by Robert Pobi
“That’s Mitchell Stahlberg,” Jespersen said.
“And why am I looking at him?”
“Because he took the same trip to Las Vegas as the other victims—same arrival date, same departure date. He had the same general profile as the other five in everything from age to geographical locale. The day he returned from Vegas, he canceled all of his social media accounts. Before he went to Vegas, he was in environmental studies—specializing in watershed management. A week after his return home to Long Island, he switched over to police tech.”
“So why haven’t I heard of him before now?” Lucas reached out with his prosthetic hand, and his aluminum finger stopped before it touched the screen. A small arc of static zipped to his digit. “Where is he?”
“That’s the thing…” Jespersen tapped on the keyboard and the images on the monitors changed to a newspaper article from a Long Island paper. There was a photo of a recreational vehicle on a beach somewhere. Most of the aluminum skin had burned away and the tires were melted; the only features that identified it as an RV were the blackened rims and framework.
“Mitchell Stahlberg blew up seven months after he returned from Las Vegas.”
Lucas felt the gears on the machine meshing—the whole contraption was starting to feel like it would soon stand up on its own. The trick was in creating a little structural integrity, which happened only if you had the bearing walls in place.
From somewhere outside his time zone, Bobby Nadeel pinged. “What?”
Lucas looked up at the kid. “What what?”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that we need to find out who these guys spent time with in Las Vegas.”
“How do we do that?”
“Pack up your shit, we’re leaving.”
86
26 Federal Plaza
Otto Hoffner handed the tablet to Kehoe with the simple statement “Watch this.”
It was a video file that had been paused—surveillance footage from one of the cameras overlooking William Hockney’s rooftop terrace garden.
It was early morning, and the sun cast long shadows across the roof. Hockney was frozen in the frame, slightly screen left, staring in the general direction of the camera. The tile deck was wet, as were the rows of well-manicured shrubs lining the terrace. Patches of snow were scattered around in an irregular geometry, and some of the greenery was dusted with white.
Hockney was wet, and his clothes stuck to his body, outlining a lean frame and a long upper body. His hair hung into his eyes and the expression frozen on his face conveyed nothing but agony. At this point he had been standing outside all night and had suffered through rain and wind and snow.
The time stamp in the corner was stopped at what Kehoe knew to be fifteen seconds before the old man’s death. He tapped the screen and time began to unfold.
Hockney started shivering in remarkable clarity, and with the added element of movement to round out the image, it was impossible to miss the terror or the pain or the confusion. He had already been at this for seven hours at this point—more or less—and was probably in shock.
The seconds ticked off, and something offscreen caught the old man’s attention. His eyes narrowed. He raised a hand. Pointed.
A small drone eased into the frame from the direction he was pointing. It hovered just beyond his reach.
The old man said something.
The drone wagged to the left, then banked back in a movement something like a dragonfly would make. The old man mumbled something else and the drone darted forward, as if threatening him.
But the old man didn’t move off his footing—he was welded in place and probably couldn’t have taken a step if he tried.
The drone was small, perhaps eight inches square, with some sort of a payload mounted on the front. It hovered in front of him, its focus unwavering.
William Hockney was crying now, big sobs that even without sound were horrid to watch.
And then he shuddered in place, as if his central nervous system browned out, and he clutched his chest.
The drone backed off, to the edge of the frame, and hovered in place.
William Hockney stumbled back in a single wooden stride.
Something beneath where he had been standing launched into the air, exploding from beneath the tiles. It moved too fast to see in any meaningful way.
There was a flash and the old man’s upper torso disintegrated in a black mist. Chunks of wet meat splatted all over the frame. One of his legs stood on its own for a second before flopping over into a puddle.
Then the drone turned, disappeared out of frame, and the video stopped.
“What did I just see?” Kehoe asked.
Hoffner took the tablet back. “That’s a hobby drone, sir. The guys downstairs identified it as an Aeromax T-221. It’s sold everywhere from Amazon to B&H Photo. It costs about three hundred bucks. It connects to a cell phone, and it’s relatively simple to use. It has a built-in camera, and you fly it by sight.”
“What was that thing on the front?”
Hoffner smiled. “You don’t miss much, sir. Our people say it looks like a charge of C-4, mounted into a lens shape for cutting—it was designed to direct the charge forward. It looks like it was large enough that if it had been detonated close enough, it would have cut his head off.”
Kehoe leaned back in his chair. “So whoever put that mine on his terrace wanted to make sure he was dead by morning?”
“Looks like, yes.”
He hated asking the obvious, because if his people had the answer to his next question, Hoffner would have told him. “If there’s a camera up there, do we have footage of whoever planted that thing in the tiles?”
Hoffner shook his head. “The system records to the cloud. It’s supposed to be on a thirty-day loop, but it was reset at midnight last night.”
“So whoever killed Hockney had access to or was able to hack his security system.”
“Looks like, yes.”
Kehoe didn’t say anything, but this was more proof that Page was right; a neo-Luddite wouldn’t use a cell-phone-piloted drone any more than hack a security system. “Thank you, Otto.”
