by Robert Pobi
Lucas stared up at the wall of image. He would never forget the man he was looking at—the last time they met was in an explosion that had cooked one of them. And nearly killed the other. “That’s Benjamin Frosst.”
Nadeel was grinning and nodding. “It gets better.” He highlighted the figure to Frosst’s left, and once again cranked the luminance, converting the form from a shadowy outline to an identifiable human quantity.
There was no missing the high cheekbones, the perfectly groomed hair, or the billionaire tailoring in the gray wool jacket and purple pocket square—William Hockney Jr.
“William Hockney Jr. and Benjamin Frosst attended a TED Talk at the same time our guys were in Las Vegas?”
Nadeel nodded. “It gets better. After finding those two guys, I ran the rest of the crowd through the in-house facial recognition software, but again, your FBI friends are a little behind the times. So once again with their permission, I downloaded a patch that upped their horsepower and I found these—” He pulled up six separate video templates. All were paused on a darkened crowd, a single attendee highlighted in a red circle. Nadeel clicked on all six images—one after another—and the darkened outlines once again morphed into discernible human faces.
They all sat in different parts of the auditorium, but there was no mistaking their identities. “I give you the Jackson Five, along with Mitch Stahlberg. Which I guess makes them the … Jackson Six? Which definitely doesn’t sound as cool. But you get the point.”
Steve Whiteman—the driver for the event organizer who delivered the foil bags to the Guggenheim. Blown up the day Whitaker and Lucas were coming back from their visit to Medusa with C-4 manufactured by ENF.
Tony Iannantuono—the intern at Stogner, Pruitt, and Gibson—who probably handed Alexander Stogner, Seth Hockney’s lawyer, his briefcase the morning he flew to be interviewed by Samir Chawla. Iannantuono had been blown up in his apartment in Hoboken.
Barnabas O’Hare—the mechanic with the maintenance company that handled the generators at the internet hub on Hudson Street. He had disintegrated in his basement apartment of a single-family home in Castleton Corners, Staten Island.
Enrique Cristobel—the UPS driver who had visited Jonathan Makepeace at his apartment on Fifth Avenue the morning he had been blown up. Cristobel had also been blown up with C-4 manufactured by ENF.
Donnie Rich—who worked with a text compactor for the local agricultural board in Upstate New York and whose foot had been found dangling on a barbed-wire fence inside a tube sock and a Croc like a Christmas ornament for a vivisectionist with poor fashion sense.
Mitchell Stahlberg—who had been subjected to an involuntary psychiatric evaluation because he believed that he had been recruited by a secret cabal. And had been cooked to death in his family’s RV.
Lucas looked at the faces of the dead staring back at him from the screen. Six young men who had gone to Las Vegas; six young men who had somehow been recruited that week; six young men who had all participated in the bombings; six young men who had been erased from the planet—five using C-4 manufactured by ENF, a company owned by the Hockney brothers.
In the same room with William Hockney Jr.
And Benjamin Frosst.
Nadeel minimized the images, leaving the giant YouTube video frozen in place. Lucas walked around the desk, and came face-to-face with William Hockney Jr. and Benjamin Frosst sitting in the front row of a TED Talk two and a half years back on a weekend that all indicators dictated was a fateful moment in the bombing timeline—the actual genesis point where whoever had been planning all of this had crossed the line from theoretical to practical.
Lucas lifted his aluminum hand to the screen, and even though he couldn’t feel it, he could hear the sizzle of spark building up as he reached for William Hockney Jr. His anodized finger was half an inch from the OLED surface when an arc of electricity jumped the gap and there was a loud pop.
He thought about the way the bombings had been laid out, about that neo-Luddite letter. He thought about Seth and William Senior’s plans for their empire; about Jonathan Makepeace; about Horizon’s golden boy, Saarinen, and the jealousy that had fostered; about the C-4 that came from ENF; about William’s getting blown up on his balcony; about Seth and his lawyer and Special Agent Chawla and the bureau lawyer being vaporized in the conference room; about Frosst coming after him and Whitaker. All of it pointed to one single person, and it was pure Freudian.
From somewhere behind him, Kehoe said, “The prince wants to be king.”
90
Lucas was comfortably packed into the Corbusier cube chair in Kehoe’s office. His adrenaline levels had dropped off and the resulting imbalance in his chemical mix was making him sleepy. Which he was trying to counteract with another coffee. Bringing the total for today to ten? twelve?
The war room looked like it was operating at double-speed out beyond the glass wall, as if the HVAC system was pumping oxygen into the building, and no one moseyed, spoke slowly, or sat still.
Kehoe was in one of the terrarium conference rooms across the hall, and Lucas watched him pace the space, working things out in his own inimitable way. The people around him were popping with the same electric juice as he posed questions, coaxed answers, and fed off input.
Nadeel and Jespersen were just outside Kehoe’s office, quietly occupying a pair of Herman Miller chairs. Jespersen’s head was back, her eyes closed, and she was breathing in a deep rhythmic cycle that said she was sleeping. Nadeel had his hands on his laptop and his knees were bouncing up and down as if Buddy Rich had hijacked his central nervous system.
