“No, these feelings are very recent and I wasn’t really sure till just now.”
“Do you want to tell him or would you like me to?”
“No, I owe it to him to hear it from me.” Brooke sat silent as the circumstances sunk in.
Bill broke the silence, “So when do you want to resign?”
Brooke had a reflexive and reflective moment. “Wow. Just hearing the word ‘resign’ makes this suddenly so real.”
“I didn’t mean to rush you; take your time. Think it all over, twice if you have to. You’ve earned carte blanche with me and I am sure I speak for Joey as well when I say, we care about you and your happiness foremost.”
As hard as she tried not to, the waterworks started. Bill handed her a tissue and just sat in silence with her for a few minutes more.
∞§∞
Later that afternoon, Bill had a moment to reflect on Brooke and her tremendous accomplishments, and as a self-check once again affirmed to himself that she had earned her right to do whatever she wanted with her career. However, the whole notion of his team changing brought a long simmering issue up to the front burner. Cheryl. He buzzed for her.
Cheryl entered the office in her usually cheerful demeanor. “Yes, boss!”
“Sit a minute, will ya.”
“Okay, sure, what’s up?”
“A while back, you correctly asked for some kind of game plan for continuity of our department. I am sorry it took me so long to focus on it, but I have decided to make you my deputy, or second in command or whatever term is governmentally appropriate.”
To her credit, Cheryl didn’t react personally but as a team member, “Thank you. I think this decision will insure uninterrupted flow of command and control during any kind of situation, and I am honored that you put your faith in me.”
“You’ve earned my trust and my respect.”
Cheryl allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction. “Shall I draw up the contingency protocol?”
“Actually, I thought you’d have it ready and in your top drawer.”
“Actually it is; I just need to fill in the blank of who you appoint.” This time, a broadside smile found freedom.
“So how’d I do?” Bill asked returning the smile.
“You did real good, boss!”
“Thanks, it means a lot to me.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, hold this tight till it’s announced, but Brooke will be leaving us.”
Cheryl recoiled at the news. “That genuinely shocks me, sir.”
“I must say I didn’t expect it either, but as I told her, she’s earned the right to do what she wants.”
“Oh, God, Joey’s going to freak out, unless he already knows?”
“Brooke wants to tell him, so until then it’s just us. Soon after though, I want you to coordinate with Joey to find a replacement for her… er, strike that, for her position.”
That simple catch reaffirmed to Cheryl why she liked working with Bill. He understood the difference between the rare individual Brooke was and the slot she filled in his Quarterback group. “Will do.” Cheryl got up and left. Besides the two surprise announcements from Bill, she also understood how losing Brooke had forced him to decide about her.
∞§∞
Brooke walked the streets of Washington, aimless and with no sense of urgency, a totally alien state for her. Her head spun with ideas, plans, uncertainties and certitudes. She stopped at the little breakfast joint where she and Mush had eaten. She opened her phone and dialed Mush’s cell.
“Hi, Bret here, I’m going to be out of reach for a while, you can leave a message, but I probably won’t get right back to you,” his voice-mail greeting said.
As the phone beeped, Brooke’s eyes shut. She knew the vague message was Bret’s way of not compromising national security, yet letting all those who had his number know that the Gold crew had gone deep for the next seventy to ninety days. She ended the call, satisfied to just hear his voice.
Suddenly she felt cold. Then her own voice-mail beeped with a new message alert.
“Brooke, it’s Mush, I tried to reach you but your phone wasn’t connecting. Our patrol got moved up and we are shoving off in four hours. I hope we get a chance to talk before we go. If not, I just wanted you to know that you’ve become a part of me. And I can’t even imagine what my life was like before you came flailing onboard my boat. I love you, Brooke, and I am going to do a lot of thinking on this patrol. Well, that’s it. I hope you get this. See ya soon, baby.”
It was turning out to be a bang-up day for Brooke’s tear ducts; they were getting more of a workout today than they had in years.
XIX. SWISS ROULETTE
Raffey was managing the stress by drinking tons of tea. He had become convinced that chamomile tea had near nuclear powers in settling his nerves arising from the unfathomable dilemma he was in. As psychosomatic as his remedy may have been, it served him and allowed him to do his job without his jittery nerves raising suspicions, save for the frequent trips to the loo. On one trip, he passed a secretary who was playing a game of online roulette. Ten minutes later he was searching for an older program which he co-wrote as a member of the development team. He found it; Roulette Demo X-5.3/v2.2. Suddenly, he no longer needed tea. He recompiled the source code and copied the original onto a flash drive. He also took a copy of the older systems folder. He had everything he needed to do this at home tonight.
∞§∞
Joey had taken an overnight flight from Paris to D.C. to catch Bill in the morning. He had rehearsed his speech many times at thirty-five thousand feet above the pitch-black Atlantic. In many ways, this would be the most important conversation he’d ever had with his lifelong friend, and although he was about to put himself on thin ice, he was ready for the risk.
He arrived at the White House at 7:20 a.m. Bill and his driver would be pulling into the portico in five minutes. Joey went straight to his office and printed out the pages he had e-mailed himself from France.
