The Hammer of God (22 page)

The President came around to the front of the desk and sat in the chair alongside Bill's.

“You know what the difference between you and me is?”

“You'll be buried in a Presidential library and I'll be in Woodlawn in the Bronx?”

“Odd thought, but I was going more for, ‘Not much,' as a way of stressing what we have in common. We have been through a few close calls together. Me almost getting impeached, the rocket aimed at the nuke plant. Hell, I met your mom and dad.”

“I still want to apologize for the whole family album thing.”

“Sweet people. Bill, I know I can trust you. But I have to impress upon you how dangerous this is without actually telling you. So please just take my word for it. You don't want to know what Jesus Factor is… ever!”

“Yes, Mr. President, but…”

“But? No one says, ‘but,' to the Commander-in-Chief, Bill.”

“Sir, if we stumbled on to it, the bad guys may already know it or possibly stumbled onto it themselves. We should let Professor Li continue his work; see where he goes. Maybe by doing that we'll discover how to keep it undiscovered.”

∞§∞

Bill was back in the State Department teleconference room with Joey Palumbo by his side. On the monitor in front of them, with the digital read-out “Paris” below it, was Yardley Haines seated next to a very much alive Peter Remo.

“I was talking to the D.J.; he was using those new Planotech Mark 7 power amps and he had them latched up in parallel and…”

“Peter, what happened?”

“Anyway, when I go back to the bar I can't find my seat ‘cause I left my jacket on the back.”

“With your wallet in the pocket?”

“Yeah. Anyway I freak and start searching all around the club. A guy says he saw someone grab my jacket and head up the stairs. When I get to the top… it was horrible… the cops were there and the guy's head was crushed right into the cobblestones. Then I hear the cop say my name. I turn and realize he's reading my driver's license. For some reason, I didn't speak up. I just wedged through the crowd and went back to the boarding house.”

Bill looked to Joey with a nod that said,
just like you said it happened
.

“Did you know the guy who took your coat, Peter?” Joey asked.

“No, Joe. I mean, I wouldn't know, because he looked like a pizza when I saw him. Do you know who he was?”

“He was a grifter named Henri Brochard.”

“Nope, never heard of him.”

“Peter, why didn't you reach out to your family or someone to tell them you were alive?” Hiccock said.

“Billy, when you didn't know what Jesus…”

“Hold it! Pete, don't say it, just move on…”

“Right… Anyway you freaked me out, Billy Kid, so I wanted to disappear. France was a good place to do it. Bonnie had a place outside Paris, so I headed there.”

“Wait, Bonnie from Ocean Parkway?”

“Yeah, she's singing here in France and doing well.”

“But we have you living in a boarding house.”

“Yeah. Bonnie's living with a guy and they didn't have room. But she had a friend who ran a boarding house.”

“He must have been thrilled when Peter Robot showed up,” Joey said under his breath gaining a glare from Hiccock.

“Anyway, Bill, the instant I realized they thought the guy in the street was me, I knew I was safe.”

“Pete, by order of the Secretary of State, Mr. Haines there will escort you back to the United States and through customs – no questions asked. I want you to come directly to my office. In fact,” he turned to Joey with a snide look, “Joey here will meet you at Dulles and personally escort you to the White House.”

“Pete, what got you so spooked buddy?” Joey asked.

“I called Kasiko in Queens when I left you. His housekeeper said he died in a car accident.”

“Where? We'll check it.”

“In New York. But don't bother, Joe. Kasiko didn't drive.”

Joey looked at Bill.

You wouldn't know it from all the hype, but one of the worst beaches in the world is in the South of France. There, you can literally see the rich and famous from all over Europe and their beautiful, topless women, lying upon and walking over… rocks. Cannes has been the playground for the idle rich and the
nouveau riche
since the Second World War. Lately, it has become the haunt of the film and television illuminati due to the Cannes Film Festival and MIP shows that attract them here twice a year.

