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 Time magazine was going to be running a story on the virus attack and Bill’s role in it. Bill followed the protocol and demurred comment pending the decision of the White House Communications Office. Sometime overnight, a mock up of this week’s magazine was dropped of at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and it sat on the conference table, the 3,500-word story having already been copied and distributed to all in the room for comment on whether they should comment.
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 Time magazine read, “Commander and Geek — An Unauthorized Look Behind the Scenes at the Outsmarting of a Terrorist’s Plot.”
“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. I don’t look as old as Joey does.
“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
St. Lucy’s Church in the Bronx had a grotto. It was a catacomb-like structure located across from the church. Lots of candles, and a few crypts seemingly chiseled right out of the blue gray stone. It was a dark and somber place. A kid’s first impression was that of going through a haunted cave. Later in life, it became a cool place to take a girl and, with the help of a buddy, get her to jump into your arms when he sprang out at the two of you from the shadows. Still later in life, it became a place of solitude and reverence or, as in Bill’s case today, a place to light a candle to remember his Irish grandparents who both had their funerals here.
Peter’s funeral had been a high mass. One of the guys from the neighborhood, Arnie, who was always an altar boy and hanging around the church when they were growing up, sang the hymns and “Ave Maria” from the balcony. An older, grey-haired woman played the church organ accompanying him. After the service, Arnie came over to Bill and introduced his wife and kids. She was neat and petite and had what used to be called beauty parlor hair. The kids were cute, and all together they made a great family picture for any Christmas card. Bill liked the idea that Arnie turned out welclass="underline" a family man, all around good guy and citizen. Somehow, it gave him a good feeling about many other things, including his own family-in-progress.
Seeing Peter’s parents was hard. When he and Johnny ‘No’, had sleepovers, Anna Remo made ravioli and meatballs or lasagna or mineste. He loved having dinner at the Remo’s. It was Johnny and Pete’s mom who gave him his first taste of demitasse, making Bill feel like one of the grown ups. Anna Remo hugged him and spoke through sobs. “Peter talked of you all the time. He would always watch you when you were doing the football. He’d say, ‘There’s that Billy the Kid.’ That’s what he called you — Billy the Kid. Then when you went with the President, he would always tell everybody how you and his little brother Johnny were friends. Thank you for coming here for my sons. Peter would be so happy to know you were here.”