Under Pressure: A Lucas Page Novel

by Robert Pobi

  He didn’t want to talk about it. Not now. A few seconds after he had stepped into the rotunda at the Guggenheim he had pushed it away, and for a million practical reasons—some of which she had just mentioned—he couldn’t allow himself to think about the past. If he did, he would never leave the house, let alone get involved with another investigation—especially this one. No, denial was an effective tool in the art of self-preservation. “I’m fine. It’s just been a long day.”

  “No shit—I’ve been watching the news. It looks like people are losing their minds.” She paused. “I mean more than usual.” Then, in an obvious bid to change the topic, she said, “I’m sorry about what Laurie and Alisha did to the study—I didn’t realize it would get so out of hand.”

  He had no idea what she was talking about. “What’s with the study?” He walked down the hall and through the big double doors. He turned on the Tiffany table lamp and the slag glass shade threw a warm green over half the room. There were orange construction paper pumpkins and black foil bats with googly eyes along the shelves, but there was something else new, and it hit him when he scanned the shelving.

  He flipped on the chandelier, and the order came to life. “Laurie and Alisha did this?”

  “They were in there all day on Friday afternoon before I picked you up at work to head out here.”

  The girls had shuffled the entire library, three walls of books consisting mostly of rare editions on the history of astronomy, mathematics, and astrophysics—3,212 volumes.

  Erin’s voice was faraway when she said, “I’m sorry—it seemed harmless and I didn’t realize they could do so much damage in a few hours. I thought they’d get bored and stop. But they really mixed your library up.”

  Lucas wasn’t really listening to her. He found their starting point—the shelf in the northeast corner of the room—and he took the book down—a bound copy of George Ellery Hale’s first scientific paper at MIT, written in 1886; thirty-one pages in a calfskin binding. He held it in his hand for a second, then looked up at the book beside it.

  “They were just having fun,” she said, probably thinking his silence indicated disappointment. “They didn’t mean to make a mess.”

  Lucas swallowed a single time. “This isn’t a mess; this is organized.” He walked down the row of shelving. “Perfectly.”

  “What do you mean? I saw the room, Luke, they mixed everything up.”

  “No, they didn’t.” He stopped at the end of the sequence, at the 2,500-page Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics—the volumes shuffled around—3, 1, 2, 4. “It used to be alphabetic by author; they reorganized them by number of pages, ascending.” He stood there, smiling. “They did this together?”

  “Alisha told Laurie where to put the books: Laurie was the muscle, Alisha the brains.”

  “Go wake her up; I want to ask her some questions.”

  “You are not going to ask her the square root of self-indulgence at two in the morning. She gets to be a little girl—she deserves that. She gets to be three and a half.”

  Lucas sat down on the sofa, the Hale volume still in his hand.

  “So, are you done with the bureau? Are you coming back out here?”

  Lucas knew what she was doing, and she was right. “No, I can’t.” But he slipped the calendar pieces around in his head and found a win-win. “Besides, we have to get Maude registered at LaGuardia. You guys need to come back. If you don’t want to drive in, I can have Kehoe send someone out in the morning.”

  “Forget it. I’ll drive us back. I have to go into the hospital anyway to look at the new office.” Erin didn’t sigh, but she came close. “I saw the news. And that letter. Is this guy really that crazy?”

  “That letter is horseshit—he’s just trying to fuck with the bureau.” And succeeding. “We’ll hear from him again, but it won’t be another letter, it will be another bomb.”

  “What’s happening to people?” she asked.

  There were a million ways he could answer that particular question, and all of them would be true. “The world is a complicated place.” He heard the waves in the background and switched conversational gears. “You outside?”

  “Yeah. Couldn’t sleep.”

  And he knew that she meant because he hadn’t called. “I’ll try to be more considerate.”

  “I’m just being selfish. Which I have every right to be, by the way.”

  After the last time, he would have understood an ultimatum—the bureau or the family. But she would never do that. “Yes, you do.”

  “Call Dingo and you two boys go get some food. It will clear your mind. And put some fuel in your stomach.”

  “I was just thinking about that.” He wished that he had stayed out at the beach with his family; in a thousand years, none of this would matter, and he would have spent the only commodity he had—time—on other people. “Smooch the kids for me?”

  “Of course. Now go catch some bad guys so we can get back to our baseline.”

  “I love you.”

  “I know.” And she hung up.

  23

  Lucas and Dingo stood on the corner of 74th and Madison. Lucas was still in jeans and the V-neck, but he had added a sports coat. Dingo was in his standard uniform of shorts and a hoodie, still in his street feet.

  The window of the Apple store across Madison was a pleasing display of aluminum chassis with rounded corners and floating icons of various apps—a noted component in their shift from retail to religion. Which pulled Lucas’s focus back to the investigation. And that letter. It was impossible to align the molecules so that the thing worked. Plus, there was no way the people who had come up with that Wile E. Coyote IED at the Guggenheim were stupid enough to think that Americans would ever give up their iPhones.

  Lucas eyed the traffic heading north on Madison—all four cars—looking for a taxi. Chance paid off, and an on-duty cab was a block and a half down. Lucas raised his hand.

