by Daniel Cole
Despite his hurry, Lucas Keaton knew that he wouldn’t be able to leave the house knowing that the photo frame was hanging askew. Even if he tried, he’d only end up turning back five minutes down the road and making himself later still. The rapping on the front door continued as he walked over to the picture and very gently raised it up on one side. He made a valiant effort not to focus on the memory entombed behind the glass . . . but his will was as weak as ever—the countless hours he had lost to this wall, immersing himself in a past bathed a rose-tinted shade of perfect.
He could no longer even hear the sound of the urgent knocking as he gazed at the snapshot: surrounded by his wife and two sons, all cheesily sporting Universal Studios–branded attire.
Lucas focused on his past self. He’d adopted a thick beard back then, the beginnings of middle-aged spread already starting to show beneath the tacky gift-shop T-shirt, unattractive wiry hair covering far more of his balding head than it managed to now. He was wearing his well-practiced photo face, the same disingenuous impersonation of happiness normally reserved for his press and publicity obligations.
He might have been there with them in person, but his mind was elsewhere, on more important matters, and he despised himself for that.
The person at the door reverted to the shrill doorbell, excusing Lucas from his self-loathing. He hurried up the stairs, checking his tie as he passed the large mirror in the entrance hall.
“I’m so sorry to pester you, Mr. Keaton, but we’re going to be late,” apologized his driver the moment he opened the door.
“No need to apologize, Henry. I wouldn’t make it anywhere on time without you pestering me. I’m sorry for keeping you waiting.” He smiled.
Henry climbed straight into the front seat, having chauffeured his multimillionaire passenger enough times to know that he hated having doors opened for him.
“Somewhere different this morning,” stated Henry conversationally as he started them on their journey.
Lucas failed to answer immediately. All he wanted was to sit in silence:
“I’ll be all right making my own way back afterwards.”
“You’re sure?” asked Henry, leaning forward in his seat to glance skyward. “Looks as though it might rain.”
“I’ll be fine,” Lucas assured him. “But I expect you to bill me for the return journey and go get yourself a nice lunch somewhere instead.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir.”
“Henry, I hate to be unsociable but I’ve got a few emails to catch up on before I get to this . . . meeting.”
“Say no more. Just let me know if there’s anything you need.”
Satisfied that he hadn’t upset the man, Lucas took out his phone and stared down at a blank screen for the remainder of the journey.
In his time, Lucas had met more celebrities, captains of industry, and world leaders than he could count, yet sat in the minimalist waiting room of Alexei Green’s practice, he had never felt so nervous. While filling out the form handed to him on arrival, his foot had shaken constantly. He had found it difficult to hold the pen in his clammy hand, and he’d managed to bite his thumbnail so short that it was now outlined with bright red blood.
He stopped breathing altogether when the receptionist’s phone went off.
Seconds later, the door across from him opened and an unusually handsome man stepped out. Perhaps because he’d been analyzing a photograph of his own thinning hair, Lucas found himself unable to take his eyes off Green’s, which he wore in the slicked-back style that all the movie stars were currently sporting—he looked like one of them.
“Lucas, I’m Alexei,” Green greeted him, shaking his hand with the sincerity of an old friend. “Please, come in, come in. Is there anything I can get you? A tea? Coffee perhaps? A glass of water?”
Lucas shook his head.
“No? Well, come and take a seat.” Green smiled, closing the door softly behind them.
Lucas hadn’t said a word in over twenty minutes. He fiddled with the zip of his jacket while Green watched him patiently. When Lucas glanced up at him, the two men briefly made eye contact before he quickly reverted his gaze to the jacket in his lap. Moments later, he burst into tears, sobbing into his hands, and still Green did not say a word.
Almost five minutes passed.
Lucas wiped his red eyes and exhaled deeply:
“Sorry,” he apologized, nearly setting himself off again.
“Don’t be,” Green said soothingly.
“It’s just . . . you . . . No one can understand what I’ve been through. I am never going to be OK again. If you love someone, I mean truly love someone, and you lose them . . . you shouldn’t be OK, should you?”
Green leaned forward to address the troubled man, passing him a handful of the “man-sized” tissues he kept on his desk.
“There’s a big difference between being OK and accepting that something was completely out of your control,” Green said kindly. “Look at me, Lucas.”
He tentatively met the psychiatrist’s eye once more.
“I genuinely believe that I can help you,” Green said.
Smiling as he dabbed his eyes, Lucas nodded:
“Yes . . . Yes. I think you might be able to as well.”
Chapter 22
Tuesday, 15 December 2015
2:04 P.M.
Baxter sent three identical text messages: one to Edmunds, one to Vanita, and then one to Thomas:
I’m OK. Coming home.
She had switched off her phone and taken one of the few trains still running out to Coney Island. She just needed to be away from Manhattan, from the traumatized people, from the four dark clouds hanging above the city, blotting the blue sky: a killer’s calling card.
One by one, each of the other wary passengers had gotten off along the way. Alone, Baxter stepped out into the almost deserted subway station. She wrapped herself up against the wind, stronger and colder than it had been back in the city, and headed for the beach.
