Under Pressure: A Lucas Page Novel

by Robert Pobi

  “I will.”

  “And therein lies the problem.” Erin took another step back and opened the blinds a little. The bright afternoon sun cut the room up into spears of 1980s Michael Mann art direction. “Okay. Get to the bad part.”

  He closed his eyes and for a minute the room stopped spinning. When he opened them the carousel started back up and he had a hard time focusing on her. “Kehoe’s right. Take the kids and go away. Let him handle things so you don’t make a mistake. I don’t think you’re in danger and I don’t think I’m in danger. But I don’t want you and the kids here. Just in case.”

  Erin was doing a pretty good job of hiding the anger he knew was starting to percolate just below the surface. “The kids will miss Halloween.”

  “When’s that?”

  “In two days.”

  Lucas tried to wave it away. But he didn’t have an arm. “You can take them out wherever you go.”

  “They’ve been looking forward to this.”

  What could he say? Tough shit? That they needed to get used to being disappointed? No, their kids had ended up with them precisely because they were too used to being disappointed. “They’ll get over it.” He knew it sounded insensitive, but this wasn’t about giving them Halloween, this was about keeping them safe.

  “And what about you?”

  “I’ve been through this before—I can change my own bandages, wash my wounds.” Lucas once again waved her question away with a hand that wasn’t there, and the irony wasn’t lost on him. “And I can do it more effectively if I’m not worried about you.” Most of that was true.

  “Will you be safe?” Which was a good question. Maybe even an excellent one.

  Lucas nodded in the general direction of the hallway. “Kehoe’s got a guy in front of the door—I’ll be fine.” But even as he said it, he wondered if it was just magical thinking; the people with the explosives had been pretty good at sneaking up on their victims so far.

  She looked like he had just punched her in the stomach. “And you’re staying with the bureau? You’re going to—”

  “No. I’m not.”

  She didn’t say anything to that. She just stared at him.

  “I am done. Quit. Going back was a mistake and I never should have done it. I thought I needed this, but I don’t. I don’t want it and I’m done.”

  “Why is there a but coming?”

  “Because there is.” He looked up at her. “Like Hartke last winter—I owe Whitaker. And I owe it to the other people who will get hurt if I leave now. I fucked up and I can’t leave my mess for anyone else to clean up. This is on me. And when I’m through, it’s over.” He felt the tears in his eye and he didn’t try to push them away—Erin and the kids were more important than anything he could imagine being allowed to be part of. “I quit.” He reached out for her.

  “Pinkie swear?” she asked, and her tears shook loose and rolled down her freckled cheeks.

  “Pinkie swear.”

  69

  ABC 7 Eyewitness News

  We are here at the intersection of Kingston Avenue and Park Place in Brooklyn, where earlier today a young man was violently murdered. You can see the scene behind me in Brower Park, where police officers are still trying to piece together the precise chain of events that led to the death of the as-yet-unidentified victim.

  At ten A.M. today, approximately five hundred people showed up for what authorities are calling a flash-mob demonstration. They were here to voice their support of the Machine Bomber, something which has become commonplace since the bomber published a letter a few days ago.

  Authorities were not aware of the demonstration, and did not arrive until after people from nearby housing reported the large fire in the park. By which time one young man was already dead and several more were injured.

  Shortly after the Machine Bomber’s supporters arrived, they started a fire and began to burn items of technology that they brought; everything from cell phones to printers to toasters and electric toothbrushes were tossed onto the pyre. The fire quickly began letting off toxic smoke, which killed several birds that were in nearby trees downwind. But it is not the loss of animal life that is most tragic, it is the death of a young handicapped man.

  According to witnesses, the victim was rolling down the sidewalk in his electric wheelchair—past the entrance to the park visible behind me—when he was attacked by several demonstrators who allegedly screamed, “Kill the machine! Kill the machine! Burn it! Burn it!” As many as thirty individuals rushed forward and attacked him. They apparently carried him to the fire and tossed him and his wheelchair into the flames, where he was burned alive.

  We are now going to show you exclusive video of the incident, taken by one of the demonstrators in the park at the time—Marta Kovacevic. In exchange for this video, Ms. Kovacevic has asked that her Instagram profile and account information be watermarked in. You can also DM her directly on Twitter, where she can be found under her name.

  Please be forewarned, there is graphic content …

  70

  Columbia University Medical Center Fort Lee, New Jersey

  He had been staring up at the acoustic tiled ceiling for months now.

  Or maybe it was only weeks.

  Possibly days.

  Or even just hours.

  Maybe minutes.

  And then he realized that seconds were a possibility.

  Fuck it.

  It felt like forever, and as long as he lay there, calculating the number of holes he was looking up at (18 holes east-west by 18 holes north-south per tile—324 holes total—multiplied by 352 tiles in the room—equaled 114,048 holes per room—131 rooms per floor, 16 floors in total—translating to 239,044,608 holes in all) the world was moving on without him.

  He thought about taking another jolt of happy juice from the dispenser—for the road, as they say—but if he hit the morphine button, he’d never get out of here. He stared at the machine for a minute, thinking that maybe one more boost couldn’t hurt. After all, they made that button look like a bull’s-eye for a reason—as if missing it was a shame. A crime. A goddamned tragedy. Besides, if they wanted you to take it, it couldn’t be bad, right?

