The Towers Still Stand

by Daniel Rosenberg

  Nancy thought she saw the man wince a little when she said this. She’d appealed to him in the past using her daughter as bait, and it seemed to be a good way to get under his skin. She didn’t know much about him, but she did know he was far from home and family. Perhaps he had a daughter or son he missed as well.

  “Enough,” he replied in a less friendly manner. “That’s enough for now. Time to go back to your room.” He whistled for his men, and they came to escort her.

  “If you’re going to make me go back in, at least give me something different to read, will you?” Nancy asked, turning her head over her shoulder to look back at Ram as the men led her away. “I’ve gotten through the entire Koran, and those Iraqi novels are pretty hard to read, even if I were good at Arabic.”

  Ram spoke to his men in their language, which she guessed was Pashto or Dari, and one of them nodded. A few minutes after she was locked up in the room, which smelled of urine from the bucket that served as her toilet, the man came back with a few more books – hardcover ones. Nancy shone her flashlight on them. None were in English or Arabic.

  “I can’t read these,” she said, knowing the man wouldn’t understand her. Some of Ram’s men spoke decent English, but this wasn’t one of them. She tried again in Arabic.

  The man shrugged his shoulders, shook his head and walked out. She sighed and sat back on her cot as the door slammed closed and the key turned in the lock. She wondered when she’d be able to get a shower. She’d had a couple of baths with a bucket since she’d arrived, and the men had given her a couple of changes of clothes – pants and shirts made for men. But she still felt disgusting. And what would happen, she wondered, when she got her period? She knew it could come any day, and she wasn’t looking forward to asking Ram and his men for a tampon.

  She threw the books to the floor and lay back with her hands behind her head. The cot was hard, but she’d grown used to it. She started the mental exercises she’d developed to keep from dying of boredom in this little cell, including writing letters in her head to Joanna and her parents, playing tic tack toe against herself, counting the number of days between today and the day she or Joanna was born (Nancy was approaching 17,000, if her math was right) – just the little things that occupied time.

  But today, the mental games weren’t working. Her mind was scattered, and she couldn’t mentally add figures or picture tic tack toe boards. She got off the cot and spent some time exercising her leg, pacing back and forth across the dark, undecorated room with its mud floor. She counted her steps, with a goal of reaching 1,000 for the day. She’d read somewhere that if you took 10,000 steps a day, it would keep you fit. With her wounded leg, she’d set the goal pretty low, and it was still difficult and painful, even with the crutches they’d given her. She hobbled around, wincing now and then at the pain, and eventually gave up. She’d only reached 200.

  She continued to wrack her brain trying to imagine ways to escape, or at least to get the message out about where she was imprisoned. The problems were her leg, which kept conventional escape a fantasy; and her absolute ignorance about her location. She ran through some ideas again about writing a coded message, but none of them seemed like they’d work. And how would she code it, anyway, and to indicate what?

  For that matter, she wondered if her letters even went through to her family, as Ram had assured her. After all, what did he have to gain by actually telling her family anything? He knew the U.S. government didn’t pay ransoms, and any sort of message coming from him or his men might give away their position. Also, she’d covered Washington and the White House long enough to know that hostages in foreign countries, even high-profile hostages such as she would like to consider herself to be, seldom made the top of the to-do list for senior officials. The U.S. hostages in Lebanon back in the 1980s, for instance, remained imprisoned for years and years with little U.S. action to free them. She shuddered to think of being here that long; but she also shuddered to think that only thing protecting her from a worse fate might be Ram.

  She decided the best thing to do was to keep on developing her relationship with Ram, who she at least could have conversations with when he wasn’t raving. He obviously had a human side, and she would use her experience as a journalist to chip away at him. It was like developing a difficult source, she told herself. Sometimes the longer you talk, the more they open up. At least she knew how to do this, and it gave her a bit of hope – the only hope she had at this point.

  Nancy sat heavily on the mud floor and picked up the books the man had left there. She turned on her flashlight and opened one up. The writing must have been Pashto or Dari, and it was beautiful to look at, filled with flowing symbols. It didn’t look much like Arabic, but it did remind her somewhat of Hebrew, as it seemed like the dots above and below the letters might serve as vowels. She had Jewish friends and had attended Passover Seders, at which she’d learned a little about the language.

  Still, there was no way she’d be able to read the books. She sighed again and scrolled slowly through the pages, boredom growing. As she scrolled, she thought she saw something unusual on one of the pages. She turned back to where she’d been, thumbing through page after page until she saw the one that had attracted her attention. Her eyes widened.

  In the margin of the otherwise uninteresting page, someone had done some scribbling with a pencil. The marks looked rather old, but were still very clear. Nancy’s heart raced as she stared at the bottom of the page, where the scribbling ended. Below the last scribbles, someone had drawn a very small picture with the same pencil. The picture looked like two tall buildings standing next to each other.

  Somehow, seeing that image brought to mind her long ago conversation with Virgil Walker, and his memo. Why had the drawing reminded her of the memo? She mentally thought back, and saw herself sitting with Virgil in the Thai restaurant, hearing the words he’d said then.

