Under Pressure: A Lucas Page Novel

by Robert Pobi

  “I’m on my way.” He hung up.

  Lucas looked down at the hole in the tiles. Then up at the crime-scene tape. And the entire line of internal dialogue he had just engaged in rolled through his head again. Something here was off. Junior didn’t have it in him to plant mines. No fucking way.

  So who did?

  And whom did it profit?

  Cui bono?

  As Lucas turned to leave, he placed a call on the phone that was still in his hand. It rang twice before Bobby Nadeel answered. “Dr. Page, where are you? I think the shit has hit the fan here—they’re high-fiving like they’ve all gone mental.”

  Lucas walked by the NYPD men and the orc who had accompanied him into the apartment—they were seated in the herd of William Hockney’s zebra chairs, talking shop. Lucas nodded a thank you and headed for the elevator.

  “Bobby,” he said, “I need you to do something for me.”

  92

  33°03’50.7”N 117°48’31.0”W—Off the Coast of Southern California

  Major Louis “Frenchie” Chasseur looked up, and the abstract blip on his radar became a physical speck, twenty miles out. The speck rapidly grew into an indistinct blob that soon became the outline of a private jet—a Gulfstream V painted in red, with gold lettering on the side. The tail numbers designated it as Hockney 239—it was their bird.

  Major Chasseur and his wingman, Captain Emmanuel “Flip” Rodriguez, were both stationed with the 144th Fighter Wing, out of the Air National Guard Base in Fresno. The 144th was tasked with protecting American airspace from Baja up through Oregon, and their purview mandated that they handle interception and escort of tagged aircraft to one of the Southern California airports, which in this particular case meant March Air Reserve Base.

  Chasseur and Rodriguez piloted a pair of F-15Cs, each armed with four AIM-9X Sidewinder heat-seeking missiles and four AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided missiles. Backing up the array of heat-seeking and radar-guided missiles were the internal M61 Vulcans—six-barrel air-cooled 20mm Gatling guns. But they didn’t expect any resistance from the civilian aircraft they were intercepting. And even if the pilot of the jet refused to comply with their instructions, there would be no engagement—the plane had to land somewhere. And when it did, the pilot would face a list of charges. But that rarely happened; civilian pilots generally followed the rules.

  Chasseur and Rodriguez had come around the GV from the west and were now closing distance from behind. They dropped speed to match its 488-knot cruising velocity, and eased into position—Chasseur coming up on the pilot’s side of the aircraft, Rodriguez taking its six, a mile back.

  They had been scrambled by an order from the FBI that had been bounced through the DOJ to the DHS, who in turn called NORAD, who had authority over the Air National Guard. The interception had been marked as Top Priority, and Chasseur wondered what was so special about this particular jet.

  He looked over at the GV, which was about twenty yards to his right, and the pilot was looking at him through the cockpit window. Chasseur waved, and reached out on the standard frequency—121.5 MHz. “Hockney-two-three-nine, this is Griffin-two-one off your left side. Do you copy?”

  The pilot of the GV immediately came back with “Griffin-two-one, this is Hockney-two-three-nine, we copy. What can we do you for, gentlemen?”

  “Hockney-two-three-nine, we have been asked to escort you to March ARB.”

  Chasseur looked over and the pilot nodded as his voice piped in through the comm speakers in his helmet. “Understood Griffin-two-one. We’ll inform our controller and amend our destination to March Air Reserve Base.”

  Chasseur radioed the interceptor controller, confirming that they had established contact with the Gulfstream and were escorting it in.

  The NORAD controller confirmed that they received the information and wished Griffin-two-one formation a safe flight to the March Air Reserve Base.

  Interception of William Hockney Jr.’s private jet was now complete.

  93

  The security presence was gone, and no one checked his ID between the front door and the elevator.

  Lucas wondered if Nadeel would find what he had asked for. Because it was out there. Somewhere. A straight line that ran through the entire narrative. And it started before that week in Las Vegas two and a half years ago.

  But how long before?

