Wednesday's Child (19 page)

Ilene was cruising now. “What are you going to do when you get there?  You can’t run around Washington crying wolf at the crack of dawn.  Who’d believe you?”

“Actually, you might be surprised.  Three weeks ago, I was the weak link on William’s team as far as anything but nuclear physics went. Now, he seems to accept everything I suggest, as though he’s afraid of jinxing my success.” 

“I don’t see how William’s irrational trust in you helps.  Are you going to call him at six in the morning and ask him to phone someone in Washington to vouch for your sixth sense?”

“Actually, it’s not quite that bad.  There’s something I haven’t told you.”

When she heard about my deal with Henry, her jaw dropped.  “Jesus, Dylan.  You mean he’s waiting for you to call and mobilize a strike force?  It’s almost like you knew.”

“I know.  It’s eerie.  I felt compelled to call him, but it’s not like I planned this in advance.  In retrospect, maybe I should have.  It wouldn’t have required a stroke of genius to anticipate something like this.”

“It never does until it happens,” Ilene said, but she was still focused on my deal with Henry.  “It’s almost too much of a coincidence that it came about by blind impulse, and just three days before this happened.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing.  I’m beginning to feel like a pawn in a game of titans.”

31.

“Did William try to reach me yesterday after the news broke?”

“He didn’t call here,” Ilene said, “but he wouldn’t.  He doesn’t know I have any idea what you’re doing.  Maybe there’s a message in your office voice mail.”

There wasn’t, and I didn’t know what to make of that.  It was consistent with what happened in previous weeks, but my perceptions had changed.  It might not be true that everyone forgot about me on my missing Wednesdays, say, if the intensity of our interaction and the urgency with which they needed me were especially high.  Wouldn’t William, in the midst of yesterday’s crisis, have wanted to reach me?

I intended to talk to him, today, one way or another.  Also Henry and Jerry.  I needed to penetrate the chaos surrounding Wednesday’s attack and reconstruct what happened precisely if I was to be successful when I reached Wednesday.  The fact that the news media seemed to have no new information didn’t mean no one did.

I reached William a little after eight, almost twenty-four hours after the terrorists struck.  As I’d expected, federal and local law enforcement had worked through the night gathering information, but no one was talking to the media.

“I’m going to Washington later today to work with Henry,” I told him, aware that a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have gone anywhere unless he sent me. 

William didn’t object, either to my decision or my having reached it without his input. “Everyone’s on high alert here, today, but if nothing else happens, you’ll do more good down there.  There’s a closed-circuit briefing at 9:30 in the media center.  I want you there.”

I said I’d be there and called Henry’s office.  From the sound of his voice I guessed he hadn’t gotten much sleep on either Tuesday or Wednesday night.  “I guess you were right,” I said.  “How are you holding up?”

“How do you think?  Between containment, guarding against more attacks, and trying to catch these bastards, we’re stretched pretty thin here.  It’s a disaster.”  I was thankful that he didn’t mention the help he hadn’t gotten from me on Wednesday morning. 

I felt for him, for the burden he bore.  I wished I could tell him I might be able to make it all disappear, but all I could offer was, “I’m planning to come down this afternoon to help.  Think about how you can make the best use of me and I’m yours for as long as you need me.”

Of course, that wasn’t true.  He’d have me for part of today, and if what I had in mind worked out, by Friday, he’d have no memory either of this conversation or the disaster he’d just described. 

“I’ll be glad to have you,” Henry said.  “People are being reassigned to help from all over, but I’ll keep you on my team.”

“Can one of your agents update me on the latest information when I get there?  I want to hit the ground running this evening.”

“I’ll do it myself.  Can you be here at six o’clock?”

***

The day was going to be tight, but I couldn’t leave for William’s briefing without spending a few minutes talking to Ilene.

“I have to meet William at 9:30,” I told her.  “I’ll be back about two, but I have to leave again at three to meet Henry.  I need you and Jerry to document everything from your points of view the way we discussed.  Store it all electronically and have it ready for me to take with me when I leave.  I don’t imagine there’s going to be much business as usual, today.”

“I already called Jerry.  He’s freed his calendar.  We’ll have the stuff ready for you when you get back.”

“You’re clear about what we’re trying to do?”

