The Eighth Day (29 page)

“Sorry it’s not over, Sir.”

“I need you back on the team.”

“Team?”

“I’ve had one of those long father-son talks with Tate. I told him I’d have his father and his son shot at dawn if he interfered with you again.”

“I don’t know … he’s a powerful enemy, Sir.”

“I’m pretty powerful myself if you get on my shit side, son.” The president handed Bill a redlined folder. “Here, we drew this up. Take a minute and read it. I’m going to have a cup of your mom’s coffee.”

Five minutes later, the screen door slammed behind Hiccock as he squeezed his eyes shut, hoping he didn’t see what he just saw. There at the kitchen table was the Commander in Chief of the most powerful nation on earth, held prisoner by Alice Hiccock and her “alblum”—the photographic history of the Hiccock clan lovingly preserved in hermetically sealed plastic pages. It used to make William cringe when she opened it for new girlfriends. But this!

“And here’s William on his second, or was it his third?”

The president glanced up from the book with a look that begged “Shoot me now.” Hiccock came to the rescue.

“Mom, you know this could be considered cruel and unusual punishment of a head of state.”

“Oh, nonsense, he’s a family man. I am sure he’s proud of his family, too.”

“I didn’t bring any pictures, but I’ll get my library to send some.”

“Mom?” Hiccock gestured for her to take the book away. She did.

“Would you like some more nuts or some dried fruit?” she said to her guest.

“Yeah, take some back to Washington with you, we keep getting tons of the stuff,” the senior Hiccock offered.

Bill pinched the bridge of his nose. How did the grateful Mario and Shelly ever find out his parents’ address?

“No thank you, Alice.” His eyes zeroed in on Bill. “Well?”

Hiccock grinned and tapped the redlined folder. “Catchy name.”

Air Force One lifted off from the old Stuart AFB heading back to Washington, ending its unannounced “little field trip.” In the front, right behind the president’s cabin, Hiccock had dozed off. On his lap was the document folder the president had handed him, the contents of which set new ground rules for Hiccock and his team. Included as well were the president’s executive orders completely relinquishing all FBI resources regarding the current domestic terrorism over to Hiccock. A passing Air Force sergeant cabin attendant collected the papers, which were perilously close to sliding off Hiccock’s lap, and placed them on his side table. She noticed the code name on the redlined cover and thought it odd: OPERATION QUARTERBACK.

BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE office, Hiccock and Janice were settling in again. Janice toyed with a hair clip that was a new gift from Bill’s mother.

“Your mom always had great taste for estate jewelry. How’s her sciatica?”

“She didn’t mention it and I didn’t ask.”

“Did she ask about me?”

“Not in so many words.”

“Which words did she use?”

“She saw in the news that you and I were working together.”

“And …”

Bill sighed. “And she said it was good to see the two of us back together again.”

“What did you say?”

“Janice, my folks love you. They made that very clear after our divorce. So naturally …”

“Naturally.”

Bill started to unpack some files.

Janice tried the clip in her hair. “What do you think?” she said when she was finished.

“I think working together has been good for us,” Bill said without looking up, not sure he could look up.

“I meant the hair clip, but do go on.”

Bill closed his eyes and then turned to Janice. “There’s nothing more to say.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Bill could feel his skin warming. He’d stumbled around women before … but this was Janice. “What exactly is going on here?”

Janice opened her mouth to speak just as the phone rang. Bill reached for it quickly.

“Let me call you back,” he said a few moments later to the falling away mouthpiece as he abruptly hung up the phone. The sound of someone yelling was cut off by the receiver hitting the cradle.

“What was that all about?”

“The FBI interviewed Martha Krummel about the Sabot Society. She said what my dad said: she thought it was a Jewish group. They grilled her pretty good and she is totally not connected to any Sabot, Bernard Keyes, or anyone else in that organization. Now they want to embrace the ‘B’ part of our theory. Your ‘bi-stable concurrent schizo ditzo’ stuff and my ‘the computer made me do it’ hypothesis. They’d like us to prove that she is a part of Sabot but can’t remember anything about it.”

“I see. So now our whole investigation has been relegated to little more than an argument of convenience for the FBI. Was that Joey?”

“No, Tate.” Hiccock didn’t let his satisfaction show—too much.

“Okay, quarterback, what’s the play?”

“I’m getting ready for the Cabinet briefing in one hour. Then we are going to get you, me, and Kronos back to the Admiral’s. I’ll worry about the FBI later. Janice, do me a favor and check if Cheryl got that
MoneyTime
videotape for me?”