  Because something was missing. And not just something that was supposed to be there—a known unknown. No, there was something else behind all this, and it was an unknown unknown—a factor that could not be anticipated because there was no way to predict its existence.

  It wasn’t money. Not entirely. Dollar signs might be a component of the whole thing, but it wasn’t the fuel feeding the fire—that was something else. Something personal. It was all over the story, from the bombing at the Guggenheim to the murder of William Makepeace to the attempted murder of Timo Saarinen to the deaths of the Hockney brothers. All of the crimes had sadism mixed in, which meant that this was personal.

  The elevator pinged, the door slid open, and Lucas pushed off the wall. The movement emphasized just how tired he was, and he bumped into the doorframe as he stepped out into the hall, the handcuffs in his pocket clinking off the brass doorjamb.

  A few paces later he came to the door. He took a deep breath.

  He then reached out and knocked.

  94

  Kehoe said, “Come in,” without looking up. When ten yards of Otto Hoffner’s shadow eclipsed the light spilling into the office from the war room, Kehoe lifted his head to see the big man accompanied by Page’s two graduate students. Weren’t they supposed to be on ice somewhere, waiting for Page to return?

  He looked behind them, but Page wasn’t there. “Yes?” he said.

  Nadeel stepped forward, that same big porcelain grin of before upholstering his face. He had a laptop under his arm. “I found something you need to see.”

  Kehoe pulled one of the standard poses from his repertoire, leaning back in his seat, arms folded over his chest. “Okay.”

  Nadeel put the loaner laptop down on Kehoe’s desk and went into his technological savant routine of massaging the keyboard with the speed, finesse, and accuracy of a concert pianist. He pulled up a group of PDFs and tapped the screen with his finger. “Dr. Page called me about twenty minutes ago and told me to look for this.”

  Kehoe looked at the forms the kid had pulled up but he didn’t feel like peering through a forest of camouflage to find tiny details. “Just what, precisely, are you showing me, Mr. Nadeel?”

  “These are insurance policies from 1997.”

  “Nineteen ninety-seven?”

  “Yes, sir, mister—um, special agent in charge, sir.”

  “And these are relevant how?”

  The kid flicked the screen again as if the answer were self-evident. “Dr. Page figured it out. Or I should say he figured out where to look. But he was right, of course. He always is,” the kid said matter-of-factly. “Right there. Boris Goldman.”

  Kehoe looked at the policy, but there was nothing obvious to focus on. “And who is Boris Goldman?”

  “A man who died.”

  “Let’s do this the short way, Mr. Nadeel.”

  “Sorry. Yes. Okay, Dr. Page said that the answer was in what wasn’t there, and what wasn’t there was a perfect crime—the bomber had screwed up; he had left Dr. Saarinen alive.”

  Kehoe held up a hand. “The bomb he planted at the internet hub on Eighth failed to detonate.”

  “That was on purpose; Dr. Page told you that.” The way Nadeel said it suggested that Kehoe was either foolish or stupid to think anything else.

  “Let’s assume you’re right.”

  Nadeel gave him a look, and for an instant Kehoe thought Page was standing in front of him. Were all eggheads like this?

  Nadeel continued. “He told me to take the anomaly apart. To go back and look at all the big electrical surges in Saarinen’s life. And the largest blip on his x-axis was the
death of his son.” Nadeel’s voice cracked and he took a deep breath to compose himself. “But she found it.”

  Kehoe shifted attention to Jespersen. She was tall, with a thin face that could have been an inspiration for Louis Icart, but she bit her bottom lip for a second and it wiped out the comparison. “Saarinen’s son died in February 2005—paramilitary rebels blew up the bus he was on, killing all thirty-six passengers and the driver. The bus was operated by Saarinen’s employer—an NPO operating through the UN—TLR Solutions. I ran down all the paperwork that was filed with the state department, and the one common denominator was that all the victims had corporate insurance policies. I’m sure your people found the same thing.”

  There was no missing that she thought they hadn’t, and Kehoe ignored the dig at his team.