“This is so much better than burkas and long black clothes,” Ross said looking out from the Croisette onto the array of topless women, some of whom were applying suntan lotion in a way that would temporarily revert any man to the age of 14.

“Wouldn't mind some R&R here when this is over,” Bridgestone said as they crossed the palm-lined boulevard, headed for the Negresco.

In decent French, Ross asked the deskman at the front to see the manager. In less than a minute, an impeccably dressed man walked up to them.

Bridgestone held up a photo. The man's eyes widened, then the sergeant said in Farsi, “Your office now!”

Without hesitation, the man led them to his office off the lobby. Bridge put the photo they had taken with a long lens earlier that morning of the manager dropping his kid off at school back in his pocket.

Once inside the office, Bridge continued speaking in Farsi to the man of Iranian decent who had lived in France for the past 15 years. “You will never see your daughter again if you lie to us. Do you understand?”

A sweat was building on the hairless top of the man's head as he nervously nodded.

“You will never see your entire family again if you tell anyone we were here. Do you understand?”

Again, the man nodded.

Ross held up the only picture they had of Brodenchy, a.k.a. Jahim El Benhan. The man squinted, so Ross pushed it closer. “When was the last time you saw this man?”

“Two, maybe three weeks ago.”

“Who was he with?”

“Monsieur Rashani. He is a big client of the hotel.”

“What does Rashani do?”

“Cinema; he's a producer.”

“Where can we find him?”

“He lives here, in Cannes.”

“I thought you said he was a hotel client?”

“Yes, he books the hotel for the festivals… for parties and premieres.”

Bridgestone threw a pad on the desk. “His address.”

The man looked up the address in his private, locked file box. He didn't trust his personal list of clients to the computer, where others could gain the advantage that having this information would bring. He wrote down the information then, with an unsteady hand, offered it to Ross.

“We found you this morning. We can find you or any member of your family in 20 minutes. Don't betray us. Forget we were ever here and little Shawra will live to see her next birthday.”

That these monsters knew the name of his daughter rattled the hotel manager to his core. Again, all he could do was nod. They left. He sat there shaking for a while.

∞§∞

Back in Washington, a file arrived by diplomatic courier. A member of the Israeli secret service, Mousad, acting at Joey's request, and Joey acting from the information B & R obtained from the truck driver Jamal, had asked to be red flagged any police activity that had to do with trucks or transport in Israel and the greater Middle East. Joey read the file with extreme interest and decided to pick up the phone to call his old friend, Hiram.

∞§∞

Ever since the heart-to-heart in the President's office, Bill was focusing on the man's words “Close enough” and “the most dangerous idea.” What did that mean?
How could an idea be dangerous?
At 12:30 a.m., with Janice sleeping next to him, he realized his brain was stuck on this. He carefully got out of bed and went down to the den. He switched on the desk lamp and booted up the SCIAD terminal, then went into the kitchen and grabbed an orange. Back at his desk, he spread out a paper towel and was about to rip into the fruit when he noticed something. The desk light had the effect of lighting the orange like a half moon. That got him thinking. Twenty seconds later, he was rummaging through the garage.

He sat back at his desk, put the basketball he retrieved on the blotter, and held up the orange. That was pretty much a good representation of the basketball “sun” to the orange “Earth.” He sat there and nothing came to him. He held up the Earth and cast a shadow on the ball. As he moved the orange, watching the shadow cross the larger ball, it hit him. He took a pen and drew, right on his desk blotter, an arc from the lamp. He then rolled the big ball over the arc. The shadow moved across the ball.

There it was: the dangerous part of the Jesus Factor.

∞§∞

Bill left a note on the bathroom mirror telling Janice that he had gone to the office in the middle of the night. Those Secret Service agents were good, he thought. Seeing the lights go on downstairs they got his car warmed up and ready to go.

At the White House entrance, he swiped his I.D., telling the sergeant at the desk to awaken Professor Li and get him to Bill's office. On the way, he stopped by the storage closet and rolled out a white board.

By the time Li got to Bill's office, Bill had already drawn orbits and planets on the board in different colors.

