“Even if you believe the building is empty, activate the fire alarm now. Then run away from the building as fast as you can. Take cover.”
“Is that you, Connolley?”
“Pay attention if you want to live. This is not a joke. The trigger cannot be disabled. This warning will not be repeated. Run away now. The building will blow up in two minutes and twenty seconds.”
He disconnects the phone, tossing it onto the floor of the truck. Reaching around the autopilot linkage, he shifts into gear and the vehicle edges forward. With the rangefinder he aims for the center of the building’s glass façade. Chagall locks in and engages the software. The laptop reads a distance of five hundred eighty yards and dropping. The truck trundles along at nine miles per hour, slowly gaining speed.
At sixteen miles per hour the laptop emits a shrill bleat. Its screen is showing divergence, just shy of two degrees between target and trajectory. Chagall shrinks back in the driver’s seat, assuring that no unintended touch is skewing the equipment. A few seconds pass. Twenty-one miles per hour. The trajectory is still off. Chagall gingerly takes hold of the steering wheel and nudges the truck back on course. Three hundred forty yards to target. Two hundred eighty. Again, leftward drift. The laptop bleats its alarm.
Two hundred forty yards to target. Chagall overcorrects this time. He should have jumped by now, but if he leaves the truck on its wayward course it’ll miss the auditorium, perhaps miss the building altogether. Feverishly he recalculates angles of drift and survivable bail speeds. A hundred fifty yards at three percent puts impact five yards off his mark. He has to go closer. A hundred yards max. Leaning over braces and rods to reach the keyboard, he throttles back the speed, choosing accuracy and escape over penetration and broken limbs. He’ll have ten seconds to impact, thirteen until the blast wave.
The readout shows a hundred sixty yards to the building. He cracks the door, scrunching low as the guard’s kiosk comes into view. Through the engine’s rumble comes an unmistakable pop. Pistol fire. That’s good, he thinks. The smoker understood the threat was real. One last, careful overcorrection. He pulls the scooter free, lowering it as near to the road as he dares before letting go, pushing away so it won’t bounce under the bobtail’s rear wheels. He sets his stance and balance. At the sound of another pistol shot, Chagall jumps into a forward roll.
Three, four, five times tumbling head over heels, he curls and scrapes into the roadside weeds. He waits a long moment after coming to a stop, then feels for arms and legs. Right. Left. Upper and lower. He can move. His limbs still bear weight. The sound of plate glass crashing gives him only seconds to spread flat.
When the blast comes he lets the concussion wash over him. Then he stands, a little shaky at first, and squints into the darkness, scanning for his scooter.
THIRTY-FIVE
Jonah and Buzz are up for school. The collective’s adults are at the hospital, or crashed following an all-night vigil outside the ICU. Marty is still in jail. Allison was released from custody early enough to see the boys to bed the evening before. Her return calmed Jonah, though his mother warned that she would be away this morning, taking a shift in the waiting room at SF General. Buzz seems less skittish too, as he begins to comprehend that arrest in his new household doesn’t foretell sadistic anger or long absence. Jonah plods sleepily down the hall to check weather on the internet.
What he finds are the smoldering ruins of the Bailey Center for Agricultural Genomics, streaming live out of every news site from Fox to the BBC.
Jonah watches for a few minutes, gape-mouthed, then flies down the stairs. Nora has been asleep for an hour when he wakes her. Christopher stumbles from his room when he hears the ruckus. Buzz joins the three of them upstairs, gathered around a computer screen to watch CNN’s somber coverage. Christopher surfs print-news sites on his laptop. It takes a few groggy minutes to think past the onslaught of photos and video clips. The coin drops when he finds a link to the “Nebraska Bombers’ Screed” on the Guardian’s home page.
Only now does he check e-mail. Chagall’s manifesto has been delivered to both his Reporter mailbox and a freemail account he keeps as a spam sponge. It’s the draft he wrote, barely edited. He looks up to watch CNN’s talking head.