“Sure thing.”

Bill turned back to his files. There was suddenly a lot more to do before the Cabinet meeting.

“Bill?”

He looked up at Janice. She seemed a little confused. He knew instinctively it wasn’t about what Tate just told him. “Yeah?”

Janice seemed transfixed for a moment. Then she said, “Never mind. I’ll go get that video.”

“Her or his only request is that you send ten dollars to a charity of your choice. Brian Hopkins has more.”

The picture froze. Hiccock put down the remote on the mirrorlike finish of a Louisiana oak table that once served a tour of duty at Fort McHenry in the officer’s mess. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the painstakingly varnished veneer and proceeded to address the president, Reynolds, and the members of the cabinet in the Situation Room of the White House. “That piece ran two days ago. Since then, over 700,000 people have downloaded this software from the net.”

“This is that day-trading program? The one that watches your portfolio and guards it against any sudden changes?” the president asked.

“Yes, Sir. It reacts like a fighter plane being chased by a missile, making counter moves. It makes minor or major buy and sell orders instantaneously and protects the investor by keeping the value of the portfolio growing.”

“It’s like having a full-time broker/trader instantly reacting to every market, everywhere in the world,” the Secretary of the Treasury said.

“So I should get this?” the press secretary said, half-jokingly.

Hiccock supplied more background. “Leading brokerage houses have spent millions trying to develop a program like this.”

“And some yahoo is giving it away free?” Reynolds could not believe it.

“And now, Mr. President, the markets are virtually frozen. No one can make a move without some hundred thousand computers instantly countering it,” the Secretary of the Treasury grimly reported.

“They plug in their computer warriors and the whole damn thing works so fast and so accurately that to the outside world it appears frozen,” the president said.

“The panic has started, and I fear we are on the verge of something that will make the Crash of ’29 look like a mere glitch,” the Secretary of Commerce said.

The president turned to Bill. “Is this now part of your Operation Quarterback investigation?”

“I think it is, Sir. There is more than one way to attack a country. I’d like to ask Vincent DeMayo, my leading computer expert, to explain.” Hiccock gestured for Kronos to come to the head of the table.

“It’s a friggin’ beautiful idea! Give away the hack code! Make every greedy day-trading son-of-a-bitch out there a hacker. Make them unwitting accomplices. Imagine locking up the entire friggin’ stock market. I wish I’d a thought of that shit!”

Hiccock snapped to the side of Kronos. “That’ll be all, Mr. DeMayo.”

“My time is your time, Hick,” Kronos said with a grin.

“Your time is federal time, Vincent.”

The president broke in. “How is it that the FBI and NSA, hell, the SEC haven’t come to this conclusion?”

“They don’t think the same way as Mr. Hiccock, Sir,” Reynolds said.

“Or as fast,” the president added. “So why don’t we just unplug the computers?”

“There’s about five trillion in wealth directly controlled by the computers and now frozen,” the Secretary of the Treasury said. “Most or all of it would be lost instantly. Some of that might come back in a few weeks or months but the impact to the economy would be disastrous. I am afraid, Mr. President, that in this instance, a frozen market is better than complete financial chaos.”

“The genius of the attack, from a purely scientific angle,” Hiccock said, “is that the lock on the system is the individual investor. Once he or she uses the program to protect their assets, they can’t stop using it, because the instant they do, the other investors’ programs will snap up the slack and they’ll lose everything.”

“So I get to deliver the bad news?”

“You go on the air in twenty minutes, Mr. President.” Reynolds tapped his watch and continued. “Your speech will ask for calm … explain how this is an adjustment, the market catching up to technology, that sort of thing. You’ll announce a plan that will give major institutional investors two weeks to suspend computer trading at their own safe rate. At the end, you’ll urge the public to stop trading online.”

President Mitchell glanced down at the report. “How could this have happened?”

“Greed, Sir,” Hiccock said. “Enough to go around.”

Marvin Weitterman could not believe his luck; the Secretary of the Treasury had called him personally, actually pressured him, to appear on the show today. Since Marvin’s mother didn’t raise no dummy, it took him all of one second to accede to the secretary’s request. He knew he was being used by the White House to get out their spin but, at the same time, he was sure to squeeze in a few good questions. “So it’s your opinion then, Mr. Secretary, that the nation should not be alarmed.”

“Marvin, I think if we all pull together and back away slowly from computer trading, we’ll go back to a normal healthy market in very short order.”