  Fuck.

  This.

  Lucas took the needle out of his arm, which was no easy task, since they had plugged it into his left. But it was close to his elbow, which enabled him to get it out with his teeth. He spit it out and it whipped over the side of the bed like a dead tentacle.

  He pushed up off the mattress with his good arm and his ribs lit up with ten thousand volts at almost enough amperage to knock him over. He lay back down, took a breath.

  Fuck.

  This.

  Erin had left the bed railing down, and he pushed up again, sliding his prosthetic leg over until it slipped off the edge of the mattress and the pendulum action pulled his hips around, lifting his spine, giving him the momentum he needed. And it didn’t hurt his ribs as much. It wasn’t easy. But it was bearable.

  There.

  I’m sitting on the edge of this bed.

  Not bad.

  He sat there for a few moments, sending little signals out to his parts to see if he could count on them. Other than his broken ribs, and that he could barely hear out of his bandaged ear, the rest of the shit could be relegated to the category of minor inconveniences. Not that they didn’t add up; sometimes a bunch of little nothings made more of an impact than one big something, like the death of a thousand cuts.

  He slid off the bed until he felt the floor under his bare foot. Then he heard—and felt—his carbon-fiber foot hit the linoleum. He reached back with his hand and pushed off the bed. His body swung out, and for a second he thought he was going to overshoot his center of gravity and take the closet door in the teeth.

  But he didn’t.

  And just like that, he was standing.

  Miracle Number Two out of the way.

  He stood there for a few moments, figuring out how he was doing. And it was pre
tty good. Everything seemed to be working. At least if he stood still.

  But standing still was no way to catch bad guys.

  After the Event a decade back, he got so used to falling that for a couple of months he wore a mouthguard—he’d be doing fine, and then he’d miss a tiny little muscle adjustment in his back or his arm would swing too far out and he’d topple over. It was never a graceful fall; it was six-foot-three of mechanical man clattering downstairs or windmilling into a table or slamming into a wire garbage can like a drunk. Thank god YouTube had been in its infancy back then—the thought of some dickhead with a cell phone camera retiring off the revenue from his embarrassment would be a hard one to take.

  He looked down at his feet, making sure not to let his head go too far forward.

  They were both there—different colors, but there.

  Okay.

  Move your feet.

  So he did.

  The prosthetic first.

  Then his original biological machinery.

  It worked. He moved.

  One small step for man; one giant leap for Dr. Lucas Page.

  Holy.

  Shit.

  So he tried another.

  Then another.

  And with each inch covered, his confidence grew. By the time he put his hand on the locker, his internal gyroscope was back online.

  Miracle Number Three taken care of.

  Inserting the pin in his humerus into the collet on his prosthetic went smoothly, and it felt good to be all put back together.

  Miracle Number Four? Check.

  He stood there for a few moments, feeling better, with only little pulses of pain coming from his ribs, timed to his breathing, like a badly designed machine.

  By the time he started contorting into his clothes, he was confident that he could make it over the wall. More or less. He creaked. And he hurt. And he was bleeding. And he couldn’t hear for shit. But he was better than he could reasonably expect. He didn’t feel any guilt knowing that he had escaped Whitaker’s fate, but he did feel gratitude, which then brought the appropriate mix of conflicting emotions into play. He understood that there was no logic to the way events unfolded—they just did. You either accepted them or you didn’t.

  He looked around the room, wondering if there was anything he should take. There were a few vases of the obligatory we-hope-you-don’t-die flowers from colleagues and assorted ass-kissers. Way too many, considering he had been in here a little more than twenty-four hours. And a bunch of bloody bandages and a crappy sippy cup. No, he didn’t need any of this shit.

  The agent watching his room jumped to his feet when Lucas opened the door and limped out into the hallway. “Hey! What? Um. Look. I … uh.”

  “Great vocabulary. No wonder they have you guarding dead people.”

  The agent was young, maybe twenty-seven or -eight, and looked like he couldn’t muster up a beard without resorting to Chia Pet tactics. “Sorry, sir. I was told that no one was supposed to go through that door.”

  “I think they meant going in.” Speaking made him cough, and he tasted blood at the back of his throat that he swallowed.

  The kid just stared at him. “You don’t look so good.”

  Lucas turned away and limped on down the hall. “And you don’t sound so smart.”

  71

  Fort Lee, New Jersey

  Lucas caught a taxi in front of the hospital. The cabbie stared at him in the mirror a little too long—evidently he looked more like a drop-off than a pickup. But he gave the driver the address in a none-too-friendly tone, and that seemed to shake the guy into action. Judging by the way he took off, he wanted to get Lucas to his destination before he expired.

  Every bump, pothole, lane change, acceleration, deceleration, swerve, and corner told Lucas that he should have taken that final shot of morphine. But he was tired, and when they were on the George Washington Bridge into the city, he put his head back on the seat and—miraculously—fell asleep.

