The Eighth Day (10 page)

JOEY PALUMBO HAD BEEN the coolest guy on Gunhill Road. He was part bad boy, part Franciscan monk. He managed the perfect balance between good and mischievous. If you were a young male, you could do worse than trying to be like Joey. To the surprise of no one, Joey became an FBI agent. He was really the perfect cut for one. He had smarts, kept his wits, and made everyone feel as if he had everything under control. He must have had a canary, Hiccock thought, when the director of the FBI called him to Washington, D.C., from his field office in San Francisco just to discuss his old friend, Bill from the Bronx, whom he hadn’t seen in eight years.

Hiccock sat at the bar in “The Prime Rib” on K Street. It was a Georgetown approximation of a place on Webster Avenue where they used to throw back a few and add two-inch, medium-rare increments to their LDL cholesterol count, way before anybody was counting. The waitress brought him his Dewar’s and soda, snapping Hiccock out of his thoughts.

“What, no egg cream? Who friggin’ ordered that?”

Hiccock made a 90-degree turn on the rotating bar stool to see Special Agent in Charge Joseph Palumbo standing behind him. Hiccock got up and, unexpectedly for both of them, gave his old schoolyard buddy a hug. Joey still wore cologne.

They ordered Joey a drink and took a table in the corner. As they sat, Hiccock almost forgot that Joey was here in an official capacity. Hiccock noticed a whole size difference in Joey’s face; not fat, but more filled out from the skinny Italian kid who could take a broomstick and smack a “Spaldeen” over three sewers with ease. Hiccock wondered what game they were going to play tonight. He chided himself for not having brought a Spalding rubber ball with him just for laughs.

“So how ya been, Billy Boy?” Joey said with a warm smile.

“I can’t complain.”

“Understatement of the century. You’ve come a long way from Bing’s.”

That was a name Bill hadn’t heard in a while. Bing’s Carousel was a candy store on Burke Avenue. It became the official headquarters of the Red Wings, a two-hand-touch football team that played its home games on the cracked cement of the big schoolyard on Bronxwood Avenue. Because of the concrete, the player who had the ball wasn’t tackled. Of course, the young stallions of the Bronx were not delicate in their application of the two-hand touch and turned it into various forms of two-hand crunch, two-hand crack, and two-hand smash. The results usually ended up like a tackle. For years the only equipment the players employed was a football shirt bought from Gunhill Sporting Supply. They asked Joe Mastruzzi’s mother to sew on the letters to save the 25-cents-a-letter sew-on charge. Eventually shoulder pads were used, but not by the real tough, real stupid guys. Bill’s basic athletic ability was hard crafted on the cold, sometimes snow-covered concrete “field” with spray-painted hash marks. When he got to Spellman High School and tried out for varsity, he was already the most experienced quarterback, including seniors, in the New York High School Football League.

“Football was your game and I hit a pretty mean stickball, but let me show you the future MVP, Gold Glove, batting ‘champeen’ of all time.” Joey reached into his wallet and pulled out a picture of Joseph Palumbo Jr. in a Bay Area Little League outfit, a small aluminum Louisville Slugger propped over his right shoulder. The kid had the same look his father had in the old days, confident and cocky.

“Geez, Joey, he’s got your ugly mug and probably your gift for swinging at the high ones.” Hiccock smiled to show Joey he was kidding. “He’s a great-looking kid. You must be out of your mind with all that Italian macho pride shit.”

“Better that than the WASP, ice-water shit you got flowing through your veins.”

“Irish and English ya Dago bastard!” Hiccock accentuated the familiar ethnic slur by flicking his right thumb under his top teeth, then adding Joey’s mom’s favorite exclamation “Fa!”

“You fucking hard-on, it’s good to see ya,” Joey said, his right cheek tightening as he half-smiled in that cool, I am straight but
I still missed ya, way
.

“You, too, Joey, you too.”

“So I figured your big mouth got you into this?”

“Geez, if I only kept it shut, I probably wouldn’t be seeing you for another few years,” Bill said, offering an opening for Joey to get down to business. But Joey decided not to take it. Instead he laughed. Bill looked over at him, “What?”

