City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  Graves rolled his eyes at that. “Not a threat? You want to talk about that?”

  “Not really, but I will.” It wasn’t hard to see through the statistics. “Since 9/11, fewer than two hundred Americans have been killed on U.S. soil by what could credibly be called Islamic extremists. Fewer. Than. Two. Hundred,” Lucas said very slowly. “Your basic Muslim extremist is not any real threat—and I’m not saying that can’t change in an instant—but as things stand, they pose less of a statistical problem than being eaten by your own house cat. The real threat is your Christian neighbor. Those yahoos kill, what?—twelve to fifteen thousand Americans a year. The Iron Man of the mass-shooting championship is your average American asshole.” He turned to Whitaker and asked, “How many mass shootings this week alone?”

  Whitaker’s eyes cycled up as she said, “Six in the last five days.”

  Lucas turned back to Graves. “We can chalk half of those up to the Silly Season. But this country has more mass shooters that are American-made than lottery winners. How’s that?”

  “You sound like a liberal,” Graves said slowly.

  “I am not a fucking liberal,” Lucas snapped. “Or a conservative. Or a Marxist, socialist, or anarchist. I’m just a human being. But I understand numbers.” Lucas leaned forward, pointing his good eye directly at Graves. “I have no problem with gun ownership; I just hate that those same people refuse to understand that by having a gun in their possession, they trip the stats up into epidemic territory. The problem with the Second Amendment is that it tricks people into the unsaid belief that when it comes time to complain, they have the right to do so with said guns. Check out the stats on virtually every mass shooting in the fucking history of this country and you won’t find a radical Muslim behind it; you’ll find a good old boy or mental case—raised on the belief that guns are a God-given right under the umbrella of the Constitution, granted by Jesus. The guise is to fight tyranny so when things don’t go their way, they automatically—and unconsciously—associate any perceived slight as both tyranny and a chance to express their rights. Otherwise, what’s the point of owning ten thousand rounds of ammunition? Don’t like your boss? Tyranny! Can’t get laid because you’re an unappealing individual? Tyranny! Koreans now own the 7-Eleven where you used to buy your Big Gulp? Tyranny! And the asshole takes up his complaint with an assault rifle. A Muslim does this and your Second Amendment supporter calls him a terrorist; when you tell them a real American—their words, not mine—did it, it’s a false flag. Apparently, believing that a secret world order carries out atrocious crimes in order to garner public sympathy in an effort to take their guns away is more believable than the truth, which is that having so many guns out there is a cultural mistake. I’ve said it before—there’s a crisis of stupidity in America. All you have to do is look at the numbers around the world. So yeah, I stand by my point. Up to this juncture in time, your average American has absofuckinglutely nothing to fear from Muslim terrorists from a statistical standpoint. At least not now.”

  Graves shook his head. “That’s not what they feel, and it’s still a free country.”

  “Who are you now, Newt Gingrich? This isn’t about feelings; this is about facts. Numbers don’t lie. And although everyone is allowed to have a position, not all positions are created equal. There are experts in any given field; one person’s ignorance is not just as valuable as another’s knowledge, and the fact is your average American has to worry about his neighbor more than terrorists by orders of magnitude.”

  “You’re kind of an asshole,” Graves said, staring Lucas down.

  “Graves, life is a nuanced sport, and you need to wear your critical-thinking pants.” He smiled over at him. “So do me a favor, and pick a number between one and fuck you.”

  Kehoe held up his hand. “Gentlemen, this is getting us nowhere.”

  Lucas nodded. “I just hate stupid.”

  Graves glared at him.

  Kehoe took back the reins of the meeting. “I appreciate your concern, Dr. Page. But we have our marching papers via a joint recommendation between the DHS, the DOJ, and the NSA.” He gave Lucas that look again, the one that said he was missing part of the equation. “And Interpol pushed the Frenchman across our desk. I’m not going to say that it’s out of my hands, but we go where we are told to.” Kehoe took a sip of tea before continuing. “We’re focusing on Froissant. We need to release a statement to the media—including photos—so we can find this guy. I want to run him down, and I want to do it before someone else gets killed.”

