by Alan Zendell
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.
Though I was sure Henry had seen the presentation we had, I loaded the slide show that produced the stop-motion display overlaid on the map of the station on my laptop. Likewise, still images of each of the six attackers, all of whom, to my untrained eye, fit the archetypal description of a Middle Eastern terrorist. I
printed several copies of each photo.
I got home at 2:00 to find Ilene and Jerry putting the final touches on what I’d asked for. Jerry handed me a flash drive containing more than a gigabyte of downloaded documentation about the state of the world on Thursday, August 7th, version one. Ilene gave me a DVD on which she had recorded news summaries from the major cable networks. No matter what else occurred, or what became of their memories of right now, as long as I kept these in my possession, I expected them to remain unchanged.
We’d see.
32.
The Baltimore field office of the FBI was located in an urban-looking suburb west of the city. An intern met me in the lobby, signed me in, and escorted me up to Henry’s office. Like the day I met him, Henry had the look of a football lineman, but today he looked like he’d just been through a bruising game.
He pumped my hand and led me to a seat with an arm around my shoulder as if we were old friends. It was kind of bizarre, but it felt right, like it was supposed to be this way.
“Good to see you, Dylan.”
Interesting that he didn’t mention my failure to call Wednesday morning.
“I feel like I let you down, not getting back to you yesterday.”
“What?” It was as if he’d forgotten his Tuesday night call. “I know you’d have called if you found something. Things went crazy so fast, yesterday, that was the last thing I was thinking about.”
No matter how often that happened, I still had trouble believing it.
Henry had seen a different version of the briefing, but he knew everything I knew and more. I spent two hours going over it with him, mostly to keep up appearances. He added a few details, but I already had most of what I needed for Wednesday.
Interacting with him, feeling his determination to make things right had a positive effect on me. He was outraged by what he’d seen at Union Station but he had an impressive ability to distance himself from his feelings. If he’d interrogated Achmed knowing everything I knew, he might have done exactly what I did, but as a law enforcement professional knowing he had to use extreme measures to get at the truth, given what was at stake, without the intense emotion that had driven me. I’d do well to follow his example.
Though he hadn’t been able to tell me much more about the attack on the station, he had valuable information I needed before the evening ended. He took me to a hole-in-the-wall Peruvian restaurant in the neighborhood, and we talked over goat stew.
“Can I ask you a hypothetical question?” I said. “What if I’d called, yesterday, at say, five in the morning, and said I had good intel that the attack on Union Station was going to occur in four hours? Or three, or even two? How many resources could you have mobilized to either head off the terrorists or defend the station against them?”
Henry looked at me with an ironic frown that suggested he thought I had something up my sleeve, but couldn’t imagine what it might be. The sigh that followed might have meant, “Okay, I’ll play along, for now.”
“Because we were on alert, Tuesday night, I had fifteen agents at my disposal, or I should say, my Director did. In theory, I’d have needed his approval before initiating an operation, but I’m not much for protocol either, when something critical’s on the line. And these days, we always have a rapid response team on immediate call, like the way the cops can call in the SWATs or the fire department can sound extra alarms in an emergency. So, let’s say I could have gotten thirty, maybe thirty-five highly trained people deployed before nine o’clock. And of course, I could have requested support from the DC police with that much lead time.”
I was impressed and relieved. I wished I could tell him he was going to have a chance to demonstrate that, but the Henry I was talking to would never know, except as the kind of dream-like, fading memory Ilene had described.
I asked him a few more questions, trying to pin down exactly how much notice he’d need to have this or that response, like deploying his force in a particular way with various rules of engagement. Henry sat through the grilling good-naturedly, but after an hour, his patience had worn thin.
“What’s this about, Dylan? You planning a re-enactment? A training drill? At least your people could wait for things to calm down.”
“It’s nothing like that. Let’s say I regret not being able to help you prevent the attack, and if I ever get a chance, I want to know how I can best help you deal with the next one.”
“We can say that if you like, but give me a break, will you? I’ve seen how you operate. There’s levels and levels going on in there.” He pointed at my head.
I grinned, embarrassed by my transparency and his candor. “Okay, you’re right. I’m planning an operation that requires me to get inside your head to be sure I know what I can expect from you. But it’s late and we’re both beat. Can I prevail on you to wait till tomorrow? I’ll lay the whole thing out for you in the morning. Any other day, I’d have started by telling you the plan and gone from there.”
