by Robert Pobi
Whitaker said, “Example?”
“If Frosst planted the Makepeace device, who directed him to? If it was Seth, and William found out and was displeased, did he order that hit on his brother downstairs? Or did William want to distance himself from Frosst after having him kill Makepeace and the plan snafued and his brother got killed?”
Setting off a bomb in FBI headquarters took the kind of balls very few people had. The act was more than arrogant—it was a personal and public fuck-you to the bureau.
Whitaker asked, “You think Seth Hockney blew up the Guggenheim and then the internet hub and this was some kind of silencing?”
“All I know is that they’re connected. There are too many things spinning in the same gravitational field for them not to be.”
Whitaker was shaking her head. “Any other possibilities?”
“Sure. Maybe someone is trying to send a series of very personal fuck-yous to the Hockneys. Maybe they made enemies of the wrong people. It’s the easy money.”
“What about Frosst?”
“If the Hockneys are involved, so is that fucker.” Lucas looked over at Kehoe. “Where is he right now?”
“We’re holding him downstairs. He’s finishing up with the paramedics and he’s not happy about it. But we’re running out of reasons to keep him from speaking to his boss.”
Lucas thought back to how Frosst had reacted to the explosion, how he sprang into action. “You need to look at Frosst’s background in an entirely new way. Take him apart right down to the molecular level.”
“And what are you going to do?” Kehoe asked.
Lucas pushed off the railing. “First, Whitaker and I are going to go talk to William Hockney. Someone needs to tell him that his brother and one of his lawyers are dead. And he should hear it from someone other than Frosst.”
“We can send someone else.”
“I want to see how he reacts. Just don’t let Frosst go until we’ve spoken to William.”
Kehoe pulled a cuff and looked at his watch. “You have one hour.” He looked like he was thinking a dozen different things at the same time. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re not telling me the bad news?”
Lucas took off his sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Because I don’t like guessing.”
Kehoe’s eyes stopped moving and he gave Lucas his Don’t-fuck-with-me look. “If you did, what would you say?”
Lucas headed for the access door. “That we’re looking at more than one bomber.”
48
57th Street and Fifth Avenue
Lucas and Whitaker brought twelve agents with them—a group of men and women who looked spawned from the same lab in the basement that produced almost everyone who walked the halls of the bureau. They had nondescript clothing that complemented their similar features and haircuts. But they were window dressing—all that Lucas really wanted out of them were the three big yellow letters stenciled on the backs of their windbreakers.
Lucas, Whitaker, and their backup people blew through security this time, not bothering with more than a perfunctory flash of their badges and a blast of pheromones that told people to get out of their way.
When they arrived upstairs, Lucas and Whitaker didn’t bother with the receptionist—this one different from that of the other day in height only—Whitaker just held up her badge and turned right, toward William Hockney’s office. The receptionist ran after them for a few paces, but turned back when she couldn’t keep up. Lucas heard her pick up the phone.
They were almost at the Jurassic-Deco doors when four men who clocked in at an average height of six-five stepped in front of them. They all had the heavy-lidded stare and impassive features of their ilk, and there had to be twelve yards of fabric between their suits.
Whitaker held up her badge and said to the agents in windbreakers, “Shoot them if they don’t get out of our way.”
The certainty drained out of their faces as Whitaker pushed through. Lucas could smell the aggression, but they parted.
Whitaker and Lucas pushed past Hockney’s secretary, who was on her feet, waiting for them. “Mr. Hockney is—”
“Going to want to see us,” Whitaker delivered without a hint of give.
They opened the door and Mr. Hockney was in his chair by the fire, talking to three men who were split between the sofa and the other chair. Voices were raised and everyone’s body language was agitated. They all looked up when the door opened.
Whitaker led the way, but it was Lucas who got the most attention—no doubt because of his spiffy duds with all the holes burned in them.
If William Hockney felt any surprise, he didn’t show it. Which Lucas realized was the difference between the rich and the poor—to the rich, law enforcement is an inconvenience, not a threat. “Special Agent Whitaker, Dr. Page,” he said in perfect monotone. “I assume this is important.” It sounded like he was ordering a glass of water from a waiter, which was a quick recovery from the heated conversation of only a few seconds ago.
Whitaker stepped forward. “We need to speak to you.”
Hockney took a deep breath and nodded toward the man in the middle on the sofa. “Please tell Mr. Molinaro that I regret this interruption, but it cannot be helped.”
The man—an interpreter—turned and spoke softly in Spanish to Molinaro, the oldest man in the group. Molinaro responded, and the interpreter said, “We understand and will be happy to pick this up at dinner tonight. Mr. Molinaro is looking forward to dining at your apartment—your chef was a surprise the last time, and he hopes that he is still in your employ. He is also looking forward to seeing your son again.”
Hockney smiled and nodded. “My chef has something special planned.” He paused, glanced over at Lucas, then finished up with “Unfortunately my son William is away on business and won’t be able to join us.”
