“How far along had the project gotten?” Brooke asked the head of the project.
“Not far, mademoiselle; we had a working prototype of the propulsion organ, but the chemicals necessary were in violation of the green oath Disney signed with the U. N. agency that gives us a green rating worldwide.”
Brooke noted that Yaleman, his American counterpart, omitted the part about the U.N. ban. “So they never went into production?”
“No. Also, it was too expensive for the budget of the rides. However, there was rumor of a live-action sequel to be made. Had we manufactured only two of the units for the movie, we could have amortized the initial cost, but the second film was never made. The Frenchman’s eyes momentarily dropped to her legs.
“When did you discover the documents were missing?” Brooke asked as she tugged the hem of her skirt down toward her knees.
“Only when your office called my chief and we dug into the files at your suggestion. Until then, we thought it was just a case of hackers trying to get to our gaming software, or at least, that’s how they made it look.”
“So they covered their tracks?”
“Very sophisticated, and now we know it had to be a job-inside, as you say.”
“How do you know it was an inside job?”
“Our firewall!”
“So you’re saying they had to be physically in this facility to — what? Plug into your network, with, like a wire or something?”
“Yes. From outside, not likely.”
“With what was taken, could someone have made a full production version?”
“Yes, it was all there.”
“In your opinion, could someone do this?”
“The hardest part would be the electro-reactive fluid procurement.”
Brooke checked her notes. “And that’s what they were cooking in East Hampton?”
Even though he was an ocean away in Washington, D.C., Joey Palumbo had real juice at Interpol, France. As soon as Brooke entered the International Criminal Police Organization’s Paris office, she was immediately ushered to a secure teleconference room and Joey was already on the monitor from Washington. Brooke slid into her seat and her image appeared in a multi-partitioned screen.
On the screen in front of her, Joey smiled and asked, “How they treating you, Brooke?”
“Fine, sir.”
“What have you found out?”
“We definitely have a potential here for the plans to have found their way into enemy hands. What we need to do on a worldwide basis is look for any thefts, purchases or intel on the various forms of…” she glanced down at her notes, “…electro-static, electro-dynamic, electro-reactive or electro-kinetic fluids. I’ve uploaded all the keywords to our Washington Bureau, and Interpol is distributing them to the rest of the jurisdictions. Also, Bill’s science network may be of use here.”
“Very good, Agent Burrell. Anything else?”
“There was a red flag in the file of the French Disney designer; we’re running that down now.”
“Okay, let me know if that comes to anything.”
“Aye, sir!”
“Bonsoir, agent…”
“Adieu, boss.”
V. BAITING THE HOOK
“Ewwww! I am going back up to the house and leave you two he-men to the great outdoors,” Janice said as she got up from the dock and brushed off the seat of her jeans.
“Okay fella, it’s you and me left to provide for the women folk,” Bill said to his progeny as the little boy giggled at the wiggly worm dancing on the end of the hook.
It was one of those moments that define a man’s life: the transmission of values from one generation to the next. Although in this case Bill intellectually knew it was a warm-up for the same scene to be repeated when little Richie reached five and would be able to appreciate it more, still it was instinctively emanating from him and he couldn’t control it if he wanted to.
The reel whizzed as he gave the line a little whip into the water. Richie watched as the hook and sinker disappeared into the murky depths of the lake Bill had swum in since he was six years old. Bill had many great memories here at the summer cabin his dad and uncle used to own together, till Uncle Bill died in `78.
With Richie nestled under his arm, his legs dangling off the dock, he bobbed his pole gently. Richie’s hair had the smell of baby shampoo, and Bill found himself breathing deeper than usual. Richie’s hand grabbed the reel and started cranking it, more to hear the sound, Bill guessed, than to reel in an imagined fish. At intervals, Bill released the lock and let it free-spin back down, then clicked it on again so Richie could continue ratcheting. The pole dipped and Bill instinctively pulled up. The reel started to click and let line out. “Richie, you caught a fish, son. You caught a fish!” Bill put his hand over his son’s and reeled the fish in. Soon a silvery flittering image appeared near the surface. He unhooked his arm from around Richie and, keeping the rod between them, coaxed the boy to turn it more. “C’mon Richie, reel it in, keep turning boy.” At that point little Richie started laughing and stopped turning the reel. That made Bill laugh, “C’mon Rich, reel it in, do like daddy.” Click, click, click went the reel, but little Richie was laughing too hard.
Bill lifted the line out of the water and a found a silver blue pike female hooked at the end. “Whoa! Looky there Rich… a fish! You caught a big fish!”
The little boy looked at his daddy, then at the fish and back to his daddy and said, “Fishy.”
Bill was flabbergasted. “What did you say? What is this?”
The little boy with his mother’s big beautiful eyes just looked at his daddy and banged on the reel. The fish worked itself free and swam off.
“What was that? What did you just catch?” Bill tried to elicit the word again, but all the little boy did was laugh. Bill picked him up and went running back to the house.
“Janice! Jaaaaanice — Janice!” Bill called out as the screen door to the cabin slammed behind them.
“What? What happened — did you catch a big fish?” Janice asked as she came from the kitchen in her mommy voice that Bill had not known she possessed until Richie emerged on the scene.
“Janice, he said it.”
“Said what?” she said, looking at her son as if marveling at him for the first time.
“He said, ‘fishy’!”
“You did! You caught a fishy with Daddy?”
“Come on Richie, tell Mommy what you caught.”
It went on like that for two minutes until they both realized it was approaching child abuse.
“Well, I’ll finish making lunch. Why don’t you wash the worm goo off both your hands.” Janice went back to the kitchen.
“Come on, champ, let’s go wash up,” Bill said as he hefted the boy up and carried him to the bathroom.
“Fishy.”
“Jaaaaaanice!”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Joey said. “I can understand piracy on the high seas or even going up against the U.S. Navy, but the bad guys must have balls to bring on the disdain of Greenpeace and the greenies who use ecological blackmail to knuckle companies into bleeding money to save the whales. Hey, that’s funny!”
“Joey, you’ve got to work on your political skills. You sound so…retro,” Bill observed as he took back Brooke’s briefing paper from him.
“C’mon, you don’t see the irony in a bunch of save-the-whale types being responsible for creating the killer whale of all time?”
“How do you make that connection?”
“First this movie, Ishmael’s Quest, was the continuing stories of Moby Dick, but in this version Moby turns into a good guy or good whale… not a dick!”