The 9/11 Machine
Page 5
The fall of 2001 was a traumatic period—anxiety about more attacks, the Anthrax scare, war breaking out around the world. Most people had welcomed the U.S. military with open arms, wanting to feel safe and protected and reassured, warm in the bosom of American might. As had happened during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and many natural disasters, the National Guard and military troops had been called in to calm a tense situation.
It had worked, making the nation feel safer, more protected. But the years had marched on, and the military stayed, establishing more permanent “temporary” checkpoints and forming completely militarized cordons along the northern and southern borders of the continental U.S. And many wondered why there were still checkpoints outside many of the major U.S. cities, ten years after 9/11. The Houston attack would go a long way toward silencing any of the brave civil libertarians that had spoken up about the increasing “militarization” of the U.S. mainland.
But Don still didn’t like it. He didn’t like the idea of the military checking people as they tried to drive into New York or military security at every major airport. The First and Second Patriot Acts had changed this country, and he wondered if it would ever be the same.
Now, the Third Patriot Act had introduced USID cards, universal identification cards that you were supposed to carry with you, everywhere you went. Don was against the new USID cards, too. The U.S. was involved in two wars, and there was talk that the government might have to institute World War II–style rationing. President Cheney was a warmonger, surrounding himself with similar-minded people after ousting Bush in the spring of 2003, having him declared mentally unfit for the presidency. He was subsequently elected on his own in 2004 and 2008. There were many that would have agreed with him about President Bush’s mental state after the chaos of 9/11, but now it seemed they had traded a president unsure of how to proceed, stunned by the loss of Congress and his wife, for a new president that looked to pick fights around the world.
There was even discussion, in some circles, of repealing the 22nd Amendment, allowing President Cheney to seek a third term in 2012.
When he got home, Don tried to watch the news, but it was just too depressing. Instead, he started the coffee maker. He knew he wouldn’t sleep if he tried to go to bed—he was unable to fall asleep before 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. usually, so he spread out the blueprints on the dining room table and started up his laptop. He might as well get some work done.
But the silence in the house was oppressive. He put the news back on and turned the volume low, just so the house wouldn’t be silent.
1.5
North Korea
It took less than three days for the U.S. government to conclude that North Korea had been behind the deadly Houston attack—evidently, the one-engine plane used to deliver the device had been stolen from an airport in eastern Texas. The device had been loaded into the plane and then flown by a suicide bomber to its intended target. The name on the rental receipt on a white van, found at the airport, was traced back to a community in northern California. After the FBI and U.S. military had moved in and begun interrogating everyone in the community, it was discovered that the plot was instigated by agents from North Korea, who had been planning the attack for months.
President Cheney held a primetime news conference, something he seemed to love to do. He announced the findings and warned the United Nations and the North Koreans that actions were being considered. CNN reported that the FBI had a very strong case against the North Koreans, and it was just a matter of time before the United States retaliated. The initial casualty numbers were over 30,000.
Houston was devastated, to be sure, but it looked like much of the radiation cloud would be drifting out over the Gulf of Mexico and away from any populated areas, dissipating before it could reach either Mexico or Florida. In a twisted sense, it seemed like a lucky break that the terrorists had chosen a target like Houston.
But it was another attack, another blow to the American psyche that was so fragile. Even now, ten years later, the attack on 9/11 still rattled people’s hearts and minds.
21,502 had been the final tally for the 9/11 attacks. There had been 17,429 people killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center complex in New York City. The city had been brought to its knees—losing their leaders, including the mayor, along with the towers. The financial district would be crippled for months. And the attack on the Pentagon had left it half destroyed, with another 2,641 dead. The attackers had crashed their fuel-laden jumbo jet into the aging symbol of American military power and crippled it. Fire had raced through the 1940s-era construction, and hundreds had perished, partly due to outdated emergency systems and a substandard sprinkler system.
But the part of the attack that had the most prolonged affect on the nation was the destruction of the Capitol building, along with the 1,432 souls lost on Capitol Hill—senators and representatives, along with policemen and visiting tourists. To see the U.S. Capitol building brought down was a devastating blow to the American psyche, not to mention the fact that over half of the working members of Congress had been killed.
The nation had been brought to its knees.
It would take Bush and the remnants of Congress months to fill the empty seats, find meeting locations and alternate working areas, and reconstitute Congress. But it would take much longer to restore American’s faith in the promise that we would rally and succeed.
It was no wonder Bush had crumbled under the pressure just months later. And it was no wonder the American people had embraced the militarization of the U.S. homeland to such an unprecedented scale.
This new attack in Houston had reminded people just how vulnerable we were. In some ways, it was amazing that President Cheney hadn’t already nuked North Korea off the map.
