The Hammer of God (10 page)

When Alizir had finished his morning prayers, he rattled his chain, the signal he had trained his captors to understand meant, “Bring me my food.” These Infidels were fools, He had braced himself for the worst after the stories of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. He thought they would surely torture him. But yesterday, he sent back his lunch because his meat was undercooked. They weren't guards; they were servants. This wasn't a country to be feared; it was a nation of men whose fathers abdicated their roles in teaching a man to pray and fight and die for a cause. Probably in deference to their wives, who were not intended by Allah to raise sons. They were half-men. He had fought the half-men of Russia as a Mujahedeen in the eighties. He volunteered in retribution for his father and sisters being brutally killed in his younger years. Lives extinguished for being nothing more than devoted Muslims; praise Allah, that he was able to save his younger brother. He and the Afghans with which he trained defeated the great Russian Army and sent them home to their weeping mothers to be breastfed once more. It was during those days he met the wealthy son of an Arab billionaire who traded a flamboyant life as a playboy in New York and Paris for the bone-chilling sanctuary of deep caves. Since those days, Osama had left his mark and, had the virus plan been executed, his name, Alizir, too would be blessed with the adoration of all those who fought the great Satan.

“Put it on the table.” The Sheik said, to the servant delivering his meal. His back was to the door. He turned when he didn't hear the tray sliding onto the table.

It was her again.

“Good morning, Shiek,” was all she said as she walked over to the chain that was locked to the hoop on the floor. She tugged on the chain and gestured for him to give her some slack.

“You are releasing me?”

Without saying a word, she produced another lock and by threading it through the links, shortened the chain by about five feet.

“Sit down!”

He almost sat, but then remembered that this wasn't a man or even an American half-man. This was only a woman.

“Are you going to sit?” She gestured to the chair.

He didn't respond.

The impact between his shoulder blades made him lose his breath and he found himself dazed and confused on the floor. She was now standing in front of him, swinging a sock with a heavy weight in the end. He immediately scrambled to his feet and rushed at her, forgetting the newly shortened chain. It snagged him back just as he reached her.

“I used to do this with the neighbor's dog. I knew how long his leash was and he just snarled and barked but couldn't bite me.”

Brooke was lying; it was actually her dog that was tormented this way by her neighbor's unbalanced son. But never let the facts get in the way of a threat. She smashed the sock onto the table, the energy and force made the Sheik wince.

“I'm not going to lie to you, Sheik. You scare the living daylights out of me. You have become a star in my nightmares.” Wham! She hit the table again. “My daddy taught me to face my fears, look them right in the eye, and see that they are nothing and only had the fear I gave them.”

She looked the Sheik in the eye and didn't blink. It was he who eventually turned away.

“How did you achieve operational ability in America?”

He didn't respond.

“Two, three, four.” Wham! She hit him so hard in the shoulder he was knocked to the floor on one knee.

“Hmmm didn't leave a mark? Oh, we're going to do this all day! And it will just be our little secret.”

He looked up at the girl. He noticed she was dressed differently. Not in the boxy man-suit of the female agent needing to conform to look like a man. She was in what the west called warm-up clothes. Tight fitting.

She saw his eyes on her chest. She had the AC turned up so that the room was cold.

She is a sadist. She is getting a thrill out of this.

Brooke's chat with Aliz lasted about 40 minutes. As she left, she said to him, “You are so full of shit, you must have to flush twice.”

An hour after Brooke had her special “breakfast” with the Sheik, one of his guards came into the room.

The Sheik quickly complained, “That woman has tortured me!”

“I wish she'd torture me.”

“She hit me!”

“Aw… come on. That little girl? Nice try.” Counting the towels, he left.

Twenty minutes later, a man in a suit, whom he had not seen before, entered with the bitch who hit him.

“Shiek Aliz Berniham, I am Robert Fusco of the Inspector General's Office. You have leveled charges against agent Burrell. I am here to take your statement to determine if any disciplinary action should be enforced. Do you understand English?”

“Yes. Of course I do.”

“Show me where she allegedly hit you.”

“My arm, my back, my shoulders, my legs…”

When Robert looked, he saw no signs of trauma or impact. He turned to Agent Burrell. “Did you strike this man?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you threaten him in anyway?”

The little bitch now in a skirt and jacket looked like a librarian and incapable of swatting a fly as she answered with a look of wonderment. “That is against procedure, sir. I will not expose my prisoner to any treatment not in compliance with the director's guidelines, sir.”

The inspector gave both of them a final review and then left the room. Brooke looked at Aliz without a trace of the anger or rage she had previously shown him.

She is a two-headed beast
, he thought.

She left.

“What's the book about?” Peter asked, Feigning ignorance to hide the fact that he'd read it just before coming to Kasiko's Sunday night dinner.

