“Of course, Mr. Cutney. But while we are being so formal, it’s Doctor Hiccock, I am no longer a research professor at M.I.T.” Bill already felt like this guy had judged him a cardboard cutout bureaucrat. Percival was impeccably dressed in a Crombie topcoat and Savile Row bespoke grey suit, and sported a thin, tightly furled umbrella, fully coifed hair, and a tan that seemed air-brushed onto his skin. He had blue-green eyes and uncharacteristically perfect teeth, caps most likely. Bill noticed he wore a Notre Dame ring, which was a bit of an oddity — he’d expected to see an Oxford ring. He also sported an odd sort of wedding ring, seemingly made to resemble barbed wire. That’s one way to keep a marriage together, Bill mused to himself. “Mr. Palumbo tells me you have corroborating evidence in the piracy affair.”
“Yes. May I have a glass of water?”
“Er… sure.” Bill went back over to the credenza behind his desk and poured a glass of water from the pitcher. He placed it in front of Percival and sat.
Percival reached into his vest pocket and produced a vial of clear liquid, unstopped it and poured it into the glass, and then removed a double-A battery from the same pocket and dropped it into the glass. He then flicked the glass toward Bill.
Bill immediately reacted, pushing back from the expected mini-deluge, but instead the water with the battery in it clunked onto the table as a solid. Although shaped in the form of the tumbler as if it were ice, it was not cold at all. Bill gave a little smirk, then leaned in and touched the solid water with the end of his pen.
“It’s a solid as long as there is a voltage from the battery,” Percival said.
“Electro-reactive fluidics,” Joey added.
“Yes, except the pirates have stolen something even more rare — electro-expansive fluids.”
“So, in the presence of a voltage, the liquid expands.” Bill picked up the solid water and looked through it.
“Yes, and that’s the breakthrough that has Maguambi rolling in ill-gotten gains.” Percival opened his folio and placed a stack of papers on Bill’s table. “Here are some of the extortion letters our shipping clients have received in the past months. In every instance, the carrier is threatened with attack from an entity no ship can defend against.”
The whale! Bill thought.
“We think there is only one of these entities. It is our policy to pay the relatively small sum to the pirates, rather than to pay out on a loss of ship and life claim. But it has to stop. We are being bled dry.”
“So that’s why you are sharing these letters with us?”
“If you stop them, you stop our bleeding. Besides, there is a rumor this machine has attacked one of your Naval vessels.”
Rather than confirming or denying the attack, Bill grabbed the stack of letters, “I can use these in a court of law?”
“In a U.S. court, yes.”
“What about the International Court of Justice in The Hague?” Joey asked.
“The UN may not be totally objective in this case,” Percival said as he sat back, his little show over.
Joey gave Bill a look that said, “See? I told you.”
“In any event, your agent was definitely attacked at least once by the machine, then.”
Joey stiffened, “What are you talking about?”
“Bad form? So sorry. We understand your agent was aboard the Vera Cruz.”
It was all Joey could do to control the shade of red he knew his ears were turning. He also deliberately didn’t look at Bill, so as not to give the statement any weight.
Bill deftly moved off topic back to an earlier point. “Why do you think the world court wouldn’t…?”
“Maguambi is running the table, and there is no state interested in bringing up proceedings against him. Therefore he has carte blanche, I am afraid.”
“So to be clear here, Mr. Cutney, neither I nor the United States government is offering you or your company any quid pro quo for the information you offered to us today. Are you satisfied with that?”
“If you stop this menace on the high seas, as I know you will, that will be recompense enough.”
Joey added, “You’d be willing to sign a release to that effect, Mr. Cutney?”
“Have your counsel draw it up and I will sign for Lloyds. I am at the St. Regis till the day past tomorrow. Well, that being my only business here today, I’ll bid you gentlemen farewell and good hunting.” Percival was up and leaving so quickly that Bill had just enough time to buzz Cheryl, who was surprised to meet him at the door to escort him out of the White House.
