by Robert Pobi
Lucas was getting too tired to think, and he realized that just getting out of the sofa was going to be a Herculean effort, so he simply nodded.
“I’ve been in this country for fifteen years, and I still don’t understand the fascination with guns. I’ve never seen a bigger bunch of scaredy-cats.”
Dingo—whose real name was Martin Hudson—was a Brazilian jujitsu master. He had a coral belt in the discipline and had trained for the Australian Olympic team in his younger days. He now taught the sport to other amputees, utilizing a unique approach that he had adapted to work within the framework of his new body. He had a hundred thousand Instagram followers and a Facebook page that went on forever. Dingo always had at least two extra pairs of prosthetics on hand because he kept breaking them at the dojo. Out on the street he usually wore his traditional prosthetics, but at home—as at the dojo—he preferred to use the blades.
Dingo examined him for a few moments before asking, “What didn’t the news say?”
“The victim was my old partner.”
“And?”
“Erin’s not too happy that I’m going back.”
“Neither am I. Which brings us to why are you going back?”
There were a lot of things Lucas could say, but he wondered if any of them would sound convincing, even to himself, so he opted for, “Because it feels like the right thing to do.”
Dingo looked down at Lucas’s leg, then shifted focus to his arm, then up to his ceramic eye. “If you say so.”
13
The phone on Lucas’s nightstand buzzed, and he had it in his hand before his wake command was fully executed. “Dr. Page here,” he said reflexively, almost sounding like he were up.
“An agent will come by to get you in half an hour.” It was Kehoe.
Lucas’s software was up and running now. And so was Erin’s. She sat up and flipped on the light, and Lucas stopped whispering. She headed off to the bathroom. “Who?” Lucas asked.
Erin left the light off in the bathroom but peed with the door open, and Lucas wondered if Kehoe could hear her.
There was a pause that could have meant a thousand things, which Kehoe ended with, “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Send Whitaker—she doesn’t talk too much.” He stifled a yawn, then said, “And tell her not to ring the bell.”
“Of course.” And with all pertinent information delivered, niceties over, and other things to do, Kehoe hung up.
Lucas looked over at Erin’s silhouette against the night-light in the bathroom. She had her head turned to him, but he couldn’t see her eyes in the dark and wondered if she was looking at him or not.
He placed the cell phone back on the nightstand and swung his leg around to the edge of the mattress, dropping his left foot to the floor. He never slept with his prosthetics at home; his body needed the break to reset tripped muscles and sore joints. And even though he hadn’t had any bad dreams for a few years now, nothing ended the sweet and cuddlies like kicking Erin with a metal foot in the middle of the night. But he always felt a little incomplete—or was that vulnerable?—each morning before he snapped it in place.
Lucas reached for his leg leaning against the nightstand. All things being equal, he would have preferred to put his arm on first, but his leg was a bone-anchored transfemoral prosthesis, and attaching it was as simple as sliding the titanium rod implanted in his femur into the collar on the prosthetic where it locked into place, much like a speed chuck on an electric drill. His arm was a transhumeral amputation and had the same attaching hardware, but there was an extra harness and it took a little more time to maneuver into place—and the leg helped with balance as he twisted to get the arm on.
Erin flushed and stood up. “How long is this going to go on?” It was impossible to miss the accusatory tone.
“I don’t know. Not long.”
“Well, that’s certainly vague.” She walked back into the room and took her battered robe off the hook on the back of the door.
“This is temporary. I promise.”
“I thought you hated them.” She pulled the robe on—it was an old Pendleton blanket deal taken from her father’s closet the day he died (and about ten minutes before her mother loaded every last one of his belongings into the family station wagon and dropped them off at Goodwill). “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. I don’t mean to be a bitch. I’m just—”
He could tell from the way she was missing the sleeve that she was tired.
“—tired,” she finished.
“Don’t apologize. But this is important.” He wanted to tell her about Kehoe’s little sales pitch but decided against it. “For them and for me.” He stood up and headed for another shower; he’d put his arm on after. “It’s a part of my brain that I never get to use. Not in any capacity that means anything.”
“No. Of course not. You only have a wife and a family and your students and your work. Oh, and don’t forget that you write bestselling books, go on Bill Maher three times a year, and NASA calls you when they have a problem. But you’re right, your mental acuities are going to waste. You need more.” Erin cinched the belt with an angry tug. “I understand.” That part came out a lot like fuck you. “You want to be John McClane.”
“I didn’t say I need more. I have everything I want. But there’s a part of my mind that only comes alive out there. I can’t explain it, and I can’t wish it away. Something happens to me when I do this, and I want to feel it one more time. Of all people, I’d think you would understand that I need to know how much I lost that day.”
“I know how much you lost that day.” She stopped at the bedroom door and nailed him with one of her looks. “I just don’t want you to lose everything else.”
