The God Particle
Page 6
“Thank you, Bob.” The Admiral dismissed the contractor and waited until he was out of the room before continuing. “Mr. Hiccock, what happened in the South Pacific was very disconcerting to us.”
“I can appreciate that, Admiral, but we were also caught off guard,” Bill said.
Joey jumped in, “And thank you for the fast and successful recovery of our operative, Agent Burrell.”
“That’s what we wanted to chat about…” Merkel said.
“Forgive me sir, but I don’t think I know what ‘chat’ means in the context of an Executive Branch, Department of the Navy meeting.”
“Of course, Mr. Hiccock. What I mean is, something strange happened out there. One of our finest skippers is now involved in what, for him, could be a devastating career blow; a career killer, in fact, as dicey as if an ace fighter pilot reported a flying saucer.”
“The whale!” Joey said.
“If that is what we are in fact dealing with,” Bill added.
“What does that mean, Mr. Hiccock?”
“We have the top marine life and cretaceous experts trying to find any research on sea life that could be trained to operate the way Ms. Brooke filed in her report. So far, they all agree it’s not likely.”
“So if you rule out living creatures, you think it’s some machine?”
“Or something machine-like.”
“But our subs can hear if a Soviet sub has a bad valve in the officer’s head at five miles out. No machine could get that close to one of our missile boats.”
“Well, we are looking into some leads now, and as soon as we have anything concrete we’ll notify you.”
The admiral looked at Hiccock and deliberately paused before speaking his next words. “I have two major areas of concern, sir. One is that I have thirty-seven thousand men at any one time in that ocean. If there is a killer whale or machine or whatever out there, I need to sound the alarm and ramp up my skippers on force protection against such a threat. And second, if there is any information that would be exculpable for Morton, sooner rather than later, it could save a brilliant career.”
“Admiral, as to the threat, as soon as we learn of anything that is actionable, you have my word, we’ll share it on the double. As for Mush, he saved my agent’s life. We owe him a debt that will be hard to repay. Again, if any of our wild-assed assumptions bear fruit, we’ll do our best to support our friend.”
“And of course, Dr. Hiccock, we never had this ‘chat.’”
“What chat is that, sir?”
Outside the Pentagon, Bill turned to Joey, “Tell Brooke to dust off her passport. Let’s get her to France and see if we can help out our boomer skipper.”
∞§∞
The last time Brooke had been in Paris, she had been with Peter Remo, a sweet older guy who was a friend of Bill Hiccock, and with whom she’d had a brief Parisian encounter a year or so earlier. She had met Peter while on a case, and he had filled a hollow place she hadn’t even realized was empty. They had spent a wonderful week in this City of Lights, both ready for the romance of France to saturate their pores. The twenty-year difference in their ages was hardly worth a second glance in this continental cosmopolitan setting where men in their sixties are frequently seen in the company of young women whose age didn’t exceed that of the Chivas Regal they sipped.
The brief May-December interlude had dissipated into an impressionist’s pastel memory as the pace of their lives ramped back up to American rat-race speed. Still, as she took a deep breath on that early Monday on her little hotel balcony, the memory made Brooke momentarily ache to have someone step behind her, wrap his arms around her and melt away the morning chill. Instead, she did some stretches and deep knee bends and ate a room service breakfast. She was showered, dressed, and in the lobby at eight thirty, when a U.S. Embassy driver picked her up for the drive out to Euro-Disney.
The drive through the French countryside was picturesque, with little farmhouses and big rolls of browning hay on emerald-green fields. Maybe I should call Peter when I get back. She immediately discarded the idea; Mush had her sole and total attention now. She wondered if it was because she knew she could have Peter with just a phone call, but Mush was like forbidden fruit. He belonged to the Navy and wasn’t kidding when he told her that his main love was the USS Nebraska. She wondered if she threatened that relationship in some way. Another woman you could fight, but the other ‘she’ was the biggest, most expensive, cutting edge, top-secret weapons platform that existed on the planet. Somehow she had to find a way to be the more desirable boy’s toy.
Like the Disney facility on Long Island, the Euro Disney Imagineering complex wasn’t near the park and its attractions, but in an industrial area. Luckily, both the head of security and the designer she needed to interview spoke English, saving Brooke from brushing off the rusted French of her father.
“How far along had the project gotten?” Brooke asked the head of the project.
“Not far, mademoiselle; we had a working prototype of the propulsion organ, but the chemicals necessary were in violation of the green oath Disney signed with the U. N. agency that gives us a green rating worldwide.”
Brooke noted that Yaleman, his American counterpart, omitted the part about the U.N. ban. “So they never went into production?”
“No. Also, it was too expensive for the budget of the rides. However, there was rumor of a live-action sequel to be made. Had we manufactured only two of the units for the movie, we could have amortized the initial cost, but the second film was never made. The Frenchman’s eyes momentarily dropped to her legs.
“When did you discover the documents were missing?” Brooke asked as she tugged the hem of her skirt down toward her knees.