“Yes, but people are throwing themselves out of windows because their money is in some sort of machine-to-machine tug of war, frozen—locked up!”
That should make the sound bites on the nightly news
.

“Last night the president asked for calm and full voluntary cooperation from the day-trading public.” The secretary addressed the camera to talk directly to John Q. “I am confident the people of the United States will put their country ahead of any profit that might conceivably be gained at this time.”

The next day’s
Wall Street Journal
headline read “INVESTORS NOT LETTING GO OF COMPUTER TRADING.” Every other paper across the nation chimed in with variations on the theme: “PEOPLE ARE NOT LETTING GO OF COMPUTER TRADING”—“BILLIONS BEING LOST AS NO ONE LETS GO”— “NO ONE WANTS TO BE THE FIRST TO LOSE.” There was the classic
New York Post’s
“DAY-TRAITORS TO FEDS: SCREW YOU.”

“IF HE WANTS TO SEE my bare chest in his film, then I want to see sixteen million in my account, Myron. Hell, I didn’t do a nude scene for ‘art’s’ sake back when I was doing Indies. I am certainly not going to do it for less than eight million a boob today!” Shari Saks picked up and considered biting into one of the organically grown carrot crudités that automatically appeared in her Beverly Hills mansion every day.

On the other end of the phone, Myron Weisberg, agent to the stars, sat peering through his door to the outer office at International Creative Agency and caught the eye of his assistant, who, as always, was listening in on his conversations via headset and taking notes. He adjusted his posture forward as the leather on the seat of his chair responded with an ungracious sound. He zeroed in on his thoughts and drilled them through the receiver to the “star” at the other end. “Look, I can’t tell you what to do, baby. These days everybody is showing everything … right on television! But this director, Graham Houser, he’s a hot ticket, darling. He waltzed from Sundance to Cannes to the goddamned best-picture Oscar! This guy is on a roll and you, my dear girl, could see an Oscar as well.”

Myron set his chin. He waited for her to comment, and when she came up for air he jumped in, not allowing her to speak, “Shari, Shari, Shari, boobalah, we’re talking Best Picture here. I can smell Best Actress, I can smell it!” He tapped his nose even though Shari couldn’t see him. It kept him in the moment.

“Myron, Myron, Myron, you also said the last film was a guaranteed Academy Award. Instead I wind up having to do a scene with 2,000 cockroaches on me …” The memory made Shari stick the carrot spear into the cluster lovingly arranged in the Pierre Deux bone china cup.

“Shari, cupcake! They were beetles. Little kids in Rangoon or someplace keep them as pets …”

“Beetles, my ass! I’m telling you they were roaches. Big fucking roaches.” She flopped down on the Turkish striped-satin Donghia chaise. “Look Myron, you get me my sixteen mil or I’ll finally take lunch with Jack Newhouse over at CMS.”

Myron’s assistant’s eyebrows went up. Myron nodded as he closed his eyes confidently as if to say,
watch me handle this
. “Now, baby girl, has Uncle Myron ever not made money for you? And you break my heart with threats? Threats aren’t going to win you that Oscar.”

“That’s only a threat if you don’t deliver! Love to Marsha and the kids, bye.” America’s current reigning female box-office attraction tossed her Freddi Fekkai–dyed blonde mane as she hung up the phone with no more regret than if she’d had her secretary order a pizza.

Shari felt she had earned her right to piss downhill. Having started out a wiry black-haired Jewish actress doing performance art pieces at the Nuyorican Café in New York’s Alphabet City, she climbed her way up to her lofty perch as
Variety’s
most bankable female star. She achieved the altitude by latching on to the winged talent of a fringe director who catapulted himself, and her career, into the mainstream when he finally got his big break.

It was of little consolation to her that she had been twice nominated for an Academy Award. Myron Weisberg, agent extraordinaire, was right. Winning the Oscar was the one thing that had eluded her thus far.

She was heading into one of her seven Italian marbled bathrooms when she heard the beep from her computer that announced she had mail. She poured half a glass of Remi Martin 125th anniversary cognac, a surviving bottle of which fetches $6,000 for the 1978 vintage. With one knee on the chair, she bent over to see who e-mailed her. Within a few seconds, she adjusted her position and sat squarely on the custom-designed, body-molded Swedish ergonomic chair.