Kehoe had set every known—and some unknown—American governmental agency at his disposal in motion in his bid to locate one William Hockney Jr. The State Department, DHS, and most likely the CIA had reached out to Chinese officials in their search for the younger Hockney. He was there somewhere; they just couldn’t nail down the specifics. Which meant that his mischief wasn’t yet contained.
All of his sisters and half sisters had been found—their presence was on file with the appropriate publicists, assistants, and various other handlers employed by the family. They may not have been involved in their father’s businesses, but they were most definitely attached to his fortune. Most of them were in Europe, and one was in Palm Beach. None of them knew where he was.
But a man who now commanded an empire and traveled on a seventy-million-dollar aircraft could not stay lost for long, not even in China. There was a paper trail—or digital bread-crumb trail—out there; all they had to do was find the initial morsel. Or wait for Chinese officials to find it for them.
When Lucas had brought Nadeel and Jespersen in with the information that all six of the men had been in Las Vegas at the same time, two years ago last April, it had started a bout of digital necromancy. The bureau people did not like being outdone—again—by a pair of outside nobodies, and they had gone into full attack mode. They sifted through that week with every known investigative filter, intent on one-upping the two graduate students. But after two hours of fine-tooth-combing everything from hotel reservations to rental cars; credit card trails to bank transfers; email and social media posts—including cross-referencing the geotags on social media accounts of anyone even remotely involved in the bombings, including all 781 victims—they had not come up with a way to place William Hockney Jr. or Benjamin Frosst in Las Vegas. Which was quite the feat considering that Nadeel had them on video on YouTube.
Again, it was Nadeel who found it—he had somehow thought to check fueling logs for the independent depots at the Vegas airport. And that’s where they discovered that William Hockney Jr.’s jet had spent five hours on the runway after it was juiced up coming back from Taiwan.
Both Frosst’s and Hockney Jr.’s passports had been checked, but only as a perfunctory duty—as with many rules that didn’t apply to the wealthy, customs and immigration was not a formal exercise, but merely a demonstration. So they were registered as having returned to the count
ry, but their port of entry was listed as LaGuardia Airport in New York the next morning.
Lucas watched as Kehoe paced the room, pushing his people. He couldn’t hear what was being said, but it wasn’t hard to imagine, and Lucas was glad he had opted out because he needed some time alone in his own head.
Even though the average American had no idea who the Hockney family were, William Junior was a known commodity if you looked in the right publications. He had been interviewed in Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and countless other financial publications from the newsstand variety to the obscure. The one through line in his thinking was that he believed that the future for the Hockney empire lay not in taking large long-term risks that had the possibility of reshaping the financial landscape, but in taking smaller short-term risks and adapting to the financial landscape. It was a complete one-eighty from the way his father and uncle had built the empire, but one, he said, that took the present into account. He didn’t come off as particularly bright or insightful, but he didn’t need to be—he simply needed to be smart enough.
But was he smart enough to orchestrate the string of bombings? Trying to shift blame to a group of neo-Luddites certainly wasn’t the move of a genius—although there were plenty of people out there who bought into the whole scam. And what purpose did all the subterfuge serve if the end goal was simply to assassinate his father and uncle? If William Junior had been working with Frosst, how hard would it have been for him to orchestrate their deaths? And how did blowing up the internet hub on Hudson Street fit in with things? If anything, it scooped a $4.5 billion hole in his inheritance.
Kehoe would not miss any of those things—his prime directive was finding bad guys, and much more of his operating system was devoted to it. And he had been at this for a lifetime now, so he would smell out the parts that were rotten. But was his own bias getting in the way? Was he so keen on finding the people responsible that he was grasping at a handful of nothing?
But it wasn’t nothing. Not entirely. Sure, most of it was circumstantial. Sure, some of it didn’t make sense. But so what? No crime was perfect. There were always mistakes, outliers, unforeseen results, errors in judgment, and personal tics baked into the cake. Things went south because the universe dictated that they were bound to. Not always. But enough of the time.
The image of Frosst and William Hockney Jr. sitting in the auditorium was certainly damning in its own right. It painted all kinds of pictures. But impressions without facts to back them up were nothing more than empty air.
Lucas finished the coffee and leaned forward to grab the insulated stainless carafe on the table in front of him. The junior agent who delivered the coffee had been kind enough to also bring a plate of sandwiches, but Lucas didn’t feel like eating—he was too busy trying to find some energy in the caffeine.
William Hockney Jr. did not come across as a long game player. Especially if he wanted less risk and more short-term investments. Would he have stretched this out to two plus years? If he had, it meant he had been planning it a lot longer. And he did not come off as a planner. And the one thing that the bombings had in common was planning—long-term planning.
Years.
