Sometimes Nick wished he worked for the Postal Service, where people accepted homicide as a routine part of the job. As it was, he suffered his ass-chewing quietly and with as much dignity as the circumstances allowed.
As the story of the Donovans’ capture and second escape unfolded on the news, Nick found himself entering corners of his mind where he hadn’t ventured in years. What was startling was the clarity with which it all came back: the faintly sulfuric odor of the burning munitions, the fear that the odor had brought, even five miles from ground zero, and later, the persistent questions regarding why Nick had ever endorsed hiring such “unstable people.”
The truth is, his close relationship with Jake and Carolyn Donovan had cost him a decent career. Had it not been for that miserable morning in 1983, Nick would undoubtedly have been in the Senior Executive Service by now; or better still, a lofty executive in the private sector. But things hadn’t played out that way, and here he was, a GS- 12 program specialist, manning a cubicle surrounded by up-and-comers, many of whom hadn’t yet been born when he was graduating from college.
Some of those kids looked up to him as the experienced old hand, but the savvier ones avoided him like the plague. Ambitious careerists were wise to stay away from people like Nick. At this stage of the game, there were only a few reasons why someone with his background and education would be stuck in bureaucratic hell, and none of them were good.
He knew what the secretaries and the whiz-kid engineers had to say about him, and the names didn’t vary all that much from the epithets he’d heard in his youth. By the time the term “nerd” had fallen out of fashion, the new and popular word “dweeb” had fallen right in to take its place. Over time, Nick had come to write the name-calling off as the price one must pay for being smarter than most of the population.
Such was life when you put your name on paper as the safety engineer at a hazardous waste site that killed sixteen people.
This morning in the shower, Nick tried to calculate the net cost of that single act of terrorism, and he realized no equation could handle it. In many respects, the corpses were the lucky ones. They merely died-relatively quickly, by most estimations. The courts then decided the value of their deaths, in the form of seven-figure settlements, and life went on. Even the loss of stockholder equity in Enviro-Kleen, and in their customer, Newark Industrial Park, Inc., could be measured in finite terms, albeit in nine digits when all was said and done.
The emotional costs, on the other hand, were incalculable. The violence of that afternoon had cost Nick his marriage. At least that was how he saw it. For the sake of the kids, they still lived in the same house, but they hadn’t shared a bed or a civil word in years. He’d told Melissa from the very beginning that his name was tarnished in his industry, but she chose to believe otherwise. When the truth of that assertion was ultimately borne out, and she realized she’d never have all the trinkets her friends thought were important, she’d written him off as a loser.
Then there were the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income from jobs for which he’d easily have been the best candidate, had it not been for the dirt associated with his name. At an intellectual level, he knew it was useless to feel sorry for himself, but sometimes he just didn’t have the strength to rise above self-pity.
Nick never believed for a minute that the entire story of the Newark Incident had been reported. Everyone had been so damned anxious to bring the incident to a close and to seal off the site from further leakage that evidence had been gathered way too quickly and way too sloppily. He’d expected more from the FBI. They considered only one option: that the entire nightmare was a wild-eyed tyrannical act by two people whom Nick knew personally to be very ordinary. Rationally, he supposed their flight from the scene represented a de facto admission of guilt, but still, someone should have considered an alternative.
Nick was no cop, but as a safety engineer, he’d done more than his share of accident investigation work, and he knew from experience how persuasively and effectively hypotheses can drive investigations. Instead of allowing accumulating evidence to lead naturally to a conclusion, investigators locked onto a pet theory, then set out to prove it. In the process, they ignored contradictory evidence, mentally discounting it as irrelevant. It happened all the time in the media, but he expected more from the police.
In Nick’s view, the Newark investigation had been driven by politics; and as with all things political, the investigation had an agenda. Publicly, that agenda was to render the area as safe as possible, as quickly as possible. Privately, Nick had always suspected something more. The president of the United States at the time had staked his entire reputation on the reconstruction of the country’s defenses. The last thing he needed was for the public to be distracted by the horrendous consequences of an accidental “special weapons” release. If accidents like that were truly possible, then the dangers inherent in such weapons would overshadow everything else. On the other hand, if a release could be written off as the senseless ravings of a couple of lunatics, then the issue would not be the weapons themselves, but rather the people who abused them.
Nerve agents don’t kill people. People kill people.
The bodies recovered from the exterior of the magazine most definitely had been shot to death, with a precision that simply was not possible via the random spray of small-arms munitions as they cooked off. And certainly, the one worker who was sick that morning-Tony Bernard-was murdered. Shot at point-blank range in his motel room. Terrible thing.
But why? Why would Jake and Carolyn Donovan go on such a rampage? And why on that particular day? Why not the day before or the day after? Or the month after, for that matter? Christ, they were scheduled to be there for half a year. Then again, such questions could be asked of any act of violence, he supposed. Why didn’t Lizzie Borden wait another day? Or the Menendez boys?
And the note. By far the most damaging and inexplicable bit of evidence, it just never made sense to Nick. It seemed too pat. These two terrorists blow away over a dozen people, and then they go by to pick off Tony Bernard-they shot him in the face, for heaven’s sake-and they top off the day by leaving a typewritten note in his room, confessing to the whole thing and ranting on about governments who choose to play God.
Puh-leeze.
Nick told the FBI agent in charge of the investigation-an arrogant control freak named Frankel-that Jake and Carolyn were not the sort to do such a thing, but the safety officer’s protests were written off as the frantic pleas of a friend who simply refused to believe he’d been duped. The agent’s condescending words rang clear in Nick’s mind as he revisited those days: Ted Bundy’s friends were shocked as hell, too.
The Donovans hadn’t even signed the note they supposedly left! Their names at the end of the manifesto were typewritten. For Christ’s sake, anybody could have pecked out the damned thing on their portable typewriter. But almost instantaneously, the sheet of paper became another piece in the “incontrovertible case” against the Donovans. To Nick, it all had the odor of a fish market on a hot day.
Still, the FBI was the FBI, and back then, he was merely Nick Thomas, suddenly unemployed and unemployable. If the Donovans were innocent, they were on their own. He sure as hell wasn’t going to fall on his sword on their behalf.
So he’d pushed it all behind him. Or tried to, anyway; with growing success, until the Big Story broke yesterday. The stock footage shown on the news of the fire and the evacuation and the body recovery operation brought everything back with disturbing clarity.
And to think that there were still bodies sealed up in there…
His phone chirped twice, an inside call. Nick considered ignoring it but decided that his boss hated him enough as it was. He pushed the speaker phone button. “Yes?”
“Call for you on line seven,” informed Maura, the group secretary. Says it’s really important.”
He moaned. “Does it sound like a salesman?”
“Well, he spoke in complete sentences, if that helps.”
Always the joker. “All right,” he obliged with a sigh. “I’ll take it.” He thought he knew who it was. He’d made the mistake of expressing interest in a new computer system that his group couldn’t afford and that he hadn’t the authority to buy, anyway. He’d been dodging the guy for weeks. It was time to come clean.
“Nick Thomas,” he said sharply, snapping the telephone off its cradle.
“Hello, Mr. Thomas,” said an older voice he didn’t recognize. “My name’s Fox. I need to meet with you as soon as possible.”
Yep, it was a salesman. Different one, but same technique. “I’m really bogged down at the moment,” he said flatly. “Why don’t you call me next week?” Why can’t you just say, “Thanks, but no thanks”?
The voice remained calm but took on a very distinct edge. “Actually, Mr. Thomas, this is something of an