The only perceptible motion was caused by the gentle current of purified air from the filtration system she had demanded the studio install and pay for and which created a gentle billowing of her silk kimono. The richly colored and finely embroidered ancient wrap had been a gift from the head of Sony to celebrate her last film going past the $200 million mark. She was told it had been a ceremonial robe worn by a concubine to the emperor in some Japanese past century. She couldn’t remember which dynasty but she knew the fucking thing was practically a Nipponese national treasure. Shari reasoned that since a French film critic classified her body as an American national treasure, it was perfectly fitting for her to wrap it up in this Jap
schmatte
.

For the next twenty-five minutes, the motion picture star sat before her computer motionless.

Was the expenditure ordered by a superior or other department? If yes, fill out form CYS 20028.

“Who creates these forms?” Hiccock grumbled to himself. His thoughts were interrupted by Cheryl.

“Professor Hiccock?”

“Yes, Cheryl?”

“Would you give this disk to Doctor Tyler, please?”

“Certainly, what’s on it?”

“It’s all the subliminal messages we have decoded so far, arranged in outline format the way she wanted.”

“I’ll make sure she gets it.” Hiccock returned to the contents of the folder on his desk—the federal employee’s reimbursement form FERF-1037. It was more than ten pages long. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Cheryl was still there. “Is there something else?”

“I could help you fill out that form.”

“Thank you, but this is something I’ve put off too long. It should only take me another four years or so.”

“If you decide you’d like to hand it off to me, let me know.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

Janice walked into the office a few seconds after Cheryl left. “You still working on that?”

“I keep getting interrupted.” He put his pen down with a bit too much force.

“My, my, aren’t we cranky?”

“I’m sorry, Janice, it’s my own fault. It’s twenty grand of my money that I’m trying to get back for that MIT contraption. That works out to about a dollar a page.” He slid his hand under the form, displaying the heft of the document. “Oh, Cheryl stopped by and asked me to give you this.” He handed her the CD.

“The subliminal screens outline. Great, now I can get started.” She walked over to her desk, which was actually a table across from Hiccock’s desk. She had decided to move into his office in the White House rather than be across town at the FBI profile lab. She slipped the disk into her computer and tapped the space bar, waking the machine up from its sleep mode.

Hiccock complained to the form he was struggling to fill out. “No, I don’t have any outstanding federal student loans.”

Janice smiled. On the screen, the report came up. It looked like a lengthy poem, with all the sentences and words on the page flush left and each phrase on its own line. Each line was numbered. “Pretty smart,” she noted aloud.

“What is?”

“Cheryl put numbers on every line so we can refer to each. Sharp cookie, that one.”

“Yeah, I’m glad she’s working out. She wasn’t using her full potential on Reynolds’s staff.”

“Oh, was that it?”

“Was what it?”

“Give me a break, Bill, you can’t be
that
blind.”

Hiccock put down his pen. “What am I missing here?”

“The girl’s got a crush on you that could flatten a dump truck!”

“Really?”

Janice threw a pencil at him that ricocheted off his shoulder.

Shari Saks picked up her white, gold-leaf, French-styled phone that was once the bedroom phone of silent screen siren—and later Coca-Cola icon—Clara Bow. In those days, she was known as the “It Girl.” The phone was a gift from Louis B. Mayer who, as the legend goes, presented it to Clara as a peace offering after he tried to get his hands all over her “its.” Jewish film moguls, Japanese electronics moguls, all the same, she equated in her mind. It was as if the word mogul was Latin for “breast-man.” Men are such schmucks, she thought as she started dialing a number to a private telephone that was only to be used in dire circumstances. She could not recall why, but she knew the circumstances were dire.

The president stopped by Hiccock’s office unannounced on his way to a fund-raiser out west for an influential senator. “Any breaks?”

“Janice is just digging in now, she may have something soon.”

“Where is she? I’d like to meet her.”

“She just went over to the FBI profile lab. She’s going to be so disappointed that she missed you.”

“I’m sure we’ll meet sooner or later. Let me know if anything new comes up.”

“Will do. Heading out of town?”

“Another rubber chicken for Dent. He’s got a big state there, with the most electoral votes and gobs of high-tech money behind him. I need to let the good people of California know that I am running for reelection as president and not him. Or at least that’s the line I am supposed to spew according to Reynolds.”

“Dent! You know, right before all the feces hit the air-circulating device, I had my position papers on his national firewall initiative forwarded to him. I think he’s got a good idea there.”

“I have concerns that it smells a little like ‘industrial policy,’ but I’ll be sure to tell him my people like his proposal.”

