Wednesday's Child

by Alan Zendell

  Henry spent the rest of the day scrutinizing what I’d brought him, that is, when he wasn’t evading invitations to briefings, dodging the press, and responding to calls from his boss. William didn’t call back, and I assumed he tracked the story down through his own sources.

  Henry realized that no matter how much help I had, I couldn’t have faked the huge volume of information on my flash drive. As for the DVD, a professional special effects team armed with hundreds of hours of on-air tape of all the principals might have created it after countless hours of effort. The front page of the Times would have been easier to fake, but he couldn’t imagine anyone going to all that trouble just to impress him.

  As I had done when I first started swapping Wednesdays and Thursdays, Henry held out the possibility that this morning might turn out be a bad joke until late in the day, when the lab report confirmed the composition of the blobs, as he’d called them. An hour later, one of the arrested terrorists unexpectedly broke and confessed to the whole affair, outlining the attack plan exactly as my surveillance videos had captured it. But after delivering a blistering tirade of anti-American and anti-Zionist hate slogans, he clammed up and wouldn’t say another word.

  Henry had joined the growing group of people who chose to accept my success rather than question it. I let him make copies of everything, but I took back my copy of Thursday’s Times. From Henry’s point of view it made a nice visual impact, but it was now superfluous.

  Everyone involved in the morning’s action had been told it was highly classified. None of them would discuss it. The Union Station management office announced that the northwest entrance and the service road within a hundred feet of it would be closed indefinitely because of leaking sewer pipes below ground. The area needed to be thoroughly scrubbed of radioactive contamination, so a bogus construction project was good cover.

  This was in advance of a policy teleconference attended by the FBI Director and the chiefs of the Metropolitan and Capitol police forces, which was immediately followed by another with the White House Chief of Staff.

  The threat of dirty bomb attacks had been withheld from the press for weeks, and no one could see any benefit to alarming the public with a story about what might have been. At 4:00 pm, the President approved a cover story. A combined strike force of federal and local law enforcement had intercepted a gang of bank robbers and, after a brief car chase downtown, cornered them on the service road outside Union Station. Thanks to the brilliant work of the law enforcement professionals, the robbers had been captured with no casualties. End of story.

  Henry was shaking his head. “The press amazes me. If the alleged car chase had been real, and they’d gotten wind of it, it would be all over the news, but not a single reporter asked whether it was a coincidence that the leaking sewer pipes were found exactly where the bank robbers were apprehended.”

  I said something inane about luck and how long a day it had been.

  “You heading back to New Jersey tonight?” Henry asked. “I have a spare room if you’d rather go back in the morning.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but I can’t. I need to be there first thing Friday morning.”

  “But today’s only Wed…oh, I see. How’s that work with you and your wife?”

  “It’s strange, but we’re adapting. Like tonight, I want to go home, but I don’t want to get there too early. The temptation to tell her about today would be unbearable.”

  “I thought you said she knows about all this.”

  “She does, but we have an agreement about how and when we share information. From my point of view, she’s already lived Thursday. I was there with her. She’s the one who told me about the attack and like I told you before, she created most of the documentation I gave you. But when I get home tonight she won’t know about any of this, and she won’t remember the version of Wednesday she lived when the attack occurred unless I force her to.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. She and I have been through this before. When I’m careless with information she’s left with conflicting memories and different, parallel realities. It’s hard on her. If I wait until Friday to update her on my Wednesday and Thursday, the way we arranged, we’ll have our friend Jerry with us – he’s the shrink I saw – and comparing facts and memories will be more like an academic exercise without the anxieties and emotional overtones.”

  Henry shook his head in sympathy.

  “Now that you know about this,” I said, “you and I need to work out some rules, too. I need coffee before I hit the road. Why don’t you come with me?”

  I spent close to an hour loading up on caffeine while Henry began to appreciate the complexity of what he’d gotten involved in. We liked each other and worked well together. We both believed the terrorists were probably feeling a little desperate, and we’d have to go all out to locate them before they pulled off something catastrophic with their remaining isotopes. After losing two of their people in the motel last week and the interrogations of the two men from the ship, there was no telling what they might feel driven to do after today’s busted operation.

  We agreed to keep doing what we had been. Henry would work on tracing the terrorists back to their source, trying to learn where they were hiding the rest of the smuggled cesium. I’d work the New York angle with William and Rod, and if either of us came up with something, we’d work the lead together.

  “With four of us knowing what you can do, now, we ought to be able to come up with a way to use it to help us nail these guys,” Henry concluded.

  “My thought, exactly.”

  ***

  My drive home was almost relaxing. I missed the worst of the traffic and had an hour of daylight for the first part of the trip. And each mile brought me closer to Ilene.

  Psychologically and emotionally, I was totally at peace. The outcome of the last two days had been just about perfect. Moreover, everything I’d done felt right. In previous weeks, I’d felt driven by a need to do something I could neither identify nor comprehend. Now, I knew exactly what I was about.