  Graves nodded at the letter. “Media is already drafting a release with Froissant’s bio.”

  “Have legal take a look at it to make sure there’s nothing in there that will come back later to bite us in the ass.” Kehoe turned to Lucas. “You see anything wrong with releasing this?”

  Lucas had absolutely no idea why Kehoe was asking him, only that he had a reason. The obvious answer was so his objections would be a matter of record. “Only that you will be looking for the wrong man.”

  “You don’t think there’s a possibility it’s the Frenchman?”

  How many times did he have to say this? “I guarantee it’s not the Frenchman.”

  “Then why is Washington so sure?” Graves asked.

  Lucas shrugged. “Because the only people who end up there are the only ones who shouldn’t? I don’t fucking know. But if you want to follow the ravings of idiots, be my guest.”

  There was a knock at the door, and one of the probationary agents clogging up the corridors of the building came in. Lucas recognized him from Kehoe’s state of the nation speech yesterday morning. “Mr. Kehoe, sorry to interrupt. I’m Probationary Agent Zeke Tran.”

  Kehoe nodded a get to the point.

  “I just got off the horn with a small sheriff’s department out West.” Tran nodded at Lucas. “They had a murder thirty-six months back that fits our shooter’s MO.”

  Lucas pushed up and back, rising out of his chair. “How closely?”

  Tran held up his notes. “He used a mountain instead of a rooftop, but other than that, it’s the same. Middle of a snowstorm at sunrise. Hit the driver of a moving car.”

  “Who’d he kill?”

  “A deputy.”

  “Where was this?” Kehoe asked.

  “Carlwood, Wyoming, sir.”

  Lucas saw something flash over Kehoe’s features, like a spark riding dry air, and then it was gone and Kehoe turned to Lucas and Whitaker. “Do the follow-up.”

  They stood, and Graves’s phone rang. He picked it up and listened for a few seconds before snapping his fingers at them, stopping them. They turned, and he asked the caller to hold on. “Ballistics matched the slugs Atchison put into your friend Dingo. It was the same weapon that killed Oscar Shiner and Billy Margolis.”

  60

  John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York

  The runway slid under the belly of the Gulfstream G550 as the dual Rolls-Royce turbofans propelled them down the snow-swept tarmac. There was an instant when the cabin began to shudder, and Lucas thought his teeth would rattle loose. But human engineering beat out gravity and they were airborne, the laws of physics pushing him into the luxurious leather seat. The earth began to unfold beneath and behind them before it was lost as they headed up into the storm.

  The updates to the bureau’s infrastructure over the past decade included their fleet of jets, and the new wings were impressive. Besides the Connolly Leather and bubinga paneling, the cabin was outfitted with top-drawer communications equipment, computers, and a minibar that would make a nutritionist proud. But Lucas was just happy he didn’t have to fly commercial. He hated clearing security, a process he saw as basically pointless (and invasive—his prosthetics always lit up the scanners and he hated dealing with the TSA simpletons). There were myriad ways to sneak weapons or explosives through. But he understood why they were there: to make the huddled masses feel less threatened. More of that feelings-over-facts that Graves had brought
up back at the bureau, another manifestation of the dumbing down of America. It was one of the reasons that Lucas wanted to grade student papers with a cigarette lighter instead of a red pen.

  Graves and the body politic of the FBI were still convinced that the Frenchman was responsible even though all the evidence said otherwise. But not Kehoe; he was a lot of things, but he was by no means stupid. And he was most definitely not an intellectually lazy man. He had always been able to focus on the big picture, and Lucas wondered if he had been sent out West so he’d be out of the way, or if he was helping Kehoe in some unknown manner.

  But there was definitely a reason—Kehoe didn’t do anything without a reason.

