The Towers

by David Poyer

  But sometimes that was what counterintelligence was like in the Mideast. At least Gamish hadn’t insisted they watch.

  Whatever’s necessary.

  At any rate, the PSO could no longer be accused of not cooperating. She cleared her throat, remembering Al-Nashiri’s battered mouth when they’d brought him back. His hands had trembled uncontrollably; he’d looked shriveled, decades older. “We’ll have to write this one together,” she muttered.

  “Ma’am?” said Benefiel, jerking. He wiped his face with his sleeve. Losing one’s innocence was always traumatic.

  “The interrogation report. We write it together. Only what we observed. Only what he told us. About the breaching attack.”

  They’d gotten a lot, though not all of it was usable. She’d have to evaluate it dispassionately, which she certainly couldn’t just now. Yes, Al-Nashiri had been ALQ. The link between the locals who’d planned the ship bombings from El-Hadedah, Makullah, and Ashahr. Al-Safani had been involved, all right. He’d stood with downcast gaze as the prisoner accused him through his shattered mouth. The colonel had murmured about keeping contacts open. Aisha hadn’t probed it. Allegiances were shifting. Better to keep that process moving, than point fingers.

  They hadn’t learned much about New York. The old man didn’t seem to have been privy to that operation. But now they knew who had the Saggers, the antitank missiles. Where they were headed. And they had names: Yemeni, Saudi, Afghani, British. More suspects to pick up, more grist for the databases. Bin Laden’s reach was daunting. The organization was far bigger than she’d thought. Worldwide.

  They also knew something more immediately important.

  A foreign ALQ cell was going to attack the embassy. A breaching attack. Blast through the walls, push in a suicide squad, kill everyone. Al-Nashiri didn’t know who, only that they were foreign and would be based here in Sana’a. She had to tell the deputy chief. Get security beefed up. She and Doanelson would send a joint report, write it together. Now, before dawn.

  She’d gotten no sleep at all, and there probably wouldn’t be any tomorrow either. She stretched and hid a yawn. Her mouth tasted of vomit. She put her head back against the cushions, trying to forget what the old man had called her, over and over, through the bubbles of blood.

  4

  New York

  BLAIR didn’t so much emerge or swim up as simply open her eyes and there the world was again. A shape hovered in the striped light from a venetian-blinded window. It had a name. Names were attached to objects. But the names themselves wouldn’t come.

  Other, less geometric shapes came and went. After a time she recognized them as people, but nothing more.

  Later she put a name to a transparent bag of fluid hanging by what must be her bed. Then, suddenly, to a voice. She rolled her head and opened an eye. “Dad?”

  “Honey.” Her father smiled, familiar reddened cheeks and big, broken-veined nose, looking older than she remembered. His skin coarser, silver hair thinner, with sun blotches she didn’t remember being there before. As if she was actually seeing him, rather than the picture she carried in her mind from long ago. But his hand on hers felt the same, big and rough and warm. “Back with us?”

  “Think so.”

  “Don’t talk. You need to rest.”

  “The Trade Center.”

  “Let’s talk about that later.”

  “Dan … where’s Dan?”

  He didn’t answer. Maybe she hadn’t actually said it aloud. She got her left hand up after a struggle with something soft and touched her face. A hardness guarded it. Had she grown a shell? “I can’t see out of this side.”

  “That’s a bandage. The doctors had to fix your eye. But you’ll get it back. You’ll get everything back, honey. Now just go back to sleep, okay? I’ll be right here. Right here with you.”

  She closed her eyes and lay resting. Holding his hand.

  * * *

  “MS. Titus. Ms. Titus.”

  She felt stronger, but her whole right side hurt. She couldn’t move her right arm or leg. She slowly realized they hurt like fucking sin. Was she paralyzed? Where was her dad? A nurse came and turned her over. Did she need to go to the bathroom? She did but it was a long and humiliating task, and when it was over, everything really, really ached and burned.

