The Eighth Day (3 page)

“Thanks,” Hiccock said, watching the wreckage he could have been buried under.

“No problem,” was all the fireman said before he and the rest of his Rescue 1 men went off to save someone else.

Catching his breath, Hiccock looked over at Shelly. “How’s she doing?” he asked the cop.

“She’s out cold but she’s still breathing.”

Two EMTs with Fort Lee New Jersey Volunteer Ambulance Corp patches on their sleeves appeared with a stretcher. “We’ll take it from here.”

Hiccock turned to survey the nightmare around him. There weren’t going to be a lot of happy endings like Shelly’s tonight.

“SIXTY SECONDS TO DETONATION,” squawked the box.

Even in the air-conditioned, electronically filtered environment of the SSC, a slick sweat covered Professor Richard Parnes’s face as the concluding stages of FINAL SWORD played out on the large-format displays in front of him. He was fully aware of the massive amount of death and destruction this operation could create. Nevertheless, for the safety of America, he had to continue with this mission in order to guarantee that the United States would remain the dominant power on earth.

“Disable safeties, arm firing circuits,” Parnes said into his headset. From his raised console, he looked down at members of his team throwing switches twenty feet in front of him. Mentally he retraced his wiring design and the triggering sequence, the precise timing of which would release the initial impulse of focused energy into the dirillium base. From there on it would be nature’s sequence of neutrons smashing into atoms releasing more neutrons to smash more atoms’ nuclei until the whole thing exploded into a rough approximation of hell.

“10, 9, 8, 7 …” the firing sequence officer said.

“Fluctuation in gamma 10 … 2.34 over nominal level.”

Parnes’s finger instinctively flipped up the safety cover of the abort switch, as his brain calculated the effect of increased gamma on the energy budget he so painstakingly fought to preserve. Then he remembered his duty. Only a few more seconds left, and it would all be over.

“4, 3, 2 …”

The hell with it.
He withdrew his finger from the red-guarded abort switch as the count passed one. No turning back now. It must be done.

Suddenly, all the monitors in the room flashed brilliantly. A large screen in the center of the room displayed a graphic representation of what was happening. Based on estimates and experimental research the yield was expected to be 200 megajoules of energy per nanosecond, or about the output of a small star. Instead, and post analysis would tell him why, the actual yield was closer to 500. The team cheered. It was a brilliant success.

On the big screen, the image of the kill zone and collateral area reached out to a circumference of forty miles. Parnes knew it was the new hyper-shaping in the first stage that multiplied the yield so significantly. This was his team’s sole focus for a year. Operation FINAL SWORD ended in victory.

“Well done, Parnes,” the four-star general next to him said as he closed his mission briefing book. “Congratulations to you and your team, a truly major achievement.”

“Thanks, Bob. Too bad it’s all for nothing.”

“That detonation didn’t just wipe out Moscow, it took out the premier’s dacha, thirty-seven miles away,” the Bomb Damage Assessment Officer said.

Parnes nodded. “A great way to end this program.”

“Well, maybe if the Cold War comes back, we’ll actually build the data you just generated into an online weapons system,” the general said optimistically.

“Til then it will remain a simulation exercise report in some digital archive of the DARPA library.” Parnes realized he probably just wrote the epitaph of his program.

“What’s next for you and your team, Parnes?” the general asked in a manner that usually accompanied opening his belt a notch after another fine meal.

“There isn’t any ‘next.’ We spent ten billion on this simulation alone. No way that kind of money will ever be available again without a national emergency.”

To the general that was a gray area, best left to the politicians. Absentmindedly he went to shake Parnes’s right hand, only to realize his error mid-gesture. He turned the attitude of his hand from a shake to a pat on Parnes’s shoulder, just above his severed limb.

Parnes had become the most highly paid civilian advisor to the military, despite his physical handicap. At his level, they paid the big bucks for his brain. Legend falsely accredited the loss of his right wing to a cataclysmic discharge of electrostatic plates during a cyclotron experiment gone awry. The story went that the discharge of millions of volts exploded the cells of his arm, leaving amputation the only option. In truth, he lost the limb in a Jeep accident as a young radioman drafted into the Army. However, legends die hard and professors do not get many romantic notions hung on their identities. And although he toyed with the most feared weapons of all mankind, being five-foot eight and on the thin side of fat, he hardly cut an imposing figure. So eventually he stopped denying the legend. Having long ago mastered typing and mouse clicking with just one hand, his absent limb did not impede his work on his chosen specialty, computer technology—specifically, virtual engagement protocol and anti-computational warfare. A complicated name for what simply was anything that processed strategic or tactical military data and computer simulations.

