by Robert Pobi
As he toweled off, he looked at the mirror, and his eyes did that weird thing that made everyone uncomfortable. His good eye somehow had perfect mobility, yet another of the thousand tiny miracles hidden inside the big one of him still being alive. But the orbit that housed his prosthetic had been put back together with a few titanium brackets and a beautiful ceramic insert, handcrafted by an artist in Okinawa. Problem was, it had zero motility, and whenever he shifted his gaze, he had to move his entire head; otherwise, the disjointed chameleon effect made it appear as if the tubes in his head were overheating, and it freaked some folks out—more rather than less. It was a party trick that he intentionally brought out only for special occasions, but every now and then it just kind of slipped by, and the result usually had someone looking for the exit. Which led to his habit of wearing sunglasses in public—inside and out. Lucas understood that a few of his new and improved physical traits voyaged well into the uncanny valley and began to scale the far side.
He was wrapping himself in a towel when there was a soft knock.
“Yeah?” he said, louder than he should have at this hour.
Erin came in wearing her flannel robe and a grumpy face.
“What?” he asked.
“Those assholes are back,” she said and left the bathroom.
11
Lucas came downstairs in a clean pair of jeans and a concert T-shirt from a band he had stopped listening to a million years ago. He was still hot from the shower, and his Levi’s weren’t working with his damp skin, so he held the railing to make sure he didn’t pull a Milton Arbogast; telling someone to get out of your house while lying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs lacked the required gravitas.
Kehoe and two field agents were in the living room. Kehoe still wore his coat, which meant he didn’t intend on staying long. Or maybe he didn’t expect to be allowed to stay long. His men flanked the arched doorway like architectural elements in an ancient temple. They seemed constructed from the same genetic building blocks, more of the infamous FBI sameness, right down to their off-the-rack suits and Mormon haircuts.
He bypassed Kehoe and his men and walked down the hall to the kitchen. Erin was standing over the coffee maker, watching it burp out liquefied caffeine.
“Go to bed,” he told her.
She looked up and shook her head; it was amazing how much stubborn you could pack into a little redhead. “You’re tired, and I know all the voodoo that this has to be doing to your head. You need a coffee. Actually, what you need is rest. But since I can’t make you a mug of sleep, you get coffee.”
Lucas planted a kiss on her forehead. “Go to bed. I’ll take care of the coffee.”
She took a step back and crossed her arms, making no effort to keep the volume down. “I took time off to help Alisha get used to us. You said that you’d be home over the holidays so we can get to know her and—more important—so she could get to know us. Right now, I’m starting to feel like I’m going to be single-mothering it. That’s unfair to Alisha. And the rest of the kids. It’s Christmas, Luke. Why are they even here at this hour?”
Kehoe was no doubt back to go at his head with an oyster shucker again. But Lucas had walked, and he intended to stay that way.
But he would be lying if he didn’t admit to any sort of curiosity, even if it was purely academic. There were a lot of questions he wanted answered, starting with What did Kehoe really want?
Because Kehoe didn’t need him. Not in any real capacity. He had the most efficient law enforcement organization on the planet at his disposal, Fox News pronunciations notwithstanding.
So why was he here?
“Let me work this out. Go to bed; the kids will be up in a few hours.”
She looked up at him with an expression he didn’t like. “I know that. Why do you think I don’t want those men in the house?” she said, this time a little louder than before. “The kids don’t need armed men in their lives. They need normal.”
They had a stare-down for a few seconds, and he added a Please to the equation to get her to drop it. She left him alone with the machine.
Lucas poured one mug of fresh coffee, filled a Japanese cup with boiling water from the teapot Erin had fired up, and dropped in two bags of Earl Grey.
Kehoe was the only man in law enforcement who drank tea. Everyone else drank coffee—black—since cream and sugar were luxuries that tended to run out in the field. Two months into a job at the bureau, and every field agent Lucas had ever met switched to black coffee (the gourmet shit that Whitaker sprang on him earlier notwithstanding—which meant that maybe he was working with outdated information).
His spine felt like it had been transplanted a few hours ago, and all his limbs might as well have been borrowed. He had the mental stamina, but twenty hours on his prosthetic threw everything off; his body simply needed downtime that it wasn’t getting. His remaining energy was being parsed out where needed most, and pain management didn’t seem to be the application deemed important enough to keep online.
Lucas came down the hall with Kehoe’s saucer on top of his own mug. “Coffee’s in the kitchen,” he said to the pair of FBI bookends.
Kehoe’s briefcase sat on the big leather-topped desk by the built-ins, the antique brass catches open, the mouth of the bag spread wide. An orange file sat under the desk lamp, beside a grinning Play-Doh donkey with blue ears.
Kehoe was in front of the hearth, away from the window and the as-yet-to-be-decorated tree. He had loaded a few logs onto the grate, following the old fire-building adage of one won’t, two might, three will. Evidently, his Boy Scout training had served him well, because the split hardwood had blossomed to life. The man stood in his suit jacket now, hands clasped behind his back.
