The God Particle

by Tom Avitabile

  ∞§∞

  “Sierra Tango Two in thirty seconds,” the chief of the boat called out.

  Mush took one more look at the chart. He was navigating through a tricky part of the undersea ice near the Lomonosov Ridge, which divides the Eurasian Basin and the Amerasian Basin into two deep depressions on the sea floor at the top of the world, under the Polar Ice Cap. Training never stops on a submarine. On every patrol, crewmembers constantly have to qualify at watch stations other than their own specific rate. That means they shadow qualified-at-rate crew member to learn that job. Mush was showing a young ensign the basics of under-ice navigation. “Under the ice, with no satellite penetration for GPS, the only way to survive these transits is to use time and distance as you chart your progress.” He placed the calipers on the chart where a red line zigged through two under-sea mountain ranges. That gave him the point in the ocean where he needed to make the thirty-eight degree turn to port. It was designated Sierra Tango Two, which by his calculations was now five seconds away.

  “And come to port zero-three-eight on my mark. Mark!” Mush ordered.

  “What’s the next target, Ensign?”

  He took the calipers and rolled them point over point to the next zig in the red line that was their safe course thought the range. “I make next target designated as Sierra Tango Three in twenty-two minutes at our present course and twenty-seven knot speed.”

  “I concur. Keep it up, Will and you’ll have your Qual Card filled before the halfway party.”

  The young ensign smiled, getting his qualifications card filled out in navigation in the first half of the patrol would give him the other half of the trip to qualify in Sonar.

  “Exec, you got the boat,” Mush said as he left.

  “Yes, sir.” He took a position at the chart table and announced, “Captain is off the conn.”

  Mush had time to go back to his compartment and review the promotions list for this patrol. He took off his cap and hung it on the bow of the battleship Nebraska, a scale model which was bolted to a shelf over his desk. On his desk was a picture of Brooke. He had snapped it on his cell phone the morning after their walk through D.C. The sun was rising and her hair had the same glow it had when he first noticed how spectacular she was up on the bridge of Big Red in that late afternoon Pacific sun. He sat back, and for the hundredth time since they shoved off, he thought about what he would say when he got his arms around her again. He touched the picture as if to stroke her cheek, then caught himself, shook it off, and opened the folder filled with assessments of his crew.

  A yeoman entered the compartment with an iPad. “Sir, I have that encrypted video file downloaded on your pad. Just enter your password.”

  “Thanks, Bob.”

  Mush waited until he left the room, then watched a video that had been streamed to the Nebraska encoded over the VLF radio link. This process took a few hours, because very low frequency communications were slow but powerful enough to penetrate the earth. This was a video direct from Commander, Submarine Forces U.S. Pacific Fleet. Mush had never gotten anything like this before, and as far as he knew, no other nuclear sub under the ice ever had. The video opened with the logo of COMSUBPAC. Then Mush’s face became one big smile as the commander of SEAL Team Nine and his men posed for a picture that sport fisherman live for, proudly standing by a landed blue marlin, swordfish or other game fish catch of the day. Only in this case, the catch was a mechanical whale. One of the SEALs was holding up a handmade sign that read what the team yelled out in perfect military cadence, “Ahoy, Captain Ahab Morton, we got the whale what got away! Sir!”

  ∞§∞

  As he read the overnight lab report, Lustig was impressed, but had a problem. The crime scene investigation unit that responded to the hotel murder of the Arab was one of the best in Switzerland. This Burrell woman from the U.S. had stuck her nose into the case and hit on something the Swiss detectives missed. For himself, this was not an issue because in the end, the path to justice was the only road he was on, but for the forensic technician, Armend, who stood before him, it was a hit to the pride of the man and his unit. “Would you like to be there when we show her these results, Armend?”

  “Yes. I would very much like to…” See this little bitch, was the thought behind the smile he hung on his face in the presence of his superior.

