“I don’t believe I caught your name, Lieutenant.”
“Malveau; Tristan Malveau.”
“Well, Lieutenant Malveau, I am just a mid-level Foreign Service Officer. The chances of me knowing the dead man only extend to the random possibility of having gone to school with him back in the States. May I ask why you are here? Last year we had more than 30 Americans who died in France and I don’t recall the police ever being here once.”
“A mere courtesy, monsieur. This was also found on his person.” Malveau handed a business card to Haines.
All Yardley saw was the seal of the President of the United States on the card and he was off. “Would you be so kind as to wait here, Lieutenant, while I check into this?”
“Of course.”
“The baby is not made out of glass. Although you have to be mindful of certain developmental issues, don’t overcompensate. In fact, the more you make the child a part of your life, the better the child’s development. That doesn’t mean you take a six-month old to the stock car races and then for a steak dinner, but for your sake and the child’s, you should try not to change everything all at once. Many parents… Many par… Please make sure all cell phones are off or switched to vibrate please.”
“Sorry, excuse me,” Hiccock said as he retrieved his ringing cell phone from his pocket under the glaring eyes of Janice. “I’ll just take this outside…”
He wedged his way past two other expectant couples in his row and headed for the exit in the back of the room. “Hold on,” he whispered into the phone.
Out in the lobby, he went toward the doors of the learning center to get a better signal. “Hello.”
“White House switchboard. I have Joseph Palumbo on the line.”
“Put him through, operator. Hey Joey, We’re auditing a baby catching class. What’s up?”
“They let you audit those now? Listen, we just got a call from State. There is a deceased American citizen in Paris and somehow he is connected to you.”
“Me? Who is it?”
“Don’t know but they want you over there.”
“Over where — Paris?”
“No, the State Department.”
“Now?”
“They were very insistent.”
“Okay, thanks Joe.” Bill hung up and walked back to the room. He hesitated at the door. He hated to bother everybody again, but he was practically ordered to the State Department. He entered and squeezed past the two couples again, then sat beside Janice.
“Honey, I have to go.”
“What? Now?”
“I have to get to State. Somebody died in Europe and they want to talk to me.”
“That doesn’t make any sense…”
“I know.” He handed her the keys. “You take the car. I’ll catch a cab.”
The instructor once again stopped in her dissertation. “Is there something the matter?”
“Uh, I’m sorry. I have to get back to work. So sorry to interrupt.”
With that announcement, the other two couples in the row got up and moved out to avoid further butt-facing from Hiccock.
Bill kissed Janice on the cheek. “Love you; see ya at home.”
As Bill approached the security post on the C Street entrance of the State Department, he flashed his White House I.D. A man on the other side of the magnetometer greeted him. “Mr. Hiccock, I’m Martin Kelsh, Undersecretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Come this way, please.”
Four minutes later, they were in a secure videoconference room. As soon as they walked in, the grainy image on the left of two videoscreens caused Bill to utter, “Oh, no!”
On the other screen, to the right, were Yardley Haines and Frank Randall. Frank was the Station Chief of the Paris Embassy. Once Bill sat in the chair, his own image came up on a smaller monitor below the two big ones.
Frank spoke first. “Mr. Hiccock, do you know this man?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Is there anything about him or his purpose here in France that affects the national Security of the United States?”
“Nothing I know of. I mean, I doubt it, but I can’t be 100 percent certain. Why are you asking? And how did you know I knew him?”
“We found your card in his personal effects. We have to make sure that we are not dealing with a potential security incident or secret envoy.”
“No. He met with me recently, but it was not in any way connected to my job at the White House.” As soon as he said it, Bill’s mind started to race.
“There was a notation made on the back.” Frank turned and addressed an embassy staffer. “Can we put that under the camera?” On the left monitor, large fingers swiped away the license and replaced it with the back of the card. The words “Prof. Ensiling” were scrawled across the width. “Do any of these references mean anything to you?”
“I believe the professor was a friend of his who died recently. That’s what he came to see me about.”
“We know of this professor. Why was the deceased seeing you about him?”
“Peter Remo was a bit of a conspiracy… lover.” Bill couldn’t bring himself to use the word “nut” in relation to his dead friend. “I had my department’s investigator find out if there was any foul play.”
“And what did you find?”
“That the professor died of natural causes.”
Even through the video screen, Bill saw the slightest of hints of “really” emanating from Frank Randall’s face. It immediately bothered him, but he thought not to go down that road at this time.
“Is there anything else we should know, Mr. Hiccock?”
Bill was about to correct him to his proper bona fide title of Professor Hiccock, but decided it wasn’t worth bringing another Ph.D. into the mix. “No, nothing else I can think of.”
“Well then, thank you sir. Sorry you lost your friend.”
“Thank you. How did he die?”
“That’s a little murky right now, but it appears he was murdered.”
“Murdered? By who?”
“All we know was that it was at a nightclub. We are waiting for the police to finish their investigation.”
“Can you keep my office informed as well? I would appreciate it.”
“Of course.”
