Under Pressure: A Lucas Page Novel

by Robert Pobi

  “That’s not why I’m here, Luke. You didn’t kill Hockney.”

  Lucas didn’t bother boiling water for tea—Kehoe wouldn’t be staying long. “How can you be so sure? I had both opportunity and motive.”

  “You have motive only if you believe that he ordered Frosst to come after you and Whitaker. But you already figured out that he didn’t—which was why you and I locked horns.”

  The coffeemaker started wheezing. “There was no locking. You held all the power. And now you can power your ass out of my fucking house.”

  Kehoe leaned against the counter beside Lemmy’s bowl and the dog got off his pillow, expecting breakfast. “There’s an old aphorism that says when you hear the sound of hooves, your average viewer expects horses, not zebras—”

  Lucas thought back to the antique club chairs at Hockney’s last night, and he suddenly felt sick.

  “But you? You expect John Cleese and Eric Idle and coconut shells.”

  “And here you are.”

  Lucas walked over to Lemmy’s place mat on the floor beside the fridge and picked up his steel bowl. He was supposed to wash it but he wasn’t in the mood for doggy maid service. He filled it with six scoops of health pellets, added some warm water, then put it back on the floor. Lemmy was laser-focused on the bowl, and a line of drool itsy-bitsy-spidered out of the corner of his mouth to the tiled floor. Lucas said, “Okay, dummy,” and the dog lunged forward.

  Lucas turned back to Kehoe. “What happened to Hockney?”

  “Someone planted a mine on his terrace. Placed it between the tiles.”

  “A mine? As in a land mine?”

  “An S-mine, to be specific.”

  “What’s an S-mine?”

  Kehoe held out his hand and Hoffner came into the room—keeping an eye on Lucas—and placed a paper in it. “It’s a device that arms when it’s stepped on. When you step off, it shoots up and detonates at about three and a half feet, dispersing shrapnel. The results are pretty standard. From what we can figure, Hockney stepped on it last night sometime after you left. It didn’t detonate until just after six-thirty this morning.” He held the paper out.

  Lucas took the page. It was a spec sheet on a specific S-mine. Lucas scanned the basic details, then looked at the technical information, picking out load, timer settings, and chemical composition—as Kehoe had said on the beach a million years ago, it all came down to physics and chemistry. Lucas handed the page back. “That thing’s meant to be buried—how do you hide it on a slate deck?”

  Unlike the late Samir Chawla, Kehoe did not need to consult notes. “The slate tiles were on a bed of sand. The mine was planted at the transept where four tile corners intersected. The perp hit the corners with a hammer and snapped them off—we found them in one of the planters. Then he scooped out some of the sand and hid the mine.”

  Which seemed like a lot of trouble to Lucas; with Hockney’s fondness for secret buttons connected to liquor cabinets, Lucas could think of less complicated ways to blow the man up—just wire up his Japanese whiskey and wait for cocktail hour. Or just load his ridiculous espresso maker to blast through the roof. There were a lot of less complicated ways to kill the guy. Which again meant that this was personal.

  “He stood on that thing all night long?” He remembered Hockney’s hip and couldn’t help but feel a little sympathy for the old man. “And the mine?”

  “Manufactured by ENF—just like the C-4 we’ve been finding. But we’re still collecting evidence.”

  In this particular instance, Lucas knew that the word evidence was a euphemism for pieces.

  Lucas poured coffee into his World’s Greatest Dad—from world’s greatest kids (and Hector)! WE LUV YOU! mug.

  “The C-4 in all the IEDs came from ENF. What does that tell you?”

  Lucas raised the mug to his lips. “That whoever is doing this has access to Hockney infrastructure.” Lucas felt himself getting sucked back in and he tried to put the brakes on, but the questions were starting. “We had that contraption at the Guggenheim; the two cell-phone-activated IEDs at the internet hubs; the farm in Medusa; the explosions in Forest Hills, Brooklyn, Hoboken, and Staten Island; the humidor at Makepeace’s; the bomb at Saarinen’s; the briefcase bomb at the FBI; and the land mine at Hockney’s. That is a pretty big lexicon.”