  “I just think the public has a right to know that there might be terrorist cells still in this country planning further attacks,” Virgil had told her five years ago. “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?” Nancy had asked. “I mean, crashing planes into buildings? That’s pretty out there.”

  She couldn’t remember where the conversation had gone after that, but she recalled that he’d been concerned in his memo about the planes turning south off their planned courses toward New York City. Two towers together. New York City. World Trade Center.

  Had Virgil told her the terrorists might have been aiming for the World Trade Center? She didn’t think he had, but it seemed logical enough if they were going to attack New York. After all, she mused, the World Trade Center had been attacked before, and a bunch of people had died. Were the terrorists on the planes trying to finish the job by flying airplanes into the buildings? And had she, somehow, been captured by the same group that had planned the attacks? She shuddered. She wondered if Ram had been part of it. Could this be his book, one he’d had back then and scribbled in absently one day during the planning, forgetting afterward that he’d done so? She felt fairly certain she wouldn’t have been given the book had Ram known the drawing was in it.

  One thing she felt sure of was the need to communicate this finding to Virgil, if she could ever get out of this miserable place. It was probably nothing. Maybe there were two towers together outside the window of whatever room the book’s owner had been in when he did the drawing. She was probably jumping to conclusions. Who could blame her after two weeks in this place with mostly just herself for company? But her conversation just now with Ram in which he mentioned the Sheik seemed to back up her theory. She knew from her studies of Al-Qaeda that Bin Laden’s acolytes often referred to him that way, and she promised herself to press Ram for more details.

  Now that she’d discovered the drawing, it seemed more important than ever
to get out of here as soon as she could. She looked once again at the page, closed the book, and turned off the flashlight.

  CHAPTER 15

  Open House, WTC

  “Oh my God, Terry, look at this view,” the woman called to her husband, who hustled over toward the window to look out from the 96th floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower across New York Harbor. “Isn’t that just gorgeous,” the woman asked. “Incredible,” the husband answered softly, eyes focused on the vista.

  It was opening day at the World Trade Center condos, and select clients milled around a model apartment. The views from the narrow windows were as dramatic as ever on this sunny December morning, with Lady Liberty plain to see and the harbor dotted with islands. The coasts of Staten Island and New Jersey stretched out for miles under the bright winter sun, and far out on the horizon the light reflected on the waters of the Atlantic. Even from between these narrow windows, the condos’ best asset was their view.

  The clients were select because to be here, they had to prove their ability to pay for one of these apartments. A simple one bedroom started at $3 million, and prices skyrocketed from there. The so-called “penthouse” on the 105th floor, right below Windows on the World, listed at a cool $100 million. That included prime northeast views toward the Midtown skyline, six bedroom suites, a library, a room just for exercise and a wine cellar (as strange as the concept of a cellar might be 1,100 feet above the ground). Monthly maintenance fees would approach $100,000 for some of the units, which had their own entrance at ground level and a windowed “sky lobby” on the 95th floor.

  The developer was Pete Gladstone, Donald Trump’s archrival in Manhattan real estate and a relative newcomer to the scene at the tender age of 35. Trump had tried to make a deal with Larry Silverstein of Silverstein Properties, who’d signed a lease for the WTC complex back in the summer of 2001. The lease had been a good idea, as the value of the property had climbed substantially in the five years since then, especially now that the economy had recovered from the recession of 2000 and 2001. The Dow Jones Average had recently hit new highs, and the buildings delivered Silverstein substantial returns in terms of office and retail rentals.

  But Trump’s idea of developing some condos on the top floors appealed to Silverstein. He never had gotten along with Trump personally, so he allowed Gladstone, a competing residential real estate developer, to handle the project. Both Gladstone and Silverstein had enjoyed seeing Trump have a tantrum in the media about how they’d stolen his idea and given it to someone else to develop. Gladstone figured if he could just get five floors to work with, he’d be able to make a fabulous profit, but Silverstein had designated 10 floors, all in the North Tower, dividing them between still lucrative office space (the highest floors generally rented for the most money) and condos.

  “It’s a growing trend,” the usually reclusive and quiet Gladstone had told The New York Times earlier this year in a rare interview when asked about the conversion of office space into condos on high floors of skyscrapers. “They just did it in Chicago last year, in one of those big 1970s office buildings off of Michigan Avenue, near Grant Park. But we haven’t seen as much here in New York, and never at an iconic property like the WTC. Just think of the address: One WTC. To say you live at One WTC says a lot about your status.”

  The décor of this model condo reflected the anticipated status of the buyers as well. One female client, obviously with an appreciation of art, eyed the minimalist modern John McCracken sculptures and paintings placed strategically around the apartment. They were from Gladstone’s own collection; his family owned an art gallery in Chelsea where works started at around $20,000 and went up into the seven figures. The polished, marble floors in the condo’s front hallway would fit right in at a French manor, and wide, Doric columns framed the arched door entries between rooms.

