Dead Idol

by Nick Tyrone

Genres: Thrillers; Political Thrillers; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

A twisty and page-turning debut thriller, perfect for fans of James Patterson, Andrew Raymond and Sam Bourne. In a world of fake news, who can you trust? Global pop sensation Noah Hastings takes to the stage for his sold-out concert. After singing his latest hit, Noah detonates a bomb strapped to his chest, killing himself and ninety-one of his fans. Speculation about the pop star's motivation for the crime runs riot until the authorities pin the blame on fundamentalist Islam. But what happens when Noah's inspiration turns out to be another ideology? Nina Hargreaves, an investigative journalist, travels around America searching for the real story. She gets close to the truth - but risks losing everything she has in the process...

Release date: February 20, 2020

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 204

Sample

‘A new, dark decade has begun’, by David O’Willery, New York Express commentary section, June 17th, 2021

Last night, the twenties began.

As I got into a cab to take me to Madison Square Garden, less than an hour after the bomb had gone off, the details were still hazy. Snippets of news reached me in episodic flashes. Each text from a colleague left me ever more eager to get downtown. The only concrete facts I had was that a bomb had gone off at Madison Square Garden and some of those in attendance at a concert there had been killed. The number of casualties was unclear at that stage.

Arrival in front of the Garden brought with it immediately the full, unfathomable tragedy of what had taken place that evening, a feeling I was wholly unprepared for. Opaque blankets of smoke still billowed forth from the building as an army of firemen ran to and fro. I witnessed a herd of paramedics entering and exiting the arena, the ones coming in wheeling empty stretchers. The ones coming out again had those same stretchers occupied. Every stretcher leaving the scene bore a sheet fully covering the body it carried.

At one point I saw a little girl, perhaps eleven or twelve years of age, swaddled in bandages. She was crying hysterically as medical professionals carried her from the arena. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t on a stretcher – until I reasoned that there were only enough on hand to service the deceased, so great was their number.

Speaking to other journalists gathered in front of the site brought me up to speed. It had been a Noah Hastings concert. A bomb had gone off early on in the show. Death toll was at least fifty. Most of the dead were under eighteen years of age. Then came the real news: Hastings himself had been killed in the blast.

At least, that was what we thought was the real news at the time.

About an hour on from when I had first arrived at the smoldering MSG, word travelled around the assembled press corps that Noah Hastings had been attached to the bomb itself and was likely to have been the one who had detonated it. This was confirmed in age-old fashion: the police wouldn’t comment on any questions about Hastings as the assailant. It appeared that one of the biggest pop stars in the world had just committed a suicide bombing, in the middle of Manhattan, murdering a cabal of his most devoted fans along the way.

Eventually, there was a small press conference at which the police confirmed at least this much to us, as well as that the death toll had been confirmed at ninety-two, with several victims not yet identified. That number included, of course, Noah Hastings himself. As the press conference concluded, most of the hacks went home or to the office, determined to escape from the Stygian aftermath of the incident still being swept away. I decided to stick around and see if I could interview a few survivors.

‘At this moment in time, I’m choosing to believe that it didn’t happen,’ said one girl who was on the balcony during the concert. She was not injured in the blast save for what has been diagnosed as a temporary case of tinnitus. ‘I mean, obviously it happened – I was there, I saw the explosion – but I don’t think it happened the way you guys are saying it did.’

The ‘you guys’ reference let me know that this was not this girl of fifteen’s first interview that evening. She was wearing a ‘Noah Hastings for President’ T-shirt. I pressed her on what she had meant by her last sentence.

‘I don’t think that was really Noah up there tonight. He sounded different, less good than normal. I think that was a stunt double or something up there. No one really died, that’s what I think. It was all just staged so that Noah would look bad. The whole front of the arena was obviously stuffed with crash test dummies or something, I remember that much.’

I managed to interview a handful of other kids who had been in the Gardens when the bomb had gone off. Most of them had a similarly offbeat take to that of my initial interviewee that night.

‘It was a CIA thing – they wanted Noah to go undercover in China and needed to fake his death.’

