by Alan Zendell
“You think the Joint Chiefs would support a nuclear strike?” Rod asked Henry.
“With sufficient provocation, they might, but he doesn’t need their approval. They’re military and he’s the Commander in Chief. Their only options are to follow orders or resign in protest, assuming any of them had the balls and integrity that required. In the end, they’ll do their jobs, because if the strikes were launched they’d want to maintain continuity in the chain of command. Short of staging a coup, there’s no way they can stop him.”
“We’ve seen it happen before,” I said, “a President with a limited world view rushing off to war against all logic, as mindlessly driven as the jihadists he’s fighting against. Only this time, it won’t stop there. We’re dealing with people who believe mutual annihilation is an acceptable outcome. The nightmare we’ve worried about for years might come true, suitcase nukes planted all over Europe and the United States. Once we let the genie out of the bottle, there’ll be nothing to deter them. Iran would use a nuclear strike by us as an excuse to annihilate Israel, and the Israelis might act preemptively and take out half of the Middle East.”
“You really believe that?” Henry said.
“He’s right, Henry,” Rod said, with no trace of irony.
“What really scares me is that it’s not just the President and his macho advisors,” I said. “Remember the weeks after nine-eleven? Almost everyone in this country was bursting with righteous anger, eager to kill anyone named Mohamed. What if Husam al Din pulls off something worse? The President won’t be the only one who wants to wipe Islam off the map.”
“Jesus, Dylan. You really think your screwed-up time stream is the work of some super-being who expects you to use it to head off Armageddon, don’t you,” Henry said. “You think it’s up to you to save humanity from itself?”
“When you put it that way, it sounds like megalomania. What should I believe? I’m the one who’s living this way and I just happen to be in the center of this mess. I can’t believe this is all some cosmic accident. Either it’s what you said, or there’s really a God up there toying with us. What if God exists and He’s a psychopath?”
“That’s way beyond my pay grade,” Henry said. It was time to get back to work.
I’m not a trained investigator, so I told Henry I’d be at his disposal in any way he needed me. I’d said the same thing to him on Thursday, but, of course, he didn’t know that. Some things don’t change, I thought, and Rod proved my point.
“Maybe you can explain something to me. When you were with us on Thursday, Henry and I were doing something quite different from what we’ll be doing tomorrow. How does that work? What happens to the Henry and Rod you knew on your Thursday?”
“You asked me the identical question on Thursday, when I told you my plans for today. Let’s talk about it on Friday, when you have a different perspective.”
42.
Friday, Henry and Rod experienced what Ilene had been living with for the first time. They both retained dreamlike glimpses of that nonexistent day, while feeling like they’d mislaid something. After a while, they could only sense it when they focused their attention, and by late morning, they’d lost it completely. When I brought it up, later, Henry said he remembered remembering the other Thursday, but not the memories themselves.
“Is this what you meant by the tension in the trampoline forcing reality back to where it’s supposed to be?”
I nodded, but I wasn’t into the game the way I’d been with Ilene, partly because neither of them was Ilene, but mostly because a dark cloud had settled over me. An insidious, toxic cloud, laced not with radioactive cesium, but with anxiety and impending doom. I needed to be active, doing something productive, but I felt like a fifth wheel. The investigators and agents did their things, and as it had always been in the past, I waited in the background…until William told me to get lost. I was stressing everyone out.
I’d brought Ilene up to date that morning over breakfast, but I’d omitted my dread of looming devastation. Now, alone in my head, it intensified as the odds against our efforts to intercept the terrorists seemed to multiply. Weeks of accumulated stress had unraveled my veneer of calm. I called Ilene and told her I was in trouble.
She reminded me that we were meeting Jerry at 5:00. “Can it wait till then or should I leave work and meet you somewhere?”
Suppressing the reflex to tell her that wasn’t necessary, I said, “I don’t think it’s good for me to be alone right now. I need help. I’m drowning.”
As usual, she knew exactly what I needed. I took the train back to New Jersey and we drove to Liberty State Park. Everyone associates Liberty Island and the Statue of the same name with New York City, but they’re actually in New Jersey, and the park is the closest you can get to them on the mainland.
We sat on a jetty, a quarter mile of wind-swept water between us and the island. The brisk breeze cutting into the humid August heat reminded me of the salt air rushing past the Harbor Patrol boat as we sped toward the Statue a few Saturdays ago. I’d silently mocked William’s cornball patriotism, wondering if he’d planned the route as a way to inspire us, but William knew what he was about.
I almost regretted not telling him the truth about me; almost, but not quite. I didn’t have energy to spare on regrets. I was using all I had to keep from floundering in the waves of horror that rushed over me.
Ilene understood what was happening. “You’re really letting this upset you.”
“I don’t seem to have any control over it. Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe.”
“You’re convinced we’re heading toward nuclear war if you don’t stop the terrorists?”
