DELUSIONAL: A MICHAEL BENNETT THRILLER

PROLOGUE

FOUR MONTHS AGO

Thomas Wayne Owens never worked on big explosives near his cabin. At least not anymore.

The scorch mark by his front door was a reminder of both the importance of keeping distance between different parts of his life and the unreliability of homemade explosives. The components he used were not commercial grade. He literally combined the chemicals himself.

Now he sat at his workbench on his porch. A second bench ran the length of the cabin’s front wall behind him. To anyone else it would look disorganized, with parts and tools covering every inch of the plywood surfaces. But Owens knew exactly where everything was and exactly what it did. Especially the lethal stuff.

The issue today was not the summer heat but the bugs. He’d made several electronic bug zappers and placed them at strategic points around the porch. But the cabin, stuck in the middle of the woods near Millwood, New York, remained enticing for bloodsucking insects. He found himself constantly shooing horseflies away from his neck and smashing mosquitoes on his bare arms.

He concentrated on his latest project, soldering new contacts for a device that would fit on a car. He had no plans for it. This was just a chance to push himself. At least it was a better use of his MIT master’s in engineering than building the squirrel trap he’d made yesterday. Though to be fair, he now had two plump squirrels he intended to sauté for dinner tonight.

Owens liked to imagine he lived like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. For instance, last year he fixed his neighbor’s tractor in exchange for a side of venison. The deer meat lasted him the entire winter. And he supplemented buying a bag of groceries a week with a diet that otherwise consisted of homegrown root vegetables and small animals he trapped.

But he also appreciated certain modern technological comforts. Not only in his explosives but also around the cabin.

The small monitor sitting on his workbench beeped. He glanced over and saw a red Chevy pickup truck on the screen, easing up the gravel driveway. He could tell by the vehicle that it was no one official. He’d already denied some county land surveyor access to his property. He didn’t want anyone else from the government bothering him. Ever.

The truck came into view and rumbled to a stop near the cabin. Two men and a young blond woman popped out of the cab. The woman couldn’t have been much more than twenty-two and wore a tight tank top and shorts.

The driver was close to Owens’s age, maybe thirty or so, clean-cut, with styled brown hair. He looked like he should be on a sailboat somewhere. His IZOD shirt had too many colors for Owens’s taste. His smile was wide but appeared fake as he looked up at the cabin.

The other man was giant. Over six foot five and well-built. His long, greasy black hair was roughly tucked behind his ears. Old acne scars marked his cheeks. He wore a camouflage T-shirt and was puffing on a little cigar.

Owens said, “Don’t smoke that thing here.” He didn’t raise his voice or even look up again from his soldering, but he noticed the man in the camo T-shirt flick the cigar onto the driveway.

The driver tried to defuse any tension.

“You Tom Owens?” He had a faint accent. Like he was from Rhode Island or some other place near Boston.

Owens didn’t respond. His policy was not to talk to people until he understood who they were and why they were bothering him.

“I’m Ellis Warrenton. These are my friends, Kimmy and Pry.”

Owens didn’t think the enormous man looked like someone named Pry, or like someone who’d normally socialize with Ellis. He still gave no response.

Ellis said, “We saw a couple of “your videos on YouTube.”

Owens interrupted him. “I only made those for some cash, so I could buy this place. I took them down.”

“Well, we saw ’em, and they were spectacular. You made that old van disintegrate. And the way you knocked that shed down was masterful. And all done with homemade explosives, right?”

Again, Owens didn’t respond, though he liked hearing the appreciation of his work. He rarely ever got any praise in person.

Ellis said, “Very impressive. Did the ads on YouTube really make you that much money?”

“Both videos got over twelve million views each. It was enough for what I needed. Why are you here?”

“I read the article you wrote for Tech and Society. I thought you had brilliant insights into how the government and Big Tech are working together to control all of us.”

The big man, Pry, stepped onto the porch and started rummaging around the other workbench.

Owens said, “Don’t bother anything.” He stopped short of ordering Pry off the porch.

The big man dropped a screwdriver back onto the crowded surface of the workbench. The hollow thud made Owens wince. He hated to have his things disturbed.