Bill got home and saw the pamphlets on baby care on the kitchen table. He opened the fridge, considered the potato salad, but just grabbed a Dos Equis instead. He screwed off the top and tossed it into the kitchen basket. He took a long draw, then did the lip-smack thing.
Upstairs in the bedroom, Janice was coming out of the bathroom a towel turbaned around her freshly washed hair. “I thought you’d be later.”
“No, it was quick. But I got some bad news.”
“Oh dear, what?”
“Peter Remo was found dead in Paris last night.”
“I’m sorry, Bill. How did it happen?”
“They said he was murdered.”
“How horrible.”
“It could have been just a fight in a club… or maybe something more. Listen to me, I’m starting to sound like Peter.”
Bill started to laugh.
“Your friend is dead; what’s so funny?”
“It’s not funny; it’s ironic. They found my card in his wallet and had to check that he wasn’t working for the government. Peter was a conspiracy theorist who spent most of his days trying to prove the government was behind everything bad that ever happened. In the end, he comes under suspicion of working for that same government. You couldn’t make this stuff up.”
“Well, God rest his soul. You coming to bed?”
“Yeah, I’m beat.”
“Did you shut the lights downstairs?”
“Yes, dear.”
Two hours later Janice got up to use the bathroom. She found Bill wide awake looking at the ceiling.
“I know why I’m up. Don’t tell me it’s sympathy peeing for you.” She nestled under his arm.
“Peter came to me and I just wrot
e him off, like he was a nut. Now he’s dead. What if I had listened? Maybe something was up with him?”
“How could you have possibly known?”
“He hadn’t bothered to reach out to me in decades. Suddenly he does and then gets killed. I just hope I didn’t miss something.”
“Billy, if he was murdered, it was something that he got involved with that has nothing to do with you.”
“He said he was afraid that he was going to be next and it just rolled off my back like he said he thought he was getting a cold. When did I get so cavalier about life?”
“Stop it now. If he had shown you any of the traditional signs of stress or impending doom, your reaction would have been totally different. The fact that he did not broadcast imminent danger to you means he was just positioning or posturing or testing your level of gullibility and was in no real danger that he perceived.”
“Is that the behavioral head doctor talking?”
“One of the best in the field, so believe her and get some sleep.” Janice kissed him and snuggled in even more.
?§?
Rodney had been waiting for this phone call since 2001. He had just missed the previous endeavor. Bad Luck. A flat tire on the way to the airport. Now, another chance. Sitting in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Canoga Park, California, he let his mind fantasize about what this adventure might mean. There was a possibility that recent events in the news could have played a role, but more likely, since he had been out of the loop, it was probably something else. No matter. Whatever it was, it would be what would be.
A tan Escalade pulled up next to his car, very close on the passenger side. As a woman and two kids emerged, one of the kids slammed the door into his car. The driver, obviously the father, called out to his son, “Careful Roshy!” As the wife and kids walked towards the store, the man got out and came around to Rodney’s driver-side window. Looking down at the scratch in the rear door, he apologized. “I am sorry, although it’s just a scratch really. Here, take my insurance information. Have a good night.” And he was off in the direction of the store.
Rodney opened the envelope; in it were directions to a meeting place, two airline tickets, and 10,000 dollars in hundred-dollar bills. For the first time in public and outside his inner prayer room, Ali Rashid, a.k.a. Rodney Albert, dared mutter a phrase under his breath.
“Allah Be Praised!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Unauthorized Accounts
“So, La Grande Fromage, what was the call from France all about?” Joey asked as he popped into Bill’s office at 7:25 a.m.
“Hey, if I am the big cheese, where’s my coffee?” He tossed the State Department’s preliminary report on Peter’s death to Joey.
“Sorry, I thought you’d have yours already.” Joey scanned the summary. “Wow, that call last night was about Johnny No’s big brother, Peter Remo?” Joey plopped in the chair across from Bill’s desk. “Poor guy.”
Both sat quietly for a moment.
“Hey, you ever think about it?” Joey said, coming out of it.
“About what?”
“About all the guys who are dead now.”
“Never thought about it, but now that you mention it….”
“Benny Elmont, rolled his car. Eddy Rissar was smoking in bed. Darlene Freemont got the big C. Danny Boyd got crushed on his construction site…who else?”
“I guess this happens as you get older. It’s the odds. Think about it; if you live long enough, everybody you’ve known would be dead.”
“You think its just odds?”
“You don’t?”
“I keep raking my mind. Guys like Eddy, Danny, even Peter. Was there something about them, some look or some trait, some harbinger of death?”
“What you really are asking is, ‘Whatever it is, do I have it?’”
“You know, you’re right.”
“I’m going to go to the funeral. You wanna go?”
