The Hammer of God

by Tom Avitabile

  Realizing he had two minutes until a staff meeting, Bill picked up the new legislation that spent the night on his bedside table and walked out, smiling with a little more pep in his step because of the way he’d spent the rest of his night.

  At the meeting, he re-tasked his White House team to get all the pros and cons on the fast-tracked legislation ready for a position paper to the President in three days. Cheryl had stitched in an addendum to this morning’s agenda titled “Crisis Management.”

  “Cheryl, what’s this last item?”

  “Yesterday you disappeared. In the event of a real emergency you need to appoint an order of succession so we can still function and be of service if the President or whoever, needs Sci during the crisis.”

  “Good point. Great point! I’ll work on a short list and we’ll kick it around tomorrow.” Turning to the others, he said, “Anything else? Good, then on with your day people.”

  As he was leaving the room, Cheryl came over and gave him the look that meant wait until the others leave. Even though the room was now empty, she spoke in low tones.

  “Mr. Hiccock, I hope you don’t mind me bringing this up, but I have lived through a couple of White House crashes before and I thought…”

  “Cheryl, I meant what I said. It’s a great point you made and I thank you for bringing it up.”

  “Actually, I was hoping you’d make me your second.”

  This is why he liked having Cheryl as his assistant. She saw things from the helicopter and very often from the ground up at the same time. “I’ll have to check if you would be eligible.”

  “I reviewed the guidelines. I qualify and section seven specifies it’s totally your call.”

  “Well at least you’re not pressuring me.”

  “During a crisis, if you become President it will just be about running things and making sure information flows. We are not going to be entering into new science areas. I know the machinery and where and when to kick it.”

  “Again, all good points. Let me think it over.”

  “Okay fine.”

  “Wait. What if I don’t choose you?”

  “Then I’ll know you had a good reason and I’ll accept it.”

  She got up and left. Bill felt uncomfortable but didn’t know why.

  A little bell went off in his head and he redirected his attention to the phone on his desk. He hit the auto dial, “Hi Hon, listen I was thinking about the Indian place on K Street tonight.”

  “Oh Bill, I don’t think I am up for it. I’ve been dragging all morning. What do you say we just stay in tonight and hang low?”

  “Sure, Babe. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yeah, probably just… I dunno; I am not really up for anything.”

  “Good enough. I should be home by seven. Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Deadly Liaisons

  Alzir El Benhan was pleased. The handoff of his Chinese package, from the Sudanese government courier, traveling under diplomatic immunity, went flawlessly at the cabstand of JFK’s International Arrivals Terminal Four. Both men acted out agreeing to “share” the same cab to New York. Although the courier went on to New York, he dropped El-Benhan off at one of the low-end motels on the access road to the airport.

  The clerk at the motel outside JFK greedily accepted his cash advance payment for a block of twenty-four rooms this Saturday, three days hence. In his attache case were twenty-two domestic round-trip tickets. One to each town in which the National Football League played that weekend along with a few other well-chosen towns, most of them with subways. The delivery of the jars shipped from Beijing to Africa and then to him was the last piece needed for Saturday’s meeting. Between Sunday afternoon and the morning rush hour the next day, their work — Allah’s work — would be done.

  ?§?

  “Feeling any better?” Bill said, kissing Janice on the forehead as she burrowed into the corner arm of the couch with her feet up on the hassock.

  “Yeah, a little. How was your day?”

  “Better than yours, except Cheryl blindsided me with something and I don’t know how I am going to handle it.”

  “She wants a raise?”

  “No, she wants my job.”

  “Did you tell her you aren’t finished with it yet?”

  “Not exactly that, no. Want me to make you some tea?”

  “Ooooh yeah, that would be perfect.”

  “Back in a nanosecond.”

  As Bill filled the teapot from the plastic spring water jug, Janice appeared at the kitchen door. “Bill, what are we doing?”

  “Well, water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius, so I am about to attempt to achieve that phenomenon.”

  “I think you know that wasn’t what I was asking. I mean what are we doing here, living together like kids again.”

  Bill placed the pot on the burner and maxed the knob. When the gas caught, he backed off the setting, silencing the clicking of the spark generator. He knew more about the workings of the stove than about the workings of the woman who obviously wanted to have a very serious discussion with him. “Let’s go back inside.”

  They settled on the couch. Bill stroked Janice’s hair with his outstretched arm. She caught his hand and ran it past her cheek before kissing it. Then she nestled it in the crook of her neck with the gentle urge for him to rub her there.

  “What’s on your mind, Babe?” Bill said as he did what she urged.

  “I’m not sure where this is going. Are we going to get married again or just live together? I don’t know why, but right now the answer seems very important to me.”

  Bill rubbed Janice’s neck harder. “Janice, when we found each other again, it was a miracle. Maybe the first time around for us wasn’t the best because I wasn’t ready, wasn’t aware of what a true relationship with someone meant. I didn’t bring any tools with me to fix any of the little things that you need to fix to keep two people together.”

  He stopped rubbing and turned toward her. “But now, thanks to you, I feel I am ready to try again. If you’ll have me, again.”

  Janice tilted her head. “Bill, are you proposing?”