“I’ll have my executive summary sent up to Air Force One for your review, Sir.”

“Make it short. I got the whole California congressional delegation flying with me … such fun.”

“By the way, Sir, I had a thought. Ever see a car race?”

“Sure, why?”

“Yellow flag. If you make an executive order locking in and guaranteeing every investor’s current portfolio value at the time of the freeze, then there will be no penalty for them to let go of Pocket Protector … Once the protocol is written to ban it from future trading, that is.”

“No one advances under a yellow flag … good idea, I’ll run that by Treasury. Did you just think that up in your spare time?”

“I just hope it works, Sir.”

“Oh, by the way, I stopped here to tell you that they found out who was behind the attempt on my life.”

“I’m touched that you personally came over here to tell me that.”

“You almost got shot as well. Besides it’s top secret. You’ll be one of less than 20 people who will ever know it was Libya.”

“Libya? No way.”

“Yes.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Hiccock tried to catch his shock before it was apparent but failed.

“Nope. We’re protecting our intelligence methods and not alerting them that their operational mobility is compromised. We’ll get more out of them that way.

“So no public accusations or even a back channel reprimand?”

“I know that Bedouin S.O.B.’s behind it. Why waste the time? I could write their official, public statement right now. They would blame some rogue faction, then garner support from moderate and radical Muslim nations, and we’d end up being the bad guys.”

“So no response? Wow, it’s their lucky year.”

“Oh I don’t know about that. I hear they are going to have a bad crop of poppies this year. Too bad, too. It will decimate their two billion-dollar-a-year heroin trade. But of course that’s top secret, too, Bill.”

The wry smirk was hidden but Hiccock read volumes in the president’s face. “Ah! Gotcha.”

The president stepped away leaving Hiccock stunned. The space-based defoliant was going on-line. In order to protect its secrecy, and in essence its whole purpose, the government was maintaining the “lone-nut” theory to explain the assassination attempt. Bill smiled as he relished in the thought of those Libyans, responsible for planning the attack, believing they had dodged a big bullet when the Justice Department proclaimed the would-be assassin to be a deranged individual acting alone…until their fields turned brown.

When Clark Gable drove up to the sixteen-foot-tall front gates, a security guard would nod and let him in. He would never challenge the movie idol, whose face was known around the world. U.S. Senator Hank Dent, however, had to punch in a seven-digit code to activate the now electrically operated gates. As he drove in, Dent scanned for gardeners, butlers, chauffeurs, and maids, but found no sign of anyone. At least Shari was following the rules that he established in their regular e-mail exchanges. Those personal, private, and often provocative missives were protected by using the U.S. Senate’s secure encryption. This was necessary because his liaisons with her, if discovered, would not be advantageous to his standing in the polls and his ambition to be the next White House resident. He was, after all, a trusted public servant—a
married
trusted public servant. On the other hand, what was the value of being the senior senator from the state that gave Hollywood to the world, if you couldn’t afford yourself the pleasures of one of its true natural wonders?

Parking in front of the seven-car garage that used to hold David O. Selznick’s sixteen-cylinder Dusenburghs, he walked around back to find Shari sunbathing nude by the pool.
God she is beautiful
, he thought as he took in every part of her. He stood there for a full minute, as someone would admire a Michelangelo painting at the Louvre.

Lying before him was the most coveted body in America, probably the world. The sexual ground zero of a billion male fantasies. Oceans of sperm had been jettisoned, from young boys and old men alike, just imagining what it would be like to be him, right there, right then. It was worth putting his staff off and canceling a few appointments. After all, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t handled presidential visits before. He could certainly squeeze out a few hours.

As he stepped closer, the sound of his Italian leather soles scraping the Israeli marble with which the pool was encircled brought Shari’s eyes to him. Tall cypress trees, planted in the thirties by Rudolph Valentino’s landscaper, stood guard as the most powerful woman in Hollywood gave the most powerful man in the U.S. Senate a classic, downtown, Avenue A, New York City blow job.

This was turning into quite a good day for the senator. Twenty-five minutes after the poolside oral gratuity, he was in full thrust atop Givenchy sheets on the actual, California-size bed that had belonged to Doris Day, humping the brains out of “eight-million-dollar-a-tit” Shari Saks. She was a wildcat in bed; her every squeal of delight, every shift of her Pilates-honed, yoga-tightened, Tai Chi–balanced, vegetarian-fed incredible body was a signal that he was the only man who ever gave her such pleasure.