Shoreline

by Carolyn Baugh

  Special Agent Chidambaram sighed dramatically. “So, Wagner wrote opera; well, he would have said he wrote dramas set to music. Major exponent of German culture generally and Aryan culture specifically. In addition to writing music he wrote essays. That first message of Baker’s swiped liberally from Wagner’s essay on Jews.”

  Anna drew in her breath sharply. “Can you tell us about the essay?”

  “Sure,” said Chid. “He was trying to say that Jews by their nature have no original thought—he was trying to win whatever competition there was to win between himself and a composer like Felix Mendelssohn. A Jew, if that’s not obvious. But mostly it was all about pointing out the ‘repugnance’ of their nature. Their inability to assimilate. That they’re physically repellant. He contended that the scars they had from years of persecution had colored—indeed damaged—their intellectual output. Meanwhile, the true guardians of the German intellectual heritage were most certainly white men like himself.”

  Anna continued dutifully taking notes, but Pete and Nora and the rest were just watching Chid carefully.

  “I mean, look, he was trying hard to become a thing, right? He was jealous of his contemporaries, especially the ones filling the great opera houses and theaters of the time. And so his project became at one point to discredit at least one group of his competitors in order to take more of the market share. He determined in the end that those Jews who did not willingly self-annul, or in another translation, ‘self-annihilate’ … well, they were deluded at best. Clinging to a cultural heritage not their own.”

  Sheila leaned in, desperate. “What on earth is your point, Chid?”

  He looked at her in surprise. “The Ring Cycle,” he answered, as though it were obvious. “Wagner’s masterpiece. The Ring.” He raised his hand, ticked off on four fingers: “Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung.” He lowered all four fingers, then ticked off again: “Preliminary Evening. First Day. Second Day. Third Day.”

  He watched as Anna wrote all this down in purple ink.

  “It’s both a celebration of German or Aryan—in this case, most specifically, Norse—culture and a promise of fire. Revolution. The deed that redeems the world. But the Nazis … well, the Nazis used Wagner for their own ends. There’s a phrase, a magic spell in the operas that invokes Nacht und Nebel, ‘Night and Fog’—Hitler devised the Night and Fog Decree in 1941. Anyone resisting Nazi rule could be disappeared into Night and Fog.”

  These words were met with absolute silence.

  “How many days?” asked Anna, her voice barely a whisper.

  “Four days,” Chid confirmed.

  Pete’s voice piped up from nowhere, it seemed. “Stormy.”

  Chid looked a question at him.

  “Why did he say ‘stormy’?” Pete asked.

  “Stürmisch,” Chid answered quickly. “It’s German for stormy, but more importantly it’s a … well, it’s like a stage direction for the conductor. The music should be stormy. It’s, like, the first thing you see when you open the score for the Valkyries—Jesus!” He started laughing again, shaking his head.

  “What?” Nora demanded fiercely.

  “The attack this morning. Women. Women on motorcycles.” He looked around, then finally started to accept that no one was on the same page with him at all. “The Valkyries were women who decided who lived and died in battle. But they rode horses—they were pretty badass.…” Chid’s voice trailed off. “Anyway. If he’s keeping to the Ring for a framework, you’ve got four days. In the end, everything’s going to go up in flames. So. Yeah.”

  Only Schacht could come up with something to say after that. “Maybe you could help us better understand Baker and his message.”

  Chid sighed, looking at his notes. “Yeah, okay. Sure.” Having said that, he lapsed into silence.

  “Now would be good,” said Sheila testily.

  “Okay, of course, no … I was just, you know, gathering my thoughts.” He took a rather languid sip of his tea. “It’s a little problematic because Baker really … See, I was working on this on the plane, reading the transcript, you know, and, well, some parts of the profile fit and others don’t. I guess this part needs sorting out still. But someone who’s using this level of rhetoric is going to be a highly educated white male. Because even if it’s overblown, his prose is correct. Grammatically on point. And the sources he’s citing, well, some of them are very erudite. Who reads Wagner’s essays, anyway? Like, three musicologists and maybe four or five history nerds. But Baker’s a truck driver, is he not? Anyway, this rhetoric makes those Bundy guys sound like hillbillies in comparison, right?”

