Atta, whose bossiness rubbed Jarrah the wrong way, seemed greatly relieved when he picked Jarrah up at the airport upon his return. From that point on, Jarrah had been a full participant, ready to die on Sept. 11. He had cleansed his mind of his former life, especially of the time he’d spent in Germany years ago living with Alev.
When his hijacking was called off at the last minute, Jarrah felt a strange mixture of relief at having his life back and frustration with the rest of the plotters for messing things up. He knew he was a better pilot than Shehhi, and felt Atta had made a mistake by not making him the pilot of United 175. Instead of crashing his plane into the White House or Capitol (it would be his decision which one), he’d ridden the plane to San Francisco, gathered the other brothers at the terminal, explained to them that their services weren’t needed for the moment and gave them money to buy tickets back to their home countries and await further instruction. This was all as the Director had wished.
That much made sense. The longer the “muscle” hijackers remained in the United States, the greater the possibility one of them would be arrested, like Moussaoui, and reveal details that were better left secret, like who had hired them. They wouldn’t, however, have been able to give details of the plot itself. Though the muscle men were aware they were on a suicide mission, they hadn’t been aware that it involved crashing planes into buildings. And luckily, from what Jarrah could tell by carefully watching post-Sept. 11 newscasts and reading newspapers, few in the U.S. had any inkling that buildings had been in danger. So in a sense, they still had the advantage of surprise, and could lie low for a while until the worst danger passed.
But part of him was angry at the Director for calling things off when they still could have accomplished at least part of the mission. The Director had always been obsessed with the Twin Towers, and probably hadn’t seen the point in continuing once the World Trade Center could no longer be hit. He’d never cared much for hitting Washington, saying that the Jews who ran America did so from New York, not the capital city. Even the White House and Capitol were after-thoughts for him.
Jarrah pulled off the highway outside Owatonna for a late lunch at McDonald’s and steered into the drive-through. He ordered a Big Mac, fries, a chocolate shake and a box of McDonald’s cookies decorated with pictures of Ronald McDonald, paid the attendant, thanked her politely in his near-perfect American accent and drove back onto the highway, where he put cruise control at the legal limit of 65. It would never do to be pulled over for speeding so soon after the mission to take care of Moussaoui. He left the food in a bag on the passenger seat to eat later as he drove, and the smell of greasy meat and potatoes quickly filled the car. He let his mind wander a bit, reflecting again on the unbelievable fact that he was still alive. He never thought he’d live beyond September 11, and all the conversations with his family started coming back to him again. He’d promised them and his girlfriend that he’d get back in touch, but those words were empty when he said them. Now he wondered if he should follow through.
A couple hours went by as the car hummed along steadily. The big southern Minnesota sky was flecked with fluffy, late-summer clouds, but it didn’t look like rain. The crops in the fields along both sides of the highway looked green and healthy. Jarrah was getting ready to pull his burger out of the bag when his cell phone rang. He grabbed the phone from the passenger seat and checked the number, which was unfamiliar. That didn’t matter much. No one on the team kept cell phones or phone numbers for very long. It was too easy to trace.
When answering a call, he always mentally adopted his alter-ego as a Middle Eastern student here in America to study engineering. That was a pretty good guise, considering his former course of study in Hamburg, Germany, was in aircraft engineering. His nearly perfect accent and his clean-shaven face, along with his stylish European clothes and designer sunglasses, completed the image quite well.
“Hello, this is Ziad Jarrah,” he said politely and earnestly.
“Jarrah, where are you?” said the familiar, grating voice of the Director, speaking in Arabic. He never identified himself when he called, but Jarrah was used to this.
“Hello, sir,” Jarrah said, changing to Arabic. The Director’s English was pretty bad, and, being the Director, he didn’t try too hard to get better. He left that stuff to the underlings. “Nice to hear from you. I’m in Minnesota, and I’m going to head east tomorrow, per your instructions. How’s the weather there?” He thought the Director sounded closer than the last time they had talked.
