Give Us This Day

by Tom Avitabile

“A paid informant actually . . .”

  “That beats a royal flush . . . hands down.”

  Brooke looked out the window as the morning sun was just hitting the Jersey side of the Hudson River. Her mind started making quick connections; she was making her list, a mental organization of pros and cons. She saw which side was the longest and made her decision. She opened her phone and turned to Nigel. “S’good you have an open ticket.” Just then the call went through. “Director Walsh, Burrell here. I’ve decided to take your offer and have Otterson join my team.” She turned to Nigel with her eyebrows up. “If he agrees to the chain of command.” He nodded in assent. “No need to call him, he’s right here. I’ll put you on speaker.”

  “Commander, does that work for you?” Walsh said from the phone.

  “As long as it doesn’t preclude my reports to MI6.”

  “It won’t,” Brooke said.

  “Then it works for me. Good hunting you two.”

  “Thanks, Director.” She ended the call and extended her hand.“Welcome to the team, Nigel.”

  “Pleasure.”

  .G.

  They watched through the windscreen as the little Grenier á Pain classic Piaggio three-wheeled bread truck rumbled over the cobblestones and pulled up to the front of the gallery. The delivery girl opened the back of the van and took out a small shopping bag. She walked around to the side alley of the gallery and out of sight of the two men waiting in the car down the block.

  .G.

  There was a whiff of something, something like rotten eggs; it caused her to make a face. She waved her hand in front of her nose to ward off the foul smell as she pressed the button on the frame of the backdoor.

  .G.

  Paul looked over to his partner. They had both seen the man who stopped to look into the gallery’s windows, but his partner shrugged. There was nothing they could do.

  .G.

  The first ring of the bell didn’t do the trick. But a few seconds later there was a longer, more deliberate ring as the delivery girl held down the button then emphatically pushed it three more times in a row. The third time, the contact that activated the bell’s armature, that makes and breaks it’s electrical contact thirty times per second, caused the most minuscule spark.

  .G.

  They watched as the man turned to walk away from the front of the gallery when suddenly the windows blew out. In a blur, they saw the pedestrian get sliced to ribbons by the plate glass being blasted into the street, followed by a ball of flame and debris, along with Francine’s body that flew out like a rag doll and flattened against a parked SUV, as the whole gallery exploded. The entire structure collapsed a split second later, as fire raged and dark black smoke billowed out onto the street and up into Old Montreal’s morning sky.

  Chapter 6

  A Shocking Development

  Out of Thin Air was a favorite Denver watering hole for bank employees, so naturally it was the best choice for Marsha Conklin’s early retirement party. At forty-eight, her leaving the bank was uncharacteristically risky. But she had professed a desire to travel the world, and many in the bank suspected the new mystery man in her life was the reason.

  Still, everyone was happy for her and wished her well with joke cards, gag gifts, and one really special present they all chipped in for: a gold Fendi watch. Marsha was truly moved, and she spoke with teary eyes as she stood up at the end of the table in the back room of the restaurant. “You have all been so kind to me over the years. Many of you have become like family. I am sad to leave, but I’m looking forward to great adventures and sharing them all with you from time to time on my Facebook page.”

  She was lying, but raising suspicions now was not wise. “So I just want to say, wherever my travels take me, each one of you will be there, right along with me.”

  There was applause and then the boss, Mr. Welsh, offered a toast. “To Marsha, may her journeys bring her joy and her joy bring more journeys.” Not everyone took the toast in the way Mr. Welsh must have intended, but they all clinked their glasses and “here-here’d.”

  Doris, who was sitting next to Marsha, leaned over and said in a very conspiratorial tone, “So are you ever going to show us a picture of Mr. Wonderful?”

  “Doris, there is no one. I don’t know how that rumor got started.”

  “Marsha, in four weeks you went from frumpy transaction director to fashion plate, from Frowning Frannie to Happy Helen. You either have a new man in your life or a nuclear-powered vibrator. In which case, text me the name of that store, girl.”