  “Maybe,” said Pete. “What do you think he represents exactly? Are we talking more patriot movement than white supremacist, or a mix?”

  Ford leaned forward to respond. “Well, that’s where it gets interesting. It’s a little unclear. I think he’s invoking various patriot and radical Christian groups in order to pander to their members, but it’s a mish-mash, really.” Chid was nodding even as he doodled on his legal pad, thinking as he wrote, not looking up at the agents around the table.

  Anna asked, “Does he have to do this in order to issue this appeal he’s laid out to all militia members throughout the country?”

  “Yeah, I’d say so,” Derek Ford answered. “Like a candidate for president. You have to appeal to everyone, bring the disparate groups together.”

  Only the scratching of pens on legal pads broke the silence.

  Anna looked up. “Why do you think he timed this with Roar on the Shore?”

  Chid smiled. “Your motorcycle festival thing?”

  “It’s not a festival,” Pete insisted with a surreptitious wink at Nora. “Celebration of biker culture.”

  Chid shrugged. “Whatever the case. If he’s sending his army out on motorcycles for this phase of it, well, you can’t just stop everyone on motorcycles when you have an extra 80 thousand of them in the area. Plus, that’s about the whitest bit of white culture I can think of at the moment. So there’s that box ticked off.…”

  Nora piped up. “Recruiting?”

  The three Philadelphia agents nodded.

  Derek Ford said, “Bikers are usually non-violent, but disaffected. And predominantly white. He may think he has a potential pool for expansion.”

  Schacht said, “But we know that usually recruitment is going on online and at gun shows and…”

  “Preparedness expos,” all three Philadelphia agents said at once.

  Pete laughed. “The end is coming!”

  Finally exasperated, Nora slapped the tabletop. “The end just came, people! Five bitches on motorcycles just slaughtered an old woman and a little girl and everyone in between,” she said furiously. “Now tell me how to fix it. Give me something doable.”

  Silence descended quickly. Pete, looking chastened, said, “You’re right, Miss Nora. Chid—can we work with this number fourteen at all?

  “What about it?” asked Chid.

  “If Baker’s saying they’ll engage in fourteen acts of violence, and you seem to think there’s a framework of four days, can you help us with the breakdown?”

  Anna added, “Are we going to be able to prevent any of them, or do we have to keep watching people get massacred?”

  She and Nora held each other’s gaze. Nora realized she too was fighting intense surges of emotion after all they had seen that morning.

  Nora looked down at the screen of her BlackBerry and found that Ben had indeed called and texted six or seven times. Her anger at him had vanished; she wanted to talk to him so badly. She needed to tell him what she had seen. She needed to tell him how she had failed to protect even one person in that center. She needed to tell him about the tiny body of the Syrian girl, and the soft curl of her hair.

  And if today counted as but the first day … She shuddered involuntarily.

  Chid was looking at her sympathetically. “Fourteen. Yes.” He scrawled something on his legal pad, then looked up t
riumphantly. “Yes. Super smart, actually.”

  “How so?” asked Schacht.

  “Fourteen. So, let’s think of Das Rheingold, which is really about a robbery, by the way, as having four acts. Technically it’s four scenes, but I think it’s fair to think of it as four acts for our purposes.” Chid paused dramatically to have another sip of tea. “Valkyrie, which is, for all intents and purposes, about biker chicks, is three acts. Siegfried, about the hero who learns to fear, is, what…” He wrinkled his brow, figuring, then said, “Yes. Three acts. Götterdämmerung, about vanquishing the gods and setting the world, aka the corrupt system, on fire, is three acts—BUT! There’s a prologue.” His voice was positively sing-songy.

  Sheila was looking at him with a deeply impatient nerd-loathing etched across her features. “So?”

  “So what is that?” he prodded, looking around expectantly.

  “Fourteen?” Pete answered slowly.

  Chid grinned. “Fourteen!”

