Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist

by Jeffrey Shapiro

  “What happened?” he asked.

  At the sound of his voice Mary started to cry as if she had never expected to hear it again, and then realized what he had said. She looked at him bewildered, “You don’t know? We can talk in a minute, I have to tell them that you’re awake.” Mary disappeared and was back in a few seconds with 3 nurses. A page echoed over the hospital intercom for Dr. Hamilton, and Jonathan knew it was because of him. The nurses scurried around him, adjusting his bed, taking his temperature and writing down statistics from the overhead monitor. Within a few minutes Dr. Hamilton came through the door. He was a tall African American man in his early fifties, slightly balding and about 30 lbs. overweight. He grabbed the clipboard from the bottom of the bed, read it quickly, made a few notes and then sat on the bed next to Jonathan peering into his eyes with a light pen and asking questions of the attendant staff as he worked.

  “How long has he been awake?”

  Mary answered, “Less than 10 minutes.”

  “Has he spoken?”

  Mary said, “Yes.”

  “Slurred speech, coherent?”

  “He seems okay, except he doesn’t remember the accident.”

  Dr. Hamilton continued with his physical, looking through all the orifices in Jonathan’s head. He then listened to his chest and breathing with his stethoscope. Finally he looked directly at Jonathan and asked him, “How do you feel Mr. Anderson?”

  Jonathan grinned as if he had been asked a ridiculous question. “Very tired?” he answered sarcastically.

  “Headache, trouble breathing?”

  “A little, no a lot, I mean my head is pounding. It feels like someone hit me in the back of the head with a baseball bat.”

  The doctor motioned to the nurse and instructed an adjustment in his medication. She disappeared for a few seconds and returned with a new bag with a different mixture of narcotics. Jonathan struggled to remember more, but his head felt consumed with pain and ready to explode like a volcano getting ready to spew molten lava.

  She could see in his eyes that he was confused. “There was a horrible explosion at your building and you were hurt; they airlifted you and Carly here.”

  He was stunned by the word Carly.

  “Is she okay?”

  Mary nodded. “She’s fine, you saved her, you know. They found her wrapped in your arms without even a scratch, no broken bones. It took 3 of them to get you to let go of her. It’s a miracle that someone can hold another person so tight that it took 3 firefighters to pry her free and yet there wasn’t a bruise on her. How did you do that? It was like you squeezed an egg with all your might and didn’t break the shell.”

  “I don’t know, maybe she’s tougher than you think. Can I see her?”

  “She’s with my sister.”

  “What about Matthew?”

  She stopped, remembering the doctor’s words, but he read it in her eyes. She saw that he recognized this and then shook her head no and started to cry, not able to say the words.

  He closed his eyes with the weight of her unspoken words. She put her head gently on his chest and they didn’t say anything for the next ten minutes, finding comfort only in each other’s presence. Finally Jonathan was the first to speak.

  “Did he suffer?”

  Mary shook her head no and then said, “I don’t think so.”

  Jonathan nodded telling her that she had said enough.

  “How long have I been here?” he whispered.

  “A little over two weeks, actually fifteen days.”

  “Please give me more details and tell me again what happened.”

  She looked at him with pain in her eyes, “The Federal building was attacked.”

  Jonathan was once again stunned and lay quiet. Finally his mind caught up with his grief, “How many people hurt?”

  “Almost 1500.”

  “Dead?”

  “All of them, except a handful. There were 700 hundred from the Federal Building killed and 400 still missing. 350 of the people were killed in the street all standing around, watching some accident.” She stopped and then looked at him with horrified eyes, “Five hundred children! They killed 100 children! What type of people target children! What kind of God Damn monsters kill helpless children! They killed our baby!”

  Jonathan closed his eyes to shield himself from the searing heat in her words, his memory flashed like frames in a 50 year old 16 millimeter black and white film between the poundings in his head; most of the details were lost in the snow and the fuzz. A clear segment of the film floated through his mind, “Of course. Children and Virginia, they’re an easy, unprotected target and then they get the added benefit of destroying the operation. They must have found out about our operation.” Mary’s eyes looked at him to see if he was babbling from his injury or speaking rationally. She lifted her head from his chest and sat upright in the chair and then her eyes turned ferocious. “What do you mean operation?”

  Jonathan didn’t have the mental fortitude to be clever. He stuttered, “I meant that federal offices are always targets for terrorists.”

  “But you said your operation. What were you doing there? Jonathan, tell me you’re not responsible for this? Oh Jesus Christ, tell me that you weren’t in there using our children as cover for some crazy operation of yours? We’ve been married all these years and I trusted you when you told me that you worked for the government and couldn’t talk about your job. But now, I have a need to know, so you can stop lying.”

  “Please don’t cry, Mary. Certainly you must have suspected I worked for the CIA?”

  “And why would I do that? Marriage is based on trust, Jonathan, and you told me you were a Procurement Officer. But now Matthew is dead, and your little make-believe world has become very real to me, okay! You’ve crossed the line and I need to know what was going on in there.”

