Luthecker (3 page)

“Alex, this can go very easy, or very difficult for you. It’s your choice.”

Luthecker showed no perceptible reaction.

“Do you believe in God, Doctor Lloyd?” He asked.

Lloyd noticed his voice was surprisingly calm and soft-spoken, yet crystal clear.

“If I said yes, would that make you more comfortable?”

“Let me answer that for you. You don’t. Understandable, considering what you’ve seen. And what you’ve done.”

“Do
you
?” Lloyd quickly flipped back. A discussion of religious belief systems, combined with a world-view filtered through the prism of victimization. Nothing remarkable so far, he thought.

“I think “God” is less a sentient being than he is the indifferent collective momentum of all things.”

Lloyd paused before responding. Assessed Luthecker’s statement. It revealed an obvious above average intellect. It also revealed what was more than likely a self-educated, self-
deluded
individual, with a heavy dose of the Internet as teacher.

“What does that actually mean?” He finally asked.

“Some people recognize this, and try to control that momentum. When your actions disturb their efforts, you get their attention.”

Luthecker wasn’t answering questions, he was preaching. A crusader. One that was obviously at odds with the U.S. Government. Perfect. Lloyd loved dealing with these types of extremists. He tried not to smile as he moved the young man along.

“Is that what you did? “Disturb the “momentum” by pointing out the bomber? Did you know him?”

“And that effort moves quickly, and often violently, to correct any aberrations in their plan.”

Luthecker sat back in his chair and waited, signaling to Lloyd that it was his move. Lloyd remained expressionless. He finally decided it was his turn to speak.

“Could you explain to me what you mean by the “momentum of all things?” He asked.

Luthecker studied Lloyd a moment before responding.

“The universe consists of countless patterns, some that intersect and some that do not, but all of which are related, and those patterns are what form the momentum.”

“I’m still not following you.”

Luthecker leaned in towards Lloyd, ever so slightly.

“All human behavior happens in patterns, does it not, Doctor Lloyd? That’s what you study. That’s why you’re here. You’re here trying to find out who, or what, I am. I mean, you are “the best”, aren’t you? At seeing what makes people “tick”? Well then let me help you: I saw the patterns of one man’s life and stepped into the momentum to save a few people. And that introduced an “unknown” into the plan, which got the planners attention, which in turn allowed the momentum to lead you straight to me. Because despite their efforts, it will not be controlled.”

Lloyd studied Luthecker a moment before responding.

“Hand of God then.” He finally baited.

“Did you know that the extended side effects of benzodiazepine addiction includes suicidal impulses and retrograde amnesia? Do you think that the drug is designed that way to keep the nightmares from finally catching up with you?”

“Shut the fuck up with the bullshit, and answer my questions.” Lloyd snapped back. He was thrown. Brown was right. Luthecker was a real danger. He somehow had access to personnel records. He had to bring this interrogation around, fast, with actionable intel. “Now this “momentum” you’re babbling about.” He continued. “That’s God, right?? Maybe Allah? And you’re acting on behalf of him, against the planners, right?”

“It makes your job easier to frame it that way, doesn’t it? But no. That’s not what I’m talking about. You’re not listening.”

“I am listening now. Explain.”

Lloyd felt a bit light headed. He wanted to kick himself for skipping out on his meds before this initial conversation. How in the Hell could this kid know?

“For all of your alleged expertise, you really can’t see what’s happening here, can you?”

Luthecker locked eyes with Lloyd and gave that barely perceptible smile once again.

“This conversation is not a challenge of your abilities, Doctor Lloyd. It’s a test of mine. It’s the source of the alarm bells in your head. The piece of the puzzle on the plane ride over here that you couldn’t figure out.”

Lloyd paused. This kid was really good.

“And what abilities of yours exactly are we talking about?”

“Do you know why most people would be destroyed if they could truly interpret the patterns that created their fate?”

Lloyd’s heart began to race a bit. This was nothing unusual, he tried to tell himself. It was only a symptom of anxiety, something he had felt many times before, and he fought to control it.