  Marsha just smiled and suppressed the urge to scream out the name Paul.

  Another employee asked, “So what’s the first stop on your world tour, Marsha?”

  She felt confident that she could reveal at least that much. “Tonight, I leave for the Cayman Islands!”

  Everyone around the table oohed and aahed and she just lapped it all up.

  .G.

  On the winding road outside Stockholm, Detrick Panover was cranking up the volume on his Bluetooth as his MP3 player was synced to his car’s twelve-speaker ultra-fidelity audio system. He was pushing it a little around the twisting turns that he navigated every day to and from his job at Shipsen-Deloitte, an art house whose blue chip reputation was second to none around the globe. Detrick’s star had risen when he’d been the only appraiser on the planet to declare a recent find of Degas’ sketches to be contemporary forgeries. Meaning the art pieces were of the time of Degas, but not by his hand. Other houses had lost millions on the deal, and although he’d saved his company from a major loss, he’d never felt adequately compensated. So when a certain party approached him with the offer of unbelievably good money just for enhancing a work’s appraisal, he saw no immediate downside. After all, these were works far off any catalog or gallery listing. Not one of these uninspired scratchings would ever get to within a hundred kilometers of a serious museum or collector. No, the only victims here would be the insurance companies if these worthless pieces were ever lost or stolen. Of course, Detrick did not consider that his upward appraisal of these works—in many cases to one hundred thousand times their true insignificant value—was a crime. That was because his cut was five percent of whatever value he deemed they were worth. So if he felt like making €20,000 that day, he’d assess some detestable waste of canvas and oil to €400,000, with just the filing of a form. The €400,000 wasn’t real but the €20,000 was, and it would really be in his account that night. In three short months, he would lose the paperwork and erase the files and no one at Shipsen-Deloitte would ever be the wiser.

  His take had been pretty healthy lately, as a batch of undeserving art had come across his desk by the same “investor/collectors” with whom he had made this very profitable deal. Enough to get a new flat and this €120,000 Tesla S-convertible with the P85 performance package. An all-electric masterpiece with the latest cutting edge tech and creature comforts that made saving the planet a pleasure.

  .G.

  At the hairpin turn, ten kilometers down the road, a man threw a standby switch and the large generator in the back of his pickup truck started up. He then threw a second switch and the generator groaned as it fought against the load it was just connected to. The large capacitor, as big as a skid of bricks, buzzed. A voltmeter hooked to its terminals started rising, passing ten thousand volts. A wire from the generator was secured to an iron rod stuck four feet into the ground. He pulled on the wires connected to a large sport fisherman’s reel to ensure the wire had slack. The large capacity reel was slot fitted into one of the holes in the bed of the truck. He pulled back the crossbow. It took a lot of strength to fight the two-hundred-pound pull. Once he latched the gut, he laid in the odd-looking arrow. Instead of a normal crossbow bolt, this one had a double-headed end made with two powerful, flat-ended magnets at the tips, each fifty millimeters around and set about one hundred millimeter
s apart. The thin wire led from the big fishing reel spool to the oddly fashioned bolt.

  .G.

  Detrick had had enough of the music and decided to switch to the news channel. He hit the button on the steering wheel and said, “News.” The car only took commands in English. But that would soon be fixed and he would be able to use his preferred German. He had paid €10,000 over the asking price to avoid the four-week delay in getting the car, but that meant accepting one that was already outfitted for an English lawyer.

  .G.

  The principle problem of the man with the crossbow was that the Tesla ran silent, so he wouldn’t know it was coming until he could see it when it entered the turn, and the driver instinctively slowed the vehicle approaching the two hundred ten degree hairpin turn on this side of the mountain. That only gave him about two seconds to aim and hit the target. It wasn’t the best position but it was the only one across from the depression in the road that allowed for the full contents of the the two-hundred-liter drum of salt water to puddle across the roadway. He donned the big, heavy rubber gloves and made sure his knees and feet were totally on the thick rubber mat he had laid on the ground.