Kehoe’s desk phone lit up and he hit the speaker button without looking over. “Yes?”
“Mr. Kehoe, Dr. Page is here. And he has some visitors with him.”
Kehoe looked up at Hoffner, who rolled his eyes—he and Page were not going to be friends any time soon. “What does that prick want?” Hoffner asked.
“For you to leave us alone, asshole,” Page said from the doorway.
87
Kehoe was able to keep the surprise from his face, but Lucas knew him well enough to see it shimmering beneath the surface. He put down the printouts, took off his glasses, and did that thing with his fingers under his chin. “This is—” And he just stopped.
Lucas let the silence hang there for a few seconds before Kehoe came back with “What do you want?”
“I want you to put those kids in the pit and give them clearance. They found all that with off-the-shelf software and a custom-made algorithm. If they had clearance, they’d put your guys to shame.” He smiled. “I mean even more than they did.” Lucas had given Nadeel and Jespersen the hard drives that Calvin-Wade Curtis had delivered to his house the day he got out of the hospital. And even though the drives contained the entire digital history on everyone and everything connected to the bombings, that was all they contained: digital histories. Nadeel and Jespersen could cross-reference a lot of the data with real-world information, but they lacked clearance to do things like dig through employment records, government archives, or police files.
Kehoe clenched his jaw. Then he forced something inside him to relax, leaned back in his chair, and picked up his desk phone. “Bring them in.”
Otto Hoffman escorted Bobby Nadeel and Caroline Jespersen into the office. Nadeel looked positively tiny beside the big man. Caroline was tall, almost six feet, but Hoffman had seven inches on
her and outweighed her by a multiple of three.
Kehoe nodded and Hoffman disappeared as much as a guy the size of a vending machine can.
Kehoe stared at them. Then down at the printouts. Then over at Lucas. He leaned forward and put his fingers under his chin again. “We are going to give this a shot. But if there’s any fuckery by either of you two, this little social experiment is over—is that clear?”
Jespersen swallowed and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Nadeel was too busy smiling to nod. “So,” he asked, rubbing his palms together, “where do you keep the computers?”
88
Lucas took his time going through the police and coroner’s reports on the death of Mitchell Stahlberg, former university student and visitor to Las Vegas the same time as the other men. The big difference between Stahlberg’s death and the deaths of the five men who had been blown up was the timeline—Stahlberg died seven months after his trip to Vegas.
What Lucas needed to know was how Stahlberg was connected to the Magic Five.
The first few pages of the police report did not give him much more information than the photo of the burned-out RV that Jespersen had shown him back in the lab. The file began with the bored, lazy language of a police officer who had more important things to do (or at least some other place he’d rather be) than fill out forms on an apparent arson. The location was noted—a beach on the north shore of Long Island. The vehicle involved was described: an older recreational vehicle; apparently abandoned; set on fire within the two days preceding the report—probably by kids; discovered by a couple walking their dog (names given). All basic five-W details.
It wasn’t until the second page, upon discovery of a body in the wreckage, that the handwriting became more cramped, frantic, as if something strange was indeed afoot in Denmark.
A quick search of the RV registration cross-referenced with missing persons reports led the officer—one Jamal Rice—to deduce that the body probably belonged to one Mitchell Stahlberg of Sheepshead Bay. Two phone calls to his parents, followed by one to his dentist, had Rice convinced that he had found Stahlberg’s corpse. DNA swabs came back five days later, confirming the identity.
The Nassau County Police sent their SCI unit, who discovered that the fire had been caused by a rupture in the line from the propane tank to the stove. They assumed that the camper ignited when Stahlberg lit a cigarette (according to his parents, Stahlberg was a smoker). Foul play was not suspected.
The real insight in the file came when Jamal Rice interviewed Stahlberg’s parents—Mickey and Judy. They outlined their son’s recent bout of anxiety and involuntary mental health evaluation. Which led Rice to interview a state-appointed psychiatrist, one Dr. Alan Abramov, who had handled Mitchell Stahlberg’s evaluation at the Rockland Psychiatric Center, two weeks prior to his death.
The police report bullet-pointed Dr. Abramov’s findings, and there was no missing the clinical to-the-point nomenclature of the head-shrinking profession in the notes.
Mitchell Stahlberg, male, 25, unmarried, was brought into the Rockland Psychiatric Center by his parents, who were concerned about his mental health. When he was admitted, the patient was in an acute agitated state. He repeated that “they” were out to get him because he had betrayed them, but refused to provide specific details as to who “they” were, or why they would want to “get him.” He was treated with 5mg of haloperidol IM for acute paranoid anxiety and calmed down relatively quickly. Since the patient agreed to clinic follow-up later in the week, and weekly follow-ups after that, we discharged him on 1mg of Haldol by mouth twice daily.
Stahlberg’s parents insisted that even though their son was obviously sick, he kept the family RV in which he was found in top shape. He had rebuilt the vehicle with his father, a mechanical engineer, and they tested and double-tested the systems all the time. The parents were certain that his death was not accidental.