Cheryl caught sight of him first. “Joey? This is a surprise! Does Bill know you are in this morning?”
“No Cheryl, I kind of jumped on a plane last night. Phyllis doesn’t even know yet.”
“Wow. Have you spoken with Brooke yet?”
“No, no I haven’t; what’s up?”
“I’ll let her fill you in.”
“Look can you give me a half hour with Bill, first thing?”
“Yeah, I think so. He’s got a light morning till eleven.”
“Thanks, buzz me when he’s in?”
“You got it.”
Joey pulled the pages from the printer and arranged them in the order he wanted them. A few minutes later, he was entering Bill’s office.
“Hey buddy, when did you get in?” Bill said, surprised in mid-sip of his coffee.
“About an hour ago.”
“How come you didn’t tell me you were coming? I mean, Paris is still important.”
“I’m going right back.”
“Okay, this is confusing. You could have been here yesterday for Brooke’s ceremony.”
“I had leads to follow. Then I decided at the last minute to hop a seat back because, Bill, I needed to talk to you, man to man.”
“Okay, shoot!”
“Are you sure about this God Particle thing?”
“What do you mean, sure? It’s a theory, so no, I am not.”
“I mean are you sure we aren’t playing with the end of everything here?”
“Joey, what’s gotten into you?”
“This ain’t about me, Bill, it’s about everyone, everything, everywhere.”
“You turning into a black-holer?”
“No, but how much risk is there?”
“Under strict protocol with proper safeguards, little to none.”
“So what you are telling me is that everything has to work at 100 percent, the safeguards have to be 100 percent effective to get what — a level of assurance of only ‘little
to none?’”
“In the breaking of every scientific boundary, a certain amount of uncertainty…”
“Bill, we’re not talking about ‘Oops, I dropped the test tube; oh look, anthrax!’ Correct me if I am wrong here, but we are talking lights out forever.”
“Joey…”
“Bill, why do we have to even go there? I mean, what’s so goddamn important about breaking this boundary, when the cost might be everything that ever was, is, and could be — including my son and Richie? What value could possibly be worth that risk?”
“Look, it’s my job and it’s your job.”
“My job? My job is to protect: protect my family, my country, and now my universe. So I am doing my job. What are you doing?”
“Hey, have you noticed it ain’t just us? The Europeans are the lead on this. I keep our interest in the game. As long as we have input, we can affect the work.”
“Can we bomb the fucking machine?”
“Joey, take it easy. Talk like that, especially in this office, is unwise.”
“Oh, but possibly making everything disappear is somehow wiser?”
“Where is this coming from?”
“I started thinking, Billy, started thinking about what we are trying to do here, stopping the guys who want to stop this machine from possibly taking us all out!”
“No, Joey, you are too good of a cop to let that get in the way. It has to be something else. Who have you been talking to?
“Are you saying I ain’t smart enough to come to this myself?”
“You should be smarter than the apocalyptic conspiracy crap you have been spewing this morning.”
“What happened to you Billy? You always were a robot, but I always saw a soul in you, although you tried hard to hide it, first from Janice and now from me.”
“My personal beliefs don’t enter into it. I am the goddamn science advisor to the whole freaking United States. I represent science, not hearsay, not rumors, not scary stories. Quantify, qualify using qualitative analysis, otherwise it’s just a supposition. That’s what I owe my kid, my wife, my country, my world and you. And I don’t need you coming in here and accusing me of being some sort of criminal.”
“Look, I always follow any order you give me, but if I think it is immoral or unethical, you are going to hear from me. And I think you are not thinking this through, Billy. I think you might be a little too pumped up on being the ‘goddamn science advisor to the whole freaking United States’ to stop and think about what you are enabling here.”
“Enough! Look Joey, this ain’t a debate and your concerns are duly noted. Now can you please get back to finding Parnell Sicard?”
“Don’t blow me off! I’m not just some low-level flunky here. I am the one who you need to get this guy, who just may be trying to stop them, by the way, from possibly destroying everything. And what I want to know is, why? Why, Bill, are we protecting this Landau Protocol, this whole evil enterprise?”
“EVIL! Are you out of your mind? What’s evil got to do with it? The church pulled that shit on Copernicus. They tarred and feathered him as evil just because he said the Earth orbits the Sun. Evil has no scientific weight. Only objectivity and evidence rule the day around here.”
“Right or wrong, Copernicus didn’t have any power. He couldn’t have destroyed everything in God’s creation in a flash.”
“Listen, pal, as of now you are off this case and as of now you are on sabbatical. Take a few days, a few weeks, hell, take a fucking year; just get your fucking head on straight before you come back to work.”
“Fine with me; I just hope we have that long.”
“Get out, just get out!” Bill pointed his fingers toward the door.
Joey threw his papers down on Bill’s desk and stormed out. He blew by Cheryl without a word. She had never seen him like that. That couldn’t be about Brooke, she thought. She looked back to Bill’s office and something told her to give him a few minutes.