Joey sat up straight in his chair. Affecting a proper British accent emulating Sister Eugenia, he said, “I was just thinking. What are the odds of two ruffians from the Bronx winding up working for Uncle Sam?” Bill smiled as he recognized the voice of the primary authority figure in black and white from their Catholic past.

“So how’d you wind up at the White House?” Joey asked as he tore off a piece of bread.

“The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology had asked me to take part in a project. They were trying to get funding for the Super Collider-Accelerator Ring. The one in Texas.”

“Oh, not the one on the Grand Concourse?” Joey jibbed.

“Anyway, I got to brief some people from the administration and I guess they liked my no-nonsense straightforward way of taking complicated, technological subjects and making them wholly unfathomable and totally boring.”

“You were always good at curing insomnia when you got into one of your smart guy rants.”

“So since I wasn’t a Democrat or a Republican, Mitchell’s people nominated me for SciAd. I think there was one other guy who actually wanted the job, but he had a tendency to wear fruit on his head. Ergo, they reluctantly settled on me.”

“I dunno, I always figured you for NASA or some nuclear shit.”

“Not on your fucking life. I had the chance to work with a guy I met back in college. Think-tank stuff on nuclear weapons and research. But I didn’t warm up to the idea of doing clean little calculations on messy mega-death yields.”

“Parnes?”

“Yeah, how’d you know that?” Then it hit him. “You dickhead! You read my file. I’ve got an FBI file?”

“One of our primary functions is the vetting of anyone working for the higher end of government. I actually recertified this Parnes guy two years ago.”

“Recertified?”

“Yeah, he changed jobs and we just made sure he was still a good security risk.”

“Yeah? What’s he doing now?”

“Classified, buddy. Couldn’t tell ya even if I knew.”

“Anyway, so now I get to affect the national science agenda, make sure important work isn’t ignored and that science in the schools doesn’t go the way of religion, music, and art.”

“God forbid. So how’d ya get on the FBI’s shit list?”

“Don’t you have that in your stinking file?”

“I’m trained as a field agent. I only trust reports when and if I can’t investigate myself.”

“Aw geez, Joey, I not only stuck my foot in my mouth, I managed to get it in up to my knee.”

A passing waiter gave Joey pause, then he asked, “Bill, I read what you said to the president, but I want to know
why
you said it?”

“I said it because I saw it happening all over again.”

“What?” Joey asked.

“Us, putting on the blinders. There were no less than three warnings leading up to the September 11th attacks. The first one was in the court papers of the Blind Sheik case back in ’95. You guys came a cat’s whisker away from nailing him for, and I quote the Justice Department indictment, ‘planning to hijack and crash a
civilian airliner
into CIA headquarters.’ Then there was the Al-Qaeda hijacking of the Air France A320 Airbus in Algiers that was foiled when the pilot realized they were going to fly the plane, loaded with fuel, into the Eiffel Tower. So he faked an emergency and landed in Marseilles.”

“Our hostage and rescue teams study the French paratrooper’s retaking of that airbus on the tarmac. It was a textbook example of overcoming terrorists who hold a plane.”

“That’s what gave that bastard Bin Laden the idea that his boys needed to learn to fly. The day after the dead hijackers were dragged from that plane onto the tarmac in Marseilles, Mohamed Atta, the asshole who led the attack, enrolled in flight school.”

“Hindsight is 20-20.”

“Awww bullshit! Bureaucratic insulation and turf wars blinded us.”

“Whoa! I thought you were a science guy, where’d all this political venom come from?”

“That’s the point, Joey boy. It ain’t political. It’s our lives we are talking here, our security. As far as science goes, the whole key is the exchange of ideas and experimental results good or bad. All the advances came from standing on the shoulders of scientists and philosophers who came before. If science were run like the FBI, the Secret Service, and the NSA, we’d still be treating disease with leeches and taking six months to cross the ocean.”

Bill paused and saw Joey appraising him. He wondered what he thought. “The final unbelievably stupid lapse of governmental oversight came in July 2001, two months prior to the attack. No less an event than Italy closing their airspace went unreported to anyone! Egyptian intelligence caught wind of a plot to hijack a civilian airliner and crash it into the G-8 summit in Genoa, killing President Bush and the other world leaders attending that little shindig.”

“Hey, that was under Secret Service’s authority.”