The fairground was closed up for winter, the skeletal frames of the frozen rides surrounded by boarded-up booths and stalls, oversized padlocks on show.
To Baxter, the scene revealed the true emptiness beneath the surface, nothing more than an illusion of bright lights and loud music to distract from its insubstantial offerings. It was the same principle that would have attracted hordes of people to Times Square that morning, the world-famous tourist trap, where people from all over the planet chose to stand and gawk up at illuminated versions of the advertisements that normally had to fight so hard for attention.
Although she knew her anger was both unreasonable and misplaced, she felt sickened by these companies’ attempts to shove their various products down everyone’s throats. There was just something about the hollowness of dying in the glow of a Coca-Cola sign that made it feel that much more wasteful.
She didn’t want to think about it any longer. She didn’t want to think about anything, especially about Curtis, about how they had abandoned her in that terrible place to die.
As much as she had blustered and protested at Rouche’s cowardice, she knew that she had let him lead her away, that had her heart truly been set on staying, nothing could have separated her from her colleague’s side. That was why she was so furious with him: he knew. It had been a joint decision.
They had left her behind.
She continued along the boardwalk, past the funfair, nothing but sea and snow stretching out in front of her . . . and just kept walking.
The next morning, Baxter got up early and skipped breakfast to avoid running into Rouche. It was a beautiful, crisp winter’s day, without a single cloud in the sky, so she picked up a takeaway coffee and walked to Federal Plaza. After passing through security, she took the lift up to the subdued office.
She was the first one into the meeting room and automatically took the seat in the far back corner. After a moment she realized why. She and Wolf had always claimed the back row as their own during staff m
eetings and training sessions. The two troublemakers messing around out of sight.
She smiled, then felt angry with herself for getting nostalgic: the time that Finlay had unwisely nodded off during a political-correctness session. Over the course of twenty minutes, she and Wolf had gradually pulled his chair around until he had been facing the back of the room. The look on his face when the trainer realized and started bellowing at him had been priceless. He had called Finlay a “lazy jock bastard,” which had brought the session to an abrupt close.
Baxter had far too much on her mind to start thinking about such things. She got up and moved to the seat in front.
The room filled up at five minutes to nine, with an atmosphere of restless anger. Baxter made sure to avoid eye contact when Rouche came in and started looking for her. With no other chairs free, he was forced to take a seat in the generally avoided front row.
All her efforts to avoid dealing with the loss of her colleague had been in vain. Twenty seconds after entering the room, Lennox switched on the enormous touch-screen display and brought up a photograph of Curtis, smiling genuinely in full FBI dress uniform, her skin still absolutely flawless, even at that size.
Baxter felt as though she had been punched in the gut and looked around the room to keep her eyes busy, knowing that they would fill with tears if she didn’t.
A caption at the bottom read:
Special Agent Elliot Curtis
1990–2015
Lennox lowered her head and stood silently for a moment.
She cleared her throat:
“I guess God just needed another angel.”
It took all of Baxter’s self-restraint not to storm out of the room, but then, to her surprise, Rouche got to his feet and walked out.
A strained pause later, Lennox commenced the meeting. She announced that they would “regrettably” be losing Baxter that afternoon and went on to thank her for her “invaluable” contribution to the case. She then stressed that the work was only just beginning for the rest of them, that they would be liaising closely with Homeland Security and the NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau “going forward,” before introducing the agent who would be assuming Curtis’s role.
“We, as law-enforcement agencies, as a nation, allowed ourselves to be manipulated yesterday morning,” Lennox told the room. “We will not make that mistake again. With the luxury of hindsight, it is all so obvious now: piggybacking off the fame of the Ragdoll case to spark initial media interest, the grotesque spectacle at Grand Central to ensure the whole world was talking about it, killing our own to provoke a disproportionate response . . . Bait.”
An uncomfortable silence followed Lennox’s summation. They had been warned all along that they were being goaded into something and not one of them had seen it coming.
“We threw everything we had at them.” Lennox paused as she glanced down at her notes. “Between the church and Times Square we lost twenty-two of our own yesterday, including NYPD officers, an entire ESU team, and, of course, Special Agent Curtis. The total death toll thus far has reached one hundred and sixty souls. We’re expecting that to increase significantly, however, as the cleanup operation continues and we lose more hospitalized victims to their injuries.”
She glanced up at the photograph of Curtis:
“We owe it to each and every one of these people to hunt down and punish those responsible . . .”
“Oh, I’m gonna punish them all right,” someone muttered.
“. . . while honoring our colleagues by maintaining the very highest standards of professionalism that they would expect of us,” Lennox added. “I’m sure you’re all sick of listening to me by now, so I’m going to hand you over to Special Agent Chase.”
Curtis’s replacement got to his feet. Baxter had already decided to hate him out of principle but was pleased to discover that it was also completely justified. Chase was wearing half his body armor around the office for no other conceivable reason than he thought it looked cool.
“OK,” started Chase, who was clearly sweating beneath the unnecessary layers. “We’ve managed to identify two of the vehicles involved in yesterday’s attacks.”
