“So?” It was Morrison who opened the dialogue. The tone of his question said that he wasn’t pleased at being second-guessed by a nobody. But he came across as smart and focused, even if the handshake hinted at a little insecurity, and Lucas decided to be polite.
Lucas took in another mouthful of dark roast and said, “The cause of the explosion is the easy one.”
Morrison didn’t seem to like that. “Easy? It took my people—”
Kehoe cut him off. “I would like to hear what Dr. Page has to say, Ben.”
Lucas continued. “This was a thermobaric explosion.”
Morrison’s mouth popped open.
Lucas put his coffee down and said, “It’s basic physics and chemistry,” while nodding over at Kehoe. But his mind’s eye was back in the rotunda, cycling through the layout he had downloaded. “The structure is relatively intact, seven hundred and two dead people and a few punched-in walls notwithstanding. Those posters were wiped off the wall by a significant shock wave—the same shock wave that blew out all the fenestration. The snowmaker delivered the airborne fuel—a dust would be too obvious, so confetti or foil is a good guess. Aluminum foil makes the most sense, since it can be bonded with anything you want. I’d go with magnesium since it would accelerate the burn rate. Also, the color would go with the Warhol theme—his workshop, the Factory, was painted silver, and silver is closely associated with his brand. Once the air was filled with the confetti, it was ignited. My guess is that the snowmaker itself was modified to create some sort of spark or flame. Grain explosions are often set off by an electrostatic discharge created by a conveyor belt—an accidental Van de Graaff generator. Either an electrostatic discharge or an actual spark was generated. Probably by moving parts rather than electronics—which would have made it easy to get past in-house security. The spark ignited the confetti, the burn was accelerated by the magnesium, and chemistry and physics took care of the rest. The initial shock wave crushed soft tissue followed by a conflagration that pressure-cooked what was left.”
Morrison didn’t look like a man used to being surprised. “It took my guys five hours to figure that out.”
“Then you need more guys.” Lucas picked up his coffee and took another sip. “Or smarter ones.”
Kehoe gave Morrison an I-told-you-so expression.
Chawla chimed in with “That’s a neat trick, but can you give us any other added value?”
Kehoe stepped into the conversation by handing Lucas a sheaf of pages held together with an oversize paper clip. “Take a look at these.”
It was a victim list, a printout of a spreadsheet loaded with various details categorized into columns. Lucas knew what Kehoe was doing, and he resented the performing seal act, but he did it anyway.
He scanned the first page. Then the second. There were forty-five lines per page, each one dedicated to a victim. They were arranged alphabetically, and the columns contained basic grouping criteria such as sex, age, occupation, and address.
Lucas quickly flipped through all seventeen pages, put them down on the desktop beside Chawla, and said, “Okay.”
Chawla looked puzzled. “Okay, what?”
Lucas looked back at Kehoe, who nodded, so he began. “Seven hundred and two victims. Three hundred and twenty-four male, three hundred and seventy-eight female, translating to 46.1538 percent and 53.8461 percent, respectively. The largest age demographic was the forty-to-fifty group, represented by two hundred and eight individuals, one hundred and seventeen male, ninety-one female, which, interestingly, is the only segment where males overrepresent females, except for those who were forty-one, of which there were more women. Out of seven hundred and two victims, five hundred and eighteen are residents of Manhattan, followed in descending order by Connecticut, California, Paraguay—that’s a country, by the way, not a state,” he said pointedly to Chawla. “Then Maryland, New Jersey, Texas, Norway, Germany, England, Canada, and New Mexico.”
Everyone was staring, even Whitaker.
Kehoe came in with “How many of the victims had the number seven in their street addresses?”
“One hundred and sixty-one. Thirty-six had seven as a first digit; forty-one as a second digit, which was the largest group percentage-wise; three had it as the fifth digit in their street address, which was the smallest group—although two of those had five digits in their street address, of which there were only nine in all of the victims, so statistically that’s the unicorn when it comes to sevens. The most common digit in all seven hundred and two victims was two, of which there were nine hundred and eight, the second being the digit one, of which there were eight hundred and four.”
Kehoe would never smile at work, but there was no missing the approval in his eyes. “How many people aged fifty-five?”
“Thirty-eight yesterday. Three of those had birthdays today and two have birthdays tomorrow, making them fifty-six. And three fifty-four-year-olds have birthdays either today or tomorrow, which would bump them into that category.”
Chawla shook his head. “Holy shit.”
“I can do this all day,” Lucas offered, before taking another sip of the now-cold coffee and pushing himself out of the chair. “But I’m not going to. So if you’ll excuse me, I have somewhere else I’d rather be.”
Lucas stepped out of the controlled microclimate of the command vehicle into the bright fall sunshine, paying special attention to the folding steps that had been set up. Whitaker came out behind him and closed the door, blocking out the conversation between Kehoe, Chawla, and Morrison.
The crowd two blocks up was chanting again, the words False flag! False flag! False flag! on loop and he wondered if certain people misunderstood the Pledge of Allegiance to include the line one nation undereducated.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, trying to ignore the crowd generating a low-frequency hum that rose above the white noise of the city. It wasn’t easy to balance the beautiful day against the Gustave Doré scene inside the museum or the imbeciles up the street. He wondered if he was going to throw up again.
Whitaker came up behind him, and even though he wasn’t looking at her, he could tell she was smiling when she said, “You know, I’ve missed you.”
10
26 Federal Plaza
Lucas did a quick head count and there were 307 agents in the briefing room—which had to be some kind of a record. The auditorium was not dissimilar to the one he used at Columbia, only it was on a smaller scale with lower ceilings. And more guns. There was a podium and a desk at the front, offset by state-of-the-art displays that at this juncture in time were blank—an anomaly for an investigation of this magnitude. Evidently Kehoe wanted all eyes on him.
Kehoe was setting the stage for the investigation, but all future briefings—twice a day according to protocol—would be handled by the special agent in charge, Samir Chawla, who stood off to one side. The bureau was a massive bureaucracy, and it functioned on a hierarchal mechanism that was as ingrained as its collegial preppy image. Everyone had a position. And every position had a function. And every function had a purpose. All the way down to the guy who washed the official vehicles in the garage.
Kehoe was in perfect form, the appropriate mix of gravitas and authority. His upbringing was diametrically opposed to the career he had pursued—he had come from a wealthy West Coast family that was prominent not only in agriculture and industry but in politics. He had been a concert pianist by the time he was fifteen, followed by a classical education at Yale that he had walked away from to become a lawman. Lucas understood what money like that could do to a person—he had been raised around it—and very few people could break away from the expectations to take the Robert Frost road. Stories like Kehoe’s illustrated that there was something addictive about this business; all you had to do was ask all the agents who had lost their marriages and friendships and health and youth to the questions they couldn’t turn off when they went home.