Noah Hastings is the most famous westerner in China. That includes the President of the United States. He couldn’t have walked five feet anywhere in that country without being recognized by people.

‘Noah has a stunt double. He was used in Monkey Trouble. Noah wanted to drop out of society, so he hired that guy to take a bomb for him.’

Monkey Trouble was the not wholly successful attempt to translate Noah Hastings’ pop stardom onto the big screen. Its plot revolves around a lower primate pet of Noah’s escaping from his Los Angeles mansion and trying to walk across that city. In the movie, Noah tries to trace the monkey’s path and bring it back into the fold while stopping here and there to sing a song or two. It is an unholy mixture of Bonzo Goes to College, Singin’ in the Rain and Falling Down that takes on whole new levels of offensiveness after the events of last night. At one point in the film, Hastings makes a joke about suicide bombers that was in bad taste at the time, never mind now.

It is not a good idea to take the opinions of a group of teenagers who have been witness to a bombing at close quarters as being reflective of society as a whole and how it will react to the events of yesterday evening. Yet if social media this morning has anything to say about it, it is precisely that the things I heard outside of Madison Square Garden last night are being echoed amongst the wider populace. As expected, the automatic connection between a suicide bombing having taken place and Islam being involved in some way runs very deep in the American psyche. Theories like this have been widely disseminated online already. I thought about quoting some of them. I refrained once I realized all of them were unprintable for one reason or another.

This is why I will say again that the twenties have now begun. ‘Hastings Wednesday’ ended one epoch and begat another. It arrives right at the moment we had started to feel safe in the knowledge that America itself was largely to be free of the kind of terrorist activity seen in Europe over the last several years. Shattered by the act of a young man from the deep south of this country committing suicide with a bomb strapped to his chest, killing almost a hundred children in the heart of New York City. As we scramble around for answers in the coming weeks as to why this horrific event took place, some will fill in the blanks with whatever comes easiest to hand. Be that Zionist conspiracy theories, suicidal stunt doubles, or sadly if so, the hand of international Islamist-inspired terrorism, let us be under no illusion that this is simply more of what we have seen before. We are entering a new age, one considerably unlike any that humanity has experienced in the recent past. For how will the newly christened Generation Hastings cope once the conspiracy theories have proven poor comfort? And if we can’t be safe from someone like Noah Hastings, from whom can we be safe? In this nascent era, which began last night, the answer is clear: no one at all.

A small advert in the New York Sentinel, June 18th, 2021

We the bereaved, each one of us having had one or more of our children’s lives ended tragically prematurely by the unfortunate incident at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday evening, are making several pleas to the general public.

Most of us have had the death of our beloved child or children tragically confirmed. Still others amongst our number have children who were at the concert and have been missing since, but these parents remain living in hope. On the page facing this advert are pictures of several children from the concert last night who have yet to be found. If you have any information on the whereabouts of any of them, please call the number given below.

We also ask that the hatred, online and elsewhere, cease immediately. We have no idea why a pop star would do what Noah Hastings did. We may well never know. At least until the facts are better known, could we all calm down and stop throwing around conspiracy theories? Particularly given some of these theories have been directed at us. Several of our number have had to face hateful messages on social media – some of them saying that our children are not actually dead and that we must therefore be involved in some sort of conspiracy. Please be assured that none of us are involved in any conspiracy to obscure the truth. Our children have been torn away from us. That we are suffering the loss of our loved ones is terrible enough without having to carry the added burden of such hateful things being thrown in our direction.

Finally, as part of this plea, could everyone stop targeting one particular creed or religion for what took place, please? We have no evidence that Noah Hastings acted under the influence of anything other than his own callousness. Again, it only makes the horrible suffering all of us are experiencing at the moment worse to know that our deceased children are being used as pawns in some sort of ideological warfare.

We make these three pleas to everyone in not only the tri-state area but the whole of America, in particular those who have children of their own. Children who are still alive; kids who still have a future, unlike ours. Please, put yourself in our position and imagine the horror. Then picture how much easier it would be if everyone listened to what we needed in our most desperate hour. In most of our cases, we have lost everything that was precious to us. Please, let your prayers be with us and our children who have departed at this time, and not with those who would wish to cause trouble out of this tragic incident.

