“Never thought about it, but now that you mention it….”
“Benny Elmont, rolled his car. Eddy Rissar was smoking in bed. Darlene Freemont got the big C. Danny Boyd got crushed on his construction site…who else?”
“I guess this happens as you get older. It’s the odds. Think about it; if you live long enough, everybody you’ve known would be dead.”
“You think its just odds?”
“You don’t?”
“I keep raking my mind. Guys like Eddy, Danny, even Peter. Was there something about them, some look or some trait, some harbinger of death?”
“What you really are asking is, ‘Whatever it is, do I have it?’”
“You know, you’re right.”
“I’m going to go to the funeral. You wanna go?”
“I don’t know. I hardly ever hung out with the guy past sixth grade and his little stoop sessions on moon shots, nuclear mutants, and perpetual motion.” You and him though… with all your egghead crap…he found a real dork in you, pal. I’ll just send a mass card.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Rodney” was entering the address into the navigation system of the car that he was forced to rent from Hertz on his personal credit card. Cash was more of a hassle when it came to renting a car and would have set off many flags. Flags were the enemy at this point. His spoken English was good and his American accent pretty decent, but reading this strange language was another story. It boggled his mind that the Arabic number system got mixed into this hodgepodge of odd characters and punctuation. So rather than trusting the English written instructions, he programmed the destination into the system. He had already, unconsciously, walked around the car checking the tires, a remnant of his last disappointment when a flat tire denied him his place of glory as the 21st hijacker.
His cover for these past years was as an assistant cameraman in Hollywood. He wasn’t union but he found enough work to blend into the indie film community. Oddly enough, he enjoyed the work. Many times, the content of these films was that of Satan himself, but his craft, pulling focus and making sure the lens and image path was always clear, gave him satisfaction that was small recompense for not being able to be the openly devout man he had studied to be.
The meeting place was not far off the New Jersey Turnpike, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Seven men assembled in a Store and Lock in the industrial part of town. Due to local blue laws and deference to the religious nature of a Sunday, the storage warehouse was closed to the public.
Upon entering the facility, a bearded man met Rodney and said, “No names. You are number 3.” He then put a sticker on Rodney that had the printed words, “Hello, I’m” under which the number 3 was written in black Sharpie. The two other men arrived in the next 10 minutes.
A man who would only ever be known as Number 1 began talking to the assembled men. “We have been chosen to be the hand of Allah. Each one of you has been picked for this honor because you have certain skills and abilities. As we go through the operational plan, each of you will also learn each other’s parts so that you may take over in the event of one of us being caught or killed. We will work from six at night until morning prayers. I have turned the basement of this building into a dormitory. You will each have a room. We have a kitchen, bath, and exercise room. When you are not working, you are either praying or exercising. We all need to be in perfect physical shape. Also downstairs is a shooting range. I expect each of you to be proficient with handguns and automatic weapons. We have 20 days.”
Port of Newark was a bustling metropolis made of millions of containers loading, unloading, coming, and going to every point in the world. The new on-demand warehouse economy kept the cost of doing business low because merchants no longer needed warehouses and financing to cover goods awaiting shelf space. Now as one item is purchased at a big box store in Wisconsin, another item to replace it is loaded on a container in Taiwan. Containers were the blood cells of this new economy. And the heartbeats of this economy were measured in “turn time.” A port’s pride and rating were based on the time to turn around one of these containers. So any delay in the processing meant higher costs, higher prices, and, worse, turn time. The pressure was always on not to slow the pace of the economy. Therefore, no containers were scanned until scanning could be done without slowing the journey of a single container. New fast scanners were big, expensive, and less efficient than manual inspection. So the realities of the potential threat succumbed to the actual realities of the marketplace.
That was, until last week, when the papers started talking about a suitcase bomb on its way to America. Now the motto was, “Economy be dammed! Check every container coming in!” In the Port of Newark alone, there were 455,000 empty containers in turnaround, a suspended animation of sorts for these large trailer-truck-sized boxes as they awaited being stuffed, sealed, and sent on to their next port of call. The job of checking the empties was assigned to four customs officers across three shifts. At the rate of inspecting 14 per hour, per eight-hour shift, (because they were stacked and had to be separated by huge ZPMC cranes), 2,240 containers a week — or less than one half of one percent — could be searched manually. Further impacting the odds was the fact that containers are designed to ride piggybacked on trains or trucks to points all over the U.S. and that meant that in addition to the ones here at the Port, there were maybe three million more out there in the economy.
If Bill was right in his supposition, that the bomb was already here, then there was a good chance it came in one of the millions of boxes also already here. That’s how U.S. Borders and Customs agent Hector DeNardo suddenly got put on an overtime-rich new schedule of twelve-hour days, six days a week. He didn’t mind that one bit. After 38 years in the department, this bump in extra pay would go a long way in calculating his pension. Every extra hour he put in now was two bucks more in his monthly pension check when he was ready to retire to the beach.
Bill never chatted with Bob Henley, the White House Director of Communications before, so his attendance at the meeting was a sure sign Bill’s phone call of the previous night hit an exposed nerve. Bill called Margaret, the Press Secretary, when he got the call last night at home informing him that
Not for publication was Bill’s positive opinion of the cover. It was a picture taken in the White House Press Briefing Room maybe during the Bio-Tech initiative briefing, when Bill was standing behind the President with the Presidential Seal on the podium. With Bill being taller and larger, they photographed as the same size, as he was awaiting his turn to comment. The headline on this
“It’s a good picture of you and the boss, Bill,” Margaret offered.
“Ya think so?” He took the opportunity to right the cover one more time and feign gauging it.
“So then we are agreed. We do not comment, stand by, or endorse the story,” Margaret’s boss said. Then, flipping through the mag one more time, the man addressed Bill, “Did you actually do half the stuff in here?”
“For national security reasons, I can neither confirm or deny anything about my participation, or lack thereof, in any of these scenarios,” Bill said as serious as a heart attack.
“Well, I guess we don’t have to worry about you leaking anything to the press today.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
