Heaven, INC: Chapter 7: GIDEON POPE

Civilization is the lamb’s skin
in which barbarism masquerades.
— THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

NORCESTOR AVENUE,
MARKET PARK
7:35 AM PDT

THE POPE’S FIRST APARTMENT had been no more than a couple miles from Millard Fillmore junior high, one Margie chose in particular because an upstairs unit was worth ten dollars more while Pope was away on a WestPac. It was safer with just her and little Jake, and there was the added bonus that the apartment’s large windows faced east. Margie most of all believed babies should wake to the light of a new day, and Jake was indeed born to an eastern sun at Mercy Hospital, one month to the day before Pope’s return. It was striking just how drastically the neighborhood had declined in those 40 years, gone from a little enclave of multi-colored middle-class to today and the visible rot wrought by drugs, poverty and decay. It occurred to Pope how lucky had been Sarah’s birth that forced them to buy a house they could barely afford but would eventually grow into and thereby saved his kids from ever having to attend Millard Fillmore Junior High.


It was with vision of the past and concerns over the future, and what Mills had told them, that they walked the few blocks to their new posting, allowing Al plenty of time to vent a few thoughts out of earshot of Deputy Inspector Rose . . .


“Norcestor and Imperial? Norcestor and Imperial. How in the fuck could our fishing trip be postponed . . . maybe even canceled . . . so we can babysit Norcestor and goddamned Imperial? And, to top it off, you’re not even in charge, no, because some fresh out of college DNS punk is calling the shots. Goddamnit, Gideon, it just isn’t right.”


During the short walk, Pope tried tuning Al and his opinions out to consider what they had been told by Mills regarding the Russians . . .


“We coulda got the airport, for chrissake, the harbor, hell, I’d even take TJ if I had my Pepto, but Norcestor and Imperial? The devil wouldn’t be caught dead in a hell-hole like Norcestor and Imperial.”


. . . and the covert DNS operation to roll up the Russian kidnaping team without creating a lot of publicity a week before the big summit. And without notifying Pope or anyone else in the FBI’s San Diego office.


Mills had described one member as Sergei Zukov, a former Lieutenant Colonel in Soviet Special Forces, and some sort of bad-ass pilot of any fixed-wing aircraft or helicopter. One slide even showed Zukov outfitted in race-wear, taken three years ago at Le Mans.



Zukov’s partner was Ramona Alexovna Romanokova, ex-Russian army and, judging by the slides of her vacationing on the Black Sea a couple years ago, the most beautiful Colonel that Pope had ever seen. As for her vacation buddy, Vassily Chelnikov, he controlled an oil company, Russia’s biggest bank, two car manufacturers, more munitions factories than the army and a majority of the country’s media. According to Chief Deputy Inspector Mills, Chelnikov had bankrolled the kidnappers, as well as the executioners who took out the research team in the Brazilian Highlands, and Mills claimed it was unclear how much the Mexican government was involved. Pope’s mission at Norcestor and Imperial, in addition to any clues to the whereabouts of Christian Ducroix or his body, would be to locate and quarantine anyone exposed to the virus under the guise of a witness round-up. It was essentially a lie, but lately, most everything the FBI did seemed to revolve around a lie.


POPE WAS SECOND GENERATION FBI, not through his father but through his uncle, Henry, who was one of Hoover’s favorites and an untouchable until dying of pancreatic cancer in ‘42. Gideon’s father was a farmer, growing soybeans and wheat, mostly, on a thousand acres of good land in west Kansas near the Oklahoma border. Though college educated, Nelson Pope was a man of the land, a man who’s heart was filled with the good dark soil of America. Things were never easy as a farmer— there were times they lived on nothing but potatoes and beans for months on end, until the milk check came in— but the Popes had a good life. Gideon was the youngest boy, his brother, Oliver, was oldest, and he had three sisters in between, Ellen, Faith and Iris. Gideon’s mother named him such because he was born in a motel room in Abilene, Gideon breaking his water while she was reading Psalms. Born prematurely, the doctor said it was a miracle he’d lived, but Angela had just smiled, convinced it was never in doubt because the Lord knew all well in advance. They were good Methodists, going to church on Sundays and church dances sometimes on Fridays. It was a modest life of family, farm and church, and Gideon was a happy child. In the fall of 1956, on the night of Ike’s re-election, with the grass of the west Kansas prairie turned brown and brittle, things changed for Gideon.


Oliver, tall and strong-willed, was a star linebacker for the Kansas Jayhawks and Gideon’s idol. Sometimes, after games, he’d take Gideon to after-parties at the fraternity houses— for which, if Angela had ever found out, Oliver would have had hell to pay— introducing Gideon as his kid brother, the kid who was gonna grow up to be the “best damn receiver the Jayhawks ever had and help us win another national championship.” On that Tuesday night, a few days before the big game against Nebraska, a lightning storm brewed up somewhere out of Texas, an uncommonly powerful storm full of anger and malevolence. Oliver, returning to campus from the farm, stopped to help a woman change a tire. He was stooped over in the rain, turning a lug when a tractor-trailer, loaded down with old tires, took a direct lightning strike, the tractor-trailer going over and spilling tires in the road. A single threadbare Goodyear white-wall broke free and with unholy, unerring accuracy clipped Oliver in the back of his buzz-cut head, just over the up-turned collar of his lettermen’s jacket. At the hospital, Oliver Pope was pronounced dead on arrival.



