The Towers Still Stand

by Daniel Rosenberg

  Virgil pondered this for a moment, sipping his sweet drink as Frank leaned back to check his reaction. Virgil had mixed feelings about his old friend Harry. They hadn’t talked much in the last few years - their most recent conversation was the one a few months ago in which Harry had reassured Virgil - and Virgil felt it wasn’t just because Harry was so busy with the Iraq war. He caught himself feeling resentful of Harry now and then. After all, Harry had pushed him to publicize his memo to the president, and it had ended up getting Virgil fired. Perhaps Harry sensed Virgil’s resentment. Or perhaps Harry wanted to distance himself from the contaminated Virgil Walker. Of course, Virgil could hardly blame Harry for this. Careers sometimes had to come before friendship.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” he said, trying to sound neutral about it. “Maybe I’ll check in with him and see if there’s anything to it.”

  “You go ahead and do that, Virge, but don’t let him know you heard it from me. You know how the rumor mill works around this town. I wouldn’t want to ruin my stellar reputation.”

  “Oh, your reputation is secure with me,” Virgil replied with a smile. “I won’t tell anyone what a gossip you are.”

  Frank laughed. “Just for that, I’m paying for your coffee next time,” he replied.

  The two said goodbye and Virgil headed to his appointment, thinking of what Frank had said. How odd to think that Harry might become a cabinet member. If it happened, it would be the first time a true friend of Virgil’s reached such a lofty position.

  The news from the doctor wasn’t good. The latest x-rays showed that the hip was in worse shape than ever, and it looked like a surgical case. Virgil was disappointed but somewhat stoic. The hip had been through a lot, starting with that college football injury, and then like a fool he’d become a runner in his 30s. He mentally began resigning himself to the operation, and hoped Linda’s insurance would cover enough to keep the costs down.

  Later that afternoon, the phone rang back at Virgil’s apartment. It was Harry.

  “Virge, ol’ buddy, glad I caught ya,” Harry said in his drawling voice. “Sorry it’s been a few months.”

  “Good to hear from you,” Virgil said. “You’ve been pretty busy – no hard feelings.” He actually had some, but he was willing to let bygones be bygones.

  “I don’t know if you heard, but it looks like your old friend George W. is going to be making a new appointment for defense secretary, and it’s very likely to be yours truly. If I get the appointment, I want you back in the department.”

  Virgil blinked. This was about the last thing he’d expected, and he sat silently in his chair, letting it sink in.

  “Virge, you there ol’ boy?” Harry asked.

  “Yeah. I’m still here,” Virgil said, recovering his voice. “I’m just surprised, I guess.”

  “Look, Virge, I’ve never felt quite right about the way things turned out in 2001 between us. I reckon I kind of pushed you on that memo, and then left you high and dry. I’ve been feeling guilty about that for a while now.”

  “Well, thanks, Harry. I appreciate it. Like I said, no hard feelings. But I don’t want you to hire me just out of guilt.” Virgil tried to keep the butterfly feeling of excitement building in his stomach from affecting the sound of his voice.

  “Oh, it ain’t just that, Virge,” Harry replied. “I value your experience and knowledge. This country isn’t getting any favors by having you sit at home when we still face terrorist threats out there. Last I heard, you had quite a network of experts on Al-Qaeda, and I’m still eating my heart out that Bin Laden is breathing and eating while all those folks on those planes are six feet under. I’m hoping you can help me bring him to justice.”

  “Well, that’s quite an assignment, and I’d be honored to serve,” Virgil said, deciding not to ask what specific position Harry had in mind for him. Probably a senior adviser role of some sort, not that it mattered. Just to get back into the game at all was hard to imagine. He took a breath, suddenly aware how improbable this sounded. “But how the heck can you ever bring me back? Bush and Cheney wouldn’t go for that. My name is mud with both of them.”

  “Time heals, Virge, time heals,” Harry replied. “I know those two pretty well and I’m fixing to make a case for you. Just stay near the phone the next few days. If I get this assignment – and I think I will – I’ll work ‘em over. We’ll have ‘em eatin’ out of my hand in no time.”