Don was not watching the news any more—the numbers coming out of Houston were just too depressing, and he didn’t need to hear about the American ships steaming off toward the coast of North Korea. It was clear that they would be invading soon, so instead of going into the warehouse to work, he’d decided to stay home and exercise his other passion. Unrelated to his current experiments with stock investments, he was working on another financial aspect of his project.
After getting the mail, he walked down the hallway, passing a table near the doorway to the kitchen. On it stood a dusty plaque from the city of New York. It was adorned with a picture of Mayor Peter Powers, expressing the city’s regret at the loss of Sarah and Tina Ellis, lost in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
He stepped into the living room and walked up to the wall covered with tattered, faded clippings and newspaper articles. There were magazine covers, newspapers screaming the horrible news: the collapse and destruction of the World Trade Center, along with the destroyed U.S. Capitol dome in D.C. Photographs of hijacked planes frozen in the sky, just before they hit their targets, littered the wall.
The front page of The Washington Post showed a large picture of the smoking Capitol dome, collapsed in on itself, a picture that would come to symbolize that horrible day. The headlines below the pictures noted the hundreds of Congressmen and staff that had been killed. Other papers detailed the attack on the Pentagon—one picture showed a burning Pentagon in the foreground and a collapsed, smoking Capitol dome in the background.
Another large color photograph showed the banking second plane just as it hit the South Tower, spraying a fireball of jet fuel out the other side. Next to that photograph was one of the North Tower falling, destroying most of the other buildings in the World Trade Center complex. That included WTC Building 7, which had housed New York City’s Emergency Management Center—everyone inside had died, including Mayor Giuliani, the Chief of Police, and a dozen other high-ranking city officials. Their deaths in the crushed building had ended the chances of any coordinated local response to the attacks.
Other newspaper headlines mentioned the essential decapitation of the U.S. Congress, with the loss of so many senators and representatives. Several months l
ater, there were still so many vacancies that the country had been seriously crippled, and the First Patriot Act was passed with a rubber stamp from the gutted Congress.
A hundred other articles hung on the wall, with information about the terrorists, their funding, their motivations. Don’s scratchy handwriting in red Sharpie could be found in the margins, circling items of particular importance: structural reports on the World Trade Center, including post-attack examinations of why the towers fell. Reports on the Pentagon’s 1940’s-era construction, including archival photos of the building under construction—on these, he had written and underlined “improved construction techniques, bullet-proof glass, sprinklers.” Continuity of government documents, detailing several new procedures were put into place after 9/11 to designate backups for every Congressperson and create alternate meeting locations during an attack. There were even listings of the most popular conspiracy theories out there, including the one that espoused that the U.S. government itself had been behind the attacks. Don didn’t put any stock in any of the theories, but he wanted to see the story from all angles.
Don shook his head and walked back into the dining room. The blueprints for the machine and his other papers had been moved off the dining room table and replaced with books and printouts bearing titles such as Making Money in the Stock Market and Trading Derivatives in a Turbulent Market.
Don was working at his laptop, a small silver Toshiba he’d recently bought for his upcoming trip. The tiny machine was the top-of-the-line laptop available, yet the styling was similar to Toshibas from ten years ago, an important consideration for him. Don tapped away at it, downloading reams of historical and financial data and using off-the-shelf and customized financial software to scan for investment opportunities.
The company he’d hired to write the customized scanning software had been confused by his initial email requests. He’d had to explain to them that he was interested in finding investment opportunities at various points over the last fifty years.
“I’m trying to figure out the optimal investment windows for these securities,” he’d told the young female programmer who had called him after several fruitless days of emails back and forth.
“You’re scanning for opportunities to invest, but using historical data?” the woman asked. He could tell she was confused.
“That’s right,” he’d said. “I’m researching the optimal entry points for a course I’ll be presenting at the university this year,” he’d lied. “I’ll be instructing students on how to recognize windows of opportunity in historical data, so they can find correlations in the current data.”
That had done the trick—two weeks later, he’d received a CD in the mail with his customized program, which was chugging away right now on his machine, crunching historical stock quotes and other data that he was downloading from Yahoo Finance through an anonymous web query server, to avoid having his search tracked back to him.
Of course, after he left on his “trip,” certain people would be intensely interested in talking to him—mostly the FBI and the U.S. military as well as a host of creditors.
Don had already maxed out several dozen credit cards, purchasing materials and sourcing parts from a dozen different countries under several different names. He had taken out second and third mortgages on the house, money he never planned to pay back. Nor did he plan to return the $2.1 million in seed money that the university had provided him to fund the initial phase of his research project. He’d told them that that the investment would be returned within two years and that they would receive payments on all future sales of his research. His former employers and the endowment lawyers had seen dollar signs and written him checks.
All the money had gone into the LLC. It was really too bad that the creditors would never be able to collect. But where he was going, he wouldn’t be able to send them a check.