Kimmy came onto the porch and eased herself right next to Owens. He could smell her bubble gum. He didn’t say anything. He liked being this close to a woman. It certainly didn’t happen often.

Owens said, “What do you want? Or are you just wasting my time?”

Ellis stepped closer. “There are two types of people in the world. Those who want to blow it up and those who’re content to watch it slowly burn itself out. Which are you, Tom?”

Owens had to concede that he liked the sound of that.

He looked up at the clean-cut man. “Why are you guys here?”

Ellis Warrenton said, “We’re kindred spirits, Tom. We’re interested in fighting the same system. We agree the government has too many ways to track us and banks are strangling society. Change follows chaos. Explosions cause chaos. With your help, we could make some changes.”

Owens didn’t even look over his shoulder at the big guy when he said, “Don’t touch that.”

Pry asked, “Why not?”

The flash and pop of the blasting cap he’d placed in an old milk carton made Kimmy jump to the other side of Owens. Ellis instinctively ducked down below the rail of the porch.

Owens calmly said, “That’s why.” He ignored the big man’s cry of pain, just like he ignored the man’s two fingers, which had landed on the porch a few feet away. He was curious about the reaction of Pry’s friends. They both kept their cool.

That was a good sign.

CHAPTER 1

I enjoyed watching my partner fidget as we stood next to a complex in lower Manhattan that housed several annex offices for the city. I left my hands in my overcoat and would never admit that the wind made my face feel like it was about to crack. I’m a New Yorker, dammit. I can stand the weather.

I turned to my young partner, Rob Trilling, and said, “This cold snap isn’t bothering you, is it? I mean, aren’t you from Montana? I thought you were tough guys. Or at least acclimated to temperatures in the teens.”

My partner cut his eyes over to me. He generally didn’t bother to respond to minor jests. For a cop on the street, that saved a lot of time. But in his case it was part of his personality, not an efficiency hack.

“I’m not sure why we’re standing out here in the freezing wind,” he eventually said. “Isn’t the crime scene inside?”

“Yes, and that’s why we’re letting the crime scene technicians and the Bomb Squad guys do their jobs,” I said.I wanted to give the local detective on scene a chance to collect as much information as possible. We’d been sent down here because it looked like the crime might be connected to another bombing almost five months ago. An NYPD patrol sergeant in Queens named Rose Vega had been blown up in her squad car, in front of her family. The brass was worried about a serial bomber. I was too. Mainly the fact that bombs had now been used on two different city employees. This wasn’t a theory they could simply ignore.

My other purpose in waiting outside was to try to get a sense of why an obscure city building like this had been targeted. Why put a bomb in the Office of Technology and Innovation? It was not even their main office. That was in Brooklyn. This was just some kind of annex closer to city hall.

There was no obvious rationale here. The building housed a few different city offices: In addition to the small Office of Technology, there was the Housing Authority, a department that handled parking fines, and a place to talk about garbage collection issues. That was it.

I kept running the services through my head, trying to see how the offices might fit together. It was a little like playing the New York Times game Connections.

Just then I saw Jolynn Nelson, one of the top detectives in the recently established Violent Crimes Task Force, appear in the doorway to make a phone call. I stepped toward her, and Trilling followed. We both made sure to slip out of the biting wind and into the hallway.

Nelson gave me the universal one-finger motion to hold on a moment. It was a quick conversation with a few yeses and noes. Then she slipped her phone into her pocket and looked up at me.

“Hey, Mike. I heard they were sending you down from Manhattan North. I’m sorry the only time we get to see each other is when things are so screwed up.”

I said, “What’ve you got so far?”

“Someone went to a lot of trouble to set off a bomb inside an office that doesn’t do much. You already know there’s one dead. The clerk, a young woman named Abby Boyd. Only worked for the city about nine months.”

“Any security footage?”

Nelson shook her head. “Someone hacked the system. Then they went from high-tech hacking to basic breaking and entering. They used some kind of a pry bar to pop the rear door off its hinges. Crime scene thinks they can lift the smudge. But it looks like whoever did it was wearing surgical gloves.”

“So we didn’t get any prints or other useful information?”

“That’s not entirely accurate. We know that whoever left the smudge was missing the middle and index fingers on their left hand.”

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