by Robert Pobi
Their efforts to reverse engineer the explosion were not going well because not a single cell phone or camera inside the building had survived. Even the high-speed security cameras in the museum hadn’t recorded anything other than a single blip of white before going dead, their final instant of usefulness stored on the cloud before they had been cooked by the blast.
A couple of surveillance cameras from the park had provided some context. But even when they slowed down the footage, all they had recorded was the skylight and front doors blowing out. Right now all anyone could agree on was that the Guggenheim might as well have been the inside of a volcano.
While the hazmat and explosives crew scoured the site, the bureau did what it did best and went after information. The digital teams were immersed in all manner of social media necromancy, combing message boards, profiles, websites, and accounts. The bureau proper had reached out to the Department of Justice, who were tag teaming with the Department of Homeland Security in search of any group or individuals whose temperament fit the psychological, political, or religious parameters of what had just happened. Email was being sifted; texts and phone calls retrieved from data vaults; passenger arrival lists and recently purchased plane tickets scoured. All in the name of Big Data, which, Kehoe understood, already had these people on a hook.
The Horizon Dynamics gala had 594 registered attendees, a combination of the rich investor variety and the wealthy eco-friendly Don’t-eat-tuna-if-it-comes-in-cans crowd. Which meant that a good percentage of Park Avenue’s wealth had just been redistributed through inheritance. There would be teary church services and flowery obituaries and new Bentleys up and down the island.
They had located 32 of the attendees who had left early. Which left 562 souls still unaccounted for. Another 60 victims had worked for the catering company, along with 42 museum employees. Add to that the people by the entrance outside who had been cooked by the burst of flames, along with the pedestrians who had been moseying down the sidewalk and ended up eating the plate glass doors, and the body count was at 702.
The wealthy hung out with the wealthy, and the phone calls had already started. Kehoe had fielded conversations with the mayor, the governor, and the attorney general, all topped off by a very terse exchange with the vice president. The cameras were rolling and the investigation would be a very public display of concern. A bus full of kids on the way to xylophone camp goes in the river, and people light candles and hold vigils; a bunch of rich white people get blown up, and the entire continent mobilizes. This one would show good old-fashioned American priorities at their finest, which, when filtered through the prism of irreducible complexity down to the fewest moving parts, translated to worship the money.
Kehoe swallowed the last of his tea and threw the cup into the wastebasket just as Calvin-Wade Curtis, the head of the forensic explosives unit, came in. Curtis had spent three tours with a bomb disposal squad in Afghanistan, where he had become fascinated by the mechanics of detonation. This experience, bolstered by a degree in molecular chemistry, brought him to Kehoe’s attention.
Curtis was a small man who looked twenty years younger than he was, mostly owing to his size and bushy blond hair. His time out in the world had done nothing to soften the country boy twang that made him sound like he was always trying to sell you something. But he was smart. Didn’t talk too much. And knew more about explosives than anyone Kehoe had ever met. He was also a consummate blues guitarist—a skill he pulled out from under the bed every Thursday night at a bar down on Houston Street. His only bad habit was a nervous smile that he pulled out at the most inappropriate times. Like now.
Curtis was back in office clothes, but still had a red line around his forehead and nose where the hazmat suit and respirator had suction-cupped to his skin while he performed chemical archaeology amid the charred Sheetrock and human remains inside. Curtis slammed the door, poured himself a coffee from the onboard machine, and dropped into the only empty Aeron in the space.
Curtis took a deep breath and nodded at Kehoe. “Chawla sent me over to talk to you.” Samir Chawla was the special agent that Kehoe had put in charge of the investigation proper. “None of the filters, swabs, cultures, badges, or spectrometers picked up anything radioactive, chemical, or biological. There are a few exotics that will take a little more time to test for, but I think we’re good.” He took a sip of coffee, then reached into his shirt pocket to take out an evidence bag. He held it out. “But I did find this.” His nervous smile was tired, but still out of place.
Kehoe held the envelope up to the light. All he saw was what looked like a tiny amount of cigarette ash.
Curtis ran a hand through his hair, then wiped it on his pants. “I sent samples off to the lab, where we’ll run it through a mass spectrometer, but under the field scope it looks like a metastable intermolecular composite. I think it was disguised as confetti.”
When Kehoe shifted focus from the little envelope to Curtis, the explosives expert continued, “An MIC is a nanothermite—a nanofuel.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that this wasn’t a detonation; it was a thermobaric, or an aerosol, explosion.” Curtis ran a hand through his hair again. “The roof, windows, and front doors didn’t blow out—they were pushed out by the pressure. That’s what that initial flash was in the surveillance footage. The people inside had their eardrums, eyeballs, and lungs crushed by a shock wave that sucked all the air out of the room, then used that air to create a pressurized firestorm. Since the airborne fuel deflagrated but didn’t detonate in a traditional sense, most of the vics inhaled burning fuel. And since the initial shock wave would have caused very little damage to brain tissue because it’s protected by relatively thick bone, it’s very probable that many of the victims stayed alive for several seconds—or even minutes—after they were cooked.” His smile eased off a little with that last bit. “Not a nice way to go.”
