Under Pressure: A Lucas Page Novel

by Robert Pobi

Kehoe stood up and crossed into his field of vision. He looked like he was lifted out of a Life magazine photo shoot at the Kennedy compound, circa 1962; he had that well-heeled vibe that a lot of the people up here wore on their sleeves, earned the old-fashioned way—through an industrious ancestor. Kehoe was the black sheep of his family; he had turned his back on an agricultural empire in order to bring law to the lawless. “I just want you to do a walk-through and get a feel for what happened. Look at it as an exercise in basic physics and chemistry. That’s all—basic physics and chemistry. Then look at the data. At the victim list. See if there’s a there there. One day. Maybe two. Then you’re back here getting sand in your socks.”

  Lucas looked up without moving his head and zeroed in on Kehoe with what he knew was his spooky stare, the one where his eyes didn’t align. He thought about the photo of the scorched partygoer. And about the other 701 victims. More than most, he knew what an explosion could do. And the ripple effect it had.

  “And of course Whitaker here is your chaperone.” He paused and glanced at his watch. “So, are you in or did I catch you in one of your cranky moods?”

  “Who did you put in charge of the investigation?”

  “An agent by the name of Samir Chawla. He’s from the Los Angeles office, transferred in four years back.”

  Lucas turned to Whitaker and was about to ask if this Chawla guy was smart, but she was already ahead of the question. “Very,” she said.

  Lucas tried not to smile but it was difficult—he had forgotten about that little magic trick of hers, the way she preemptively answered his questions as if she had a Bluetooth connection to his brain. He looked back up at Kehoe. “Brett, you know I don’t play well with others. There is no I in team. I’m not being facetious, but I know my own weaknesses.”

  “I don’t want you for teamwork.”

  “Then what is it—precisely—that you do want from me?”

  In an uncharacteristic display of camaraderie, Kehoe said, “Just do do that voodoo that you do so well.”

  6

  Lucas had to concentrate not to let his focus shift from Erin to the helicopter down on the beach. He was going—he knew it; she knew it. They just hadn’t figured out how to put it into words without yelling. So they stared at each other for a few moments, Erin doing a bad job of hiding her disappointment, he doing a good job of not looking at the chopper.

  Not that it was any secret he would be going back every now and then. But Erin was an optimist, and for her, every now and then meant at some undefined point in the future—far off and likely never to arrive. Lucas could no longer play the reluctant antihero; he was back because he needed to do this. He and Erin had discussed it ad nauseam, and they had reached one of those untenable middle grounds where one person got everything they wanted while the other pretended to be happy for them.

  Lucas led with the good news. “Two days and then I’m coming home.”

  “And the schmuck?” Erin asked, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder toward one of the FBI men parked at the corner of the patio, his form exaggerated by the thick bulletproof vest.

  “The schmuck will be here until I get back, which will be by tomorrow night. Maybe sooner. I can take the train.” He knew he’d get one of Kehoe’s men to bring him back, but the train sounded like routine, like it was part of the way things always were in Optimist Town.

  “Which means that you’ll be free for Friday so we can register Maude at LaGuardia?”

  “I should be. Yes.”

  She eyed him skeptically but remained silent, and he could see that she was struggling not to say anything that would hurt him.

  He walked over and pulled her in. They held each other for a moment, and for an instant their world didn’t include FBI men on the patio and a helicopter down on the beach.

  Laurie came into the kitchen, holding Alisha’s hand. At seven, Laurie had been their resident youngest until Alisha showed up. They worried that there might be a little tension over that, but Laurie happily switched into big-sister gear. And now, going on the better part of a year, the two girls were inseparable. They were also the quietest of the kids, and would often show up silently when Lucas and Erin were trying to work something out. Like now.

  “Are you going away?” Laurie asked.

  “Just for a little while.”

  Laurie looked over to Erin to see if he was telling the truth, which almost broke Lucas’s heart. He squatted down—putting all of his weight on his good leg, and steadying himself on the island with his hand—and the two little girls came over. “I have some work in the city.”