  “Are you going to come back?” Kehoe didn’t quite sound like he was begging. But he didn’t quite sound like he wasn’t, either.

  Lucas took a sip of his coffee. “That depends.”

  “On?”

  “Am I working for you this time, or are you working for me?”

  84

  26 Federal Plaza

  Kehoe was at his desk, and for the second time in less than twelve months, found himself acting as his own lead agent on a case because the SAIC had been killed. He was taking notes when Otto Hoffner came in and told him that he had a call from the Manhattan medical examiner’s office. He put down the big fountain pen and picked up the call.

  “Dr. Marcus, Brett Kehoe.”

  Marcus didn’t bother with formalities. “I found something interesting regarding William Hockney’s murder—he had a heart attack just before he was murdered.” Marcus had been the ME for Manhattan through six presidential administrations and two bypass surgeries.

  “That’s a lousy coincidence.”

  “It wasn’t a coincidence.”

  Kehoe leaned back, as if better posture would somehow clarify things.

  Marcus coughed once, then said, “He suffered from long QT syndrome, which required a pacemaker. He had a Johnson Medical EKJ06 installed at Cornell two years back—I checked. The unit was destroyed in the explosion, but the memory chip was salvageable and we hooked it up to a diagnostics computer to see if it could tell us the exact time of death.”

  Marcus paused, and Kehoe knew it was for effect. Everyone fancied themselves David Caruso these days. “And?” Kehoe said.

  “And 3.4 seconds before the explosion was triggered, his pacemaker caused atrial fibrillation, effectively sending him into an immediate infarc.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he was standing on the mine, and his pacemaker caused a heart attack that in turn forced him to step off of the mine, causing it to detonate.”

  Kehoe sifted the information. “Why would it do that?”

  “It wouldn’t. There is no external force—including a direct hit from an electromagnetic pulse—that could cause that sort of malfunction. There is so much redundancy built into these units that they are—pardon the expression—bombproof. I’ve had linemen working for Con Ed come in here after sucking on 7,200 volts and every organ in their body is destroyed. Skin is perforated; shoes are melted; brain is fried. But the pacemaker is still plug-and-play. I’ve never seen one shit the bed under any conditions, unless the unit itself suffered direct trauma, like a bullet—and three thousand of these come through my office every year. When we pulled the log on this one and ran the code, we found a group of commands that shouldn’t be there.”

  “So it did malfunction.”

  “No. These things receive software updates automatically—like your phone. They also send feedback to the hospital so a doctor—or I should say a medical algorithm—can analyze the data and make the appropriate adjustments. All in real time. But in Mr. Hockney’s case, the computer at the hospital sent malicious code.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The software manager at Cornell intentionally sent code to William Hockney’s pacemaker that caused him to have a heart attack.”

  “And you can prove this?”

  “The data is in the memory card; this is not speculation.”

  “So William Hockney wasn’t killed by that mine?”

  “He was killed by that mine. But only because it detonated before he finished dying from a myocardial infarction that was intentionally triggered by software.”

  85

  Columbia University

  When Lucas pushed the door to the la
b open, Bobby Nadeel and Caroline Jespersen were both seated at one of the two long tables. Jespersen’s head was down and she was snoring in a way that men think is cute and women leave relationships over. Nadeel was deep in the zone and he didn’t even look up.

  They were in the basement, where the cerebral cortex of the university was housed in a grid of air-cooled passages. The next-generation computational reactor boasted enough firepower to model the most complicated mathematical problems man could conjure. The hardware was on par with that of the Pentagon, purchased through the generosity of a well-funded alumni endowment coupled with a public outreach program to technology companies interested in the next crop of think-tank impresarios and future titans of the tech world.

  It looked like every available whiteboard in the building had been dragged into the lab and corralled across the front of the room. There wasn’t a square foot of white space left on any of them—the surfaces were tattooed with three miles of red Sharpie and upholstered in hundreds of Post-its. But by the angle they were at, Lucas could tell they were dead ends; evidently their digital haystack still hadn’t paid out—sometimes you had to get your hands dirty to find meaning in all the nothing and even then there was always the risk of low returns.