“I guess, but it blows my mind to think about it.  If you’re successful tomorrow, I mean Wednesday, all this will change.  It’ll probably be like last week when I had contradictory memories, with the replaced set fading away unless I fight to retain them.  I’m still not sure I believe it, but I wouldn’t have believed any of this a month ago.  If it works, we’ll meet with Jerry Friday morning to compare the world after you and Henry do your thing with this.” She indicated the
Times
. “And you’ll have proof of how your actions altered events.”

“I know it sounds insane.”

“It’s all on you now, Dylan.  I was watching the news while you were talking to William.  The saber rattling is starting.  It’s exactly what you were afraid of.  Nine senators introduced a resolution this morning to give the President the authority to order a nuclear strike against any nation or group found culpable in the attack on Union Station.  The President won’t comment, but you know he’s been itching for this kind of power.  It could really all spin out of control.

Ilene’s words caused a maelstrom of conflicting feelings in me.  I felt the nascent horror of everyone who lived through the Cold War. Starting with the Cuban Missile Crisis, any mishandled international confrontation could have triggered a chain of events leading to nuclear annihilation.  Until now, rational heads had always prevailed when we were on the brink.  But when one of the parties in the end game was hell-bent on martyrdom, all bets might be off.  The President had publicly said as much on many occasions.  “If martyrdom is what they want, the United States military will be happy to help them along to their final rewards.”

Barely submerging my horror was the conviction that I had the power to avert that.  As Ilene said, some all-powerful entity seemed to have laid it all on my shoulders.  But preventing what had apparently already happened might not be enough because going back to Wednesday and averting the attack would erase almost everyone’s knowledge of it.  For my actions to have lasting effect, there had to be a way to let people know how serious a bullet they’d dodged, maybe not everyone, but at least those in a position to do something about it.  Telling them what might have happened wasn’t nearly as effective as showing them what actually did happen in the reality Ilene and I were living today.  That’s what Ilene and Jerry would be working toward.

I only had a couple of hours with William and then the evening with Henry to come up with a plan for Wednesday morning, but the briefing was more than I could have hoped for.

As I’d anticipated, the Government knew a lot more than it had released to the media.  The secure, closed circuit video presentation filled a number of large display screens.  One showed a floor plan of Union Station, with entry and egress points clearly marked.  Like all urban rail stations, this one had an open design with wide walkways and lobby areas, intended to move thousands of people in and out quickly and efficiently. 

Three screens were divided into windows, each of which represented one of the station’s surveillance cameras.  Without the output from the cameras our task on Wednesday morning would have been an order of magnitude more difficult and far less likely to succeed.

The presentation I saw was the result of hours of painstaking work, examining video footage and backtracking through the frames containing the attackers until the moment they first appeared in the station.  While the smoke was infernally effective at limiting visibility and creating chaos on the main floor level – the upper level shops and restaurants were of little consequence, here – the surveillance cameras fared considerably better.  Even with the smoke at its worst, we observed six figures in white radiation suits moving quickly through the station, each following a well-planned and coordinated path.

The camera images were all still as we took our seats.  For those of us who found simultaneously keeping track of dozens of camera feeds daunting, when the presentation began, the screen depicting the station map turned into a stop motion display on which we could see the progress of all six men.

Most of the station’s security cameras monitored access to the AMTRAK tracks.  The public entrances to the station leading to shops, restaurants, and broad walkways, were no more secure than a shopping mall.

***

A purple truck belonging to a local catering company stops on the service road between the northwest wall of the station and First Street, NE, in front of an unsecured entrance. A short flight of stairs leads up to the main promenade. 

The truck disgorges six men dressed in catering company coveralls, each carrying what looks like a vinyl sports bag.  People barely notice the men moving quickly up the stairs and fanning out into the station, their destinations three restrooms at different locations on the main level.  They’ve built an extra minute into their schedule to allow any current occupants to leave.  The men’s room cameras – yes, that’s right, someone’s watching when you piss into a urinal – record everything as, two to a restroom, they post out-of-order signs on the doors and don radiation suits.  Their movements on several screens are so well timed, they look like synchronized dancers.  They’re ready to move again in less than ninety seconds. 