  He had signed off on their trip to Wyoming to examine a three-year-old crime scene—not the actions of a skeptic. The fuel alone would be worthy of an accounting report, massive investigation notwithstanding. Which brought Lucas around to the why part of it all: Why had he sent them across the country?

  “Page?” Whitaker interrupted the questions ticker-taping through his mind.

  He turned away from the window.

  “We’ve got a little under four hours to Jackson; if you want to stretch out, the seats in the back fold down.” She nodded at her purse. “I’ve got Seconal if you need a little extra help.”

  “Do I look that bad?” She was facing the damaged side of his body, and after two days of shitty sleep and too much coffee in the tank, he no doubt looked like Frankenstein’s monster in need of fresh paint and a good waxing. The bolts in his neck were probably rusty, too.

  “Yes, you do.”

  Lucas turned back to the window. Back to the storm they were rising through. And back to the questions he couldn’t shake.

  The biggest question of all being: What was Kehoe not telling him?

  61

  The panel assembled on Fox News was deeply immersed in the scientific analysis of the Ferguson effect, which was no doubt the only logical explanation for the recent killings of four law enforcement officers in New York City. The panel was headed up by a cliché in a suit who looked like he was hawking hair care products, toothpaste, or both. He kept smiling into the camera as the other guests rolled out their theories. The Ferguson effect was bound to be responsible for more killings unless immediate legal steps were taken to shut down Black Lives Matter for what it was—a terrorist organization. These were criminals. These were African American thu—

  And then Smiley McSmileyface’s expression changed as his producer piped in through his earpiece and the chyron swinging across the bottom of the screen shifted ideologies.

  “Sorry to cut this short,” Chuckles said to the panel of experts—one former lawyer for the DOJ who had been fired for taking bribes; a former model turned spokesperson for a grocery chain; and a retired police officer who was now a celebrated author on the coming race wars in America. “But we have breaking news that the Islamic State has just claimed responsibility for the shootings.”

  At that, Chuckles turned to the camera and did his best to look like he knew what he was talking about. He managed a reasonable imitation of a news anchor as he read from the prompter. “According to the new ISIS propaganda chief, the four law enforcement officers recently shot in the city of New York were killed by one of their fighters. They have not released any additional information, only that more killings are to come and that God will grant them victory.” At that, he turned back to the panel.

  The disgraced lawyer was the first to speak. “As I said, this is clearly the fault of sloppy foreign policy under the last Democratic president, and it’s clear they wanted to deflect the blame to the African American lobby in order to conceal their Muslim sympathies so that hardworking, plain-speaking Americans can’t…”

  * * *

  CNN had become the New York City Shooting Channel. No other news existed, not even in America. They ignored the mass shootings unfolding across the country just as they did every week. They ignored the storm blanketing the northeastern states and the closed schools. They ignored the pileups on the beltways, the religious freedom cases being fought in the Supreme Court, they ignored the stock market plunge and the airline strike. They ignored the protests in Germany and the power outages in Venezuela.

  They ignored.

  And ignored.

  And ignored.

  But they did it with graphs. And charts. And videos and interviews and cool graphics and way too many commercials.

  They did it in suits.

  And dresses.

  They did it outside and indoors.

  They invited experts and laymen to voice their opinions.

  They did survey after survey. Then they announced the results.

  The only thing they did not do was report any facts.

  62

  The Upper West Side

  The mosque on West Eighty-sixth and Amsterdam had been under sporadic government surveillance for the past fourteen years. It was on the watch list for every agency that had a finger in the anti-terrorism pie, from the DHS to the NSA to the FBI. The focus of their attention was usually on the center for Islamic studies that operated out of the offices, but the mosque proper, and its imam—Kifah Elseyed—had been a fixture in governmental memos since the Arab Spring of 2011.

