Wednesday's Child

by Alan Zendell

  “I’m sure of it. Next time, I’ll document everything that happens on both the day I jump to and the day I skip, cable news web pages and emails. I’ll keep a diary of every significant interaction, especially conversations with you and other people that matter to me. All I need is some high-capacity flash drives.”

  Ilene looked stricken, and I realized she’d stopped listening. “You okay?”

  “I hadn’t considered that there’d be a next time till you said it. No wonder you’re rattled.” She yawned and fell back against her pillows. “I can’t do this anymore tonight. Come here and hold me and let’s try to get some sleep.”

  The good news was that the next morning we both thought it was Saturday. Ilene was in front of her computer by seven o’clock. I brewed some coffee and tried to read the Times, but I was too distracted to concentrate. I had to meet William at noon.

  I poured coffee for Ilene and set the cup down beside her. “Find anything interesting?”

  She sat back and sipped. “Mmmm, good. Thanks. I confirmed what I thought originally. Now I’m checking to make sure I hadn’t missed anything important. I think I’ll call Jerry Schliemann, later.”

  Jerry was a neuropsychiatrist who’d been one of Ilene’s thesis advisors. She’d consulted with him several times since then and recommended him to her clients when they needed an expert witness on psychotropic drugs.

  “You okay with me calling him? He’s a doctor. Anything I tell him is completely confidential.”

  “Even when you’re not the patient? Maybe I should talk to him myself.”

  “I wasn’t going to push you on that, but if you’re agreeable, I think you should. He won’t discuss your case, even with me, unless you want him to.”

  I felt like a huge burden had been lifted from me. “If you’re willing to be part of this with me, I want you there. There’s nothing I’d tell Jerry that I wouldn’t want you to hear.”

  She got up and hugged me, her relief as tangible as mine. “We’ll solve this together.”

  Much as I’d have liked to stay with her that way, I couldn’t. “There’s something else. William Franklin called, Thursday. He wants me to meet him at noon.”

  Ilene paled. “Franklin? Ohmygod. It’s been so long, I’d hoped we were done with all that.” Then there was apprehension in her eyes, a fierce expression on her face. I knew where her mind was going. “God, Dylan, do you think…”

  “I don’t know. Anything’s possible.”

  10.

  Attempts to use dirty bombs as military weapons in the Iran-Iraq war proved impractical, but their potential use by terrorists was another matter. Scattered around a city like New York, long-lived radioactive isotopes could cause thousands of casualties and unprecedented economic chaos. The delivery system could be as simple as vials of powder scattered by the wind.

  After the first Gulf War, when federal budget cuts greatly reduced active surveillance, people like me became sleeper agents, available in emergencies, but otherwise invisible. Since I was already known in several foreign capitals, the Agency provided me with a career that would serve as a front and mesh with my Intelligence activities. Thus, Dylan Brice became a mild-mannered international marketing analyst by day, and a Caped Crusader on call to defend America against nuclear terrorism whenever my secret phone rang. Thursday was the first time it had rung in years.

  I’d described William to Ilene as a Reserve Unit squad leader, only more covert. She knew there was a lot I couldn’t tell her, and she understood that it wasn’t only the risk of going to prison for violating security. As I’d told Gayle, she was better off not knowing.

  Ilene asked me a couple of times if my work with William was risky. I told her I’d never been in danger. I was a scientist consultant, not a field operative.

  What I didn’t say was that the Government preferred to invest its resources reacting to past threats rather than future preparedness, which meant a small, underfunded unit like ours had to be cross-trained. We all knew how to defend ourselves, and we all carried side arms on duty.

  William Franklin was the kind of patriot in the war against Islam was coincidental that the marina at the North Cove of Battery Park was only the length of a football field from the Freedom Tower, which stood where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once had.

  Any illusions I might have had of a luxury cruise up the Hudson were quashed the moment I arrived at the Cove. William, looking every inch a barrel-chested Marine drill sergeant, was impatiently pacing the deck of what was either an NYPD Harbor Patrol boat or something cleverly disguised to look like one. He could have been forty-five or sixty, with his steel gray buzz cut and lined, sun-worn features.

  “Move it, Dylan. The others are already here.”

  The sight of William projecting his trademark stalwart confidence transported me to a place I hadn’t been in so long I’d almost forgotten the feeling, pushing the bizarre events that had begun on Wednesday to a dim recess in my mind. The anxiety and nervousness that had been my constant companions evaporated as I was again drawn into William’s orbit.

  I savored the heady feeling of being part of something special again, one of the protectors of freedom, blah, blah, blah… It energized me the way these assignments always used to. We were an elite unit, even me. Not that I was a great field agent, but there were only a handful of people with my specific experience, and the work we did might save a million lives one day.

  The others turned out to be only two of our group. William used his own version of the cell network concept. No one but the people you were teamed with on an assignment knew what you did, and even they usually didn’t know all the details.