  From somewhere behind him, Dingo’s voice said, “You have that I’m-working-on-a-Rubik’s-Cube look you get when you’re trying to figure shit out.”

  He kept his eye on the cab. And his hand in the air. “I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast.”

  “I’ve seen you go days without eating. Which is why you’re six-foot-three and weigh as much as the average house cat. You look like Jack Skellington. And that hair doesn’t help.”

  He had forgotten about the hair—he really needed to do something about it.

  The taxi crossed 73rd, flashed his lights, and threw on the index.

  “Here’s our cab.”

  “You ever heard of Uber? They’re, like, chauffeurs, man. And the cars don’t smell like rented bowling shoes.”

  Lucas held the door open. “Would you please get in?”

  Of course the cab smelled like rented bowling shoes.

  They charged up Madison, and Lucas wondered if the driver was related to Whitaker. But traffic was sparse, and Lucas settled in when they turned on 79th to cut across the park.

  “So why, exactly, are we going across town at two-thirty in the morning to eat poison?” Dingo pointed at the world outside. “It looks like everyone has been Raptured.”

  “I need a break.” He thought about Erin’s orders. “And food.”

  “I have oatmeal at my place. And beer. We could have stayed in, watched Frankenstein, and played Yahtzee; I bet you love Yahtzee.”

  “Is there something wrong with going out?”

  Dingo shrugged. “I never leave the house this time of the year; every Halloween some asshole comes up to me, points at my feet, and says, ‘Cool costume, bro! Where can I buy those?’”

  The canyon of 79th opened up as they crossed Fifth Avenue, then closed in with the dark canopy of the park. Lucas said, “No one’s that stupid,” but he did a lousy job of selling it.

  * * *

  Gray’s Papaya was empty except for an old lady carrying a bagful of umbrellas and a man in a suit who kept slurping from a drink that sounde
d like it had been empty for a good hour. Lucas ordered two recession specials (both with onions) and two papaya drinks from the little Filipino guy with rockabilly sideburns behind the counter.

  They stood by the window, looking out on Broadway.

  Dingo poked his hot dog with a finger. “You eat this stuff too much.”

  “You can’t kill me—not with anything man-made.” Lucas held up his prosthetic hand to demonstrate his point.

  “This, my friend…”—Dingo jabbed the dog again—“is not man-made. This is sorcery, necromancy, and against the Geneva Conventions.”

  But Lucas wasn’t paying attention—his mind was back in the files, trying to find something that simply wasn’t there. Once again he asked himself, Who would the bombing profit?

  “Ground control to Major Page.”

  “What? Sorry. My mind is somewhere else.”

  “I can see that. I assume you’re thinking about the techtard who sent that letter.”

  Lucas smiled in spite of himself and took a sip of his drink, which tasted like a Popsicle mixed with shaving cream. “The only thing I can tell you about these people is that they don’t hate technology; they’re just fucking with us.”

  “So you have frat boys blowing shit up.” Dingo smiled and gave the hot dog a theatrical sniff. “There, solved it for you.”

  Lucas realized that Erin had been right—he was hungry. But he didn’t feel like eating and he kept staring at his food, as if that would make him want to eat. “This wasn’t some dickhead in a Ryder truck loaded up with diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate; this was complicated—overly complicated. This target was specific and the people responsible took the pains to do it in a specific—and very creative—way. But how does killing a bunch of people during a gala for a company that does environmental impact assessment and cleanup help the cause of someone who wants a revolution against technology? It’s a hundred and eighty degrees against brand.” He took a bite.

  The dog tasted exactly like it had since he was a child, and suddenly he was hungry. Mrs. Page had brought him here the first time. They had pulled up in the Bentley and walked into complete and absolute silence. It was her attempt at finding a child-friendly place; Lucas found out years later that she had heard one of the women at her manicurist promising their son Gray’s Papaya if he behaved while she had her nails done. Of course Mrs. Page was horrified that the place had very little to do with papayas. But she tried a hot dog and a drink. And every couple of months after that, they would have supper there. Once, not long after he had started at MIT, Mr. Teach had driven her up to deliver a box of Gray’s Papaya hot dogs. Lucas and the girls he shared his apartment with had eaten them for three days.

  Dingo leaned over and asked, “Maybe you’re asking the wrong questions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How the hell should I know? You’re the guy with all the answers.”

  24

  Tribeca

  Billy Zhang pulled up to the light on the intersection of Harrison and Hudson Streets. It was late now, and he had been Ubering people around since finishing his shift at the restaurant, a little after six that evening. His ass was sore and he had had enough of picking up, driving around, and dropping off drunks—which was basically what his nighttime job amounted to: a shuttle service for alcoholics.

  But this was the last one. He had four blocks to go, where he’d drop the drunk kid in the back off at his apartment. Then he’d zip up to the Bronx to get about four hours of sleep before he went to work at his morning job as a real estate agent. No, the American Dream was alive and well, as long as he didn’t die of a heart attack before he achieved it.

  The kid in the back was mumbling something, and Billy looked up in the mirror. “Sorry?” he asked.

  “What country are you from?”