  The day ended on an equally high note. Ilene greeted me with enough heat to melt an iceberg. As always, there was love, but that night it was with an intensity not always present in a twenty-five year marriage. Or was it something else?

  Last week, two different Wednesdays had coexisted in her memories and feelings for a time. There was no way she could know anything about the attack on Union Station, yet she communicated nonverbally that in some deep recess of her mind she sensed that something momentous had occurred and that I’d been involved in it. Maybe she just knew me so well that she read it in my demeanor and reflected it back to me.

  I didn’t really want to think about that. I didn’t want to think at all. I just wanted Ilene in my arms. Apparently, that was all she wanted, too.

  35.

  I awoke Friday morning eager to learn about Ilene’s Thursday, the one I’d skipped, on which William surely must have been looking for me. After not calling back on Wednesday, he’d left messages in both my office voice mail and my Agency cell phone system on Thursday, neither of them sounding happy about my unavailability. A perverse part of my brain wanted to retort that I’d spent two hours with him, on Thursday, at a briefing he didn’t remember attending.

  William’s tolerance for my odd behavior wasn’t unlimited. I was contemplating how to handle that when Henry called to add fuel to the fire.

  “Glad I caught you, Dylan. I thought you’d want to know – William called my office looking for you yesterday. I told him you were working down in the archives, where there’s no cell phone reception, and you’d be heading home when you were done. I said you left word that you’d call him this morning after you got back. Was that okay?”

  “It’s fine, Henry, thanks. It ought to keep him at bay for a while.”

  “He asked if I knew about the message you left him Wednesday morning. I told him about our brilliant bust and he wanted to know what your role was.
He didn’t say it, but I’m sure he really wanted to know whether one of your mysterious hunches was involved. I said we got a lucky phone tip and worked the case together and he could get the rest from you.

  “There was a moment when I thought he was going to challenge me, and it occurred to me that someone might want to look into that alleged tip. Every call that comes in to this office is logged in the computer. What if someone checks and finds that five a.m. call from you?”

  “They won’t be able to trace it to me. I used the motel phone, and as far as the motel’s records are concerned no one was registered in that room on Tuesday night.”

  I thanked Henry again, and hung up. Jerry wasn’t due for a while, so I bit the bullet and called William, deciding not to approach him with my tail between my legs.

  “Henry said he briefed you on our bust, yesterday. You should have seen it, William. Smooth and efficient, just like we drew it up in the play book.”

  “I got the official, Top Secret version from Manzone last night. You continue to amaze me, Dylan.”

  “Me? This was Henry’s operation. I just went along as backup, in case some of the cesium got loose.”

  “Come on, Dylan. Aren’t you the guy who always warns about banking too much on coincidence? How come whenever you’re around, these days, something remarkable happens? If it wasn’t that I can’t imagine what motive you’d have, I’d be convinced you were hiding something from the rest of us. That’s not how we usually operate, here.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, William. Henry deserves all the credit on this one. I just happened to be there when he put it together.”

  He knew it didn’t add up. He was a logistics type, smart and competent, but not overly imaginative. More than once, I’d heard him say, “I have no interest in science fiction. I only deal in reality.” Though he deserved better from me, I thought I had no choice but to hide the truth from him as long as I could. In any case, it turned out he’d been trying to contact me for an entirely different reason.

  “We’ll deal with that later,” he said. “I need to update you on your friend Burdak and the Hamas agent Mossad turned over to us. We’ve been interrogating him, keeping him isolated, but except for demanding a lawyer and some more anti-American ranting, he won’t talk to us. Burdak said our methods were too soft. ‘Give him back to us and you’ll have answers in a day,’ was how he put it.”

  A month ago I might have pontificated about how prisoners ought to be treated, but all I said was, “He might have been right.”

  “I’m not squeamish about doing what’s necessary,” William countered, “but there was a better way in this case. The guy’s a minor operative, one of hundreds like him. He wasn’t important, but what he knew might be, so we worked a back-door deal with the Palestinian Authority. We’d deport him and ship him back home and hold his bosses harmless if he told us who was running the dirty bomb operation. Hamas leadership has no love for those guys. Hamas is Sunni and the Iranian-supported terrorists are Shiite, never mind the way the Iranian group belittles them.

  “A Palestinian envoy showed up and met with the prisoner with Samir listening in. The envoy ordered him to tell us what he knew, as long as we didn’t question him about Hamas itself. He gave us a few leads to follow in New Jersey, but the most important thing he told us was that someone was coming soon from the Middle East to take over the dirty bomb operation. That was why they wanted to move quickly to close the deal, before the new guy could veto it. Mossad followed up, and we think we know who’s coming and when.”

  ***

  When Jerry arrived, we played a brief game of Who Goes First. I’d already looked at Friday’s Times, and watched the morning news on CNN. The Times treated the failed bank robbery in DC as an interesting story, but not one of national importance. CNN gave it nine minutes, including commercial breaks, but after getting non-answers to their questions from both police and FBI officials, and with no devastating video footage or helicopter chases to re-run, they conceded defeat and moved on to a story about a tornado in Oklahoma that had the good grace to leave a couple of smoking buildings in its wake.

