The Eighth Day (14 page)

THE COLLEGIATE CALM AND SERENITY of the MIT campus were suddenly disrupted by the thumping sound of heavy composite resin rotors chopping through air. Hiccock looked down at the bike path he used to pedal between classes during his graduate study here at the nation’s premiere brain trust of genius. Leaves and dirt swirled, causing tiny whirlwinds that eventually developed into mini-tornadoes. A Marine Huey helicopter made an unscheduled landing on the highway in front of the vaunted institution, the commonwealth’s state police having closed both the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge and Memorial Drive to give wide berth to the hurriedly arranged arrival of the president’s science advisor. Hiccock emerged and was greeted by a school administrator and the head of school security. He was hurried into the gym.

At the front doors was a sign that read, “AUCTION TODAY 3–5 PM INSPECTION 9 AM–2 PM.” He was met at the door by John Wallenford, a man with long gray hair that was not in a ponytail, green-gray eyes, and a body alignment that made you think he was listening for baseball scores through the static of a table radio with one ear.

“I don’t know if this means you have good or bad timing,” Wallenford said, “but thanks to your government at work, 20 million dollars worth of 1960’s era state-of-the-art equipment is right this second up for surplus auction at pennies on a dollar.”

“What? Right now? We’ve got to stop the auction!”

In the gym, the auctioneer waved his gavel. On the small stage sat lot 112, a mass of two-inch videotape recorders, spectrographs, cameras, and racks of time-base correctors—the former subliminal research equipment now on forklift skids. “3,800 going once … going twice … sold! To the esteemed gentleman in the plaid jacket from Boris Reclamation Services.”

Nearly as soon as the word
sold
reverberated off the gym’s tiled walls and hardwood floor, Hiccock and Wallenford walked up to the recycling czar in plaid who just won the lot. Hiccock immediately sized this guy up as the A/V monitor from high school, now all grown up. “Excuse me, Sir?”

“Yes?”

“We arrived here late. We need this equipment.”

“Who’s we?”

“My name is Hiccock. I work for the president of the United States, and all I can tell you is that this equipment is needed for a matter of national security.”

“I just bought this
from
the government as scrap. Why didn’t you just hold onto it while you had it?”

“I’m willing to reimburse you for it.”

As they walked away, Hiccock placed his checkbook back into his vest pocket with prejudice. “I can’t believe I just paid 20,000 dollars for that pile of junk.”

“One man’s junk is another man’s dubious obsession, I gather,” Wallenford said wryly.

“I wonder if I can claim this as an expense,” Hiccock thought aloud while fingering the receipt and dreading the inevitable reams of paperwork to follow.

A huge crate and six pallets of what the untrained eye would categorize as junk were conspicuously plopped in the center of the FBI’s Electronic Crimes Lab. Hansen, returning from lunch, was shocked to see Hiccock standing beside the pile.

“What are we supposed to do with this junk?”

“Hook it up and test the computers,” Hiccock directed.

“How?”

Hiccock grabbed a curled, yellowed manual as thick as a phone book and slapped it into Hansen’s chest. “Here. Partial assembly required.”

Tommy was not concerned that the rear quarter panels of his Camaro were rotted out as he sat in the diner parking lot. It matched the rest of his life. Seemed ever since the seventies ended, his life was just a big pile of rot. He tried a few different get-rich-quick schemes: phone cards, Nutralite products, at-home distribution of cleaning products, and ten others that turned out to be stay-poor-longer schemes. At this point, the notion of lashing out, getting even with anything, had struck a receptive chord in his twisted mass of internal wiring. Three days ago he waited outside the Sperling Plant and decided that truck number seven was his baby. For the next three mornings he followed number seven, studying the driver’s habits. The teamster religiously stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Sunrise Highway. Lunch, however, would present the real opportunity.

The twenty-six-foot truck that Sperling used was a Freightliner M2-106, the same make and model that anyone with a driver’s license and a pocket full of non-traceable cash could hire from most any truck rental company. He went to Ryder. Scanning the application, he smiled inside when he came across the section requesting information regarding “materials to be transported.” Tommy dismissed the application and asked the clerk if he could see the truck, his well-rehearsed cover story being that he had to deliver custom cabinets to a client down poorly maintained roads and he needed to measure the clearance before renting. The clerk, who could not give a shit, said, “Yeah, go ahead. Knock yourself out.”

Out in the lot, Tommy crawled under the truck and measured not the clearance, but the area right ahead of the rear wheels and the distance between the main chassis rails, which ran the length of the truck. Those rails had facing flanges that formed a natural shelf support.