  The minute Lustig and Armend walked into the conference room, Joey could see it all over their faces, a look of contrition, even resignation. He had no idea what it pertained to and was about to ask something like, ‘Hey fellas, why the long faces?’ when Brooke walked into the room, after stopping for her morning cup of wake up.

  “Madame, the preliminary result of the skin test you wanted is in,” Lustig said as he handed the translated form to her.

  “Is this about your Arab murder, Brooke?” Joey said.

  “Yes, Mr. Palumbo.” Lustig answered for her, as she was deep into the report. Somehow he just couldn’t warm up to the idea of calling him Joey.

  Armend watched her, this slightly built woman, this American heroine, who walked into his crime scene and had the bad manners to question his findings. Yes, there were two different skin cells embedded in the terry cloth material, but what was she getting at? He watched her as she studied the rendering his department had prepared less than an hour ago with the two different color keys on it showing the location and relative amount of different skin residue. She curled her lip while she read. Armend thought it was the mark of a schoolgirl trying to struggle with algebra; perhaps he should explain the results. Then he thought better of it, Why help her?

  Then she asked for the ladies’ locker room. Lustig directed her. A minute later she returned with a towel. Armend scrutinized every step she made. She flattened out the towel on the conference room table and opened her purse. She folded the towel and rolled it long-ways to make it like a rope. She took out an eyeliner pencil and a highlighter and rubbed onto the towel three marks roughly corresponding to the three ‘blue-red-blue’ marks on the diagram of the towel in evidence as yellow-eyeliner-yellow onto her towel.

  Armend looked at the clock; how much longer would this take?

  Then she grabbed the towel by the two yellow ends and asked Armend to step over and turn around. As soon as he did so, she swung the towel around his neck and pulled fairly hard. The startled Armend almost fell backwards, but the woman released her grip in time.

  “May I?” the bitch asked, as she gently tipped Armend’s jaw back showing the smudged eyeliner residue on his neck.

  “Now the big money question, did either of the skin types match that of the deceased?” Brooke said.

  “No.” Armend said, rubbing his throat, but actually his ego instead.

  “Gentlemen, somebody other than the deceased was strangled in that room,” Brooke said while swallowing her first sip.

  “But, mind you, this is just a cursory microscopic examination of bacterial communities and pigmentation levels,” Armend pointed out to take some of the sting away.

  “But it appears all three do not match…” Lustig said looking over the towel.

  “Of course, in a week we will have definitive DNA.” Armend said.

  “But I got enough for a working theory.” Brooke took another sip of her coffee and dabbed at her lips with the demonstration towel.

  “Which is what exactly, Brooke?” Joey asked, picking up the lab report and flipping through it.

  “Well, it could have gone down like this. The towel was used by a third person to choke someone, probably the geek.”

  “So you are putting four people in that room?” Joey asked.

  “Two’s company, three’s a crowd, but four’s a party!” Brooke said with a wink.

  Armend looked down at the towel; how could he have missed that? This American woman had a skill set his entire team lacked. But why would she care about this case?

  “Well, Brooke, that’s good detective work, but where is this all going to lead you? You are not officially her
e to investigate this case; you are here to help us find the Architect or Engineer or whomever,” Joey said with a shrug.

  “I know boss, thanks for these few minutes. I will pursue the rest on my own time.”

  “Armend, please distribute this new theory to the team. See if they think it has enough meat on its bone for the judge to take a bite and maybe reopen the investigation.” He then turned to Joey and Brooke, “Shall we get started on today’s progress?”

  They both agreed, and Armend took it as his cue to leave.

  They spent the rest of the morning looking at priors and travel patterns of train engineers, civil engineers, sanitation engineers, chemical, electrical, software, computer, and mechanical and building engineers whose names were flagged by a crime computer for having any contact with the law. The largest list was that of building engineers, or superintendants as they were called in America, who most frequently called the police or had been called on by them. Nothing they found seemed to fit the kind of profile that Parnell had outlined.