  “Here wait; let me make it official.” He slid off the couch, got down on one knee, grabbed her hand, kissed it, and said, “Janice, I lost you once. I never want to lose you again. I love you. I love you more than I love myself and I need to be with you every day. Janice, if you’ll have me again, will you marry me, again?”

  “Oh, Bill,” she hugged him so hard that she slid from the couch and joined him on the floor. He held her tight and he felt her begin to cry. He continued to hold her with his eyes closed until her breathing settled.

  A few minutes later, she spoke softly, “When we were almost killed, looking into your eyes gave me courage. It gave me the strength to come through that horrible time. I knew then how much I loved you and that I always had. Yes, yes, let’s get married — sooner rather than later.”

  They kissed and rolled on the floor. Bill was on top when he broke off the kiss, smoothed her hair, and looked into Janice’s eyes. “We are going to make this a wonderful life. Just you and me.” They kissed again.

  The teapot attempted to disturb the moment. They let it boil.

  For no particular reason, Bill’s eyes sprung open at 4:30 a.m., an hour before the alarm was set to go off. He rolled over and saw Janice in a restless sleep. He put his hand on her shoulder and that seemed to calm her somewhat. He kept his hand on her for a moment, thinking about how their lives had changed last night. Then he rose from bed and made his way into the den.

  Might as well get a jump on the day, he thought, hitting the startup key on his secure home computer and then going into the kitchen to make coffee. When he returned, he checked his inbox, finding the usual array of mail and memos. He spent some time answering and redirecting some of it, then decided to look in on SCIAD, using his home-based retinal scan device. His inquiry of the previous
day created a torrent of activity. Three, however, came with Element priority. According to his own rules, he’d open those.

  The first response was a thoughtful dissertation on nefarious forces masking a biological attack under the haze of an influenza outbreak caused by the lack of vaccine. The gist of the piece was that public health authorities would have been slow to ferret out the biological attack agent from the thousands who would fall victim in the normal course of time. In biological attacks, time is the enemy. Contaminants and agents must be identified, then quarantined, and then eradicated. The longer it took to realize an attack was taking place, the bigger the attack got. He bookmarked this message and used the comment tool to highlight “time is the enemy” in yellow. He’d go back to his one later.

  The second message dealt with the need to harden the notification network of first responders. Here the emphasis was on preventing outside forces from affecting or skewing our biologic reporting system, blinding us from the severity of the outbreak and having the same effect as giving a natural virus more time to spread throughout the population. Bill decided to have that one redacted and released back to the outer compound rings for further comment.

  The last position paper was a bone chiller. It was a short list of known viral strains, both natural and synthetic, that could wreak havoc in a poorly inoculated population. Lots of nasty little bugs nestled in labs and in arms factories all over the world. They were all deadly but, thank God, all very delicate. Some would die in direct sunlight. Others had no tolerance for temperature swings. Some hated smog while rain rendered a few strains impotent. The fragile nature of most of these viruses eliminated their possible use as weapons. But a few were robust enough to scare the bejesus out of anti-biological response teams.

  One particularly nasty little bugger was HCD Complex 33, a synthetic strain that needed to be incubated right up until its time of release. The heat of the human body was incubation enough, but the Complex 33 had to get into the body from a warm source to begin with and that wasn’t that easy. Sunlight killed it. UV actually. So you couldn’t just release it in a warm climate. However, once it was inside a person, it spread by the simple act of breathing. Then the next victim’s internal heat incubated it for the next migration through the new host’s breathing patterns.

  Bill read the blurb again to make sure he understood that in order to start the chain of infection you’d have had to set it inside a body from an incubated environment intentionally. Then he put the message at the top of the list. He wanted everyone’s thoughts on this. Pronto.

  He was about to call up some position papers by the NIH when the sound of retching made him fly back to the bedroom. He saw Janice in their bathroom bent over the bowl throwing up. At a time like this, a man makes a choice, one that will either dog him or herald him for decades to come. Bill chose wisely. He pulled back Janice’s hair, placed a gentle hand on her upper back, and was ready with a damp washcloth when she was able to stand again. He then guided her by the shoulders back to bed and sat alongside her.

  “You okay?”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “You were pretty restless all night.”

  “I can’t imagine what got into me.”

  “Probably some bug or twenty-four-hour thing.”

  He spoke reassuringly, but inside, Bill’s silent alarm went off. This is how it would happen. Thousands of Americans dismissing the first sign of an attack as a bug or bad sushi. He got another washcloth, wet it down, and laid it on Janice’s brow.

  “Rest. I’ll call in for you.”

  “Just give me a minute or two, I’ll be okay.”

  A half-hour later, Janice was ready to get dressed and start her day. She headed off to work, but only after Bill made her promise to see a doctor later.

  At 7:30 a.m. from his office phone, Bill called Judy, America’s “MD #1.” By 8:00, she was in his conference room.

  “What’s the gestation period of the kind of influenza we are going to get hit with this season?”

  “Thirty-six to forty-eight hours from the time of infection, depending on the antibodies and general health of the exposed.”

  “Ever hear of HD Complex 33?”

