Backhouse continued his color commentary. “Thirty yards, I’d say.”
Rook dashed over to the nanny. “Pardon me, I’ll reimburse you, promise.” He snatched the pizza box from her and took out the personal-size pizza within. As the drone closed in, slowing to hover near Backhouse, who retreated until he bumped into the arch’s fa?ade, Rook Frisbee’d the pizza right at the aircraft, grazing one side of it, causing it to shudder and veer away before recovering. As Rook celebrated inwardly, watching the thrumming copter fly off to regroup, a loud cracking sound made him turn.
Heat was kicking in the door to the arch. Well, not the door itself. There was a square louvered ventilation screen set into the thick wood, which disintegrated under three expertly placed blows from the sole of Heat’s shoe, creating a hatch for them to crawl inside. “Hey, it’s like a doggie door,” said Rook in admiration.
As Heat guided Backhouse through the opening on his hands and knees, she said to Rook, “Rule one: Never attack the strongest part of your target.” And before Rook climbed in behind him, she added, “Bet they didn’t teach you that on PBS.”
Fifteen minutes later, Heat climbed inside the police van safely parked outside the privacy gate of Washington Mews and slid in beside Rook. She hooked an elbow over the seat back and addressed Wilton Backhouse where he sat on the middle bench. “No sign of the drone anywhere, so you can relax a little.”
“Yeah, that makes me feel fucking great.” He craned his neck to look out the rear window, past the pair of unis posted beside the van, and into the park, where other officers from the Sixth canvassed the square for eyewitnesses. “What happens when the blue crew leaves for Donut Planet?”
“We’ll provide you police protection, if you want it. I suggest you want it.”
“What do you call what I just had?”
Rook said, “Hey, Wilton. You’re alive, right?”
Since Nikki wanted to finish the interview that the attack had interrupted, she worked to engage Backhouse. She knew it wouldn’t be easy. He wasn’t so much uncooperative as asocial, enough to make her wonder if the engineering professor wasn’t on the autistic spectrum somewhere—Asperger’s, possibly. “For the record, the cop-donut thing? So done. It’s Cronuts now, grampa,” she said. That elicited a hint of a smile that came and went as fast as a wince. “One eyewitness—the nanny whose pizza I replaced, which Rook owes me fifteen bucks for—says she saw the drone gain altitude and rapidly exit the park to the west.”
“That fucker was all over me.”
Rook said, “I know a thing or two about those things. I’ve been thinking about buying one.” He said that as news for Nikki to digest. She did, and rolled her eyes. “The range of the controllers on the latest versions is up to a mile.”
“But it was so precise,” said Heat. “I was thinking it must have been controlled by someone on one of these tall buildings around the park. Either the NYU law school or those apartments bordering the square.”
Rook wagged his head. “Wouldn’t be necessary. That thing was rigged with a high-def camera. That’s all the real-time visual feedback a controller would need. Draw a one-mile radius around the fountain, it could have been someone with an iPad in a parked car, a storefront on Canal Street, even at a picnic table outside Shake Shack.”
“Not making me feel any better here,” said Backhouse. “Especially after Fred. Man…” He hung his head, and his face fell behind a curtain of long hair. Just when Heat thought she had been premature with her Asperger’s diagnosis, she realized he wasn’t mourning, but texting. “Canceling a class. Not happening today.”
“Wilton,” Nikki asked, “can you tell me how Fred Lobbrecht was connected to you?”
“You already know that.” He nodded toward Rook. “He told you, so why ask?”
“Because I want to hear it from you.”
“I’ll have to backtrack.”