Wednesday's Child

by Alan Zendell

  “Okay, what’s next? Are you going to be our new secret weapon?”

  Henry said, “He’s only effective on Wednesdays or Thursdays. The rest of the time he’s the same old Dylan.”

  “I actually had something else in mind,” I said. “I want to go public.”

  William frowned. “I can think of a dozen reasons why that would be a bad idea.”

  “So can I, but there’s one very good reason that outweighs all the bad ones.”

  We spent an hour going over all the statements made by the President, several Senators, and numerous commentators and military leaders, on the days when the averted attacks on Union Station and Yankee Stadium actually occurred.

  “Dylan saw it first,” Henry said. “Starting with the original attack on the World Trade Towers in 1993, the whole country, probably including each of us, reacted with self-righteous anger, blood lust, and a thirst for revenge, whenever the terrorists did something spectacular. It doesn’t matter that we were justified; in fact, that’s precisely what makes it so dangerous.”

  William nodded his agreement. “What’s your point?”

  “Every time the attacks escalated, our national response got more extreme. We’ve gone from a nation that counseled war as a last resort, to one that initiates hostilities whenever our anger is aroused, and it’s not just the Administration. After every act of terrorism, Americans wave the flag yelling, ‘Kill the bastards.’ At times like that an over-zealous President has a free hand. He might have started a nuclear war last week if we hadn’t stopped the attack from happening. One of these days he will if we don’t change the way we address this.”

  “There are too many nuclear weapons in the world,” Rod said, “and Israel’s not the only country that would use them preemptively. India, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea – and let’s not forget that only one nation has ever nuked another, and it wasn’t part of the Axis of Evil.”

  “You believe that going public will change things in the future? No offense, Dylan, but I didn’t think you were that naïve,” William said.

  “It worked in the eighties. The nuclear freeze movement started as a grass-roots thing that spread throughout the industrialized world, and eventually led to the SALT treaties. You could make a similar case for the anti-Vietnam and anti-Iraq War demonstrations that destroyed the legacies of three powerful Presidents.”

  William shook his head. “I don’t buy it. It’s a pipe dream.”

  I hated to do it, but I’d expected it to come down to this. “Do you believe in God, William?”

  The question startled him, but he said, “You know I do.”

  “We’ve discussed it before, so you know I’ve never had that kind of blind faith, but I accept yours. Consider everything we showed you, today. How do you explain it?”

  “You think God directed your actions?” William asked, incredulous.

  “I asked what you think. How would you explain what I’m able to do?”

  “Are both of you with him on this?” he asked Henry and Rod.

  “Personally,” Rod said, “I’m an atheist. Dylan is an agnostic, and Henry’s a pragmatist. It doesn’t matter whether you call the entity that chose Dylan for this role God. What matters is that whatever it is, compared to us it might as well be omnipotent.”

  “The only thing I’m sure of,” William said to me, “is that if you go public, you’ll have to reveal things about both attacks that have been classified Top Secret. You’ll be arrested for treason and crucified.”

  Notwithstanding my recent delirium, I doubted that. “I can accept that risk.”

  “Damn it, Dylan, every politician and industrialist whose power is enhanced by war and terror will go after you. Churches and anti-religionists’ll both attack you.”

  “Probably, but I won’t be alone. My family will stand behind me.”

  “He’ll have Rod and me, too,” Henry said.

  “All I want is a public forum. We can’t count on a super-being on a white horse saving us every time. We have to do it ourselves, but only the truth will empower people to make it happen.”

  A light seemed to go on in William’s head. “You expect me to help you?”

  “Damn right,” Henry said. “Look, William, no one’s asking you to put your head in a noose. The Government decided the public is better off not knowing what almost happened, but people in power know, right up to the President, and I’m sure our allies do too.”

  “Certainly, Israel does,” Rod added.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “You knew, too, when you came in this morning, but after seeing it the way we showed it to you, do you still feel the same way?”

  “Suppose I concede your point. What then?”

  “Then, I’d ask if our little presentation might not have the same effect on your superiors. What if the whole country saw what we showed you?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You and Henry are heroes, today, William. You both have a unique opportunity to get the ears of the people at the top of your respective food chains,” I said. “Help us get a hearing with people who matter. Get word to the FBI Director and the Homeland Security Secretary that urgent new information has come to light concerning the aborted attacks. If you and Henry both tell them to listen, they will. Get us a hearing.”

  “What if I do and they throw us out on our collective ears?”

  I noted that he’d said, “Us.”

  “Then we’ll have to find another way to spread the word.”

  “They’ll kill you, Dylan.”

  “I’ve been reading about Daniel Ellsberg. People remember him as the man who blew the lid off the lies that three Administrations told about the Vietnam War. What they don’t remember is that it was his status as an expert defense analyst committed to the Cold War that got him access to the Pentagon Papers in the first place. It was his realization that continuance of the Government’s policy could only lead to disaster for the country that motivated him to risk a conviction for espionage.”

