The Eighth Day (21 page)

It was amazing. Within three days, the post office box he rented from Pack, Wrap, and Mail on Sunrise Highway was stuffed with U.S. Post Office blue-and-red Priority Mail packets. They were the perfect carriers, these solid cardboard envelopes that offered not a hint of their contents. Less than five dollars’ worth of stamps got second-day delivery. They were dropped in standard, anonymous mailboxes leaving no way to trace the sender.

Outside the store in his rotting Camaro, Tommy opened envelope after envelope, calculating their contents. There were twenties, fifties, fives, and tens, some wrapped in newspaper in a further, though unnecessary, attempt to hide the contents. Within two weeks, he had $8,432 dollars in cash all collected, transported, and delivered through the courtesy of Uncle Sam’s post office. What a great country!

Alinco permanent magnets were awesome devices. A one-pound magnet could lift an engine block. The two magnets he needed cost $1,200 each, for which he paid cash, no questions and not even a raised eyebrow. Edmund Scientific out of Tonawanda, New York, supplied the next crucial element of his surprise package, a four-pound gyroscope. It was a 24-volt model. He had already located eight-ounce RV model batteries that put out 24 volts from Radio Shack. Designed for model planes and boats, they were lightweight. Each one cost $189. He bought four. The expensive part was the C-4. It took him three weeks to locate the guy on the Internet who once said it would not be a challenge to acquire certain “plastics” for rapid remodeling work. Rapid being the three ten millionths of a second it would take to detonate the four pounds of deadly putty.

It was a devilishly simple device, once he figured it out. The basic principle was based on a cat’s ability to land on its feet. Of course, making something that performed like a cat was no small task. He even toyed with the notion of using an actual cat, but he thought it might bring about unfavorable Karma to initiate the genocide of possibly 10 million with the death of one of God’s innocent creatures. No, he would not sacrifice a cat to help man pay for his sins.

The cat solution came to him as he was watching some kids play Frisbee in the park. The disc always flew level as long as it was launched level. It was, he reasoned, because of the angular momentum of the spinning disk.

“Five dead including one who was in the Sperling plant. She was a bookkeeper working late,” Nichols, the assistant to the director, told his boss. “The other four were poisoned watching the flames. Nitro traces are leading our agents on the scene to suspect dynamite. They are focusing on one of the delivery trucks as the point of origin, and that truck was loaded with a chemical used as a coolant for high-voltage transformers.”

“Anything from EI on this?” EI was Electronic Intelligence, a once small, now major part of the bureau’s crime-fighting arsenal. The whiz kids down there had ways of determining what some online pervert trolling for twelve-year-old boys in a chat room had for lunch. EI provided the big payoff on Bernard Keyes, the FBI’s number one suspect in the rash of recent homegrown events.

“Yes, Sir. Homegrown 1 sent this e-mail at 9:04 PM EST. It only contained two words, ‘Sperling. Ultimate.’” The suspects on a big case like this were code-named in their order of discovery. Homegrown 1 was actually Homegrown 1 and only.

“Have you confirmed that it’s a genuine claim of responsibility?”

“The timing is close, but it is incontrovertible. The factory blew at nine, four minutes before the e-mail was received. However, it wasn’t on the fire call boxes or radio frequencies until 9:05, a minute after. So no way it was just someone responding to a scanner call. The first report didn’t get out to the media until twenty minutes after that. We got ’em, Sir.”

“What is the operational plan then?”

Nichols smiled. “Sir, something’s fallen into our laps. E-traffic out of Keyes’s location indicates a meeting of their top cell leaders has been called.”

“When?”

“Three days.”

“Can we identify whomever he e-mailed the meeting notice to?”

“EI was able to pick up his outgoing keystrokes. They have determined he posted the call for the meeting to an old bulletin board.”

“Meaning?”

“They communicate without leaving a routing trail but we’re watching the billboard. It’s a challenge because people don’t have to enter one or reveal themselves in any way in order to read the postings. Our guys are working on it.”

“The good news is we know the location of the meeting place, so we stand a good chance of apprehending the entire ring.”

“Seems probable, Sir, especially since we’ve kept security on Homegrown airtight. The Sabot will have no reason to suspect we are on to them.”

“Nichols, I want you to personally call everyone with knowledge of Homegrown and remind them one more time how critical containment is on this. And let them know you are calling for me!”

“Yes, Sir.”

“You have my approval to wait for the meet to get all of them. One proviso: if we learn of any bombings or potential acts of terror in the next three days, we jump all over Homegrown 1, stop it cold, and chase down these cells some other way.”

“Of course, Sir. I’ll write up the operational guidelines and have them on your desk for you to sign in fifteen minutes.”

“Take twenty, I don’t want any mistakes.”

“Yes, Sir,” Nichols nodded as he took leave.

Alone in his office, Tate ran through the next few steps in his mind. He reached for the telephone to call Reynolds to ask for a sit-down so he could see the president’s face when he told him he had solved the case. Better yet, Homegrown 1 was about to be joined by Homegrown 2 through 10 or 20.

On second thought, he decided to call the San Francisco office.

It was 6:30 PM in Oakland. The setting sun, hanging low over the Pacific, bathed the ball field in an amber wash. Joey Palumbo was sitting on a dusty bench watching his nine-year-old master the strategy and mechanics of playing Little League second base. This was the perfect time, watching his son grow up. Joe Jr. was the greatest achievement of his and his wife Phyllis’s lives. Watching his son turn two and discovering that birthday cake wasn’t just intended for one’s mouth, Joey had an epiphany and suddenly understood what true selflessness meant. This was someone he would gladly die for.

