by Alan Zendell
“You said you know who they are, ‘in a way.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”
I reached into my bag and pulled out a set of pictures, close-ups of faces with the backgrounds slightly out of focus. “It means this. These are the men we’re going to intercept. I’m sure my Agency knows their names, by now, but I don’t see how knowing what to call them will help us. That’s really all we know.”
“Where the hell’d you get these?”
“They were downloaded from surveillance videos and digitized. These are the six men who’ll participate in the attack, all positively identified by my source. They plan to enter the station through the northwest entrance dressed as caterers.”
“That’s some source you have. Does he rent out his services?”
We all met at 6:45 at the Metropolitan Police Headquarters cafeteria, five blocks from Union Station. The team was issued armored vests, protective coveralls, face masks, eye protection, and gloves. They were divided into tactical groups of four, and each group leader received a set of the photographs I showed Henry.
An hour later, Henry sat at a table with another FBI squad leader and tactical officers from the two police forces, poring over a map of Union Station and the schematic I’d created from the video briefing in New York of the proposed routes of the six terrorists and the approximate timing of the attack.
Henry claimed the northwest entrance for his team, and the other groups were assigned to be deployed at the north parking garage, the subway entrance below the station, and the main entrance from Massachusetts Avenue.
Henry dictated the rules of engagement. Once a positive identification was made, the six men would be given a chance to surrender peacefully. The moment any group encountering them believed themselves to be at risk of deadly force or the terrorists attempted to place civilians in harm’s way, they were authorized to open fire. Once the terrorists were immobilized, every attempt would be made to take them alive.
33.
The adrenaline coursing through my veins made my body hum like a finely tuned Maserati as we waited on First Street NE in our conspicuous-as-hell SUV. Twelve group leaders were tied in to Henry’s radiophone network with orders to sound an alarm at the first sign of the purple box truck or a potential sighting of any of the men in the photographs. Otherwise, there was to be no chatter on the line.
I was confident the truck would stop at the northwest entrance, but we had a contingency plan for every possibility we could imagine. If there was no traffic on First Street, we could reach the northwest entrance in about twenty seconds, and other units, out of sight in the parking garage, might even beat us there.
It was 8:15 and I’d already had two donuts and a large coffee. Henry was drinking the stuff like it was coming out of a hose, and I wondered what he’d do if he needed a bathroom about the time the terrorists showed up. I’d never known minutes to tick by so slowly.
At 8:46, a lookout several blocks up North Capitol Street squawked a warning. “Purple truck heading south. Could be our bad boys.” One of Henry’s men jumped into the street to block traffic, and everyone else craned his neck in the direction of North Capitol, despite the massive office building blocking our view. But that part of Capitol Street had traffic lights on every corner and it was still rush hour, so three tension-filled minutes passed before the truck appeared, crossing First Street NE onto the Union Station service road.
“Northwest entrance. Go!” Henry barked into his phone. The agent directing traffic jumped into the back seat, and the driver jerked our vehicle into gear. We turned onto the service road just as the purple truck reached the entrance, screeching to a halt behind it a few seconds later as the SUV trailing us pulled up alongside it. Two more SUVs coming south from the parking garage hemmed the truck in from that side, and tactical officers with riot shields came streaming down the steps from the station and deployed on the sidewalk. The truck was surrounded. It was all so neat, I wanted to shout, “Cut. That’s a wrap.”
Henry set his loudspeaker to maximum volume and said: “This is the FBI. Come out showing no weapons and no one will be harmed. You have ten seconds to vacate the truck before we open fire.” Then he began counting.
Meanwhile, officers armed with tube-shaped launchers approached the truck from front and rear. Henry had ordered low-yield projectiles. We didn’t want to turn the truck into a dirty bomb of our own.
When the count reached ten with no movement from inside, Henry issued a command, and a single shell was launched at the truck’s rear bumper. The impact lifted the vehicle a foot off the ground, destroyed its rear axle, and blew away the lock on the roll-up door, along with a good chunk of the door itself. Masked and covered in protective suits, more than twenty law enforcement personnel waited, hoping a smoke bomb wouldn’t come flying out of the rent in the back of the truck.
Henry counted to ten again, then gave another command, and a second shell was fired into the truck’s engine compartment, which erupted in flames that quickly surrounded the glass-enclosed driver’s cab. The driver and passenger doors opened, and two men tumbled out shouting something I couldn’t understand, presumably warning the men in the back of the truck that the fire could spread quickly to the fuel tank less than ten feet away. They scrambled away from the burning front of the truck. No one had to tell them to kneel face down with their arms behind their heads. They must have been through this drill before.
At almost the same time, the damaged rear door rolled halfway up before jamming, and the six would-be attackers crawled through the opening. Hunched over with their hands raised, they ran clear of their burning truck and assumed the same position on the ground as the first two. Henry ordered two of his men to get the terrorists’ carry bags out of the truck, while three others, armed with commercial fire extinguishers attacked the flames.
