talking about what happened last night. Ask ourselves why in God’s name anybody would want to do something like that. And who would be capable of it.”
“Turn on the tube, and you’ll hear the talking heads blathering about domestic terrorism,” Nimec said. “Present company excepted, Alex.”
Nordstrum was looking down at his eyeglasses, wiping their lenses with a cleaning cloth he’d pulled from a pocket of his herringbone blazer.
“I’m a part-time consultant for CNN and several other news-gathering agencies. They pay well and give me an opportunity to air my views. Not all, uh, talking heads warrant immediate disregard.”
Scull’s voice came from the video setup. “Watch your ass, Nimec.”
He shrugged. “My point was just that their general opinion is kind of ironic, when you recall that the knee-jerk reaction once would’ve been to pin any terrorist act on the Arabs. Oklahoma City changed all that.”
“I take it you disagree with the media consensus,” Gordian said.
“Even from what little we know about the bombing, I very much doubt it could have been pulled off by some borderline retardates from Ephraim City.”
“Reasons?”
“Several,” Nimec said. “For openers, their justification for homegrown violence is a paranoid hatred and suspicion of the feds, and a sense of themselves as latter-day minutemen fighting for their constitutional liberties. Their targets have always had some connection, whether real or symbolic, to government agencies. The killing of ordinary citizens is something they view as collateral to the struggle.” He paused a moment, sipped his coffee. “Remember, the real intent in bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Building was to take out FBI and ATF employees with offices on the upper floors. The damage to the lower stories was unavoidable given that the drums of fertilizer and fuel oil McVeigh detonated weighed over four thousand pounds, couldn’t have been smuggled into the building, and therefore had to be left in front of it. What I’m saying is that he couldn’t pinpoint his target, so he convinced himself all those kids in the day-care center were necessary casualties of war. Acceptable losses.”
“What about the bombing in Olympic Park?” Megan asked. “That was a public space.”
“The verdict on who was behind that one’s still out,” Nimec said. “But even there, I can see the message they might have been sending. A hard-core belief among the superpatriots is that all three branches of government have been infiltrated by an international Zionist conspiracy… a secret cabal bent on absorbing the United States into a New World Order. And the Olympics has been a symbol of globalism since its origin. You can see where I’m heading.”
“If you follow that warped thinking, though, you can imagine how they might have seen the Times Square event as something comparable,” Gordian said. “A kind of worldwide jubilee bringing people of every nation together.”
Nimec wobbled his hand in front of him. “That’s a little tenuous. At best, we’re dealing with prosaic minds when we talk about the movement’s leadership. And once you come down to the foot soldiers, you’re really dredging the bottom of the IQ curve. These are men who get confused if it takes more than a single stroke of the pencil to connect the dots.”
“If you don’t mind, Pete, I’d like to get back to what you said a minute ago. About not believing they could have pulled it off…”
“Let’s use Oklahoma City as an example again,” Nimec said, nodding. “The bomb that was detonated was big and crude because the perpetrators couldn’t get their hands on more sophisticated, more tightly controlled demolitions… not in sufficient quantities to achieve their goal, at any rate. So instead they follow a recipe that’s been disseminated in cheap kitchen explosives handbooks, Internet message boards, you name it. A scene in the Turner Diaries becomes their mission blueprint, and the rest is history. The whole episode’s characterized by a lack of imagination, and a reliance on materials that can be obtained easily and legally.”
“The eyewitness accounts I’ve been hearing all agree that the initial blast emanated from a vender’s booth on Forty-second Street,” Nordstrum said. “There’s also supposed to have been an incident involving a K-9 cop and the vender just minutes earlier.”
“That’s been confirmed by the visual record,” Nimec said. “I’ve already had our experts do computer magnifications of the televised footage. And we’re trying to dig up amateur videos. There must have been thousands of people with minicams at the scene. But even in the absence of other evidence, I think we can assume the bomb was inserted into the area by means of the booth. Whether it was with or without the knowing complicity of the donut man is still anybody’s guess.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Scull said, “whoever planted the charge got plenty of bang for his buck.”
Nimec looked stiffly at the eyehole camera lens atop the video monitor.
“The charge was very compact in proportion to its effectiveness, yes,” he said, his frown making it clear that he disliked Scull’s particular shorthand. “I’m guessing it was something like C-4 or HBX.”
“And the secondary explosions?” Gordian asked.
Nimec shrugged. “Hard to tell at this stage,” he said.
The room was quiet for a moment. Gordian drank some coffee.
“Okay, Pete, supposing we go along with your assessment for now, and put aside homegrown terrorists as the culprits,” he said. “What about militant Islamic fundamentalists?”
“All of them, you mean?”
Gordian looked at him. “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“Neither was I. It’s just that things aren’t always very straightforward when it comes to our enemies in the Arab world. On the one hand, they’re more likely to be interested in causing mass destruction for its own sake. Their hatred of America makes no distinction between its government and its citizens,” Nimec said. “On the other hand, we in this room really
“As I’m sure you’ll explain,” Gordian said, still regarding him steadily.
“In my opinion, the World Trade Center bombing fits more or less into the third category,” he said. “There’s never been any conclusive proof that would link the conspirators to a foreign government. Ramzi Yousef, the so- called mastermind of the plot, was an incredible bungler. His bomb was supposed to cause the largest of the Twin Towers to crack up and fall into the other, which didn’t happen. It was also supposed to release a poisonous cloud of cyanide gas. Obviously that didn’t happen either, since the sodium cyanide he’d impregnated it with vaporized in the heat of the blast… something any high school chemistry student with a B grade average would have foreseen. Two years later, Yousef sets his Manila hotel room on fire while making liquid explosives and takes off for Pakistan to avoid arrest, leaving behind a computer whose hard drive is full of incriminating data files. If this fool was an agent of a hostile Middle Eastern nation, his superiors must have been quite desperate for a henchman.”
“Okay, so he was a regular Shemp. I’ve got no problem with what you’re saying,” Scull said. “But while we’re doing Terrorism 101, I think we ought to mention the guys that knocked Pan Am 103 out of the air.”
“Scull’s right, we should,” Nimec said. “Even at this early stage, it seems to me there are at least superficial comparisons to be made. Both were efficient, well-financed, and bloodthirsty operations. And, God help humanity, the men who did the work were slick professionals.”
“We know that the Pan Am 103 disaster was underwritten by Libya,” Gordian said. “What you’re suggesting, then, is that last night’s attack has the earmarks of state-supported terrorism.”
“I’m not at all ready to go that far. But it certainly meets several of the criteria,” Nimec said. He smoothed a hand over his bristle of close-cropped hair. “The question is, who’d want to do the deed?”
“I think I see what Pete means,” Nordstrum said. “All the usual suspects have been quiescent for some time now, though for different reasons. The Khatami government in Iran’s trying to impress the European Union with a more moderate posture than its predecessors. Ditto for Iraq, where Saddam’s been hoping to achieve an easing of Gulf War sanctions by acting like the boy next door. We know the Syrians are engaged in back channel peace talks with Israel… offhand, I can’t see that any Moslem regime would want to rock the apple cart right now.”
“I didn’t hear you mention Khadafy in that list of the born again,” Scull said.
Nimec was shaking his head. “He’ll always have fangs, but there’s no benefit to him in stirring up trouble at a time when the rest of his Arab brothers are reaching out across the water. He’s not going to risk isolating himself.”
The five of them were silent awhile. Gordian rose from the table, went to the credenza, topped off his coffee,