Kehoe turned from the renewed blaze. “I’m sorry about that.” He nodded at the ceiling above, where Erin’s footsteps could be heard as she did the rounds, checking on the kids. Kehoe was still perfectly groomed, but the new day’s stubble was coming in and his eyes were red; not even he could prevent exhaustion from making its mark.
“Why are you here?” Lucas handed the tea over.
Kehoe didn’t reply. He simply gave Lucas a gracious nod and took a long, silent sip, pausing in the moment. Then he blinked as if the tea were laced with energy. “I need your help.”
“So you seem to think.”
Kehoe took another sip from the porcelain cup, then brought it back to the saucer. “I have a problem, Luke, and I don’t have anyone who can handle it.” At that, he glanced over at the file by his briefcase, and the gesture was pregnant with meaning.
Lucas followed his gaze, then went to the file on the desk beside the child’s Play-Doh homage to Marino Marini. He picked it up and scanned the contents. It was a suspect file, the bulk of which had been assembled by French intelligence bodies—their versions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security: the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure and the Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information. Lucas’s French was nonexistent, but it was easy to see that it was a surveillance file on a French national named Philippe Froissant.
After flipping through a few pages, he looked up. “Who is this?”
“The man I have been told is our shooter.”
“By whom, the Frenchers?”
Kehoe smiled. “I can say no to the French government.”
And that’s when it fell into place. He put the file back down on the desk. “What’s going on, Brett?” He wanted to hear Kehoe say the words.
Kehoe turned back to the fire, and his voice dropped. “That file was forwarded to the DOJ from one of our liaison departments in the DHS, and the DOJ handed it down to me. Tonight. I was told that is our shooter.”
Lucas dropped into the sofa. His lower back was lit up in ten shades of ouch, a reminder that all the computer-driven design on the planet couldn’t compensate for a skeleton missing important muscle groups. Nothing a week of sleep and thirty painkillers w
ouldn’t knead out. “And?”
For a few seconds, it appeared as if Kehoe were wrestling through some internal dialogue. Then his face switched back into business mode. “Take a look at the file.”
“I don’t read French.”
“Humor me.”
When Lucas began to stand, Kehoe picked up the file and handed it over—more manipulation disguised as kindness.
Lucas dropped back into the leather and flipped through the file. He couldn’t understand any of the text, so he concentrated on the photographs. Froissant was young, maybe thirty, and obviously very rich. There was a shot of him in a dinner jacket—not off the rack—taken at a social function decorated with cocktail dresses, diamond tennis bracelets, and pretty blondes; there was another in the Formula One pits at Monaco, a bottle of champagne in his hand; one on a yacht, an expensive-looking woman kissing his ear, both of them holding cocktail glasses; another of him skiing in the Alps with an entourage—all wealthy and handsome and young.
The only shot that said he knew his way around a firearm was a single photo taken at a country club somewhere. He wore a tailored shooting jacket with a padded shoulder, and he was cradling an expensive Italian shotgun. It was not a sniper’s weapon, and it most certainly did nothing to advance Kehoe’s claim that this was their guy.
Lucas put the file down and made a point of not moving for a few moments. The coffee had edged out the exhaustion that the shower had hammered home, and his mind was cycled back to the point where he could hear the whine of the turbine in the back of his skull belting out the required rpm.
“And?” Kehoe asked.
“That’s not the guy.”
“How do you know?”
Lucas looked at Kehoe as if he had just asked if it were possible to land a spacecraft on the surface of the sun. “The same way you do.”
Kehoe began a smile but killed it. “Humor me.”
“This asshole looks like some rich French society kid who has too much time on his hands. Old money. I assume that he was bored and ended up making poor choices in either the friend or ideology department and ended up being flagged by French security. And they think he’s radicalized.” Lucas took a slug of the coffee and shook his head. “Maybe he can shoot, but there is no way this guy has the skill for what happened to Hartke. You don’t learn skills like that on a manicured range. Besides, that’s for skeet, not targets a thousand yards out,” he said, pulling out the photo of Froissant in the shooting jacket.
Kehoe smiled, and Lucas realized that he had been sucked into playing the game after he had promised himself—or had that been Erin?—that he wouldn’t. “Why are you here, Brett?”
“I want that cryptic computational wonder inside your head.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not for sale.”
“I need your help.”
“So you keep saying.”
“That’s not our shooter—the reasons you just—”
“Don’t say our, Brett. It’s your problem.”
“Of course. Yes,” he said, then picked up with, “The reasons you just mentioned are just some of the details that don’t fit; but even the broad strokes don’t mesh; I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m not wrong on things like this. Not anymore. But I’ve been told that Froissant is our guy, and I’m supposed to find him. Right now, the bureau is in a precarious position; this current White House administration is not exactly forward-thinking. They’re myopic, and they’re not very curious, which is a bad combination. They want us to hand them a Muslim terrorist because it fits their agenda—even if we don’t have a Muslim terrorist to give them. It’s confirmation bias, and it’s a deeply flawed approach to solving crimes, but as you know, we live in a post-truth world where facts don’t matter.” He paused and finished his tea, then put the cup and saucer down on the mantel. “But they matter to me, Luke. I need someone I can trust who doesn’t scare easily. And I need someone who isn’t concerned about losing his job.”