14
The East Side
One by one, the lights in the terminal blinked to life in 1,500-watt increments, illuminating the tram floating motionless above the concrete floor of the hangar. The steam coming off the vents gave it the appearance of an alien craft hovering in the bay of the mother ship. The ice on the windows was slowly melting away as the onboard heaters cycled up. At peak capacity, the car could hold 110 souls and still manage a speed of eighteen miles per hour as it crossed the East River, a distance of more than three thousand feet. It was roughly half the size of a city bus, but there were only two benches—one at either end. Most of the occupants would be visible from the waist up through the large windows.
The tram hovered in the shooter’s crosshairs, the image fading in and out through the visual noise of the snow. Mother Nature would add wind and cold temperatures to the equation, but these were simply more input. There was no thought, no analysis, of what would be done. This was not about magic or luck or even skill; it was about mathematics, patience, and experience.
And about putting another of those fuckers in the dirt.
15
Whitaker kept the patter set to zero as she threaded the black SUV through the snow-covered streets with patient determination. She had been kind enough to bring coffee and doughnuts, and the early-morning jolt of sugar combined with seat warmers and silence greatly improved Lucas’s mood.
Whitaker was dressed the same as the night before with the only difference being that without the hood, her complexion somehow looked much darker. She leaned more to a large rather than medium build, but she offset this by being tall, and the impression that she wasn’t someone you’d want to fight for the last seat on the lifeboat still held.
The post-storm world outside zipped by, looking only narrowly like Manhattan. And it wasn’t just the snow or the wind or the lost cars that gave it a film franchise vibe; the almost complete lack of foot traffic drove home that the whole system was not operating on its usual frequency.
Ten minutes into the commute, she finally broke the silence. “So, do you enjoy teaching?” She had broad cheekbones and a small forehead that ended in an intricate hairdo held up in a tight dominatrix bun by a pair of polished black chopsticks.
The way she asked it e
mphasized that she couldn’t see him standing in front of a class.
Then again, neither could he.
“Sometimes.”
“Is your next sentence going to start with, ‘Kids these days…’?”
He smiled. But he felt justified for his curmudgeonly outlook. Most of the studentry were addicted to phones and apps and all manner of digital bullshit that sold them on the communal delusion that they were interesting. The big problem was that their obsession with technology wasn’t directed toward broadening their positively abhorrent knowledge base. “I just find it hard to fathom the lack of curiosity most of the students exhibit. And the ones who are curious love conspiracy theories. I had a student begin a paper by stating, ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist,’ then go on to proclaim to be a 9/11, Sandy Hook, and Boston Marathon Truther. If I were younger, I’d be petrified of getting infected by whatever brain-eating parasite these people have.”
“Are there some good ones?”
“They’re the ones who keep me getting up in the morning.”
For the next few minutes, she expertly negotiated the sometimes-plowed, sometimes-not roadways of the city. She drove well, using third and even second gear to best harness the laws of physics. Lucas began to wonder where she had learned to drive in the snow like this.
Whitaker said, “Illinois.”
“Illinois what?” He glanced over at her.
“You were wondering where I learned to drive like this.” Whitaker’s speech pattern was compact, with a slow, deliberate delivery.
Lucas knew there was no such thing as mind reading, telepathy, or clairvoyance, but he found her response a little weird. “If you say so.”
“It’s something I do. It helps with interrogations.” Whitaker was on the younger end of the spectrum for this kind of work, but it was obvious that she had that particular mix of smarts, curiosity, and fearlessness Kehoe liked to groom in his people.
She pulled the Navigator through a southbound turn onto the West Side Highway, which was as deserted as the rest of the city. What was going on? Lucas had never seen New Yorkers scared off the streets. Not during 9/11; the big power collapse of 2004; or Hurricane Sandy. And he certainly couldn’t believe that they were frightened by a little snow.
Lucas put more coffee into his system and felt the machinery get up to speed. Or at least as close as it could on so little sleep. “What’s your—?”
“Anti-government militia groups,” she offered by way of a preemptive answer, cutting his question off before he could say the word specialty.
Very few things impressed him, but that was a neat trick. “I see.”
She glanced over. “In the interest of full disclosure, I want to tell you that Kehoe warned me about you.”
He smiled at that. “That doesn’t sound like Kehoe.”
“He said that you were allergic to stupid.” She hit the gas, pushing the big SUV through a drift that the wind off the Hudson laid across all three lanes.
“I take that back. That does sound like Kehoe.”
“He also said you could be a prick.”
Lucas sipped his coffee as his brain cycled up. “Eye of the beholder.”
She answered with a shrug, and he was once again left with his own thoughts.
They passed the Lincoln Tunnel, and the closer they got to the FBI offices, the more distant home began to feel. And along with it a lot of the guilt he felt. Erin didn’t mean to make him feel guilty; it was just a by-product of her protective nature. She always told him he was lucky, and when he looked at things from a practical point of view, she couldn’t be more right. Things were good. At least right now. And he no longer thought about the Event. Not really. It had been the only thing he could focus on for so long, but like all hiccups in time, the things that had been taken from him slowly lost their meaning. Whereas he used to think of life in terms of Before and After, now he simply looked at it all as Now. And the Now was something Erin was worried he was taking for granted. And going strictly by his actions, it was not an unreasonable assumption.
