Nick was caught off guard. Brooke had turned her body edgeways to him with her arm extended right to his head. “Don’t flinch or I’ll splatter your brains all over the counter.”
Nick said, “Okay. Okay.”
“You’re not dropping the gun! Drop it. Drop it now or you’ll never walk out of here.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“Fuck the ‘okay.’ Drop the fucking gun, asshole, or I’ll cap your ass!”
That last bit of street lingo registered as the sound of the gun hitting the floor released Brooke’s squeeze on the trigger she was a millisecond away from pulling.
“Kick it away, then get face down on the floor. Down!”
Nick looked around, saw he had no options, and one knee at a time got down and then extended his hands and lay down. Immediately, he felt the weight of Brooke’s foot on his neck.
“Somebody call the cops and get me something to tie this jerk up with.”
As Brooke waited, she noticed something odd. The employees started removing the gems from the display cases and sliding the trays into a huge safe. In thirty seconds, they had all the cases empty and the jewels in the safe. Then the oldest guy there came over to pick up the bag that Nick had been holding.
“Leave those. They’re evidence and part of a crime scene,” she ordered, standing with one foot on the perp’s neck and her gun pointed at his head.
The man looked up at her and obediently nodded as he went back around to his desk in the back room. Brooke had to ask, “Why did you all lock up the stones?”
The old man came back out. “There will be police and others here and sometimes they take souvenirs.” He could see the look on Brooke’s face as he added with a shrug of his shoulder, “What can I tell you, it happens!”
Twenty minutes later, major case squad detectives and beat cops were crowded into the small showroom with the multi-million-dollar inventory. Detective Crenshaw was trying to understand what had gone down.
“Okay, so you gain entry and he goes for the bag, presumably for the diamonds, and you got a gun and you get the drop on him? Who are you, Annie Oakley?”
“FBI, Special Agent Brooke Burrell, retired.”
“No shit! At what? Half pay?” Pay rates and benefits was the currency of cop talk.
Brooke was no different. “Yeah, took the package at twenty-two years in, plus special rate last two years, attached to — a special unit.” Brooke almost said, ‘attached to the White House.’
“Sweet. Yeah, I was going to pull a federal job, but the wife had the first kid, so moving out of my parents’ old paid-for place in Queens and paying D.C. rent wasn’t in the cards.”
“I hear ya,” Brooke said.
“So, you ever see this skell before?”
“No. Like I told the scene commander, I saw the blood on the door of the truck, followed the guy up here, and then kind of improvised from there.”
“Look, as a professional courtesy, if you want to come down to the squad later, I’ll take your statement.”
“Thanks, Detective, cause I was on my way to find a ring for my b — my friend. That was weird; is Mush my boyfriend?
“Did you say ring?” Mr. Abramowitz came from the back. “What kind ring?”
“Well, it’s a Navy anchor with diamonds.” Brooke made a whirly motion around her finger.
“How about an engagement ring?” Abramowitz said as if he were dangling it in front of his favorite niece.
“That could happen.”
“You saved my business and who knows, maybe a life or two. When you get engaged, the ring is on me!”
“Really, that’s such a nice thing to do.”
“What, like stopping a robbery is chopped liver? You’ll pick a big beautiful stone, and I’ll get my best designer to make a setting you’ll plotz from.”
“I am ready to plotz then, Mr. Abramowitz.”
Detective Crenshaw smiled at Brooke, “Cool!”
Even in Paris, a passerby can easily catch the headlines from the New York Post, especially at the Embassy. The paper is on the desktops of several people who receive the tabloid as one of thirty different U.S. newspapers the ambassador ordered his staff to read every day in order to not lose touch with the tone in America. So Joey was stopped in his tracks when he saw on the cover of the three-day old paper a picture of Brooke next to the headline, ‘Familiar Ring’ Midtown Jewel Heist Foiled by Alert Ex-FBI Agent. Joey had the paper in Bill’s hands in twenty seconds.
“I guess you can’t keep a good cop down, Joey.”
“I am going to call her later.”
“Tell her I said, ‘good job.’ Now about the Interpol…”
Joey interrupted, “Bill, I was thinking of saying more than that.”
“Like what?”
“Like, right now, her Navy boy is somewhere under the North Pole for a few months and obviously she’s bored,” he tapped the paper in Bill’s hand, “so I figured we give the bad guys in New York a break and get her back here on temporary assignment.”
“And what would that assignment be, temporarily?”
“I could use Brooke in Geneva with me. Together we could do the whole job and keep it contained — away from the locals and Interpol.”
“So Brooke gives us operational security without having to be spread too thin? But what if she’s already picking out the china patterns?”
“I bet they have great tableware in Switzerland!”
“It’s worth a shot; make the call,” Bill said. Then he couldn’t help but turn to the sports section to read the hometown view on the Giants’ prospects this year.
XXIV. .00000000000000000000000000000001
Raffey had not heard from the kidnappers in three days, although he always felt he was being watched. He knew his phones were monitored, and his house was probably under the eye of the monsters. He never knew when he was being followed. He had simply stood next to someone on a tram and almost caused Kirsi to lose her eyes. But here in the lab on his workstation, he was free to upload the files he had prepared to stop the madmen in their insane plan. He opened the Unix-compiled roulette program and when it loaded he typed the word ‘Simulation’ at the password prompt. Although the graphics were rudimentary, the collider and the rings were schematically displayed. Like a marble in a roulette wheel, a small dot started spinning around the collider rings on the screen. At the lower right was a time sample number that incremented in powers of ten. That number rose as the speed of the dot orbiting the ring accelerated. The faster the particle went, the higher the sample rate, or as Raffey thought of it, the slice of time narrowed, so that the speed of the dot on the screen remained somewhat the same because the time sample was getting smaller and smaller as the particle accelerated. When the number reached thirty-two, the dot seemed to almost freeze, as it now took only a fraction of a pico-second for the dot to make the seventeen-mile journey; one revolution took only 10–32 of a second. Written as a numeral, that’s thirty-one zeros after a decimal point before you get to a one. At 10–32, Raffey’s narrow slice of time displayed something akin to a slow-motion replay of an event happening at 99.9999 percent of the speed of light.
Only nothing was really happening. The program fooled the giant multi-million dollar, million-ton machine into believing that a sub-atomic particle was actually in its ring. All the ninety-three hundred magnets, sensors, and beam-benders believed this was a real experiment. Only Raffey knew this nuclear gun was loaded with a blank.
Fame is an interesting thing. Brooke recieved a call from her old office. They wanted her to come down and get her mail. She ignored the first call, figuring she’d stop by in a few days and get it. But the next call came from the facilities manager of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; she “needed to remove the mail now.”