Although he loved his wife and intellectually knew he would sacrifice himself for her as well, their love was somehow, somewhere, at some point far out in the abstract, conditional. Especially if she divorced him or, someday, God forbid, she turned against life and went on a self-destructive path. But there was no limit, no threshold that his son could cross that would erode Joey’s selfless devotion to Joe Jr. Down deep in his soul, at the very center of his being, he would be willing to make a draconian deal with any devil to trade his life for that of his son’s.

His secure bureau cell phone rang. He got up and distanced himself from the other parents. “Palumbo.”

“How are you, Joe?”

He knew the director’s voice. “Fine, Sir, and you?”

“I’m having a great day, Joe. We got a concrete match to Homegrown 1 on the explosion and fire on Long Island.”

“When did this happen?”

“Within the last hour. NCIJTF has him typing the credit note four minutes after the blast.”

“It is a good day, Sir.” There was an awkward pause, Joey trying to decide why he got this call, probably before the president. Then he found out.

“Has your friend come up with anything?”

“Our agent Hansen tells me they have found the means of recruitment.”

“The subliminal thing?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Hiccock’s not dumb, Sir. If he is going that way, there’s probably something there.”

“Of course, that doesn’t rule out Homegrown 1. I mean he could be behind Hiccock’s subliminal theory.”

“That’s true, Sir. Should I call him and see?”

“Joe, I need you to find out what you can, but I don’t want to tip him off that we are as close as we are.”

Joey didn’t like the sound of this. “Can I ask why?”

“Homegrown is about to expand. We found out the perpetrators are having a big meet in three days and we expect to be there when they do.”

“Sir, Hiccock has clearance.” Joey had the unsettling thought that he may have just pushed a little too far.

“Joe, I am asking you to ascertain what he knows without jeopardizing Homegrown.”

Joey resented the implication that his friend was a security risk and considered telling his boss to go to hell. But looking toward the infield as his son bobbled a routine ball to second, it was all too plain to him that his little second baseman wasn’t going to get a baseball scholarship to Harvard. After a deep breath, the father in the agent said, “Yes, Sir.”

“Let me know as soon as you know anything, okay, Joe?”

“Certainly. Good night, Sir.”

As he folded his encrypted phone, Palumbo seriously considered his next action. He had pretty much kept his old buddy out of the loop, feeding him nothing of any consequence. Now he was being asked to see if Hiccock was going to scoop the FBI before they could have their little dog-and-pony show in three days.

How do I do this?

Kronos was confused. He had flown all the way to bum-fuck New Mexico and then was driven two hours and 300 minutes to this place in the middle of nowhere. He knew Hiccock was summoning him here to meet some kind of Navy Admiral, but as the car drove up, he saw nothing but Army crap: soldier jerks, trucks, and satellite dishes. He thought about it and laughed to himself.
What did I expect? To see them pull a ship up to this shack in the middle of the desert.
Hiccock and Tyler stepped off the small porch into the desert’s oppressive midday heat to greet him.

They entered Parks’s home. Looking around the inside, the sparse furniture, curtains on the windows, and wood burning stove reminded Kronos of a family trap restaurant on Route 4 in Paramus, New Jersey. The politically correct environment of the eatery was corporately designed to look like a country home. It was a ploy to get people’s minds off the portion-controlled servings as mandated by the head office in Milwaukee or someplace. Except for the Sun Microsystems minicomputer in anvil cases, this house looked like a small corner of that restaurant, complete with an old grandmother.

Taking it all in, Kronos turned to Hiccock. “So where’s the Admiral?”

“She’s at the computer,” Hiccock said, pointing.

Kronos was enraged. “She? She’s, she’s … she’s an old broad!”

“Mind that tongue, boy. She is an old
Admiral
broad. And she forgot more than you’ll ever know.”

Kronos felt the skin on his face start to heat up. He bit the inside of his cheek, pivoted on his heels, and stormed out the door.

“Come on, Kronos,” Hiccock said, following him. “This isn’t some hacking competition. People are dying out there wholesale. We have to try everything.”

“Look, I hacked for the mob. I made them millions. I was Electronic Enemy Number One for four years. I got pride. Why do I have to work with her? What could she possibly know?”

“Let’s go find out. I left her with her first computer four days ago.”

Kronos planted himself, not moving. “What? She didn’t have a computer? Are you whacked out of your freaking mind?”

“Look, in the early days she was in Naval Administration, a fancy name for the secretarial pool in the Navy.”

“Is this going to be a long freaking story?”

“When the computer first came along, the torpedo heads didn’t know what it was and assigned it to her command.”

“You are boring me here.”

“Well, when they started aiming guns and figuring out missile arcs with the damn things, her department grew. She had the first machine, an ENIAC.

“Electronic numerical integrator and computer, yeah, so? I had a Commodore 64, big whoop!” Kronos crossed his arms, assuming a petulant stance.

“The story goes that one day the whole machine went down. Couldn’t get it running. Techs and engineers all over it. No go. Then she got this idea. She walked over to a big rack, reached inside, and found a moth had flown into the cabinet and got stuck in a relay contact. She removed it and the thing started right up. She logged it officially as ‘Computer not functioning. It had a bug in it’!”

Slowly Kronos turned. “That was this broad?”

“Wherever you are, young grasshopper, she got there first.”

“Yeah, so what’s with the no box till four days ago?”

“She abandoned all technology. I read her papers when I was in college. She called for a halt to further computer research and enhancements, claiming that one day they would become too fast and too smart to overcome, and then whoever controlled the boxes could control the world.”

“So they kicked her ass out of the Navy for that?”

“If anybody was going to control anybody, Uncle Sam wanted to make sure it was us. C’mon ‘couzeen,’ let’s go see if she can help us.”