  She continued. “I went back through the insurance histories of all the people on that bus, and I was looking at the policy of one Michelle Lariviere, a French national. Her policy payout had gone into dispute because a week before she was murdered in the attack, she filed for divorce and had changed the name of the beneficiary from her husband to her mother. She had filled out and signed the paperwork, but hadn’t mailed it in. The company eventually settled, paying out to the mother because Ms. Lariviere had the change of beneficiary witnessed. All this got me thinking. So I looked up every insurance policy on every victim throughout their lives, and I found something with Boris Goldman.” She pointed at the screen. “When Mr. Goldman was in his first year at university, he purchased a term life insurance policy from a kiosk set up on campus. He made payments for three years but eventually let the policy lapse. But look at his beneficiary.” She displayed Nadeel’s facility with the keyboard as she brought up the form. “Right there.”

  Kehoe read the name of Boris Goldman’s beneficiary. “Benjamin Frosst.” He let it all sink in.

  Nadeel nodded. “Which means that Timo Saarinen and Benjamin Frosst are connected by the attack that killed Saarinen’s son in 1997.”

  95

  Twenty Miles out of March Air Reserve Base, Southern California

  Major Chasseur and his wingman, Captain Rodriguez, had escorted the inbound Gulfstream across the last swath of the Pacific before turning northeast, toward MARB. The flight, from first contact until now, had taken a little more than thirty-nine minutes at the GV’s cruising speed of 488 knots, and they were twenty miles out from the base. There had been no further communication with the pilot of the GV—there had been no need for any.

  “March tower, this is Griffin-two-one flight with you at twenty miles southwest, escorting Hockney two-three-nine.”

  The controller at MARB came back with, “Griffin-two-one flight, this is March tower, we have you and Hockney two-three-nine twenty miles southwest. No other traffic, runway two-two is in use, wind is two-five-zero at ten, call five miles final.”

  Chasseur heard the pilot of the Gulfstream acknowledge his landing instructions from MARB, and he looked over at the private jet.

  Chasseur waved.

  The pilot waved back.

  Chasseur was turning back to his instrumentation when there was a bright flash, and the fuselage of the Gulfstream blew open behind one of the wings.

  Chasseur was an experienced combat veteran, with more than four hundred combat sorties to his name, and he instinctively veered away from the other aircraft.

  As he looked over, the wing peeled off, torquing the fuselage as it ripped away. The aircraft broke in two and hung in the sky for an instant as momentum momentarily beat out gravity.

  And then it began to fall.

  Chasseur keyed his mic. “March tower, Griffin-two-one— repeat: this is Griffin-two-one, escorting Hockney-two-three-nine, do you copy?” Hockney-two-three-niner, do you copy?”

  “Affirmative, Griffin-two-one, we copy.”

  “Hockney-two-three-nine is going down. I repeat: Hockney-two-three-nine is going down. It was not fired upon. I repeat, it was not fired upon. It just … blew up.” Chasseur began a slow arc around the falling aircraft, Rodriguez on his tail, a mile back.

  “Copy, Griffin-two-one. We are initiating emergency response measures. What are your intentions?”

  “Roger, March tower. We’ll establish a cap and inform you of developments.” Chasseur began to bank right. “Two-two, follow me.”

  As Chasseur started to circle around the fist of smoke that the wind was now breaking up, he saw the form of a man on fire cartwheeling through the debris field, toward the earth below.

  96

  After knocking, Lucas took a step back; since the trip through the Navigator’s windshield, he looked like all the king’s soldiers and all the king’s men had been high when they slapped his parts together again and he didn’t want to scare anyone.

  In what could have been thirty seconds or thirty minutes, the big cantilevered panel swung in. Once again, Saarinen looked surprised to see him. “Dr. Page? You look—” He stopped. “Would you like to come in?” He wore a pair of gray pants and a white shirt with the cuffs rolled up. The little bulldog was in his arms, a canine beanbag with fat little feet.

  Lucas limped over the threshold and followed Saarinen through the foyer, to the transept where the kitchen and living room intersected. Like the other night, the apartment was organized and staged, but this time Saarinen was not drinking his supper.