  “Whoa. Yes. Very nasty, a super-strain on steroids. Helped along by synthetic technology. And unfortunately that genie is out of the bottle. We couldn’t stop the propagation of the synthesis process because it was Chinese-Soviet research initially. When the Soviet Union went down the papers got out.”

  “So why isn’t this more of a concern? I mean, I just learned of it.” Hiccock asked as he tapped the printed out email in front of him.

  “The only good thing is it is very unstable outside the host and not easily transported. Can I ask why you brought it up?”

  “What would the gestation period of Complex 33 be?”

  “Again it’s supercharged; maybe twenty minutes.”

  “So how long would it take before our public health system was alerted to any spikes in influenza with a normal virus?”

  “I know you are going to tell me why you are asking me, but three to four days is the generally accepted timeframe for confirmation of a major event.”

  “Roughly twice the gestation time. So if we were hit with Complex 33, the confirmation time would be forty minutes?”

  “I see where you’re going, but let me call in the boys at CDC. They have some epidemiological data sprays on stuff like this.” She picked up the phone and dialed. “You know, if you think this agent is in play, you are duty bound by law to inform my office.”

  “I assure you all of this is just speculation, a big what-if.”

  She nodded to the computer. “Is this an exercise in your SCIAD group?”

  “Yep. Just egghead stuff. For now.”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way.” She drew her attention toward the phone. “Hello George, Judy. Can you flash-net over to Mr. Hiccock’s office the first three tiers of the EP study you ran for me last week? Oh and George one more thing, does Complex 33 have a dormant quotient? Uh hum. I see. Okay, get back to me fast.”

  She hung up the phone. “You better hope it stays an exercise, Bill. Complex 33 has a dormant quotient.”

  “Which means?”

  “It can lie dormant inside the host for up to seventy-two hours before any signs occur. Yet unlike natural viral structures, it remains infectious while it’s napping.”

  “So that means we have a stealth weapon, a biological time bomb, which spreads silently before going off.”

  Judy nodded solemnly. “That makes us blind to an attack for the first three days at least. Then hundreds of thousands of cases start overloading the system.”

  Bill shook his head at the concept. “Infectious diseases were so much more fun when we left them to nature.”

  “How real is this exercise, Bill?”

  “I swear it’s just that.”

  Angela D’Martino adjusted her brand new plunge demi-bra so the neckline of her new sweater showed just the right amount of cleavage. She made a face like she suddenly had fangs to check that the Revlon Killer Red lipstick was not smudged all over her new caps. $12,000 dollars worth of dental work, free! That was just one of the benefits of boinking her Jewish dentist. Here was a man who noticed a woman and all the little things she did. Her husband, the “schmoe,” never noticed anything about her anymore. Including her frequent nights out with the “girls.”

  Angela checked her watch as she grabbed the car keys. Harvey was going to meet her at 8:30 at “the place.” As she opened her front door, she called out to the blob on the couch. “I left sausage and peppers in the Tupperware. Just heat it up for a minute in the microwave. Didja hear me? The sausage and peppers!”

  “Yeah, microwave, right,” was the rumble from the living room. He was in for the night; Saturday night no less.

  As Angela drove down the Van Wyck Expressway, she felt excited, young even, feeling the warm flush of impending sex. It would go just like the other times. She�
�d wait in the motel parking lot inside her car, wearing her sunglasses in spite of the night. He’d pull up, go in, get the room key, and then come out and escort her inside.

  Harvey Edelstein, DDS was a good lover and didn’t mind the oral thing. Her husband, on the other hand, thought it was beneath his manhood to please a woman that way. His loss.

  She arrived at the Starlight Motor Inn at 8:25. Even had she not been lost in her sweaty reverie, she would have never noticed the dark sedan that entered the lot with her, parked, and killed its lights.

  A few minutes later, Harvey’s BMW pulled in. He parked next to her, and came round and gave her a peck on the cheek through her driver’s side window.

  “Be right back. Oooo, you smell good,” DDS Edelstein said. It was that kind of comment — noticing the little things — that made her want to fuck his brains out.

  ?§?

  “Short stay as usual?” the night manager behind the bulletproof glass asked the face he’d seen a few times in the last month or so.

  “Yes. Something on the ground floor, around back.”

  “No can do, chief. Got a big block of rooms signed out. All I got left is 108 out front to the left.” The manager was telling a half-truth as he slid the registration card under the glass with a pen. Dr. Edelstein signed as Josh Cohen, after a schmuck he hated in college, He used this alias whenever he didn’t want anyone to know his real name. He laid $45 in cash into the little tray slot below the bulletproof glass and didn’t ask for a receipt.

  ?§?

  From the sedan, Wallace watched the doctor — whose picture he’d shown to the clown behind the front desk along with a new crisp $100 dollar bill — collect his girlfriend and go to room 108. Wallace made the deal sweeter for the guy at the desk by also booking that room for the entire night for $129. That meant the clerk could keep the short stay fee for the doc’s three hours of humping. Having the room from 4:00 until noon the next day, Wallace was able to wire it up and could retrieve his valuable equipment in no rush after they left. He’d also get some semen samples, hair, and whatever else might be of use to his client.