“You think I’m wrong?”
“It’s possible, even plausible, but it’s hardly a certainty.”
“I know, but it’s the only possibility I can think about.”
She cradled my head against her, pressing her cheek against my forehead. We sat motionless, not saying anything, as her calming energy filled me. After a while, I got up and took her hands, letting our eyes speak for us.
Ilene checked her watch. “Let’s go see Jerry.”
We met in the lounge of the Hyatt Regency in Jersey City. Since it wasn’t quite happy hour yet, we managed to find a table with a view of New York and the Hudson that was as spectacular, in its way, as that of the Statue from the park, but to me, it was haunting. We talked quietly, Jerry and Ilene sipping wine while I nursed an iced tea. I told them how Husam al Din eluded us on Wednesday, and that I’d been with Henry, earlier, thirty-six hours after William made his all-out-effort speech, but so far, we’d come up empty.
Jerry listened, watching me carefully. “You’re in quite a state, Dylan.” He reached for my wrist. “Do you mind? Your pulse is racing, your eyes are like sparklers; you’re so on edge you’re almost twitching – your blood pressure must be up thirty points. I could prescribe something for you, a mild sedative to take the edge…”
“No! I don’t want to be tranquilized.”
“All right. You want to tell me what’s got you so worked up?”
When I didn’t say anything right away, Ilene answered for me. “Dylan believes the only way to prevent a nuclear holocaust is to stop the terrorists before they carry out another attack. And he’s convinced it’s up to him to stop them.”
“I wouldn’t want that responsibility,” Jerry said. “Is she right?”
“It’s not that I actually believe that, literally.”
“What is it, then?”
“It’s a feeling driving me, a mindless conviction that I have to be on alert every second.”
“Why?”
“That’s just the way it’s been the last few weeks. Something bad happens and I’m in a unique position to fix it.”
“I thought that only happened on Wednesdays and Thursdays. You’re anxious over what might happen next week?”
“Yes, very.”
“There’s something else.” Ilene said. “Our kids�
�ll be here next week.” She looked straight at me. “Ever since I reminded you, you’ve been wired. Is that what this is about?”
“Oh, God,” I moaned, clamping my hands over my ears, feeling like I was suffocating. A premonition of grief overwhelmed my senses.
“Dylan, what’s happening! Look how pale he is.”
Jerry was already at my side. He pushed my head down to my knees, imploring me to take deep breaths. The episode passed quickly but it had marked me.
“Tell us what just happened,” Jerry said, maintaining his professional calm.
“It was like a vision. My sons, their wives, right in the middle of everything. Death and destruction all around them. It was so intense, so real.”
“It looked like a classic panic attack,” Jerry said. “Understandable, under the circumstances. We all have a breaking point, and you’re stretched pretty thin.”
The attack had sapped what was left of my energy. I must have looked and sounded like an automaton. “It didn’t feel like panic. It was more like anguish. Panic starts in your gut and expands. This felt like something imposed on me from outside. It started in my head and spread to my diaphragm like a wave of paralysis passing through me. I felt growing background apprehension, like the way the air feels before an electrical storm or when the pressure below ground is about to erupt in an earthquake. You must think I’ve lost it.”
“Don’t worry about that. Just let it out.”
“It isn’t me doing it, Jerry.” I trembled, shivering in the air conditioned room. “I think the Übermensch is manipulating my feelings, warning me.”
“Warning you that something’s going to happen to your kids?”
“Warning me about something terrible, forcing me to face that it’s coming if I don’t stop it. He let me supply my own imagery, and I superimposed my concerns about the kids.”
“Why don’t you let me give you something so you can stay functional?”
“But what if…”
“What if what?”
“What if I can’t hear Him any more?”
“Do you remember what you just did? You covered your ears with your hands. Is there a voice telling you all this?”
“I don’t hear voices, Jerry.”
“Look, Dylan. The fact that the other things you described seem demonstrably true doesn’t mean you didn’t create this crisis in your head. You know what I think? You’ve convinced yourself that everything rests on your shoulders, and you’re afraid you won’t be able to handle it. You’re anticipating the guilt you’ll feel if you fail and punishing yourself to preempt what you think is in store for you later.”
I stared at him for a few seconds. My trembling stopped and I experienced a sudden, unexpected clarity. “I know what this is. It’s stress in the fabric of space-time. The Übermensch messed with my time stream, trying to change the probability of a future catastrophe. He’s manipulating forces that are unfathomable. Imagine you’re in a place where violently opposed forces capable of destroying you instantly are everywhere, and you’re at the only point in the continuum where they all balance each other. Imagine the terror of knowing that the slightest misstep will crush you. He’s caused a snag in my trampoline that places impossible stresses on the strands that hold it together. If I can’t find a way to free it, it’ll snap and destroy everything.”
Jerry looked at Ilene. “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”
“Not really, but he apparently does. Look how much better he seems.”