It was over in five minutes. The fire was out, the attackers were in handcuffs, and six boxes of cesium smoke bombs were safely locked in lead containers. My Geiger counter showed some residual radioactivity, so everyone kept well back from the truck, and the northwest entrance to the station was sealed off. I checked my watch as the terrorists were being driven away to a decon site. It was 8:59. Ready to jump out of my skin, I wanted to call Ilene and William to tell them what I’d done, but they wouldn’t have known what I was talking about.
There was much hand-shaking and back-slapping among Henry’s people. As I sat on the curb watching Henry and waiting for my body to settle down, the other teams, having assured themselves that we’d contained the entire threat, gathered along the service road, giving the radioactive truck a wide berth. Henry thanked them, especially his counterparts from the city and Capitol police, and they congratulated him on a well-executed operation. Henry would be a celebrity after today, his future assured.
Someone else might have been ecstatic, but not Henry. After the others dispersed, he circled the smoking truck, a lot closer to it than he should have been, studying the photographs of the terrorists, looking at the surveillance cameras mounted above the sealed entrance doors to the station, then back at the truck. Realizing where his thoughts were headed and remembering what he’d said in Laurel about conceptualizing a crime scene by studying the aftermath, I wondered how the scene was playing out in his mind. And thought hard about how I’d respond.
He walked back and settled his bulk onto the curb next to me.
“Good job, Henry.”
“Yeah. That it was.”
Each of the surveillance photos showed a terrorist carrying one of the bags we retrieved from the truck, a portion of the purple truck itself, and enough of the background to make it obvious, even slightly out of focus, that the images had been captured by one of the cameras mounted above the northwest entrance door. Henry sat silently looking them over. He waited until there was no one else within earshot, then turned to face me.
“You got some ’splainin’ to do, Lucy. Either this was all a magnificently staged hoax or publicity stunt, or you can see into the
future. What the fuck are these, anyway, cast pictures from a dress rehearsal?”
His gaze was intense. Not angry, but I knew it could turn that way if he thought he’d been manipulated in some bureaucratic game or exercise.
“Henry, Henry,” I sighed, knowing I couldn’t carry my charade any further. “I wished like hell I could tell you the truth earlier, but you’d have insisted on proof I didn’t have, and we could have wasted so much time, we might not have stopped them.”
“You’re telling me those guys really are terrorists, and those blobs in the boxes really are radioactive smoke bombs, right?”
“Absolutely. Your lab’ll confirm that.”
“Then what are these?” He held out the photographs. “They were taken right here. That’s their truck. This could have been them, this morning, if we hadn’t intercepted them. Even the sun angle and the shadows are right.”
“You’ve got it, exactly, Henry. You’re a hell of a detective.”
“I’m sorry, Dylan, you’ll have to do better than that.”
He’d gotten that far reasoning it out on his own. Would he believe me if I told him the truth? I reached into my pocket for my flash drive. I hadn’t been willing to let it out of my sight.
“See this? It’s all here. The proof you’ll want.”
“Of what?”
“Of what you’re thinking, but can’t quite make yourself believe. This thing is packed with news stories describing a successful attack on Union Station the day after it occurred. Radioactive particles everywhere, the station quarantined, hundreds, maybe thousands of people affected by deadly radiation. And those six guys escaping without a shot being fired.”
“I don’t understand,” Henry said.
“I don’t either, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that it’s real. My wife downloaded it from tomorrow’s news sites. She gave it to me before I drove down here to see you, tomorrow. I met you in your office at 6:00 pm, Thursday, the day after the attack.”
“What are you, a damn time traveler?”
“Now you see why I couldn’t tell you before. Bear with me a couple of minutes. I know it sounds crazy, but Thursday evening, more than a day after the attack, I went over the surveillance videos with you. You’d been up most of two nights and were about to drop.” He was listening. He seemed to want to believe me, but couldn’t. I needed something to poke a hole in his disbelief.
“You took me to that South American place down the street and a sweet young Salvadoran girl served us goat stew for dinner. I didn’t want to order it, but you insisted. You swore I’d love it.”
He knew I’d never been anywhere near his office before and couldn’t possibly know about the little out of the way restaurant he was hooked on. I needed to build on the shred of credibility that bought me.
“While we were eating, you told me what I needed to know to ensure that we’d be successful this morning, though you thought we were discussing future preparedness. I know how this sounds, Henry. Imagine what I went through when I first realized what I could do.”
I could have said more, but he wouldn’t have heard me. He was busy processing what I’d said from every angle he could think of.
“Are you telling me you guys have discovered a way to go back in time and change things?” His eyes locked onto mine, like a mongoose on a cobra’s. The force of his stare was almost a physical thing.
“Not exactly,” I said, “but close enough that the result is essentially the same. First, there’s no us, just me. And I didn’t figure out how to do it, it just happened, I still don’t know how. A month ago I started living Thursdays before Wednesdays. I’d go to sleep on Tuesday night and wake up on Thursday. Then I’d go to sleep on Thursday night and wake up on Wednesday. That’s what happened after we talked on the phone Tuesday night. I went to sleep, and when I woke up it was Thursday and the attack had already happened. My first thought was how worried you were Tuesday night, when all the chatter had stopped and everyone had gone to ground. Now I knew why.”
