“Wouldn’t mind some R amp;R here when this is over,” Bridgestone said as they crossed the palm-lined boulevard, headed for the Negresco.
In decent French, Ross asked the deskman at the front to see the manager. In less than a minute, an impeccably dressed man walked up to them.
Bridgestone held up a photo. The man’s eyes widened, then the sergeant said in Farsi, “Your office now!”
Without hesitation, the man led them to his office off the lobby. Bridge put the photo they had taken with a long lens earlier that morning of the manager dropping his kid off at school back in his pocket.
Once inside the office, Bridge continued speaking in Farsi to the man of Iranian decent who had lived in France for the past 15 years. “You will never see your daughter again if you lie to us. Do you understand?”
A sweat was building on the hairless top of the man’s head as he nervously nodded.
“You will never see your entire family again if you tell anyone we were here. Do you understand?”
Again, the man nodded.
Ross held up the only picture they had of Brodenchy, a.k.a. Jahim El Benhan. The man squinted, so Ross pushed it closer. “When was the last time you saw this man?”
“Two, maybe three weeks ago.”
“Who was he with?”
“Monsieur Rashani. He is a big client of the hotel.”
“What does Rashani do?”
“Cinema; he’s a producer.”
“Where can we find him?”
“He lives here, in Cannes.”
“I thought you said he was a hotel client?”
“Yes, he books the hotel for the festivals… for parties and premieres.”
Bridgestone threw a pad on the desk. “His address.”
The man looked up the address in his private, locked file box. He didn’t trust his personal list of clients to the computer, where others could gain the advantage that having this information would bring. He wrote down the information then, with an unsteady hand, offered it to Ross.
“We found you this morning. We can find you or any member of your family in 20 minutes. Don’t betray us. Forget we were ever here and little Shawra will live to see her next birthday.”
That these monsters knew the name of his daughter rattled the hotel manager to his core. Again, all he could do was nod. They left. He sat there shaking for a while.
Back in Washington, a file arrived by diplomatic courier. A member of the Israeli secret service, Mousad, acting at Joey’s request, and Joey acting from the information B amp; R obtained from the truck driver Jamal, had asked to be red flagged any police activity that had to do with trucks or transport in Israel and the greater Middle East. Joey read the file with extreme interest and decided to pick up the phone to call his old friend, Hiram.
Ever since the heart-to-heart in the President’s office, Bill was focusing on the man’s words “Close enough” and “the most dangerous idea.” What did that mean?
He sat back at his desk, put the basketball he retrieved on the blotter, and held up the orange. That was pretty much a good representation of the basketball “sun” to the orange “Earth.” He sat there and nothing came to him. He held up the Earth and cast a shadow on the ball. As he moved the orange, watching the shadow cross the larger ball, it hit him. He took a pen and drew, right on his desk blotter, an arc from the lamp. He then rolled the big ball over the arc. The shadow moved across the ball.
There it was: the dangerous part of the Jesus Factor.
?§?
Bill left a note on the bathroom mirror telling Janice that he had gone to the office in the middle of the night. Those Secret Service agents were good, he thought. Seeing the lights go on downstairs they got his car warmed up and ready to go.
At the White House entrance, he swiped his I.D., telling the sergeant at the desk to awaken Professor Li and get him to Bill’s office. On the way, he stopped by the storage closet and rolled out a white board.
By the time Li got to Bill’s office, Bill had already drawn orbits and planets on the board in different colors.
“What’s on your mind, Bill?”
“Phil, the Jesus Factor does not define a place on Earth. It’s extraterrestrial physics, meaning from a point other than Earth.”
Li caught on. “It’s a threshold point somewhere in a harmonic relationship to the sun!”
“Exactly. But is not a point — it’s a cusp, a distance. And that distance is the same all around the sun, creating a ring in space, a zone where celestial mechanics and nuclear physics nullify each other. Probably some interaction at the atomic level that resonates with the solar system level.”
“Both the atom and planetary system are similar with the solar being the macro of the atom.”
“Somehow, Blake Lathie unraveled a math system in his book that revealed the harmonics of the two systems.”
“The empirical data on the 107 A-bomb tests I have been accumulating can easily be cross-calibrated to solar positioning charts and pretty much define the cusp ring with 107 points.”
Bill stopped him. “Li, what must never be known is the following.” Bill grabbed his basketball. With a Sharpie, he drew “USA” on one side and “China/Russia” on the other. He then went up to the board and placed the ball on the red “nuclear cusp” ring. Bill then rotated the ball as he moved it around in an elliptical shape, which approximated the actual orbit of the Earth around the sun. The ball crossed and re-crossed the cusp line four times.
“Holy shit!” Li said.
“Yep. That’s the problem and the most dangerous idea on Earth.”
?§?
The address was on the Lerins Islands, an exclusive community 15 minutes from the hotel. It was like the Beverly Hills of Cannes. The home of Rashani rivaled any mogul’s home on Mulholland Drive. There was an electric fence and keypad arrangement. The place was quiet. They rang the bell. A woman, with an Iranian accent answered over the scratchy intercom.
“Two visitors for Mr. Rashani, please,” Bridgestone said in Farsi.
“He’s not here.”
“When will he be back?”
“He’s on a Hajj. Not for one more week.”
“Okay; we’ll call on him then. Thank you.”
“All right.”
As they walked away, Bridgestone said to Ross, “So if you were him, with all this, would you fly to Madinah commercial or on your own jet?”
“This guy’s got to have his own G4.”
Bill was in his office going over the speech he was scheduled to make in a few days to the Society of Chemical Engineers in New York. Cheryl was briefing his Secret Service detail on the itinerary, which was purposely not squelched. The President didn’t want to send the message that they were in a bunker mentality, and had been crystal clear when he ordered that all administration public activities not be affected by the loose nuke. Bill was right in the middle of rewriting a sentence about synthetic polymers and the tax incentive for creating them from recycled material when, thankfully, Joey came in smiling.
