Tom Avitabile - The Hammer of God

“Do me a favor,” Bill said as he punched his cell phone. “Hold on for thirty seconds.”

“Thirty seconds, you got, Mr. Hiccock.”

?§?

“Kronos, get up. Get up now and go to your SCIAD terminal on the double.”

“Wha…?”

“Kronos, wake the fuck up!” As Bill yelled, Janice stirred.

“Okay, okay geez, where’s the fire?” came the disgruntled voice on the other end.

“In New York. I need the Joint Terrorist Task Force on the SCIAD net now.”

“They can’t.”

“Can you set up a backdoor to SCIAD for about thirty seconds from now?”

“Sure, Hitch, no big whoop. I can create a one-time challenge and passkey to my super FTP.”

“Just do it.”

As he typed on his end, Kronos couldn’t believe what he was being asked to do. “You’re gonna give all our stuff to the fucking feds?”

“Relax, brainboy. We’re the fucking feds, too. How long?”

“C’mon Hitch; I just woke up.”

“How long?”

“Sixty seconds… I’m booting up now. Geez.”

Bill smirked and changed phones. “Brooke, get the tape and the camera to the communications van. I have my guy making a password to my SCIAD net. We can use it to process the tape in three minutes max.”

Brooke entered the van and placed the camera and tape in front of her comm tech.

“What’s this?” the tech asked.

“You’ll get instructions.”

“From who?”

Brooke spoke into her cell. “Bill, who’s gonna tell my tech what?”

“My guy Kronos will be on the line in a few seconds.”

Brooke jutted the cell phone at the tech. “Can you capture this call?”

“Sure. What’s your number?”

In a few seconds the patch was complete and over the speaker they all heard, “Kronos here. Who am I talking to?”

“Rich Hest, JTTF com officer.”

“I’m Kronos. You got HTML?”

“Yes.”

“512K Bandwidth?”

“1 meg.”

“I’m going to multiplex that to 30 meg,” Kronos said.

“Whoa, how you going to do that?”

“Magicians oath. If I told you I’d have to make you disappear.”

“Okay, I’ll just do what you tell me.”

“Cool. X,F,T,P, back slash, back slash, sciad, forward slash, admin.”

“Forward slash admin. Got it.

“Here’s the answer to the challenge. Charlie, Siera, Tango, Romeo, Papa Siera.”

The tech typed simultaneously as he listened. “Papa, Siera. I’m in.”

“What are we uploading?” Kronos asked.

“I got a HD camera here.”

“Firewire?”

“Shit, no cable,” the tech said looking around.

“I’m on it,” Brooke said as she bolted from the van. Once outside she yelled to Wallace. “We need all the wires!”

Wallace reached into his car, grabbing the whole bag and ran back meeting her halfway.

?§?

Janice took the lull in the action to ask, “What’s going on?”

“Kronos is rewiring my network and pulling off another miracle.”

“Oh, that.”

Brooke opened the bag and the tech found a cord that had a small plug at one end and larger one at the other. He put the small end in the camera and the other in an Core i7 — iMac that was in the van. “Okay I’m hooked up.”

Kronos came back on the line. “I just set up, back slash, back slash, tape. Upload to that.”

“Okay, I pressed play; it’s on its way.”

“Bill, where’s this going?” Kronos asked.

“FBI labs in New York and Washington, TSA, DHS and Face Recognition Systems in Roanoke.”

“I better send them all this Ultra HD video codec as well, so they won’t waste time. They never got video like this before.”

None of this was lost on Brooke’s tech in the van. “Whoa, real-time HiDEF full-bandwidth upload? Who runs this thing?”

“Need to know only, Rich. Erase and forget it when this is over, understood?”

“Yes, Sir, Ma’am.”

Kronos had the backdoor shut and SCIAD secure thirty seconds after the tape finished uploading.

Bill asked the tech to hand the phone back to Brooke. “Brooke, what happened up there?”

“Looks like these guys had cold cream jars filled with a bio agent of some kind that had its own heat source.”

One of the cops entered with the empty case they found in the shootout room.

“Could be a viral strain, one that needs to incubate right up to the point of release. Are we contained?”

“A few jars got shot up, some were smashed, and one was opened by a cop.” Brooke noted the stamp “24 count” on the side of the cardboard. “It looks like there were twenty-four of them.”

“Brooke, lockdown immediately! The risk of secondary contamination is too high.”

“I already ordered a secure perimeter. I have Bio-response on the way. Any idea what we could be dealing with here?”

“There’s no way to know for sure, but we were just war gaming an attack with HCD Complex 33. It’s a synthetic strain of influenza. We figured with the vaccine shortage we might be vulnerable.”

“So this could be nothing more than the flu?”

“A fast acting, potentially deadly form, but not if you catch it early. I’ll notify NIH. Make sure your bio guys know it might be viral.”

Brooke was writing as she repeated the name over the phone, “H… C… D… Com… Plex… 33, got it. I’ll alert them. Thanks.”

?§?

Bill dialed another number. “Judy, Bill. Sorry to bother you this late.”

Judy was in her den with CNN on in the background. The events in New York were starting to make the cable news. “Bill, I know all about it. I am the one who had DHS call you as soon as I got the call.”

“Is there any flu vaccine for Complex 33, if that’s what this is?”

“Vaccine is a preventative. Once the cardio-pulmonary is infected you have to treat it with intense medication, face masks and gloves, and lots of soap and water to wash hands with.”

“That at least sounds manageable.”

“Only if it’s C-33 and only if we catch it within the first hours. The chances of which, so far, seem good if all the first responders have been quarantined.”

“Some of the jars are still unaccounted for. Can you work up some numbers if a few of those get away?”

“I’ll get the epis working on it. Maybe it won’t get to that.”

“From your mouth….”

“Amen, Bill.” Then she called the chief of staff at the CDC’s National Center for Infectious Diseases to muster the epis of the Epidemiological Analysis Team and get them cracking on the impact report.

After Bill hung up, he mentally created a checklist to make sure he had done and was doing everything he could. Satisfied, he slouched back under the covers, pecked Janice on the cheek, and tried to sleep. But the singing was keeping him awake.

Singing?

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re humming.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. You am.”

“Maybe I’m happy.”

Bill pondered this for a few seconds. “Okay, why?”

Janice rolled over and faced him. “You know the other morning when I got sick and you said to see a doctor?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember I said I didn’t know what got into me?”

“Yeah.”

“Well it was you. You got into me. And now…”

“Oh God, baby! Are you saying you’re…?”

“Um hmm. Yes, we are!”

“Whoa. So you’re happy?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“Yeah, yeah! I’m happy. Wow!”

“I know, wow.”

“How… when…”

“The how we covered. The when was probably two months ago.”

Bill beamed. “Wait till my folks find out.”

“My mom’s going to go nuts.”

Bill’s head was spinning. What a turnaround from just minutes ago. “Janice, I love you.