  William directed me to the small enclosed cabin. Inside was Samir Jafour, a one-time Syrian who had years of experience on the ground infiltrating Islamic training camps, and whose command of Arabic and other Middle-eastern tongues had been invaluable after nine-eleven. I knew and liked Samir, but the other occupant of the cabin was a stranger who introduced herself as Mary Conlon, of late, a member of the UK’s antiterrorism strike team in Belfast, until the relative calm there convinced the cash-poor Brits to cut back on personnel.

  “Dylan,” she said. “What is that, Irish? Welsh?”

  “I think my mother just liked the name,” I said, but I couldn’t help laughing.

  “What’s funny?” she asked in a delightful brogue.

  “Oh, you made me think about names. I grew up in an Irish working class neighborhood and for a while I wondered if every girl in Ireland had been named Mary.”

  “You were more right than you knew,” she said, laughing with me. She took a seat across a small work table from Samir and William. I sat beside her, facing William.

  “How’d you get your hands on a New York police boat?” His superiors could usually borrow anything they needed from local law enforcement, and I knew he liked to parade his connections in front of his command.

  William preened. “You might have noticed this isn’t an ordinary police boat.” I hadn’t, but I might have guessed as much. “After nine-eleven, the feds offered to outfit one with high tech surveillance gear in exchange for being able to requisition it when we needed it. We also made it virtually impervious to eavesdropping.” William loved that stuff.

  “Those two,” he nodded toward the two uniformed men in the pilot house, “are harbor patrol. They’re discreet, but they don’t know why we’re here and they can’t hear us. Conlon, here, is our new communications and electronics expert, and she’s damn good at decrypting things. Personal citation from the Prime Minister.” Mary parodied a sitting curtsy.

  “The last few years we’ve quietly stepped up our port security. Ports have always been soft targets, and we decided to let the terrorists think they still are. We use intelligent software to analyze emails, especially if they’re written in Arabic or they contain certain word patterns in French and English typical of people whose first language is Arabic. We intercept cell phone calls, too, when we have
an idea what to target. Why don’t you bring Dylan up to date, Mary?”

  We’d been cruising south into the harbor straight toward the Statue of Liberty. William, I thought, it’s enough with the symbolism. We get it. We passed to the east of the Statue and out into the shipping lanes where several big freighters lay at anchor.

  Mary described the volumes of communications their screening programs identified and the months of tedious analysis they’d done. I hadn’t been involved with that stuff for years. I was impressed by how far things had progressed but wondered how valuable it was…

  “Until, last month, I found this.” She handed me a printout. Excerpts from a sequence of emails, the contents of which meant nothing to me. “Then this and this,” and she began laying sheets before me with several items circled in red. Three times the name “Al Khalifa” was circled and my brain snapped to attention. I’d just seen those words. I stood and scanned the harbor through the police boat’s smoky windows. There! A container ship precessing about its anchor line in the outgoing tide, had “Al Khalifa” stenciled on its starboard bow.

  If William called me in, he was worried about radiological contamination. I looked at Mary’s papers, focusing on the circled items. Most of them seemed like gibberish, lots of unrelated symbols. They were all watching me expectantly, so I looked again, with my brain on full alert. Shit, I must not be processing information very well. Just minutes ago I’d passed over a line that should have triggered alarm bells: PU238-88, CS137-30, AM241-430, CO60-5.26, SR90-28.1. It was a list of radioactive isotopes and half-lives, all byproducts of nuclear reactor fission, extremely deadly, and long-lived.

  Samir noticed my reaction. “Dylan has seen the light.”

  “You think Al Khalifa’s carrying these?” Port security had been a political football for decades. There was always a lot of talk about it during election campaigns but no evidence that anything was done about it when the elections were over.

  “We’re not certain.” Samir glanced at William, who nodded at him. “Things have changed, Dylan. We don’t publicize it, but we’ve been doing random sweeps of freighters entering the harbor for years. We cast a broad net on a regular basis so they’ll think we’re just fishing, but it’s also a cover for taking an apparently innocent look at targets like Al Khalifa when Intelligence identifies them.”

  “What do you have, exactly?”

  “I went on board with the Border Patrol carrying a radiation detector. It helped to know the language.”

  “You’re kidding. You mean they actually mark containers, ‘Illegal Radioactive Contraband’ in Arabic?”

  “You’d be surprised what I can learn from a shipping label. These guys are thorough and patient, but not always terribly creative. They tend to follow predictable patterns like always using the same front companies to cover their activities.

  “I found traces of radioactivity on a container marked ‘Medical Supplies.’ There was even a radiation hazard sticker on it. That’s not unreasonable because some of these isotopes are used to treat cancer. It’s also not uncommon for slight leakage to occur, not dangerous, but enough to register on a good counter.”

  “What made you suspicious?”

  “The container was addressed to a hospital in Riyadh.” He unrolled a map of the Arabian peninsula and the Mediterranean. “Why would a ship carry potentially dangerous and sensitive cargo bound from Aden to Saudi Arabia, travel up the Red Sea through the Suez Canal, to Benghazi and Marseilles, and then across the Atlantic to New York? Why would you even put it on a ship?”

  He was right; it made no sense from any point of view. Riyadh is landlocked, two hundred miles from the nearest port in Bahrain, and if the cargo was going there and then by truck to Riyadh, the ship would have gone in the other direction. And even that dodged the question of what the cargo was doing in Aden in the first place.

