by Jim Riley
I called Tish. She still was unaware of everything that was going on. Boy, was she going to be surprised. The local hospital could better be described as an all-around-care center. It was not an overly-large building, although it was new and very nicely done, but they made use of every square inch. In fact, it probably had more services under one roof that most of the larger medical centers did. Besides the hospital proper, which was not much more than the emergency room, it was the normal clinic. It also had rooms set aside that several specialists shared, most of whom just had satellite offices there. Some of that centered on the fact that Eaglenest was ski-central, which translated into ski-injury central. There are orthopedic surgeons that specialize in every joint or tendon, and we had at least one of each. There was also a urologist, an oncologist, and even a podiatrist. Tish filled me in that although some of them were there to provide services, some just used the opportunity to have a remote office near the ski slopes. They worked half a day and skied half a day. There was also a dentist in the building, as well as a visiting orthodontist once a week. Next to the ski area itself, it was the busiest place in town.
Tish worked the ER on day shift. In winter it was almost a full-time job with skier accidents, but in summer it slowed down considerably. When it did, she moved to the clinic side and did regular nurse stuff. I must have caught them at a slow time, because she was able to come to the phone when I called and wasn’t going to have to call me back. I think that was the first time that had ever happened.
“This is Tish.”
“This is your husband.”
“Hey, babe. Everything okay?”
“Couldn’t be better. Guess where I’m calling you from?”
“I give.”
“Work.”
“I thought you weren’t going to start for another couple of weeks?”
“I’m not working for the S.O.”
“Stalone hired you back?”
“Not exactly. Stalone isn’t the Eaglenest P.D. Chief anymore.”
“Who is?”
“Me.” There was silence. My intention had been to catch her off guard but now I wondered if she’d fainted. “Are you there?”
“Are you serious?”
“You think I’d kid you about something like that?”
“Are you … what … are you going to take it? The position, I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure you’re up to putting up with the politics?”
“I had a talk about that with the Town Council and apparently they love me just the way I am.”
She laughed. “And you think it’ll work out?”
I knew that she wasn’t doubting me, but the match of me with this job. “What’s the worst that can happen, them fire me? Hell, I was looking for a job when I found this one.”
We celebrated that night by eating out at D’Angelo’s. Word had already gotten out about me being the new chief, and D’Angelo himself greeted us. He told me that dinner for Tish and I was on the house that night as a welcoming and congratulatory gift from him. I thanked him but told him I was not going to be able to accept the generous offer, since it was like taking a gratuity. He looked at me like it was speaking Armenian.
“Chief Stalone always accepted my gifts of appreciation.”
“Yes, but Mr. Stalone is now bagging groceries at the Safeway.” I assured D’Angelo that I appreciated the offer and meant no disrespect by turning him down. He still seemed a touch offended, so I took him up on his offer of the best table in the house as a consolation gift. The table was by the large window looking out over the ski slopes. Even in the snowless summer it was beautiful.
“I’m proud of you,” Tish told me as she pecked me on the cheek.
“You’re just excited about me getting us this nice table.”
“Yep.”
The next day I called Coop. I didn’t know how or what he’d done, but I knew as well as I was sitting my ass in that nice, soft, Italian-leather desk chair that he’d been behind me getting this job.
“This is Watts.”
“How’d you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Get me this job?”
“What do you mean? I just heard there was going to be an opening and called you to let you know about it. I take it you got the job?” I could hear him smiling over the phone.
“Bullshit. I was the only applicant and they all but forced me to take the position. What’s going on?”
“It seems you have a friend in high places.”
“You, you mean?”
“No. Hell, I’m just a small fish in a big pond. I just happen to know a lot of big fish. But this was all about you. You remember the girl you saved in the Goldstein building?”
“Yeah. Mary, uh … ”
“Calder.”
“Yeah. So?”
“You know who her father is?”
“James Calder. Some millionaire that owns an oil exploration business or something like that. Why?”
“James Calder inherited Calder Exploration from his father, but he turned his millions into hundreds of millions by diversifying. Hell, he owns a little of everything, including parts of the Miami Dolphins and PepsiCo. He also is the major stockholder in Aztek, Inc.”
The light went on in my head and I finished his sentence. “Who owns Eaglenest Ski Area.”
“You got it.”
“Now that’s a coincidence,” I admitted.
“If there ever was one,” Coop replied.