  I half expected William to ridicule me for comparing myself to Ellsberg, but instead, he said, “Ellsberg might have spent the rest of his life in prison if certain people hadn’t been stupid enough to burglarize his psychiatrist’s office, trying to discredit him. You might not be so lucky. The power boys have become a lot more sophisticated at destroying their enemies since then. If you don’t wind up in jail you’ll be branded a crackpot along with every other lunatic who preaches Armageddon.”

  “You could be right, William. But the question is still on the table: will you help us?”

  51.

  William and Henry spent some of their capital getting us a hearing the following afternoon. Tuesday morning, Ilene joined us on a high-speed train to Washington.

  We’d convinced William, but we’d have to do better in Washington. William had no personal ax to grind, but each of the thirty-two powerful men and women we’d be addressing on Tuesday had an individual political agenda that might not coincide with either common sense or the common good.

  The Secretary of Homeland Security introduced William and Henry, who used their currently high credibility to set the stage, warning the audience that what they were about to see would strain their credulity.

  Including Ilene in the group was a stroke of genius. We’d enlisted Jerry’s help in planning the presentation, and he’d insisted that we use Ilene to get the audience’s attention. When she rose to present the videos of our alternate history, the prestigious audience saw an attractive woman who embodied self-assurance, intelligence, and that all-time favorite, family values. She seemed the ideal fair witness, appealing to them, with irrefutable sincerity, to open their minds to what at first glance seemed unbelievable.

  I studied their faces as they watched people succumb to radioactive smoke bombs and cower under cesium-laced clouds in the stadium. I saw surprise, horror, confusion, consternation. They didn’t know what to think when Ilene assured them that what they were seeing was
real, that she’d recorded it herself.

  I limped to the podium, next. “Ladies and gentlemen, I know what you must be thinking. This isn’t even as credible as a video of an alien spaceship landing on the White House lawn. If you doubt the authenticity of what my wife showed you, we’ll be happy to turn the files over to your IT people, who’ll find that they are exactly what we say they are. These videos were recorded on Thursday, August 8th and 15th, and placed on storage devices with the news websites we downloaded. Ilene showed you only a sample. There’s much more if you’d like to stay and view it when we’re finished.

  “You’re wondering why you have no memory of these events. That’s because, using a quirk of modern physics that none of us here is prepared to explain, we were able to reset the clock, as it were, and undo them before they occurred. When your staffs told you we prevented thousands of casualties and averted crippling disruptions to our nation’s economy, they didn’t know those things had already happened before we were able to alter the events that caused them. If you cannot accept that possibility, I won’t be able to convince you, but I’d appeal to your judgment. Why would we who are already hailed as heroes risk public scorn and humiliation by inventing such a fable?”

  I told them about how I’d gone to sleep on Tuesday, July 15th and woke up to find that I had somehow skipped Wednesday. And so on. I explained that it happened again, every week since then, and how that enabled us to subvert the attacks in the absence of adequate intelligence. Then it was time for the bombshell.

  “Until a few days ago, only five people knew the attacks actually occurred. But the attacks themselves are not our sole reason for being here. It’s their horrifying aftermath that we came to show you.”

  Ilene then played them a brilliantly edited sequence of video clips: the President threatening nuclear strikes; prominent generals and politicians making speeches designed to stir up war fervor; counter threats from leaders of other countries; righteous appeals for an all-out holocaust of the Moslem world. No less than nine of the clips were of people sitting in the room with us. One after another, they gasped as they heard themselves publicly rallying the country toward nuclear war and genocide.

  When the video ended, William re-took the floor.

  “If you’re thinking this has been an attempt to shock you, you’re right. If you’re thinking we hired a bunch of Hollywood special effects people to create fake videos for the purpose, ask your technical people what it would take to fake what you saw here, considering that for each minute of video we showed you, there are hundreds more on this device.” He waved the flash drive he’d removed from the computer-driven projector.

  “Ask yourselves what possible motive we four might have for doing such a thing. Believable or not, what you saw is real. We requested this briefing to convince you that if you and your counterparts in other countries don’t do something soon to change things, eventual nuclear devastation is a near certainty.”

  They asked a lot of questions, some discerning and astute, some inane. We answered them all with total candor. They asked, repeatedly, how my day swapping could have occurred and we said we had no idea, avoiding any supernatural or religious allusions, knowing they had to get there themselves.

  The President had appointed many people with deep religious convictions to critical posts in his Administration, a circumstance that Ilene and I despised, but that day, it proved useful. One such was the Attorney General of the United States, a devout, some would have said rabid evangelistic Christian, who had attended at the urging of the FBI Director. When the questions and answers were done, he rose and addressed the room in the pompous tone that invariably infuriated almost everyone around him.

  “In my opinion, what we have just witnessed was the hand of God, warning of the holocaust to come. I thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Brice, Agent White, Mr. Franklin, for acting as His faithful messengers. After we adjourn, I intend to issue a press release to that effect. I invite my colleagues, here, to join me in spreading the Word.”

  Holy shit! I vowed never to say anything disparaging about that self-righteous prig again.

