To do that would be a gross disservice to those you have sworn to protect.”
Ray just put his head in his hands. The committee members all stopped in their tracks for a moment to listen to Bill. They then resumed their shuffling of papers and exiting, as if he said nothing.
“What are they doing? Didn’t they hear me?”
“Bill you are such a fucking amateur. All you did was waste their time. The committee is adjourned, meaning they have ceased hearing anything as a body. You spoke to no one.”
“No one, huh?” Bill raised his voice again. “Listen, you bastards! You are weak, spineless, and impotent. You are hiding behind procedure. Well, I’m not. Any one of you thinks you are man enough to face me, I’ll be right outside, you bunch of hypocritical, ideological wimps. Outside!”
“Will the sergeant of arms remove Mr. Hiccock from the room,” was all the chairman said as he leaned into the microphone clutching his folio close to his chest. Two security guards winged Hiccock.
“Okay boys, let’s get me out of here,” he said to them.
Ray Reynolds was beet red and out the door. In the hall, Hiccock turned to the guards. “Thanks, fellas. Sorry I got upset back there.”
As Bill smoothed his ruffled jacket, Congressman Jacob Edelstein, from the committee, approached Bill.
“You got a big mouth, Mr. Hiccock.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Bill said getting in his face.
“Try to help.”
The response stole all of Bill’s bluster. “Oh. Well. Okay then, let’s hear it.”
“War Powers Act.”
“I’m listening.”
“Section 214 and 104 are contradictory and could open a crack that allows the President to suspend various legalities. As long as he notifies Congress within two weeks.”
“Wait, are you saying?”
“Goodbye, Mr. Hiccock. Not all of us are wimps by the way.” And he was off.
“You want me to invoke War Powers?”
“Yes, Mr. President. It’s the only way to protect Bridgestone and Ross on domestic soil.”
“For only two weeks. Then you rescind the finding and it never leaves this room,” Reynolds explained sliding the finding under the President’s hands for signature. “The Congressman’s idea is a little like a two-cushion shot, but our counsel says there’s enough teeth in it or enough ambiguity in the language to fight off any Congressional inquiry.”
“Unless they kill a few people and get caught,” Mitchell said.
“Forget kill; all they have to do is muss a Muslim’s hair in front of a
“Why not bring in FBI and Justice if you are so sure about your intel, Bill?”
“Sir, I am afraid that then we will be talking ‘cats out of the bag’ in a big way and we’d be mucking up B amp;R’s speed with procedure. But of course, any actionable intelligence will certainly be shared, sir.”
“You realize I am giving these two men more power than any citizen or police force ever had on American soil?”
“Sir, these terrorists could achieve what the entire U.S.S.R. couldn’t in 50 years of the Cold War. We need to even the playing field, get some advantage over the terrorists. Or at least not be caught dead playing by the rules against guys who aren’t.”
“Lousy argument, Bill. No bad guys play by the rules, yet we never did anything like this before.”
“So why did you just sign it?”
“Because in this case the rules may take us into sudden death overtime. Just tell me you trust these two with the keys to the kingdom, Bill.”
“These are my guys, Mr. President.”
“Good enough for me, Bill.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Janice was sure that somewhere in hell, a man was slow roasting on a turning spit for creating “fashion.” It had to be a man because no woman would wish this on her own kind. From the grotesque malformations of their pedal extremities — forcing those appendages into size 8 pointy-toed pumps — to the spectrum of carcinogens absorbed into the brain through the scalp for the sake of keeping up with this year’s “in” hair color. So it was, that for Janice, what most women would welcome as a day of beauty, was to her a day of torture and discomfort, although she passed on the dye job because she was pregnant. The necessary small talk and opinions that historically accompanied a gathering of females in these settings was markedly different in tone due to recent events. “Circular Error Probable,” a term once only uttered by nuclear scientists, was now bandied about by beauticians and manicurists replacing themes like shopping, families, extensions, dermabrasion, mud wrap, facials, and Botox.
Most amazing was the nuclear gossip. “Did you know a little radiation could clear your complexion?” “If it’s a plutonium-based bomb then the residual radiation is more conducive to multiple orgasms?”
Janice shuddered at the way people were making peace with the seemingly inevitable detonation of the suitcase bomb. Every niche market theologian or practitioner of the New Age had creatively woven the nuclear calamity into their spiels, as if they always knew it and had spoke of it for years. And now the cathedrals of the inane, the very essence of talk for talk’s sake, the spa/salon dialogue, was newly polluted with bomb management phraseology.
Janice viewed this phenomenon from a level of global consciousness. Since there was only one bomb, the devastation would localize in one place. Wherever that locale was, once exploded, the rest of the globe had to have a way to categorize, sort, and finally set the event on some mental shelf. On that shelf would also go the remnants of the random terror generated prior to the detonation: namely, that it could have exploded, literally, in anyone’s backyard.
During her nail wrap, after her mud pack and facial, she overheard two women scaring one another to death. Most of what they spoke so confidently of was merely parroting the overblown rhetoric of various talk shows. One notion, however, sent a chill up Janice’s spine. The idea that, within a twenty-mile radius of a nuclear blast, serious genetic damage and miscarriages could result from the first millionth of a second’s worth of exposure to a radioactive wave front. Buildings and other manmade structures being porous to this initial surge or radiological pulse meant there was no place to hide. As Janice’s nails were drying, a plan formulated in her mind.
Everyone on her floor was surprised to see Janice on her day off. She went right into her office and called the COO of the hospital. Ten minutes later, she was being driven by her Secret Service agent, Brenda, to an address in Baltimore.
“Peter, after we finish, I want you to meet Kronos,” Bill said across the table in the Map Room as Joey sat beside him. “The two of you were separated at birth.”
“Billy, thank you for believing me. I thought you were one of those Trilateral Commission guys or one of their puppets.”
“Peter, I don’t know what you’re talking about but I don’t want to hear any conspiracy theories from this point forward. Only fact, pal. Now tell me what you think is going on.”
“It’s a conspiracy.”
“Damn it, Pete! I am not fooling around.”
“Okay, I’ll bite, Pete,” Joey said. “What’s the conspiracy?”
“Don’t encourage him!” Bill protested as he threw down his pencil.
“There is a key code that Ensiling created to detangle an algorithm that deals with the…you know, “
