a bombing?”

  Knechtel stared at him over the rim of his glass for a few seconds. “That would not be an incorrect approach.”

  “And you need this when?”

  “I need something by tomorrow. If you need to put something else in motion that might take a few days, that’s fine. But I need something by tomorrow if at all possible.”

  “What’s this about, Paul?”

  “I owe someone.”

  Zaritski drained his whiskey to the ice cubes and stood up. “Then I better get to work.”

  They shook hands and he walked away, threading between the tables and ducking out the front door as if he had never been there at all.

  When he was gone, Knechtel ordered another scotch, then picked up his phone.

  22

  The Upper East Side

  It was a little past two A.M., and he was tired from scanning countless columns of data—his investigative equivalent of biography. Some of the files were more comprehensive than others; a few contained newspaper articles—gleaned from society pages, from the business section, and even a few from the crime pages (all white collar, of course). Eighty percent of the text could have been replaced with the word blah and the general dynamics of the files would have changed very little, if at all.

  In the old days he could work at a computer for sixteen-hour shifts with nothing but a little caffeine to prop him up. Now, with one of his peepers blow
n out and a back that continually overcompensated for missing muscle groups, he found that his limit was about two hours before he had to chow down on a handful of Tylenol.

  Lucas folded up the laptop and stood up, realizing that he hadn’t eaten since … he couldn’t remember.

  He looked out the kitchen window and the lights were still on in Dingo’s apartment, so he took out his cell phone. He was about to dial Dingo’s number when the phone rang—it was Erin.

  “Everything okay?” he asked, half expecting her to say that she missed him, half expecting her to ask for a divorce.

  “The kids saw you on the television earlier, getting out of the helicopter, and they’ve been worried. I thought you’d call.”

  He looked at the clock on the microwave. “Shit. I’m sorry, baby. I’ve been—”

  “Busy? I know. But I’ve been doing damage control all day. They think something happened to you—I lied and said you texted.” She was packing his bags for a guilt trip and he resented it. But she was right and that brought even more resentment. She was the only person on the entire planet who could make him feel like a prick.

  “I’m sorry.” There was nothing else he could say.

  “Have you eaten?”

  Lying would have been the smart move, but he always told her his version of the truth. “No.”

  “What would you do without me?”

  “Starve to death would be the appropriate response.” He stretched and felt a few of his vertebrae slip into place. “How is the Maude Squad?”

  “They’re fine. They want to come home. And so do I. Are you okay?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” The softness disappeared as quickly as it had visited. “Maybe because you got blown up yourself once upon a time. Maybe because investigating an explosion that killed hundreds of people might trigger some stress or angst or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Maybe because the kids and I were almost murdered the last time you went back to work for these people. You know, the basic reasons married people ask each other if they’re okay.”