“That’s my fucking point! Did the Secret Service, the FBI, or the NSA ever tell the fucking FAA? You think those pilots in the airliners that hit the towers and the Pentagon would have gone along with a hijacking, thinking it was only a political exercise, if one asshole from the government had told the FAA, ‘Hey, the next hijacking might be with the intent to use your plane as a missile.’ Those pilots would have flipped the plane the moment anyone got up to rush the cockpit, whose doors, by the way, would have already been fortified. On top of this, if the public had been informed, those passengers on either of those flights would have stopped things from getting that far—like those brave souls on Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. Do you realize that the window of opportunity to hijack a plane and use it as a flying bomb lasted less than an hour? That was the time it took for the Flight 93 passengers to find out about what happened to the World Trade Center and say, ‘Let’s roll.’”

“Are you laying September 11th at the FBI’s feet?”

“The FBI and the rest of the agencies laid the welcome mat at the terrorists’ feet by keeping their tight-assed, ‘agency first,’ bullheaded, bullshit attitudes.”

“Come on, Bill, don’t hold back. Tell me what you really think!”

“Sorry, but that whole thing gets me started.”

“So now I see why Tate hates your guts.”

Hiccock nodded. “What about you, do you hate me?”

“Me? Nah. Look, even though I’m an agent for the FBI, I get your point. I’m not supposed to, but I do. Personally, I think you’re chasing fairy tales, but hey, it’s a free country.”

“So what’s the message you’re supposed to deliver to your old pal here, Joey?” Hiccock figured he might as well save his friend some anguish. He expected Joey to ask him to go away, to drop the whole thing.

“Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you. And if it happens I want you to promise me you’ll notify the bureau.”

“Gee, Joey, I appreciate your position and all, and I really would like to help out the old bureau there, but I got two problems with this.”
Let’s see who can fake sincere better.

“Well, let’s see if we can work those out.”

“One, your boss is, like you used to say, a
strunz-a-menz
. And two, I work directly for, and report directly to, the president. Period. You got a problem with that, take it up with the Commander in Chief.” Having put the last nail in that coffin, Hiccock sat back and hoped it was over. It wasn’t.

“Then can I ask you something as an old friend from the neighborhood?”

Hiccock picked up his right index finger and started wagging it at him. “Don’t start with that …”

“C’mon, from one Boulevard Blade to another.” He then gave the secret club gesture, making a fist but with the thumb between the index and middle fingers. Hiccock could not believe Joey was actually invoking schoolyard ethics but his face softened. “Here’s my card, Bill. I’m the head of the San Francisco office now, so call me personally, please. Despite my asshole political boss, us worker bees actually do know what we’re doing, you know.”

Hiccock was about to decline, but then flashed on the fact that with his three science degrees, he didn’t know diddly-squat when it came to investigations. A lifeline to an experienced agent could be a good thing. “Deal.”

Joey smiled. “So I heard you got married … to a doctor, no less.” Hiccock took a deep swallow from his drink and proceeded to relate the ballad of Billy and the head doctor.

Three drinks later, there was a lull in the conversation. Joey fingered the edge of his glass as Bill swirled the last bit of liquor around the ice cubes.

“You’re right, you know,” Joey said. “We really blew it.”

“Forget the fact that on September 10, 2001, the whole country cared more about some congressman’s zipper than Bin Laden’s attack on the U.S.S.
Cole
. We stopped appreciating how good we had it and that there was someone out there who wanted to take it all away from us.”

“But we were supposed to be the guardians, the ones on watch while others slept. Hell, we got seduced too.”

“Bullshit, you got declawed, de-balled, and defanged by politically correct, political bullshit that took the war out of warrior, the police out of policeman, and the secret out of secret agent.”

“So you really think you’ll get these fuckers, Bill?”

“
Think
is the operative word. I’ll leave the guns and the bombs to you guys. I just want to make sure they don’t get away with this because I
didn’t
think, didn’t consider every possibility.”

“So is that how a brain guy fights crime?”

“Nope, that’s how a dumb guy tries to get out of something he has no right being in the middle of in the first place.”

Joey’s FBI sedan, probably borrowed right out of the Washington D.C. motor pool, was pulled around first. Bill was waiting for the valet to fetch his car when his cell phone rang.