“Brooke, intellectually, I was hoping you would agree with me…”
Ice started to form around his tone. Brooke was suddenly aware she was clinging to him like the lifeboat in the ocean. He placed his hands on her shoulders and separated them enough to see her eyes, “…but, God, how I was praying you felt the same as I do.”
They kissed, a long, deep kiss. Neither pulled away; they just kept adjusting their embrace, getting closer and closer, contouring into each other more and more. It seemed like it lasted for five full minutes until each started to involuntarily laugh through the kiss. Finally, they came up for air.
“Aren’t we supposed to be above this? Isn’t this too normal for our jobs?” Mush said.
“You mean, if we weren’t working for the government…”
“We’d be on a beach somewhere…”
“A secluded beach…” She said as she pulled him in for another long, deep kiss.
In the morning, the hotel’s housekeeper was confused. Her rules of engagement were clear and based on whether the dangling doorknob card requested privacy or maid service. She didn’t know what this meant. Sometime during the night, a passerby had hung the captain’s hat over the doorknob to the room. She was about to knock when a passing Air Force major advised her, “I wouldn’t disturb the man, miss.”
Raffey had lost fifteen pounds from his already wiry frame and he was beginning to look emaciated. The hopelessness of his reality reared up into a shuddering series of anxiety attacks, as he found no safe harbor for his thoughts. There was no good side, no peaceful thought upon which he could land safely, and he fought hard not to spasm again. His best defense was the avoidance of thought. That avoidance was easier when his mind focused on work. At the lab, with its many distractions, he had fewer episodes; every hour though, he focused on what it was they were going to ask him to do. His worst nightmare was that the people who took his sister and niece didn’t have a political or religious rationale in their desire to cause a calamity at the site, but simply wanted to start Armageddon; the destruction of everything, for some unfathomable reason.
He was tortured with conflicting emotions, one moment wanting to flee and keep running ahead of the screams and horrors they would inflict on his sister Leena and his niece Kirsi and another moment he would decide to play along and help them destroy the machine. Today his mind quickly went to the third extreme. If they were in it to destroy creation, then everyone, everything, was dead, including Leena and Kirsi. So what was the point? Suddenly the path became more clear. He now had a decision point, and his logical, organized, engineering mind was able to crystallize a plan of action. If they were just interested in disabling the machine, he’d play along. If their goal was the end of all, then he’d kill himself, and seal the fate of his loved ones. But the math worked. Three dead in exchange for all that ever existed or would exist, for all of forever! It was as if someone had opened a window in a stifling room. He suddenly inhaled and exhaled as a free man. He had his operational model.
XVI. BEANTOWN BUST
Bill was taking a Special Air Missions flight from Dulles to Logan so he could be there when the ATF busted the South of Roxbury branch of the Knights of the Sepulchre.
The State Department was totally against this raid; their thinking was that the Vatican should be notified prior. Bill vetoed that idea and had to pull rank by invoking his presidentially bestowed authority as head of all of the Homeland Security departments. It also didn’t hurt that the President had backed Hiccock’s position, agreeing that the Vatican might be compromised by zealots with sympathy for the late Father Cleary’s cause.
The operation had been green-lighted by Bill only twenty-four hours before. Here is where countless exercises by ATF in conjunction with state and local police paid off. Giving him “off the shelf” options with which to fill in the operational gaps in the hastily hatched plan.
The location was the Dublin Pub, a tourist trap, long forgotten by the Boston Convention and Visitor’s bureau and apparently a few health inspectors. No doubt, its Teflon shield was buttressed by the expatriate Irish community’s deep inroads into Boston politics. For that reason, Bill insisted on a cover story to be used to all local and state resources employed in the raid. One block away was a check-cashing store. Bill quickly got the IRS, through Treasury, to claim that the honest business was a money-laundering ring to Bolivian drug lords. The BPD and Massachusetts State cops were not told that the actual target was the Dublin Pub. In fact, until the evening roll call, nobody in Boston knew there was even a raid planned for the check-cashing joint.
As he waited in an up-armored SUV three blocks from the pub, he wished he had Joey by his side. This field stuff was Joey’s happy place. Bill’s mind went back to last weekend and the corporal who had been glad to take little Richie under his wing in an effort to stave off the separation anxiety he was feeling over his own son. The fact that Corporal Bradley was dead only an hour later still stung Bill.
He looked at the Secret Service agents and members of the FBI HRT as they prepped and went over the takedown details for the twentieth and final time. Do any of these agents or Hostage Rescue Team members have kids? Of course they do, he thought as he reached around and patted the Glock he’d been carrying for a few months now. Although his protective detail hated the idea of another gun in the mix, a gun carried by an amateur to boot, he had promised only to carry it in situations like this. If President Mitchell decided to show up on a whim, either his head of detail or Bill’s own, would ask that he surrender his weapon until the president was no longer in the area. That was okay with him. So although it rubbed most security types the wrong way and was against their instincts, Hiccock was strapped.
Bill had never felt the macho impulse for a gun. However, along with the resolve that no one was going to force his son to grow up without a dad came the need for Bill to have a chance to vote against it — fifteen votes with a full magazine!
The agent in charge appeared at the rear window of the war wagon Bill was sitting in. Bill lowered his bulletproof window.
“We go in one minute, sir! You are requested to stay at least two hundred feet back from the operation, sir.”
“Agent Simms.”
“Yes sir?”
“You married, got kids?”
“Er… yes, two girls…”
“Be careful, okay?”
Simms didn’t know how to respond; he didn’t expect that kind of sentiment from a superior. “We are all going to get home tonight, sir. Good men, well trained and well-armed.” He left to lead the assault.
Boston Public Works employees and phone men stood at key points in the circuitry, with a federal agent on a walkie-talkie ready to cue them when to pull the plug and ditch the phones. A vehicle with a special transmitter similar to those used in Iraq to block cell-phone-activated bombs would start blocking all cell phone signals on cue.
As Bill’s vehicle rolled up to his safe perch seventy-five yards from the pub, he watched as the two-man assault teams started from each end of the block, sweeping all civilians and securing all building entrances and in general making sure no members of the public could be caught in the line of fire. Also locking down the street insured that none of the citizens would tip off the men who, if the confidential informant to FBI was right, were having a meeting inside the pub to plan their next moves.
As the lead men advanced, local BPD took their places securing those doorways and civilians. The lead guys with the battering rams hit the doors of the pub hard. Five helmeted men went through the door, shouting commands. Forty-five seconds later, agents in suits went in. To Bill, this was a good sign. These were the guys who would collect the evidence and interrogate the people inside, and they would have only gone in once the bar was secure and everybody safe. They would set up a legal triage so the next move could be planned instantaneously.