Each of the men takes an open-topped, rectangular cardboard box like an oversized shoebox out of his carry bag.  The boxes are filled with what look like grapefruit-sized lumps of clay with stems sticking out of them.  These are smoke bombs with fuses of different lengths, which look incongruously like the cartoon bombs Wile E. Coyote tosses at the Road Runner. They are made from sugar and potassium chlorate, which can be purchased in most drug stores.  Anyone with a stove, a saucepan, and a wooden spoon can make them. 

The men wait patiently.  The leader checks his watch – the wall clocks visible on three other screens all say 8:59 – and he barks something into a cell phone with its walkie-talkie feature enabled.  The men light the variable-length fuses and emerge into the terminal, moving rapidly along their assigned routes.  At first, most people ignore them.  Those that notice them at all seem more concerned with hurrying out of the station on their way to work or to meet that special someone for breakfast, than why men in radiation suits are walking quickly among them.  A few pause to stare, but no one interferes with them.  Even the scattered policemen do nothing at first, and a few seconds’ hesitation is all the terrorists need.

At another barked walkie-talkie command they begin flinging their smoke bombs behind them as they walk, throwing those with the shortest fuses first.  The operation must have been practiced a thousand times – each bomb goes off within a few seconds of being tossed.   The deadly, irradiated smoke spreads rapidly in clouds that hover along the floor, causing panicked stampedes in all directions, as people running from one smoke cloud find their paths obscured by another.  In the resulting confusion, security is helpless to do anything but try to control the herds of terrified people.  They have no idea that the smoke is emitting deadly gamma rays, but their instincts are good, and they tell people to breathe through handkerchiefs, shirt sleeves, whatever they can use, and get out of the immense terminal as quickly as they can.

We watch, impressed despite ourselves, as the terrorists brazenly exit the station through the main entrance into clear, smokeless air.  Moving quickly across the semi-circular plaza, past the flagpoles, they arrive at Massachusetts Avenue just as the purple truck arrives.  They pull off their radiation suits and toss them in a pile, careful to remove their gloves last.  Climbing into the truck, one of them tosses an incendiary device onto the pile.  A moment later they’re gone, leaving a flaming pile of radioactive suits on the curb.

DC’s emergency response teams respond with obvious efficiency and professionalism, as though they’ve been trained for exactly this situation.  They quickly identify the radiation hazard, begin urgent radio and television broadcasts, and deploy police vehicles with audio speakers, warning that anyone who either breathed or was exposed to the smoke should return to one of the civil defense field tents near the station, immediately, or get to a hospital emergency room.  People are warned that their clothing is probably dangerously radioactive and they should obtain immediate medical care.

I sit in stunned silence when the briefing ends.  William has to shake me out of my stupor.  My legs are wobbly.   

***

My squad met when it was over.  In addition to Samir and Mary, there were more than twenty others who were deemed to be within the need-to-know circle, some of whom I hadn’t seen since our nine-eleven effort was cut back, and some who were recent recruits.

Still dazed, I heard snatches of chatter around me, barely tracking on most of it.  …
smart, those purple trucks are around the station every day, who’d have imagined…hey look at this.  I  just Googled “smoke bombs”…unsecured websites with complete instructions, like baking muffins
. 

William’s angry retort again cut through my lethargy.  “The cooking instructions on the Internet don’t suggest seasoning to taste with cesium salt!”

William got down to business, then, summarizing the efforts to track the terrorist cells in the New York area, which had had no measurable results. He gave out assignments and ended with a classic William pep talk, then announced that I’d be heading to Baltimore and Washington in a couple of hours to work with Henry and help with the decontamination effort.

William clapped my shoulder and shook my hand.  Samir was next.  “Go down there and do what you’re trained to, Dylan.  Don’t be a cowboy.  Let the guys trained to catch terrorists handle that stuff.  We need you back here in one piece.”  Neither of them had said a word about my whereabouts on Wednesday.

Disasters like this caused people like us to bond closely.  Even Mary, who I barely knew, hugged me tightly before I left.  Their reactions touched me, but my feelings were overlaid by a surreal strangeness.  The scene couldn’t have been more real, yet in a way, I knew it wasn’t.  I felt like Scrooge looking through a window at Christmas future, knowing it was up to me to make sure this scene would never happen.  It made no sense, but with luck, I’d see them Friday morning and their memories of Thursday would be of a thwarted attack, not terror and mayhem.