He didn’t want to risk stealing another vehicle, since the California Highway Patrol was particularly vigilant about watching for stolen cars. License-plate reading software gave them the ability to check over ninety percent of the vehicles on their freeway. So he booked bus passage down the California coast, arriving at Los Angeles International Airport at seven in the morning. He had no need for possessions but he had packed a small suitcase anyway, to avoid raising suspicion among the TSA profilers. Abdal kept a “ready bag” for that purpose, a carry-on stuffed with amenities, clothing, a nondescript novel, and a book of crossword puzzles.
A few minutes after his encounter with the security agent, Abdal was seated at the gate, his paranoia abated. If the woman had suspected anything he would never have gotten this far. She would have motioned one of the security guards over casually but with a hand gesture that indicated there was a problem, and Abdal would have been thrown to the floor, pinned there while another agent handcuffed him.
Instead, the woman went out of her way to be polite, to smile, to assure him she wasn’t profiling. And in that way she let a terrorist through her checkpoint.
But that was not his concern.
All Abdal could think about now was not his mistakes, nor his certain death, only getting home to the woman he loved.
Getting home to Sara.
4
The FBI wasted no time instituting a media blackout.
They didn’t call it that, of course. At an impromptu press conference near the blast site that night, with particles of dust still visible in the floodlights, newly appointed Mayor Daniel Maywood announced that the city of San Francisco was cooperating fully with the FBI and Homeland Security. However, due to the sensitivity of the investigation all inquiries were being routed to the FBI’s press liaison-which Jack knew from experience was a deep black hole.
The public was assured that the federal government would spare no expense in finding out who was responsible for the blast, but until the investigation was complete, they would not engage in speculation.
Questions about Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations were floated, but an FBI spokeswoman repeatedly explained that unless someone came forward to claim responsibility they may not know who was responsible for several days. At this point they didn’t even know who the driver was, who owned the car, or what his target had been.
Figuring that out didn’t take a Heritage Foundation think tank, Jack thought. The city’s civic center was only blocks away, the fattest target on the route. But the feds had no intention of fueling rumors or causing concern that the center, or any other public space, was not safe.
The mayor had no comment about the assertion that a person involved in the carjacking had identified the driver as an Arab. He didn’t want to speculate and create a reactionary spike against Muslim Americans.
When he heard that, Jack wished he had been there instead of riding in the back of an ambulance with Maxine. He would’ve gone on record as saying that he, for one, was tired of all the special-interest hyphenates and wished that any fill-in-the-blank Americans would be Americans first and something else second.
Even though that was the kind of thing that got you tossed off the air, he reflected. But it was worth it. People said he was insensitive and a racist. He said he was a patriot, which was different from most of the mainstream media who seemed to be happy watching the country perforate along ethnic borders like Spain or the former Soviet Union or Iraq.
Jack lived and worked on a fifty-nine-foot Grand Banks yacht in the Sausalito Marina where, as if reflecting the mood of the region, the wind and tides were making some pretty ugly chop. Still, he managed to snag a few hours’ sleep around dawn then watched as local and national law enforcement across the country were put on high alert and did everything they could to create the impression of ensuring the public’s safety. The President made an Oval Office speech the following morning, reminding the country of his commitment to keeping the citizens of the United States secure-and to raise his mortally wounded poll numbers-while politicos from both sides of the aisle clogged the cable news networks and talk radio with enough hot air to float a horseshoe. That bugged Jack the most. Despite the magnitude of what had happened, and the devastating scope of what had accidentally been avoided, the news coverage had no real depth to it, no dimension, no insight.
Only one thing resonated with him. At the center of the newscasts and speeches, the one piece that was never far from anyone’s mouth was that while debris and shrapnel had caused several minor injuries, there had been only one fatality: Officer Thomas Drabinsky of the SFPD bomb squad, whose attempt to defuse the device had ended as he was en route to the target. There was one thing about him that no one mentioned, however, probably because it was too bizarre a thought for anyone to process. It was something he heard from the marines in Iraq and air force personnel when fighter pilots went down.
Tragic as the loss was, Thomas Drabinsky accomplished something that not a lot of people got to do: he died with his boots on and he would not be forgotten.
Jack had seen enough forgotten soldiers in his time. He’d tried to rectify this when he was still on the air, had used the last two minutes of his show to honor the fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, to put names and faces to these men and women he so admired. It was a reminder to his viewers that the enemy they fought wasn’t some abstract notion, but a real, living danger to the western world. Nine/eleven was a decade past, and too many of us were becoming complacent-including and especially our so-called representatives in Washington.
He had even started a fund, raising money for the kids of fallen vets, and for training guide dogs-by prison inmates, no less-to aid those who had left arms, legs, eyes, and ears in the Mesopotamian war zones.
Jack checked with the hospital at nine A.M. Max was sleeping and her injuries weren’t serious. She had a gash on the side of her head that took twenty-seven stitches to close, but there was no concussion-her camera had taken the hit for her. It thanked her with a smack to the temple that looked, to Jack, like the recoil of a. 357 Holland amp; Holland Magnum. However, he was not surprised when she called early in the afternoon and told him that she wanted to get to recuperate at home. What she said, actually, was, “The deductible on the health coverage I was forced to buy is going to kill me faster than my injuries, so get me out of here.” She said she’d cleared it with her doctor, and calling a cab, Jack went and collected her.
After taking her home, putting her to bed, and making sure the nice old woman who rented her the attic space would look in on her, Jack went back to the boat and began editing the footage they’d shot over the last several days, retooling it to focus on Drabinsky himself. Nothing she had shot at the blast site had survived, but in the end it wasn’t needed. The money shot was not the explosion, it was the proud, smiling face of the fallen warrior.
It took Jack most of the day to assemble it, and when he was done he realized he had something special. He also knew he could make anywhere from fifty to a hundred grand with the package, but decided to offer it to the networks free of charge. His entire reason for becoming a journalist was not to sleep on silk but to sleep well, knowing he had done the right thing.
This was the right thing.
Jack had known Tony Antiniori for a little over a year, but the moment he’d met the guy they’d felt an immediate kinship. And that was the kind of compliment he didn’t hand out often.
A former Green Beret paratrooper, Tony had done three tours in Vietnam, had cross-trained as both a medic and a rifleman, and was still active in the National Guard, teaching combat medicine to young recruits headed to Afghanistan.
He was sixty-nine and still teaching field medicine to the young recruits. Maybe that was part of what kept him young, having to shame the know-it-all out of kids less than half his age. The other part was staying in shape. He was solidly built, more muscle than fat, but at first glance you’d never know that he was career military. He looked like a fugitive from a Fellini movie, his thick head of shoe-polish-black movie-star hair framing a tanned, creased, bearded face and wise but playful eyes. He kept his lanky, six-foot-four-inch frame in shape with a brisk morning flurry of push-ups, jumping jacks, and crunches every other day. Nothing high impact; just enough to get