  Nora stared at him, trying to decide whether he was growing on her. He was simply too frustrating to watch in action. Yet somehow he reminded her of her mother. Her mother had had an almost infinite tolerance for finding pleasure in things that Nora had found utterly useless. She watched Chid shift in his chair, realizing they were a pretty tough crowd of exhausted agents.

  “So in the end,” she said, making her voice as sarcasm-free as possible, “what are you telling us, Chid? Besides that this guy wants to set the world on fire.”

  “That your perp is quirky. A lover of classical music—and really good classical music, mind you. Not, fucking, Pachelbel’s fucking canon. He’s probably pretty well-off. Super smart. I imagine he’s got a wine cellar and a fondness for risotto as well as a mind-blowing gun collection.”

  They were all silent, digesting this.

  Suddenly Chid added, “Oh, and he’s a mother-fucking racist.”

  Nora tried to reconcile these quirky aspects with the images of Gabriel Baker they’d watched over and over that morning. It didn’t all seem to jibe.

  Derek Ford had been sipping from his coffee mug as Chid spoke. As Chid fell silent, Derek placed his mug on the table with a slightly-too-loud thud. “Crucially,” he added, “he has the ability to motivate people to do his bidding.”

  “Well, what’s the point if you can’t have minions?” asked Pete, then he looked over at Nora and seemed to bite his tongue.

  “So how do we find him?” Anna asked.

  Chid looked thoughtful. “It’s safe to bet he’s got a place in the country. Somewhere that people can train.”

  Special Agent Ford nodded, affirming this.

  “So basically anywhere around here,” said Sheila.

  “Well, yes and no,” Chid said. He’s not going to be living in a trailer. So that’s going to narrow it down. You’re looking for a very nice house surrounded by at least twenty to fifty acres.”

  “Aryan Nations had only twenty in Idaho,” Ford said.

  “And you’ll have to have a barn,” added Chid. “At least one.”

  Ford said, unnecessarily, “To store the weapons.”

  Silence descended once more as the agents considered this. Then Nora said, “So our risotto-eating friend wants to launch a revolution. Why is he giving us hints? Doesn’t that mean he wants to get caught?”

  Chid and Ford both shook their heads, but Ford was first to speak. “Look, when you’re a terrorist you’ve built an organization and you’ve spent a lot of time offering your people fame in exchange for their insignificant little lives. You have to do what you can to get attention for your cause, on the one hand, and to make your opponents look bad on the other.”

  Schacht chimed in. “He’s convinced that he is very smart and that we representatives of the government, by virtue of being lemmings, being sheep, that we are deeply stupid. He’s got vision, we’ve got none. These acts of violence are to teach us a lesson. He may say it’s about revolution, but it’s mostly about him.”

  “Which is in keeping with the Ring theme,” Chid said, excitement surging across his features again. “What does it mean to possess the Ring of Power? What shall we do with it? He’s saying, I can bend people to my will. And I can do it with an agenda that is totally opposite to yours. The agenda ultimately may not matter. The power does.”

  Sheila was shaking her head. “But how can he think this is going to play out? Race war? Are people really going to rise up and join his cause?”

  Schacht replied, “They were prepared for revolution, armed rebellion. Collectively they have the means. What’s been lacking is the right voice to assess when the new leader has failed. How much of a chance does he get? You need someone who appeals to all the disparate voices of discontent. If Baker can organize them and unite them, they will be a force.”

  “Look, the media has, in the space of a few hours, made this man the stuff of legend,” Chid said. “He’s taken the darkest xenophobia, the deepest racist sentiments we harbor, and the filthiest remnants of campaign rhetoric and shown us what all that can look like made manifest. He’s done exactly what many have fantasized about. All the groups he appeals to will point to this for a long time and imitate it if they dare. So he’s already won. We may wipe out his army today or tomorrow, but the precedent is now in place for action.”

  Chid had scarcely spoken these words when the Erie agents’ BlackBerries started buzzing on the tabletop. Each agent sprang up as though electrocuted.

  Sheila threw open the door and dashed out of the conference room.