“I don’t know. I hardly ever hung out with the guy past sixth grade and his little stoop sessions on moon shots, nuclear mutants, and perpetual motion.” You and him though… with all your egghead crap…he found a real dork in you, pal. I’ll just send a mass card.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Rodney” was entering the address into the navigation system of the car that he was forced to rent from Hertz on his personal credit card. Cash was more of a hassle when it came to renting a car and would have set off many flags. Flags were the enemy at this point. His spoken English was good and his American accent pretty decent, but reading this strange language was another story. It boggled his mind that the Arabic number system got mixed into this hodgepodge of odd characters and punctuation. So rather than trusting the English written instructions, he programmed the destination into the system. He had already, unconsciously, walked around the car checking the tires, a remnant of his last disappointment when a flat tire denied him his place of glory as the 21st hijacker.
His cover for these past years was as an assistant cameraman in Hollywood. He wasn’t union but he found enough work to blend into the indie film community. Oddly enough, he enjoyed the work. Many times, the content of these films was that of Satan himself, but his craft, pulling focus and making sure the lens and image path was always clear, gave him satisfaction that was small recompense for not being able to be the openly devout man he had studied to be.
The meeting place was not far off the New Jersey Turnpike, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Seven men assembled in a Store and Lock in the industrial part of town. Due to local blue laws and deference to the religious nature of a Sunday, the storage warehouse was closed to the public.
Upon entering the facility, a bearded man met Rodney and said, “No names. You are number 3.” He then put a sticker on Rodney that had the printed words, “Hello, I’m” under which the number 3 was written in black Sharpie. The two other men arrived in the next 10 minutes.
A man who would only ever be known as Number 1 began talking to the assembled men. “We have been chosen to be the hand of Allah. Each one of you has been picked for this honor because you have certain skills and abilities. As we go through the operational plan, each of you will also learn each other’s parts so that you may take over in the event of one of us being caught or killed. We will work from six at night until morning prayers. I have turned the basement of this building into a dormitory. You will each have a room. We have a kitchen, bath, and exercise room. When you are not working, you are either praying or exercising. We all need to be in perfect physical shape. Also downstairs is a shooting range. I expect each of you to be proficient with handguns and automatic weapons. We have 20 days.”
Port of Newark was a bustling metropolis made of millions of containers loading, unloading, coming, and going to every point in the world. The new on-demand warehouse economy kept the cost of doing business low because merchants no longer needed warehouses and financing to cover goods awaiting shelf space. Now as one item is purchased at a big box store in Wisconsin, another item to replace it is loaded on a container in Taiwan. Containers were the blood cells of this new economy. And the heartbeats of this economy were measured in “turn time.” A port’s pride and rating were based on the time to turn around one of these containers. So any delay in the processing meant higher costs, higher prices, and, worse, turn time. The pressure was always on not to slow the pace of the economy. Therefore, no containers were scanned until scanning could be done without slowing the journey of a single container. New fast scanners were big, expensive, and less efficient than manual inspection. So the realities of the potential threat succumbed to the actual realities of the marketplace.
That was, until last week, when the papers started talking about a suitcase bomb on its way to America. Now the motto was, “Economy be dammed! Check every container coming in!” In the Port of Newark alone, there were 455,000 empty containers in turnaround, a suspended animation of sorts for these large trailer-truck-sized boxes as they awaited being stuffed, sealed, and se
nt on to their next port of call. The job of checking the empties was assigned to four customs officers across three shifts. At the rate of inspecting 14 per hour, per eight-hour shift, (because they were stacked and had to be separated by huge ZPMC cranes), 2,240 containers a week — or less than one half of one percent — could be searched manually. Further impacting the odds was the fact that containers are designed to ride piggybacked on trains or trucks to points all over the U.S. and that meant that in addition to the ones here at the Port, there were maybe three million more out there in the economy.
If Bill was right in his supposition, that the bomb was already here, then there was a good chance it came in one of the millions of boxes also already here. That’s how U.S. Borders and Customs agent Hector DeNardo suddenly got put on an overtime-rich new schedule of twelve-hour days, six days a week. He didn’t mind that one bit. After 38 years in the department, this bump in extra pay would go a long way in calculating his pension. Every extra hour he put in now was two bucks more in his monthly pension check when he was ready to retire to the beach.
Bill never chatted with Bob Henley, the White House Director of Communications before, so his attendance at the meeting was a sure sign Bill’s phone call of the previous night hit an exposed nerve. Bill called Margaret, the Press Secretary, when he got the call last night at home informing him that Time magazine was going to be running a story on the virus attack and Bill’s role in it. Bill followed the protocol and demurred comment pending the decision of the White House Communications Office. Sometime overnight, a mock up of this week’s magazine was dropped of at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and it sat on the conference table, the 3,500-word story having already been copied and distributed to all in the room for comment on whether they should comment.
Not for publication was Bill’s positive opinion of the cover. It was a picture taken in the White House Press Briefing Room maybe during the Bio-Tech initiative briefing, when Bill was standing behind the President with the Presidential Seal on the podium. With Bill being taller and larger, they photographed as the same size, as he was awaiting his turn to comment. The headline on this Time magazine read, “Commander and Geek — An Unauthorized Look Behind the Scenes at the Outsmarting of a Terrorist’s Plot.”
The Hammer of God Page 18