The bombers’ communiqué was posted on the White House website for about half an hour earlier this morning. Hackers doctored the site to portray the president applauding political positions espoused by the terrorists. Fraudulent links on whitehouse-dot-gov sent thousands of visitors from the trusted site to the Canadian Institute for Environmental Responsibility, a research group affiliated with the University of Toronto …
Christopher can practically feel his personality rupture as he throttles an impulse to confess. He continues to news-surf. “Reuters says the Chicago Tribune’s site was hacked too.” He’s not hyperventilating, but only by force of will. “Eight and a half minutes before they took it down.”
The news anchor reports that no one is believed to have been in the building when a truck rammed its lobby, shortly after the single security guard received a phone call warning him to flee.
Authorities say it will be hours until forensics teams can begin to sift through the rubble. Though the bombers’ communiqué made no reference to suicide, the security guard is said to have seen a driver. Police declined to comment on rumors that the vehicle was operated by remote control. A three-state manhunt is underway, with federal agents and staff fanning out from an Emergency Operations Center in Lincoln, according to a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security.
On the Washington Post’s site, Christopher sees the Justice Department is calling the attack “an unprecedented convergence of conventional and cyber-terrorism.” The obvious comparisons are drawn across the spectrum of media: September 11th, McVeigh, the Unabomber.
Christopher’s father calls. Nora holds out the phone, but he retreats to the third-floor kitchen and picks up there.
“This is despicable,” Professor Kalman says. “Despicable! Do you agree or do you not?”
“I’m barely awake, Dad.”
“This communiqué, whatever they’re calling it—it’s an apology for terrorist attacks on basic science. I’m ashamed to see that the excuses these hooligans offer are indistinguishable from the nonsense you and your friends were spouting yesterday.”
If there had ever been a moment ripe for reciting the rosary, this was it. But his mother had skipped instruction in the Catholic aspect of his mongrel heritage. He didn’t even know how to start. “I haven’t read it all the way through,” he says.
“Chris, tell me yesterday’s stunt on the bridge has nothing to do with this insanity.”
His stomach sinks. “Nothing, Dad. Nothing at all.”
After a minute or two more, Professor Kalman lets him go. Christopher hangs up the phone. He wants nothing more at that moment than to catch a ferry and ditch his laptop in the bay. He returns to the others. “We need to get back to the hospital,” he says to Nora. “We need to talk, all of us.”
“What about me and Buzz?” Jonah asks.
Nora sighs. “Guys, this is happening two thousand miles from here, okay?” She speaks in a near monotone. Her face is slack, her eyes puffy and red. “You both missed school yesterday. We’ll catch you up this afternoon.”
Christopher is certain the police will look for a connection. Nora begins to herd the boys toward breakfast, but turns back at the library door.
“You’re right,” she says quietly. “But I can’t string two thoughts together without more sleep. Let me get Buzz and Jonah out the door. I’ll crash another couple of hours, then come to the hospital.”
“Don’t make coffee. I’ll grab a cup on my way.”
“I’ll call Allison to let them know you’re coming.”
Christopher scrounges fresh clothes from his room. He clears his head under a cold shower. He’s going to be telling a lot of lies in the coming days. Not just to his father, and not only over the sheltered di
stance of a phone line.
He has to get his story straight.
—
Trudging up the hospital’s broad, concrete stairs, Christopher is blind to the seasick-green of thickly painted walls, the worn safety treads edging the steps, a whiff of thwarted hope lingering in the wake of those who trekked this way before him. None of the hospital’s institutional ugliness registers. Nora relieved him from duty outside the ICU less than six hours ago. It feels as though he never left.
He leans into a fire door’s push bar. The door absorbs his weight, prolonging a moment suspended between worlds. Alone, and then among. Christopher steps into the hospital corridor.
