Tom Avitabile - The Hammer of God

“How?”

“I was good and I had a little secret I shared with the news managers.”

“Job security?”

“In our room was one of the first Xerox machines, a 3600. It was massive and had stuff we take for granted today: document feeder, 20-copy sorter, up to 999 copies. Had a Nixie tube readout.”

“Ahhh, Nixie tubes… please stick to the story.” Bill checked his watch.

“Anyway, do you know why it took so long to invent copy machines? Because they had to invent copier repairmen first. ‘Cause you couldn’t run one of those suckers for more than a few hours before they broke down. I only worked Saturday and Sunday nights cause of school, but I made seventy-five dollars for the weekend. I was paid through newsroom dinner vouchers. Every week I was somebody’s dinner.”

“Wow. Seventy-five a week back in ‘68. That must-a been good!”

“My dad broke his ass on the stone truck for one-seventy-five a week! So anyway, one Sunday night the news manager has a report to get out and the Xerox is down. He’s about to retype the whole fifteen pages on Rexograph masters when I say, ‘I think I can fix it.’

“‘You think you can fix the Xerox machine?’ he says.

“‘I might have to shut the lights in the newsroom for a while.’

“So then he says, ‘Peter, I’ll give everybody flashlights to work with if you can fix it.’

“I started by defeating all the cabinet door sensors with paper clips. The problem was the tray that you pulled out to free jammed paper came all the way off the runners and the ball bearings went everywhere. So I shimmed up the tray using shaved down pencils. I got that sucker right in line but had to run the machine wide open cause of all these sticks and tape and paper clips hanging out of it.”

“I bet NBC news was never the same after this,” Hiccock said.

“Billy, you had to see it. At one point this big arcing light was swooping across the entire newsroom with each page being copied. I had to shut the lights because it was an electro-photostatic process. The inside of the machine was like a dark room, so when it was open the room had to be dark, but I had it running and humming. At the last minute, the news manager came in and asked for the last page of the report back. I remember I used to have to print it on NBC stationary that had hundreds of little interlocking NBC logos on it. He gave me back the last page and I collated it into the thirty copies of the fifteen-page report. Then I went about my job distributing it to the inner-office list. I did that every Sunday as the last thing I did before I went home. This way the VPs had it on Monday first thing when they got in.”

“So that’s how you stayed employed?”

“No. It’s how I got fired. Actually, on that last page? He rewrote the end to say, ‘This entire report wouldn’t be possible without the ingenuity and determination of desk assistant Peter Remo.’”

“Nice touch.” Bill said.

“Actually, not really. When the head weenie in personnel read that about me, he checked his list and found that I was nobody’s kid and fired me the next day. A week later, I was hired back.”

“Great story Peter, but what the hell’s that got to do with why you called me?”

“What happens then is Professor Brodenchy sets up his committee and gets Kasiko to be the Sergeant of Arms. Around the holidays a year or so after I started working there, Kasiko invites me to his home for a little Christmas Dinner…”

Joey Palumbo didn’t like off the record meetings. They ran against his Quantico cut, by-the-book, grain. His reluctance to meet with Agent Burrell, “out of the house,” was hard to hide as she approached the bench in the park located at the beginning of Madison Avenue in Manhattan.

“Thanks for coming, Mr. Palumbo.”

It still stung that he’d lost the SAC salutation ahead of his name. “No problem, Special Agent Burrell.”

“Brooke, please.”

“Brooke. So what’s on your mind?”

“Aliz Berniham.”

“Nice job processing him. That was a career-making collar if there ever was one.”

“NYPD SWAT did the hard cheese. Your guy Hiccock’s magic network zipped the I.D.s in record time. I just mopped up.”

“Still, it goes on your dance card.”

“I’ve been dancing with the good Sheik, and I got a bad feeling.”

“Did you report this?”

“I don’t report feelings because, being FFBI, they still don’t rise to the same level of male intuition. “

“So then unofficially give me the Female FBI intuition.”

“Something big is in play… I don’t know what… I just know that this creep knows that another shoe is going to drop and drop big.”

“How or what can SCIAD do to help you?”

“I didn’t want to meet with you because of SCIAD, sir.”

That surprised Joey.

“I wanted to talk with you because you were a good agent. How can I stop whatever this is that I think is going on?”

“He’s been in ‘iso,’ right?”

“From the moment he came conscious, it’s been FBI only.”

“So he couldn’t have any current info.”

“Exactly, so this must be a long range plan.”

“Like 9-11!” Joey said.

“That’s my fear.”

“But, Brooke, you stopped him and his plot, which at the end of the day could have killed 80 to 100 million Americans. That isn’t chopped liver. That was a big shoe, too! Maybe the one and only, not a pair.”

“See, that’s part of my… Okay, let’s say you were him, the mastermind of the biggest bio-plot ever, and it failed like it did. You would think that was it; the big wad had just got shot. Wouldn’t you be defeated, introspective, hell, angry! Yet …”

“Your other shoe feeling?”

“See why I didn’t want to send this up the chain?”

“It could just be him in denial?”

“He’s too cool. Too smart.”

“Yeah, we forget that despite the popular opinion, most of these terrorists are college-educated, most with degrees, and all middle-to-upper class.”

“This guy talks like he has two degrees in science, but we can’t track him back further than 15 years.”

“Can you work him?”

“Not in this environment. The director is yielding to public pressure, so the Sheik has had uninterrupted sleep at night, in climate control comfort, without any discomfort caused by his detainment. He is allowed to pray five times a day and he has weekly, monitored visits with a holy man.”

“So you have no interrogation leverage?”

“None. That’s why I have been flat out straight with him on how his life can get even better.”

“Get better? What’s the death toll estimate at, right now? 26,000 additional deaths?” Joey curtailed his instinct to slam down on the park bench with his fist.

“Around that number. Thousands needlessly killed just because this asshole decides to infect America.”

“And because those deaths are statistically within the range of possible deaths from influenza, a really bad influenza, there isn’t the same hatred of this bag of excrement that there would be if he poisoned the water supply of a small town, or blew up 80 airliners to reach 26,000 dead.” Joey was getting less objective and more agitated as he focused on the kid glove, politically correct, religiously sensitive handling of this mass murdering scumbag.

“So he gets the royal treatment, while his ‘comrades in alms’ don’t think twice about cutting off Daniel Pearl’s head. Makes me wanna go in there and introduce him to flesh-eating bacteria. Slow, flesh-eating bacteria.”

In a way, she stole Joey’s thunder and rage, and he took on the role of objective mentor. He looked at the woman agent, who appeared not much older than a teenager, and as American as apple pie. ‘Corn Flake!’ That’s what the guys in the Bronx would call a person from Iowa or the midwest, a corn flake. Then he remembered this one had frosted a terrorist in a parking lot in New Jersey on the way to foiling a chemical attack on the New York area that would have brought unimaginable death. This was one tough corn flake and if her sixth sense was tingling, there was probably something to it.