  “Well, like I said, I’d be honored,” Virgil said. “Just keep me posted, and best of luck to you.” He ran his hand through his receding hair, as if to make sure he was really there and this was real.

  “Thanks – I’ll be needin’ it if I get this job,” Harry said. “They ran Rummy through the meat grinder over there. Hopefully I don’t bring as much baggage.”

  “I don’t think anyone could, Harry, truth to tell,” Virgil replied.

  “True, true,” Harry laughed. “You take care now, Virge. We’ll be talkin’.”

  Virgil hung up the phone, wondering exactly what he’d gotten himself into. As much as he’d felt depressed and disconnected being out of government, he wasn’t sure he was ready to get back in, and once again face the big egos who ran things. Plus, there were still a lot of people in town who thought of him as a traitor for that memo, or as some sort of agitator at the least. Especially Cheney. He didn’t relish having to encounter the Vice President again, even if Harry was able to butter him up.

  Ah well, Virgil thought. If it all goes through, at least I’ll have government health insurance again for my surgery.

  CHAPTER 4

  Chicago Connection

  The alarm went off for the third time and instead of pushing snooze again, Adam Fenton reached for it and turned off the alarm function before settling his head full of bushy, curly hair back onto the pillow. He closed his eyes, not wanting to look around the disheveled room, where his dirty clothes from the night before hung haphazardly over his desk chair. As he lay there, his gray cat Elmer leaped onto the bed with a loud “Meow!” and started kneading the blankets, purring and shoving his face against Adam’s hand simultaneously.

  “Breakfast time at the zoo, Elmer?” Adam asked groggily. The cat kept purring but didn’t have anything else to say.

  “Ah, another day,” Adam said, stretching out his arms and pushing off the covers. In doing this, he mistakenly knocked the cat, which jumped lithely onto the floor and began licking his paws.

  Adam rolled his 200 pounds out of bed and managed to stand up on the floor, wearing only his boxers. His hairy belly hung over the elastic band, and he felt his scratchy face with his hand. He hadn’t bothered to shave yesterday, and now a light beard was developing. “Shit,” he thought. “Can’t get away without a shave today. Or maybe I can. Who gives a crap?”

  He pulled out a can of cat food and gave Elmer his breakfast, then looked in the refrigerator (across from his bed) to see if anything was left. A nearly empty milk carton, a six-pack of Budweiser and a frozen dinner stared back at him. “Damn it – meant to put that in the freezer,” Adam thought. He grabbed the dinner and took a look. Hungry Man fried chicken. He tore open the box, peeled back the tray’s top and felt the food. It was cool, but definitely no longer frozen. Probably OK. He put the whole thing in the countertop microwave and sat back on the bed while it cooked. The cat smacked his lips over his breakfast across the room. Adam lit a cigarette.

  Time to think. What next? He tried to recall the last few days and it all seemed blurry. Being fired from PetSmart after coming in late for the fifth time in a month. Going to the bar and drinking, trying to forget what a mess his life seemed to be. Not being able to forget. Coming back home and undressing and sleeping for 12 hours. What next? He thought through his finances. He had a couple thousand in the bank, which would pay rent for a few months on this crappy apartment. He certainly didn’t feel like going out and asking anyone else for a job – not now. First of all, he’d have to get a haircut, and he didn’t want to bother. And h
e’d have to get his one suit dry-cleaned. It all seemed too complicated.

  The floor was littered with yesterday’s newspapers and dishes of half-finished meals. The little studio apartment smelled like cat litter because he’d neglected to clean Elmer’s litter box for the last week. It also smelled like old cigarettes, but Adam didn’t even notice.

  “Let’s face it, Elmer. I’m a mess.” Elmer didn’t reply. The dinger went off on the microwave and Adam grabbed the tray and a fork.