Signed,

The parents of the Ninety-One

‘It’s Islam, dummy’, a piece by blogger Joyce Randall, June 20th, 2021

Holy shit, right? What we’ve been thinking was a ripe possibility for many a year now has finally dropped, yo. Noah Hastings straps on a bomb before a concert, trots out onto the stage, and then blows himself and ninety-one fans (and possibly counting – there are seven children still unaccounted for, although there are also several bodies yet to be identified) to smithereens. I’ve been saying for years that radical Islam was someday soon going to infiltrate white, Christian culture – but even I didn’t think Noah Hastings, the most cornball, white bread douchebag on planet Earth, would be the one to light the fuse. In retrospect, I should have known.

The signs were always there. Hastings was part of the liberal, Trump-hating elite that always saw Islam not only as something totally compatible with the American way of life, but as something essential to that way of life as they reconstructed it. A group of people for whom the Islamification of America was both something that wasn’t going to happen – in fact, was a figment of the fevered imaginations of right-wing pundits such as I – and yet also something to be welcomed, even if by some chance it wasn’t simply the delusions of the Trump-friendly. Hastings was part of a Hollywood clique that sees any criticism of Islam whatsoever as ‘racism’. It was only a matter of time before one of them went full towel-head, strapped a bomb to their chest and slaughtered a pile of innocents.

As horrible as the deaths of ninety-one kids undoubtedly is, we need to start seeing the upside in all of this. After the Noah Hastings suicide, no one can tell us that Islam isn’t piercing its way into the very soul of American life, corrupting its very beating heart. We’re no longer talking about Saudi immigrants as suicide bombers here, but a kid from Louisiana raised Baptist. If Noah Hastings can go Bin Laden on us, anyone can.

So, what should we do now? The most important thing is to not allow the liberal MSM to establish their warped version of the story as the one of historical record. There will be a battle for hearts and minds over the next few weeks and we need to be the ones who come out of it the victors. You all know as well as I do that any chance they get will see the liberal establishment attempt to deflect the blame away from Islam and onto something else. The New York State Police, the FBI, the CIA, all of them will be in on this. We need to call them all out at every turn and remind people that no one, particularly a redneck kid from the deep south whose father was a preacher, blows themselves up for no reason whatsoever. The only thing that could have caused someone to commit such an act was a deep-seated belief in the tenets of the Muslim faith – what other religion is currently driving its adherents to such barbarity? When was the last time you heard about the Buddhist threat stalking the land? Or about how a horde of Shintoists were planning to blow up a federal building?

We need to say this and say this again and again until it gets through to the American public. Or at least, the portion of the American public which still retains an open mind; those who haven’t been poisoned irreparably by liberal politics; those who can still be reached by reason.

Almost certainly for the time being, only those of us on the supposed ‘alt-right’ will be the ones saying any of what I’ve just said, political correctness keeping everyone else’s tongues at bay. That only puts more of the onus on each and every one of us to shout as loudly as we can. It may get unpleasant over the coming weeks. Yet we cannot fail in our mission, Christian soldiers. Our time is now. If the rise of pop-star jihadis is on the menu, it’s time to burn the restaurant down.

‘I was meant to be there’, by James Hillel. article in the New York Sentinel, June 20th, 2021,

As the lead popular culture journalist on this newspaper, it was my unwanted job to sit through two hours of Noah Hastings music at Madison Square Garden and then write about what I’d heard. I dreaded it like you would not believe for a week beforehand. I am exposed to a lot of music I do not like in my job, but none as vapid and tuneless as the Hastings ‘songbook’. He always sounded to me like a man deep within the pains of a large bowel movement that wouldn’t budge as he huffed and puffed his way through his panoply of horrible tunes, the unbearable synth pads that accompanied him something out of a Bananarama-inspired, 1980s-inflected nightmare.