Will his comrades be better off warned, or safer in the dark? However indirect and blind his part, every person he tells anything will be implicated. Conspiracy after the fact. On the other hand, as soon as police draw a line between yesterday’s protest and the Nebraska communiqué, the Triangle will be tossed from top to bottom by every agency with a stake in thwarting terrorism. Every demonstration they ever organized, every name on every list they ever compiled will be swept into the FBI’s maw.
His father saw the connection immediately.
How can the government miss it?
—
In the waiting room Brendan sits glued to the TV. A woman in a powder-blue hijab rocks a dozing toddler beside him. Standing ramrod straight to the woman’s right, an old leatherneck watches with arms folded, mouth puckered as if he’s about to spit. Allison faces away, poring over the Chronicle.
Brendan turns when he walks in and gestures to the screen, inquiring. Christopher nods, and crosses to sit beside Allison.
“Hey,” she says wearily. “You look like I feel.”
“It’s not a feel-good kind of a week. Any change?”
Allison shakes her head. “Jonah and Buzz got off to school?”
“Nora’s making sure.” Yesterday’s elation collapsed into impossibility. This morning the ordinary is surreal.
They sit quietly. “Zac’s got one fucked-up family,” Allison says after a while.
“Worse than he warned us. Like he was born into a cult.” Christopher wonders whether California evangelicals forgive their errant little lambs any more readily, or if he’s just predisposed to despise their brethren in Kansas. “His sister’s flying out?”
“This afternoon. The rest won’t even pick up the phone.”
There isn’t a lot to say to that.
“Nora talked to Therese for the better part of an hour. She says their parents have spoken about Zac in past tense for years.” Allison sighs. “When they speak about him at all. The brothers are worse.”
Brendan joins them. “Can you believe this shit? CBS says this ‘manifesto’ could reach a hundred million people.”
Christopher opens his bag and pulls out a freshly printed copy. “Emailed to my work account.”
Allison skims over Brendan’s shoulder. Christopher paces the room while they read. The news moves on to Iraq, where Marines have attacked insurgent forces in Fallujah.
“Jesus,” Brendan exclaims when he finishes.
“It’s solid,” Allison says. “Not what I’d expect from somebody driving kamikaze into a building.”
Christopher nods. “How ’bout we take a walk around the block?”
—
A park opens out behind the hospital’s main building. Stepping off the sidewalk, Christopher breaks their silence. “This conversation never happened,” he says.
“Sure.” Brendan strikes a match and lights a cigarette.
He needs more than that. “I mean never ever.”
“Chris, you have our word,” Allison says.
“I don’t mean to be dramatic.” The park is poorly maintained. Gopher holes pock the lawn, crabgrass pushes out of red-gray dirt in knotty clumps.
“Go on,” Brendan says.
“That e-mail.” Christopher aims for a neutral tone. “Their manifesto. Did anything about it seem peculiar?”
“I—” Allison stops herself. She waits for more.
“My dad called the Triangle, about an hour ago. It made him livid.”
“And?”
“He said it looks like ‘the same nonsense you and your friends were spouting yesterday.’”
Brendan and Allison exchange a glance.
“We’ve spouted a lot in that vein over the years,” Allison says carefully. “So have a lot of other people.”
The three of them stand in the middle of the open lawn, watching each other.
“I had no advance knowledge whatsoever about what happened this morning,” Christopher says. “So help me God.”
“Then we’re here because? …”
Christopher shakes his head, deflecting Brendan’s prompt. “The text can’t be tied to me. Not directly. Not definitively. But if my dad detects a resemblance the government might too.”
“This is not our politics,” Allison says. It’s a question. A challenge.
“No. This is not our politics. It’s extremism of a kind we would never endorse.”
“Let’s be clear.” Brendan’s voice is strained. He grinds his half-smoked cigarette into the mangy grass. “It makes a pickup full of Kalashnikovs look like a Sunday school picnic.”
“The point is that cops hell-bent on a culprit aren’t going to draw subtle distinctions.”
“Okay,” Allison says. “This thing is going to get full treatment, you’re saying. And we’ll be on the short list.”