Everyone stood, shook hands, and the Spanish speakers left. As they walked by, Lucas saw that Molinaro’s cuff links were striped in rubies, diamonds, and sapphires, and there was something familiar about the motif. Then he made the connection—they represented the flag of Paraguay.
After Hockney’s visitors had left, the old man turned to Lucas. “To what do I owe this displeasure, Dr. Page?”
Whitaker nodded at the other agents and they left the office. Hockney mimicked her and nodded at the security men, who pulled the door closed when they left.
Hockney looked Lucas up and down. “Are you all right?” But there was zero concern in his voice.
“Mr. Hockney…”—the tone in Whitaker’s voice got the old man’s attention—“I have some bad news.”
Hockney didn’t say anything, but Whitaker, with her preternatural ability to sense questions before they were asked, said, “Yes, it’s your brother. He and Mr. Stogner were killed.”
His facial muscles went rigid, as if he were a bust of himself.
After a few long seconds, his engine started back up. “I see.”
Hockney went to his fancy hidden bar and pressed the secret button. The wall slid open, and without looking at his hands, he reached for the nearest bottle, cracked the top, and poured three fingers into a glass.
He returned to his chair and sat down without touching his drink.
After a moment of silence, the old man opened his mouth to ask a question.
Whitaker preemptively answered with “We’re still investigating, but it appears that Mr. Stogner had an explosive device in his briefcase. It detonated when he opened it.”
Hockney no longer looked like a captain of industry—he was just an old man who had received bad news about someone he loved. Or at least that was the impression he was selling. “Was anyone else hurt?”
Whitaker nodded. “The special agent in charge of the investigation was killed along with one of our lawyers. He was interviewing your brother and Mr. Stogner at the time.”
“And Mr. Frosst?” There was nothing in the question that gave his feelings away. He might as well have been asking about the
time. “He accompanied Seth.”
“Mr. Frosst has some minor injuries. He will be released soon.”
Mr. Hockney nodded once. Then some errant command blipped through his software and he raised the drink to his lips. He held it up for a moment without looking at it, shook his head once, then put it away in a gulp that would choke a weekend drunk. At that point he seemed to see the tumbler for the first time, and he placed it gently down on the end table beside the coaster.
Without turning to look at them, he said, “Dr. Page, judging by your appearance, I assume that you were close to the blast.”
“Mr. Frosst ran into the room when it was still on fire and I followed him with an extinguisher.”
That seemed to please the old man. He smiled, but it was a sad, distant expression. “Mr. Frosst is—was—fond of my brother.” He looked up. “Is there anything else you two have come here to tell me?”
“Do you have any enemies?”
William Hockney didn’t look up when he said, “I would think the answer to that question is obvious by now, Dr. Page.”
And with a flutter of the old man’s fingers, they were once again dismissed.
49
26 Federal Plaza
Whitaker spent less time in her office than in any other routine location in her life except the front door of her ex’s apartment, where she picked up her son every second weekend. The space did not fit the criteria for either a cubicle or a proper room because it was neither of those things—it was simply an alcove on one of the general task floors, hidden away behind a support wall. There was no door, but there was a line across the floor that implied an invisible barrier. Some of her fellow agents—the ones who felt friendly enough to do so—often mimed a knock when they came to see her. The gag had lost any of its humor a long time ago, but that didn’t seem to stop anyone. Lucas was right about that—people didn’t grow.
While Lucas was downstairs, trying to flow-chart the events of the past few days with the bureau’s various departments, she was going over field agent reports. The bombings hadn’t been carried out by phantasms—there were human beings out there doing this. And human beings made mistakes, you just had to recognize them. More of Lucas and his patterns.
The file on Frosst was bolstered with some general Big Data information—it was amazing what you could add to a file just by hitting the search engines. Whitaker was already half an inch into the binder and it was doing nothing to soften her dislike of him.
Unlike the files on a lot of men of his type, Benjamin Frosst’s was replete with all the prerequisite details, including date and location of birth, addresses growing up, educational background, and health history. There was nothing remarkable in the building blocks of his life—they could have belonged to a parts manager at a car dealership or a high school teacher anywhere in America. And even his transcript from the University of Montana, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts under the general discipline of business, showed him to be only an average student. But he had somehow escaped the predictable and moved on to the remarkable when he was hired by a Japanese banking consortium a week after graduation.
He disappeared into their corporate maze for a decade, where he bounced around various parts of the world, first under the heading of general security, later as specialized security, then finally as head of security—personnel. His passport records, gained through a request to the Department of Homeland Security, showed him making nine hundred trips to foreign countries during his time employed by the Japanese, most of them to well-known dictatorships around the world—some to countries that no longer existed. The only known routine he had was a yearly two-week vacation that he spent in California.
And then, for no apparent reason, he was back in the States, working on Wall Street as head of security for one of the investment banks. He spent eight years with the firm, and again the only routine in his life was his yearly two-week sojourn in California. His tenure ended during the subprime mortgage crash of 2008, when the company was disassembled. Remarkably, the enterprise hadn’t succumbed to the greed and mismanagement associated with that particular historical block of financial bloodletting—it had fallen to a hostile takeover by the Hockney brothers, who were using the chaos in the markets to shore up their empire. Three weeks after the firm shuttered its doors, Frosst showed up on the Hockneys’ payroll.