  The past three days had certainly been some of the busiest in the way of good old-fashioned governmental peekaboo. Email had been scanned; cell phone records collated and analyzed; visitors photographed and run through databases; banking monitored. All in search of a French national turned jihadi named Philippe Froissant. And now, with news of Middle Eastern terrorists claiming responsibility for the four dead law enforcement officers, the men in the apartment across the street were filming on a twenty-four-hour schedule, going so far as to use night-sensitive gear after sundown.

  Surveillance on this particular mosque was not the result of random anti-Muslim sentiment. Imam Kifah Elseyed had been promoting elements of radical Islam for years, and in the heightened tensions of the past few days, the analysts with the FBI had upgraded his threat classification. The imam, American by birth, was a fixture in the homegrown radical Islam movement; he had recently been charged with inciting hate and was out on bail, awaiting trial.

  The pair of agents from the Department of Homeland Security took turns at the binoculars. They had very little in the way of concrete orders other than to look for Froissant. If they saw him—even if they thought they saw him—they were to call in a tactical squad. Until that happened, they were to observe and report. And to make sure the camera was always running.

  Even in the midst of a storm that had slowed the metabolism of the entire city, the imam’s white Toyota Sequoia arrived precisely on time. The side doors to the mosque opened and two assistants—a euphemism for bodyguards—stepped out, looking up and down the street. They motioned for Elseyed to come forward, and he emerged from the mosaic-decorated doors in a fur coat that covered his robe. He was a small man, with a round physique and a distinctive walk the agents were by now familiar with.

  The steps had been shoveled and sanded, but the freezing temperatures kept them icy, and he made his way cautiously, occasionally reaching out to steady himself on the arm of one of his assistants. He paused at the bottom step while they opened the door for him.

  The imam took a step, and it was as if he had walked into a guillotine and his head popped off his neck, sending a black arc of arterial spray into the air. His body stood there for a second, and there was a brief instant of silence before he went to his knees and the sound of the shot whistled in.

  He fell over and the steps around him quickly went red.

  63

  State Route 39, outside Carlwood, Wyoming

  Lucas cradled the travel mug of coffee in his gloved hand. It was his fourth of the morning and it was doing its job, binding with his blood on a molecular level and providing him with the mental fuel to face another day of trying to find meaning in the meaningless.

  The sun was coming up over the mountain be
hind him, painting the road in early-morning pastels. It was freezing here, much colder than back in New York; he had never experienced temperatures like this, and he wondered if something was wrong with his central nervous system. It was a wet, humid cold that needled down into his bones like a dental drill. Each time he pulled in a lungful of mountain air, his nostrils froze together. It sucked.

  “Right here?” he asked.

  “Right here,” the sheriff said from somewhere behind him.

  Whitaker stood ahead of them on the road, her shadow stretching out in front of her as she surveyed the terrain. She was in her FBI parka and vapor-barrier boots and looked as comfortable as the sheriff, no doubt the Midwest roots serving her well.

  Lucas finished off the coffee and placed the mug down on the hood of the sheriff’s sport ute, a monstrous vehicle that had a kangaroo bar welded to the front, an extra tire fastened to the back, and three separate long weapons inside. All four quarter panels and both bumpers were decorated with CSPOA stickers, the proud head of a bald eagle staring defiantly into the future the main graphic. If you were worried about the zombie apocalypse, it would be hard to find a better ride this side of a King Tiger.

  Sheriff Brice “Bronco” Doyle was a tall man a few years into his fifties, with a solid set of shoulders and a head that could have been hammered out of a paint bucket. He had thick white hair offset by a beard that, with the right tending, could rival Billy Gibbons’s. He had a cross pin on his lapel beside the American flag, and he carried a pair of pistols in a tooled old-time holster that had the mirror images of Jesus worked into the pockets. Doyle gave the impression that he was the kind of man you’d want at your side when you ran out of ammunition and the cannibals made it over the fence. But there was nothing humorous about his disposition, and he didn’t smile much. But what weirded Lucas out was that for a small-town sheriff on the edge of civilization, he had yet to swear.