  Lucas felt lousy. He was standing, but so were the whiteboards; verticality did not prove sentience. And he felt like he could use a hit with the paddles.

  “Dr. Page?”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Lucas looked over at Nadeel and the kid was staring at him as if he had just eaten a handful of car keys. Caroline Jespersen was behind him, in the midst of waking up.

  “Are you okay?” Nadeel asked.

  “I’m just a little tired.”

  “You need a coffee or something?”

  Lucas took out the bottle of Tylenol. He tried to get the lid off, but he couldn’t line up the little arrows, so he laid it on its side on the desk with his good hand and gave it a karate chop with his prosthetic. The cap zinged across the room. Along with half the pills. He scooped up a few, tossed them into his mouth, and looked up as he chewed them to see the kids eyeing him as if he were a lunatic. He said, “Defective cap.”

  The space was on loan from the computer lab supervisor, a woman named Cecile Rasmussen. Lucas’s star appeal was a big factor in the school’s fund-raising apparatus, and he never had trouble getting access to the system—bestselling books and appearances on the late-night talk-show circuit had their advantages.

  Lucas knew that if he didn’t sit down, he would fall down, so he pulled one of the chairs over and slowly ratcheted in so as not to jar his system. Everything felt like it was held together with rubber bands and luck, and he was worried about adding new injuries to the already lengthy roster. “Have you connected those last five bombing victims?”

  Nadeel was smart and creative, but Jespersen had an innate subtlety when it came to algorithms—which was a skill that you couldn’t teach. Nadeel could sort data, but he needed Jespersen to set him up with the tools.

  Nadeel reached into the forest of Coke cans on the edge of the desk and shook a couple until he found one that still had some life in it. He took a slurp that emptied the can, put it down, and gave Caroline the stage with a wave of his hand. “Caroline will tell you everything you need to know about the Jackson Five.”

  Jespersen stretched, yawned, ran her fingers through her hair, then wiped her index finger across her teeth—all while obviously making an effort not to stare at Lucas. He could tell she was about to ask him if he was okay, but he glared at her and she went straight to work. “Um, yeah, uh, okay—you couldn’t find five people less connected if you used an algo to keep them apart. I mean, the random p-value alone makes this statistically impossible, which makes no kind of practical sense for five men in the same age group, with the same type of education, in the same general geographical vicinity. We know that each one participated in the bombings, at least circumstantially. And it appears as if they participated in the bombings independently of one another. Which is not possible. So, like you taught us, we started to look for what wasn’t there.” Jespersen sounded as if she had figured out a trick question. “And what wasn’t there was a social media presence.”

  Jespersen picked up a cup of what had to be cold coffee and pulled the lid off. She took a jolt, tamped the lid back down with her palm, then spun her laptop around. “We banged our heads against this one all night and couldn’t put them in any sort of a mutual orbit. But their lives mimic one another almost completely, and the weird part is they do it in their respective vacuums, culminating with all four of them being murdered on the same day in the same manner, almost at the same time—so they all follow the same pattern.”

  Jespersen track-padded a command into her laptop, and the wall of monitors came to life in one massive blink of pixelated spreadsheets—the digital equivalent of colored yarn and pushpins. “Up until two years ago from last April, the Jackson Five were all active on social media. Nothing over the top—no Instagram influencer bullshit, no YouTube channels—just regular Here’s-me-and-my-friends-white-water-rafting kind of stuff. Then it just stops. Dead.”

  “Just like that?”

  Jespersen snapped her fingers. “As if they all found some kind of new religion.” She cycled through the spreadsheets she had up. “So here we have the Jackson Five. All five share the same basic profile: males in their early twenties. Donny Rich, twenty-five, blown up in the house he shared with his mother in Medusa. Steven Whiteman, twenty-three, blown up in his bedroom at his parents’ home in Forest Hills, Queens. Tony Iannantuono, twenty-seven, blown up in his apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. Barnabas O’Hare, also twenty-four, blown up in his basement apartment of a single-family home in Castleton Corners, Staten Island. Enrique Cristobel, twenty-five, blown up in his apartment in Brooklyn.”