  “American,” he said proudly. He had immigrated nine years back and was now a proud citizen.

  “Where you from?”

  “The Bronx.”

  “No. Jesus, before that. What country? No speak-y Eng-rish?”

  The light went green and Billy turned right onto Hudson. “I spea—”

  But Billy never completed the turn. His answer was never delivered. And the argument never happened.

  Because the Western Union Building they were passing on Hudson Street exploded, blowing the car off its wheels, collaterally taking out a fire hydrant and two pedestrians before flattening it against a concrete wall.

  25

  72nd and Broadway

  Lucas was washing a bite of hot dog down with a jolt of papaya drink when Broadway lit up in one massive whump of white, then blinked out.

  Dingo said, “What the fuck was that?”

  The few pedestrians who were out all stopped and turned downtown, toward the flash.

  “Two … three … four…” Lucas put his drink down as he began to count out loud. “Five … six … seven…”

  Everyone in sight turned to the south and looked up.

  “Eight … nine … ten…”

  With the hot dog still in his hand, he started outside.

  “Eleven … twelve … thirteen…”

  He stopped at the free newspaper dispensers on the corner. Everyone on Broadway was turned south-southwest, looking up at the sky.

  “Fourteen … fifteen … sixteen…”

  He followed their line of sight but didn’t see anything.

  “Seventeen … eighteen … nineteen…”

  He stared up at the sky in the general direction the flash had come from.

  “Twenty … twenty-one … twenty-two…”

  A woman behind him asked someone offstage, “Did you see that?”

  “Twenty-three … twenty-four … twenty-five…”

  Lucas knew that his calculations were getting close to the end of the island.

  “Twenty-six … twenty-seven … twenty-eight…”

  Dingo appeared beside him, chewing loudly. “You okay?”

  Lucas nodded, but kept counting. “Twenty-nine … thirty … thirty-one—” And that was when the sound wave came rolling in, like a thunderclap let loose underground.

  All of his software fired up and he did the math, calculating the distance from the interval of time between the flash and the sound wave.

  Six miles out.

  Which meant Tribeca.

  He didn’t bother worrying that it had been the FBI offices—they were in the general vicinity, but more to the east. This was something else.

  A black guy walking toward him scrolling on his phone stopped dead in his tracks. He smacked his cell phone. “What the fuck?” He looked up at them and shrugged. “Fucking technology, man. Never works.”

  A voice behind him said, “Hello? Bennie? Hello? Hello?”

  A woman at the subway stop across the intersection was yelling at her phone and shaking it.

  Others were frantically tapping away on their cell phones, as if they weren’t working.

  Dingo eased up beside Lucas, holding up his hot dog. A monstrous black jellyfish of smoke reached into the sky to the south, its belly rippling with light from the fire below. “What the fuck is that?” he asked.

  The question jarred something loose in Lucas’s gears, and he remembered what lay in that direction. “Phase Two.”

  26

  60 Hudson Street

  The scene around 60 Hudson Street looked like fire engines had been on sale with zero percent financing and no money down. The wire had been set up two blocks out, but the explosion had spread debris beyond the control zone and the wind blowing in from the ocean was carrying smoke up to the Bronx.

  The news vans were on site and had probably arrived while Lucas was still counting out loud on Broadway—those people slept in their shoes and kept microphones in their pockets. They were outside the line, but doing their best to convince everyone at home that no matter where they were in the country, they were in grave danger (and that there would be more updates after the commercial break, which was bein
g brought to them by Rascal scooters).

  Whitaker honked at the herd of pedestrians milling about in the middle of the street, but they parted only after she hit the siren. Once through the crowd, she rolled up to the barrier and the duty cops—who were dressed in full tactical gear—checked their badges before letting them through.

  They crawled up the block, steering around the larger chunks of debris, and parked among the coterie of FBI vehicles behind the big command vehicle. The Blue Bird had its doors open, and windbreaker-clad acolytes scrambled in and out.

  There was debris everywhere, from small bricks and dust to garden-shed-sized chunks of burned buildings. Computer parts, insulation, and thousands of feet of cable littered the street, and windows up and down the block were blown out. A hydrant had been knocked off its bolts (no doubt by the car embedded in the building behind it), sending a geyser into the sky that no one seemed to be paying attention to. Hoses crisscrossed the road, and the flame jumpers had three dozen nozzles trained on what was left of the building, sending big belches of steam into the air.

  The west and north walls were almost entirely gone, exposing floors and internal organs like a cutaway architectural model. Burning cables dangled from the walls and ceilings, some of them sparking like nerve endings trying to kick-start phantom limbs. All that was missing from the scene was Snake Plissken.

  Of the dozen ambulances lined up, only one had the back doors open. A firefighter was seated on the bumper, sucking on an oxygen mask. There didn’t look to be any other victims. Or survivors.

  Chawla was beside the command vehicle, typing on his phone with his thumbs. He glanced up and greeted Lucas and Whitaker with “Special Agent Whitaker, Dr. Page.” He expressed neither surprise nor pleasure that they were here. “The Machine Bomber blew up an internet hub.”

  “Yes. I know. I’m right here in front of it.”

  “Which is what he said he’d do.”