by Robert Pobi
He stood by the exit for a few moments, waiting for his pulse to slow the disco beat in his chest. The things he saw, heard, and smelled were driving iron nails into his sensory memory, and he wondered if he could do this.
He leveled out his breath, trying to keep the rhythm even and full, a task directly at odds with how the dust mask was designed; every lungful of filtered air he pulled in sounded like a spider clawing through a rusty muffler, and when he let it out, the mask lifted and the air that escaped tickled his eyelashes.
He closed his eyes for a second, but the darkness and the sound of his own wheezing made it feel like he was buried in someone else’s coffin, and a low-grade fear started to snap its fingers. He opened his eyes, pulled off the mask, and wiped his face with his good hand. And somehow he felt a little bit better. So he took a step.
Lucas had been in the Guggenheim dozens of times, and even with its unique layout, it was unrecognizable. Every square inch of surface—from the curved outer walls, to the ceilings of the ramp that wound up to the skylight—was charred and black, with drifts of soot built up in the corners and filling every depression. The now-black floor was crisscrossed with footsteps, gurney wheel tracks, and patterns from the emergency crews. There was broken glass everywhere. Thousands of yards of electrical cable snaked along the walls and over the floor, delivering juice to the lighting and other imported systems. Wright had designed the space with very little in the way of texture, and there was not much in the basic design that was flammable, but if it had a burning or melting point, the explosions had erased it from history in any meaningful form. There were no bodies on the main floor of the atrium, but an easy thirty people in anti-contamination suits were busy packing up the dead on the floors above and Lucas could hear the errant squeak of gurney wheels as they ferried bodies to the morgue.
Lucas started to get a feel for what had happened here.
He walked to the middle of the large room, watching where he placed his feet. Somewhere off to his left, one of the hazmat-suited bureau women said, “Hey, mac, put your mask on!”
Lucas knew she was right—the airborne dust particles alone could clog up a vacuum. But he couldn’t take the claustrophobia it caused or the way it amplified the sound of his breathing, so he dropped it and it touched down in a cloud of dust like a dead squid settling on the ocean floor.
He pushed the molten fist of adrenaline to the bottom of his stomach and took in a deep breath to smother it. This one tasted of soot and something sour that he didn’t want to think about. He looked slowly around, cranking his neck to the end of its tolerances so his good eye could take in the space.
High above, centered under what used to be the skylight but was now just a hole in the ceiling covered with tarps and plywood, was what looked like a pair of spaceship engines. They were roughly the size of pickup trucks, and four men in harnesses were dismantling them, aided by several winches and a ground crew positioned on the top walkway.
The space was getting smaller and his breaths were getting shallower and he knew that the only way to make it all stop was to get out of here. Which would happen only one way. So he closed his eyes, forced himself to forget where he was, and flipped the switch.
Then he opened his eyes.
He no longer saw color.
Or texture.
Or a room where too many people had died.
What he saw was a space reduced to numerical values. It was an automatic process and it hit him in the brain like a fist of ice. Everything morphed into numbers, numerical representations generated by some hidden mental algorithm that only he recognized as having quantitative values.
He spun in place, arms out, taking in the geometry of the Guggenheim with his one good eye. He downloaded the surroundings into a mental model, bringing the museum alive in a way that not even the genius of Wright could have envisioned—a swirling combination of distances, dimensions, elevations, and volume that was permanently embedding itself in his mental hard drive.
It took a few moments to absorb the environment, and when he was done, he closed his eyes, took another deep breath, and shut the process down.
When he opened his eyes, the world looked as it did for everyone else.
Mostly.
When he felt that all the extraneous mental apps had shut down, he took a few heartbeats to orient his thoughts before beginning the trek to the top of the rotunda.
As he moved through the space, the medical examiner’s acolytes ignored him as just another bureau drone. He stepped over broken glass and avoided the little mounds of soot that were scattered everywhere. The art that had been on display was gone—obliterated. There were no charred rectangles on the wall and nothing had survived, which said a lot about what had happened here.
There were a few bodies still in situ on the top two ramps, and more suited minions were hard at work bagging them up. From what Lucas saw, they’d be identifying these people through their DNA, their dental records, and the jewelry baked into their blackened meat.
It took him six minutes to make the top floor. He stood there, watching the bureau’s technicians working on the charred metal device suspended below the skylight. It didn’t take a degree in stage production to recognize it as a machine used to drop confetti at parties or simulate winter on movie sets; in the film industry it was known as a snowmaker.
He calculated the volume of the room, the number of bodies, the available oxygen. He calculated force necessary to undo all these things. The amount of fuel needed. The amount of time it would take. The way it would unfurl.
Then he stopped. And waited for it to happen.
It took a few moments to begin, and when it did, he was almost surprised.
Time stopped, its progress frozen between two ticks of the second hand. The mechanics of the universe ceased. Nothing moved—not the people around him, not the air currents, not even his own heart.
And then a wormhole opened.
It.
All.
Started.
Back.
Up.
In.
… reverse …
In.
Up.
Back.
Started.
All.
It.