But she had to know—had to understand—that every now and then, the monsters came back in a single sour surge. From the way his body had been taken apart to the Dr. Frankenstein months in the hospital to losing his first marriage and his job. Along with the rest of the broken architecture of what had once been enough to convince him that he was relatively happy.
Nancy had stayed with him for almost three of the thirteen months he spent being slowly bolted back into a functioning human being. Things with them were okay before. Not perfect all the time, but not bad all the time either. Then the Event interrupted their plans, and everything stopped. He spent forty-four days in a coma, plugged into as much medical hardware as was feasible. Nancy had okayed the cessation of artificial assistance on day forty-five. She signed the appropriate forms, initialed the important small print, assigned all salvageable organs for donation, and at 4:30 p.m. on an October afternoon—as witnessed by hospital officials—the medical appliances keeping his organs functioning were disconnected, and the wait for him to die began.
But like everything else associated with the Event, he defied the odds. In one of those weird happenings that the superstitious automatically label as miraculous, his heartbeat continued. And he began to breathe without the iron-lung rasp of the respirator. Seventeen days later, he woke up. Two days after that, Nancy came to visit. Then every second day after that. And once she saw he was going to live, she split. No good-bye. No final smooch. Just a visit from a bailiff and she was gone. He didn’t hold it against her. Not anymore. Not since that first time Erin had walked into the gym at the rehabilitation center and he learned that there was such a thing as unselfish love.
It had been an instantaneous attraction, one of the most powerful moments of his life. And by some miraculous intertwining of chemistry, it was the same for her.
She had been there to help one of the children she was fostering, a little boy named Kevin who had lost a race with a bus. He was eight but had an old soul and took to his prosthetic legs with determination and humor. Lucas and Kevin became pals. Soon followed by Lucas and Erin. And in a few days, it became obvious that Erin was timing Kevin’s visits to the gym so she could see her new friend.
When they first met, Erin fostered children on top of her work as a pediatric surgeon, and he watched as she gave herself to the kids. She knew she’d only have them for a brief period, and she wanted to give them as many tools as she could before they went back into the world. He had never figured out how she kept her practice afloat with all the time she put into the kids, but he just wrote it off as more of the magic she was able to conjure out of thin air.
After they got married, fostering children became part of their life. But like anyone with even a modicum of compassion, they got worn down—seeing kids go back to places that they shouldn’t became more and more difficult. And after too much heartache, they decided that the one way they could really make things better for the children who came through their lives was to adopt. So they started building a family.
The concrete of the parking garage swallowed the 4 × 4 and brought Lucas back from the past.
“Ready for your first day back at school?” Whitaker asked.
16
26 Federal Plaza
After checking through the security desk, Whitaker led Lucas through the core of the building with the flat, patient delivery of someone who didn’t believe in surprises. The trip upstairs required two elevator rides and 309 footsteps. Lucas hadn’t been in the offices for a decade, and it had gone through at least one big bout of plastic surgery and the underlying form of the space had been altered; whereas it used to resemble a press room in a seventies film, it now looked like a well-funded university with a straight dress code.
By the time they hit the right floor, night still hung in the sky and the office building directly across was pockmarked with squares of light. Without meaning to, Lucas did the math, counting the floors, multiplyin
g it by windows per floor, counting the number of lighted windows per floor, and averaging them out. It was with these little automatic mathematical distractions that he often amused himself—a habit since childhood.
They headed down the hall, where Whitaker swiped them into a sally port. An instant later, the security doors opened and they crossed the line into the war room.
When they walked in, all work stopped, and a ripple of whispers rolled out.
Then everyone began to clap.
Whitaker slapped him on the shoulder. “Must be nice to be the cool kid.”
Lucas looked around the room, picking out the few people he recognized and nodding a couple of hellos. Then someone hit the Play button, and the world started back up. “Swell,” he said.
Flat panels were bolted to almost every vertical surface, each one filled with a news feed. Some displayed broadcasts from smaller stations that Lucas had never heard of, others were piped in from the larger networks, and there were many foreign news programs.
The staccato clatter of activity permeated the maze of cubicles, bureau personnel installed in overdesigned Aeron chairs—the ubiquitous government seat of choice since the early nineties. The space still wasn’t sexy, but when you looked at the resources on display, it was hard not to be impressed.
Lucas finished the five-dollar paper cup of franchise blend and nodded at one of the FBI mugs peppering the room. “Where’s the coffee machine?”
“Coming up.”
As they plunged deeper into the war room, the pixelated presence ramped up with the heavy stockpile of computational firepower. Displays of every possible size, purpose, and permutation glittered, blinked, and hummed in a low-frequency choir that could keep a small country running smoothly. Outside, daylight was finally starting to seep into the sky.
Grover Graves spotted them and cut across the room. For some reason, he looked bigger without the FBI parka and hat, and his hair was little more than stubble on the sides. He had to be unhappy about Kehoe shoehorning Lucas into his playdate.