The Hammer of God

by Tom Avitabile

  In five minutes, six people remained around the large table. Bill had convinced the facilities manager of the White House to put the next meeting intended for that room into the Mural room. Bill took out two folders and a fresh pad from his portfolio. He drew a bull’s eye target on the yellow-lined paper then split it in two.

  “Here’s the way I see it. One of two realities; the bomb already here, or on its way here. The new tighter security is going to have to do the job if it’s the second possibility and the bomb is on its way. For now, I want to assume the first proposition: that it’s already here.”

  “How do you figure that it could be here already?” one of the men around the table asked.

  “The ports are locked down now. But a week ago, maybe 20 percent of containerized freight got scanned.”

  “Maybe 20,” Joey repeated.

  Luck is the only way we are going to interdict this thing and scientifically luck is an undefined number, like zero divided by anything, or infinity. The only way to stop this thing without luck is intel. So here’s what I am proposing: a two-pronged approach. We hit all the cells and suspected cells hard and mine any data that’s retrieved. At the same time, we game it out on a few Crays and get some probable scenarios and start running those down.”

  “So start gathering data or intel then feed it into a big computer and see where the computer points us?” the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency asked.

  “Essentially, yes. This way, if we do it ourselves, we aren’t stopping everything else that’s going on. This just becomes another tool.”

  “How do we get raw intel from the various agencies?” Joey asked. “I mean, that’s already supposed to be happening through the Director of National Intelligence and the DHS. And so far we haven’t gotten enough to feed into an adding machine much less a super computer.”

  “We’ll get alternate sources,” Bill said.

  “That’s a pretty tall order, Mr. Hiccock,” Admiral Swank, head of National Security Council noted.

  “I think I already have the men for the job.” Bill slid the personnel files for Sergeants Bridgestone and Ross across the desk.

  “Are these your aces in the hole? Then, my friend, you haven’t seen this.” The head of the FBI’s counter terrorism unit slid back over the table that morning’s New York Times. The above-the-fold headline read, “Army Rangers Face Torture Charges.”

  Bill quickly scanned the article. “It doesn’t mention them by name.”

  “We’ve asked them for restraint in publishing their pictures and kids’ schools’ addresses. At least until we play out if the charges will stick.”

  “Play out means there’s no doubt they did it, just whether or not you can hang them with it. These guys should get medals! They found the ambassador and, from that, we found the nukes. That’s 23 little Hiroshimas canceled and, God willing, 24.” Bill shook his head.

  “We don’t control the press in America, Bill.”

  “How did this get out anyway?”

  Harold Salter, Deputy National Security Advisor, spoke up and filled in the blanks. “Their key was the Embassy Guard, Jamal’s girlfriend. They found out about her and how she apparently conscripted our man over to the terrorist camp. Bridgestone and Ross went into deep cover. They became nomadic tribesmen, stink and all. They tracked her down and used whatever force necessary to get the information in a timely fashion.”

  “Whatever force necessary sounds vague. What does that really mean?” Hiccock asked.

  “They could have killed her or anybody else. They were not connected to us in any way. They were so deep and so disconnected that they could only be considered mercenaries or freelancers if they were ever caught or killed.”

  “The secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions,” Bill said, interjecting a line from the old TV show, “Mission Impossible.” The title seemed very appropriate to the current situation.

  “Exactly! B and R managed to get the location of the ambassador after some physical torture.”

  “How bad?”

  “She didn’t talk till she lost a finger.”

  Bill winced.

  “Then, for some odd reason, they brought her to the LZ. That was their mistake! It opened them up to crap like this in the Times.”

  “But how did anybody find out?”

  “Along the extraction route, her boyfriend and she jumped out of the copter at 200 feet. Some nomads in the area saw it and when they found the bodies, they camel-backed them into the town. Some Arab reporters were there and the rest is in the paper.”

  “Okay, but how does anybody know it was B amp;R?”

  “They don’t. Not by name. But street vendors and some neighbors saw them enter her apartment. They should have killed her in the apartment. That way, at best, they would have been thought of as desert thieves. Eyewitness accounts of them falling from a clandestine U.S. helicopter, however, allowed the Arab press to connect the dots another way around.”

  “Has their identity been compromised in the least?” Bill asked.

  “We don’t know. But the last thing we want is someone to identify them as the two from her apartment. So for now they are still over there but in tight control.”

  “Not arrested, I hope?”

  “They understand that they cannot go beyond the base right now.”

  “These are my guys. I want them on the team.”

  “These men tortured this woman,” the Judge Advocate said.

  “No, we did. All of us. The United States of America did in our name. These guys just got to be the working end of the stick. We need that stick now to help find the bomb before we find a big hole where Times Square used to be.”

  “Bill, are you sure about this?” President Mitchell asked as he pulled out a piece of White House stationary from the desk made from the planks of the H.M.S. Resolute.

  “Sir, I am convinced we can have a better chance at interdicting the device with these men on the team.”

  “They are already on the team. You mean your team.”

  “They are benched right now, sir. I want to get them back in the field doing what they do best.”