Kehoe considered it a point of pride that he never allowed himself to show emotion at work and even though he was tired, he didn’t break character when he said, “Good work.”
The building had suffered very little damage—at least compared to the people inside—but it would be closed for months while construction crews tried to reset the clock on the damage. The fenestration had all blown out, and a few of the interior walls had been pushed in, but it was still recognizable as one of the city’s most prominent landmarks. Which was more than you could say for the victims—they looked like castings from Pompeii.
Less than an hour after the bombing, two representatives from the museum’s insurance underwriters showed up, asking for a tour. Kehoe didn’t bother letting them begin the chest-thumping, he simply told them to leave his command vehicle. But not before showing them the remains of a young woman who looked like a melted tire.
They wouldn’t be back.
Kehoe handed the envelope back to Curtis and nodded at the door; he needed some fresh air.
Kehoe and Curtis stepped out into the fall morning, and the light wind was in direct contrast to the humid, cramped environment of the command vehicle. It was state of the art, but when you piled more than the recommended 8.6 human bodies inside (which they had exceeded by 22.4 individuals), the space quickly became a humid closet that smelled of people. Kehoe hit the asphalt and took a deep breath, surprised that the air out here tasted as fresh as it did with a building full of pressure-cooked human beings mere yards away.
They had closed all traffic in the immediate vicinity—from 87th up to 90th, and from Fifth Avenue right across to Park—which meant the sounds of the city were somehow less intimate. Any cars in the zone had been towed, and the only foot traffic allowed inside the wire were residents—which was presenting its own particular set of problems with the NYPD as they checked IDs. Kehoe was proud to be a New Yorker (if only by transplant) because the citizenry were more good than bad. He had seen it during 9/11 and the big power outage of 2003—people donated blankets, handed out free sneakers for the bus an
d tunnel crowd, and gave away ice cream. But this time things felt different, as if the whole island could go feral. Kehoe (and the analysts he paid to do the thinking) believed that social media was responsible in that it was continually etching lines of demarcation between every discernible demographic, cutting the social fabric into smaller and smaller swatches. And things were getting worse as people started seeing the world in terms of us versus them.
Samir Chawla, the special agent in charge of the investigation, came up, coffee in hand. Curtis pocketed the evidence envelope, delivered the prerequisite I’ll keep you posted through the still-present nervous smile, and disappeared without shaking hands.
“Anything?” Kehoe asked his SAIC.
Chawla was a thin, fit man who ran on caffeine and salad. “With seven hundred and two victims, our people are buried under enough information to choke Google. I requested additional agents from the federal pool, and a few from Vermont, Jersey, and Mass have already arrived. We’re expecting a hundred more. One of the empty floors is being outfitted with workstations; the math on this one will be considerable.”
Kehoe looked up the street. The crowds were not pushing at the fencing, but they were making a lot of noise. The nutjobs had started arriving last night, holding up bristol board placards denouncing the attack as a false flag operation that had been orchestrated by the government. Some wore red ball caps, some wore QAnon T-shirts, some wore Nazi T-shirts, and some were dressed as Muppets. With Halloween a few days off, there was no shortage of costumes in the crowd, which presented its own set of security concerns. Kehoe wondered just when, specifically, postliteracy had morphed into complete stupidity. He wanted to feel sorry for these people, which he resented because they didn’t deserve the emotional space. What really bothered him was that they worked tirelessly to connect a bunch of unrelated dots when assembling a working model of even the most basic facts seemed to be impossible for them. Why was it that whenever there was a mass casualty event, the stupid gravitated en masse toward the assumption of conspiracy? Kehoe was not a pessimist—his job precluded that particular muscle—but every now and then he got tired and was tempted to give in.
Besides the rubberneckers, the media was making his life miserable. Every news network on the planet had one—if not several—crews at ground zero. Which translated to almost two thousand individuals from the entertainment corps on site. They had tents set up in the park, but they were being kept away for now. The bureau had yet to issue a comprehensive statement, other than they were in the initial stages of an investigation into what had all the earmarks of a terrorist attack. This concise and factual statement proved to be too complicated for the journalists, and they did what they did, placing blame on either Muslim or right-wing extremists, depending on the source.
But right now Kehoe had problems other than dealing with people who made things up. He crossed the street to the site proper and two of his men eased up on his flanks, doing bodyguard duty. Kehoe stopped in front of the museum and wondered what kind of a human being—or beings—were able to justify cooking 700-plus innocent people. Thirty years of trying to outthink society’s broken spokes had done nothing to assuage the repulsion he felt at times like this.
Even though all the workers wore matching white coveralls, Kehoe had no problem telling his team apart from the medical examiner’s: the bureau people were picking through the rubble, looking for evidence; the medical examiner’s minions were carting the dead out of the dust and placing them in vans that had been in constant rotation since last night. Two white-coveralled people from the ME’s office were rolling another body out, and as Kehoe watched, he was upset that he was thinking in terms of numbers, not lives.