“Only when your office called my chief and we dug into the files at your suggestion. Until then, we thought it was just a case of hackers trying to get to our gaming software, or at least, that’s how they made it look.”
“So they covered their tracks?”
“Very sophisticated, and now we know it had to be a job-inside, as you say.”
“How do you know it was an inside job?”
“Our firewall!”
“So you’re saying they had to be physically in this facility to — what? Plug into your network, with, like a wire or something?”
“Yes. From outside, not likely.”
“With what was taken, could someone have made a full production version?”
“Yes, it was all there.”
“In your opinion, could someone do this?”
“The hardest part would be the electro-reactive fluid procurement.”
Brooke checked her notes. “And that’s what they were cooking in East Hampton?”
∞§∞
Even though he was an ocean away in Washington, D.C., Joey Palumbo had real juice at Interpol, France. As soon as Brooke entered the International Criminal Police Organization’s Paris office, she was immediately ushered to a secure teleconference room and Joey was already on the monitor from Washington. Brooke slid into her seat and her image appeared in a multi-partitioned screen.
On the screen in front of her, Joey smiled and asked, “How they treating you, Brooke?”
“Fine, sir.”
“What have you found out?”
“We definitely have a potential here for the plans to have found their way into enemy hands. What we need to do on a worldwide basis is look for any thefts, purchases or intel on the various forms of…” she glanced down at her notes, “…electro-static, electro-dynamic, electro-reactive or electro-kinetic fluids. I’ve uploaded all the keywords to our Washington Bureau, and Interpol is distributing them to the rest of the jurisdictions. Also, Bill’s science network may be of use here.”
“Very good, Agent Burrell. Anything else?”
“There was a red flag in the file of the French Disney designer; we’re running that down now.”
“Okay, let me know if that comes to anything.”
“Aye, sir
!”
“Bonsoir, agent…”
“Adieu, boss.”
V. BAITING THE HOOK
“Ewwww! I am going back up to the house and leave you two he-men to the great outdoors,” Janice said as she got up from the dock and brushed off the seat of her jeans.
“Okay fella, it’s you and me left to provide for the women folk,” Bill said to his progeny as the little boy giggled at the wiggly worm dancing on the end of the hook.
It was one of those moments that define a man’s life: the transmission of values from one generation to the next. Although in this case Bill intellectually knew it was a warm-up for the same scene to be repeated when little Richie reached five and would be able to appreciate it more, still it was instinctively emanating from him and he couldn’t control it if he wanted to.
The reel whizzed as he gave the line a little whip into the water. Richie watched as the hook and sinker disappeared into the murky depths of the lake Bill had swum in since he was six years old. Bill had many great memories here at the summer cabin his dad and uncle used to own together, till Uncle Bill died in `78.
With Richie nestled under his arm, his legs dangling off the dock, he bobbed his pole gently. Richie’s hair had the smell of baby shampoo, and Bill found himself breathing deeper than usual. Richie’s hand grabbed the reel and started cranking it, more to hear the sound, Bill guessed, than to reel in an imagined fish. At intervals, Bill released the lock and let it free-spin back down, then clicked it on again so Richie could continue ratcheting. The pole dipped and Bill instinctively pulled up. The reel started to click and let line out. “Richie, you caught a fish, son. You caught a fish!” Bill put his hand over his son’s and reeled the fish in. Soon a silvery flittering image appeared near the surface. He unhooked his arm from around Richie and, keeping the rod between them, coaxed the boy to turn it more. “C’mon Richie, reel it in, keep turning boy.” At that point little Richie started laughing and stopped turning the reel. That made Bill laugh, “C’mon Rich, reel it in, do like daddy.” Click, click, click went the reel, but little Richie was laughing too hard.
Bill lifted the line out of the water and a found a silver blue pike female hooked at the end. “Whoa! Looky there Rich… a fish! You caught a big fish!”
The little boy looked at his daddy, then at the fish and back to his daddy and said, “Fishy.”
Bill was flabbergasted. “What did you say? What is this?”
The little boy with his mother’s big beautiful eyes just looked at his daddy and banged on the reel. The fish worked itself free and swam off.
“What was that? What did you just catch?” Bill tried to elicit the word again, but all the little boy did was laugh. Bill picked him up and went running back to the house.
“Janice! Jaaaaanice — Janice!” Bill called out as the screen door to the cabin slammed behind them.
“What? What happened — did you catch a big fish?” Janice asked as she came from the kitchen in her mommy voice that Bill had not known she possessed until Richie emerged on the scene.
“Janice, he said it.”
“Said what?” she said, looking at her son as if marveling at him for the first time.
“He said, ‘fishy’!”
“You did! You caught a fishy with Daddy?”
“Come on Richie, tell Mommy what you caught.”
It went on like that for two minutes until they both realized it was approaching child abuse.
“Well, I’ll finish making lunch. Why don’t you wash the worm goo off both your hands.” Janice went back to the kitchen.
“Come on, champ, let’s go wash up,” Bill said as he hefted the boy up and carried him to the bathroom.
“Fishy.”
“Jaaaaaanice!”