The FBI people unwound through time. Some brought bodies back in. Some unloaded gurneys, pulling their occupants out of body bags and replacing them on the floor. Others walked off the set in reverse.
It happened quickly. It happened in slow motion. It happened both ways at the same time.
The men and women in the white overalls kept walking backward into the room, the dust in the air sucked back into their footsteps, the tracks from their gurneys erased as they were undone by time moving against its only provable direction.
The bodies piled back up, filling the space with charred corpses that lay knotted on the floor, woven into a portrait out of Dante’s Inferno.
And then Lucas was alone with the dead. They lay silent, the smoke in the air rolling back into their bodies.
Then came the fire. It mushroomed into itself.
The explosion.
Glass flew up from the floor, raining up to the skylight in reverse, where it reassembled into 175 individual panes.
The front doors reconstituted.
Warhol’s posters and Adams’s prints unburned, refilling frames that appeared out of the shock wave.
And the dead rose up, sucked to their feet in reverse, their skin unburning, their ribs uncracking, their lungs uncollapsing.
Their eyeballs unruptured.
Their eardrums uncollapsed.
Their clothing unburned.
Drinks went back into hands. Smiles went back onto faces. Words went back into mouths.
Silver confetti rose from the floor, floating back into the snow machines hanging high above the crowd.
It was before.
As it was.
They were alive.
Then Lucas blinked and the clock slammed to a stop and the dead froze in mi
d-celebration, their laughter and hopes and lives suspended in a slice of time too short to measure in any meaningful way.
Lucas watched them for what might have been a fraction of a second or a fraction of forever. He looked up at the snowmakers. Down at the celebrating crowd. At the sophomore soup can posters. At the banners hanging down from the ceiling that declared, Today’s Solutions for Tomorrow’s Problems!
He blinked. And the clock started back up, this time moving in the direction the universe intended. Time shuttered forward. And caught up to itself.
The world detonated and he was back in the now, with the dead and the dust and the gurneys carrying body bags.
Kehoe was right, this was basic physics and chemistry.
Then his stomach clenched and he grabbed a dented garbage can that had rolled against a wall.
And the taste of soot and death and flesh and time filled his throat and he threw up.
9
FBI Command Vehicle
After dropping his coveralls into the bin marked for the incinerator, Lucas washed his face, doing several passes with the strong disinfectant soap, reaming out his nostrils to scrub away the stink of burned human meat. But the particles wouldn’t leave, so he was now pouring coffee down his throat to mask the taste. It wasn’t working.
The command vehicle had been cleared out and Kehoe had assembled all his top players for the brief. Lucas knew that it was an audition of sorts, and he was fine with that—the bureau teams were a tight-knit community that had built up trust in one another through performance. He was willing to do a little sleight of hand—but that was it. He wasn’t here to be part of a team, he was here as an outside opinion, which required an entirely different approach. But they needed to know that he wasn’t dead weight.
Other than Kehoe, the commander of the Fire Department, a small man named Ben Morrison, was there. Morrison rarely blinked, looked like he didn’t have a sense of humor, and it was easy to see the little guy complex in the way he carried himself. When he shook Lucas’s prosthetic, his shoulder had torqued—a sign that the guy had one of those handshakes designed to break metacarpals. He looked tired and grumpy and like he had passed I-don’t-give-a-fuck a long time ago. One of the other people in the room was the special agent in charge—Samir Chawla. Chawla was thin, somewhere in his mid to late thirties, and was a handsome man with grooming that rivaled Kehoe’s. He sported a very nice dark blue Pee-wee Herman suit offset by a lavender dastar that matched his tie (and, Lucas strongly suspected, his socks). His eyes were dark and accentuated his avian features, the most prominent being a long thin nose that made him appear more visually interesting than he was. It was easy to see that the guy took himself very seriously. But Whitaker said he was smart and Lucas would give him the benefit of the doubt. After Chawla, Lucas was introduced to Calvin-Wade Curtis, a man with a huge grin who was head of the forensic explosives team. Lucas recognized the military background in the way he stood. And he recognized the southern small-town upbringing in his manners. His slow drawl made him come off as more naive than he was. He looked to be about fifteen and had hands that were too big for his arms, but he was to the point when asked a question. Whitaker was also there. She had rolled up her sleeves and was leaning against one of the desks, arms crossed, the big chrome automatic in the pressure holster on her belt at odds with the neutral fabrics she wore. As usual, Lucas couldn’t help feeling like she was watching out for him.
“So?” It was Morrison who opened the dialogue. The tone of his question said that he wasn’t pleased at being second-guessed by a nobody. But he came across as smart and focused, even if the handshake hinted at a little insecurity, and Lucas decided to be polite.
Lucas took in another mouthful of dark roast and said, “The cause of the explosion is the easy one.”
Morrison didn’t seem to like that. “Easy? It took my people—”
Kehoe cut him off. “I would like to hear what Dr. Page has to say, Ben.”
Lucas continued. “This was a thermobaric explosion.”
Morrison’s mouth popped open.
