Bill opened his door and stepped out into the damp night air coming off the bay. His driver had already exited and run to the doorway. Then Bill saw a third floor window open and a leg jut out, followed by a man, who causiously traversed the adjoining roof.
Bill watched, but the man never appeared at the narrow alleyway to jump across to the next roof. Bill surmised that he must have slipped down the stairway of the adjacent building. Bill ran down the alleyway next to the building, figuring the man wouldn’t leave by the front door being guarded by BPD. Bill made it to the back of the building in time to see the man jumping the last eight feet from the rear fire escape ladder. Suddenly it was as if Bill were watching a movie. The Glock was in his hand and he was yelling, “Freeze!”
The man got up and was turning toward Bill.
“Freeze! Goddammit!”
But the man kept turning.
Then Bill’s ear stung as someone yelled, “Freeze!” He turned while wincing to see his Secret Service man, Moskowitz, in a full military-like crouch stance, his service weapon cupped in his upturned right palm. Bill turned back to the man he was chasing who was crouched and squeezing off a round. Moskowitz’s fired before that bullet hit him full in the chest. Both men went down. The secret service agent’s shot found center mass and crumpled the suspect. Bill ran to the downed man and kicked away the weapon. He ran back to Moskowitz. Bill was surprised he was conscious and helped him sit up. Bill saw the small hole in his shirt, but there was no blood. Kevlar vest, he thought.
“You okay?”
“I’m good; stop him!”
“He’s not going…” Bill turned and saw the man wobble to his feet and head for the gun. Bill took off as if he were escaping the pocket from defensive linemen, went low, and field tackled the guy. This time he pinned him down and called for help. “Hey, somebody give me a hand here!”
A BPD sergeant showed up, placed his knee on the man’s back, and slapped a pair of cuffs on him. Bill went back to Moskowitz. “Looks like everybody’s wearing a vest but me.”
“What the hell were you doing, Hiccock?”
“I saw the guy running and no one was going after him, so…”
“There’s an army of cops and Feds here; you were only here to observe,” he wheezed as he tried to catch his breath. “Hell, I turn my back for a second and there you go playing High Noon with a thug.” He winced through the pain that the punch of the bullet had transmitted through his vest.
“I guess ‘sorry’ is kind of weak, huh?”
Two EMTs came running. One checked Moskowitz while the other went to the man in the alley.
An hour after the take-down, Bill found himself playing the role of referee in a jurisdictional dispute in which he held all the cards: those that identified him as oversight chairman of the FBI, Secret Service, CIA, NSA, and DHS. All under the order of the president, who felt he and his authority had been ill-served by these agencies in the two previous affairs where Bill’s instincts had proved to be superior to that of the heads of the agencies. Since they all worked for the Executive Branch, President Mitchell rearranged the administration’s furniture, putting Bill’s seat closer to his and ordering all the agencies to answer to him before Mitchell got their attention. So here he was, a professorial academic, holder of three degrees in science, no political agenda and no favor bank credits or debts to repay, in the back of a Boston pub deciding who got to interrogate the seven men rounded up in the Boston pub raid.
The Secret Service wanted first crack because the helicopter that one of the group’s alleged members blew up was in their bailiwick. The FBI persuasively argued that this was domestic terrorism and totally within their mandate. Owing to the need for secrecy and to contain the entire affair because of its religious sensitivity, he decided on the Secret Service. Having made the decision, he briefed the special agent in charge and in no uncertain terms told him of the need for quick, actionable intelligence under a blanket of secrecy.
In the U.S. Embassy in Paris, when Joey received the first reports and got the gist of the Boston operation, his blood pressure began to rise. First was a feeling that he should have been there. His best friend was involved in a shootout while he was sitting behind a desk in France. Second was the upward pressure that was being exerted on him from the Bureau’s Boston office due to Bill’s decision to make Treasury the lead agency over the FBI. It was still Joey’s alma mater, albeit one that had jettisoned him from its active-duty ranks for his display of loyalty to Bill during the Eighth Day affair. Yet he was still a product of Quantico and the Bureau was in his blood, so it was with a sympathetic ear that Joey listened as the special agent in charge of the Boston office relayed to him that Joey’s new boss, Bill, had given them the cold shoulder on the investigation into the chopper shoot-down. Joey listened, but steered clear of agreement with the SAC of the Boston office, but commiserated nonetheless.
Now, Joey was about to meet with Father Mercado, so he put the Boston op behind him and wondered why Frank the priest had asked for this meeting.
One of the embassy staff led in the priest, who, to Joey, seemed overwhelmed.
“Father Mercado, it’s good to see you. Are you okay?”
“I must have gone through five security checks.”
“Sorry about that; I should have escorted you in myself. My apologies.”
“Mr. Palumbo…”
“Joey!”
“Joey, I know you are a government representative and your allegiance is to Uncle Sam, but I need you to talk to your superiors.”
“My superiors? They pay me to listen, not talk.”
“You know, back in Philly, and I’m sure it was like this in the Bronx, when the baseball cards came out, we’d flip ’em and the winner would take all the cards. But if the next card up was a Pete Rose, you panicked, because you could trade the whole rest of the team for one Pete Rose card.”
“I once had five Mickey Mantles and later three Reggie Jacksons! I was the king of 213th Street.”
“So if a Mantle came up, would you flip it? No, too big of a risk, right?”
“Yeah, sure, but where’s this going, Frank?”
“I am no scientist; heck I’m in the anti-science uniform,” he pulled at his black shirt, “but the stakes here are the highest ever. If your science men are wrong, then everything, all creation, is gone. The Church is not willing to take that big of a risk with God’s creation. Why is your government willing to flip all the cards?”
“Frank, I can’t answer that. But my friend, my boss, Hiccock, he is as good a man as I have ever met. I don’t think he’d walk us all off a cliff to oblivion. I know he would seek every assurance that each step was safe.”
“Joey, your man Hiccock may be a virtuous and inscrutable man, but in the end he is just a man. Fallible and unaware of God’s plan, as are we all. And the same is true of whomever he would get these assurances from. Joey, your greatest military commanders, all the armies and planes and bombs you could ever amass, can be wiped out by one tsunami. An earthquake can render a nuclear plant a radioactive catastrophe. All of the accomplishments of man pale in comparison to God’s power and that which he gave to the earth, the planets and the universe.”