“It removes the illusion.” Luthecker added, answering his own question.

“And what…what illusion is that?” Lloyd asked. He realized he was sweating. He resisted the urge to pad his forehead.

“That they can out run their choices.”

Lloyd’s heart kept racing. It was diazepam withdrawal and he knew it. He didn’t think he would need it with Luthecker, considering it was just questions, and now he was really regretting it.

He couldn’t understand why Luthecker was making him so nervous. He took a deep breath to calm himself. He may have to cut this initial session short, and pick it up again later in the day, he decided.

He caught Luthecker staring at him again, with those god-awful rapid moving eyes.

“Stop it…” Lloyd whispered out of defensive instinct.

“It’s just killing you, isn’t it? The weight of it all. The momentum of your choices.”

Luthecker leaned in closer, seizing the moment, like a fighter with his opponent on the ropes. He spoke barely above a whisper.

“Let me tell you what I see in the patterns that created David Lloyd. He was severely abused as a child. Like many who are, he carried it forward. Torture was home for him. He chose a path that allowed him to legitimize his fantasies. He murdered people in Iraq. And he liked it. Like his father before him, he developed a taste for young boys. Abuse begets abuse, does it not? His superiors knew this, but covered it up, for the good of God and Country, but mostly because he was so good at what they wanted him for. But now his indiscretions and addictions have become insatiable, and he’s become unstable. A liability. So they decided that he had one more use, as a sacrificial lamb in order to see if I was truly capable of what they suspect.”

Lloyd sprung out of his chair in shock, falling backwards into the concrete wall.

“How…?”

“It’s all over your face.”

Lloyd turned white. Somehow his darkest secrets had been exposed. It hit him like a shockwave. He couldn’t comprehend it. Couldn’t get his head around it. His mind started to shut down. His heart pounded like it never had before, like it might burst from his chest. He began to shake.

“As you know, they’re recording this conversation. What you don’t know, and what I do, is how it all ends. They’re waiting for you at your hotel. But the shame of being exposed as a murderer and a pedophile is too much for you, isn’t it? You’re not going to let them get you alive, are you?”

Luthecker’s voice chilled Lloyd to the bone.

He had to get out. He had to take care of things. Damage control mode. How the fuck could this twenty-two year old kid whom he’d never laid eyes on before know all this? He ripped through the steel door and out of the room in sheer panic.

“Sir!?” The guard asked, gun ready.

Lloyd ignored him. He scanned the hallway.

“Where’s Colonel Brown?”

The guard looked back and forth between Lloyd and Luthecker before answering.

“He left, as soon as you went in, sir.”

Lloyd was already running down the hallway.

He blasted through the lobby, knocking over chairs, people, paperwork off desks.

He couldn’t believe what had happened. Brown had used him. Exposed him. Betrayed an unspoken honor to never speak of the secrets of those who did the dirty work to keep the world safe. That was the only explanation.

He sprinted to his car, got inside, and instinctively ducked low, as if to hide. He was completely out of breath, covered in sweat, the shaking becoming uncontrollable. He was destroyed and he knew it. He could only imagine them going through the interrogation tapes from Iraq. Sorting through the images on his computer. Scrutinizing his travel records. Searching his business apartment. Why would Brown do this to him? He didn’t know where to go, what to do. What would he tell his wife? His kids? His head was spinning, his anxiety on overdrive. He needed his meds. The trial would be a public spectacle of shame. In prison he’d be a dead man and he knew it. His stomach churned, causing him to vomited suddenly, all over his lap and the steering wheel of the car.

Deep in the recesses of his mind, he had often wondered what this day would be like.

He started to sob. He couldn’t face them. He couldn’t go home. He had to escape this, had to have time to think. He had no options. It was all over. His life was over. The pain in his chest became nearly unbearable. The edges of his visions started to go black.

Then, a moment of stillness washed across his face, the sudden calm before a rash act of finality.

He turned to the glovebox. Reached for it. Opened it.

Inside lay a matte black Sig Sauer P250 9mm semiautomatic. His standard sidearm for many years. He always stashed one in a rental, no matter what city he was in. An old habit born out of many years working in actively hostile environments.

