The Hammer of God (18 page)

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 wrote 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!”

“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 sent 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.”

“It's a good picture of you and the boss, Bill,” Margaret offered.

“Ya think so?” He took the opportunity to right the cover one more time and feign gauging it.
I don't look as old as Joey does.

“So then we are agreed. We do not comment, stand by, or endorse the story,” Margaret's boss said. Then, flipping through the mag one more time, the man addressed Bill, “Did you actually do half the stuff in here?”

“For national security reasons, I can neither confirm or deny anything about my participation, or lack thereof, in any of these scenarios,” Bill said as serious as a heart attack.

“Well, I guess we don't have to worry about you leaking anything to the press today.”

St. Lucy's Church in the Bronx had a grotto. It was a catacomb-like structure located across from the church. Lots of candles, and a few crypts seemingly chiseled right out of the blue gray stone. It was a dark and somber place. A kid's first impression was that of going through a haunted cave. Later in life, it became a cool place to take a girl and, with the help of a buddy, get her to jump into your arms when he sprang out at the two of you from the shadows. Still later in life, it became a place of solitude and reverence or, as in Bill's case today, a place to light a candle to remember his Irish grandparents who both had their funerals here.

Peter's funeral had been a high mass. One of the guys from the neighborhood, Arnie, who was always an altar boy and hanging around the church when they were growing up, sang the hymns and “Ave Maria” from the balcony. An older, grey-haired woman played the church organ accompanying him. After the service, Arnie came over to Bill and introduced his wife and kids. She was neat and petite and had what used to be called beauty parlor hair. The kids were cute, and all together they made a great family picture for any Christmas card. Bill liked the idea that Arnie turned out well: a family man, all around good guy and citizen. Somehow, it gave him a good feeling about many other things, including his own family-in-progress.

Seeing Peter's parents was hard. When he and Johnny ‘No', had sleepovers, Anna Remo made ravioli and meatballs or lasagna or mineste. He loved having dinner at the Remo's. It was Johnny and Pete's mom who gave him his first taste of demitasse, making Bill feel like one of the grown ups. Anna Remo hugged him and spoke through sobs. “Peter talked of you all the time. He would always watch you when you were doing the football. He'd say, ‘There's that Billy the Kid.' That's what he called you––Billy the Kid. Then when you went with the President, he would always tell everybody how you and his little brother Johnny were friends. Thank you for coming here for my sons. Peter would be so happy to know you were here.”

“He knows, Mrs. Remo. He's up there seeing all of us right now.”

“You think so?”

“I know it, Mrs. Remo.”

“You're a good boy, William. You always were. How's your mother?”

“She and Dad are fine, living out on Long Island. They do some traveling and Dad's always ready to go fishing.”

“You tell her Anna said hello and that she should come around the old neighborhood sometime for coffee.”

“I'll tell her, Mrs. Remo.”

The funeral procession rolled down Bronxwood Avenue. Bill saw that the White Castle was still going strong, the lumberyard was gone, and Gino's restaurant was now an IHOP. Somebody, probably a Haitian family, took over Paul Manelo's house and now there were baby blue shutters, a large Virgin Mary, and plastic flowers in window boxes. It was pretty, but stuck out like a family in Easter Sunday clothes at Orchard Beach in July. They slowed the procession when they passed Peter's house on Matthews Avenue then down Burke Avenue to White Plains Road; then it made a left onto Gunhill Road and headed to Woodlawn Cemetery.

At the gravesite, Bill was looking out across the cemetery. In the distance was the elevated train running down White Plains Road. That reminded him of the reason Peter and Bill knew each other. It went back to the day Bill's dad came into school for “what's your father do for a living” day. Many of the dads who showed up were truck drivers like Pete's dad, storeowners, a few cops, firemen, mailmen, Con Ed workers. Eddie's dad was an elevator mechanic. When Peter, a train freak, heard that Bill's dad was a subway engineer, he latched right on. Peter eventually got the senior Hiccock to allow him to “front end” the entire trip from Woodlawn in the Bronx to Utica Avenue in Brooklyn. To Peter, it was as if Bill's dad was Mickey Mantle.

Peter, however, never got to watch the Yankee games, or the Mick, from the tin shed at the end of the 161st street el platform as Joey and Bill did. Most of the guys who worked for the T.A. scheduled the shed for one of their kids on game days. All the engineers and conductors would keep an eye on ‘em like surrogate fathers peering from each passing train. The token booth clerk would check on them every half hour or so just for good measure. By the time Billy was old enough to enjoy this perk, Peter was in his room a lot, building stuff and almost burning down the house. In fact, while the other guys were going to Orchard Beach or horseback riding on Pelham Parkway, Peter apparently got a job working at NBC. That was why nobody ever saw him.

Bill's train of thought, triggered by the number 2 train, stopped when Johnny Remo, Peter's brother, and Bill's childhood pal, came over and gave him a big bro-hug and thanked him for coming.

“Billy Hiccock, It's been too long.”

“Too long, Johnny, too long.”

“We know how busy you are. It really means a lot to us to have someone like you here.” He was shorter than Peter, tight-cropped razor haircut in a Frank Sinatra, circa 1970's way. He was a mass of muscle and wore a gold pinky ring. He talked like an ironworker, mainly because he was one.

“Whoa, John, I ain't someone like me,” Bill said. “I'm someone like you; we both grew up here, and Peter and you and all the guys know me like nobody else does.”

“No Billy, you were smart. Always were, you work with your head, not your back like us stiffs.”

“Paycheck's a paycheck, Johnny.”

“No. Well, just the same, thank you, and thank you for being there for Peter. He was all excited about seeing you last month.”

“John, I got to tell ya, I wasn't much help to him. In fact, there was nothing I could help him with.”

“No, hey, Billy, you gave him time. You listened; you did what a friend does. Towards the end, Peter didn't have too many friends, you know what I mean?”

“He was driven to…”

“No, no, he was obsessed. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what killed him,” John said turning to the coffin now lowered into the grave.

“Have you found out…well maybe this isn't a good time to talk about this.”

“No, Bill you are right, later. You coming to the house after this?”

Bill checked his watch; he had a 4:30 out of LaGuardia back to Reagan. “Sure, I got time.”

“No, we'll talk then. I got something I want to show you.”

∞§∞

David had been a cop in Haifa before taking on the security detail of the West Bank. His responsibility was for the safety and peace of Palestinians and Jews living side by side. There were flare-ups and occurrences that would be shocking in places of other demographics and geographics, but against the centuries-old rivalries of two peoples positioned in close proximity, these schisms just passed as any other day in this once proud prize of Israeli land. So the reported death of Hamir al-dashabi, a truck driver for an Israeli MRI manufacturer was little more than a footnote in the homicide log for that day.