∞§∞
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Joey said. “I can understand piracy on the high seas or even going up against the U.S. Navy, but the bad guys must have balls to bring on the disdain of Greenpeace and the greenies who use ecological blackmail to knuckle companies into bleeding money to save the whales. Hey, that’s funny!”
“Joey, you’ve got to work on your political skills. You sound so…retro,” Bill observed as he took back Brooke’s briefing paper from him.
“C’mon, you don’t see the irony in a bunch of save-the-whale types being responsible for creating the killer whale of all time?”
“How do you make that connection?”
“First this movie, Ishmael’s Quest, was the continuing stories of Moby Dick, but in this version Moby turns into a good guy or good whale… not a dick!”
“Are you here all week, Shecky?”
“Some college professor did a paper on the public’s lack of caring about the plight of whales. He cited Moby Dick, still to this day, as the main cause for the callousness over the fate of the cretaceous.”
“Stop being cute, just tell me the facts.”
“Fact: a percentage of the proceeds of the movie was going to a whale protection group. The first movie, it’s animated, and it bombs. The die-hard save-the-whale heads vow to try again, but this time with a live action film. You know with actors and some CGI…”
“Joey, I got it. Are you finished?”
“So they plan on making this mechanical whale for the film, you know, so no real whales were hurt in the making… Disney doesn’t build it because the chemicals are on a banned list they corporately signed an oath never to use. They shit-can the sequel. The plans sit until these bastards throw caution to the wind, environmentally speaking, steal the blue prints, and build the thing.”
“I still don’t follow, but even more important, I don’t care. Can you tell me who built it and how we can catch them? Or at least prove it’s a real entity to get Red Beard off the hook.” Bill pulled out the page that had the different fluid names.
“Hey, that’s funny too! Red Beard… Pirate… Hook?”
“You are in a rare mood, buddy boy. Did you get laid last night?”
“As a matter of fact…”
“Good, I am happy for you, and I feel for Phyllis. Now, stop giggling like a kid and be the cop I owed a job to.”
“Okay, but I already did all that.”
“You hard-on, when were you going to tell me?”
“Just before you shoved this report that I already read in my face.”
“Okay cut the crap; what do we got?”
“The propulsion bladders were of rubber, made by a subsidiary of Michelin out of Libya. The specs were right out of the WDI plans. The electro-reactive fluid came from a chemical tanker presumably pirated off the Somali coast. The ship’s owner, the Marnee Line, claimed the pirates let seawater into the hold and ruined the load of P784. It made a claim and received 1.2 million of the insured value of this very rare gunk. Of course, it’s possible the bad guys took all they needed first, then flooded it.”
“And the sixty-four thousand dollar question is — ” Bill announced in a game show host styled voice.
“Who are the bad guys? Hold on to your girdle, Mabel — UNESCO.”
“As in the United Nations?”
“The terrorists in Turtle Bay, that’s correct.”
“What the hell?”
“The rotating head of UNESCO was the Somali ambassador. During his reign, his half-brother, T.R. Maguambi, used the UN’s credit card to finance the whole op and opened accounts in Geneva that would endow their little terrorist Orca for years to come.”
“How much are we talking about here?”
“Near as we can tell, one hundred million in the various Swiss accounts.”
“How could this happen?”
“At the UN only the big things like global warming, nuclear proliferation and human rights are watched by the Security Council, which is us, France, Germany, Russia and China; the relatively good guys. The rest are all thugs and thieves trying to use the UN as a big bat to bash in the brains of century-old enemies.”
“That’s a rather cynical view, Joseph.”
“So Maguambi takes advantage of the chaos in the General Assembly and funds his personal pirate program.”
“Why not? The last Secretary General’s son hit the mother lode on “oil for food” right under everyone’s nose. They’re still trying to find the millions squirreled away around the world.”
“How do we shut him down?”
“Right outside is the guy who can help us build the case.”
“Case? That sounds like court, cops, plea-bargaining and years. I want these guys stopped, yesterday.”
“Ah, Billy boy, now, now, here’s where that nagging little crinkly piece of old yellowed paper pisses all over your righteous indignation. The Constitution says you can’t just wipe ’em out without proof.”
“Wrong! Maritime Law clearly says you find a pirate, you can hang a pirate.” Bill stuck out his tongue as the school yard decorum continued.
“Wanna take this to the judge? You are going to lose. That only covers at sea and in the act. Here you have a diplomatic figure from a sovereign nation who may or may not be implicated in an illegal conspiracy to commit piracy on the high seas.”
“I hate you…”
“Really off your game if it ain’t science, aren’t you Bill?”
Bill gave him the finger by holding up three and asking Joey to “Read between the lines! Now, who’s outside?”
“Percival Cutney, from Lloyds of London.”
“An insurance investigator?”
“From London!”
“Okay, bring him in.” Bill got up and moved over to the small conference table in the right corner of his office.
He remained standing until Joey entered with the insurance man.
“William Hiccock, this is Percival Cutney from Lloyds of London.”
“Nice to meet you; do you go by Percy?”
“No, I prefer Percival, Professor Hiccock.”