Chapter Five
Joey Palumbo didn’t like off the record meetings. They ran against his Quantico cut, by-the-book, grain. His reluctance to meet with Agent Burrell, “out of the house,” was hard to hide as she approached the bench in the park located at the beginning of Madison Avenue in Manhattan.
“Thanks for coming, Mr. Palumbo.”
It still stung that he’d lost the SAC salutation ahead of his name. “No problem, Special Agent Burrell.”
“Brooke, please.”
“Brooke. So what’s on your mind?”
“Aliz Berniham.”
“Nice job processing him. That was a career-making collar if there ever was one.”
“NYPD SWAT did the hard cheese. Your guy Hiccock’s magic network zipped the I.D.s in record time. I just mopped up.”
“Still, it goes on your dance card.”
“I’ve been dancing with the good Sheik, and I got a bad feeling.”
“Did you report this?”
“I don’t report feelings because, being FFBI, they still don’t rise to the same level of male intuition. “
“So then unofficially give me the Female FBI intuition.”
“Something big is in play… I don’t know what… I just know that this creep knows that another shoe is going to drop and drop big.”
“How or what can SCIAD do to help you?”
“I didn’t want to meet with you because of SCIAD, sir.”
That surprised Joey.
“I wanted to talk with you because you were a good agent. How can I stop whatever this is that I think is going on?”
“He’s been in ‘iso,’ right?”
“From the moment he came conscious, it’s been FBI only.”
“So he couldn’t have any current info.”
“Exactly, so this must be a long range plan.”
“Like 9-11!” Joey said.
“That’s my fear.”
“But, Brooke, you stopped him and his plot, which at the end of the day could have killed 80 to 100 million Americans. That isn’t chopped liver. That was a big shoe, too! Maybe the one and only, not a pair.”
“See, that’s part of my… Okay, let’s say you were him, the mastermind of the biggest bio-plot ever, and it failed like it did. You would think that was it; the big wad had just got shot. Wouldn’t you be defeated, introspective, hell, angry! Yet …”
“Your other shoe feeling?”
“See why I didn’t want to send this up the chain?”
“It could just be him in denial?”
“He’s too cool. Too smart.”
“Yeah, we forget that despite the popular opinion, most of these terrorists are college-educated, most with degrees, and all middle-to-upper class.”
“This guy talks like he has two degrees in science, but we can’t track him back further than 15 years.”
“Can you work him?”
“Not in this environment. The director is yielding to public pressure, so the Sheik has had uninterrupted sleep at night, in climate control comfort, without any discomfort caused by his detainment. He is allowed to pray five times a day and he has weekly, monitored visits with a holy man.”
“So you have no interrogation leverage?”
“None. That’s why I have been flat out straight with him on how his life can get even better.”
“Get better? What’s the death toll estimate at, right now? 26,000 additional deaths?” Joey curtailed his instinct to slam down on the park bench with his fist.
“Around that number. Thousands needlessly killed just because this asshole decides to infect America.”
“And because those deaths are statistically within the range of possible deaths from influenza, a really bad influenza, there isn’t the same hatred of this bag of excrement that there would be if he poisoned the water supply of a small town, or blew up 80 airliners to reach 26,000 dead.” Joey was getting less objective and more agitated as he focused on the kid glove, politically correct, religiously sensitive handling of this mass murdering scumbag.
“So he gets the royal treatment, while his ‘comrades in alms’ don’t think twice about cutting off Daniel Pearl’s head. Makes me wanna go in there and introduce him to flesh-eating bacteria. Slow, flesh-eating bacteria.”
In a way, she stole Joey’s thunder and rage, and he took on the role of objective mentor. He looked at the woman agent, who appeared not much older than a teenager, and as American as apple pie. ‘Corn Flake!’ That’s what the guys in the Bronx would call a person from Iowa or the midwest, a corn flake. Then he remembered this one had frosted a terrorist in a parking lot in New Jersey on the way to foiling a chemical attack on the New York area that would have brought unimaginable death. This was one tough corn flake and if her sixth sense was tingling, there was probably something to it.
“Whoa. Agent Burrell, we’re the good guys remember?”
“He just…”
Then Joey saw a flash of something he missed before, subtle and quickly dissolved, but there nonetheless. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”
As she looked at him, Joey could see the two opposing forces waging battle in her head. The deep breath she then took was the surrender flag of one side. “He scares the bejesus out of me, sir.”
“You are in fear for your safety?”
“Not just me, although yes, me too, but he thinks… no, strike that, he knows, he’s getting out. He doesn’t have to play ball with me or give up any info. He just has to wait it out because one day he won’t be there.”
“He’s manacled, right?”
“24/7 and anchored at night and at meals.”
“Ten bucks!”
“What?”
“Go to the bank; get a roll of quarters…” What Joey then described was in no agent’s field manual ever printed by the FBI.
Chapter Six
In late December 1968, twenty-five people attended the traditional Christmas dinner in Kasiko’s apartment in Jackson Heights. Peter noticed a shelf above the fireplace where there were more than 40 finely etched and brilliantly colored eggs. All beautifully displayed on gold stands. Of the people there, many of the men were scientists. Peter actually recognized many of them from TV shows on Channel 13 and the Sunday morning shows that featured scientists who talked about everything Sputnik, Gemini, Teflon, and beyond. The men were very engaging; most spoke with thick foreign accents, but Peter was able to have deep discussions with most of them. They spoke of things that Peter had never heard of, Global Warming, Nanotechnology, Large Scale Integration, Cold Fusion, and Supercomputing. None of which at the time could be read about or was even mentioned in Scientific American. When Peter left, he felt he had met some really smart guys. What he didn’t know was they had all agreed later, in a small impromptu meeting, that they had met a really smart kid. So Kasiko got their permission to bring the kid into the fold. His first assignment would come Saturday night.
Before “Saturday Night Live” began its reign, NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza was deader than a doornail on a Saturday night. In fact, aside from master control and a few videotape guys, the news was the only department with even half a staff. After the torrent of activity getting the “Weekend Huntley Brinkley Report” on the air at 6:30 (it aired off tape in New York at 7:00 p.m.) things settled down to a constant drip of non-events. Every 30 minutes or so, Peter, often working alone on weekends, would make the rounds in the room and spike copy. Spiking was the process of distributing the five impact copies of teletype paper from each newswire machine to the various on-air talent, producers, writers, or directors whose names were above spikes running all the way around the room. During the day the spikes were cleaned every 15 minutes or so. But on weekends, only the news manager, domestic and international film desks, and a few local writers across the hall doing the “11th Hour New York” local news came to gather their copy. So once every thirty minutes was all it took to do a fine job keeping up with the slow moving stories.