“He’s a little thin for Santa Claus, ya think?” Bill said as he probed the solid water not soaking into the blotter in front of him.
“And five hands shy of a gift horse, but I’ll take it.” Joey turned deadly serious. “How did old Saint Nick know about Brooke?”
Bill threw it back to his head of security and operations. “I thought we were supposed to be Ultra on this.”
“We are!”
“No, I’d say having a complete stranger come in here and let on that he knows our biggest secret ever, kind of indicates we are not,” Bill said in a manner more suited to a kindergarten teacher.
“I’ll do some digging into Percy’s lineage.”
“That’s Percival to you, Joey!”
“Sorry old chap, right you are.”
Joey left Bill staring at the battery and thinking about the ramifications of the other liquid, if it existed, which not only became solid in the presence of so low a voltage, but also actually expanded. It would truly be ‘electric ice.’ The liquid would act just like water being frozen, becoming a solid and expanding at the same time but only at the flick of a switch. His mind immediately raced through all the possibilities, a new source of hydraulics for everything from earth movers to reclining chairs — hydrodynamics, new piston engines, miniature air conditioners, manufacturing and shaping machines, black box recorders, black box shipping containers that would solidify against any shocks, vacuum pumps, and nano-technology. In spite of the endless possibilities, someone had developed the technology as a weapon, a weird weapon; one that was right out of a classic novel.
∞§∞
It had happened; Bill and Janice had become one of “those couples” — the ones who bring their eighteen-month-old out to dinner, to be subjected to the wary scrutiny of suspicious couples to determine if the tyke could be the type to explode in a spine shrinking, shrill scream at a moment’s notice. Or worse, fling spaghetti and meatballs or strained peas all over their Saturday night date clothes. It wasn’t too long ago that Bill and Janice had been the “on guard singles,” scrupulously avoiding a close encounter of the third grade or below. But parenthood had defeated or deafened those senses, giving them immunity to certain wailing frequencies emanating at full force from developing lungs.
Happily for all concerned, Richard Ross Hiccock was an inquisitive little boy who, for the most part, amused himself. He would from time to time burble out a giggly laugh if something moved or dripped or slid or just sat there long enough for him to try to get it to do something by letting out this laugh. So tonight it was a good night at Mimmo’s Villa Napoli.
“Tiramisu or cheesecake?” Bill offered to Janice as the waiter hovered with the dessert tray.
“How about cheesecake with chocolate ice cream?” Janice said with eyes lighting up. This combination, discovered during her cravings with little Richie, had stayed with her.
“Fine,” Bill said with the smallest of smiles because he knew it came from that time as well. “With two forks please.” He picked up his napkin and wiped his lips. “Excuse me honey, gotta hit the room of men.”
As Bill walked through the restaurant, he was unaware of the man who watched his every step.
In the men’s room, the daily Naples’ newspaper was thumbtacked to the wall above the urinals so a man had something to look at other than looking down. Bill was stumbling over Noticas de Oggi and the Campangola Region Soccer results, so he didn’t pay attention to t
he man entering the restroom. When the man didn’t appear at the urinal next to him he casually turned to see where he was. The man was leaning against the sink, his hands behind him, propped on the corner edge of the vanity’s Corinthian top.
Bill finished up and turned to him, “What? Was I in your favorite spot?”
“Dr. Hiccock?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Russ Klaven, USN, retired.”
“Retired as what?”
“Commander, Office of Naval Intelligence.”
“Okay, so why did you follow me into the head, Russ?”
“Sorry, but I wanted to speak to you alone.”
“I got an office, pal. Call and make an appointment, I am with my family right now…” Bill crumpled the paper towel and made a three-pointer right into the wicker waste basket in the corner.
“You can either hear me out right now, or forget we ever met, in which case you are going to spend a lot of time, money and resources finding out what I can tell you tonight for free.”
“Can we not do this in a bathroom?” Bill suggested.