Professor Richard Parnes achieved the ultimate position in the game of military leapfrog where success and power were awarded with positions toward the outer ring of the Pentagon. He had an office, with a window, in the E-ring. Almost as impressive was his parking spot on the River Entrance side.

At first blush, nuclear weapons research seemed a relic of America’s paranoid, mutually assured destructive past. Parnes’s work was, however, still a matter of national security. Furthermore, his elite stature was justified, because even though the Cold War ended nearly two decades before, one tiny troublesome fact remained. It seemed someone forgot to tell the Russian Strategic Rocket Force, its commanders, and their nineteen missile divisions to go home, it was all over. Instead, the Soviet’s mega death-tipped SS-20s and the like were still targeted at Main Street, U.S.A., just like in the bad old days.

Our politicians had moved this undiminished nuclear threat to the back burners of America’s collective consciousness, primarily by negotiating away atmospheric and below-ground testing. It was good public relations but it did nothing to reduce the stockpile of overkill both nations stored away like dangerous nuts for a nuclear winter.

This politically expedient non-solution to humanity’s nightmare made computer simulations the only way for our nuclear warriors to ply their trade and be ready to protect America with massive retaliatory force. Parnes’s team was born out of this need when he approached the Pentagon with the notion of “E-plosion,” detailed high-definition computer simulations of nuclear explosions. All it took was one secret, illegal underground test, officially logged as an earthquake, to prove unequivocally the accuracy of the data Parnes generated. With that baseline sample as a model, Parnes and his people were free to explore and try “what ifs” to their hearts’ content, blowing up nothing more than the occasional computer chip. The data Parnes’s E-plosions yielded gave America years of advancement in a nuclear arms race that was frozen in the eighties.

Accordingly, Parnes’s slice of the 300-billion-dollar defense pie was the second biggest, after you removed operations. He was technically part of the old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The members of his team were handpicked technicians, the cream of the crop, enlisted from schools and America’s largest corporations. They were young and old, white, Asian, Indian, and black, male and female. Their personas ran the gamut from out-and-out nerds to fly fishermen. Only two things were considered when recruiting them: that they were the absolute best in their fields and that they pass the security clearance. Keeping America number one in any race was expensive. In nuclear weapons research, the cost was obscene. Team members made, on average, ten times more money than their commercial counterparts did. But true to the field, they rarely, if ever, got home early enough or took ample time off to enjoy most of it. The team had become Parnes’s de facto family.

Being doggedly focused on every challenge while simultaneously planning for the next made Parnes the most boring man any woman ever had the pleasure of saying good-bye to. Even brain groupies, those women who hang around geniuses as if they were rock stars, tired quickly upon finding out they were not the center of his world. A world of microns and electrons, math and physics, and a cat named Archimedes.

He and his entire team were classified, working from black op budgets, so named because the Pentagon blacked out the name and the amounts on the line budget they submitted to Congress. Congress, for its part, exercised its power of the purse by keeping those black ops on a short leash, cutting or appropriating the monies blindly as a percentage. At the end of the day, however, the route the money took was unimportant. Regardless of how it was appropriated, through black ops or out in the open, all of the money spent on defense found its way eventually into the congressmen’s districts. After a short stay in some captain of industry’s bank account, a portion of the appropriation found its way into a PAC. These political action committees “laundered” the money one more time, and then contributed it into the congressmen’s election campaigns. The whole thing worked without grinding to a halt because it was self-lubricating. In short, a percentage of the money Congress appropriated for war, appropriately enough, found its way into a congressman’s war chest. This was proven by even those antiwar congresses who, despite being elected and given the majority to end a war, just couldn’t seem to muster the votes to cut off even one penny of what the Department of Defense wanted, because in the end they would be cutting off their own funding as well.

This mission today was the last shot. It would be his last time in the Strategic Simulations Center. Détente and a weakened Russia wounded the brand of weapons research Parnes and his team worked on so diligently. The ratification of the SALT II Treaty delivered the coup de grâce. The Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty had limited his career and those of his team. Tomorrow he would awake and be without a job, without an office in the E-ring, without a parking spot, budget, and research team. He would have nothing but the severance from his contract. Not that this in itself mattered. He did not have to work another day in his life, or Archimedes’ nine.