  While neither Ilene’s diary nor the files and videos Jerry saved on their revised Thursday said anything essentially different from what I’d seen in the morning news, we needed them for the point-by-point comparisons we were building. Exhibit A, Congressman, is a recording of Headline News, from 2:00 pm, on the version of Thursday, August 7th on which Mr. Dylan Brice was extant. We invite the Committee to compare that with Exhibit B, a recording of Headline News, from 2:00 pm, on the version of Thursday, August 7th on which he was not.

  “Before I tell you what I experienced,” I said, “is there anything you want to add, for the sake of documentation, before your memories are contaminated by what I tell you?”

  Jerry shrugged, negatively, but Ilene, who, had a stronger emotional connection to me, hesitated. “I don’t know whether I actually remember anything different or I’m anticipating what you’re going to say. It feels like last week, when I had two sets of memories. I’m trying to focus, now…damn it, I know something happened on Wednesday, something shocking. I remember feeling enraged, some kind of revenge reflex, and desperately wishing you could go back and change it. Am I right? Is that why you went to Washington?”

  “Yes, but we probably shouldn’t conclude anything from that. Given how the last few weeks have gone, you probably could have guessed as much. Assuming your ghost memory is real, I’m not surprised that it’s less precise than last time. It’s Friday, and more time has passed. Last time we did this it was Wednesday night and you were trying to remember what happened that morning.”

  Seeing that Ilene was struggling to piece together flashes of fading memories, I opened my briefcase and took out the Thursday Times Ilene gave me before I left for Washington.

  “Does this ring true for you?”

  She and Jerry stared at the 96-point headline: Dirty Bomb Attack on Washington RR Station. Then, below it, in 42-point, Four Dead, Hundreds Affected by Possibly Fatal Radiation; Union Station Quarantined Indefinitely.

  Ilene, who had been standing, bent over with the heels of her hands on my desk to read the headline, gasped and dropped onto a chair, pressing her hands to her temples.

  “God,” she whispered, “I remember.” Then, sharp as ever, she processed what she was reading against what we’d seen on the morning news. Seconds later, she was calm and calculating, her eyes blazing, the way I’d seen them on my Thursday.

  “You got them? You and Henry? The bank robbery story was a cover-up?”

  I nodded, and Jerry looked on, not quite with the program yet. I wasn’t quite with it either. I was startled by the clarity of Ilene’s memory. Maybe what I’d surmised, last time, had been correct. If space-time was like an elastic system of enormous potential energy, it might give, like a trampoline, in proportion to the intensity of the energy applied to it. No one would question the intensity of Ilene’s determination to remember, and it had apparently been enough to stretch a couple of strands of the fabric, at least until her concentration relaxed.

  To my continued surprise, Ilene described our Thursday morning together and her memory of what the Times said happened on Wednesday to Jerry, not missing a thing. He took it well, but had questions.

  “You remember all that and you also remember Thursday the way I do?”

  Ilene blinked, as though her brain was shifting gears. “I do. It’s like remembering two different days, both of them yesterday. The same with Wednesday.” She brought her right hand to her head again, pressing against it. “I can feel one set of memories fading. It takes so much energy to remember, like pushing as hard as I can to keep a door open against a gale. Eventually, I’ll have to stop and it’ll slam shut.”

  “You don’t have to try so hard,” I told her. “The fact that you could dig down for the memory at all, and grasp it so securely for a few minutes tells us what we need to know. You don’t have to remember it directly a
ny more, only that you were able to for a while, and Jerry and I both saw you do it. It’s all here, thoroughly documented.”

  I plugged my flash drive into a computer port and brought up one of the cable news sites she’d downloaded. “You did all this, both of you, and gave it to me so I could show it to you today. You were here on my Thursday, Jerry, working with Ilene while I attended a security briefing in the city. This, too.” I handed him the DVD.

  I’d been holding my breath until I saw that the flash drive and the DVD were as I remembered them. The three of us worked for most of the day comparing the records of the two Thursdays, I with growing satisfaction, Ilene with grim determination, and Jerry with complete amazement that only dissipated as afternoon turned to evening.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “The Government’s decided to keep the threat of dirty bombs quiet, even though no one’s sure how much of the smuggled cesium is still out there, who has it, or where it is, right? You think that’s the right decision?”

  “It’s a tough call,” I said. “It comes down to two questions. Would the situation be improved if people knew; and if we created terror and disrupted people’s lives by announcing the threat, would we be doing the terrorists’ work for them? I think people have to know the truth, all of it, once the threat’s past. That’s why we’re documenting everything, but there’s a more subtle question that needs an answer.

  “Say we’re able to nail the bastards with no real harm done from here on. What would full disclosure mean, then? The people keeping this quiet don’t know the whole truth. Only the three of us and Henry White do, because every time a disaster is averted, everyone else’s memory of the event disappears. We need to show the world the horror of what happened, and how close the President came to starting a nuclear war, yesterday.