Wednesday's Child (18 page)

The Israeli embassy acted with dispatch.  Saturday morning, Carlton Manzone had breakfast at a Washington hotel with an Israeli cultural liaison who verified every point in Rod’s account.  The issue was resolved by noon. 

Rod proved correct.  Unless Mossad killed the Hamas agent in cold blood, they were in a sticky situation holding him captive.  Turning him over to us was a win for both sides, and it helped establish Rod as someone William could work with in the future.  A kinder, gentler Rod Burdak went home to Gayle and his kids. 

The incident caused me to drastically revise my opinion of him.  He might be dour and secretive, but I couldn’t help admiring him.  William had obviously reacted the same way, instinctively wanting him on our side.

WEEK 4

29.

Ilene, Jerry, and I worked out a way to document everything that happened as a result of my day-switching.  Each week, on my Thursday evening, Jerry and Ilene would record the day’s news from media outlets and the Internet, and add personal notes of their own.  They’d store everything on a flash drive which I would carry with me when I dropped back to Wednesday. I asked Jerry to add encrypted items that only had meaning for him that he’d find when we compared notes on Friday.

Contrasting what we recorded on my Thursday with the state of the world on Friday would tell me whether my actions on Wednesday changed things significantly. I also hoped that seeing how Ilene’s interactions with me changed her Thursday would ease the strain on her, but there was no guarantee of that. I counted on only two things: amassing evidence to prove that I was living days out of order and getting better at predicting which events I could influence and which ones I couldn’t. 

Except for the fact that it could manipulate the space-time continuum, we knew nothing about the powerful entity that Ilene, partly as a joke, and partly because naming it made it less terrifying, had called the Übermensch.  I understood, now, that the Übermensch intended for me to alter some events that had already occurred. The implications of that were enormous; I feared that I would unknowingly cause a catastrophe downstream in time.

On Friday, August 1
st
, I made a list of differences between my July 31
st
and everyone else’s.  I didn’t think living Thursday before Wednesday had significantly affected the outcome of my visit to APL.  There was nothing in the media on Friday that reflected my actions on Wednesday, but their effects might not show up for a while.  The possibility that Karminian might change his mind about talking, Henry White’s investigation, and my involvement with Rod all had significant potential to impact future events.  Speaking of Rod, he went back to doing what he’d always done, except that, unknown to Gayle, he and I now had an open line of communication.

The most open-ended event arising out of last week’s day-switching was my role in the death of one of the terrorists.  I couldn’t imagine the conversation William intended to have with me, but the more important unknown was the FBI investigation.  I convinced William to let me try to work it out with Henry White.

I felt a strong connection with Henry, a near-compulsion to engage with him again.  With the media scenting blood over the Laurel killings, he’d be working with his team in the Baltimore Field Office on Saturday. When I called his cell phone, he actually sounded pleased to hear my voice.

“How’s the investigation going?” I asked, knowing full well that it wasn’t.

“The most promising lead so far is what you got from Karminian.  We matched the Arabic handwriting to a ninety percent certainty with a person of interest high on our watch list.  He was a suspect anyway, but now we can connect him directly to the dead Arabs. 

“The shooters are another matter.  Forensics came up empty except for the Walther slug.”

“If you ask me,” I offered, “tracing the dead guys’ connections is more important than finding out who killed them.”

“I agree, but I can’t just bag the investigation.  The
Post
would love that.”

“I might be able to help keep them off your back if you’re interested.”

“I’m all ears.”

I didn’t like manipulating him, but there was something to be said for approaching a delicate subject the right way.  I proposed a joint investigation, suggesting that we had sources he didn’t have access to, and it had to stay that way for security reasons.  I hate that bullshit, but it comes in handy sometimes.

“Suppose you worked on tracing the victims’ connection to the isotopes we’re searching for, and let us go after the shooters.  That way, you can pass the buck to us when the reporters come after you about the killings, and you can focus on what’s really important – stopping the terrorists from killing people and creating chaos.”