  He tried to speak but was overcome with exhaustion. “I’m really tired, can we talk about this later?”

  Mary realized that she had gone well beyond the doctor’s limits, but had a hard time holding back. “Jonathan, I can wait until later, but you are going to give me a full explanation.”

  Jonathan nodded.

  He closed his eyes and entered a tomb between life and death, terrorists and agents, with dreams about his children. He awoke suddenly with the thought, “Matthew’s dead!” And then hoping it to be a dream, he tried to recall all that had happened, not knowing what was real and what had come from the demons he had slept with in the underworld.

  Mary was napping in the chair next to his bed when he awoke. He glanced at the clock and saw that it was 1 p.m. and knew he had been sleeping for about 3 hours. He let Mary sleep for another 20 minutes and she woke as suddenly as he had.

  Immediately, as if there hadn’t been an interruption, Jonathan continued with his explanation, “You cannot repeat this, do you understand? Bob and I were working on a joint Homeland Security/CIA/Secret Service project. The operation was planted with the other federal employees to avoid detection.”

  It took Mary a few seconds to catch up with him because she was still disoriented from her nap. “Planted?” She snapped. “Jonathan, what in God’s name were you doing in there?”

  “We were an anti-terrorist group, studying all the signs, tracing emails that terrorists use to talk between cells, trying to prevent the very thing that happened.”

  The comment caused her anger to swell until it overflowed, “You fucking murderer! Well your operation didn’t do a very good job did it? Why would our government use children as a cover for you? How could you take a position like that and then lie to me? How could you put our children in danger and not even tell me? If we’re at war, why use children, our children as a decoy for soldiers? The kids were innocent, Jonathan; Matthew was just a baby! You killed our baby!” she started crying. “I don’t even want to look at you!” She backed away and went into the waiting room where she sat and cried.

  Jonathan lay alone staring at the ceiling, realizing tha
t she was right. “How could I have been so stupid?” he muttered. “Of course they would figure us out; how best to attack a more powerful enemy than to attack their center, splitting their front line in half.” The shock of the death of his son Matthew began to overwhelm him like a dark shadow and he was enveloped by an unbearable mixture of grief and rage. Desperately trying to stop the pain, he clicked on the television, but found it impossible to listen to CNN with his mind swimming in so many directions.

  After about 30 minutes the door opened and Mary came back into the room, a different woman, with the cold attitude of a wife now forced to do her duty and take care of her husband. Her presence brought with it fear.

  “I’m so sorry,” Jonathan pleaded. “I’m so sorry that I didn’t tell you and that I wasn’t there for you.”

  He was hoping that the damage done to their relationship was not permanent. The light in her eyes had turned dark and he sensed that the only compassion left was in the form of a base instinctual pity that one human being would have for a wounded human being.

  There was a long cold silence and then she began to talk staring blankly across the room. Her words were in a monotone and strained, “You were there, you were alive and you saved Carly and that was the only thing I had left to live for.” She laughed, “It’s funny the illusions we create. We think everything is going to go just like our perfectly conceived plans. You were my hero. Had I known what I know now, I might not have been able to make it.”

  “Come on Mary, you know I would never do anything intentionally to hurt Matthew and Carly.”

  “Jonathan, Matthew’s dead and he’s dead because he was in the wrong place, a place that you put him. If I had known, even had an inkling that that building was a target, I would have had them both a million miles from there. You lied to me, Jonathan, and you didn’t let me do my duty as a mother. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive you for that.”

  Jonathan closed his eyes as the words pierced through his brain and into his heart. Involuntarily the words blurted out, “Did it happen quickly?”

  Mary nodded her head yes. “The explosives were planted in different places in the daycare and the blast killed them all instantly.”

  “Did they find his body?”

  She grimaced as she recalled the image that was indelibly burned upon her brain, “They found him, but they didn’t want me to see him, but I insisted. They had him in a little bag. He was burned so badly, I couldn’t recognize him! I looked him over. Every inch of him, and begged God that there would be something I could recognize, something I could remember.” She looked at him in utter horror, “Jonathan, I couldn’t recognize my own baby! His face was gone and so was one of his legs. Three of his little fingers were so badly burned that there was nothing but little black stumps, no bigger than burnt matchsticks. He was completely naked, I think the explosion and the fire consumed his clothes. And he was covered with black welts. I didn’t believe that it was him. I wouldn’t believe them! There wasn’t one thing that reminded me of my Matthew. I made them prove it to me. They took me to a conference room where they had plastic bags filled with pieces of his hair and little pieces of his body. They had all kinds of reports showing blood and other DNA samples. They proved it through DNA testing. Jonathan, it took a team of scientists to prove to me that the little boy that came out of my stomach was my baby! I’ll never get that picture out of my mind. That burnt piece of broken flesh was my baby!” She put her head down and started to sob, her whole body shaking.

  He wanted to hold her and comfort her and tell her how much he loved her but was limited by his shackles. So he just agonized, constrained in his prison, watching her cry.

