by Alan Zendell
***
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 radioacti
ve 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.
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 prob
ably 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.