I did feel better.
I don’t cope well when things are in flux. I need something solid to hang on to, or I lose my bearings. I’d found a logical construct in which the terrible foreboding that had been choking me made sense.
At home, later, Ilene said, “I’m concerned about how you included the kids in your apocalyptic vision. Do you want to cancel next week?”
“Part of me does, but I feel strongly about living our lives, not sacrificing what’s most important. Remember when the Government told us to live normally after nine-eleven? We knew it was bullshit, but there was a point to it. If we give up the things that matter most, they win without firing a shot.”
“I know Dylan, but maybe He’s sending you a warning to keep them safe. You’ve been relying on your feelings all along. Why not now?”
“Trust me about this. We know iconic events and places like Yankee Stadium are targets. Security will be airtight. The cops’ll have radiation detectors at every turnstile and anyone wearing concealing clothing in this heat will be thoroughly searched. If we were concerned enough for me to tell the kids not to come, we’d have to consider canceling the games. Where would it stop, then? Besides, what would we tell them? They have no idea about any of this.”
Ilene still worried, but we decided to move ahead with our plans unless something changed.
WEEK 6
43.
The push to locate the terrorists continued unabated through the weekend with William conducting a daily five o’clock briefing. I finally had something constructive to do, spending twenty hours working with Port Authority analysts on the radar traces.
On Monday morning, Henry met with a federal judge and revealed what had been kept from the public about the aborted attack on Union Station. He obtained the court’s approval to apply the anti-terrorism provisions of the Patriot Act to those arrested at the station. Even with the court order, his Monday update on the FBI’s efforts in the Washington area was not upbeat.
“After twelve days of solitary confinement and intense interrogation, none of the prisoners has told us anything, though one unsuccessfully attempted suicide. We searched their homes, and seized their phone records and computers, but all we found were calls from throw-away cell phones and closed email accounts.”
The structure of the terrorists’ organization was extremely effective. After the Union Station arrests, the cell that carried out the stymied attack had been amputated like a gangrenous limb. Henry believed those under arrest didn’t know the identity of the people who’d been running them, anyway. Chances were there’d been little or no face-to-face contact, and their handlers probably hadn’t used their real names.
“Our only real lead in the Laurel killings,” Henry continued, “was the mosque the victims attended, many of whose members are on watch lists. My Baltimore office interviewed everyone that had a connection to the victims or whose past suggested they might have knowledge of the smuggled isotopes. But even though the judge’s order covered that case too, the secrecy around the attempted attack on Union Station made it impossible to conduct mass arrests. Without the apparent cause of an imminent emergency, the Muslim community would have been up in arms, and the investigation would have turned into a media circus.”
William thanked Henry and turned to Samir, “Anything on the two seamen from Al Khalifa?”
“They don’t know anything about the operation here in the States,” Samir said. “They were full of bluster, but when we produced pictures of their families in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, well within reach of our agents, they broke down and told us who had shipped the isotopes and given them their instructions. The people they identified are well-protected by extremist elements in Iran. I don’t see much happening quickly in that regard.”
The news was better concerning the search for Husam al Din. The individual who gave John Barksdale his cell phone number had dropped out of sight, but unlike the dead terrorists in Maryland, he’d interacted openly with the local community.
“The State Police analyzed his phone records and interviewed everyone in the area who had contact with him,” William said. “They sent us a new watch list. Rod’s people developed one, too. Mary’s tracking them in her database, especially the names that are on both lists.
“Your turn, Dylan,” William said.
“We finished analyzing the radar data this morning,” I said. “We got the tapes from every civilian and military site in the New York area late Friday. Thousands of radar traces h
ad to be compared with the transponder labels in the ATC system.
“As we expected, the pilot avoided most of the radar-controlled airspaces by flying close to the ground, but he couldn’t do that over populated areas without attracting attention, so several different radars painted him for brief periods. We identified three possible tracks. Here’s the one we like best.”
I unfolded a map of a sixty-mile square area that included New York City, western Long Island, and the area north and west of the city. A red line ran southeast from Kennedy Airport over the Atlantic, looped eastward, then north across Long Island and Long Island Sound, thirty miles east of the city. Near Stamford, Connecticut, it circled west over Westchester and Rockland Counties in New York, and terminated in Passaic County, New Jersey.
“They flew over a hundred miles in a wide loop,” I said, tracing the red line with my finger, “then turned southwest at Suffern, New York into New Jersey and continued in a straight line for eight miles, which we think means they were close to their destination. He dropped under the radar near the Wanaque Reservoir. There’s very little residential or commercial development west of there, just forests and a few roads.
“Helicopter and small plane traffic are light around there, too, so the police are interviewing residents, storekeepers, truck drivers – anyone who might have seen a helicopter land or take off Wednesday afternoon. A county police officer remembered seeing one flying low over the reservoir at about the right time.”