“What's on your mind, Bill?”

“Phil, the Jesus Factor does not define a place on Earth. It's extraterrestrial physics, meaning from a point other than Earth.”

Li caught on. “It's a threshold point somewhere in a harmonic relationship to the sun!”

“Exactly. But is not a point – it's a cusp, a distance. And that distance is the same all around the sun, creating a ring in space, a zone where celestial mechanics and nuclear physics nullify each other. Probably some interaction at the atomic level that resonates with the solar system level.”

“Both the atom and planetary system are similar with the solar being the macro of the atom.”

“Somehow, Blake Lathie unraveled a math system in his book that revealed the harmonics of the two systems.”

“The empirical data on the 107 A-bomb tests I have been accumulating can easily be cross-calibrated to solar positioning charts and pretty much define the cusp ring with 107 points.”

Bill stopped him. “Li, what must never be known is the following.” Bill grabbed his basketball. With a Sharpie, he drew “USA” on one side and “China/Russia” on the other. He then went up to the board and placed the ball on the red “nuclear cusp” ring. Bill then rotated the ball as he moved it around in an elliptical shape, which approximated the actual orbit of the Earth around the sun. The ball crossed and re-crossed the cusp line four times.

“Holy shit!” Li said.

“Yep. That's the problem and the most dangerous idea on Earth.”

∞§∞

The address was on the Lerins Islands, an exclusive community 15 minutes from the hotel. It was like the Beverly Hills of Cannes. The home of Rashani rivaled any mogul's home on Mulholland Drive. There was an electric fence and keypad arrangement. The place was quiet. They rang the bell. A woman, with an Iranian accent answered over the scratchy intercom.

“Two visitors for Mr. Rashani, please,” Bridgestone said in Farsi.

“He's not here.”

“When will he be back?”

“He's on a Hajj. Not for one more week.”

“Okay; we'll call on him then. Thank you.”

“All right.”

As they walked away, Bridgestone said to Ross, “So if you were him, with all this, would you fly to Madinah commercial or on your own jet?”

“This guy's got to have his own G4.”

∞§∞

Bill was in his office going over the speech he was scheduled to make in a few days to the Society of Chemical Engineers in New York. Cheryl was briefing his Secret Service detail on the itinerary, which was purposely not squelched. The President didn't want to send the message that they were in a bunker mentality, and had been crystal clear when he ordered that all administration public activities not be affected by the loose nuke. Bill was right in the middle of rewriting a sentence about synthetic polymers and the tax incentive for creating them from recycled material when, thankfully, Joey came in smiling.

“Why the shit eatin' grin, Joe?”

“B&R played a hunch that this Rashani guy had his own jet. Bingo! He did. According to the flight plan, he went to Madinah for the Hajj. There's a filed flight plan for his return from Mecca to France next week. But here's the thing – in between, the plane is making a quick trip to New York. How's that figure?”

“That's easy; he either ducked out of the Hajj, came here, picked up some White Castles and got back fast before anybody noticed, or he gave someone a free ride?” Bill said as he closed the folder with the draft of his speech in it.

“Pretty sweet $32,000 trip even without the murder burgers.”

“Anyone ask the pilots?”

“Saudi Air Force interviewed the crew. They say it was a friend of Rashani who they were ordered to fly to New York.”

“And…”

“No name, and here's why: in addition to be being the biggest producer of film in Iran, Rashani is also, and wow what a surprise this is, the Minister of Film for Iran.”

“So he's got DPL disease!”

“And, unfortunately, so does his aircraft.”

“So no documentation of who came in?”

“No. I think this is a probably a screw up, because the only record is that it was Rashani.”

“Wait. I'm confused. He did come here for belly bombs?”

“Someone says it was Rashani. Even though the pilots say it wasn't him.”

“Okay, Mr. FBI, what's your working theory?”

“As far as I can tell, some guy walks into the U.S. off Rashani's plane; some rent-a-cop at private aviation says, ‘Welcome Mr. Rashani,' and the passenger says, ‘Thank you,' and he is out of there.”