“Did you take care of things at today’s meeting, as we discussed?” the Director asked gruffly, not bothering to answer Jarrah’s meteorological query.
“Oh yes, things went very well,” Jarrah replied, his eyes on the road ahead but in his mind imagining the fat face of the Director and his uneasy eyes. “Our comrade understood everything perfectly, and I expect him to follow through with the plan.”
“Good, good,” the Director said. “Look, I expect to see you in a few days. I’ll call you when I’m near and then we can talk in person.”
Jarrah tried to hide his surprise. He hadn’t planned on seeing the Director face to face anytime soon. And certainly not in America.
CHAPTER 7
Virgil Takes Care of Business
At 11 a.m. on September 16, Virgil approached the Kalorama Station post office. It was a sunny, warm morning, and the sidewalk cafes were full of brunch-goers enjoying their coffee and pancakes. A little boy ran up the sidewalk toward Virgil, obviously not looking where he was going, and bumped into him.
“Ethan!” the boy’s mother yelled from up the street. She ran quickly toward Virgil and grabbed the little boy, who looked about five and was wearing shorts and a Ninja Turtles t-shirt. “I’m so sorry, sir,” she said to Virgil. “You know…kids…”
“Been there, done that,” Virgil said with a smile. “Enjoy them while they’re still young.”
“What do you say, Ethan?” the mother cajoled her son.
“Sorry,” the boy said, not looking too chagrined. He stuck out his tongue at Virgil.
“Ethan!” the mother yelled.
“No problem,” Virgil said, smiling at the child.
The incident with the boy took some of the heaviness out of Virgil’s step, and he stayed where he was for a moment and breathed deeply of the warm late-summer air, redolent of coffee from the outdoor cafes and flowers growing in the window pots of the turreted 19th-century town homes. The sun shone brightly, and he looked up at the sky as if he’d noticed it for the first time in a while. A smile touched his lips and quickly disappeared. Then he walked purposefully toward the post office.
As he expected, a brown-haired, short woman was standing at the entrance, wearing a stylish tan leather jacket and a hesitant smile, as if she wasn’t sure he was the person she was waiting for. She looked somewhat familiar, but he couldn’t immediately place whether he’d seen her before. He approached her. “Ms. Hanson?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Mr. Walker?”
“Yep. Nice to meet you,” he said, offering his hand.
“You, too,” she said, taking it.
They stood there awkwardly for a moment as pedestrians walked by, and then he withdrew his hand from hers.
“Let’s say we start walking,” Virgil said quickly. “I know a good Thai restaurant down the street that’s nice and quiet. We can talk when we get there.”
“OK,” Nancy said. They began walking, not speaking as they went, and minutes later were inside the Thai place being escorted to a corner table in a secluded nook of the restaurant. “The tofu soup is really good here,” Virgil told Nancy as they sat down. A young Asian waitress took their orders and left them alone. The small room was crowded with young families, local by the looks of them, eating their meals and talking happily.
Virgil lifted his battered leather briefcase onto the table and unbuckled it. Only one of the two buckles still worked. He fished out a couple pages of crumpled paper and la
id them on the table in front of Nancy.
“Go ahead, read it,” he said, hands out on the table. He leaned back and sat quietly while she picked up the pages.
She spent a couple of minutes reading carefully, then looked up at him expectantly.
“You can keep it,” Virgil said. “Do what you want with it.”
“Can I say you gave it to me?” she asked.
“Whatever,” Virgil replied. “Either way, it’s the end of my career in this administration once it’s out. They’ll know it was me, whether you say it right out or not. I’d almost rather have you write that I gave it to you. At least that way it doesn’t look like I’m sneaking around.”
She nodded. “You realize this is going to cause a big hubub, right?” she said.
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” he replied, smiling.
Their soup arrived, and the waitress placed a bowl in front of each of them. Tofu for Virgil and Tom Kha Kai for Nancy. The smell of coconut and cilantro drifted tantalizingly up from the table.