The photographs slowly filtered out across the room. One had captured a white van in an alleyway, the other a second white van parked in the middle of the pedestrianized area.
“As you can see, we’ve got two identical vehicles: fake plates, positioned strategically for maximum damage,” said Chase.
“In an alleyway?” asked a female agent near the front.
“Human and structural,” clarified Chase, tensing to support the piece of paper in his hand. “The van in the alleyway was positioned to bring down the billboards and New Year’s ball. We were already on high alert. On any other day, these vehicles would have been flagged and intercepted before they got within ten blocks of Midtown. We dropped our guard for less than an hour and we paid the price for it.”
“And the other two explosions?” someone asked.
“The final detonation was underground, in the subway but not on a train. We’re assuming in a rucksack or similar, but that one’s gonna take a while to trace. The one in the church looks like it was triggered by the doors. Our best guess—the hollow wooden mannequins reported were packed with C-4. They detonated the moment our boys breached.”
Chase held up a recent photograph of the long-haired British psychiatrist:
“Our primary suspect, Dr. Alexei Green, appears to have dropped off the face of the earth. He thinks he can hide from us. He’s wrong. He believes he’s smarter than us. Also wrong. None of us rest until we have this bastard in handcuffs. Now, let’s get to work.”
Baxter settled into her window seat on the plane. It had taken her almost an hour and a half to negotiate the enhanced security checks that had been implemented the previous afternoon. She had been summoned to Lennox’s office following the meeting for an insincere farewell and had waited for an opportune moment to escape without having to see Rouche again. It had been rude to leave without saying goodbye, but she didn’t trust him. She found him irritatingly eccentric at times, downright weird at others, and now his face served only as a reminder of the worst experience of her life, horrific and shameful in equal measure.
She was glad to be rid of him.
After spending the evening roaming the city streets aimlessly, she was exhausted. She had walked miles. When she had finally returned to the hotel, the thoughts she had been trying to outrun had caught up and prevented her from getting a moment’s rest.
She removed the cheap plastic earphones from the pocket in front of her, found a radio station to fall asleep to, and closed her eyes.
The gentle hum of the engines faded in, accompanied by the soothing sound of warm air blowing into the cozily lit cabin. Baxter pulled the blanket up around her and shifted position to get comfortable again when she realized that she had not fallen asleep with a blanket.
Instantly wide-awake, she opened her eyes to find a familiar face inches from her own, openmouthed and snoring quietly:
“Rouche!” she exclaimed, waking at least seven people in the vicinity.
Rouche looked around in bewilderment for a moment: “What?”
“Shhhhh!” someone hissed behind them.
“What’s wrong?” Rouche whispered in concern.
“What’s wrong?” replied Baxter, still rather loudly. “What are you doing here?”
“Where?”
“On the . . . Here! On the plane!”
“Madam, I’m going to have to ask that you keep your voice down,” said a waspish flight attendant from the aisle. “You’re disturbing your fellow passengers.”
Baxter just stared at her until she tottered off again.
“Working off the educated assumption that yesterday’s events constituted the conclusion of the US attacks, we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility of a similarly sized attack in the UK,” Rouche whispered almost inaudibly. “Alexei Green is our best lead, and he was last seen in Lo
ndon shortly after Cur—” He stopped himself from saying her name. “Shortly after we were at the prison.”
“Curtis,” spat Baxter. “You should say her name. It’s gonna haunt us both for the rest of our lives either way. We had guns. We should’ve tried. We just left her there to die!”
“We couldn’t have saved her.”
“You don’t know that!”
“Yes, I do!” Rouche snapped in a rare moment of anger. He waved apologetically at some miserable old woman across the aisle and lowered his voice: “I do.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
“She wouldn’t have wanted you to die for her,” Rouche continued softly. “And she knows you didn’t want to leave her.”
“She was unconscious,” Baxter bit back.
“I mean now. She knows. She’ll be looking down on us and—”
“Oh, will you shut the fuck up!”
“You shut up,” someone in front mumbled.
“Don’t you dare start spouting your religious shit at me. I’m not some idiot child whose hamster just died, so keep your sky-fairy bullshit to yourself, OK?”
“OK. I apologize,” said Rouche, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender.
Baxter wasn’t done, however.
“I’m not gonna sit here listening to you console yourself with some fantasy that Curtis is up in some wonderful place right now thanking us for letting her bleed out onto a dirty floor. She’s dead! Gone! She felt pain and then nothingness. End of story.”
“I’m sorry for bringing it up,” said Rouche, shaken by the venom of Baxter’s tirade.
“You’re supposed to be intelligent, Rouche. Our entire careers are built on collecting evidence, on solid facts, yet you’re happy to believe that there’s some old bastard sat up on a cloud somewhere waiting for us all like some geriatric Care Bear. I . . . I just don’t get it.”
“Could you just stop? Please,” said Rouche.
“She’s gone, all right?” said Baxter, only now realizing that she was crying. “A cold slab of meat in a freezer drawer somewhere because of us. And if I’ve got to live with that for the rest of my life, you’re damn well going to live with it too.”