Later that day, exactly two-and-a-half years before the building exploded in Westchester County, at a small, melancholy celebration in the Parnes’s home, the twenty-two members of the Nuclear Research Team gathered for the last time.

The TV was on in the den where the last few hangers-on and Parnes settled in for a cognac-and-cigar nightcap. It was the opening of the Democratic National Convention. The televised coverage eventually turned the chatter in the room briefly to the election. The general reaction was ambivalence; the opinion shared around the room was that there was no real choice for president being offered to America. Benyru Macordal, the team’s lead mathematician, pointed out that the two most exciting candidates, the ex-fighter pilot James Mitchell and the wiry freshman senator from Wyoming, were the ones who were gaining popularity. But they had their brief moment in the limelight summarily snuffed out by their respective parties’ political machines.

“Do you think we will ever work on a project again, Professor?” the youngest of the team inquired. Parnes, already lost in thought, fixed his eyes on the flickering images of the convention. Maybe there was a way to leverage a little something he always thought about experimenting with. The interstitial rates would certainly be fast enough, and the architecture would be very simple.

The television report switched to James Mitchell’s campaign manager. The type at the bottom of the screen identified him as former governor Ray Reynolds, but Parnes knew him on sight. Reynolds was the driving force behind Mitchell’s third-party attempt.
Yes
, Parnes thought,
very doable.

And the professor now knew exactly who would be interested in funding this new research.

IT HAD BEEN TWO YEARS since the election and nine hours since the horrific blast in Westchester as dawn broke over the nation’s capital. The buffeting rotor noise of the WJLA News Chopper 7 shattered the calm of the new day as it patrolled the beltway, its reporter scanning the roadway for early signs of the inevitable traffic tie-ups. To his right, the sun rose behind the Washington Monument. A quick look over his left shoulder revealed the first rays of early light washing over the front portico of the White House. This was as close as any aircraft had ever dared come since the attack on the Pentagon, the obvious exception being Marine One, the president’s private helicopter. The pilot pushed his steering collective control left, veering away from the White House and its Patriot surface-to-air battery missiles that kill you first and ask questions later.

What the reporter/pilot could not see was the heavy traffic going on inside the mansion. Aides hurriedly passed the bronze busts of former presidents and antique Early American furniture that resided there since America was “early.”

One of the aides, Cheryl Burston, waited at the door of a small office, fingering the edge of a manila folder, not wanting to disturb the conversation between the two men within. One of the individuals was her sixty-year-old boss, Chief of Staff Ray Reynolds. She learned from Ray that a president was able to smile in public because all the burdens of office were carried on the shoulders of his COS. To her, Reynolds’s face seemed cast in stone, the turned-down ends of his mouth arching in the same direction as his bushy eyebrows. She imagined his whole countenance would crack if he were ever to hazard a smile.

Cheryl panned across from him to see—in marked contrast— William Hiccock. At forty-five years of age, he retained the confidence and dynamic persona of the starting quarterback he was in college.
He still looks good enough to be on the cereal box.
Out of so many bright, young, and even more powerful men around here, why was he the only one able to affect—often only with a nod or a boyish smile—the breathing patterns of most of the female White House staff? Most would say this was because of Hiccock’s easy manner and bedroom eyes. But she recognized something else in him. Even here, outside his habitat, standing on the rocky, uneven terrain of politics, where seasoned professionals often lose their balance, she saw him take and deliver full body blows when fighting for a concept or ideal. Her intuition told her that his position in these battles was purely based on passion and not in any way manipulated to advance his own career or line his pockets. And this was hugely attractive.

Cheryl found any passion to be rare in a place where most men are just doing what it takes to move up. Those overachievers were the ones who presented you with their ego first, second, and always. One might attribute it to her lack of experience, but she could not believe Hiccock ever broadcast a false or manipulative message. He was an enigma: a political appointee, the president’s national science advisor, but without a political bone in his broad-shouldered body.

“So what’s your assessment of the damage to the industry?” she heard Reynolds ask Hiccock, pulling Cheryl out of her daydream.

“It was a design-and-research facility. Manufacturing is split between their Johnson City plant and a few German fabricators.”

“What is the impact?”

“For the immediate future, none, because the chips and integration they were designing was tomorrow. Their current output will not be affected, so it’s only down the road …”

“Shorter sentences, Hiccock!” Reynolds interrupted and then summed up. “No immediate impact. Good. The boss cut the ribbon at that building. It was part of his high-tech initiative.”