  The man examined Lucas for a few moments before placing the dog down on the floor. The puppy sniffed at Lucas’s ankle before waddling off to the kitchen, where Lucas heard him drinking. Saarinen gestured to the living room.

  The coffee table had been moved up against the sofa where he had sat the other night, probably to give the dog room to play, but it prevented Lucas from sitting down. He swung around it and went to the big windows, drawn to the view. Tonight they were closed against the rain, and the city outside looked like a 1940s film—dark, shiny, and mostly blue.

  “What happened to you, Dr. Page?” Saarinen’s reflection in the window asked from somewhere behind and to his left.

  “This is from my run-in with Mr. Frosst.”

  The reflection over Lucas’s shoulder nodded. “Mr. Frosst was nothing if not sui generis. Much like yourself.”

  “Yeah, well—” And Lucas let the sentence die because he had no idea what he was supposed to say to that.

  “Would you like some water?” The reflection asked. “Or aspirin?”

  Lucas had to smile. “Do I look that bad?”

  The reflection crossed its arms. “You look like you need a rest.”

  Lucas kept his focus on the museum across the street. The Hayden Big Bang Theater was lit up in suboceanic blues, the domed sphere within the glass cube straight out of a Crichton novel. Water rippled the surface, adding to the effect. “Yeah, well—” he said again.

  Saarinen’s reflection sat down in one of the Wassily chairs that faced the sofa, his body language conveying the same weary defeat it had the other night.

  The reflection of the puppy crossed across the back of the room, from frame left to frame right, chasing a little rubber ball with too-big paws. “What can I do for you, Dr. Page?”

  The rest of the murders had been perfectly executed; Saarinen’s survival had been an outlier, an accident. The unpredictable element of luck had pooched the calculation. “I know it wasn’t the Hockneys. And I know Frosst was only a component. And those five kids blown up on the day Frosst came after me? They were just subcontractors. Patsies. I want the person who set them in motion.”

  The reflection nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe it isn’t the who but the why that you should be focusing on.” Saarinen stood up and went to the Knoll console.

  Lucas didn’t bother nodding. “I already know the why.”

  The reflection pulled out a pair of highballs that looked like they had been carved out of ice. He placed them on the coffee table, then disappeared into the kitchen, where Lucas heard the freezer open. Saarinen came back with a bottle of vodka and a bottle of Perrier.

 
; “And what is the why, Dr. Page?”

  “All this time I’ve been asking the wrong question—Cui bono? The right question was Who does this hurt? This was about something much more personal than money; this was about revenge.”

  Behind him, the puppy came ripping back into the room, swerving after the ball like a fat little drunk trying to run down a panicked chicken. Saarinen said, “Come here, pentu koira. Let me put you away,” and picked up the little bulldog and carried him offscreen.

  Lucas stared out at the museum across the street for a few moments. It was amazing how different it looked from up here. It was all a matter of perspective—nudging the molecules.

  Saarinen’s reflection came back into the room and pulled the table away from the sofa, clearing a path for Lucas to sit down. Then he opened the vodka and poured himself a drink before sitting down. The whole exercise looked odd in reverse, as if something were wrong—more perspective at work.

  Saarinen picked up his vodka and resumed his position in the chrome tube and black leather chair. He faced the sofa. “Revenge?”

  Lucas turned his back on the city and put his hands into his jacket pockets—which took some of the weight off his shoulders. “Everything about these bombings, from the way the people in the Guggenheim were incinerated to the way William Hockney stood on that land mine all night long, was personal. Someone was getting back at the Hockneys. Maybe even the world. And—”

  Saarinen raised the glass to his lips and Lucas realized what had been wrong with the reflection a few seconds earlier—Saarinen was left-handed.

  And, Lucas got it.

  All of it.

  He had missed it because he was too fucked up by the nature of the crimes to see through it. He told them to look for what was missing. And what was missing was his own impartiality.

  He knew who had done all this.