When Brooke arrived at the office she received the usual razzing any cop who gets a little ink suffers from the rank and file. “Hey, Ring-o!” “Gun Slinger,” “Wonder Woman” and more were all respectfully thrown at her as she made her way to the facilities manager’s office. On a folding table in the office across from the man’s desk was a pile of mail in forty stacks.
Brooke was dumbstruck, “What the…?”
“It started showing up yesterday, all addressed to you,” Walter Helfer said.
Brooke started picking up the rubber-banded stacks and flicking the edges with her thumb flipping through the return addresses. Most were from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, some from as far away as Ohio. One caught her eye; it was from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She pulled it from the stack and sat in the chair opposite Helfer’s desk. She took his letter opener from his desk to open the handwritten letter. The English was poor but the emotion was clear. It was from the mother of a man who was killed. She was desperate and reached out to the ‘hero woman policeman of America.’ The authorities in her country gave her no information, no solace and no comfort in the death of her beloved son, Abrim. Her heartbreak was that they accused her son of being less than virtuous and having died in sin. Brooke immediately felt much sympathy for this poor mother who, it seemed, was fighting the Royal Family and government in an effort to resurrect her son’s name in the eyes of the followers of Allah. Brooke sighed audibly.
“Tough one?” Helfer asked.
“Saudi Arabia! How shitty must things be over there that his poor woman reaches out to me?”
“How shitty are things here in the U.S. that all these people reached out to you, period!”
Brooke looked at the stacks of envelopes. “Good point! Mind if I go through some of these here?”
“Just so long as you either throw them out or take ’em with you when you leave. I want ’em out of here,” Helfer said, as he brought a wastebasket next to Brooke.
Two hours later there were two filled and one half-filled blue recycling barrels next to Brooke, and she was down to her last stack. She had placed nine letters aside, either because they were heartbreakingly eloquent or she thought she’d snoop around a little. For instance, there was a woman who wrote saying that her daughter had been killed by her husband’s bookie as a way to get him to repay a gambling debt. Another sought out Brooke to help track family heirlooms that disappeared from a bonded warehouse; the heirlooms were gold coins squirreled away by her grandfather right before the government recalled all the coins in the 30s. The now rare coins were worth millions and she suspected the manager of the warehouse. Brooke didn’t know what she would do with these letters. Maybe just write back saying she was retired or maybe offer some advice, but that would probably make her somehow legally responsible, so maybe not. Maybe with these she could get a P.I. license and make some cash before Mush got back.
Brooke got up to take a bathroom break when her cell phone rang. It was Joey from Paris.
The Boston Seven, as Bill had come to refer to them, were proving to be an isolated group who had two major connections that rattled Bill and the higher-ups in both Justice and Homeland Security. One was a direct pipeline to the militant wing of the Irish Republican Army in America. That was where the surface-to-air shoulder-launched missile had come from. ICE and ATF were raiding and shutting down that arm right now, in raids on docks and airports, and a few diplomats were being uninvited by the State Department to stay in America. The second element, and by far the more worrisome to Bill and the president, was the Knights of the Sepulchre members to whom the Boston Seven had arms-length access. It was they who had forwarded to the seven the instantaneous information on the meeting Bill had with the Landau at Camp David.
What kept the president and all his best people awake every night was that there were spies deep within the American government at the most sensitive levels. Although not Russian, Chinese or Iranian, they were spies who had decided there was a loyalty that surpassed their oath to the United States. Bill knew that all spies share this suborned agenda; however, these individuals were doing it out of religious obedience. The devastating impact of this subtle difference was that a communist spy in the government would never take May fifth, the Russian Day of Independence, off, lest they show their true colors. Yet employees of the United States government openly celebrated Christmas and Easter and Passover and Ramadan. Deciding who was a religious spy was a hornet’s nest of conflicting national security and civil liberties tenets. For that reason, the president quickly passed a finding, a secret law, allowing extreme measures to be taken in ferreting out the Knights. Mitchell knew that this kind of treason threatened the sovereignty of the United States at a cardiovascular level compromising the very heart of government. He was out for blood. He didn’t have to wait long.
Bill started reading the morning briefing Cheryl had prepared back in Washington on the developments overnight in the Boston Seven investigation. The FBI had broken the IRA connection by arresting the second-level operatives in five states. The FBI, the Diplomatic Security Service, the Secret Service and the CIA were circling around three suspects who might be members of the Knights. Arrests were imminent, one inside the White House itself. Bill knew that one would personally hurt James Mitchell the most. Being the first independent to hold office, and owing no patronage to either party to hand out jobs, he had hand-picked every one of the heads in the administration. This would strike him at his very core. The report was interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
The janitor of the Paris Embassy entered, “Monsieur, here is the hammer you requested.”
“Thank you, er…”
“Henri.”
“Yes, Henri, thanks.” Bill unlocked his desk drawer and placed the hammer in it.
The report riled up anger in Bill as he read it. He wanted summary public execution in Yankee Stadium for the person whose treason had led to the death of Professor Landau, and to announce to the world, You can’t fuck with America, whether you are a radical Muslim or devoted Catholic. Bill didn’t connect his personal desire for revenge with the fact that he and his son came inches away from being killed by that same treasonous act.
Bill’s aide knocked on his door, “Sir, the Papal Nuncio is here.”
“Send him in. And no calls.” Bill closed the briefing file and put it in his top desk drawer. He stood and shook the hand of the de facto ambassador of one billion Catholics around the world, but principally of the one head Catholic seated in the Holy City in Rome.
“Your Eminence, thank you for coming all this way.” Bill gestured to the chair next to the couch, figuring it would be easier for the septuagenarian to sit in than the couch, which swallowed up anyone who sunk into it.
“Coming to Paris is never a burden for the former Cardinal of France,” he said with an old man’s grunt as he sat.
Bill chided himself for already slipping on a diplomatic banana peel for not knowing that, or knowing the man for that matter. The bishop had been brought up from the French ‘farm team.’ France being the birthplace of diplomacy, he must have been a shoe-in for the Vatican’s chief political officer.
“Will your ambassador be joining us?” the Prince of the Church asked.
“No, no, Your Eminence. I bring a personal message from the president, and he asked that I share it only with you. No disrespect to the American ambassador, but when you hear this sentiment you’ll understand why it was better left to me, a non-diplomat.”