  Adam plodded over to his desk, put down his fried chicken and turned on his computer. The one bright spot in his life now was the Internet and his website. He’d started blogging five years earlier (they’d called it “web-logging” back then, not blogging). Now he had a site devoted to his passion: airplane disasters. The site had hundreds of followers, and he continually updated it with the latest news about airline accidents around the world. There were sections where you could listen to actual recordings of flight control and pilots during the last minutes before crashes. The site had dozens of transcripts of “black boxes,” and articles about specific crashes and the causes behind them. When he thought back, he admitted to himself that he’d let the blog get in the way of his job. He’d showed up late for work several times because he was so wrapped up in his blog. Of course, writing and researching about jet crashes was far more exciting than stocking 20-pound boxes of kitty litter.

  He turned on the CD player and the disc he’d had in last night – “Remains Nonviewable,” by a punk group called The Effigies, began to spin. The CD case lay next to the computer, showing a dim landscape of firefighters combing through an air crash site with red flags marking the location of human remains.

  The Effigies, who had some success in the mid-1980s, were Adam’s favorite group, though he sometimes thought he might never meet another person who’d heard of them. They’d broken up years ago. The sound of raw, hard guitar blasted through the apartment. Adam looked at his watch. He realized now why he was so tired. He’d accidentally set the alarm for 7. How the hell had that happened? “Must have been drunk. Why did I set it at all?”

  His web page came up on the computer and he began updating his article about the collision of Flights 175 and 11 back in 2001. Now that was an interesting one. The National Transportation Safety Board’s full report on the crash had lots of blank places in it where parts had been blacked out for “security purposes.” Even the cockpit voice recorder transcripts of both planes, usually a fixture in NTSB reports, weren’t complete. The transcripts went up to the moment before each plane was hijacked, but no further. The last words on the transcript from Ogonowski, pilot of Flight 11, were, “Wait a minute – you can’t come in here!”

  The government had never explained the collision of the two planes to Adam’s satisfaction. The government ultimately had blamed it on Bin Laden and his associates, but who those associates were – other than the hijackers on the two planes themselves – had never been made clear. The government said the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, had met with an agent of the Iraqi government in 2000, and that was one of the reasons the President cited for this current war, but Adam thought that was bullshit. Bush had always been gunning for Saddam, and pulling Atta into the story was just too damn convenient. There were other, more shadowy figures associated with the hijackings, the media reports said, but they remained unidentified. Presumably they were still out there, which was sort of scary to contemplate.

  The ultimate goal of the hijackers was still under debate. Some said they’d planned to land the planes and start shooting passengers. Others, including that guy whose name he’d forgotten who’d been fired from the administration shortly after the hijackings, said he thought the hijackers wanted to steer the planes into buildings in New York City. Now that was a genuinely frightening prospect, but there wasn’t much evidence to back it up. Adam wondered absently what had happened to that guy.

  Anyway, you couldn’t argue with Bush’s national security strategy, Adam thought. No terrorist attacks since that day in the fall of 2001. Attacks on civilians in Riyadh in 2002, Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 did cause some brief periods of concern, but mostly, Adam thought, people didn’t go around worrying too much about terrorism any more. Nor, like Bush, did they spend much time thinking about Osama bin Laden.

  Well, if there was one advantage to being jobless, he had a lot more time to write some meaningful stuff now, he thought. He sat there in his underwear, his cat again cleaning itself nearby, and began typing. He soon got involved in his writing and lost track of time and even where he was. The phone rang, interrupting him.

  Where had he put the phone? With the music still blasting from the stereo, it was hard to pinpoint where the ringing came from. He realized it was on the bed, and he walked over, wondering who it might be. There weren’t many people who’d be calling him this early.

  He picked up the phone and frowned at a smear of mustard on the earpiece. The pungent odor reminded him of last night’s take-out dinner, and he looked down and realized he had slept with a half-eaten hot dog on the bed.

  “Hey Adam, it’s Bob,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Yeah, Bob, what’s up?” Adam replied.

  Bob, like Adam, was an airplane blogger, though his blog was less concerned about plane crashes and more about planes in general. The man was obsessed with planes and airports. A fun day for him would be driving out to the cell phone lot at O’Hare, pulling out his camera and spending eight hours taking photos of different planes landing, taking off and taxiing. He had a network of other airplane-obsessed hobbyists who sent photos to his site from various airports around the world, and he posted them all. You could search his site by airline, type of airplane, year, airport and various other aspects. Adam, who was more focused on air disasters, sometimes visited Bob’s site to find photos of so-called “accident craft” – or aircraft pictured before they crashed. He’d found a good one through Bob of Flight 175 waiting on the taxiway to take off from Logan before the 2001 collision, and he used it as the illustration for his blog post on that accident.