  The Attorney General was better than his word. That evening, he delivered a fiery speech to a collection of hastily assembled journalists, referring them to us, by name, whenever they asked a question he couldn’t answer.

  ***

  When Ilene and I got home around eleven, our voice mail’s memory was full. We’d turned off our cell phones on the train, sure that the press wasn’t going away. They’d call back in the morning.

  The problem was that it was Tuesday night.

  “Nice of you to leave me with this mess,” Ilene joked.

  “What do you mean? I’ll do my share when I get to Wednesday.”

  “What happens if…” she began, then looked at me, obviously frustrated. “This doesn’t get any easier. I’m too confused to formulate a question.”

  “Why even bother? Let’s go to bed. I’ll see you when I see you.”

  For the first time in several weeks, I slept totally relaxed. Not because what lay ahead would be easy, but at least the immediate terrorist threat was behind us.

  Ilene was beside me when I woke up, looking so peaceful, I was torn between waking her to ask how her Wednesday had gone and wanting to let her sleep. I settled for finding a position that reduced the shooting pain in my hip and thigh until she opened one eye and smiled at me.

  “Hi, husband, how was Thursday?” Uh oh.

  “I don’t know, I haven’t been there yet. Today’s Wednesday?”

  “Unless I’ve been in a coma for a day-and-a-half.”

  “He must have turned off his machine.”

  “Who did what?”

  “The Übermensch. Apparently, I’m not skipping days any more.”

  “That’s wonderful! Maybe it’s his way of saying ‘Well done, mission accomplished.’”

  “Except that it’s not. It’ll all have been for nothing if we don’t get things to change. I think it means that since there’s no immediate terrorist threat, He doesn’t want to keep stressing the space-time continuum. I wish He’d consulted with me first. I was planning a three-day sleep demonstration for all the skeptics.”

  Have you ever wondered how Superman would feel if he woke up one day and couldn’t fly any more? That was me.

  On the other hand, I was suddenly a celebrity. Thanks to the Attorney General, the whole world believed I’d “single-handedly foiled two of the most dastardly terrorist attacks the world had ever seen,” with barely a wave given to the FBI and the Agency’s Anti-Terrorist Task Force. Ilene was caught in the spotlight, too – the media seemed more interested in her than in me.

  We kept trying to deflect their attention to Henry and the rest of my team, to no avail. The only one who escaped the spotlight was Rod. It wouldn’t do to announce that we’d brought a Mossad agent into the fold. He was just as happy we hadn’t.

  Ilene made me take the cane I’d promised to use until my wound healed, and I headed downtown to Federal Plaza. I got William, Henry, Rod, Mary, and Samir together – having explained everything to the latter two before we departed for Washington – and told them the news. They seemed more shocked than I was.

  “How do you feel about it?” Henry asked.

  “I’m used to the idea that all this is beyond my control. I was surprised, this morning, when Ilene told me it was Wednesday, but I knew it would happen one day. There’s a sense of loss, but it’s a relief to be able to live normally again.”

  “You certainly got what you wanted from the hearing,” William said. “My desk is covered with requests for interviews, mostly with you. What do you want to do?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, we’re all in this together, unless anyone wants to drop out. We need a strategy. This is too important for any of us to wing it.”

  “When do you plan to tell people you’re not skipping Wednesdays any more?”

  “I think we should decide that together. Keep in mind that things could
change again next week. I have no idea what the Übermensch has in mind for me now.

  “I also need your input on something else, William. As long as you’re my superior, you and the Government are accountable for anything I say or do. Maybe I should resign from the unit or you should fire me. As a free agent, I wouldn’t pose a problem for anyone else.”

  “Didn’t you just say we’re all in this together? If we decide you should quit, Henry and I probably should, too. Rod can make his own choice.”

  “I’ve been talking to my wife about that,” Rod said. “I probably told her more than I should have. I’ve thought about quitting for some time.”

  “I spoke to my General Counsel about our legal position,” Henry said. “It was awkward for her, because in any legal action against me, she’d represent the Justice Department. But she offered her opinion that the only one who’s liable for exposing Top Secret information is her boss, the Attorney General. Once that box was opened, there was no way to close it again. The Government would have a hell of a time prosecuting any of us for discussing the attacks openly.

  “She thinks we have no liability concerning anything not explicitly included in the list of items that were classified. I didn’t ask her, specifically, but I’m sure that applies to Dylan’s time-skipping. It can’t be considered classified information because no one but us knew about it until the briefing, and then the Attorney General’s actions muddied the waters completely. As to quitting, when I asked her about that she suggested that I request administrative leave for an unspecified time, during which I would be free to act and speak independent of the Bureau. That may be the answer for all of us.”

  The next order of business was deciding who to talk to and in what settings.

  “The way I see it,” I said, “we’re in the driver’s seat. We’re a hot property and the media all want a piece of us, but they’re corporations, not the Government, so we’re not obligated to talk to them. As long as we’re hot, we can negotiate our own terms.”