  Anna addressed the visiting agents, her voice a whisper. “Abe from the bomb squad—they’re trying to defuse a bomb at the synagogue.”

  Chid held her gaze, then said softly, “Fire.”

  * * *

  Anna’s usual veneer of calm while driving had evaporated completely. She blazed across the sun-baked pavement at top speed, shouting insults at anyone who dared impede the SUV’s path.

  “I don’t get how they knew,” Pete said.

  “Rabbi Potok showed up to give the summer Bar Mitzvah class and saw a U-Haul truck parked outside, still warm—she must have missed them by thirty seconds. She’s no dummy, not on a day when we’ve just had a mass shooting at the refugee center. She called the police immediately.” The wheels shrieked as Anna made a hard right turn.

  “Were they waiting for the kids to arrive to detonate?” Pete asked.

  Anna said, “What do you think? Why blow up an empty synagogue when you can blow up one that’s full of prepubescents?”

  Schacht had insisted they should not use their sirens in order not to alert the press; it would be a tricky stunt to pull off, however. Nora knew that so few newsworthy stories happened in Erie that any congregating of emergency vehicles, particularly after what had occurred that morning, would draw attention.

  Temple Beth Torah occupied the corner of 21st and Peach Streets. It was an innocuous enough tan brick building. It was squat and simple, if wide. A large stained-glass window, a kaleidoscope of bright colors, soared atop the northwest corner.

  A firefighter was holding up his hand and staunchly refused to let Anna get any closer despite her threats. The three agents thus descended, all staring at the building from a block away.

  The U-Haul truck sat in the designated handicapped space near the synagogue’s main entrance. The jet-black armored bomb squad van was there, and Nora spied Abe in his EOD suit along with the rest of his crew.

  “Their initial report is that there’s as much ammonium nitrate as Oklahoma City,” Pete said softly.

  “But there’s a remote trigger mechanism this time hooked to the—what did they say, dynamite?” questioned Nora.

  “Yes, that’s what they’re trying to figure out, apparently.”

  “Maybe they need you, Peter?” Nora said.

  Anna had heard them. “I already volunteered him,” she said, without looking at either of them.

  “What did Abe say?” Pete asked.

  She shrugged. “I dou
bt he can text back effectively at this moment. But someone will have relayed the message.”

  Schacht had kicked into high gear. He took Anna and Sheila and began doing the only possible thing in such a scenario. He began forging a Unified Command Center, drawing senior law enforcement and rescue people under one roof to coordinate decision-making. He was, Nora knew, a master coordinator, and Anna—unlike Sheila—had the connections and relationships with the various branches of law enforcement that they now desperately needed.

  Agents Chidambaram and Ford joined Pete and Nora where they stood. Chid was looking at the scene like he might analyze a text. His black eyes were calm and clear, taking everything in at once. His face was grave. He had not spoken at all since they’d arrived.

  It was only a few moments before Anna jogged over to the cluster now made by Ford, Chid, Nora, and Pete. “Sheila’s calling in evacuation notices to every mosque and black church and ethnic community center,” she said in a rush, panting. “This trigger mechanism is wired to the dynamite and apparently has a password—they think you have to log in from a device, iPad, iPhone, something like that … We pulled matching iPhones off the dead women this morning and the one you sent to the hospital in a coma, Nora, so the idea they have a network going might be valid.”

  Nora was nodding, remembering watching Anna collect them from the scene.

  She continued breathlessly, “Abe thinks they set it up that way in case something might go wrong and they need to abort along the way—it’s not just a small bomb they can shoot and run from; if it goes off we’re losing a whole city block. Abe’s trying to hack it now before the bomber connects with it and gives the okay.”

  She looked directly at Chid and Pete. “They need you guys. We’ve got seconds.”

  Abe was running toward them with a laptop, his helmet dangling from the back of the suit. Chid and Pete jumped into the back of Anna’s SUV, Abe handing off the MacBook to Pete, even as Anna helped disentangle him from the top half of the EOD suit. Nora and Ford stood on either side, peering through the open windows.