And yes, he had suffered from bouts of mental illness since he was a child. But they had always taken him for treatment. He took his medication. He had lived a normal—some would say exemplary—life. He had been cured for almost a decade now—there had been no cracks in his composure for almost eight years. They believed that his troubles were behind him.
But Mrs. Stahlberg’s statement showed that their son was coming unraveled. He had insisted that he was part of a secret group that was going to destroy society in order to rebuild it out of the ashes; the group communicated via secret email accounts and prepaid cell phones that were left on his doorstep at night; a mastermind ran the group, and he had an army out there, on the verge of their first strike, when they would lash out at technology, showing their fellow man that the path forward was to side with humanity, not artificial intelligence, technology, or mechanization.
Lucas closed the file and sat there, staring at the folder for a few moments as the pieces swirled around the drain in his head in ever-tightening circles.
Stahlberg came off as a paranoid nut.
A secret group that was going to destroy society?
They communicated via secret email accounts and burner phones?
A mastermind ran the group?
And Lucas remembered the Joseph Heller quote that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. Even Freud had famously said that the paranoid are never entirely mistaken.
Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe there had been a leak in the propane line. Maybe the kid was a paranoid nut.
But he had been in Vegas and he fit all the other criteria, right down to the manner of his death.
So how was he connected to all of this? Where did he fit in?
Because there was only one logical reason the rest of those men had been killed—they had completed their parts in the crime.
So had Stahlberg’s part been completed?
Or … was it something more obvious? Had he gotten cold feet? Had his mental health become an issue?
Because there was one certainty about Las Vegas: all six of those men—who were students at the time and really only kids—had been recruited.
Which led to the next question on the conveyor belt: By whom?
Lucas was still staring down at the file when Otto Hoffner came into the office, moving surprisingly fast for a man of his volume and mass.
Hoffner snapped his fingers. “You need to come downstairs.”
89
Lucas moved as quickly as he could, which he noted with some pride was slightly faster than he had been able to manage yesterday. He wasn’t able to keep up with Hoffner, but the big man hadn’t been able to lose him, so that said something about determination. He was led to one of the isolated computer rooms—the ones they usually used for tactical operations—where Hoffner opened the door and waved him in.
There was a single large desk with three keyboards lined up on the otherwise empty surface. In place of a wall, a floor-to-ceiling bank of monitors was acting as one screen surface. The visual real estate was taken up by a single image—a YouTube video on pause.
Kehoe was standing behind Jespersen and Nadeel, and there was no missing the concentration or purpose in his posture.
Nadeel swiveled around in his Aeron, smiling like the only one who got the joke. He pointed at the OLED wall illuminating the room. “I did what you said, and ran through all eight hundred and twenty-six conferences that were happening in Las Vegas that weekend in April, two years back. Half of them were retail fairs—carpets and cars and stuff like that—so I back-burnered those. I went after anything that might tie in with the general dynamics of this case—medical conferences, insurance conventions, industry and commercial recruiting pushes. And I found this TED Talk.”
Kehoe looked over at Lucas; there was no missing that he was impressed. Or at least not regretful for allowing Nadeel and Jespersen into the fold.
Nadeel raised his finger over the keypad, moved it in circles as if conjuring magic from the keys, then hit the return button with his index finger.
Everyone looked up at the screen.
It was professional video, and even on the ten-by-fifteen-foot display, was relatively clear and unpixelated, without visual noise in the dark areas. The setting was an auditorium of indeterminate proportions—the walls and ceiling were blacked out, giving the illusion of vastness. The single word TED was illuminated in red, floating somewhere in the background.
The camera swung around, panning over the audience. It was difficult to see the crowd—they were in the dark.
The camera panned back, and a man walked onstage. He was about twenty-five and attired in Silicon Valley formal wear—jeans and a hoodie, both black. He was wearing a headset with a tiny microphone. The applause was perfunctory and polite.
The speaker went into his routine. “My name is Dr. Zachary Sarkozy, and I want to welcome you to my TED Talk on the unintended consequences of failing to prepare for the coming AI revolution.”
“Do I have to sit through this?” Lucas was already bored with Sarkozy’s lazy delivery.
Nadeel held up his hand. “Okay, forget this tard. Take a look at this.” He stopped the video, minimized the screen, then brought up another piece of tape from the same talk.
The new piece of video was paused. It was an image of the crowd, in the dark and barely discernible as anything other than a group of seated people. “Right there,” Nadeel said, pointing at what was the dome of a human head but could as easily have been a sock puppet.
“There what? I don’t see shit.”
“Which is why I am here. I started out on the FBI’s software, which for some arcane reason is Adobe Premiere Pro, which is not bad off-the-shelf software if you have no imagination.” Nadeel side-eyed Kehoe, but no one caught it except Lucas. “It’s clunky and has absolutely zero finesse.” Nadeel brought the editing console up. “But I downloaded a plug-in my friend Ronnie coded—after Mr. Kehoe’s people here were nice enough to open a hole in their firewall—and it sped things up.” He highlighted the area of the screen he had pointed at, then fiddled with the brightness, and it was as if a spotlight came on, illuminating a ghost.