Tom Avitabile - The Hammer of God

Forty minutes later, Bill was ruing the fact that they didn’t take the old wagon. Tied to the top of the Caddy was the big box holding the crib. Jutting out from the tied-down open trunk was the stroller box and the back seat was crammed with little blankets, pillows, and stuffed animals. With over 300 I.Q. points between them, the one thing they did that was smart in ‘Babies R Us,’ was not commit to any gender specific color scheme or wallpaper.

“Didn’t we say we were just looking?” Bill said, as he drove no faster than 40 miles per hour, lest the wind shear lift the crib’s box into somebody’s front grill.

The nursery wasn’t ready yet. It wasn’t even a nursery, and it still had to be divested of the books, junk, and old exercise equipment that lived there. Bill put the crib, stroller, and other stuff in the garage. He then began tinkering with a lamp he started rewiring last winter.

“I made you a sandwich,” Janice called out from the kitchen.

“Just a minute.” Bill snaked the new cord through the body of the lamp and out the top. He left enough hanging out to be able to work with when he would wire the new socket to it, later, after lunch.

The TV was on in the kitchen and CNN was all over the ambassador story with graphics and serious music calling it “Summit with Death?” They had silhouetted the grainy image of Greeley from the terrorists tape and it now flew back over the graphics of a masked terrorist as thunderous theme music played. Being CNN, there was a panel of talking heads who didn’t beat the living shit out of the one “Intellectual” who espoused that the taking of the ambassador was “justifiable” due to America’s continuing suppression of the Arab sentiments in the world. Instead, they simply went to commercial. Bill just shook his head.

“Did you know him?” Janice asked.

“Greeley? No, never met him, although I hear he was… is, a good man.”

“The news is now saying his ambassadorial appointment was a political payoff for campaign contributions.”

“Well, ain’t that a scoop! They are only about a hundred years late on catching on to that dirty little secret. But that’s the soft posts like Canada or Portugal, where some political appointee can’t screw it up too bad. Egypt is prime time, Class one. Those only get career Foreign Service Officers. The press is just looking for any way to slam Mitchell because he isn’t one of them.”

“Because he isn’t a newsman?”

“No, because he’s neither Fox news “Right,” or CNN “Left,” and they both hate that neutrality, like he was selling the secret formula of Coca Cola to the Russians.

“So what do you think is going to happen?” Janice asked as she poured Bill and herself more iced tea.

“Thanks. This is just a guess, but I’d say there’s a delta force or SEAL strike team warming up the coffee right about now waiting for someone to drop a dime on where the man is being held.”

“What about Egyptian sovereignty?”

“That’s covered under ‘Posse comi — fuck ‘em.’”

It took a second for Janice to realize that Bill had just bastardized ‘Posse Comitatus.’

Bill added, “If they get a 20 on this guy, our guys will go in first, snatch him back, then spin it as a joint U.S./Egyptian intelligence op or some kind of bullshit so that the Egyptians save face.”

“Okay, so now I feel better.”

Bill was in the middle of going through a box of stuff in order to throw most of it out and put what was left in a smaller box from which, if he continued the process, he could whittle down the contents of the ten boxes that were taking up valuable baby space in the garage down to one. He was going through old checks and photographs when he heard a familiar voice.

“You are human! You actually do normal stuff!”

“Joey, I don’t believe it. I just found this in the box.”

Bill handed Palumbo an old photograph: a picture of the two of them and some other guys standing in front of a pipe held up by two braced two-by-fours.

“Hey, the high bar, Muzzi, Johnny ‘No’, Soccio, Mush, B.O. Look at the mop of hair on your head!”

“Look how skinny we were.” Hiccock laughed as he tossed the picture back in the keeper box. “What brings you round this way on a Saturday?”

“Something is bugging me and I thought I’d run it by you.”

“Wanna beer?”

“Nah.”

“Okay, then shoot.”

“You remember Brooke Burrell out of the New York Bureau office?”

“Sure do. She was point on the whole virus thing and the poison gas tank plot in New York. Solid agent.”

“One of the best. She and I had a talk, off the record. A lot of it was just agent-to-agent, you know? ‘How do I do this, how should I handle that?’ But she said one thing that…Have you heard the latest out of Egypt?”

“That they took Greely to set El Benham free? Yeah.”

“She had an inkling that Alzir knew he wasn’t going to be in custody long.”

“Have they ever done this before?” Bill asked as he decided to throw out a desk calendar from 1999.

“Not one for one like this, and if they have it’s usually a low-level or convenient grab. A local police chief or U.S. military captive. But it’s always reactive, almost improvised by them. This has pre-meditated all over it.”

“And you’re telling me this because?”

“Brooke had a sense about this guy knowing he was going to be sprung, and now she’s right.”

Bill looked at him in a way that said, “So?”

“This is a big play. They wouldn’t do this kinda thing if we caught Al Qaeda number 1. This Alzir guy is deeply connected to something else, something bigger.”

“Bigger than potentially infecting and killing fifty million Americans? I don’t think I want to know what that could be.”

“I want you, as a deputy director of the FBI, to authorize a guy who I have been following for a while. He’s Dr. Robert Fusco, a psych-ops guy who’s got some methods and practices that might give Brooke and us an edge.”

“I am only dep director for stuff under my area.”

“This guy is under your area and, besides, the funding can’t go on any record, so I need you to bury it in your SCIAD budget.”

“Okay, now you’re scaring me. Is this one of your wild-assed ideas?”

“Who was it who taught me to think outside the box?”

Joey positioned it perfectly to create the maelstrom in Bill’s head. It raged there for a minute then he simply said, “You really think this is going to pay off?”

“It’s got a good shot.”

Bill responded in the affirmative by giving Joey the Boulevard Blades gesture of a fist with the thumb jutting out between the index and pointer fingers. Not that they knew it, but it was an actual gesture from the ancient Neapolitan society, meaning “to protect.”

At 4:00 p.m. in the Situation Room beneath the White House, President Mitchell was being pushed to make a decision between two diametrically opposed evils.

The Secretary of State was uncharacteristically lobbying hard to save the life of the man who worked for him. “Mister President, the ambassador is a prime asset of the United States. He is worth every effort to retrieve.”

“Chuck, we can’t negotiate with terrorists. You’ll be setting a precedent that will have every American overseas being kidnapped round the clock,” the Chief of Staff needlessly reminded him. “The only option is military, if we get that lucky. Otherwise, the ambassador is now a combatant and prisoner of war.”

The Secretary of State turned to Mitchell. “Mr. President, how can you sacrifice his life like this?”

“Look, Charles, this ambassador makes over $200,000 dollars a year plus all expenses paid. There are dog faced G.I.s, who are just as valuable to me as he is, who die in shit-holes all over the world and their families barely live at poverty level. So they are both soldiers and, unfortunately, he is as expendable as they are. Chuck, what’s really going on with you? You know the damn policy as well as anyone, yet you continue to lobby for a trade that isn’t going to happen?” The President’s agitation was evident in the way he threw down his pencil.