At least, that’s what they wanted us to believe.
“I guess some things aren’t meant to be.” Skylar exhaled with feigned and exaggerated disappointment.
Listening from inside his vehicle, Barnes couldn’t help but smile. The girl did have a way. No wonder the old man was so smitten with her. Barnes sharpened the focus of his binoculars onto the back of her dirty-blonde head ninety-seven feet away. He could hear her breathing.
“I’m sorry. I know how badly you wanted this.” Jacob’s voice was compassionate. “You still in Woodbury?”
“Yeah.” Her voice wavered ever so slightly. She was having trouble containing her excitement. “I guess I’m going to have to get used to it . . .”
He paused. The man was no dummy. “You’re messing with me, aren’t you?”
She held it for as long as she could. “I did it! I got the job!”
“Congratulations! You deserve it.” He paused, genuinely thrilled. “Hurry up and get back to the city so we can go out and celebrate.”
“I have no intention of going out the entire weekend.”
Barnes watched her turn left out of the parking lot, not through the windows, but on his laptop. A transmitter affixed to her right rear wheel well tracked her location. It was a redundant system in the unlikely event that the GPS transmitter in her phone went down. The wheel-well transmitter was also more accurate. The phone could only pinpoint her location to within five yards, while the other was accurate to within five inches. Barnes would concede that it was overkill, but also saw nothing wrong with that.
Before starting his engine to follow her into Manhattan, Barnes sent the recording of the phone conversation to Fenton. Nothing in the conversation would concern him. Shrinks were given greater latitude than most others he typically surveilled, which was part of the reason Michael Barnes had enjoyed his employment at Harmony House for the last fourteen years. It seemed more forgiving.
Until he was asked to kill someone.
CHAPTER 4
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, May 19, 4:17 p.m.
Jacob Hendrix clicked off his cell phone inside his small, cramped office. At thirty-six, he was the youngest tenured professor in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He’d been offered similar positions at Northwestern, UCLA, Stanford, and Duke even before he’d gotten his doctorate from Harvard. It seemed inevitable that one day, these institutions would have to create a formal draft for these hotshot young professors, just like the ones used by professional sports. Maybe CNBC or PBS would cover it.
NYU was lucky to have Jacob. He was published. He was produced. He was awarded. And to top it all off, the guy wasn’t just good-looking. He was cool. The rarest achievement for an academic.
The sounds of the city were present even through the double-paned glass in the office’s two windows, which were sealed shut. New building, new materials, new technologies, all designed to mute the city around them, but achieving only nominal effect. A beast the size of New York City can never be fully silenced, but it can be quelled, or so thought the big-name architect from the prestigious firm who’d successfully pitched the campus-expansion committee and built this edifice of higher learning, only to be humbled as all others had been before him.
The student sitting across from Jacob was Barry Handelman, a nineteen-year-old burdened by coming from too much money. A billion-dollar-hedge-fund baby. Matisse in the living room, Monet in the dining room. But it wasn’t his fault. Barry wanted to be a filmmaker, and that was his fault. Jacob apologized for interrupting their meeting by taking Skylar’s call.
Barry shook his head. “No problem.” His haircut cost more than most college students spent on food in a month.
Jacob looked over his young charge. “You were saying?”
“When I saw everyone else’s films, it was pretty obvious how shitty mine was.”
“You’re right. It honestly wasn’t great.”
Barry nodded, appreciating Jacob’s honesty, even if he had probably expected something a little less than both barrels between the eyes. “So you think I should quit?”
God, rich kids. “Let me ask you something. Are you here because you want to be, or just to piss off your father?”
“Because I want to be.” And he obviously meant it, too.
“The two most important kinds of work I’ve done fall into two categories: the best shit, and the worst shit. The best shit gets you jobs like the one I have and people to say nice things about you, and might even make you famous, but it doesn’t help you grow. Not as a person. Not as an artist. Not as anything. But the worst shit does. The stuff that you bust your ass on and truly suffer for that turns out to be absolute crap. Because it’s how you respond—whether you can handle the criticism, and what you learn from it—that will determine whether you have a future communicating something or if you should just quit and see how much money you can make.”
Barry smiled just a little. “I could make a lot, you know?” Jacob was certain his student was thinking of a number with nine zeroes.
“I do.” Jacob stared into his charge’s eyes. “But that would be easy, wouldn’t it?”
Barry stared back defiantly. “I’m not a big fan of easy.”
“Prove it.” The mentor didn’t blink. Neither did his protégé. Barry stood, accepting the challenge.
CHAPTER 5
Jacob Hendrix’s Apartment, Greenwich Village, New York City, May 19, 9:33 p.m.
It was several hours later when the police siren screamed past Jacob’s building on Bleecker Street, but up on the third floor, neither of them appeared to notice. Both he and Skylar were too busy catching their breath. He was lying naked on the couch, chest heaving. She was sprawled on the floor, somewhere in the vicinity of her clothes, which were strewn around the room.
Veuve Clicquot was Skylar and Jacob’s celebration drink. It was what they had downed when Jacob accepted his offer from NYU, as well as when Skylar graduated first in her class from Harvard. And it was what they were drinking now as Skylar finally got around to asking, “So how was your day?”
“Not quite as good as yours.” He smiled in the disarming way she’d loved from the first time she met him.
“Your day isn’t over yet.” She threw back the remainder of her glass and poured herself another.
“Good thing I bought a second bottle.”
Sounds of the city poured in through their cracked-open window. Another siren immediately followed the first, this one heading south on MacDougal Street. It was accompanied by tires screeching.
Outside, those close enough to the police vehicle speeding through traffic could smell the tire rubber burning. These included a stooped elderly man slowly making his way down the sidewalk, an Albanian mother carrying a screaming child over her shoulder, and a muscled man sitting quietly in a Chevy Impala, listening to a conversation that was being automatically transcribed on the laptop sitting next to him.
Michael Barnes barely gave the screeching NYPD vehicle a second glance. He had been a cop once, a long time ago, but that was another lifetime. The job he was now so well compensated for was to ensure the sanctity of America’s most important, and least known, scientific-research facility. At least, that was how it was referred to in the federal budget every year. Scientific-Research Facility. Outside the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the current occupier of the Oval Office, no one in the government was aware of Harmony House and its importance. That was how it had been for twenty-five years. And that was how it was to remain for another twenty-five, if Barnes had anything to do with it.
He ignored the cacophony around him. The screaming baby. The teenage couple arguing. And the dueling television sets blaring over each other. Mets seventh inning versus I Love Lucy dubbed in Spanish. Barnes filtered out the white noise, listening only to one source.
He had placed seven different wireless microphones throughout Jacob Hendrix’s apartment. One of the adjectives used in every report ever written about Barnes was thorough, and for good reason. He had no life. No outside interests. No serious relationships. And that was the way he liked it. To be this good at what he did, it couldn’t be any other way. And he really was this good.