  The voltage meter hit one hundred and fifteen thousand volts. The red S-type, came out from behind the bushes. He led the car through the sights on the crossbow. He pulled the trigger. Silently, except for the whirling of the reel of wire unspooling at a fast rate, the magnetic bolt slapped onto the side of the Tesla. Upon contact, the full jolt of one hundred and fifteen thousand volts discharged throughout the frame, chassis, and all the systems of the car, as the high energy current found a path to the ground through the salt water splashing up under the car from the roadway.

  .G.

  As he approached the turn, Detrick heard the thump followed by a blinding flash as his digital dashboard flared up and burned out. Suddenly, his engine stopped and his brakes failed.

  Inside the high-tech car, the electric sensors in the anti-lock circuit had fried with the impulse.

  .G.

  The shooter watched as the car hit the guardrail at over seventy miles per hour. For its part, the rail held, but the light-weight car with the heavy batteries in the rear catapulted over the railing as it flipped and then tumbled down the side of the mountain some five thousand feet. The car disintegrated as it cart-wheeled and smashed against the rocky terrain, littering it with jagged parts, spewing corrosive battery acid, and flinging pieces of Detrick all the way down.

  The man reeled in the magnetic bolt, which was dislodged as the car flipped. He shut down the generator, threw everything in the bed of the pickup and took off.

  A few kilometers away, on a quiet country road, he stopped at the bridge over a deep river he had scouted two days earlier. He made sure there was no traffic in either direction. He went around back and opened the tailgate. He then drove across the road, positioning the truck to span the roadway. He then put it in reverse and floored it. The pickup lurched backwards and, just before it hit the low guardrail on the other side of the road, he slammed on the brakes. The huge seven-hundred-pound army surplus capacitor, the half-ton generator, the reel, the bolt, the empty drum, ground spike, and the rubber gloves and mat all went sliding off the high back of the truck, clearing the low railing, and plummeting into the deep river below with a gigantic splash. He turned and looked out the rear window into the truck bed to ensure that it was all gone. He then put the truck in drive and proceeded to drive normally over the bridge, albeit with his tailgate open. The driver of a passing Audi was none the wiser that all the evidence of a hybrid-car-killing “Taser” had just been eliminated.

  As the man in the pickup drove, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a first-class ticket to the Cayman Islands in the name of Paul Grundig.

  .G.

  Brooke was deep in a meeting with the US Attorney, Southern District and it wasn’t going well.

  “Director Burrell, without the last part of the puzzle, the T&E records, we’d just be making opposing counsel rich as they mount up billable hours while denying their clients were even in the places where the transactions and illegalities went down.”

  “Our techs are trying to recreate the files from the erasure event that took place. Our only lead witness is dead.”

  “Yes, that unfortunate business with the subway.”

  “It’s looking more like he was murdered.”

  “You think he was silenced? Couldn’t it be just a random murder?”

  “It scores way too high on the coincidence scale for me.”

  .G.

  The flood protection gates of the Rokytka River in Prague are both an essential functional part of the city’s infrastructure and a bit of a tourist attraction as well. All over the world, from Victoria Falls to the Colorado rapids, the force of rushing water instinctively draws human interest. So it was here as well, in this branch of the Vltava River where people often gathered to behold the power of nature as the big blue floodgates opened in balletic synchronicity and the surging waters burst out to the lower end of the river in Liben. The event’s actual purpose was to control the flow in order to balance the river’s moods.

  So when the fourth gate from the east end was putting out considerably less volume than the others, the Water Authority engineers investigated. To their shock, they found the meter-and-a-half-wide gateway pipe clogged with the body of a 114-kilo man.