Hiccock took a sip of some Starbucks “President’s Blend” coffee and Cheryl saw a chance to break in, coughing for attention.

“Yes?” Reynolds said sharply, softening it with an insincere smile when he realized it was a woman at the door. His face didn’t
crack
after all.

“The proposed draft of the president’s statement,” she said as she handed the single page to Reynolds.

“It is with great sadness … hmmm …” The chief of staff had a way of mumble reading while he scanned any document, bypassing the fluff but billboarding the factual or meritorious parts. “The incredible loss of more than 600 lives both in the buildings and on the commuter trains which were caught … uh hum … Our prayers and thoughts go out to the families … Yes, this is fine.” He picked up a pen and scratched his initials on it. “Take it up to the residence for him to review.”

Cheryl left and Reynolds resumed his conversation with Hiccock. “So you felt the blast three miles away?”

“It was massive. I went to the scene afterwards but it was too hot to get close.”

“You were there?”

“I was speaking a few miles away. It didn’t look like anything bigger than your fist was left, so I jumped on the late shuttle back to D.C.”

“What were they working on there that could have blown up like that?”

“Not a thing. Mostly high order …” He paused as Reynolds snapped his fingers and yelled down the hallway.

“Cheryl!” The aide returned in an instant. As if inspired by the gods of spin, Reynolds said, “Change ‘passengers on the commuter train’ to ‘hardworking people going home on Metro-North.’ The dead were more than commuters. Hell, they were voters!” He winked to Hiccock. “New York is an important vote. Don’t want them to think we can’t feel their pain!”

Cheryl looked to Hiccock and, although he tried to remain expressionless, she noticed his left eyebrow ripple almost imperceptibly as the sides of his mouth tightened ever so slightly, revealing a trace of disgust. She turned to deliver the speech to the president.

Hiccock asked, “Anything else?” in a way that said, “I have nothing else.”

“Yes. Let’s cut the crap. I know you don’t like me because I didn’t go along with your appointment.”

“Go along? You’ve tried to have me fired three times, Ray.”

“Chemistry, that’s science. Physics, that’s science. But artificial intelligence? What the hell is that? What kind of background is that for a president’s science advisor?”

“I have three degrees …”

“Please spare me. I’ve read your résumé. Scientific methodology, another winner.”

Reynolds’s dismissive tone triggered Hiccock’s retaliatory instincts, but he tempered it. “Don’t hold back, Ray. Real scientists don’t have any feelings.”

“But now you get to earn your title, Mr. Presidential Science Advisor. It is your job to see that the boss is not blindsided by any high-tech guano at the ‘speak-and-smile.’”

“How about if I just write my reports and hand them in?” Hiccock said in a tone usually associated with the words “You don’t pay me enough for that.”

With a small explosion for emphasis, Reynolds said, “Look, I am the goddamn chief of staff around here and you are staff!”

Hiccock maintained his composure as well as his resolve. Twenty years earlier he would have told this “scuzzbucket” where to stuff it and then stuffed it up there for him.

The chief, possibly sensing some latent Bronx rage in Bill, continued in a more reasonable tone. “The boss isn’t going to study all this crap in fifteen minutes and then go out there and be tested by the press corps. The need is immediate. That is why you are here, brain-boy. So forget the goddamn reports and be ready to win this press conference on your feet!”

“Why do we have to
win
anything? How about just telling the truth?” “Why is your type always so smart in gee-whiz science and so pathetically out of touch with political science?”

This won’t be that hard,
Naomi Spence thought as she prepared her final briefing papers for the earlier-than-normal daily briefing. Before her job as White House Press Secretary, there were many mornings she got the girls and her husband up before the crack of dawn and rallied them into shape to face the day. This was all before her car picked her up at 6:30 for the 25-minute drive from Georgetown to the NBC news studios in the heart of D.C. With that kind of battle-hardened experience behind her, a room full of cranky reporters presented little challenge. The decision to take the job as press secretary was made easier by the fact that she and the family could stay in their home and the kids in school with all their friends. She took one last sip of English Breakfast tea and walked the few steps from her office to the podium.

In the White House pressroom, the members of the press corps were wiping the sleep from their eyes. This session was called earlier so the White House could “weigh in” on the explosion in suburban New York in time for the network morning shows. The reporters started pelting Naomi with questions as soon as she appeared at the doorway. She essentially gave the same non-answer six times. Then, when she felt they had settled down enough, she introduced Ray. Reynolds took the podium. “As Ms. Spence said, an investigation is currently under way into a massive explosion that happened a little less than ten hours ago. Obviously we don’t have all the facts yet, so please lighten up on the detail questions.”