The ME had two floors of offices and labs downtown, but nowhere near the capacity to handle this many bodies. A temporary facility had been set up in a warehouse earmarked for just such an emergency, where technicians would spend the next month sorting out which body went with what name.
“So what do you need that you do not have?”
Chawla didn’t spend any time thinking about the question. “I need more analysts. And more programmers. People who are good with numbers.”
There was some sort of a disturbance in the space behind Kehoe, and he turned, his men stepping to his front flanks in a protective measure.
A man in a red ball cap was corralled by two carbine-carrying policemen near the park wall across Fifth. The civilian had a GoPro mounted on his cap, and he kept pointing at it. The cops were shaking their heads as he screamed that he knew his rights.
One of the officers reached out and put a hand on Red Cap’s elbow and he crossed the threshold from angry to enraged. He spit on the cop and Kehoe knew that signaled the end of the argument—which the officer demonstrated by reaching around to the zip-tie cuffs hanging off his belt.
But Red Cap wasn’t interested in complying, and he faked left, then ducked right, scooching between the two policemen like a wiry little monkey.
Up the street the crowd let loose with a roar punctuated by whistles and applause. They began chanting, “Go! Go! Go! Go!”
Red Cap ran toward a stretcher being loaded into one of the vans. “False flag! False flag!” He swung a yellow utility knife.
By this time the two officers were on his six, and he was tackled as he slashed at the body bag, screaming, “It’s a dummy!”
But he had made his mark, and the cooked corpse spilled out.
“False flag!” Red Cap screamed again as the cops wrestled him to the ground.
He grinned triumphantly as the corpse’s skull impacted with the morning street beside him. “Proof! It’s a dum—” The sentence ended when the corpse’s skull shattered, spilling cooked brain out on to the ground, splattering him with blood and bits.
Red Cap threw up as the cops cuffed him.
Up the street, the crowd roared.
Kehoe was impressed that the cops hadn’t put a bullet into the guy. But their luck wouldn’t hold out indefinitely, not with people like that allowed to walk around. Eventually someone was going to get shot—either deservedly or not. And the best way to stave off an accident was to solve this crime.
Kehoe turned back to Chawla, who was shaking his head. “You need more computational firepower?” Kehoe asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then get Whitaker to meet me at the helicopter pad.”
4
Montauk, New York
Lucas was fucking around with the leaf blower, and his prosthetic hand was useless with the pull cord. He had given it a few halfhearted yanks with his good hand, but all he had done was pique the curiosity of the dog, who stood at the door examining him as if he had sprouted feathers. Lucas was about to pitch the contraption through the garage window when he decided that a walk on the beach would be healthier than messing around with yard work that he neither enjoyed nor cared about. As far as he was concerned, they could pave the entire property and paint it green—everyone would be better off. Besides, they had a guy that took care of these things. His name was Mr. Miller and he was about the same age as most of the rocks on the property. He showed up precisely every ten days (rain, shine, or hurricane) to wrestle an ancient gas-powered mower out of the bed of his rust-eaten Ford. Then he mowed over everything on the property—grass, weeds, flowers, shrubs, and the occasional children’s toy. Lucas had a strong suspicion that they were Mr. Miller’s only clients.
His effort to keep his focus away from the bombing in the city yesterday would have to be directed elsewhere, so he put the blower down on the floor beside the station wagon. But he gave it a kick, spinning it into the rim of the front tire, which caused the dog to step back, out onto the driveway.
“Well, dummy? How about a walk?”
Lemmy made a noise that was neither all dog nor all human.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” He closed the garage door and headed around back.
Erin had the big double doors open and the curtains were doing that fall thing they di
d where they reached into the kitchen as if they knew winter was coming. The kids were off upstairs, no doubt gobbling up data on their devices (they were permitted half an hour each morning on the weekends), Laurie and Alisha probably playing with the dollhouse Lucas had bought them at a garage sale up the road on the Fourth of July weekend.
The house wasn’t as large as many of the beachfront monstrosities that dotted the coastline, and every inch of available space was taken up by the kids and their crap. But Lucas was grateful for the weekend home—no matter how he looked at it, they were lucky. The layout had initially been a two-bedroom design, but they had split up the largest room and adapted the attic into a space for the boys. With the two youngest girls in bunk beds in one of the rooms, they were able to keep all five kids relatively happy. Lucas had spent a chunk of his childhood in foster homes, including a six-month stint where he slept in a bathtub, and he still marveled at all the space they had here. The kids were good about it, even when their friends showed up and they were forced to pull out the sleeping bags.
Erin was in the small office off the kitchen, remotely managing her duties at the hospital on her laptop. “Done with the leaves?” she asked, doing a bad job of hiding the ridicule in her voice; it was no secret that Lucas and lawn care had nothing in common but alliteration.
“I went with the ‘less is more’ approach.”
Erin took off her glasses and put them down on the keyboard. “And by less you mean what, exactly?”
“In this particular case, less means none. Besides, it’s all relative. My less is more than someone else’s more and my more is less than a third party’s less. I can argue semantics all day.” He came over and leaned on the edge of the desk beside her. “And I can even do it under the guise of quantum mechanics.”