Henry liked the idea.  He thanked me.  “I think my Director’ll buy it.

I told him, between us, that I’d keep him up to date on our side of things, though I might have to keep certain details, like the names of the shooters, confidential.  He said I was welcome to come back down to his territory and work with him if he found anything worth pursuing.  It couldn’t have worked out better; I couldn’t have explained impulses like the one driving me to connect with Henry, but as long as they worked out, I wouldn’t tinker with success.

Henry called back later in the day to say the arrangement was a go, and I phoned William with the news.  His fire had cooled, no doubt helped by what he saw as the continuation of my winning streak.  Since yesterday, a potentially nasty mess had turned into a coup, with both Mossad and the FBI developing leads on the issue that mattered most to him. 

“So you and I are okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, but why do I have the feeling that you’re crawling further and further out on a limb and it could break off any minute?”

“Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.  I won’t embarrass you.”

I didn’t admit that in my weaker moments I had similar thoughts as the need to continue being proactive nagged at me, pointing straight at Henry.  It wasn’t logical, just another of those gut feelings that I’d decided to follow wherever they took me.

Sunday I called Henry on a secure line. It would have been easy to believe some irresistible force meant for us to work together, but I wasn’t quite there yet.

“I thought I’d hear from you again,” he said. 

“I was thinking about what we said, yesterday.”  I suddenly felt stuck.  What could I say that wouldn’t convince him I was crazy?  “I’d like to propose a working arrangement, but it has to be just between us.”

“I think I can live with that.  Working with you’s been interesting, so far.”

I couldn’t help smiling.  It was William all over again.  No one wanted to jinx my recent success with too many questions.

“I’m glad you feel that way. I have a confidential source of information that’s so reliable, I’ve never regretted acting on it. But for this to work you’ll have to take a lot on faith. 

“Okay, I have sources I can’t compromise too.  How would you involve me?”

“I sometimes learn things that demand quick responses, the kind I need help with.  Now that it’s clear that Washington terrorist cells are involved, I need someone I can count on in your area.  I’d like that person to be you, but I don’t want to put you in situations that would be indefensible to your boss.  I’m not always big on following procedure.”

Henry didn’t answer right away.  “What are we talkin’ about here?  You’re not gonna put my pension in jeopardy, are you?”

“Not intentionally,” I chuckled. “As long as success and my luck hold and I make my Agency look good, they go along with my methods without demanding explanations.  I’d need your people to do the same.”

Henry was intrigued.  He said he could give me a better answer if he knew more.  How much could I tell him?

“Usually, it’ll involve preventing something from happening, like interdicting bad guys before they accomplish their objective.”

“Aaahhhh.”  Henry’s sigh was like a dominant chord.  He wanted more.

“I’ll give you an example, but you can’t repeat this.  William would tear my head off,” which made Henry laugh out loud.  “I had a tip about the attack on the ship in New York harbor the night before it happened.  William was planning to meet it at the dock and board it, which might have been disastrous for my unit.  I called him late that night to warn him off, which put him in a tough spot, because switching gears involved several agencies.  He had to decide fast and be ready to demobilize everyone quickly on my say-so alone.”

“He must really trust you.”

“I guess he does.  The thing is, the same thing might happen with you.  What if I called out of the blue and said I needed you to bring a squad somewhere and meet me in an hour?  You’d know the objective, but you’d have to take all the rest on faith.  The only thing you can count on for sure is that if I call, it’ll be urgent.  There probably won’t be time to discuss it.”

“It sounds like you’re expecting something specific.”

I hated to say it, but, “Right now it’s just a hunch, but if I didn’t think this conversation was necessary, I wouldn’t have called.  There isn’t any more I can tell you, now.”

“I guess that’ll have to do, then,” he said.  “Call if you need me.  I’ll do what I can.”