Lloyd removed it from its resting place. Carefully chambered a round. Closed his eyes. Slowly placed the end of the barrel underneath his chin.

And pulled the trigger.

NIKKI

N
ikki Ellis stared at her six large computer monitors, the double-stacked, half-hexagon arrangement of screens taking up the entire wall in front of her desk.

Her eyes darted from screen to screen, fingers quickly tapping the touch monitors, updating each picture, either refreshing the information or changing the video feed entirely, from graphs, to market analysis, to talking heads, to live coverage of various events worldwide deemed newsworthy. To the untrained eye, it was an overwhelming sea of incidental information. But to Nikki, there was something symphonic about it, a beautiful rhythm that only she could follow. She could see connections between seemingly unrelated sound bites and bits of data, random numbers, happenings, calculations and images, that to her were not random at all. It helped that she had a goal in mind, and knew exactly what to look for, and what to ignore. With a keen eye and the help of PHOEBE, the modeling software she had designed to search and sort through the countless details, she waded through economic reports, political speeches, weather patterns, and the status of multiple wars across the globe.

There was more: Military budgets. Interest rates. Trade routes. Consumer spending. Energy consumption estimates. National debt. The constantly fluctuating value of the U.S. dollar.

The give-away to her was new oil tanker leases.

Saudi Arabia was discreetly adding to its fleet, which could only mean one thing: A step up in production.

Nikki worked in the world of energy futures trading, and her specialty was the lifeblood of civilization, in its most raw form: crude oil.

The fact that the world’s largest supplier of oil looked to ramp up production in this current environment of uncertainty meant to her that an attempt at some form of a global economic stabilization process had begun, and it included a temporary adjustment downward to the price of oil.

Her firm, Kittner-Kusch, a hedge fund specializing in energy futures, was founded by former Enrad Energy trader Michael Kittner. Enrad, which up until four years ago was the world’s largest energy trading firm, had exchanged trillions of dollars betting on the future price of oil and gas on a daily basis, but subsequently had been torn apart by illegal activity and scandal. Price fixing, insider trading, fraud, and outright theft had brought the firm down, made all the worse when top executives shamelessly cashed out and left the average stockholder holding the bag, wiping out entire life savings, not only defrauding its workers of hard earned millions, but also destroying thousands of lives.

When Federal investigation into the energy giants’ misdeeds began, several traders saw the writing on the wall and decided to walk away long before indictments were handed out, and thus avoided prosecution. Michael was one of those traders. The collapse of Enrad was a financial disaster of epic proportions, with hundreds of billions lost, but “small fish” like Kittner, and several others like him, managed to cash out relatively well. He personally walked away with a trifle 30 million dollar take, and after the furor and legal wrangling was over, he, along with his attorney Stephen Kusch, used that money to seed Kittner-Kusch, a hedge fund specializing in what they knew best, energy, thus filling a void in the futures markets left by the failing giant.

Now, with over 20 billion under management, the small firm of just twenty-seven traders was beginning to make a name for itself. And one of the names that was beginning to stand out was Nikki Ellis.

When Nikki graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the banking industry had just collapsed.

Despite the fact that most firms were downsizing if not out right being crushed into non-existence by the large amount of toxic assets on their books, nearly every institution that had a prayer of surviving recruited her heavily. At M.I.T. she was originally a software engineer, and before she turned her attention to Wall Street and the energy sector, her ability to program accurate modeling algorithms had become legendary. It was at the Institute that she had developed PHOEBE, which she had named after the Titan Goddess of intellect and prophecy. A software program that could sort through literally billions of data points in search of patterns, it had proven accurate and flexible in its applications, as long as it was given strict parameters to work within. Nikki had made it clear to her professors that the software alone was in no way some sort of electronic soothsayer, however. In untrained hands it was useless, and it didn’t connect anything it wasn’t told to. “Phoebe doesn’t do random”, was the way she had put it, because despite its abilities to organize data, it still took a skilled human eye to actually know what to look for.