  He woke up a few blocks from the office, and he could feel that blood from the bandages on the right side of his face had leaked out and dripped down, pooling in his collarbone. He wiped it away with his pocket square, and when he looked up, the driver was watching him in the mirror with an expression somewhere between terror and horror.

  “You don’t look so good.” The cabbie’s permit identified him as one Zigfriedo Gomez.

  “Thanks.”

  “No, seriously, man—you don’t.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You want me to take you to a doctor?”

  “I just came from a doctor.”

  “Did he beat you up?”

  “Ziggy, pull over.”

  “Let me take you through the light, so you don’t have to walk. I won’t charge you.” He reached over, and threw the meter. “It’s on me—”

  “Pull. Over.”

  The sudden maneuver pinched his arm between the door and his ribs, sending a bolt of pain through his internal organs, and he wanted to puke. But he held it in and was embarrassed that it took him four tries to get his wallet out of his coat pocket.

  He ran his card through the touch-screen process, and when he looked up, the cabbie was holding out a box of Kleenex. “You’re bleeding.”

  Lucas took it and grumbled the closest approximate thank you he could fake, then got out and slipped his sunglasses on over the eye patch.

  He didn’t have to wait for the light, then was double lucky in that he didn’t lurch across the intersection like Johnny Cash after a bender. But New Yorkers are notoriously impervious to weirdos in their midst, and he was grateful that no one gave him more than a cursory glance.

  Armored vehicles and police cars were on the street in front of the building and dragon’s teeth had been planted every three feet around the perimeter; it looked like they were expecting a rush by hostile infantry.

  The armed tactical men at the concrete barrier gave him a thrice-over, and he pulled his badge and ID. They had extra agents on duty—a paramilitary arm that looked like they should be kicking down doors. There were a dozen K9 units, all outfitted with tactical vests denoting them as FBI personnel in big yellow letters.

  The counterpart to the armed bureau people were the crowds that had come down to demonstrate, or protest, or whatever you wanted to call a bunch of adults dressed up as superheroes and Star Wars characters waving signs advertising their ignorance. A lot of the placards said that there was no bomber. Others said the FBI itself was fake and didn’t exist outside of its own mind. Some accused the FBI of being staffed by traitors who were intent on destroying the country. Lucas could forgive stupidity on occasion because it wasn’t intentional, but he found willful ignorance like this revolting.

  One of the security people at the door proper took a long hard look at his credentials. And the sign-in officer came over when he swiped through the turnstile and asked to see his identification. Evidently bureau personnel weren’t used to seeing the freshly sewn-up come into work with IV bags dragging behind them.

  Miraculously, the elevator didn’t stop until it hit his floor, and he took a deep breath as it slowed, willing himself to stay upright. The doors slid open and he walked into the war room.

  The second hand locked between two ticks of the clock.

  No one moved.

  Or talked.

  No one breathed.

  Or laughed.

  No one sneezed.

  Or made a phone call.

  No one touched a keyboard.

  They just stared. Mouths open, like a gaggle of shocked federally employed law enforcement emojis.

  Lucas headed down the middle of the room, between the rows of desks. As he made his way, a sensation from the past jumped the void and he could feel it wafting off the agents: pity—they felt sorry for him.

  Kehoe was in the middle of a phone call that he ended with a quick “I’ll call you back” as soon as he saw Lucas.

  Lucas gingerly lowered his frame into one o
f the Corbusier club chairs and closed his eye, trying not to feel the pain fingering his organs. For the first time in a very long while, he felt like he could die at any moment.

  “Are you okay?” Kehoe sounded concerned, which was out of the norm.

  “Swell.”

  Kehoe examined him for a few moments that he ended by leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms. “Because you don’t look good.”

  “So people keep saying.”

  “You’re supposed to be in the hospital.”

  “No, I’m supposed to be home with my family, but they’re gone.”

  Kehoe didn’t register a facial expression. “Is this the part where you act like this is all my fault, we argue, then realize we’re on the same side and wrap up with a hug?”

  Lucas nodded at the teacup on Kehoe’s desk. “This is the part where you have one of the minions bring me a cup of coffee.”

  Kehoe leaned forward, punched into the office line, asked for a coffee and a sandwich, then resumed the forced casual of before.

  “Where is my family?” Lucas asked.

  Kehoe had folded his arms across his chest again. “California—Big Bear. I sent two people I trust with them.”

  At that, Lucas felt the tears start to sizzle, but he pushed them away. “Thank you.”

  “Why are you here? You should be relaxing in the hospital, eating Jell-O and enjoying Turner Classic Movies.”

  “Where are you with the investigation?”

  “I can have a summary delivered to your home if you would like.”

  “What I would like, Brett, is an answer to my question.”

  Kehoe nodded at the war room beyond the wall of windows. Lucas didn’t turn to look; he didn’t need any more vertigo. “We’re going through Frosst’s life piece by piece. And we haven’t written William Hockney off—his brother’s death puts him at the helm of a very well funded retirement.”

  “William Hockney is past the point of actually caring about money—it’s become an existential reward to him.” Lucas realized that he was sliding to one side, and he pushed himself up in the chair. Where was that fucking coffee? “It’s not William Hockney.”