A reporter for an Internet news service said, “We have a report that Intellichip was designing a chip for the Israeli air defense system. Could this be in any way a preemptive strike by certain Middle East elements who want to keep the balance of power where it is now?”

Reynolds was caught off guard. He hated this obnoxious Internet twerp whose only journalistic experience was getting lucky on a scandal from the last administration. Reynolds looked to Hiccock, who sent back an emphatically mouthed “No!” Reynolds grabbed the edges of the podium.

“That is unsubstantiated and, as far as I am concerned, wild speculation. Intellichip would have registered that type of work with State and we received no advisory from the State Department on that. So, no, your information may need to be checked more thoroughly.”

Trying to dodge that bullet, he picked on a member of the “legitimate media,” a reporter from ABC.

“So what were they working on at that Westchester plant?” the ABC veteran asked.

“I am going to turn the podium over to William Hiccock, the president’s science advisor, who will address that issue.” He gestured to Bill with his hand. Bill was shocked, as were some members of the press corps.

“They’re putting Wild Bill in the game?” a surprised UPI reporter mumbled.

“Here comes the end run!” the correspondent from Reuters said back to him under his breath.

Bill approached the podium and leaned into the mic, causing feedback. A technician backed him off. Locating the ABC reporter in the room he asked, “Could you … could you repeat the question, please?”

“What were they working on at Intellichip’s Westchester plant that could have exploded like that?”

“Not a thing.”

The room burst into a flurry of shouted questions. Reynolds, the blood drained from his face, rushed back to the podium.

“Too short a sentence, Ray?” Hiccock asked as he was pushed aside. Reynolds glared at him and then turned to the press. “Now hold on. As I said before, neither Mr. Hiccock nor anyone else knows for sure what that plant was engaged in.”

“That’s not entirely correct,” Hiccock said. A trained observer would have recognized the frozen eyeballs in Reynolds’s head as his life passed before his eyes. Hiccock continued, “Our records indicate Intellichip was involved in parallel processing firewall technology. That’s creating chips that will protect the next generation of computers, which will be so complex that they will be even more susceptible to hacking and other nastiness.”

“For Israel?” the ABC vet asked.

“We have no information of any activity in the military procurement area, which, as you know, without permission from DARPA or the State Department, would be tantamount to treason.” The room broke into a frenzy upon the use of the word
treason
. Reynolds buried his head.

“Someone’s going to swing for this. You can’t tell the truth here,” said the Reuters correspondent, summing up the moment.

“Good God, Ray, what the hell were you thinking, putting Hiccock up there?” Spence asked, brandishing a fanfold of wire copy with a death grip. Watching her, Hiccock figured that whatever finishing school network anchors go to didn’t cover getting so worked up that your neck veins showed.

“It was a gut call. I expected him to snow ’em.”

“I don’t snow people, Ray.”

“Grow up.”

“‘White House leaves terrorism question open in Intellichip blast,’” the press secretary read from a headline. She continued, “‘Science geek number one scares nation … Arabs protest accusation they planted bomb.’ Sweet Jesus, what a mess.” She threw the copy down.

“I asked you what they were working on,” Reynolds said angrily to Hiccock.

“And I told you.”

“Gentlemen, please,” the press secretary said. She turned to Hiccock. “Mr. Hiccock, please don’t ever talk to the press directly again, and any releases are to be cleared through my office first.” Without looking, she held a finger out in the chief of staff’s direction, “Do I have your support on this, Ray?”

“Of course.”

“Does this mean you don’t want me to accept the request to go on
Geraldo?
” The vicious looks he received in response to that quip dissolved Hiccock’s little smile.

Carly Simone made it to the press briefing room just after the briefing ended. It took her 30 minutes to get through White House security and obtain her press pass. Her original papers were back at the hotel by now, the airline having lost them with the rest of her check-in baggage. So there she stood outside the empty pressroom in the same clothes she wore last night. She also didn’t have a clue where you went after a briefing was finished. But she didn’t panic; after all it was only her first day as White House correspondent for Scientific American. Suddenly she saw him, William Hiccock, the reason she got this new assignment. If things had gone as planned last night, she would have introduced herself at the A.I. Convention, and this morning would not be the first time, but the explosion ruined everyone’s night.