  Laurie reached out and touched his face in a gentle little sign of affection that she had never used before. “Stopping the bad people?” she asked. It was poignant how a seven-year-old could convert the complex to the simple without missing any of the meaning.

  Lucas and Erin tried to talk to the kids about what had happened last year. The conversation had morphed into a discussion about Lucas and his work for the FBI. It had been relatively easy with Maude, Hector, and Stevie—or at least they had understood the general idea. But explaining what had happened proved more problematic with Laurie and Alisha. In the end it came down to good people and bad people and which side they were on.

  None of the kids—not even Alisha, who was still struggling with the fundamentals of language—had forgotten what had happened last Christmas. The whole family had their heads candled after that one. All of them except Lucas, who had a pretty defined perception of events that he had worked out in his singularly pragmatic way. Lucas and Erin saw the on-again/off-again struggle with what had happened in all the children as they tried to work it out. Except for Maude; she insisted that she was fine—and she most certainly looked and acted as if she were. She had voluntarily endured a single therapy session. In that one hour her therapist came to the conclusion that the girl was already very good at dealing with trauma and would need a return visit only if she felt it necessary. Score one for the good guys.

  That the kids had bounced back demonstrated that they were somehow coalescing into a functioning family. Lucas often wondered how he was doing as a father—a line of questioning that would be completely inconceivable in every other aspect of his life. That he occasionally got it right had to mean something.

  Alisha kissed him on his ear, a loud sucking sound that depressurized his sinuses, and hollered, “Can we come, too?” straight into his head.

  He kissed her back, and her face rolled into a smile. “Sorry, sweetheart, Daddy can’t bring you guys to work.”

  At that, Alisha’s face scrunched up and both Laurie and Erin put their hands over their ears. Lucas even turned away in preparation for the little girl’s preprogrammed response. She hollered, “I ain’t no guys!”

  All of a sudden the other kids were in the kitchen. Maude had a sketchbook under her arm, her fingers blackened with charcoal, a single gray fingerprint in the middle of her Eric Clapton Sucks! T-shirt; Hector held the dead crab shell from the beach, now painted a black that was beginning to dry; Damien came in and sat on one of the barstools with his guitar. They looked like a bunch of pirate kids.

  Lucas opted for the direct approach; you don’t lie to pirates. “I have to go back to the city.”

  Maude said, “That terrorist attack?”

  Lucas knew she was asking the question to help him break it to the other kids, and he appreciated the lifeline.

  “Yes. It’s just a couple of days. Today. Maybe tomorrow. Then I’ll come back here. Or you guys will come home to the city.”

  Damien got off the stool and swung his guitar around to his back like a rifle. “Then break a leg. Well, not your leg. You only have the one. Well, you have two, but only one real one. So don’t break that. But if you have to break something, break the prosthetic one. Aw, crap, you know what I mean.”

  “Watch it with the crap,” Erin said.

  “I’ll miss you guys,” and even before it was all out, Lucas knew it would be true and that he w
ould regret leaving.

  Then he heard the sound of the helicopter’s turbofan kicking in and turned to see Whitaker at the door. She opened it, tapped her wrist, and said, “Dr. Page, tempus is fugitting.”

  It was time to step into character.

  7

  Long Island

  The helicopter banked inland and the lazy undulating surface of the ocean gave way to the thoughtless geometry of suburban sprawl. From this height, the neighborhoods looked tired, deforested, and ready for the Big Darkness (as Erin called Old Man Winter). They were low enough that he could see shrubs bundled up in white Styrofoam dunce hats, shrink-wrapped boats, covered pools, and an army of Halloween decorations waiting to fulfill their purpose before retiring to attics, garages, and basements until next year. The suburban quickly gave way to urban, and the backyards became expressways, parking lots, apartments, and shopping malls—the true core of the American psyche.