  In the afternoon, they dug into a list of ‘Architects’ with equally disheartening results. After work, Brooke went to the crime lab at FedPol and retrieved a few prints of the video frames from the club’s surveillance tape that she had requested during her quick lunch break. She planned to be at the club tomorrow night, Saturday; the murder had happened on a Saturday night.

  ∞§∞

  Janice had arrived at Orly at about 7 a.m., and Bill was there at the airport to greet her. They had a very French breakfast at a little Boulanger Patisserie on the rue Monge. Bill could see she was tired from the all-night trip so he had worked at the embassy while she slept until mid-afternoon. Today, Saturday, they were going to see the town.

  Befitting his position in the White House, Bill was afforded a driver/guide from the State Department. He and Janice had a crash course in Paris tourism 101. First the Louvre and then the Eiffel Tower for lunch. In the afternoon, they scooted up to Versailles and took a picture of themselves in a mirror in the hall of mirrors. Bill tried to point out that the Great War, World War One, the war to end all wars, ended in the Armistice drawn up in this room on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month; which is why Veteran’s Day is November 11th, but Janice was more impressed by the chandeliers. As the sun set they headed for dinner at a must-dine spot in the Paris Michelin Guide. Then Bill had a thought. He tapped his driver on the shoulder and said, “You have lived here your whole life. Where would you go tonight?”

  “Me? Monsieur, I am not a VIP.”

  “Hey, Francois, neither are we. I think we did enough of the tourist thing. What would a Saturday night for a Parisian, in Paris, be like?”

  “Sadly, the place I recommend would not be in Paris.”

  “Is the food good there?”

  “The best!”

  “Then, my good man, take us to your place,” Bill said, getting the smile of approval from Janice.

  “I will have to call in this change of itinerary,” Francois said to make sure his passenger and responsibility for the evening understood that it would become a matter of record.

  “Call it in then.”

  Francois smiled. This VIP, he liked.

  The drive outside Paris was both enchanting and surprisingly pedestrian. Many of the little clusters of poor neighborhoods were not the stuff of travel brochures, but the open spaces and quaint villages, now fed by ‘off the track’ tourism, were maintained to meet the expectations of the pseudo-Francophile and their greedy cameras.

  The spur-of-the-moment venue for this evening was a tavern-like restaurant that was not dressed for tourism. The people inside were not tourists and the menus were in French only. Bill took in a deep breath and the aroma of the food told him he had found the true experience. As if on cue, a four-piece band struck up the familiar opening chords of The Beatles, Day Tripper. The vocals, in a decidedly French accent, made Bill joke to Janice that at some point the band would launch into the Beatles song, Michelle, and the place would probably stand as if it were the national anthem.

  Flagrantly in violation of the diplomatic service rules, their guide and driver, Francois, joined them at the table and filled in the blanks in Bill and Janice’s hardly passable French. When the waiter came by with the wine list, Bill looked at Janice as if to say, ‘Should we?’

  Janice just gestured with her palms up at their surroundings and said, “When in France…”

  ∞§∞

  Brooke had persuaded the policewoman from FedPol to tag along with her to the club that night. In civvies, with her hair down, Verena’s out-of-uniform appearance turned Brooke’s two-woman, ad-hoc investigation team into a female dynamic duo of Saturday night warriors. Between the two of them, they got more invitations to join, offers of drinks and even a few marriage proposals, than all the regulars scored in an evening. To the chagrin of the males, and a few of the females, both these women were focused on the job at hand, namely to find out the ‘geek’s’ name. Here, being two hot blondes helped grease the memories and helpfulness of the club-goers.

  Somewhere around eleven, they got a hit. ‘The brain,’ she called him and said she didn’t see him much anymore.

  “Much or never again?” Brooke asked the bouncing twenty-something wearing a short skirt and flimsy tank top, which didn’t hide the lack of foundation garments beneath.

  “Not for a while.”