Lucas put his coffee down and said, “It’s basic physics and chemistry,” while nodding over at Kehoe. But his mind’s eye was back in the rotunda, cycling through the layout he had downloaded. “The structure is relatively intact, seven hundred and two dead people and a few punched-in walls notwithstanding. Those posters were wiped off the wall by a significant shock wave—the same shock wave that blew out all the fenestration. The snowmaker delivered the airborne fuel—a dust would be too obvious, so confetti or foil is a good guess. Aluminum foil makes the most sense, since it can be bonded with anything you want. I’d go with magnesium since it would accelerate the burn rate. Also, the color would go with the Warhol theme—his workshop, the Factory, was painted silver, and silver is closely associated with his brand. Once the air was filled with the confetti, it was ignited. My guess is that the snowmaker itself was modified to create some sort of spark or flame. Grain explosions are often set off by an electrostatic discharge created by a conveyor belt—an accidental Van de Graaff generator. Either an electrostatic discharge or an actual spark was generated. Probably by moving parts rather than electronics—which would have made it easy to get past in-house security. The spark ignited the confetti, the burn was accelerated by the magnesium, and chemistry and physics took care of the rest. The initial shock wave crushed soft tissue followed by a conflagration that pressure-cooked what was left.”
Morrison didn’t look like a man used to being surprised. “It took my guys five hours to figure that out.”
“Then you need more guys.” Lucas picked up his coffee and took another sip. “Or smarter ones.”
Kehoe gave Morrison an I-told-you-so expression.
Chawla chimed in with “That’s a neat trick, but can you give us any other added value?”
Kehoe stepped into the conversation by handing Lucas a sheaf of pages held together with an oversize paper clip. “Take a look at these.”
It was a victim list, a printout of a spreadsheet loaded with various details categorized into columns. Lucas knew what Kehoe was doing, and he resented the performing seal act, but he did it anyway.
He scanned the first page. Then the second. There were forty-five lines per page, each one dedicated to a victim. They were arranged alphabetically, and the columns contained basic grouping criteria such as sex, age, occupation, and address.
Lucas quickly flipped through all seventeen pages, put them down on the desktop beside Chawla, and said, “Okay.”
Chawla looked puzzled. “Okay, what?”
Lucas looked back at Kehoe, who nodded, so he began. “Seven hundred and two victims. Three hundred and twenty-four male, three hundred and seventy-eight female, translating to 46.1538 percent and 53.8461 percent, respectively. The largest age demographic was the forty-to-fifty group, represented by two hundred and eight individuals, one hundred and seventeen male, ninety-one female, which, interestingly, is the only segment where males overrepresent females, except for those who were forty-one, of which there were more women. Out of seven hundred and two victims, five hundred and eighteen are residents of Manhattan, followed in descending order by Connecticut, California, Paraguay—that’s a country, by the way, not a state,” he said pointedly to Chawla. “Then Maryland, New Jersey, Texas, Norway, Germany, England, Canada, and New Mexico.”
Everyone was staring, even Whitaker.
Kehoe came in with “How many of the victims had the number seven in their street addresses?”
“One hundred and sixty-one. Thirty-six had seven as a first digit; forty-one as a second digit, which was the largest group percentage-wise; three had it as the fifth digit in their street address, which was the smallest group—although two of those had five digits in their street address, of which there were only nine in all of the victims, so statistically that’s the unicorn when it comes to sevens. The most common digit in all seven hundred and two victims was two, of which there were nine hundred and
eight, the second being the digit one, of which there were eight hundred and four.”
Kehoe would never smile at work, but there was no missing the approval in his eyes. “How many people aged fifty-five?”
“Thirty-eight yesterday. Three of those had birthdays today and two have birthdays tomorrow, making them fifty-six. And three fifty-four-year-olds have birthdays either today or tomorrow, which would bump them into that category.”
Chawla shook his head. “Holy shit.”
“I can do this all day,” Lucas offered, before taking another sip of the now-cold coffee and pushing himself out of the chair. “But I’m not going to. So if you’ll excuse me, I have somewhere else I’d rather be.”
Lucas stepped out of the controlled microclimate of the command vehicle into the bright fall sunshine, paying special attention to the folding steps that had been set up. Whitaker came out behind him and closed the door, blocking out the conversation between Kehoe, Chawla, and Morrison.
The crowd two blocks up was chanting again, the words False flag! False flag! False flag! on loop and he wondered if certain people misunderstood the Pledge of Allegiance to include the line one nation undereducated.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, trying to ignore the crowd generating a low-frequency hum that rose above the white noise of the city. It wasn’t easy to balance the beautiful day against the Gustave Doré scene inside the museum or the imbeciles up the street. He wondered if he was going to throw up again.
Whitaker came up behind him, and even though he wasn’t looking at her, he could tell she was smiling when she said, “You know, I’ve missed you.”
10
26 Federal Plaza
Lucas did a quick head count and there were 307 agents in the briefing room—which had to be some kind of a record. The auditorium was not dissimilar to the one he used at Columbia, only it was on a smaller scale with lower ceilings. And more guns. There was a podium and a desk at the front, offset by state-of-the-art displays that at this juncture in time were blank—an anomaly for an investigation of this magnitude. Evidently Kehoe wanted all eyes on him.