  “I’m out at O’Hare, Adam, and I’m seeing the same shit again,” Bob said in his distinctive nasal voice. “Come out here and I’ll show you what I mean. It’s really weird.”

  “You mean that shit you were talking about the other day?” Adam replied, wiping mustard off of his ear with his hand. The sharp smell drifted up to his nose.

  “Right. Just some weird shit, dude.”

  Adam thought for a moment. He didn’t have anything going on today, and an El ride to O’Hare was only a few bucks. The weather looked nice. What the hell?

  “OK, I’ll come out there. Give me about an hour. Hopefully I won’t have to wait too long for the Blue Line.”

  “OK, man. I’m not going anywhere. I’m in the cell phone lot.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much,” Adam said. “See you later.” He hung up the phone, feeling a little better. At least his day now had a modicum of structure. And he had a reason to get dressed. He pulled yesterday’s clothes off the chair where they were hanging and began putting them on, not bothering to change his underwear.

  For the past week or so, Bob had been noticing some strange goings-on with one of the airline ground crews at O’Hare. Through his binoculars, Bob had watched as uniformed ground crew members had gathered, sometimes exchanging small packages. Bob was convinced it was some sort of drug trafficking deal. Probably no one else would have noticed anything at all, but Bob spent about 300 days a year observing operations at this particular airport, so he’d be more aware than anyone if something was off-kilter.

  As Adam finished dressing, he wondered where Bob got the money to live like that, anyway. Maybe he had a night job. The guy certainly didn’t look like he came from wealth. In fact, he was arguably more disheveled than Adam himself. As for Adam, he was skeptical that anything really fishy was happening with the ground crews, but he thought he’d humor Bob by coming out and seeing what he was talkin
g about. He’d always wondered if ground crews posed a security threat. After all, didn’t they get in to some pretty secure places just by touching a card to a sensor? There had to be a few rotten apples among them, Adam thought, and maybe Bob had spied some. Could be an interesting article for his blog, he supposed, if it turned out to be anything.

  “So long, Elmer,” he called as he left. “Don’t work too hard while I’m gone.” He pulled on his coat, closed the door and walked down the stairs, heading to the train station.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Director in New York

  A few days later, as November drew to a close, a very short, dark-skinned balding man with a short black beard and a bit of a potbelly boarded the elevator to the World Trade Center observatory in Tower Two. He wore dark slacks and a checkered blue and white dress shirt, along with a cheap-looking navy jacket. His growing belly peeked out below his shirt, which had come un-tucked. His somehow unpleasant face contrasted sharply with the light-hearted look of the tourists, most of whom were bundled up against the November chill. The tourist crowds had thinned with the coming of cold weather, and the elevator wasn’t too crowded. The man, known as the Director by his colleagues, stood patiently, watching the floor numbers quickly turn as the speedy elevator advanced 107 floors in just over a minute. The doors slid open and he stepped out with the tourists.

  The Director didn’t pause to look out the windows of the observatory. Instead, he walked quickly, as if he knew the way well, to the escalator on the north side of the observatory, which led up to the roof deck. At the top, he stepped off onto the wide observation platform, where the November wind blew fiercely from the north, making a high-pitched roaring sound that rose every time the wind sped up. He cursed under his breath at the cold in a language that wasn’t English, and put his head down and advanced to the railing. He was practically alone up here – few others had any desire to face these winds. Looking north, the other tower dominated the view to his front left, its tall antenna piercing up another 100 feet into the sky. Below spread the streets and buildings of Manhattan, reaching north toward the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings 50 blocks away. The cars and trucks crawled up and down the highways along the Hudson and East Rivers, and thin November clouds sped quickly across the blue sky, blotting out the sun with their shadows every few minutes. A few boats lazily prowled the rivers, but not many. Pleasure boating season was pretty much over.