Virgil took a spoonful of the hot soup, bit into a piece of tofu, and chewed slowly. Nancy was looking at him, waiting for more.
“What made you decide to release it?” she asked, still waiting for her soup to cool.
Virgil thought for a bit. He was uncharacteristically reflective today, he thought. At work, he usually spoke quickly, and often didn’t wait for others to finish what they were saying before jumping in. But today, he felt different. Maybe it was because he’d made his decision and was at peace with it. There were no longer any dragons to slay, at least not any he could see right in front of him.
“Are we on the record or off?” he asked, looking her in the eyes.
“Off,” she said. “You can trust me on that.”
“Good. I do. No hidden tape recorder, right?” She nodded.
He coughed – the soup was rather spicy. After wiping his mouth with a napkin, he said, “I’ve been thinking of doing this for a while. The hijackings last week put me over the edge.”
“You feel people weren’t listening to you?”
“Right. I’ve served this country for nearly three decades, Ms. Hanson. I love it dearly. And I’m sitting here…sitting here watching it be threatened by some really dangerous people. I’ve been telling my bosses that for months and months, and they don’t take me seriously. Then we had the hijackings last week, and they’re trying to blame Iraq, which had nothing to do with it. Nothing. And they’re not being straight up with the country about the threat we face. If they won’t be, I will. It’s going to cost me my job, of course.”
“What do you think is driving them?” she asked, leaning forward. “I’ve been covering this administration for eight months now and they don’t tell us anything.”
“Oh, all administrations are like that,” he replied, a slight smile on his face.
“Well, to some extent, I guess. The Clinton people certainly buttoned up a lot after that impeachment thing, but usually with a new administration you start out with some decent rapport. Until the going gets tough, anyway.”
He took another spoonful of soup.
“You’ve got to realize,” he said quietly after he swallowed. “What’s driving them is the same thing that’s driving me. They’re determined to keep the country safe. Now, they think they can do that best by keeping things secret. I think it’s best if the public is educated. It’s just a difference of philosophy.”
“Aren’t you afraid that going public with this would tell the terrorists something they didn’t know we knew?”
“No, no,” he replied, his voice rising a little and his face reddening slightly. “What I’m giving you isn’t anything that shouldn’t be known. I was careful not to put anything in there that would give the terrorists a leg up on us. I just think the public has a right to know that there might be terrorist cells still in this country planning further attacks. And it may actually help us if the terrorists know we knew about their ideas to smash planes into buildings. Maybe it would make them think before trying it again.”
“You really think they had buildings in mind? I mean, crashing planes into buildings? That’s pretty out there.”
“I’m not 100 percent sure, but I’ve spent a lot of time focused on this organization, and it is something they’ve talked about in the abstract. I’ve never seen any fully-formed plans, but it just haunts me so much that both those planes turned south – toward New York. If they hadn’t collided…I don’t know what might have happened.” He thought about his dream and shuddered.
“You aren’t doing this for any partisan reason, are you?” she asked. When he responded with a bitter laugh, she added, “I mean, you did serve under Clinton.”
“Look,” he replied. “I’m a lifelong Republican. That’s pretty funny – that I’d be doing this for partisan reasons. Even Bush and Cheney might get a laugh out of that one. Of course, after today, I won’t have to worry what they think.”
“I feel bad that you’re going to lose your job over this,” she said, biting her lip and leaning back a little in her seat. “Are you OK with that?”
He thought for a bit while she spooned soup into her mouth.
“It’s like I can’t quite believe it’s happening,” he finally said. “I’ve always played it by the book, always been a team player, and now I’m turning into Benedict Arnold. I don’t quite know how I feel.”
“I’m sure you feel relieved that you’re doing the right thing.” She had finally gotten around to tasting her soup. Ugh – too much cilantro, she thought.