  Finally, she exhausted herself and once again they sat in silence, trying to cope and pull themselves back to the land of the living.

  Jonathan broke the silence. Cautiously he uttered the words, “When can I see Carly?”

  “I’ll bring her by, but I need to warn you, she’s different."

  “What do you mean?”

  “She hasn’t said a word since the explosion. At Matthew’s funeral she just sat frozen and didn’t show any emotion. When we walked past his little casket, she reached out her hand and touched it for just a second, as if to assure herself that he was inside and then walked away. I don’t know what’s going on inside her little head. She’s not eating much and the agency has sent a therapist, but the therapist hasn’t been able to tell me anything. She says that her mental functions have shut down because she can’t deal with all the emotional pain from losing her brother and knowing that you were hurt. She’s blaming herself.”

  “What did she have to do with anything?”

  “The therapist says it’s always the same. People who survive violent events always blame themselves and feel guilty that they survived when someone else died. When it’s a family member, it’s compounded.”

  “Will she get better?”

  “She said that there’s a 50/50 chance that she’ll come out of it with time, but she’ll probably always need therapy. You waking up may help.”

  “Kids are tough, Mary. When we get back to being a normal family, she’ll bounce back.”

  Mary recoiled. “How can you say that? How can we ever be a normal family? Jonathan, there’s not much left to this family.”

  There was another long barrier of silence, which Jonathan once again cautiously broke through. “How badly am I hurt?”

  “You should have asked the doctor.”

  “He was in and out of here pretty fast. Please, just tell me what you know.”

  “You heard him say that they are going to do tests, so they don’t know the extent of the neurological damage, but miraculously only your left arm and 3 ribs were broken and the doctor said that your burns will heal on their own without graphs. The neck brace is precautionary, because you did receive some neck trauma and they were afraid of paralysis. They said that you were in the right place at the right time and the building fell all around you. Fortunately you were big enough to support everything that fell on top of you. The only other survivors were also in the stairwells.”

  “Do they have any idea who did this?”

  “The President was on television and it’s the same old lines. He’s using it to justify the war in the Middle East and his approval ratings have shot through the ceiling. Can you believe it? One week the most unpopular President in American history, the next week, the most popular! The flags are back out in all the neighborhoods and there are record numbers of young people lined up to go to war. He says it was Al Qaeda operatives, trained in Iraq and he said the target was the children of federal employees. It was the biggest line of propaganda bullshit I have ever heard!”

  Jonathan shook his head knowing Mary’s hostile feelings for the current administration.

  She continued, “I don’t care what he says, there had to be someone on the inside. The explosives were surgically planted to kill everyone in the building. If there wasn’t someone on the inside there would be no way to get that many explosives close enough to do that much damage.’”

  “Did anyone else survive from my floor?”

  She shook her head no. “You’re the only one. The firemen stumbled across you in a cavity within the debris. They airlifted you here.”

  “What about Bob?”

  She shook her head no. “They had a service for him on Wednesday. Melissa and the kids are devastated. All I’ve done these past 2 weeks is attend funerals and sit in hospital rooms.”

  “That’s nice that all of his kids showed up.”

  “Yes, it was very emotional.”

  “Johnnie and Kristen were in the daycare with Mathew?”

  “No, Melissa had the day off and had them at home. Can you believe her luck?”

  “Thank God! Did they find Bob’s body?”

  ”Open casket, amazingly he wasn’t badly burned….died of a head wound. I wish you could have been there. It was probably the only time in my life that I’ve seen Bo
b with his mouth shut. The President was at his funeral and gave him a beautiful eulogy. He called him a national hero and awarded him posthumously the Distinguished Intelligence Cross. He gave it to Melissa. I wish you could have been there, I know how close you two were.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he answered. “I guess I wasn’t there for anyone.”

  He felt the weight come on him like a lead curtain being pulled down over his life. Suddenly, exhausted, he closed his eyes and retreated from the pain and was welcomed into the bottomless chasm of emptiness. He was startled awake by a group of nurses prepping him for testing. He looked over for Mary, but she was gone.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning, Jonathan was startled from his sleep by a person leaning over him. He twitched as his brain quickly tried to focus and determine who or what this presence was. He smiled when he realized that it was his 7 year daughter, Carly. She was standing on a chair that she had pulled close to the bed and leaned over him supporting her tiny body with her outstretched arms, looking a little like a baby giraffe with a short neck reaching for a piece of vegetation. Her nose was only about 6 inches from his and she looked bewildered. She seemed to believe that if she stared hard enough and thought long enough she could rouse her daddy from his deep sleep. When his eyes popped open, she jumped back, nearly falling flat on the floor. Mary was sitting on a chair next to Carly reading an Oprah magazine and with the dexterity of major league infielder, dropped the magazine and scooped her up preventing a terrible fall. “Be careful,” her mother yelled, but in an instant, Carly was back up on the chair and once again close to her father’s face.