“Find that guard and find the new Mr. Rashani.”

“That's what B&R are doing. They're two hours out of New York now. They'll talk to the security hack, pick up the trail, and track whoever this was down in a manner that would take us, minimum, a few days, if you know what I mean?”

“You know, too bad I just thought of this, but I wonder if those guys are cleared for domestic work.

“Good point. Find out quick!”

“Let me check with someone,” Bill said as he looked down at something Joey had slid across his desk. “What's this?”

“You like it?”

“I don't know… a football?”

“Catchy, don't you think?”

Bill was looking at the familiar blue and yellow seal of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, which was just like the large OSTP one above his desk, but modified with the words “Quarterback Operations Group” in the lower arc that usually read “Office of Science and Technology Policy.” Right under the eagle's tail was a little football! “Joey, where did this come from?”

“I had Dara the new kid in communications do it up. She's a whiz with Photoshop.”

“First of all, the Office of Protocol is going to have a shit fit if they see this.”

“Why?”

“Numb-nuts, it's the government. I'm sure there are no less than 55 people who have sign off on shit like this.”

Joey reluctantly retrieved the glossy print-out from Bill's desk. “You know, sometimes you can be a real joy killer.”

Bill sighed and took it back from Joey. “Okay, let me look into this, but no promises.” He placed it under the speech folder and laughed under his breath. “Football.”

∞§∞

Half the ‘boiler room' was now full, Dariush thought as he started his shift. A few years back, there were three translators at the Farsi Desk. Now half of the 108 listening stations here in the giant room in West Virginia were staffed 24/7 with more translators coming on line all the time. The output from NSA listening posts of phone, e-mail, military, and commercial traffic in Farsi and other Middle East languages was a booming business. Cable and satellite networks like Al Jazeera and others weren't even covered in this room and probably had four times the numbers of translators and monitors. His review list was set by his supervisor. The loose suitcase nuke had everyone working overtime and tonight would be another 14-hour shift.

The first audio file he opened, earmarked OF#3DF23, was a tap of an optical fiber and from the hexadecimal code, 3DF23. He calculated in his head that it was the 253,731st capture from optical fiber this calendar year. His real knack, aside from languages, was his ability to detangle stuff like hexadecimal code in his head, which is why he was the chief decoder in the Farsi section. He played the file and understood it to be a chirp warble of an encoded data string. He patched it through a digital analyzer and rotated the step knob. At modulo, 13 he got a hit – the output stopped being random and started having repeating, intentional patterns. What followed was a cryptogram of sorts, a grouping of letters that meant something to a key index. What the key was, was the hard part to figure out and this prevented him from identifying the meaning of the data string.

He looked at the arrangement and pattern of the letters and something caught his eye. It was t-y-y-f-q-r-q-b-s. Seemingly meaningless except that if the modulo held for the length of the word, then it was a letter followed by two of the same letters followed by a letter followed by the same letter that was following the next letter, then two other letters. It wasn't a word but the “footprint” of a word, as he liked to think of it. Also, it was probably a word in Farsi that had to be translated to English. But it could also be any language translated into any language, or not a word at all but a number. He called his superior and asked for some Cray time.

∞§∞

The House Oversight Committee on Intelligence is a tough crowd, but they control the purse strings for all the spook houses of the U.S. Therefore, you have to play nice with them if you need something done, like grant unprecedented powers – a.k.a. license to kill – to two grunts in hot pursuit. So it was with cautious trepidation that Ray Reynolds sat beside Hiccock in a top secret, hastily called, closed door meeting of the committee. Being populated by politicians, the members spent a half hour peppering Ray with criticisms of administration policy. Hiccock remained patient and took his cues from Ray. The Chief of Staff knew how the game was played, and Bill wasn't going to start worrying unless he saw sweat on Ray's forehead. Hiccock was under strict orders not to speak unless specifically addressed. If he answered anything, it was not to be a syllable more than the bare minimum.