  The Czech police were able to identify the poor fellow as Ebner Dubrovnik, a digital engineer who worked for a high tech company in Prague. The best they could figure was that, due to his blood-alcohol level, he fell off either a bridge or a boat on the river, and then floated downstream until his body got stuck in the floodgate.

  .G.

  “A fleet boat of the Navy, a submarine with her fighting power still intact! And you’d take her back to Pearl? I don’t believe . . .” Brooke hit the pause button. She thought she heard a knock at the door. She listened for a few more seconds then hit the remote again. “The best exec I could possibly get in the whole Navy. ‘The backstop’ I think you said, and the first command you give as a captain is to order a retreat!” the movie soundtrack continued.

  Ever since she’d married a submariner she had developed an inordinate fascination with submarine movies. Also because she’d once played a dangerous game of cat and mouse between a secret US submarine and a doomed Russian Akula-class boat. A situation in which she’d invoked her presidential authority as the mission’s runner and taken over the control of the American submarine in the midst of a secret mission. A mission that was failing after an underwater collision fatally damaged the Russian sub that was on a similarly secret assignment. Her decisive leadership led to the detonation of a small Russian tactical nuke twenty thousand feet below the Indian Ocean. It was a brilliant gambit that she’d engineered, on the spot, to conveniently destroy any evidence of US involvement in the God Particle affair. So tight and well orchestrated was her improvised battle plan, that the Russians, to this day, have chalked up loss of their sub to a nuclear accident aboard one of their notoriously “leaky” boats. But that event, and all the other times she’d served her country as part of QUOG, the Quarterback Operations Group, a secret operations cluster run out of the White House by her old boss, Dr. William “Wild Bill” Hiccock, was highly classified.

  For those reasons, her fascination with all things submarine had grown. This movie, Run Silent, Run Deep, hit very close to home. Clark Gable, the sub’s skipper—or as she thought of it, the actor playing her husband, Mush—and his wife lived on base at Pearl. He was struggling with command and battling his exec officer, Burt Lancaster. Every one of these films brought her closer to her man, who was out there somewhere below the ocean on what was known as deterrent patrol. She didn’t know if the deterrent was as effective in foreign policy as it was in deterring her domestic life, but she’d signed up for this duty when she signed the marriage certificate. The
one good thing about being here in New York, on this now-extended case, was that it kept her mind off the emptiness she felt from time to time.

  This time there was no mistaking the rapping at the door. She shut off the TV and walked over. “Who is it?”

  “Nigel.”

  She unlocked the door and let him in. “What’s got you knocking on my door at ten o’clock on a school night?”

  “So sorry, but I just got this communiqué from our Middle East station.” He headed to the kitchen table and flipped open his iPad. He pressed his thumb on the screen and a biometric scan identified him.

  Brooke looked over at the screen as he held it upright on the table. It was a Skype-like picture of a man speaking in an English accent in some sort of control center with equipment behind him. “Highest confidence sources and incontrovertible surveillance videos indicate that a cell we have tracked from the ISIS camps in Somalia and through Yemen and found to be idle for the last twenty-seven days has just fallen off the grid. Our best guess is that they are now active. The cell has been classified as SOM37. A follow-up briefing paper as to methods and suspected capabilities is attached to this compression. The directorate considers this an imminent and present global threat. All resources are to be diverted to determining the SOM37’s whereabouts, and potential target packages. All known methods and sources are to be pressed for any corroborating intelligence. Follow-up briefing via this channel as the situation dictates. This is a level A-one-A communication and should be considered a direct order from the directorate and superseding any and all previous orders to the intended recipient. Direct all inquiries and findings through normal secured channels to your immediate control and oversight officers. End of file, end of communiqué.” Then there were three beeps and the screen went black.

  “That’s a very specific order, but are you reading me in on this because you think it relates to my—our—investigation? Or is this your way of telling me you’ve been reassigned?”

  “Hardly. Look here at the briefing paper.” He swiped his finger and the attachment opened up. He scrolled down. “Here, this little tidbit caught my eye.”