After excusing himself from the cheesecake and suffering the mild scorn of a wife upstaged, Bill walked with Russ to an empty corner of the parking lot. Russ took out a pack of Lucky Strikes and lit one, exhaling a long drag into the crisp mid-Atlantic night’s air. “How much did Merkel get from you?”
“I’m sorry, didn’t you say you were retired?”
“I also said Naval Intelligence. You never rotate out of that.”
“Then look, you must have been around the block enough to know that I can’t talk to you, or the vice president, for that matter, about anything real or imagined, so why are you trying to get me to talk?”
“Okay, don’t talk. Listen.” He took another drag from the cigarette, then continued, “I was the guy who designed, built, and ran the DSRV during the Cold War. When we started, we couldn’t catch a fish in a butterfly net. But soon we were retrieving missile parts and, hell, whole submarines, from ten, fifteen, twenty thousand feet. We were snagging Soviet nose cones from spent rockets and ICBMs, whole codebooks and decoder machines from sunken Akula- and Victor-class, red missile boats. Christ, we even tapped the Russian undersea telephone lines and listened in to everything from data bursts to lovesick sailors trying to sweet talk their girlfriends to wait till they got home from the sea and not to fuck the guy from the vodka factory. We got a shitload of stuff.”
“Okay, well thank you for your service. What’s all that got to do with me?”
“You are about to be taken by scrambled eggs who don’t give a shit about you or your project. They just need funding for the shit they really want to do that Congress won’t authorize.”
Bill recognized ‘scrambled eggs’ as the term given to the yellow filigree embroidered on the visors of flag officer’s hats. Still, he remained silent; for all he knew this could be some sort of security test dreamed up by the CIA to tarnish him and take over many of his projects and budgets.
Russ took him in and decided to go on. “Okay, keep not talking, but hear what I am telling you. There are two special ops subs that can crack your buried treasure from miles off — in two weeks. They are already bought and paid for, and their operational expenses are, I bet, one quarter the cost Merkel and the rest gave you.”
“How do you know these boats are still on line?”
“I retired last week.”
“Look, Commander, I hope you’re doing what you are doing out of patriotism and not some beef you have with Navy brass. In recognition of your service and your rank, I am going to make believe all that happened tonight was I shook twice and flushed once. Have a good retirement.”
As Bill walked back to the restaurant, Klaven called out, “Try the Halibut!”
∞§∞
At the White House the next day, Peter Remo stopped dead in his tracks when he attempted to walk into Bill’s office. The scene in front of him made him smile. A sound engineer pressing headphones to his ears sat at a rolling cart, which held a mixer and a digital recorder. Seated across from Bill was a woman with a stopwatch and a big book full of what seemed like script pages. Seated next to her was a man with his chin resting between his thumb and forefinger listening intently to every syllable coming from Bill. In front of Bill was a microphone with something that looked like a fly swatter made out of panty hose material between the mic and his face. Right below was a small easel with loose pages on it and around him there were stands holding thick, heavy blankets, Pete surmised these were sound deadening blankets to ward off the roomy sound only a microphone could hear.
Bill was smiling as he talked, the director sitting across from him having recommended it because a smile affects the tone of voice, making the speaker sound more energetic and happy. “In our next show, can Tiffany and Diego outsmart a robot mouse controlled by the freeze-dried brain of a real mouse?” Bill finished the line and looked to the director.
The director gave an okay sign, then held up his hand, waited, and pointed at Bill.
“Come on now, Diego, say cheese!” Bill added, as if taunting the boy who wasn’t there.
“Cut, circle it. Okay, that’s a wrap. Thank you, Bill, We’ll see you in four weeks.”
“Bye Mo, Jenny, take care,” Bill addressed them as they bugged out in an instant. Bob, the sound guy, stayed behind and took down the sound blankets and stands.
“Peter! You’re early.”
“Radio star?”