Twenty-four sticks of dynamite were stashed under the oil drum out back in his yard. He had accumulated them one stick at a time from uprooting jobs. His design was quite ingenious. He filled a four-inch-wide cardboard mailing tube with the twenty-four sticks. Precisely packaged in six bundles of four, they were wired to a kitchen timer set for ten hours from now. He then went to buy a pack of cigarettes, even though he didn’t smoke.

Setting the charge in broad daylight wouldn’t have been his first choice. Doing it at night, however, would have necessitated breaking and entering, since the trucks were garaged and locked then. That would have brought with it a whole slew of issues and risks he was not prepared to deal with.

With the loaded tube in the trunk of his car, Tommy sat in the diner’s parking lot waiting while the driver lunched. Five minutes earlier, he dropped a matchbook with a lit cigarette sticking through it into the dumpster on the side of the diner. The glowing tobacco reached the first match tip, igniting the book and in short order the grease-drenched paper products that filled the container.

Within two minutes, everyone who was outside the diner and anyone coming out of it turned away from Tom and his car to look at the burning dumpster.

He walked between the Sperling truck and his Camaro. Squatting down, he fitted the black spray-painted tube between the rails. He attached the bungee cord from the tube to two of the many holes along the rails, one to each side. The bungee spanned the other end of the tube that was resting on the far rail flange. This last piece of ingenuity would hold the tube in place as it bounced and rumbled through its last day.

Twenty seconds later, he was up from under the truck. He quickly surveyed the location and determined that no one had been watching him. He walked off without looking back, confident that, unless the truck was to go in for rear-end service, no one would ever notice the tube. He got into his car and pulled away.

Do I call and cancel or bring flowers?
Hiccock toiled extra hard through the afternoon in an attempt to avoid making that decision, until it was too late to call and maintain any shred of decency. Having cornered himself into a no-choice situation, he showed up at 8:30 at the Watergate Apartments, sans flowers. Carly came down looking great. That made him smile and change his whole attitude about the night. They took a cab over to M street. Carly had picked the place. It was a quiet establishment where politicians and lobbyists could converse in relatively secure high backed booths significantly minimizing the risk of being overheard. To him, this practical setting played against the notion that this was somehow intended to be a romantic encounter.

Dinner was pleasant enough and off the record. Then, Carly asked if they could go “on record.”

“Sure,” Hiccock responded.

“Is there a rift between you and the FBI?”

Hiccock thought long then said, “My area of expertise is the scientific ramifications of these attacks. The FBI is the investigative arm of the Justice Department. They have their methods and practices which have served this country well for the last century.”

“Fair enough, but is there a rift?”

“There might be occasional disagreements as to the value of certain data.”

“What would be some examples of data you disagree on?”

“I think that’s as much as I want to say.”

“Is there any cooperation between you and the bureau?”

“Yes, in fact I have an old friend there and he and I get along like ‘old friends.’”

“Are you close to finding the culprits of these attacks?”

“In that regard, this is more like chess than football. It’s sometimes hard to tell how close the victory is just by looking at the board. The move/countermove nature of this investigation makes ‘predicting’ a fool’s endeavor.”

“Is there any progress?”

“Only in the elimination of certain people or groups as suspects, but the list of potentials is so long it doesn’t make a dent. Besides, all you need to do is find the right one. That can happen in the next minute or years from now. There is no way of knowing.”

“When is your next report to the president?”

“I report to him every day.”

“Personally?”

“Yes, whenever possible.”

“Tomorrow?”

“I suppose.”

“May I come along?”

Hiccock was a little thrown, “That seems like a silly question. You can check with Naomi, but my instinct says, ‘No way!’”

“You’re probably right.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Off the record?” Carly prodded. “Where will you meet with the president?”

“I’m afraid that ever since the attacks the location and schedule of the president is a national security issue. I cannot divulge anything about his plans on or off the record. But don’t you know that?”

“I am sorry. You’re right. It’s just that this is all so new to me.”

“Why would you want to know that?”

“My next question was to ask if I could interview you tomorrow, and I was hoping that might be right after your meeting with the president.”

“Oh, I don’t want any more publicity than I already have, thank you.”

“Can I call you tomorrow and just get a quote?”

“Sure… but I’ll have to call you. I’ll be on the road.”

“Fine. Now can we go back on the record?”

“Why not?”

The evening lasted 45 minutes more and ended with a handshake and separate cabs. Hiccock didn’t know if he was relieved or perturbed. Somewhere deep down in his maleness, he wanted something to help offset the slight nudge that he felt over Janice having a date and being out there, living her life. As for Carly, at an intellectual level he knew he was playing with fire. Especially since the only time he’d gotten burned on this job was when he got too close to the press. Now he was dining with it!

As he got into the cab, he wrote the night off as a pleasant enough diversion and totally harmless.