How did William Hockney Jr. meet those six kids? And how did he sell them on the idea of blowing up innocent people? Obviously Stahlberg was a defect in the plan—he had started to melt down. But the rest? They had changed their lives and stuck to the plan for two years, which took dedication. And William Hockney Jr. did not seem like the kind of man to foster that kind of loyalty. The only motivation he had to offer was money. Sure, money made the world go round—it had been the cause of endless wars and untold suffering. But could five average American university students watch as bomb after bomb went off and not get cold feet? Lucas knew university students, and money might get them to take a step in that direction. Of course there were psychopaths out there, more than enough to go around. But what were the chances of finding five young men that fit that profile? After they had all been murdered, the bureau had interviewed family members and friends, and none had a history of mental illness. If anything, they were socially grounded—all of them believed in recycling and supporting environmental causes and reducing their carbon footprint.
Lucas realized that he needed a little perspective, because the investigation was listing to one side, and he didn’t want to be on deck when it rolled over. He polished off the coffee and torqued himself out of the chair.
Nadeel looked up hopefully when Lucas came up to the row of chairs.
“I have to go out,” Lucas said, but his attention was on Kehoe in the conference room.
Nadeel began to stand. “Can we come?”
Nadeel’s voice rousted Jespersen, who opened her eyes and began a tight cat stretch. “Come where?”
“You stay here,” Lucas said. “I may need something.”
“What about your driver?” Nadeel said, looking around for the junior agent that Kehoe had assigned to Lucas in absence of Whitaker.
Lucas walked away without responding.
91
The Upper West Side
The sky was a seamless gray from horizon to horizon—the park to the east, a dense fog enshrouding the skyline to the west. Lucas stood out on the terrace, taking in the scene as if that might unlock some psychic box where objective truths were stored. He had no idea if being here would do any good, but he knew that every now and then it was enough just to nudge a few molecules to get a new perspective.
William Hockney had died up here after a night of standing on a mine. It was impossible not to imagine the man’s terror and fear and, most of all, determination—which was the single truth Lucas could apply to the death. The terror and fear were imagined—reasonable assumptions when considering the reaction of a seventy-five-year-old man with a bad hip to being held hostage by an explosive device. But that’s all those two components were—assumptions. But determination? That was a given. A fact. A truth learned from the evidence. Because he had most certainly stared down the Reaper out here for six or seven hours. And the old fucker would have won if the Reaper hadn’t resorted to sneaky tricks and blown out his heart with a line of computer code.
Strips of yellow crime-scene tape hung off iron outdoor furniture, the tattered ends snapping in the wind. It was not difficult to discern the blast radius of the mine—the deck, wall, and banister were pockmarked from the shrapnel. The shrubs surrounding the explosion had taken a good hit, and branches and bark had been blown away. The cleanup crew had done a pretty good job, but there were specks of blood here and there and he knew that if he made an effort, he would find little pieces of William Hockney in the bushes, or brickwork, or cracks between the slate tiles.
Two uniformed police officers and a man from the Hockney security company—another orc—waited in the living room. Lucas’s badge got him upstairs without the usual phone calls to superiors; right now everyone just wanted this case to be put to bed, and his presence meant a step in that direction. At least theoretically.
Lucas looked down at the deck, to the intersection where four heavy hand-milled tiles met. Their corners had been chipped away with a hammer and the sand beneath dug out to hide the mine. There was no great skill in the job—no great creativity or insight. But it had taken balls.
Which was where his doubts about Junior Hockney came in.
The man possessed bluster and the false security that often comes with being the squab of a billionaire. But for all the education and access to information he had been afforded, he gave the impression that he was barely good enough.
His father had sensed that as well.
Lucas had seen them interact precisely once, and the old man had mentioned him once during their talk the night his life had been taken, and in both instances William Hockney had unintentionally shown that he probably didn’t have all that much respect for his son. It was an old story, one that began with Greek tragedy and had been a mainstay in fict
ion from Shakespeare to Faulkner ever since. And it always ended with the old man in a body bag while a bunch of stooges stood around, chanting, The king is dead—long live the king!
But all the great murderers of history and fiction had one thing in common—balls. They may have regretted it afterward, but they all had the courage to do the deed. And Lucas just didn’t see Junior having it in him.
Lucas had watched the video where the drone crawled up over the stone banister and hovered in front of William Hockney. It had been set up with an explosive charge, effectively making it a warhead. So the drone pilot—or whoever had ordered the hit—wanted to make sure Hockney died.
But there was something else on the drone—a camera. Which made it perfect for taking a souvenir.
The hole in the deck where the four slate tiles met hadn’t been repaired, and the tiles around it were dimpled with shrapnel hits—ball bearings traveling at supersonic speeds. They had torn the old man to shreds, and there had not been much left between his knees and the top of his skull. He hadn’t simply been murdered, he had been obliterated.
Did Junior want the empire with such passion that he was willing to mulch his father into meat popcorn?
Lucas’s phone buzzed and he answered without checking the number. “Dr. Page here.”
“Where are you?” It was Kehoe, and there was no missing the buoyancy of triumph in his voice.
“Upper West Side. William Hockney’s apartment.”
“Get back here. Junior’s plane just entered U.S. airspace about ten minutes ago, a hundred miles out of Southern California. It’s on its way back from Beijing for his father’s funeral. I’m having it intercepted.”