  “You know, even though they don’t know who it was, any Arab claims that it was the work of Americans will be enough to get some to scream bloody torture, start quoting Benjamin Franklin,” Ray wryly observed.

  “Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither,” Bill said, repeating the quote. “Well, that’s just another reminder of why, despite what 42 percent of Americans think, Ben Franklin was never President. Flowery language withers in the face of real world responsibility and devil’s choices.”

  “I thought it was because he was a Francophile,” Ray added.

  The President was finishing a note to the Secretary of Defense, ordering him to assign Bridgestone and Ross to Hiccock, when he looked up. “Ray, help me here. Who, or what, am I asking the Secretary to hand these men over to?”

  “Good question. Why don’t we have them assigned to the NSC here at the White House?”

  The President nodded and finished the note. He handed it to Ray, “Get this over to Barney. What are you going to call this idea of yours, Bill?”

  “If it weren’t so close to the bone, I was thinking Mission Impossible, sir.”

  “Get a better name and good luck, to you and to all of us.”

  Along with the President’s agreeing to the plan came his directive, which immediately did two things. One was that it established the “QuOG,” or Quarterback Operations Group, a new, top-secret cluster to be run out of the West Wing, at the sole discretion of the President, with a 27-million-dollar operating budget. Bill could get more if he needed it, but that was what was lying around in a discretionary fund at the White House that day. This money had already passed through Congress and was held in reserve for the Presidential shopping list of emergency actions or commissions. It was, essentially, anonymous money, and the lack of immediate Congressional oversight was the best way to kee
p Bill’s not-yet-named operation secret and unhindered. The second part of the Presidential order made Bill’s Quarterback group the “LFA” on the suitcase nuke investigation. By being designated Lead Federal Agency, Bill was immediately given standing in all the departments under the administration, Justice (FBI), DHS, INS, IRS, TSA and a handful of others, suddenly had a new deputy director. Hiccock’s thickened wallet of new ID cards allowed him to have one-way conversations and intel exchanges with these federal agencies without having to explain anything that could expose the true top-secret nature of the QuOG.

  When Bill returned to his office, he found Joey was on the phone with Janice. “I know; my wife was sick for nearly eight weeks with Joe Jr. … Eup, he just came in. Take care lady; see you soon.”

  Joey handed the phone to Bill, got up, and let him sit behind his own desk.

  “Hi babe, how are you feeling?”

  “My stomach feels like I’m on a rollercoaster that never stops,” Janice said as she pushed a pile of papers to the edge of her desk and laid her head on her arm as she cradled the phone.

  “Maybe you should have stayed home today.”

  “I had these patient summaries that I already put off long enough. But I am just beat. How did your meeting go?”

  “It went well. That’s all I can say right now. You understand.”

  “Sure. Oh, Joey was just telling me how his wife used buttermilk to qwell the same Category 5 typhoon that I have going on inside me. Can you stop off…”

  “No problem; I’ll pick it up on the way home.”

  “Thanks, Billy. I think I need to go now.”

  “Feel better.”

  Bill hung up and looked at Joey. “Thanks for doing that.”

  “What?”

  “Not letting Janice think she’s the only woman who’s ever been through this.”

  “Hey, Phyllis had her sister around when Joe Jr. was born, otherwise she would have been even more frazzled.”

  “Well, I hope Janice can manage without you for the next couple of days.”

  “Why, where is she going?”

  “Not her. You, Kimosabe. You are on the next flight out to Forward Operating Base Delta Tango 1, wherever the hell that is, to personally give B amp;R their orders with the President’s executive decree of immunity for the ambassador affair.”

  “So they went for this whole cockamamie idea of yours?”

  “Ours. This cockamamie idea of ours, Joey boy. Oh, we need a operational name?”

  “How about ‘Stork?’”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Phone Calls

  “Thank God, Francoise, that he died up here in the street,” commented Pierre as the ambulance pulled up to the cobblestoned curb on the Saint Germain street. Many of the kitschy jazz and rock clubs went three or four stories below the street. In the past, they both had to lift deadweight up the old stone narrow and sometimes winding staircases. Those were mostly drug overdoses. Occasionally a knife fight or rare gunshot victim. Judging from the trail of blood on the sidewalk, this man had made it to the street. Unfortunately, he was apparently run over by a car as well. At 4:30 in the morning, the driver was probably drunk and didn’t stop. The Surete would handle the hit and run. Pierre’s job would have been to see if this poor soul was still alive and in need of immediate medical attention but his stethoscope remained in the large pocket of his uniform, especially made to hold it. He placed two fingers on the victim’s bloodied neck, not to find a pulse, but to check the temperature. The coldness of the body meant he had been lying there for some time.

  The cop’s intuition of the Inspector who arrived on the scene, that this fellow was killed before the car crushed his skull, was confirmed when Pierre, pointed to the knife wound in the body’s chest. That being the case, Pierre and his partner would have to wait until the police collected any evidence. From experience, he knew this would take a while, so he opened his thermos and poured two cups for Francoise and himself.

  Bill was entering the White House at 7:32 a.m. As he swiped his I.D., a man was waiting for him at the security post.

  “Mr. Hiccock, please come with me.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Mr. Smith, Special Assistant to the President. Please come with me now.”