“Only Professor Ensiling has read it. We are all looking forward to studying it,” Brodenchy said as he took another ladle of creamed onions.

“Basically it's a mathematical postulate asserting the teraphysics involved with maneuvering and navigating an interplanetary craft in the Earth's atmosphere,” Ensiling said.

“Interesting term, Professor – ‘teraphysics,'” Brodenchy noted.

“Yes. It is the physics of Earth from a perspective outside of Earth's domain.”

“How does one achieve that point of view?” the younger Brodenchy asked.

“The beginning of ‘teraphysics' is best visualized by the following construct: coming from outside the solar system, Earth is the third planet from the sun. Therefore three was a logical divisor. So why not divide the Earth into not 24 but 27 hours per day. Twenty-seven being three to the third power also added parabolics to the mix. The author bought an ordinary globe of Earth and circumscribed 27-hour meridians on it. He almost had it, but there was no point of origin with which to anchor the new grid. Then he placed the crosshairs of an intersection over a point in Auckland, New Zealand where a flying saucer was rumored to cause a tremendous explosion. Everything then snapped into place. All previous UFO sightings were now along lines of the new grid. Not only longitudinally but latitudinally as well. His big discovery was that major grid intersections fell on places like Giza, where the great pyramids were. The Bermuda triangle was at the intersection of three lines. The Exeter Vermont sightings from the '50s were right down the major line on America's East Coast.” Ensiling paused to tamp down the tobacco in his pipe.

Brodenchy filled the pause with an observation of his own. “But Professor, now that Lathie had divided the Earth into 27 longitudinal meridians, then navigationally, the math also has to change, correct?”

“Exactly. Using 27 meant new smaller degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc and, along with them, shorter new hours, new minutes, new seconds. Suddenly a whole new world of co-incidence appeared. He started converting everything into the new math. Natural phenomena, manmade events, even celestial events.

Doctor Adam Borda spoke up. “Yes, I researched a fellow; his name was Frank Edwards and he wrote a book in 1957 tantalizingly called,
Flying Saucers: Serious Business
. In that book, Edwards reported on a suspected crash in a place called Roswell, New Mexico of three flying saucers in 1947. He claimed his source on the details of the crash was an ex-Air Force investigator who gave the dimensions of three round craft as 99, 66, and 33 feet respectively.”

Ensiling picked up the tale from what was in the smuggled book. “Yes, Adam, and this struck Lathie as a detail that could be crucial. He converted those measurements into new feet and then factored in a constant of .2640, which had been showing up more and more in the math of his grid work. The resulting new measurements had proven to have a harmonic relationship with his worldwide grid. At the time, he didn't know what that meant, but it was a startling discovery with a scientific probability of a million-to-one against random numbers getting the same result.

“Why did the book have to be smuggled in?” Peter asked.

“As far as we know, that galley was the only remaining copy of this book,” Kasiko said.

“Yes. The printing company in Hong Kong had an unfortunate fire and the manuscript and all the copies of the first printing are gone. The folder I brought in is the only surviving copy of the text.”

“It is one of the first books ever banned by the United States?” another said.

“Can't the author write it over again?” Peter asked.

“He died in a plane crash,” Ensiling said. “He was a commercial pilot and crashed in his private plane on a beautiful day with no weather problems, Peter. There are now only six copies of this book in the world.”

Eleven
thought Peter, but his face remained like stone.

“How do you know the book is legitimate?” another man of science asked.

“Ahh, that is our task, gentlemen.”

Kasiko noticed Peter's furrowed brow and faraway look, “What's on your mind, Peter?”

“I was wondering; did the harmonics prove the grid, or did its harmony to the grid prove the saucers' existence?”

“That's very good, Peter; hold that thought.” Ensiling left and returned with a big lawyers' briefcase. Out of it, he pulled a giant red loose-leaf book. Embossed in gold leaf on the front was the seal of the United Nations.

Somebody's cell phone rang and Peter jumped nervously, turning in the direction of the sound. The paranoia being infectious, Bill also was startled, but looked and saw nothing but tourists and a Boy Scout troop visiting the Memorial.

The interruption gave Hiccock a chance to get a word in edgewise. “Peter, is this professor, in the Queens apartment back in 1968, the one who smuggled in the book… Is he the same Professor Ensiling that just died?”

“Yes. That's why I am here, telling you this story. He didn't die – he was murdered.”

“Whoa. You know this for sure?”

“He was old, but he was in good shape. They got him.”

“Who got him?”

“That I can't tell you.”

“Can't or won't tell me.”

Peter stole a nervous glance away from Bill. “Four out of the five remaining committee members are dead. All within a half a year. Actuarially, those are lottery ticket odds. Bill, something is going on. I need you to help me.”

“Help you? What this got to do with you?”

“I think I might be next.”