I tried everything I could to get out of the job; no one wanted to take my place, even for the lure of some of the delightful favours I am able to bestow by virtue of my position. I promised one guy who covers grassroots New York stuff a month’s worth of Mets tickets I had managed to get by trading in very nice seats at the opera. He didn’t even need to think about it before giving me a solid, unmistakable no. For context, this is a guy with the names of the starting XI Mets 1986 team tattooed on his back, so I’m clearly not the only journalist in this town with a deep-seated aversion to Noah Hastings.

It looked like I was stuck with the gig – until fate intervened, at least. I awoke on the morning of June 16th with a very sick child on my hands. When I went to rouse her, my daughter Eli complained that her side hurt. My heart started to race; as a parent, you learn to differentiate between your children’s phony complaints to get attention and when they are actually ill. This was definitely in the latter camp. She looked like she was running a fever, so I took her temperature. One hundred and four. Her lips and fingertips were blue and she was slipping in and out of consciousness. In a panic, I wrapped her up in a blanket (why is this our first instinct with children who are burning up from the inside?) and almost literally threw her into my ’02 Dodge Romero. I then burnt rubber getting to Mount Sinai Emergency. She was checked in quickly (thank God) and I was left alone to stew.

I was sitting there in the waiting room for a long time, my thoughts entirely preoccupied by my daughter’s health as you would expect. My phone ringing brought me back to the real world. It was my wife. I’d tried calling her earlier, only to get her voicemail, so I’d texted her what had happened.

‘What took you so long to get back to me?’ was how I opened the conversation, not terribly warmly. I was stunned that it had taken her over an hour to respond to a desperate text, telling her that her daughter was on the brink of death.

‘Sorry, I was having a nap after a meeting. Jet lag.’

My wife was on a business trip in Europe. I instantly felt bad that I’d been so rude.

‘I’m sorry. Just worried.’

‘How is she?’

‘No word yet.’

It then kicked in that with my daughter sick and my wife out of the country, I faced a dilemma, one that wasn’t altogether unpleasant in the current context. I could use the whole set-up of my ill child as a pretext to get out of the Noah Hastings concert/article deal. And it wouldn’t involve the slightest hint of deception whatsoever.

There were problems with this course of action despite its transparency. One, I had been less than secretive in terms of my desire to pass the buck at work on this score, what with attempting to bribe most of my colleagues into taking the gig for me; the Noah Hastings dartboard I had erected in my cubicle wasn’t helpful. The timing would be questioned by my editor, straight off. But my daughter was sick, something the hospital trip proved beyond any doubt, so there was a comeback there. The second thing to consider was whether I was using my daughter’s condition unfairly, a moral question arising from it all, in other words. But no – someone had to be at the hospital until she was discharged or at least there was more information available. I called work and told the Big Cheese about the situation. He was so unconvinced at first that I had to get the Emergency Ward receptionist to confirm that I was indeed at the hospital.

‘I suppose you’re now going to say I got some random woman to pose as a hospital receptionist, right?’ I asked him after having taken the phone back.

‘No, that was a bona fide receptionist all right. Some things in this world can’t be faked. You’re off the hook, Hillel. I’ll get Jefferson to cover it.’

About half an hour later, I was told that my daughter had been unconscious for a while and they had her on a drip while they did some tests. She was going to be fine, they told me, the words frozen in mid-air as they were spoken. She just had a terrible flu, thank all the gods that might or might not exist in the universe. The pain in the side was an odd symptom that showed up in about one in ten children with this particular flu strain. They wanted to keep her in overnight. I was told in no uncertain terms that I should go home and come back in the morning to see her, particularly as they were giving her a sedative. It occurred to me at this point that if I hurried I could just about catch the start of the Noah Hastings concert. This prompted the first chuckle from me of the day.

I left Mount Sinai and drove back to my apartment downtown feeling relieved beyond description. I parked the car in my building’s lot and remembered we needed food. I was walking down to the local Wholefoods when I heard the explosion. Hearing it from almost fifty blocks away, it sounded like it could have been any n. . .