ALTHOUGH A FIVE-MAN TEAM would normally do this kind of preliminary surveillance of a suspect, the full compliment of agents on this case was a straight result of the director of the FBI being intimately involved with this operation. Scuttlebutt had it that he had some issue with the president and wanted to make sure the bureau cracked the case in short order. All the stops were pulled. Terrance Johansen, the original suspect, turned out to be totally unaware and unconnected to the e-mails that originated from a temporary online account created with his credit card. It required a federal court judge ordering the Illinois ISP to release those billing records.

Suspicion fell on the current target, Bernard Keyes, when the bureau painstakingly deconstructed Mr. Johansen’s credit card life. Every transaction, every purchase in every store, and every salesclerk still working or fired had their background combed and analyzed. It all came up a dead end, until Terrance recalled, in his sixth interrogation, about having a problem with the May Company.

It concerned a credit he was seeking on a dress his wife had purchased but never wore to their son’s graduation from medical school. She had brought the dress back to the store, but the credit to his American Express card never went through. After many frustrating phone calls, mostly navigating through automated customer service, he finally reached a human being who simply told him to write a letter including all the facts and pertinent information. She would personally see to it that the credit was applied to his account.

The FBI spent two days with Doris Welch, the assistant comptroller of the May Company. They investigated her husband, Wilbur, with the thought that he might have appropriated the number. But again, nothing out of the ordinary arose. Of course, the first thing the agents asked for was the letter. It was ultimately found in the company archives at the end of the second day. It was of little physical evidentiary value because it had been exposed to scores of fingers, each leaving a set of prints or a partial. Still, everyone who could have possibly touched it was printed, as the FBI forensic lab went “by the numbers.” The letter was torn and crumpled. When questioned, Doris finally remembered that the envelope had been ripped and resealed at the post office, now inferring a new potential suspect.

The chain of evidence took a new turn. Not having the original envelope was a bad break. Ever since the anthrax cases, the post office had become very serious regarding opcodes being stamped on every piece of mail that went through the system. Those codes would have told the FBI exactly what path the letter traveled. Without those imprinted telltales to go on, finding the route of the letter from Johansen’s home to Doris Welch’s office involved three distinct possible courses, each one implicating many postal employees. Although the scope of the investigation jumped to hundreds of individuals, the task actually became easier. As postal employees, they were known entities, with fingerprints and closer tabs kept on them than random citizens.

The trick, of course, was not to arouse suspicion among the postal workers. “Friendlies” were identified at the highest level of management. Again, military service records were the best place to go. The bureau looked for former officers who had distinguished themselves. There were no guarantees, but any police work had to make certain assumptions in order to move ahead. Three supervisors were found to have good military service records in the nine suspected places where the letter could have been opened. They were contacted surreptitiously by SACs. Those special agents in charge personally met with each one and made the call that, first, these supervisors were not suspects themselves and, second, that they could be trusted with a certain degree of information. These men having been military commanders and serving in the chain of command made the agents’ tasks easier. Their cooperation was as good as any cop in the world could expect. All three concurred that the highest possibility of a piece of mail being damaged was in the handling that occurred “in the house,” as they called it. Although not impossible, once the piece was routed and sorted, it was hand-delivered and the chance of damage reduced significantly with the personal touch of letter carriers. In addition, if the envelope was sealed in a clear plastic tape with lettering on it, this also boded well for the damage to have happened in the house, since carriers didn’t carry reseal tape.

Manual sorting and machine sorting being the essence of the postal system, the investigation focused on these choke points of mail flow. A letter got from here to there by someone or some machine deciding that it went into this pile or that. Twelve people were identified as highly probable to have come in contact with the Johansen letter. The date of the letter and the “date received” rubber-stamped at the May Company eliminated four people from the list because it traversed the system midweek and therefore excluded those on weekend shifts. Two more fell from the list, one on vacation and one on sick leave that week. That left six people in three substations covering two shifts. The Sumpterville and Hattings offices were eliminated after nothing in the personnel files or supervisor interviews pointed to anything suspicious. However, the Parkersville station had the “Dip Shit,” his supervisor’s name for a man that fit the profile—a real nonachiever, given to rants and rages against the machine, literally. His supervisor and coworkers all acknowledged the fact that he was bitter and harbored much anger toward everything. Thus, Bernard Keyes became the insect under the huge microscope that was the FBI.

With thirty agents in the field, 300 more in offices and headquarters, aerial reconnaissance, and dedicated satellite time, every move Bernard Keyes made was now a matter of national security. His place of work, home, car, garage, and even his favorite bar were now more wired than most local TV stations. Millions of dollars worth of electronic gear was sending the FBI’s central nervous system every impulse of Bernard’s life. The most productive device, however, and the one that would prove to be the best few hundred dollars invested, was the keystroke transmitter. NCIJTF technicians attached it to Keyes’ Dell computer during a surreptitious, court-ordered break-in. It transmitted every keystroke he made to a “bread truck” parked near his house. The truck was equipped with a satellite up-link patched directly into the FBI Electronics Crime Lab in Washington, D.C. There, other National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force technicians would eavesdrop on every chat room and web site Bernard visited, including the e-mails he sent out announcing an emergency meeting of the Sabot Society.