∞§∞
Joey walked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue and hailed a cab. “Airport — no, take me to the FBI.” Looking out the window he replayed what had just happened. He wasn’t going back to Paris; he wasn’t going to work tomorrow. He was on leave. Bill could be such an asshole. As he watched a group of first graders cross the street, all tethered together, led by their teacher in front and a parent taking up the rear, he thought about his little family. He changed his destination one more time as he gave the driver his home address. Bill could stop him from working for Quarterback, but he couldn’t stop him from protecting all that he loved.
Joey Palumbo and his wife, Phyllis, had an agreement about Joey’s work. She knew that sometimes there were things he could not share due to the security of whatever operation he was involved with through the years. Even so, she was shocked when Joey’s keys rattled in the door as he called out, “Phyl? Phyl, honey, I’m home!” Little Joe got there first, “Dad! When did you get home?”
“Just now!”
“Hello, stranger,” Phyl said, smoothing her hair.
Joey looked at her and opened his arms as she filled them.
“Why didn’t you call? I look terrible.”
“You look great, babe.”
They kissed, and after a quick breakfast Joe left for school and the morning quiet, interrupted only by raucous calls of blue jays, hung there for a minute. Phyllis looked over to him. “Can you tell me about it?”
“I am going to be home for a while, but everything else is fine.”
“Okay. I won’t ask. Are you going to work today?”
“I thought I’d work from home today.”
“Okay, now I really won’t ask.” Phyllis got up and cleared the dishes.
XX. PARIS BY NIGHT
Inspector Dupré was confused. Neither Palumbo nor Burrell was returning his phone calls. He had left messages at the Embassy but he knew those weren’t worth the recycled paper they were written on. He had a solid lead on Parnell Sicard, mostly because of the intelligence that had come from this Quarterback in Washington.
No matter; the cop in him wanted to ferret out this man because he felt responsible for the possible lapse in justice over the killing of the Franciscan Friar. To Dupré, it had become personal. He was also aware that Sicard was being protected by someone up high in the French government. The Americans would have added a little more lift to his efforts to get his hands on Sicard, but they weren’t essential, not with the plan he had devised. His intercom buzzed. “Yes…”
“We are ready in five minutes, Inspector.”
“Very well, I am coming down.” He took out his desk key, opened the always-locked bottom drawer, and took out his .32 caliber pistol and slid it into his ankle holster, then clipped his service weapon’s hip holster to his belt and slid something else in his waist band. As he came around his desk, his immediate superior entered with a tall American.
“Marc, here is someone I would like to introduce you to.”
Dupré zoomed past them, not stopping to even shake hands. “Hello, nice to meet you, but I am on my way out.”
He was almost out the door when his boss said, “Pity, I thought you’d like to meet Quarterback.”
Dupré stopped dead in his tracks, turned around, and extended his hand. “Pardon, I am running late; in fact, to pick up someone you have met! Would you like to come along?”
“Sure. Bill Hiccock…”
“Marc Dupré, pleasure to meet you.”
On the way down in the elevator, Dupré turned to Bill. “May I ask why you are here?”
“I see Sicard as the key to my investigation and I am a little light on personnel right now, so I jumped the next flight out of D.C.” Bill had reviewed the files and reports. Joey had written that this inspector was an honest guy and a good cop. He also knew how much Dupré knew and how much he’d been cleared to know.
“Then our talk with Monsieur Sicard should be quite interesting.”
“I am looking forward to it.”
&n
bsp; As they emerged from the elevator into the garage, there were three SUV-type vehicles idling. Dupré opened the door of one vehicle for Bill and he, as soon as the door shut, the convoy was off and out of the underground garage. On the street they were joined by two motorcycle cops who ostensibly were there to block cross traffic ahead, then fall behind, race to the front, and do it all again at every major intersection.
Bill took notice. “This is very impressive. Are you responding to some sort of threat?”
“No, we are trying to get there before the courts, police, or whoever is protecting Sicard knows we are coming. That’s how we lost him last time.”
“I see. How good is your information?”
“Actually, because of the files you forwarded, we were able to connect with a retired French operative who worked intimately with your CIA. He identified a former safe house, which he believed Sicard would still use. One of my men positively identified Sicard as being in the house…” he looked at his watch, “…some thirteen minutes ago.”
With military precision, the two vehicles stopped in front of the house while the third circled around back. The two motorcycles sealed the street at either end. The men were out of the vehicles with heavy armor, helmets and automatic weapons. Two cops held the battering ram. Then they all froze in position as Dupré simply walked up to the door and rang the bell.
“Alo,” came over the intercom.
“Monsieur Sicard, may I have a word please?”
There was a moment’s hesitation. Bill waited for something theatrical to happen, like machine guns suddenly popping out of the second floor windows or an escape helicopter launching from the roof. Instead, the buzzer clicked and Dupré just walked in. A minute later, Dupré came back to the door, pointed to Bill, and waved for him to come in. As Bill crossed the street, he was keenly aware of the eight rifles trained on the house he was about to enter and the fact that all he had was a leather portfolio as a shield. How did I get in the middle of this again?
The God Particle Page 24