I laid the phone down, amazed at myself.  I’d called Henry on a blind impulse.  The whole time we were talking, I’d felt like I was listening to someone else say those things.

30.

I’d promised I would share everything with Ilene from now on, but there would always be things I couldn’t or shouldn’t say.  It wasn’t security, I’d made up my mind about that.  William or someone else might decide to prosecute me for violating any number of federal statutes one day, but those laws hadn’t been written with the Übermensch in mind.  I was concerned about avoiding telling Ilene things that would only make her life more difficult.  Moreover, she seemed content just to have me home in one piece.  She was clearly of two minds about how many details she wanted.   

When she asked about my surveillance at the motel, I told her we’d identified the shooter, but the Agency had thrown a security blanket over his identity.  I don’t know what I’d have done if she’d pressed me further – I couldn’t mention anything about Rod to either her or Gayle.

Things were quiet for a few days.  William had set his investigators on the trail of the two men Peter Dignan told me about, and we fed Henry’s team the identity of the terrorist handler Rod identified before the shootings.  Henry knew not to ask.

I surprised Jim and Gayle by showing up in the office on Monday, and again on Tuesday.  There was plenty to keep me busy, but I needed to talk to Gayle.  I drifted into her office and shut the door.

“How was your weekend?”

“Good.  Very good.”  She had a dreamy, schoolgirl look on her face.

“I’m happy for you, Gayle.  That’s quite a turnaround from a few weeks ago.  You’re even okay with the cast?”

She said that was fine, then seemed at a loss for words.  “I’m still embarrassed about pouring my heart out to you, only to have Rod say what he did last weekend.” 

I nodded.  “I admit, I was a little skeptical, but it sounds like everything’s going well.”

“Better than I could have dreamed.  He’s a different person.  It’s like he was living in a nightmare and he suddenly woke up.  The man I married is back.”  We talked some more, and I did some dancing when she asked what I’d been doing. 

“You’re starting to sound like Rod,” she joked.  “Why do the men in my life have so many secrets?”

I left her office feeling good and re-engaged with my overflowing inbox. By Tuesday afternoon, I was bursting with anticipation about what might happen on Wednesday and Thursday. 

***

My life was strange enough without introducing something new, but there was another unlikely aspect I’d been ignoring.  Not only were my reversed days always Wednesday and Thursday, but each week’s critical event horizon seemed focused on those two days as well.

I’d told Jerry my reversed days would be the same ones each week because having to guess which days they would be could only reduce my effectiveness in performing whatever tasks my supposed Übermensch had in mind for me.  But that would only work if the events I was supposed to influence occurred on Wednesdays and Thursdays, too.  Could my puppet master also control that? If he could cause a sequence of events involving countless people all over the world to occur when he wanted them to, what did he need me for?

If making things turn out a certain way was all that mattered, he didn’t, but it was about more than that, like God telling Abraham he would spare Sodom if ten honest men could be found.  He could have simply relented and spared the city, but there would be no lesson in that.  Human catastrophe on a global scale had to be averted by human intervention, or the result would be meaningless.  The great Ü might rig the deck or tilt the playing field – he undoubtedly had an endless supply of clichés – but the act that saved us had to be performed by one of us. I almost expected to be struck by lightning for presuming to know his mind that way.

Either that was the play in which I had been cast or I was totally delusional, and I’d already ruled out the latter.  I was starting to feel glib about having worked all that out when Ilene brought me back to Earth.

“What are you doing out here by yourself?  It’s getting chilly.”

She was right.  The sun had set, and a stiff breeze announced an impending thunderstorm.  From the feel of the wind, hail would be pounding my deck any minute.

“Lost in thought,” I said, following her inside.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?  It’s nine-thirty on Tuesday and you’re about to skip days again.  Any idea what’s going to happen?”

“Not a clue.  I haven’t talked to William since Sunday.”