His computer was crunching numbers, but Don wasn’t paying attention. He stood at the back door, which looked out from the dining room into a modest backyard. Tina’s Powerpuff Girls playhouse was still out there, leaning heavily to one side after nine years of disuse. Two of the neighbors had offered to come over and remove it, assuming that he been too emotionally broken to take it down himself, but he’d explained to them that he’d preferred to keep it up. That was about the time most of his neighbors stopped talking to him—before, he’d been a normal member of the community, a working dad with a wife and a child. Now, he was the strange, sad interloper who had never taken down his dead daughter’s playhouse. His was the house that folks avoided.
He didn’t care.
Like he’d told Terry a few days before, it didn’t really matter anyway. Nothing here, in this world, really mattered.
Things were almost ready.
1.6
0.11 Variance
Two weeks later, Don was ready. He’d done what he could to prepare and, at this point, he was just stalling for time, waiting for improved results in the machine’s calibration. He pulled into the parking lot, thinking about the items in his trunk and those stored at the warehouse.
He parked his car next to Terry’s red truck and climbed out, but on this morning, he spent an extra few minutes looking at the Manhattan skyline before going inside. Even ten years later, it looked like there was something missing from the jagged rows of buildings. Don opened the trunk of the Volvo and pulled out a box of items, heading inside.
Terry was smiling and greeted Don as soon as he entered the primary work area. He was clearly excited about something.
“What is it?” Don asked, setting down the box of items from his truck. “You look like you’re about to burst.”
Terry nodded, beaming. “We ran another two more simulations last night, after you left. The variance is 0.11 now.”
Don nodded, looking at the graph Terry was pointing at on the monitor.
“Wow, that is good,” Don said. “Very good. Can I see the printouts?”
Terry handed the thick stack of paper over—it was bound by one of those super binder clips. Don started flipping through it as Terry excused himself and left the room.
Don looked through the charts. He’d given Terry permission to work on the variance problem, even though Terry didn’t really know why—but the man had taken to the problem and solved it.
Terry came back into the room and Don looked up at him. “Vibration?”
“Yup, that was the problem,” Terry said, smiling. “The accelerator was moving too much, and it was creating the variance. We stabilized the supports and added another series of welds.”
“This is great, Terry. Really great,” Don said, smiling and setting down the report. “The numbers look right. Good work.”
Terry was beaming.
“What’s up?” Don asked.
“Oh, some of the guys are watching the TV in the computer lab. The news,” Terry said, grinning. “It looks like we’re finally bombing North Korea. We’re taking the fight to them.”
Don nodded but didn’t say anything—he needed to remember to control his reactions.
“I wondered when Cheney would get around to that,” Don said, making up his mind. It was time. The geopolitical situation was getting less and less stable, and he was ready.
Don looked up at Terry. “I’ll tell you what—why don’t you send the others home?”
Terry looked at him. “Are you sure?”
Don nodded. “Yeah. And if you and I can work for a little while longer, to update the schematics, I’ll let you off as well.”
Two hours later, Don was standing by the machine, in the central area beneath the massive red particle accelerator—it looked somewhat like a CAT scanner, a large open area in the middle with a horizontal, hollow tube surrounded by wires and fans. Beneath it was a large metal table. Don worked on a monitor attached to a control panel, tapping away at a keyboard, and behind him, the machine began to rumble, powering up.
“Good,” Don said to himself. “This is very, very good.”
He turned the key. The green button lit up, ready.
Don stepped away to the open area adjacent to the machine and opened a metal cabinet. He took out a small cage containing a hamster, crossing back to the machine. He held up the cage, regarding the hamster inside it for a moment, and then placed the cage on the flat stainless steel platform directly under the aperture of the particle accelerator.
Don returned to the controls and, consulting his printout and a clipboard of jots and calculations, adjusted a few controls. He double-checked his figures one more time and then opened small door, his hand hovering over the Actuate button.
He sighed deeply and pressed the button.
The lights in the room flickered and dimmed. Massive amounts of energy poured from storage batteries into the bulky machine. As he watched, a hazy blue glow began to surround the flat table and the hamster cage upon it. The room started to vibrate slightly, and he grabbed his clipboard and printouts as they began to slide to the floor.
Suddenly, huge booming cracks, like ice shattering, echoed through the room. It sounded like the floor was tearing itself apart beneath the machine. The overhead lights flickered and, as Don watched by the glow of the machine, the hamster cage began to fade out of reality. It didn’t disappear all at once—instead, it appeared to evaporate. The top of the cage paled, and then the rest of the cage faded and was gone. The computer, following the preprogrammed cycle, began slowing down the machine’s power consumption, and the overhead lights flickered again.
Terry raced into the room.
“You tested it? We’ve got so much more refining—”