“Why? You aren't a professor, are you?” Bill realized there was a lot about “Peter Robot” he didn't know. In fact, all Billy remembered about Peter before this meeting on the steps was that he had built a robot in sixth grade (hence his schoolyard nickname) and won all kinds of science fairs with a computer he built. He had faded into the haze of Bill's Bronx memories until Cheryl said his name this morning.

Today a guy like Peter would set off alarm bells in every quarter of society, but back in the '60s and '70s people were still considered innocent until proven perverted. So it was, that, the mentally-advanced Peter was socially-retarded; outcast from his age group in the first known case of a nerd-ectomy in the U.S.A. Although jocks and cool guys shunned him, Peter actually had no need for them as well. On any given Friday or Saturday night he was content soldering and inventing in his room. But there was one group to which Peter Remo was the coolest guy, mostly because he was older – his younger brother Johnny's friends, like Bill. These younger guys were enthralled by his stories and science wizardry. In addition, because he was older, he could take the rap for one of Johnny's group and, for example, claim that the pack of Parliaments that hit the floor were his, or maybe give you a swig of beer. And if you hung with Peter, the bully guys, who were maybe a year older than you, were ‘a-scared' of him.

So it was that Tommy Mush, Joey Plum, Billy Hic, Larry Soch, and B.O. all related to Peter as if he were also in the seventh grade.

The neighborhood was close knit. Everyone knew everyone and each parent was the parent of every kid as they played in the courtyard or on the sidewalks. Therefore, every parent knew Peter, his good nature, and his brains. In a word no one would ever use today, Peter was “harmless.”

In many ways, Peter was Bill's entry point into the wonders of science. Bill spent many hours on the stoop of the apartment house with tape, wood, motors, batteries and buzzers building “electro-cities,” actually electric busy boxes that rang, beeped, lit up, spun, and blinked. At first, done under Peter's careful guidance, they soon became a canvas upon which Bill would create newer and more complex circuits and combinations, at times surprising Peter with his ingenuity. Yet, Peter always had the next challenge, such as challenging him to make two lights alternate every time the buzzer rang. That one took Bill a week to figure out, but when he finally got it, the praise he got from Peter was like his winning the Nobel Prize in Science.

After Bill reached high school, he only saw Peter around the neighborhood from time to time. Their age difference guaranteed they never traveled in the same social circle. In his teens, Bill was the geekiest guy in the “football” crowd, but the older Peter spent his formative years as a true mainline geek – no sports, no girls, no nothing other than science. Upon reflection, Bill realized that was how he could have been described today if he hadn't let Janice finally get through to him.

Today on the steps of the Memorial, the look in Peter's eyes was hard for Bill to decode. It could either be the deep-set hollowness of a man in mortal fear or the warning signs of insane indifference to reality of the delusional. This was more Janice's area than his. He'd discuss this with her tonight.

“Bill, Professor Ensiling and I kept in touch after the committee was disbanded by Kurt Waldheim. Ensiling was working on super-conductivity and I was asked to join his team as a ‘theorizer.'”

“A what? I've two degrees in the sciences and I have never heard of a theorizer.”

“He liked my opinion on things that many felt were already settled as science or proven as fiction.”

“I know a little something about outside the box thinking myself, Pete.”

“Like, I told the engineers once about relative absolute zero.”

“Wait – you can't have a relative absolute anything.” Bill then relaxed. After all, this was Peter the Great, as Billy the Kid had called him. He was the great science whiz who fed into Bill's hunger for science and answers. So Hiccock once again became what he had been on the stoop of the apartment house, now the stoop of the Lincoln Memorial… an apt pupil.

“See, that's where I came in. I theorized that at around -273 degrees Celsius the temperature coefficients of likely super-conducting materials aren't linear but are skewed by the specific gravity and mass of the sample being tested. Therefore…”

“Therefore, their molecular stasis points don't necessarily follow the degree intervals.”

“Exactly. Believe it or not, those scientists would never consider that and whole reams of data was discarded as being junk or polluted.”

“So are you saying super-conducting got the Professor killed?”

Peter paused before speaking again. “Bill, did you ever hear of the Jesus Factor?”

“What is it, some bible-thumping fad?”

“No. But if you've never heard of it, and you're the one in the White House, then I am really fucked out on a limb.”

“What are you talking about?”

Peter looked at Bill. Twice he started to form a sentence and then stopped. “I did some preliminary work for the professor on instantaneous values of Epsilon H33,” he said at last. “He told me to destroy my notes and then they killed….” Peter pulled up short.

“What?” Bill's interest was thoroughly piqued.

“Nothing, Bill. I don't think we should talk any longer.”

“Why?”

“I should go.”

“Peter, you are starting to weird me out here?”

“Thanks for the time, kid. I'll see ya round.” With that, Peter trudged down the steps of the Memorial.