The tight-knit Pope family was devastated, but none more than Gideon, consumed by grief, seemingly unable to overcome the loss of his brother, his hero and his best friend. For months inconsolable, he wandered through the fields in a daze, or would lay in bed at night, staring at the bed across the room from which Oliver had launched balled-up socks around the room for Gideon to catch. When spring came, when the time came to plant the fields, he remained distant and cold to the family, Gradually, youth and the rhythm and cadence of the land’s ritual, the planting and harvesting, healed Gideon, until a couple years had passed and it came time for he himself to attend Ulysses High. He joined the football team, switching to linebacker, and was given Oliver’s old number 28. On the JV team, he set a school record for tackles in a season and was poised to start on varsity the following year and the memory of Oliver’s loss, though still strong, instead of an errant thread hanging free, was tucked into the quilt of Gideon’s life.
Times were always tough on the farm, and 1958 was the worst in a long line of drought, the fields of wheat rendered sickly and small. As ususal, they got by on Angela’s potato and bean-diet, until that summer, when Gideon went with his father to get the milk check and deposit it, to pay down the farm’s debt and have a little left over; this was a big day around the Pope household, signifying the end, for a time, of potatoes and beans because, after cashing the check, Nelson Pope would pick up a big roast, a monster, which Angela would cook up with carrots and onions and cloves, inviting family and friends to share the bounty. Afterwards, there’d be a sing-along followed by fresh ice-cream made right there in the kitchen; Gideon loved helping make ice-cream, his part being to sit on the ice-cream maker as his father ground the ice and salt and cream.


On the day Gideon and his father went to the bank to deposit the milk check, a man was hell-bent on stealing the bank’s money. They were walking in and the bank-robber was backing out— menacing the tellers and customers with a blue-steel automatic— and Nelson, catching the man unaware, wrestled him to the ground. But the man broke free and in the tussle, the gun discharged and Nelson, the milk check still in the hip pocket of his overalls, fell dead to the ground. The bank-robber had turned to Gideon— not yet 15 and down the two most important men in his life— and all that was visible over the bandana were the robber’s eyes.


“Sorry, kid,” the bank-robber said, before racing to his car. The man, named Horace ‘Dirty Socks’ Hicks, was caught three days later, shot dead after washing his socks in the sink.
Once more, grief descended upon the Pope farm in west Kansas, just north of the Oklahoma border. Angela retired behind the bible, claiming it was somehow part of God’s plan. Ellen returned home from nursing school in Kansas City, to help with the hurt and to help with the farm, but neither could be helped. Angela, deciding it was pointless to struggle to keep the debt-ridden farm until the bank got everything, got what she could; the sale of the thousand acres and tractor, all that Gideon’s father had earned in a life-time of hard work, earned them enough for gas to go cross-country, to Los Angeles, and three months rent in an apartment in Whittier. Angela, Faith and Iris got jobs at the Coca-Cola plant, working long days. On Friday nights, Angela she and Gideon’s sisters went to the Methodist dances, and sometimes, when he wasn’t drinking beers with the Gonzalez brothers, Gideon went with them. Adjusting to LA wasn’t easy— even in the late-Fifties, it was a big city, and much bigger than anything in west Kansas— but Gideon managed to do well in school and even to play football for Whittier High. He wore number 28 and made flying tackles that earned him write-ups in the Herald-Examiner and the Times and gained him all-city honors while attracting notice from college recruiters. Scholarship offers came from Oregon, Ohio State and Nebraska and others, but none from his beloved Kansas Jayhawks, who were extraordinarily deep at linebacker that year, nor from UCLA or USC, who simply were not interested. With nothing close to his mom and sisters, with nothing at KU, and with no intention of ever having anything to do with the ‘Huskers, Pope turned his focus to the east. The Naval Academy had noticed his crisp tackles and high grades. At his mother’s urging, Gideon accepted the offer to play at Annapolis.


He was never what you’d call the star there— that designation belonged to a man by the name of Staubach— but he did well; his key tackle against Army helped seal the grudge match of ‘67. After tours aboard the carriers Independence and Ticonderoga, Pope left the Navy in ‘74 to a bittersweet homecoming: Mom had died of breast cancer in ‘69, Faith of the same in ‘70 and Iris in an automobile crash on Christmas day 1973, less than a mile from Pope and Margie’s tiny San Pedro apartment.


Following the Navy, Pope applied to the FBI and was quickly accepted, and after Quantico, was assigned to the San Francisco field office, finding himself shortly thereafter present at the arrest of Patty Hearst and her SLA captors.


Over the years, he and Margie were moved all over the country, as the Bureau is wont to do, spending time in Tacoma, Jacksonville, Boston and Santa Fe, before being posted to the San Diego Field office as SAC, through a kind of luck unheard of in the FBI, he’d been here ever since.