Epilogue
It turned out in the end that the two events involving the nuclear devices were in fact linked. Although not exactly like the great counter-terrorist minds of the day were supposing. Hell, the talking heads on television almost came closer to getting it right, but no one could have ever guessed what the truth really was. And quite frankly, no one in the public would ever know it all. Coop said that was because of the way some of the information had been “extracted” from some of the players, and because some of the information itself did not need to be made public. I bought all of that, but I still think the real reason was that it would have been slightly embarrassing to the higher-ups.
The suitcase bombs had indeed been the two that went missing from Russian soil. That was no surprise since they were the only ones that had any to begin with. They had been stolen, then sold, by a disgruntled ex-intelligence officer who had found himself out of a good job after the end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union. He had been smart enough to sit on them for a few years without advertising he had them. In fact, he had generated a couple of false leads along the way that both Russia and the CIA had looked into very hard. It had been so convincing that both countries were sure they must have been true. When no one was looking, he sold the bombs to a German arms dealer named Helmut Eichelberger and retired quietly in a villa in Sweden.
This is where the story gets a little bizarre. A French exporter named Gaston Auclair, who mainly dealt in food exports from his country, had an office in the JP Goldstein building. Although the owner at the time was no longer Mr. Goldstein, it was another Jewish man by the name of Benjamin Redman. An argument over a rent increase had put the Frenchman and the Jewish owner at odds, and after arbitration failed, Auclair’s lease agreement was not renewed. I guess he was the kind to hold a grudge or maybe he was anti-Semitic beforehand. Whichever, to say he wanted some payback was an understatement. Anyway, he also did business with a German by the name of Erhardt Jaeger. Apparently, Jaeger was a Nazi loyalist and a member of the New Millennium. The two became friends with the common interest in hating Jews. Enter Helmut Eichelberger, who now owns two suitcase-sized nuclear devices for sale. Jaeger didn’t normally run in Eichelberger’s circle of business associates but was close friends with the man who agreed to purchase the bombs. Eichelberger, being a Neo-Nazi himself, agreed to even lower the price after he found out what the intentions for the weapons were.
Jaeger and Auclair sold the first bomb to the al-Qaeda cell an
d agreed to import it since Auclair nor his business were on any terrorist watch list. The price to al-Qaeda had been further reduced on the agreement that the bomb be detonated at the JP Goldstein building. It may not have been the perfect target, but it would still serve its purpose for al-Qaeda, and Auclair got what he wanted out of it, which was some payback. Jaeger was simply enjoying the irony of it all. Auclair was not an all-around racist; he just hated Jews. Probably deep down he really just hated Redman. Jaeger, strictly adhering to Neo-Nazi beliefs, hated just about everyone that wasn’t blond-haired and blue-eyed. However, thinking outside of the box, he had joined league with the Muslim Extremists to conquer their common greater enemy, Israel.
When that disaster was diverted by M28, the two men decided to try another avenue. Knowing that Muslim Extremists were being watched closely by counter-terrorist agencies around the world, Jaeger decided to use an established White Supremacist organization. Since he was an active member of the New Millennium, he had the connections and before anyone knew it, ol’ Shirttail was trucking a nuclear device across country.
The target for the second bomb, it turned out, and unknown to Jaeger no doubt, was nothing Jewish, but NORAD, which is located in Colorado Springs. Besides being anti-Semitic, Bill Goodman was anti-government, anti-taxes, anti-just-about-everything. He had believed for a long time that the U.N. was eventually going to take over the U.S. and that the U.S. Government was even cooperating in the effort. According to him, NORAD in Colorado Springs was to be their base of operation. He thought he’d just shut the whole thing down. His intention was to plant some evidence that would place the blame back onto al-Qaeda. It would make sense and everyone would have probably bought it. Hell, I probably would have.
In the end, Coop never said it outright but he implied it, all of the major players were rounded up. He wouldn’t tell me what happened to them but I could guess. I asked him if he found it ironic at all that this whole thing started out as a landlord-tenant dispute over some office space. He said I was being too short-sighted. He agreed it was a dispute over property, but the real estate was a few hundred square miles of land in the Middle East, currently called Israel. And until that dispute was settled, there would be no peace anywhere. I asked Coop when he thought that would be, since he was supposedly in the know. His answer surprised me. He said when God came back and sent everyone to their rooms, and not until. In the meantime, we’re just going to keep going like a bunch of unruly kids fighting over the last piece of pie. I asked him if he thought it was just all one big coincidence that I had been in both places the bombs ended up, or was there some bigger cosmic plan going on. He said no, he just thought I was a shit magnet.
THE END