  “Smith?”

  They headed to the Situation Room. After the usual vetting and scanning, Bill was facing the President and an older man he did not know.

  “Mr. President, what can I do for you, sir?”

  “Bill, I am really sorry about this.”

  “Mr. Hiccock, please surrender your White House I.D. and all other federal I.D. you may have on you.”

  “What?”

  “Please Bill; don’t make this any harder than it already is,” the President said.

  Bill fished out the six I.D.s from the various agencies he was temporarily technically in charge of.

  “May I ask why?”

  “Bill, NSA intercepted you on a phone call. At that time you used a term on a non-secured phone that even the knowledge of is classified.”

  “Sir, I certainly have the highest clearance,” Hiccock said, pointing to the pile of alphabet soup cards that started with FBI and went straight through OHS.

  “Bill, only three people are cleared to know this — me, this man, and one other person who I designated. In fact, I really don’t know all of the specifics myself. But I know the code words and their intent.”

  “Okay, so what did I say?”

  “How did you come to hear the term, ‘Jesus Factor?’” the other man asked.

  “Is that what this is about? You’ll have to revise your numbers. I got that from an old friend of mine, who learned it from a group of scientists. In fact, I have 10 people working on it now.”

  “That’s incredible,” the President said. “You could be shot!”

  “Sir, this cat is well out of the bag.”

  For the next five minutes, Hiccock told the story of the scientists, Peter Remo, and What Would Jesus Do.

  When it was over, the President sat dumbfounded. “But he didn’t tell you what it was?”

  “It didn’t get that far. As soon as I said I never heard of it, he freaked… and now I understand why.”

  “Bill, I want his name and address. We have to contain this. I also want the 10 people you say are working on it.”

  “Mr. President, please don’t make that a direct order, because each of the 10 is very highly cleared on my SCIAD network, which is hyper-encrypted and random encoded. They are scientists and handle all kinds of sensitive material. Besides, most of them don’t believe in UFOs.”

  “Bill, what do UFOs have to do with this?”

  “Wait, what? You mean the Jesus Factor isn’t about UFOs?”

  “No. Is that what your men are doing?”

  “Yes. I guess I left that part out of Peter’s story. So this isn’t your Jesus Factor? This is just a coincidental name?”

  The President looked at the man Bill didn’t know. “Bill, this was harrowing, to say the least. Look, save yourself more headaches. Forget you ever heard of Jesus Factor and just call this damn thing something else, okay?”

  “Yes, sir, of course sir… Er… should I take these back?” Bill asked pointing at the pile of agency I.D.s.

  “Certainly,” said the President.

  Bill left.

  “Flying saucers,” the President said with disgust.

  “Bonjour… Bonjour…” Yardley Haines always greeted the embassy staff with that double-metered greeting. The same way, every day, for the six years he was posted to Paris. Arriving at 7:30 in the morning gave him time to review reports and the overnights from Foggy Bottom. In fact, most of what was his overnight was midday at the State Department. His usual routine of getting the first cup of coffee from the morning brew then settling in behind his desk for at least 30 minutes of precious solitude was immediately shattered by a man who he spied already awaiting him in his office.

  “Bonjour… Bonjour�
�� Emily, who is that in my office?”

  Emily, a secretary whom he shared with his counterpart, explained, “He’s a policeman. An inspector, I think. He was very insistent. Your computer is off and there are no documents on your desk. All your drawers are locked and I took your calendar out with me. It’s right here.”

  “Very good; but what does he want?”

  “I think a tourist died last night.”

  “So? Was this tourist an FSO?”

  “No. He didn’t mention that.”

  “Okay, give us five minutes and then buzz me with my next appointment.”

  “Sure.”

  Approaching his office, Yardley took in the man seated across from his desk. He was around 50, broad-shouldered, balding spot emerging from thinning, once brown, hair. He had a small scar off the left ear in a jagged design, the kind a broken bottle would make. There was a tilt to his shoulders that the fledgling crime novelist within Yardley might ascribe to the weight of his firearm snugged in his shoulder holster. Shoes were worn but well-polished. He wore a wedding ring and had suffered a break of his left pinky. Why do policemen everywhere insist on those ratty trench coats?

  “Inspector! So sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “Ah, Mr. Haines; it’s Lieutenant. And not to worry; I am actually at the end of my day.”

  “Night shift! Keeping Parisians safe while they sleep.”

  “Unfortunately, I am sorry to say, I could not keep one American safe last night.”

  “Yes, I heard. A tourist, I believe?”

  “Seemingly so. Do you know this man?” He handed Haines the driver’s license retrieved from the wallet of the American. It was a New York State license with a picture.

  “No, no, I can’t say I know the man.”

  “Forgive me, but because you are Embassy staff and a diplomat, I must request more specificity. You cannot say you know him because you are under orders not to say, or you mean you don’t know who he is.”

  Yardley was thrown. What was this cop getting at? Maybe he should look again; maybe he should wait until the Chief of Station got in and clear any answer to the local authorities through him. After all, at Yardley’s FSO pay grade, he didn‘t know everything America was doing in France.