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 would 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.