Lucas hated Kehoe using his first name. “Why aren’t you using Hartke’s death? Guilt is a wonderful carrot.”
Kehoe’s expression didn’t even dent. “I already tried guilt; it didn’t work.”
“You’ve got Graves.”
Kehoe eyed Lucas for a second. “Graves thinks what I tell him to.”
“You don’t need me. You are going to find this guy.”
“Before we do, we are going to expend a lot of energy in the wrong direction so the people in the West Wing can slap each other on the back and proclaim what a swell job they’re doing of keeping America safe from terrorists. While that is happening, what if this guy keeps going?”
Lucas examined him for a few moments, and by the way Kehoe’s focus shifted around his face, he knew his eyes weren’t lined up. “You think he might?”
When Kehoe answered, it sounded like his voice was coming from a different time zone. “I’m not paid to think in best-case scenarios.”
12
Lucas locked the big front door behind Kehoe and went back to the study. He closed the glass panels on the hearth, pulling the vent open so that the heat would flow out as long as the fire kept emitting energy. Old Man Winter was in a particularly vengeful mood this year, and the front rooms all felt a little cold even though the insulation and windows were state of the art. Then he once again went through the preflight motions of locking up the brownstone to keep the lions and tigers and bears at bay.
He needed to wind down his mental machinery and get some sleep before he went down to Federal Plaza in the morning. Jesus, he wondered, just how the fuck did I get roped into this? But he knew. It wasn’t really any kind of a mystery. He could blame Kehoe, and he could blame the man with the rifle, and, if he really wanted to, he could blame Hartke—but what it really came down to was that he wanted to do this in some way.
To prove that they hadn’t taken everything from him.
To prove that his mind was still capable of the once extraordinary things that used to be easy.
Standing out on that street tonight, watching the world come alive in a living code that only he was able to see, felt better than the dreams he used to have where he was whole again.
But at the end of this, would he feel that same spiritual disappointment he always had when he woke up?
Fuck it, he thought. Think about this tomorrow when you talk to Kehoe. If you don’t like what you see, you walk away. Simple.
Yeah.
Sure.
He put the three coffee mugs into the dishwasher and washed Kehoe’s porcelain cup by hand, leaving it in the dish rack. Then he slipped his feet into the big boots by the back door and stepped out without a coat.
It was a little after 4:00 a.m., but the lights in the apartment over the garage were still on. Lucas knocked softly, and the door was opened before his arm was back at his side.
Dingo’s expression telegraphed that he expected bad news; people rarely knock on the door at four in the morning in December to tell you the Powerball ticket you partnered had come through. Without a greeting, he waved Lucas into the small apartment before the cold made too much of a dent on the microclimate.
He was dressed as always, sporting a pair of board shorts, a T-shirt from his dojo, and his home prosthetics—carbon-fiber blades.
After he closed the door, he asked, “What be fucked, mate?” in a heavy South Australian accent.
“I need a favor.”
“You were here,” he stated emphatically.
“What?”
“You need an alibi.”
“For what?”
“I haven’t got a clue. I’m not clairvoyant. You were out with another woman? Some hack from a posh Swedish school accused you of stealing one of his ideas, then died suspiciously? I have no clue. You’re the one asking for an alibi.”
“I’m not asking for an alibi. I’m asking for a favor.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? Sometimes I think you’re a complete idiot.”
“And sometimes you
’d be right.” He smiled. “As your own personal Kato Kaelin, I am your humble servant.”
“You pay rent.”
Dingo smiled. “I’m still happy to play Kato as long as you need me to.”
Lucas and Dingo met at the hospital when it had been their mutual home address. They were wheeled into physical therapy one morning, and a friendly competition started up. Lucas, who was recovering from what he still referred to as the Event, started calling the Australian Dingo due to his relentless tenacity. He was a combat photographer for the BBC who had become a little too intimate with a land mine in the Sudan. The initial damage wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, but what should have been a minor operation to set a broken tibia, clean out some shrapnel, and stitch up some severed tendons was complicated by local politics. Had he been able to get decent medical treatment, he most certainly would have kept both legs. But two days in the back of a pickup combined with no access to clean water had resulted in gangrene. By the time he made it to a South African hospital on a network jet, the doctors were worried about saving his life, not his legs. He lost both from just below the knee.
Lucas dropped down on the sofa facing Dingo’s desk. “I’m taking a job.”
“You have a job, mate.”
“I’m going back to work.”
At that, Dingo’s expression flattened out. “The one that took your drumstick, wing, and peeper?”
Lucas was too tired to smile. “That’s the one.”
“And I’m the complete idiot?”
“Yeah. Well…” Lucas was too tired to argue—even with himself. “I’d be grateful if you’d watch over Erin and the kids a little.”
“That’s what friends are for. At least that’s what the small print says. Besides, I’ve got fuckall going on at work right now. Product photos for one of the big-box landfill supermarkets.” Dingo jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at three monitors displaying what appeared to be plastic lawn furniture. “Is this about the display of Second Amendment rights I saw on the news earlier?”