  “You’re sure the container was loaded in Aden?”

  “According to the manifest it was. We have a priority request in to Homeland Security to have the Coast Guard impound the ship. We’ll have to move quickly to get the crew off before they can react, then get in and out as fast as possible.”

  Identifying the substances Samir detected would be pretty routine, the same kind of thing I’d done working for NRC. The trick was to keep our options open. If we found something significant, we’d confiscate most of it, but try to make it look like we didn’t know it was there. The best scenario would be to neutralize the threat and still be able to follow the containers to their destination.

  William said, “Any questions? Okay, then, stay loose and be ready to jump when I call you.”

  WEEK 2

  11.

  Sunday morning, the second day in a row that Ilene and I awoke with no temporal disconnect, was a lovely morning, perfect for a drive in the country, except that we left the interstate well within the suburban sprawl of northern New Jersey. Just ahead was a startlingly modern building that looked like it was built entirely of glass and pure white marble and would have been at home perched on a cliff at Malibu.

  “Jerry’s office is in there,” Ilene said.

  Emotionally, I was still engaged with William and my squad. I hadn’t been thinking about hallucinations or living days out of order when I got home, and it must have showed in my body language, because Ilene’s face lit up with surprised delight when she saw me. She’d asked how my meeting with William went, then dutifully pretended that my perfunctory “fine” was actually a response.

  When Ilene described my situation to Jerry, he offered to meet us in his office this morning at ten. I didn’t know him well, but the few times we’d chatted at cocktail parties had left a positive impression. He was one of those highly accomplished people who inspire confidence by speaking softly and surely, without arrogance. Even his car, which was parked in front of the dazzling white building, suggested unostentatious quality and efficiency.

  “You’ve had quite a week,” he said, shaking my hand and directing me to an ergonomic wing chair. Ilene sat unobtrusively to one side on a brown leather couch.

  “I’m amazed that you still have your wits about you,” Jerry began. I smiled at what I took to be a compliment. I imagine that my body language, still reflecting the buoying effect of the meeting on the boat, affected Jerry as it had Ilene on Saturday, the perversity of which wasn’t lost on me. I’d been shown an apocalyptic view of New York’s future that only a handful of people even suspected and come away feeling renewed.

  Jerry explained how unusual it was to treat a patient who was closely related to a friend or colleague, even more so for her to be directly involved in our conversations. “I only agreed to this after I was sure I could be objective. Even so, many people would question my judgment.”

  “I have no reservations about your objectivity, Jerry.”

  “Good. We’ll observe strict confidentiality, and decisions concerning treatment options, if any, will be yours. If I become concerned about your well-being I won’t pull any punches. Ilene told me what’s been happening, but I want to hear it from you. Start from the beginning and take your time.”

  I did, over the next hour, notwithstanding the irony that starting at the beginning only made sense in a linear world. To his credit, Jerry listened patiently, displaying no recognizable emotion or expression. He wasn’t someone I wanted to play poker with.

  “You’ve said several times that you were terrified by all this,” he noted when I was done, “yet you sound like you desperately want it to be real.” I felt like a kid caught doing something he shouldn’t.

  “Ilene asked if I’d rather live never knowing what day I was waking up to if I could make it stop by taking a pill. It’s not that I want it to be real, I know it is. What scared me was thinking I was a random victim of some quirk of quantum physics. I never understood that stuff very well.”

  “You no longer think you’re a random victim? What, then?”

  “I know how it sounds, but I feel like I’ve been singled
out, somehow.”

  “How do you know a thousand other people didn’t experience what you did?”

  “Impossible.” My certainty surprised even me, but there it was. “The more people who skipped Wednesday, the more likely we’d be to know. Some of them would have been bound to freak out over it. There’d be reports of time-displaced people checking into hospitals, kooks claiming the end of the world was at hand, you name it.”

  He reacted with a non-judgmental smile. “Let’s see if I’ve got this right. It’s easier for you to accept someone or something deliberately causing you to live days out of order, than to believe it was a random accident. Do you really think either is possible?”

  I shrugged. “You’re the doctor. What do you think?”

  Jerry considered that for several seconds, looking somber. “I don’t know, but I understand how you feel. I wouldn’t like my life determined by random events, but if I believed this was happening by design, I’d want to know who or what was manipulating me.”

  “I think I’ll only find out if it wants me to. It’s only reasonable that if some entity powerful enough to make me live days out of order is doing so by design, there’d be some purpose driving it. I think I’m supposed to figure out what it is and use my day-skipping to accomplish it. But I still have free will in everything but the order in which I live my days. If this super-being wanted a pawn it could have programmed one.”

  I told Jerry I expected to live Thursday before Wednesday again next week and every week after that until I accomplished what I was supposed to. It would always be the same two days of the week and never every second or third week. “If there’s a point to this that I’m supposed to figure out, changing days all the time would only introduce more complications.”

  Jerry looked at me sternly. “You seem to be enjoying this, like solving a puzzle.”

  “I am, in a way.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Why should it?”