  She lay and tried to remember, and little by little it came back. Except she couldn’t remember getting out. She recalled the firefighters, trudging up the stairwell as if scaling a mountain. Calling after them to be careful. The scrape and rasp of heavy boots and heavy breathing. Then she and Cookie and Sean going on down the empty stairwell. Cookie so heavy. Sean flashing Blair a grin. And then the slamming. A noise she’d never forget, as if the sky itself were falling in on them.

  Maybe there at the end a hot hard fist of wind, a flash of scorching air. Burning her as she screamed.

  Then … then …

  She fought her breathing until she got it back under control and lay there flaming in pain.

  A male face over hers. Murmured questions. Then the head of the bed powered upward. The rest of the room rolled up into view. A man in a white coat, and across from him, her dad. Silent. Looking worried.

  “Blair, I’m Dr. Doen. Your surgeon.” Stocky and serious-looking, about forty. Two young women standing behind him, holding clipboards. Jotting notes. “Do you know where you are? Has your father told you?”

  “A hospital, I assume.”

  “Do you know what year it is?”

  “Two thousand and one.”

  “Good. You were brought here four days ago from the South Tower. To what point do you remember things, Blair?”

  “I was with two others. In the stairwell. We were almost to the ground floor. Then we heard a noise. A huge noise. I woke up here.”

  “That noise was the South Tower collapsing. You’re a lucky woman. Very lucky; always remember that. Okay? You were pinned under hundreds of tons of burning wreckage. A rescue team from Ohio found you buried in a stairwell, covered with concrete. They had to put a fire out to get to you, which explains your burns. But you must have been close enough to a wall or some support structure to have some shelter when the building came down.” Doen glanced at something in his lap.

  “What about the others?”

  “I’m sorry. What others?”

  “Sean and Cookie. They were with me.”

  “I don’t believe they made it,” Doen said, looking at his lap again. “At least, you were the only one brought out alive from that section of the collapse.”

  “How badly am I hurt?” she whispered.

  He cleared his throat. “We have hundreds of other injured to take care of, so I’m going to be brief and factual. All right? You sound as if you can handle it. They tell me you’re a federal official?”

  “I—I was.”

  “That explains the senators and generals who keep leaving messages. Well, you’re seriously injured. You have fractures to the right hip, right arm, and crush and burn injuries to the right face and eye. It took us seven hours to put you back together. The fractures were simple breaks. I think you’ll be happy with the way the arm heals; the hip may be a little rougher.

  “The facial injuries are more complex. We saved the eye, but the face will be a challenge. When the skin goes, reconstruction’s difficult and not always satisfactory. Hard to say, but I’d guess you’ll get a lot back, but not everything. Do you want to hear more? Or is that enough for now?”

  “… More.” She groped with her left hand, encountered her father’s. Gripped it.

  Doen told her about crush and burn injuries and what happened with full-thickness skin loss and cartilage. She’d lost her right eyebrow and ear and eyelid and other skin on her face. Some of the facial bones were broken, but she forgot the names as soon as he said them.

  “Is there … brain damage?” she muttered. Her father looked away.

  “Don’t think so. Crushing’s not as bad that way as high-velocity impact. You’re gettin
g a pretty heavy titration of painkillers. Once we taper that off, you’ll have more pain, but your acuity should return. At that point, we’ll get some of these bandages off. Then we can discuss follow-up surgery. Reconstruction.” He looked at one of the women, then back at her. “We have specialists to help you cope with this. A shock. I know. But remember, like I said—you were lucky to survive. Thousands didn’t. Any questions?”

  She asked if he meant plastic surgery, and he said yes, but he didn’t want to get into the details; surgeons would give better advice once they saw what kind of damage they were dealing with. He stood and her dad stood too. They shook hands and Doen patted her shoulder. Then he was gone.

  She lay and looked into the light. Her dad came back. Then she remembered; how could she have forgotten? “Dan. Did you hear from … where is…”

  “His daughter called. He’s in hospital too. Smoke inhalation, but not critical now. There was an attack on the Pentagon as well.”