He was listening, not saying anything, so I continued. “After our conversation last Sunday, I knew I could count on you to stop the attack before it happened, if I could get down here early enough, today and alert you. My wife, a friend, and I downloaded everything we could find from CNN, BBC, Fox, Al Jazeera – all the major sites. We even recorded a DVD of the TV coverage. I attended a closed circuit briefing with William that included all the surveillance videos from the attack. That’s how I got the photographs and was able to tell you how they intended to carry it out.
“I called you Thursday afternoon and offered to come down and help. I didn’t mean to game you, Henry. It was the only thing I knew to do. So I was here, tomorrow, Thursday evening with you. I went to sleep in that Holiday Inn up the street from your office and when I woke up it was Wednesday, today, just like I’ve been doing for the last month. That’s why I was there at 5:00 am.”
Henry still hadn’t said a word. I’d have given anything to read his mind.
“You don’t believe me, do you? I can’t say I blame you.” I asked him to walk back to the SUV with me so I could get my briefcase. Inside was an audio tape.
“I made this for you,” I said, handing it to him. “I recorded my conversations with you, Thursday evening. It’s all there, you and I discussing the attack and how we might have prevented it if we’d known in advance. I showed you the pictures of the terrorists and told you they were from surveillance tapes. And finally, I have this.”
I showed him the front page of Thursday’s New York Times.
The rest of the team had left, so Henry and I were alone in his SUV heading north on I-95. We were half way to Baltimore before he said anything.
“So all this time, your highly reliable source was you.”
“Right,” I said.
“I’m surprised William hasn’t locked you up in a research facility.”
“William doesn’t know. No one does except my wife and the shrink I went to see when I thought I was delusional. And you, of course.”
“I’m flattered,” he said, deadpan, then thought some more. “If all this is true, last week when I met you in Laurel, you hadn’t lived Wednesday yet. I’m surprised you didn’t go back to the motel Wednesday morning and…shit! You did, didn’t you? You son of a bitch, you saw the killers. That’s why you offered to take over that part of the investigation. You knew who they were and your Agency was covering for them. Stop me when I say something wrong.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“Son of a bitch!” he repeated. “Are you at least gonna tell me if I was right?”
“About Plan B? Yeah, you were right.”
“I thought the whole point of Homeland Security was for us to communicate. Was shooter number one yours? And you never told us?”
“Hell, Henry, we didn’t know either, and he’s not one of ours.”
“He wasn’t a cop or I’d know. Who the hell was he? CIA? NSA? You’re not going to hold out on me after all this, are you?”
“What would be the point? You’d figure it out in another minute, anyway. Try Israeli intelligence. They’ve been way ahead of us since this began.”
Henry nodded, assimilating the new information as if I’d told him it was going to rain.
“You carry a Walther, don’t you?”
“How’d you know that?” I’d never had it on me when we were together.
“Didn’t you just tell me what a great detective I was? Let me guess. You witness the shootings. The smoke clears and you decide to go in and have a look. One of the victims is badly injured but still alive. He thinks you’re the killer returning and takes a shot at you. You ever shoot anybody before that?”
“No.”
Henry glanced over at me, incredulous. “Shit, Dylan, didn’t anyone ever tell you about the fifth amendment? You just confessed to shooting someone to a federal agent.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t read me my rights, so it’s inadmissible.”
Henry laughed so hard I thought I might have to grab the steering wheel.
34.
Faced with two possibilities – either I had escaped from an asylum or I was telling the truth – Henry reserved judgment until he could study the web downloads and videos I’d brought.
The part of Henry that excelled at synthesizing facts and observations had fit everything he knew about me into a consistent picture, which left him in a comfort zone, but he was too good an investigator to seize on the first theory that fit the facts, especially one that required the kind of leap of faith this one did.
We were in his office by 10:30. Feeling relaxed for the first time since waking up beside Ilene Thursday morning, I thought about the promises I’d made to her and William. Henry installed me in a room with a secure phone and went off to a television-equipped conference room to watch the DVD I’d brought.
I called Ilene to tell her I was in Washington working with Henry, but decided against telling her how I had spent the morning. On this version of Wednesday, she didn’t know anything about the plan to attack Union Station and I wanted her to live today and Thursday without corrupting her view of events. There’d be plenty of time to share everything with her on Friday. I told her I’d be home late that evening.
My conversation with William would be dicier. I had promised to keep him informed timely of what I was involved in – at least I wasn’t making him wait two days this time. I needed to tell him a sanitized version of this morning’s actions. If only I could be sure William wouldn’t flip out − I felt badly sharing the truth with Henry but not him. Fortunately, I got his voicemail. It was probably secure, but I was careful, anyway.
“William, it’s Dylan. I’m in Washington. Henry White phoned last night and asked me to come down to help him follow up on some intel because most of the chatter his people monitored had gone quiet. You may hear something about a joint FBI/police operation outside Union Station around nine this morning. We’re guessing some kind of cover story’ll be released, later today, but that was us. We caught some people you’ve been looking for trying to pull off something nasty inside the station. I’ll be with Henry all day if you want me.”