Frosst’s occupation was listed as head of security on his business card, but his income tax returns declared that he was a personal assistant—the truth was probably somewhere in between.
Whitaker went through some of the photographs in the file, and in every single one he was with one or both of the Hockney brothers. He was always dressed impeccably, and his expression never varied off the asshole setting by more than a few degrees. Lucas was also right about his hair—it always looked terrible (not that Lucas had any right to pass judgment in that department).
Frosst had an apartment in the same building as the Hockneys—a twenty-six-story Renaissance Revival on the Upper West Side that overlooked the park. William occupied the penthouse—which translated to the entire top floor; Seth occupied the floor below; Frosst had a three-bedroom flat on the third floor. He had no wife or significant other. He owned two cars—a Range Rover and a Ferrari. His credit card statements showed very little in the way of extraneous spending, and he didn’t appear to have any vices other than his tailor and an account at Tourneau that he used to stock up on high-end wristwatches.
There was nothing remarkable about the man. He didn’t seem to have any interests outside of work. He didn’t gamble or own a boat or chase women. Lucas was right—without the Hockneys, Frosst wasn’t even there.
So why did he set off all of Lucas’s alarms?
Whitaker closed Frosst’s file and pushed it aside.
If you factored in the Guggenheim and the internet hub and Makepeace and Seth Hockney as parts of the same puzzle, it all seemed cockeyed. Like something was wrong.
Was it Lucas?
50
Medusa, New York
The house was there.
And then it wasn’t.
In its departure, it punched a flaming crater into the field that slowly chewed its way through the dry fall leaves and unmowed grass in a widening circle that the wind quickly sculpted into an ellipse.
The Medusa Fire Department arrived on site fourteen minutes after the explosion scared the shit out of the neighbors. There were no fire hydrants this far out of town (or even in town), but the volunteers ran a pump into Tenmile Creek. But by the time they started on the house and the barn, both were little more than insurance claims.
It took an hour of dousing the two outbuildings with four hoses pushing water at 400 pounds per square inch to completely subdue the flames, but everything went well and no one was injured. When a final inventory was done, the farmhouse and barn were gone, one 1999 Jeep Wrangler had met its demise, two toolsheds had been eaten by the flames, three utility poles had been lost, and the field was black.
At this point the neighbors were involved in a dialogue with the attending experts—a euphemism for volunteers. And even if you didn’t believe in eyewitnesses, it was pretty obvious that there had been an explosion. Which was odd, because there were no propane tanks on the property and no natural gas lines out here. There had been no barbecue found on the premises—not near what was left of the porch, and not anywhere in the field around the house. The neighbors said that the occupants, Hazel Rich and her son, Donny, weren’t gun owners—so it was unlikely that a stockpile of ammunition or gunpowder on the premises (a natural assumption in any rural enclave, even in a state with relatively strict firearm laws) had accidentally gone up.
The sheriff collected details. Ms. Rich was fifty-one, Donny was twenty-six. Based on known schedules, it was believed that both mother and son were home at the time of the explosion.
They found Ms. Rich in a ditch across the gravel road, under a tree. There were bits of plaster and shingle in her hair—from when she
had been blown through the roof—and her clothes had been torn off as she had come zipping back down through the trees. Most of her bones were broken and her head was facing the wrong way, but she hadn’t lost any parts other than her nose, which was some kind of a miracle considering the ride she had taken. Her shredded nightgown hung in the branches overhead, bloody and attracting flies.
Proof of Donny’s death was found dangling on a barbed-wire fence at the edge of the property, more than 800 feet from the house. It was a foot, still clad in a white tube sock stuffed into a blue rubber Croc in a man’s size 11.
This was a small town where they were not used to investigating explosions, but the local authorities thought things through and then called in the New York State Police. A coroner from Schenectady was sent over.
One of the troopers, a man named Eli Benson, had been in the first Gulf War as part of a bomb disposal unit. This is not why he had been called, but it turned out to be a nice little bit of synchronicity when he was the one to discover the trigger for an improvised explosive device embedded in the mailbox down by the road—no one else on site would have recognized it for what it was. Or bothered to call the FBI.
Benson did both.
51
Whitaker had come down to check on him a few times, but for the most part he had been left alone. He called Debbie, and she would take over his classes for the next couple of weeks—or however long he still had a job. He had chosen her as his assistant because she was impervious to the jet engine whine of the student need turbine.
His attention swiveled back and forth from the bank of monitors mirroring his reflection to the wall of printouts spider-webbed together with red Sharpie lines. It looked like a conspiracy theorist’s bedroom, minus the pushpins, yarn, tenuous deductions, and poor judgment. There was order in the mess, and he saw a dozen underlying patterns when he looked up at what most people would see as chaos.