  Gladstone, a tall, thin, pale man with neatly combed blonde hair, who dressed in the finest dark suits and seldom smiled, professed to not worry about possible terrorism at the property, despite the 1993 bombing and the scare five years ago when some had warned that hijackers might have been aiming planes at New York City monuments.

  “We have a very strong security system here, and anyone moving into a property like this is used to having a lot of security in their lives – many of our prospective buyers already have bodyguards,” Gladstone had told the Times. “We’re not talking about the average Joe moving here. These are sophisticated world business and entertainment leaders. They know what they’re getting into.”

  Several major celebrities and business people, including two Oscar winners and four Fortune 500 CEOs, had already signed leases. In addition several Saudi sultans had expressed interest in purchasing the 10,000 square-foot penthouse. Opening day would be shortly after the new year, on January 9.

  Gladstone, in his customary dark suit and red tie, watched the tenants step off the elevators into the model condominium. He chatted with people now and then but mostly stood alone with a half smile on his face, holding a glass of white wine but never sipping. This condo was his baby, and he’d already chosen it as his own apartment, which he’d move into once it was no longer needed as a model. He loved the idea of entertaining up here, with the tall windows looking out over the harbor and fireworks lighting up the sky on the Fourth of July. Maybe he’d raise a family here, if he ever got married. Right now, life was too exciting to waste time on domesticity.

  CHAPTER 16

  Adam Makes His Move

  There could scarcely have been more contrast in apartments than between the one Gladstone stood in, with its marble floors and electronic blinds, and Adam’s tiny studio walk-up with a window looking across an alley to the dirty brick walls of another building a stone’s throw away. Adam was in his apartment now, lying on the bed with Elmer purring on top of him, still trying to decide what to do.

  It had been two weeks since the man broke into his apartment in the middle of the night, and he’d said nothing yet, except to his friend Bob, who’d experienced a similar late-night visit. Bob was petrified, and determined to stay out of the matter altogether. He had told Adam he’d never get involved again in any photography of people at the airport. From now on, he’d stick to airplanes. His site was still up, and anyone who wanted to look at photos of 737s from the 1980s or DC-10s from the 1970s could find thousands of them on his pages. That was good enough for Bob.

  Adam’s site was also still up, minus the offending photo and blog post. Those parts were gone. Adam hadn’t bothered to put them up again, as he had no wish for further nocturnal encounters with his ski-masked friend. He hadn’t changed his user name or password, either. Actually, he now had little interest in the site. It seemed polluted, somehow.

  The man had warned him against going to the police, and had left several thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, obviously bribing him to forget the whole thing. The guy must have been part of some sort of drug deal, Adam decided, and he and Bob had just been in the wrong place (or the right place, you could argue) at the wrong time. He’d heard the heroin trade had really taken off in the Midwest, so maybe these guys were trying to get product onto airplanes using grounds crew people to do the dirty work and avoid security. It made a lot of sense.

  Part of him wanted to forget it all, spend the money to pay a couple more months of rent so he could put off a decision about what to do next with his life, and move on. But another part of him fought back, saying he should do the right thing and report what had happened. It seemed dangerous, but maybe the police could give him protection. They’d probably be able to trace the criminals through the serial numbers on the bills, which he’d kept protected in an envelope in one of his kitchen drawers. He supposed the criminals knew that was a possibility, but counted on him to stay quiet in the face of their threats.

  The other thing nagging at him was the possibility that the criminals weren’t just drug dealers, but some sort of terrorists. He’d done a lot of research on air crashes, including the
hijackings and collision of 2001, and was fascinated that the terrorists successfully boarded the doomed planes and seized the controls. He hated the bastards, of course, but you had to admire their pluck. That had been a hell of a plan, but he supposed it could never work again now that the authorities knew how they’d done it. The government had made a big deal about how hijackings were no longer possible, but Adam was a skeptic, and he didn’t quite buy it. Certainly the ground personnel represented a flaw in the works, and it would be pretty easy, he supposed, to pay them off or even get them to help the terrorists under some circumstances. He figured whoever had planned the attacks in 2001 could probably have found a way to bribe some ground crews if necessary. It hadn’t been necessary then, but now it might be the only way to successfully carry out a hijacking, considering how difficult it had become for a passenger to bring a weapon aboard.

  What finally swayed him to go to the police, besides, he supposed, his sense of responsibility to the community, were the images he’d collected of the victims of that collision in 2001. The photos he had weren’t the ones you could find on newspaper front pages. They were the ones the police and first responders had taken once the smoke had cleared, and they’d seared their way into Adam’s head ever since he’d found websites showing them. One showed a boy of around eight, still strapped into his airplane seat, which now sat upright in a field. The boy was wearing a mud-stained baseball jersey and cap, his face was reddened with burns and his blank, dead eyes still looked startled. Another photo showed a man’s half-naked body, muddy and sprawled across the ground with an arm over his face, as if to keep himself from seeing whatever one saw when falling onto a corn field from 20,000 feet in the sky. Severed limbs. A doll here; a magazine there. Signs of lives destroyed in a single second. He supposed he’d never forget those images.