  “All had science backgrounds in high school. All good students. All got awards that were published on their school websites.” Jespersen pointed up at one of the spreadsheets. “All start university in September, all in the Northeast. All start four years ago except for Iannantuono, who started law school five years ago. Different schools, but there is overlap in four of the five subjects’ choice of fields: Rich in cellular botany at SUNY Cobleskill; Whiteman in crop metabolism at Cornell; Cristobel in biodiversity management at Guttman Community College; and O’Hare in crop diversity management at Houghton. Iannantuono is the outlier at Albany Law School.

  “None of them had girlfriends. I mean, not a single one. And I’d bet we’re looking at incels here.” She looked up at Lucas, who was shaking his head. “What? It’s a thing.”

  “Go on.”

  She let out a sigh, then went back to the screen. “In April thirty months back, all five go to Las Vegas. They stay at different hotels. Facebook pages show typical student type stuff. Whiteman went to a show—a Beatlemania revival, which is apparently still a thing; Iannantuono went to a car museum; O’Hare went to the Ralph Lauren store; Rich didn’t have a Facebook page, so we have no idea what he did. Cristobel played the slots a lot.”

  Jespersen said, “And from here on out, not one of them has a digital footprint.”

  “Nothing?”

  “They might as well be dead. All five paid for and kept top-shelf internet service with unlimited data plans, but not one ever visited a single website. Never accessed an email account. Never Googled a single thing. Didn’t own cell phones. They just stopped participating in their online lives.”

  “Tor browsers?”

  Jespersen shrugged. “Probably. I don’t have access to their accounts at their internet service providers, but it’s a safe assumption.”

  Nadeel came back with “How the actual fuck is that even possible? It’s like they occupied different universes in the same headspace. Like she said—you’d have trouble finding five other people on the planet less connected than they were—it’s as if their lives were intentionally scripted to be unrelated. It’s a statistical impossibility.”

  Nadeel
got up and stood in front of the screen. “Three of the four drastically change their career trajectory within two weeks of their trip to Vegas. Rich transfers to computer programming; Whiteman drops out of school and gets his commercial driver’s license; O’Hare goes to a mechanics school specializing in commercial generator repair and maintenance. Iannantuono stayed in law.

  “Whiteman was hired by the company that organized the event at the Guggenheim—he’s the guy who delivered both the snowmakers and the foil bags. The FBI interviewed him, but there was absolutely nothing to suggest that he was in any way involved. Iannantuono was an intern at Stogner, Pruitt, and Sterlingshires—he was Alexander Stogner’s assistant. He was interviewed by the FBI, but he lived such a normal life that they gave him a pass—he’s probably the guy who put the bomb in Stogner’s briefcase, who was blown up in the FBI building with Seth Hockney. O’Hare worked for the company that maintained the generators at the internet hub on Hudson Street—he was in the building nine different times in the past year. And we know that Cristobel was the UPS driver who visited Jonathan Makepeace on the day he was blown up—so it’s safe to assume that he put the bomb in the humidor. Rich never left his hometown.”

  Lucas saw the pieces slide into their respective places. “So the only thing the FBI could have found that connected them was their deaths. Before that, they were not connected in any real-world way.”

  Jespersen pointed at her laptop. “Except in Las Vegas.”

  “So something happened in Vegas.” Lucas walked over to one of the monitors and leaned in close, focusing on one of the fields. “And now you’re going to tell me that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?”

  Nadeel started smiling.

  “What?” Lucas’s Spidey sense started tingling.

  Nadeel nodded at Jespersen. “You tell him.”

  She clicked around on the keyboard and the monitors in the room blinked out, then came to life with a photo of a young man. He was in his mid-twenties and had the bland looks of the single dad/tow-truck driver love interest from every rom-com Lucas had been forced to sit through with Erin. There was nothing interesting about his features, and Lucas knew that if he closed his eyes, he wouldn’t be able to remember his face.