“Maybe it’ll just be a normal week, regardless of the order in which you live it.”

“Maybe.  It feels so anti-climactic.”

“I’m tired,” she said, with an unsympathetic frown.  “Let’s go to bed.”

“That sounds like a fine idea.  Even better, it means I’ll wake up next to you tomorrow morning, my tomorrow, anyway…”

“…while I won’t know what I’ll wake up to until it happens.”

Nearly an hour later, with Ilene drifting off to sleep in my arms, I heard my cell phone.  I crawled out of bed and saw, “Henry White” on the phone’s screen. 

“Hey, Henry, what’s up?” I said, walking into the guest bedroom and closing the door.

“I don’t know, Dylan, but it seemed worth a call.  Some of the guys we regularly track have dropped out of sight.  It may be nothing, maybe they’re all at a retreat in the woods celebrating Osama’s birthday.  But all the chatter we normally hear has dried up.  It feels wrong, like the ocean receding ahead of a tsunami.”  I knew what he meant.  Things had been eerily calm since Friday.  And it was Tuesday night.

“I thought your highly reliable source might have heard something,” Henry said.

“I’ll get right on it,” I said, “Call you first thing in the morning.  And thanks, Henry.  I’m glad you called.”

“You wanted to work together, and I never look a gift horse in the mouth.  By the way, don’t worry about waiting till a decent hour. I don’t expect to get much sleep tonight.”

We said good-bye, and I sat on the bed in the dark, amazed at how things had changed in just a few weeks.  It no longer seemed strange that I’d had a sudden impulse to call Henry on Sunday.  Henry’s call felt perfectly natural.  Of course he was going to call, and of course he would call on Tuesday night.

***

I woke up next to Ilene, Thursday morning, but not quite as I’d expected.  She sat cross-legged on the bed, bent forward from the waist, her chin propped on the heels of her hands, her arms like struts rising out of the soft flesh on the insides of her knees. Her body was rigid, her eyes slitted.

“Hey,” I said softly, not wanting to startle her.  “What’s going on?”

She turned her head toward me and slowly unwound to stretch out beside me, her arms draped loosely around my neck.  Despite her obvious intensity she wasn’t violently emotional like the morning after she picked me up at Saint Vincent’s. 

“They hit Washington yesterday about nine in the morning,” she said, softly.  “It’s all there in the
Times
.” 

She needed me to hold her, so I did.  I didn’t feel any particular urgency.  It was six a.m. on Thursday.  I had all day to study the situation, and Ilene was obviously way ahead of me.  I could spare her a few minutes.

She sat up so quickly I thought something had happened, but it was just Ilene snapping into action.  She looked down at me with a fearsome expression on her face.

“Those fuckers!  It’s like nine-eleven.  Remember the anger, the frustration, the rage we felt?  Remember how we wanted to hit back, every one of us?”

“I remember,” I said, gently.  Best to let her get out what she’d been stewing over.

“God help me, Dylan, if one of those bastards were here in front of me I’d pull the trigger myself.  And I take back what I said last week.  You do whatever you need to to stop them.”

Ilene was far too wound up for a long discourse, so I grabbed the front page of the
Times
:

Washington, DC // At 9:00 am, Wednesday, just past the peak of the morning rush hour, six men dressed in radiation hazard suits ran through Union Station throwing smoke bombs laced with radioactive Cesium salt.  Authorities estimated that there were upwards of two thousand commuters and AMTRAK passengers in the terminal at the time of the attack.  Police and fire department HAZMAT teams equipped with radiation detectors quickly identified the threat, cordoned off contaminated areas and removed exposed civilians to hurriedly erected emergency medical response tents.

Because of the low explosive yield of the smoke bombs, few casualties were directly attributed to the explosions, though at last count, thirty-nine people were in critical condition, as a result of inhaling smoke and concentrations of radioactive particles. At least thirty people were seriously injured when masses of people fled in panic.