  The Pentagon too? She tried to struggle up. What else didn’t she know about? But her father’s hand pressed her down again. “Just lie quiet, I’ll tell you.”

  He told her things she both couldn’t believe and yet recognized as what the secret estimates had long predicted. Nonstate actors, spreading terror in the name of religion. The president declaring a crusade. She squeezed her eyes closed, feeling something crawling inside the right one, the hidden eye, as she did so. A queer, nauseating tickle. She wanted to go to the office. Her old office, in the Pentagon. Maybe it was wrecked by now. What about her aide? Her staff? The civil service civilians? Would it be a breach of protocol for her to call and find out? Well, she didn’t give a damn if it was.

  “Dad? I want to use your phone.”

  * * *

  HE wouldn’t let her. Kept telling her to sleep. But it hurt too much to sleep. Finally she told him she had to pee again, to get the nurse. As soon as he was gone, she began worming her way to the side of the bed.

  It was incredibly painful, and she was sobbing by the time she could stretch out for the phone, where he’d left it on his chair. She almost slid off the bed, but finally snagged it. Concentrated, and pushed in numbers.

  By the time he came back, she’d talked to one of her old staff buddies at House Armed Services, to her former military aide, and to Bankey Talmadge, the oldest warhorse in the Senate. She hid the phone under the pillow and sent her father out for a Post. As soon as the nurse was done, she was back on the phone again. Dan’s cell didn’t answer and all she got at home in Arlington was their answering machine. She tried Nan’s number, but there seemed to be a lot of traffic and some of her calls weren’t going through. She called two generals and caught one, then talked at length to a political appointee in the West Wing. She was from the other party, but they’d both been DAR State Regents and always gotten along and sometimes even traded favors. Under the table, of course. Girl to girl.

  When she was done, she checked the battery. Not much juice left. She tried Dan again. Again, no luck.

  She called a three-star woman admiral and then a congressman from Maryland. She called Hanumant Giory’s number at Cohn, Kennedy, thinking the call might be forwarded, but got only the “number has been disconnected and is no longer in service” message.

  She hid the phone as the door opened again. Her dad, with the paper. She felt nauseated and weak, and it was much harder to read small print with one eye than she’d expected. He offered to read to her. She accepted gratefully and lay back with eyes closed, sipping a glass of water, while he went down the front page and then the international news. Just as she’d gleaned over the phone, the administration was beating its chest about all-out war. Ridiculing the previous administration as weak on terror. She remembered the mountains of Uzbekistan, and those were just the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Pushing a U.S. force into those mountains … the last time the Army had done anything like that was in Korea.

  Slowly, through the pain and weakness and confusion, anger rose. This administration would push their own agenda. Channel billions to their patrons. What else was new? Her own family had done the same thing during the Civil War. It was the nature of politics, and of war. But it didn’t mean whoever had done this wouldn’t have to pay. They had to. For all these dead.

  The only remaining question was, what role would she play in it?

  * * *

  NOT until late that afternoon was her dad able to get him on the phone. When her father held the cell to her ear, she almost couldn’t speak. Finally murmured, “Is that you?”

  “Blair. Been trying to get through.… How are you? Your dad said you were pretty badly injured.”

  His voice was so hoarse it sounded like a bad Louis Armstrong imitation. But it was him. He was alive. They traded war stories and commiserated about whatever evil star had put them both at their respective ground zeros. He said he’d gotten out of hospital two days before, stopped by the house for a uniform change, and was now in Virginia Beach.

  “So you’re back at TAG?”

  “For the moment.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means, JCS didn’t have any con plan ready for something like this. We’re waiting for Higher to come up with one. Once we get that … I can tell you then.”

  She couldn’t get any more than that, and he probably didn’t know any more. She knew the military planning system would be grindingly slow. The administration was making warlike noises, but it would take months to get a sizable force anywhere. Like the buildup to Desert Storm. “But, Dan, you’re Navy. Isn’t this going to be a land-forces job?”