“Tell you the truth, I thought for a long time that the right thing was to stay in my job and keep pushing people to take my advice,” he replied. “Seems like that didn’t work out too well. Ah, well. There’s no going back now. You’ve got the note, and my goose is cooked.” He smiled.
“I can still give it back,” she said earnestly. She reached for the note.
“No, no. No turning back now. I’ll never get the courage to do it again. Now or never, I guess. I had a lot of drinks last night when I made the decision. You know, the older I get, the more I’m convinced I make better decisions after a glass of bourbon. What about you?”
“Oh, I’m not a big drinker,” Nancy said as the waitress returned with their entrees and laid them down.
“Now that I’ve gotten this monkey off my back, I feel pretty hungry,” Virgil said, taking a bite of his pad thai. “Wow,” he said. “No one makes it better than this place. You been here before?”
“Oh yeah, my daughter and I come here. She loves Thai food.”
“Funny,” Virgil said. “When we were kids, who’d ever heard of a Thai restaurant? I don’t think I had Thai food till I was 25. How old’s your kid?”
“She’s 12,” Nancy said. “She’s been sassy lately.” She smiled. It was easier to talk about her daughter than to deal with her brattiness.
“Oh, I know sassy,” Virgil said with a laugh. “It all goes by so fast. Just wait. One day you’ll look up and she’ll be off to college.”
They ate silently for a few minutes.
“Do you have kids?” Nancy asked, looking up from her bowl.
“Yes – two boys. Both grown up. Sometimes their entire childhood seems like it lasted all of one minute. Speaking of which…” He looked at his watch. “I suppose you have to go file your story soon, right?”
“Oh, I will,” Nancy said. “But I didn’t think it would be polite to interrupt our lunch.”
“No, go ahead,” he said, waving his hand casually. “I’ll pick up the bill. Might as well while I’m still taking a salary.”
“Will losing your job be a financial burden for you?” she asked, a look of concern crossing her face.
“No, no – don’t worry about me, Ms. Hanson. I’ll be fine. My wife makes too much money already, and the government doesn’t pay much, you know. Go on – get out of here and write your story.”
She got up.
“Thanks, Mr. Walker. For everything
.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said.
She started to walk away and he called out, “Ms. Hanson?”
She turned around and looked at him.
“Yes?”
“Please treat me gently in the article.”
“I will,” she said, and stepped quickly toward the door.
Virgil sat at the table for a while, no longer feeling very hungry. He picked at his noodles and took a sip of water.
The waitress came by. “Is everything OK?” she asked.
“Yes, yes, everything’s fine. Please bring me the bill when you have a chance.”
Virgil sat there, his stomach jumpy. As far as his career was concerned, he’d just signed his own death warrant.
Later that afternoon, Virgil puttered around the house. Linda had taken a cab to the airport for a business trip out of town, and the huge home felt more silent and empty than ever. Maybe I should get a cat, Virgil thought. At least it would be someone to talk to now and then. Back when the boys were little, they’d had dogs, but he felt no need to get another. Too much work.
He realized he was purposefully ignoring his computer, not wanting to check emails or the New York Times’ web site, fearing what sort of demon he’d unleashed by handing over that memo to the reporter. It was an unusual feeling for him, like floating. He couldn’t ignore the growing pit in his stomach.
The phone rang. It was Harry.
“You did it, Virge! Nice job,” Harry said when Virgil picked up. “I can’t believe it. I never thought you’d carry things through.”
“All right, Harry,” Virgil said, a cold feeling spreading up from his stomach into his chest. “What does the article say?”
“You haven’t read it yet? Damn, Virge, get online and check it out. Call me back when you’re done. I want to hear your reaction. Fuckin A – I can’t believe it. Have you heard from anyone in the White House yet?”
“No, but now I’m dreading it,” Virgil replied, walking with his phone toward his little office at the back of the third floor. “Look, I’ll read it and then call you back and let you know if I hear anything from anybody.”
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