According to DC Fire Chief Thomas Robbins, dense, acrid smoke reduced visibility to near zero in most of the station, “causing those trying to flee to become disoriented and enabling the perpetrators to escape within seconds of discharging their smoke bombs.”

Civil defense and medical authorities on the scene warn that thousands of people may have been exposed to highly radioactive Cesium particles.  Some may exhibit symptoms immediately, while others may carry greatly magnified risks for cancer…

The article covered five columns, but I’d read enough.  Ilene had been right.  Like nine-eleven, the attack had been diabolically simple, requiring only the money to purchase the bombs and the isotopes and the kind of brazen, reckless disregard for life typical of religious fanatics, although this time, the attackers had eschewed suicide in favor of radiation suits.  The idea of exploding fireballs might fit their twisted view of martyred death, but radiation poisoning was something else.

I ran through the TV news channels trawling for anything new.  Except for the fact that casualty estimates rose hourly, it was typical news media coverage: repetitious file footage, scenes of chaos and confusion replayed
ad nauseum
, rampant speculation by talking heads desperate to sound well-informed, and not much information.

The good news was that the quick reaction teams were well trained and equipped.  Since the Metropolitan Police and most of the more than thirty federal police forces in Washington were equipped with radiation detectors, the first responders knew what they were dealing with almost immediately.  They understood, too, that aerosol contamination would be limited to the areas where the smoke bombs were set off.  The radioactive cesium particles in the smoke were too heavy to spread very far on air currents.  The downside was that virtually every surface in the station within roughly fifty yards of where one of the bombs had ignited – floors, walls, pillars, countertops, chairs, tables – was likely to be dangerously radioactive.

It was almost the ideal scenario if you were a fan of terrorism.  One of the busiest passenger terminals in the country would be shut down indefinitely.  Rail traffic was disrupted into and out of the nation’s capital, and thousands of people would experience the aftereffects of the radiation, for decades, in the form of greatly heightened cancer rates.  Everyone remembered Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and Americans already had an exaggerated fear of radiation hazards, as evidenced by the never-ending citizen opposition to nuclear power plants.

Union Station could be decontaminated.  It would probably be declared safe within a couple of months.  But few people would ever use it again without wondering if they were being irradiated every time they walked to catch their trains.

“You’re taking this very calmly,” I said to Ilene, whose earlier rage seemed to have evaporated.

“Appearances can deceive,” she grimaced.

My mind raced, looking for a way to get a handle on the attack.  I probably shouldn’t have let myself be diverted – maybe I needed a little time to assimilate it – but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that it had happened on a Wednesday. The Übermensch’s doing?  This kind of attack would be most effective when the station was crowded with commuters.  In Washington, where a large percentage of workers telecommuted part of the week or worked flexible schedules, that eliminated Mondays and Fridays.  To maximize the impact of the attack the terrorists would avoid striking too close to a weekend, which left Tuesday and Wednesday as likely target days.  Nine-eleven, I recalled, had been a Tuesday. 

Maybe the Übermensch had nothing to do with the attack happening on Wednesday. Maybe it would rain locusts tonight. And maybe the irresistible impulse that made me call Henry on Sunday had been nothing more than a hunch. I was thinking about how to broach that to Ilene, when she beat me to it.

“I guess you’ll be going to Washington, later, so you can be there on your Wednesday morning,” she said.  I looked at her, too surprised to respond.

“Don’t look so shocked.  Despite your constant assertions about free will, we both know you have no choice.  You may have had a head start on me, but I get what this is about, and I intend to be part of whatever you do, from now on.”

“Nothing could please me more.  It’ll be good to think this through with you.”

“Not just me.  I was thinking about it while you were sleeping.  We need to call Jerry.  It’s even more important, now, that we document how this craziness works.”

Part of Ilene’s motivation was to increase the chance that I’d survive Wednesday. The more we thought things through and considered alternatives, the less I’d be at risk.