“Isn’t this how they found Kaczynski?” Brendan asks.
Christopher swallows. “Ted Kaczynski was actually the Unabomber.”
“And a brother figured out his manifesto was Kaczynski’s writing. The Feds were handed their man’s head on a plate. Am I right?” Brendan glares, his jaw working. If he’s trying to mask his hostility, he’s not trying hard. “How pissed off is your dad, Chris? And let’s not leave Marshall out.”
“Look, there’s no point tying ourselves up in paranoid knots.” Christopher’s throat is parched. “I don’t want to invent a connection—”
“Then why are we standing here?”
“Because if a witch hunt is in the works there are steps we can take. Individually and as a group. For one thing, we need Marty to sanitize our computers. Industrial strength.”
“Once they let us bail him out,” Allison says.
Christopher can’t get a read on what she’s thinking.
“The climbers will be out today or tomorrow,” Brendan says. “But the computers? That’s the first thing that comes to mind? What about a book burning while we’re at it?”
“What’s with you?” Christopher snaps. “Why not scrub lists that lead to everybody we’ve ever worked with?”
“The kids downstairs deserve a heads-up, wouldn’t you say?”
“Look—”
Allison interrupts. “Where are you going with this, Brendan? Why are you throwing weight around?”
“The Feds are going to show. One day after another, same issue. They’re going to look into whether there was contact. And I take it back about Marty. Maybe they’ll keep the climbers locked up for weeks.”
“Was there contact?” Allison asks. She looks Christopher dead in the eye.
He forces himself to hold her gaze. Ruined. He has ruined them. “If there was, it would be a very bad idea for anybody to know.”
“We’re not anybody.” Brendan isn’t speaking now, he’s hissing. “You’re not alone on the wrong end of this thing.”
Christopher looks back and forth. Allison is as beaten as he’s ever seen her. Brendan is ready to pounce. “There was an e-mail,” he says hoarsely. “Months ago, to my address at the paper. Nothing explicit. An invitation to communicate anonymously.”
“And?”
“Let’s say I ignored it.” Christopher clears his throat.
“Goddamn it—”
“Let’s just say that I deleted the e-mail. If that was a trail—I can’t know if I didn’t follow it�
��if that was a trail, it ended there. We can count on that.” Can they? He hears his own words as if from a distance.
“Can we?” Allison asks.
Brendan is trying to extract another smoke from his pack. His hands shake visibly. “Fuck me, Chris. Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“I can’t control who sends—”
“Bullshit! What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I knew nothing about this … thing until I saw the news.” His voice quavers now. “Nothing until this morning.”
“Tell it to the Gestapo.” Brendan faces away, sheltering his cigarette while he lights it.
“Slow down,” Allison says. “We need a couple hours to think, to figure this out.”
Brendan whips around. “There’s nothing to figure. And we might not have a couple of hours.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Listen to me, Al. I’m out. Sorry for the shitty timing. I can’t get caught up in this.”
“That’s—”
“—a done deal.”
“You don’t need to disappear,” Christopher says.
“I’ll decide what I need.”
“You’re running again, Brendan. Same as ever,” Allison says.
He steps forward, leaning into Allison as if daring her to strike. “Nothing will ever be the same, Al. Chris is right to keep what he knows to himself. I’ve heard enough. Bottom line is the government’s going to pull out all the stops, and the Triangle is right smack in their crosshairs.”
Christopher tries to speak, but can’t. It hardly matters. He’s no longer in the conversation.
“Think,” Brendan says. “Think where I was last year. What are they going to do if they find me in the middle of another armed fucking struggle? What conclusions do the cops draw if they find you sheltering me?”
“Don’t go.”
“I’ll be in touch. Eventually. But I’m not going to be crashing at the Triangle when they bust down the door.”
THIRTY-SIX
Nora wakes anxious, the place strange to her.
“Mrs. Tanner?”
Whose voice is that? And who’s Mrs. Tanner?
Consequence Page 26