  His arm was on the rest, his aluminum fingers automatically curled around the plush leather, right pinkie against the bulkhead. As the bird adjusted altitude, the pitch of the engine changed, and a low-frequency hum transferred from the body of the aircraft to his aluminum finger, sending a vibration up his arm, into the transhumeral anchor pin. From there it jumped a few bones, drilling into the base of his skull like a dull dental tool. He pulled his shoulder back and his finger came away from the strut, slowing down his molecules.

  Kehoe sat across the passenger bay, his back to the pilot, his focus somewhere out the window. Whitaker was beside Kehoe, eyeing Lucas with what could have been amusement, uncertainty, or both, and her outward friendliness belied the meat-eating predator inside. One of Kehoe’s men sat beside Lucas—the big one whose name was Hoffner—on standby while his batteries were being charged. He had the disinterested stare that came with the job, and Lucas wondered if the guy knew how to smile. They had left the other one back at the house as a precaution. Lucas wondered if Erin was giving him coffee and muffins or if she had called him a cab—neither action would be out of character.

  Lucas’s specialty was numbers. Patterns. Discrepancies where there shouldn’t be any. None where there should be some. And he could do some nifty tricks when geometry was involved; he was just a guy who saw patterns where no one else seemed to. But this? Other than a single one-thousandth of a second that had altered his life, Lucas had very little to contribute to a conversation about explosions, at least not on the level he was used to performing at. But Kehoe was right about one thing—an event like this could be reduced to basic physics and chemistry, which meant he wouldn’t be completely useless.

  He wondered what Mrs. Page would say if she were still alive. Would she approve of his work with the bureau, or would she disapprove of him being around these people? He wanted to think that it would be a little of both, but he had never been good at figuring her out—not from the day she had adopted him to the day she died. And even though he never cared about what anyone thought, her opinion would matter, because he owed everything—his education, his house, absolutely everything—to the eccentric old lady who saw promise in a five-year-old orphan.

  After a relatively smooth ten minutes crossing Oceanside, then Queens, and finally the East River, the chopper dropped down and swung over the East Side, heading for ground zero.

  The improvised LZ was two blocks up from the Guggenheim—the closest terrain that could accommodate the Ranger’s clearance requirements—at the intersection of East 90th and Fifth Avenue. The chopper centered for a second before dropping straight down onto a freshly painted yellow bull’s-eye, shock waves from the Nomex blades spinning litter, leaves, and DANGER! tape off into the void.

  As the bird shuddered down, the wall of faces lining the perimeter were hidden behind SLRs, lighting, and shoulder-mounted video cameras—journalists here to generate the sugar high of fear that was now as much a part of the American diet as hot dogs, apple pie, and gluten-free muffins. Others held up political signs; some advertised their Facebook pages. There were a lot of people wearing QAnon T-shirts and red MAGA caps. There were hundreds of superheroes in the crowd. Lucas wondered why any of them were here, when he would rather be anywhere else on the planet. But you could always count on a significant segment of the American population to find entertainment in horror. All while dressing like children.

  Keeping the citizenry behind the fencing was an army of police officers outfitted in Kevlar vests, tactical helmets, black knee and elbow pads, and small assault carbines cradled in harnesses, fingers over trigger guards. They looked like backup singers for Darth Vader, and even the QAnon people weren’t hassling them.

  The skids scraped the asphalt and Whitaker was on the pavement before the pilot began to cycle down the turbofan.

  As Lucas unbuckled his seat belt, Kehoe said, “I appreciate this,” before grabbing his briefcase from the luggage rack and stepping out of the helicopter.

  Lucas had to concentrate on his leg as he ducked under the rotors—a necessity whenever he had to move his center of gravity out of its usual orbit.

  Out here, without the sound of the helicopter’s engine to mute the crowd, the noise was distracting. People were chanting, but there were at least three different contingencies, and they were out of sync in both cadence and ideology. Lucas picked up the terms false flag, fascist overlords, and deep state somewhere in the mix.