“You know, Dylan, your Agency doesn’t have the greatest track record for playing well with others. I’ve gone along with you because I said I’d cooperate; it’s your turn to open up. But you’re right. If I don’t get some sleep, I’ll drop. Let’s continue this in my office about 9:00 tomorrow morning. But no bullshit, right?”
I promised, and he dropped me at a motel a few blocks from his office, suggesting that there were several better ones nearby. I said it didn’t matter, but the truth was I’d needed to find a room that had been vacant on Tuesday night, and that had been more difficult than I expected.
The first place I called claimed they didn’t retain a record of which rooms had been vacant on previous nights. I knew there had to be a way, probably from cleaning records, but I didn’t have time to argue. The next place had a reservation clerk that insisted I explain why I was stipulating such a strange requirement. It wasn’t until my third attempt that I encountered a clerk who was both willing to process my request without comment and able to find me a room. I’d quit while I was ahead.
I needed to sleep, too, but that wasn’t going to happen for a while. I had to think through how we could stop the attack and minimize the chance of collateral damage.
I wished there was someone else I could talk to who knew more about planning a tactical operation than I did, which was next to nothing. I spun my wheels for an hour and finally decided I might as well go to sleep, since I had to be up early. I couldn’t request a Wednesday morning wake-up call on Thursday night, and I’d worried about waking up on time until Ilene rescued me.
“I have just the thing,” she’d said, reaching into a drawer and coming up with an old-fashioned, spring-operated timer she’d used in graduate school for time-sensitive experiments. “Something told me I’d find a use for it again some day. You can set it for up to twelve hours.”
The little device didn’t care what day or time it was. All I had to do was turn the dial that set the spring inside and let it tick down until it sounded its alarm. At 11:50, avoiding midnight like a superstitious baseball player skipping over the foul line, I turned the dial to five hours and ten minutes, laid the timer and my briefcase on the bed beside me, turned out the light…and was jolted awake at 5:00 a.m. The first thing I did was phone the front desk.
“Today’s Wednesday, right?”
The clerk answered, “Yes,” in an unfamiliar accent and asked me if I was all right. I told him I always checked what day it was when I flew over the International Date Line. He said he did, too.
I washed my face and called Henry’s cell. Some instinct told me to use the motel phone rather than my cell, though I didn’t think much about it at the time. I wasn’t surprised when he answered on the first ring.
“Hey, Henry, are you up late or in early?”
“Dylan, that you? Man, you don’t screw around, do you.”
“Not today, I don’t. Do you know any more than you did when you called me?”
“No, our sources seem to have all gone to ground. It�
��s ominous.”
“Damn right it is. Listen, Henry. I know what’s up. You need to activate your troops and get them down to Union Station in Washington. The terrorists are going to stage an attack at 9:00.”
“You’re certain?”
“Absolutely. Let’s not waste time right now. I’ll explain when I see you.”
“Where are you now?”
How about three blocks from your office? “I’m a couple of exits away on the beltway. I jumped in my car the moment I got a lead on this. I wanted to be here when I got confirmation, which happened about ten minutes ago.”
“Know how to get here?”
“You’re in my GPS. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
I told Henry about the radioactive smoke bombs, that my informant had gotten hold of the attack plan, and that the terrorists had carefully timed and rehearsed it to occur this morning while the station was crowded with commuters. He accepted all that without question, and an hour later we were in the rear seat of another black SUV, speeding down I-95 toward Washington with two of Henry’s agents up front.
He’d needed only a few minutes on the phone to put together a mixed force of fifty federal and local law enforcement personnel, including a crack FBI tactical team, and DC and U. S. Capitol Police officers.
At just shy of 6:00, on the freeway with another agent driving and time to think, Henry said, “Why are we trying to interdict them at the station? With this much lead time we might be able to hit them where they live and avoid putting civilians at risk.”
Good point, Henry. Why hadn’t I thought of that? It was a good thing I’d had three weeks of practice dancing around the truth. I wasn’t even sure what the truth was.
“We know the plan and we know who they are, in a way, but not where they live or where their staging area is. If we’d had another day or two, we might have been able to locate them. They could be holed up anywhere near the station until a half hour before they strike. The only place I’m sure they’ll be and when, is Union Station at 9:00.”
