Now Gordian looked at the faces around the conference table, considering how best to start a meeting that was light-years from business-as-usual. Present in the flesh were his Foreign Affairs Consultant Alex Nordstrum, Vice President of Special Projects Megan Breen, and Security Chief Peter Nimec. On a video docking station across the table, Vince’s puffy-eyed, basset-hound face was scowling at him over a high-band satellite link from Kaliningrad.
Gordian took a deep breath. He had observed that, to a person, their features reflected his own low, grim mood.
“I want to thank all of you for coming in virtually without advance notice,” he said. “I don’t know how many of you lost friends or loved ones in Times Square last night. For those who might have, my profound condolences.” He paused and turned his gaze toward Megan. “Have you gotten any word from your brother and sister-in-law?”
A trim brunette in her late thirties, Megan looked at him with alert, sapphire-blue eyes.
“Not yet,” she said, “but that isn’t any reason to assume they were hurt. The long-distance phone lines to and from New York are choked.”
Megan’s unworried tone didn’t fool Gordian. He had once — long ago — made the mistake of thinking she was just another starched and stuffy executive clone cranked out by the Harvard Business School — in her case, one with an added sheepskin in psychology from Columbia. An executive clone who was apt to play mind games, then. That had been pure bias, a last prickly vestige of the blue-collar resentments that were the bulk of his familial inheritance. It had taken him years to discard his unfair, limiting preconceptions about those with upper-class backgrounds. Dan Parker had been the first to make him see things differently. Meg had taken him the rest of the way down the road.
In a sense, though, those stereotypical notions had worked in Meg’s favor when he’d originally employed her as a human resource executive/headhunter for the R&D divisions. He’d wanted someone who could make hiring and firing decisions in a detached, intelligent manner, and that she had done. But he’d also gotten an inspired thinker, and a trusted confidant, in the bargain. And that was something he hadn’t expected of her.
“Pete, you have people out east. You think they can do anything to help Megan find out about her relatives?” he said.
Nimec tipped his narrow jaw downward slightly, his tightly wound version of a nod.
“I’m sure they can,” he said.
“Good.” Gordian was quiet a second, his eyes moving around the table again. “I think we’d better do some 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.