  The clatter of cameras was offset by the shouted questions and the glare of the video feeds that were going out live, real-timing out-of-context information to various points on the news and social media compasses. America would have their eyes glued to the tube until this one was long over. And everyone in New York City would want to take a selfie as close to the Guggenheim as humanly possible to show that yes, indeed, they were participating in life.

  Kehoe ignored the questions from the reporters and the angry screams from the conspiracy theorists and headed for a bureau van parked at Engineers’ Gate, inside a pen denoted by more modular steel fencing.

  Hoffner opened the passenger door for Kehoe, then squeezed in behind the wheel. Lucas and Whitaker got in the back. Lucas’s beach clothes—jeans, a pair of Vans slip-ons, and a black V-neck sweater over a T-shirt—didn’t contrast too much against Whitaker’s business casual.

  She had been silent for the flight in, but now that they were inches apart and free to speak without headsets, she asked, “So, are you any nicer?” She had her full smile out now, and it looked like she had too many incisors.

  “Define nicer.”

  “That’s a no.”

  The van swung around the helicopter and Lucas watched the faces in the crowd, all turned down the street, cameras up, hoping to capture something that might get them a few more dopamine-generating YouTube hits. Welcome to the future—where everyone wants to be vicariously interesting to the feedback loop of the echo chamber.

  Fifth was closed from where they had touched down to two blocks south of the museum—a three-block spread. Traffic control and pedestrian management alone would be a logistical nightmare.

  Lucas was no stranger to the mechanics of investigations, but the display of resources was on a level he hadn’t seen before—half of the law enforcement officers in the city had to be on Fifth. Uniformed cops were stationed every ten feet and posted at every door, all dressed like the storm troopers back at the LZ. Besides acting the part of security, they were monitoring the flow of citizens and no doubt making certain that people who didn’t belong here were kept out. Fifth Avenue resembled a major artery in a police state.

  Hoffner kept the speed dialed down as he threaded the blacked-out van through emergency vehicles, various official worker bees—mostly of the law enforcement and medical examiner variety—and all manner of equipment. Lucas knew that the reduced pace had to be pushing Whitaker’s blood pressure up; she hated being a passenger almost as much as she hated driving slow.

  The ocean liner form of the Guggenheim materialized ahead, a building that opened to derision, evolved into a clas
sic, and was now the location of the incomprehensible.

  “You ready?” Whitaker asked.

  Lucas wondered if she knew how much meaning was packed into those three syllables.

  8

  Lucas stood on the sidewalk, staring up at the Wes Anderson geometry of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous public commission. The structure appeared remarkably intact considering the explosion had killed 702 people and incinerated a billion dollars of banana posters and photographs of an America that no longer existed.

  The front door and entry windows had been covered with plywood, but the char marks indicated that plenty of bad things had happened inside. An oversize plastic gerbil tube was installed as an air lock, the kind the CDC used out in the field. The sidewalk in front of the main entrance was carpeted with a grid of electric cables, conduit, and Danger! tape. There were bits of glass and garbage strewn about, and a bird was near the air lock, picking at what looked to be insulation.

  The medical examiner’s people were still carting bodies out—two jumpsuited women were negotiating a body-bag-laden gurney through the outdoor entrance to the air lock, to a line of black vans at the curb.

  Cops were everywhere.

  Whitaker put her hand on Lucas’s shoulder; the action startled him. “I’m at the end of the radio in your pocket if you need me.”

  Lucas double-checked the plastic zipper on his crime-scene overalls, then shook his head. “If I need you, I might as well leave.”

  “There’s that sweetness I missed so much.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Lucas took a breath, then pulled the door open and stepped into the plastic tunnel. The thirty feet felt deceptively long, and when he stepped through the second door into the nave proper, he found himself transported to a familiar place—hell.

  They had the Quasar task lighting dialed to equatorial solar mode. Lucas always wore sunglasses—even inside—but they did little to mask what he saw.