“TV actually. I do a PBS show for kids called Science Beat, and a Science And Technology Policy Review once a month for U.S. Information Agency. We are hoping CNN picks it up.”
“So which was this?”
“The PBS show. I shot the opening and did a series of wraparounds on camera a few months back. These were the audio tracks for the coming attractions.” Bill rifled through his desk and came up with a DVD. He walked over to the TV and popped it in. “Tell you what Pete, you check out this DVD of the show. I am going to hit the men’s room.”
Peter watched the opening of Science Beat. There was Bill on the fifty-yard line of his alma mater. As he cocked his arm back to throw a pass, his body changed into a computer graphic of the musculoskeletal system as he propelled the ball. The ball was shown in a perfect spiral (what else?), bulleting through the air. Around the spiraling ball were vector lines and parabolic arcs, as well as math formulas on lift and drag. Then the panning camera caught the big Jumbotron in the stadium and zoomed into the screen until the pixels were as big as baseballs. Peter could see the alternations of the pixels from red to blue to green that create a picture, shooting down the cable to the camera, as well as the splitting of the image across a chip that digitized the picture. After going through the lens, flipping and shrinking through the focal point, the picture was right side up as it came out of the last lens element. The subject of the picture was a woman in the stands wearing an iPod. Her earphones became one half of the cutaway showing the diaphragm of the earbud on the opposite side of the eardrum. The vibration off the earbud sympathetically vibrated the eardrum and the signal was transmitted through the tympanic bone into the brain as impulses. On the screen, her brain began to spin and transformed back into the football. When a wide receiver caught the football in the end zone, he looked down and saw he had caught a brain, not the ball. At the end, a graphic announced “Science Beat with Professor ‘Wild’ Bill Hiccock.” A series of credits ran over drawings by da Vinci and Michelangelo, ending in a computer-aided design of an airplane on a huge screen. The CAD drawing of the plane started to materialize as the SR-71 Blackbird at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, as Bill appeared standing on the wing of the fastest supersonic spy plane in history.
He held a rock in his hand as he spoke to a circling camera giving a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the plane and the museum. “Today we are going to see how a rock in a river led to the development of the fastest commercial aircraft in the world, as Roscoe Banks takes us on a trip that goes
back three hundred forty-five years and proceeds at supersonic speed to land in a secret Air Force base during the Cold War.” The image of Bill standing on the wing digitized into a stream of dots and was replaced by Roscoe standing near a river as people dressed in Middle Ages attire beat clothes against rocks to clean them.
Just then Bill re-entered, “Well, what do you think?”
“Don’t quit your day job.”
“Hey pal, education is my day job. All this cloak and dagger crap is extracurricular.”
VI. I LOVE THE NIGHT LIFE
There are many reasons men don’t wear leather pants anymore, but in the after-hours clubs of Switzerland, the diffused euro-sexual gender ambiguity was in full view. In this case, the view was that of Raffael Juth’s simulated-cowhide- covered butt. The observer was Hanna Strum, an attractive woman whose long curly blonde locks dangled and played peek-a-boo with her pushed up breasts that ‘Victoria’ was not trying to keep secret. Raffey, of course, exhibited all the male characteristics of trying not to stare while staring that tickled Hanna at a level she dared not let on. After he caught her looking a few times, he drummed up the courage to walk over to her breasts and ask if she’d like to dance. She made sure not to look at him approaching; however, another woman watching would have noticed the subtle “girls up” pose she morphed into.
“Hi, I am Raffael,” he said as he bobbed and weaved a little to place his face in her line of sight as she scanned the room.
“Hi.” She gave him a quick glance then continued her not-interested investigation of the gyrating room.
“I was wondering if you would like to share a dance with me?”
“You were?” She said without looking at him.
“Yes, unless you are here with someone?”
“Would that matter to you?” She said, finally locking eyes with him.
“It would be a pre-condition of which I was not aware and therefore acceptable to me as your preference.”
The God Particle Page 7