  “Come on, Blair. That’s TAG’s job, to address emergent threats.”

  “Emergent naval threats, Dan. Does bin Laden have a submarine?” Her dad was gesturing, looking angry; and she was getting tired; her head was sagging back into the pillow. Abruptly she was exhausted, as if she’d just hiked up Everest. “I’ve got to get off.… Don’t push it too hard, Dan. You always do. And don’t volunteer, okay? You’re not twenty anymore.”

  “Look who’s talking. I’ll try to get up to see you, if they let me. Say hi to Checkie.”

  She sank back, resentful. He had a job. She had no task, no position, and with the other side in charge, the war would not go well; they were such fucking amateurs. The pain had been gathering force. Now it was a fire glowing deep in shattered bones, a torch scorching her shattered face. She put a hand up, felt the hard shell of the bandages, forced her fingers away.

  “We’ll take you home,” her father was saying, gathering up the paper where she’d discarded the sports section, the classifieds. “As soon as you’re well enough to travel.”

  “Dan and I have a house in Arlington, Dad. Remember?”

  “He won’t be there. He’ll be overseas. And you need to get away, Blair. You’re not in government now. You heard Dr. Doen. You’ll need more surgery. Need pampering. You can’t just plunge right back in.”

  She turned her face away. “Into what, Dad? What can I plunge back into? Anyway, you’re right—I am tired.”

  A tap at the door. The nurse, with an injection. She breathed slowly, and little by little the pain retreated. Leaving only the tremendous weakness, the incredible fatigue.

  “Can you get the blinds, please? I’m going to just rest for a little.”

  They rattled, and the room darkened. She closed her eyes and started to slide into sleep.

  A slam echoed through the building. Or maybe she’d imagined it, but she still flinched and tensed, gasping as muscles contracted around broken bones. Just a stairwell door. Or someone knocking over a chair.

  A cold sweat broke out all over her back. What floor was she on? How high? She wrung the bedrail, wondering if she could lever herself out if she had to. But then what? She wanted to be on the ground floor. She wasn’t going to be trapped again. No more tall buildings. Not ever.

  She kept herself from asking her father the floor number. But not by much.

  5

  Sana’
a, Yemen

  NESTLED in the comforting folds of a dark blue burka, in the cigarette-smelling, too-soft backseat of the battered, rusting Nissan taxi, Aisha watched the buildings go by. They were in every tone of tan and cream and white, with such intricate, abstract carving the stone sunscreens resembled lace. A string of beads she’d bought in Mecca worked through her fingers. She sighed.

  Everything had come apart since 9/11. In the world, and in her personal life. Albert didn’t even want to talk on the phone, keeping his answers brief, always in a hurry to get off. Her stomach had been bothering her ever since that first long night in the cellars of the PSO. God knew plenty of bugs were going around Sana’a that tore through an American digestive system; but she suspected that wasn’t all that was going on. She hadn’t actually seen serious interrogation—oh, call it by its real name, Aisha—before. Maybe other federal agencies had, the notorious Other Government Agency, but not hers.

  She’d heard the stories, of course. Few security forces in the Mideast had scruples about “enhanced interrogation,” as the messages from Washington were terming it. The same techniques the Yemenis had employed with the old man and, since then, others the political security service had rounded up, based on his confessions.

  She didn’t believe she was acting against her faith. These monsters were not fighting for Islam. But that didn’t mean that the names the old Salafi had called her didn’t tinkle down inside her like shattered glass and lodge there, grinding and bleeding. And how could you trust what someone said when his only motivation was to stop the pain? Beating people to a pulp, then expecting what came out to be the truth—why did you even need a trained investigator?

  She shook her head and blinked out the window. No interrogations were scheduled for tonight. The madness of the first week had died down, but the threat remained of an attack against the embassy. Yes, Aisha, she reminded herself, that had come out of the interrogations. The DCM had called them in. Find out who’s behind it, he’d said. Help the host country target them.