Mallory’s Chrysler Concord was parked in front of his daughter Kelly’s house. Inside, Cynthia and Kelly spoke in hushed tones in the kitchen as Kelly’s husband Jim and her father tinkered with Jim’s Jeep out in the garage.

“Does Daddy know?”

“No, I didn’t want him to worry.”

“How did you hide the dizzy spells?”

“They only happened a few times. It was the headaches that made me go to the hospital.”

With tears in her eyes, the daughter reached across the table, grabbing the hand of the mother she loved, then hated, then loved again and had now come to cherish, since she herself became a mother. “It’s so infuriating. It isn’t fair, it just isn’t fair.” Anger replaced Kelly’s tears.

“Kelly, this is God’s plan. It’s been there since before I was born and decided to act up now.”

“You know, you are going to have to tell Daddy sooner or later.”

“Tell Daddy what?” Dennis asked, as he and Jim stepped into the kitchen.

As their grandson John worked a Tonka bulldozer into a pile of dirt in the corner of the yard, Dennis and Cynthia sat on a stone bench near a sleeping rose bush.

Dennis read the letter for the third time. “I’ve paid into the health plan for thirty-five years, and they won’t cover the type of procedure you really need? I’ll go down there and raise hell.”

“Dennis, the doctors at the hospital and the administrators all tried. No health insurance will cover it, it’s too expensive. Those words in that letter, severe aortic stenosis, complicate every treatment option that we could ever afford.”

Dennis picked at one of the thorns as the gravity of Cynthia’s situation sank into his chest. He closed his eyes in one last-ditch effort to test whether or not this was just a bad dream from which he could awaken. Cynthia’s sigh brought him back to the inescapable reality of the nightmare already in progress. The sun was setting, the day’s final light illuminating Cynthia’s graying blonde hair and affording her a radiant glow. Her eyes were large and sparkling.
She’s never looked more beautiful
, he thought. He couldn’t let her go without a fight. He spent his whole life protecting strangers, the great unwashed, the hoity-toity, the average working stiff. If he could do that for them, it was his duty to protect his gal Cynthia. Hell, there were doctors all over the world working on this. Surely, they could help. He’d find a way to save her life.

Truck seven returned to the loading bay of Sperling High Voltage at 4:18 PM. At 7 AM the next morning, it was scheduled to be reloaded and ready to roll by eight, but instead of going to Brookhaven Labs, it would be making a delivery to Con Ed in Shirley. The dispatcher, seeing number seven back into the loading dock, glanced at the clock and decided that there was plenty of time to load up before the 5:00 PM punch-out and directed the dock men to do so. A forklift specially set up with a curved saddle and claw to hold 55-gallon drums loaded fifty of them filled with Translyte. At 4:55 PM, the load was completed, and the workers closed the truck’s rear door. The crew all punched out before 5 PM. One of the workers noticed some people still up in the office as he steered his Ford Focus toward the employee parking lot exit.

Dennis squinted as the late afternoon sun glared through the window behind Miles Taggert, silhouetting him in his own palatial offices. “Mr. Taggert, I’m here to propose a trade.”

“Go on,” Taggert prompted across a teepee of fingers, two dabbing at his chin.

“You want me to keep you alive; I want you to keep my wife alive.”

“Whoa, wait a minute. What’s the matter with Mrs. Mallory?”

“She has …” Dennis reached into his coat and retrieved the hospital letter, not wanting to get this wrong, “arterio-venous malformation in her head. Traditional surgery, the kind my Detective’s Endowment medical will cover is very risky because of …” he found the other words in the letter, “Severe aortic stenosis, they’d have to lower her body temperature during an already risky operation. She probably couldn’t survive that.”

“What can I do?”

“You travel in high circles, with people who are always running off to Liechtenstein or Sweden to try new radical therapies that aren’t available here in the United States. I’ll work for free, but you pay all the travel, medical, or whatever bills to make sure Cynthia beats this thing.”

“You’ll draw a salary and we’ll do everything we can for your wife … as long as I am alive. Deal?” Taggert extended his hand. Dennis did the same, worried that his might be shaking from nerves. He had been in tight situations before, even helped negotiate a Detective’s Endowment contract once, but this was different. He was negotiating for Cynthia’s best shot at survival. It was a pressure he had never known, even when he was undercover.

“Deal.”