  “Do you know his name?” Verena asked in German.

  “The brain? I don’t know, something like Renny or Rashie.”

  “Do you know anyone who knows him?”

  “No, but I just remembered, he was an engineer or something like that.”

  Brooke looked to Verena, “Ask her if she knows what kind of work he does or where he works.”

  “I think he said, Hadron, but all the guys here say that.”

  “They do?” Brooke said.

  “Because that means they got money and they got a good job, but most of them still live with their mothers.”

  ∞§∞

  Lustig didn’t appreciate being disturbed on a Saturday night. In fact, it was a rare occurrence since he had been elevated to FedPol, where he fought crime in a supervisory capacity, nine to five, as opposed to when he was a Canton cop whose life was ruled by the phone. The fact that it was Brooke, on the scent of the Arab murderer, made it more of an inconvenience, until she said ‘engineer’ and ‘Hadron.’

  “I will call the head of security and I’ll meet you there at midnight,” Lustig said, with a new sense of urgency. He then called and woke up the head of Hadron security, Martin Jenson.

  XXIX. DO-GOODER

  “I wanna hold your hand, I wanna hold your haa-ah-ah-ah hand.” Bill was crooning along with the French Beatles tribute band and Janice was laughing like she hadn’t done in a long time. Francois the driver was drumming on the table top with bread sticks. Then the lead singer, the ‘John’ of the group, made his way over with his boom mike on his head and wireless guitar and leaned over and brought the mike close to Bill as they sang the next verse in unison. The crowd was clapping and laughing and Janice’s eyes were tearing up from laughing.

  When the song ended, the musician told the waiter to bring this couple more wine. Bill respectfully waved off the waiter, and Janice through her smiles agreed. They stayed for another half-hour, and after everyone did indeed stand for Michelle, they asked Francois to drive them back to the embassy.

  They entered past security like teenagers sneaking back into the house after curfew. They made their way up to their room and continued the party and the teenager profile for another hour.

  ∞§∞

  “Do you know this man?” Lustig tapped the photo in his hand in front of Jenson.

  “No, I don’t recognize him,” a sleep interrupted Jenson said as he turned to the face-recognition system tech, who had also been rousted out of bed for this impromptu late Saturday night meeting. He scanned the photo and then started a twenty-seven-point feature sea
rch. It took all of forty-five seconds and the computer got a hit on a Raffael Juth.

  “Raffael. I guess Raffey or Rayphie sounds like Renny?” Brooke said.

  “He’s a programmer in the measurement and monitoring section. He got an award for a new program that stabilizes sensor output during data lag accumulation,” Jenson said, as if he didn’t have a clue what that was.

  “What is that?” Brooke asked.

  “I haven’t a clue,” Jenson said, “But it was good enough to get him a new Audi A6 as a prize.”

  “And I assume he has had no run-in with the law?” Lustig asked.

  “Yes, he has a very clean past. He was a Fédération internationale des échecs master with a 2639 rating from the World Chess Association.”

  “Well, that’s why he wasn’t on our list; we didn’t include the chess club,” Brooke said.

  “Jenson, give us his address and we’ll ruin his Saturday night as well,” Lustig said.

  “I wouldn’t do that.” Brooke got everyone’s attention.

  “Look, I know it’s a long shot, but I don’t make this guy to be a killer, especially the kind to be cool, calm, and collected after ripping opening a guy’s throat.” Brooke walked over to the file. “How has his attendance been since the murders?”

  “Checking,” the tech said. “He’s not missed a day or been late all year.”

  “I see your point, Agent Burrell.” Lustig chewed it over and then got on Brooke’s page. “We know he was there, we know there was violence, we know you can’t turn on the TV and not hear about the sex-scandal-murder, yet he, with no record, does not come forward nor run. Why?”

  “The blood on the sill!” Brooke snapped her fingers. “This guy got away. And he’s hiding something bigger than a murder.”