by Rio Youers
“But mostly I feel … empowered.”
“Empowered?” She grinned. “Why?”
“It’s quite a feat,” he said, “to burn what was weak to the ground, and rebuild with strong materials. That’s what I’ve done with my life. Thanks to you.”
She nodded, kissed the top of his head. Her nipple throbbed against his palm.
“You belong here,” she said. “We value you.”
“Yes.”
“You are giving and intelligent and resolute.” She squeezed his upper arm with every compliment. “And certainly you know—and this is perhaps your most agreeable quality—that these traits, if not utilized, mean nothing at all. They are the pages of a book no one will ever read.”
“I’ll make them read,” Garrett said.
She kissed the top of his head again and said in her loving, motherly tone, “That’s the quickest way to Glam Moon.”
“Sometimes I think I’m already there.”
“Oh no, Garrett. You’ve a long way to go.”
She removed his hand, popped two more buttons, then dragged her heavy right breast from inside her shirt. He saw the scars and veins across her chest and had to hide his disgust. “Sugar,” she said, and pulled down the front of her bra to reveal a blunt, leathery nipple, broad as a penny.
He averted his eyes. He looked at the box with the watch inside—the watch, replicating an average American life: a complex but ultimately robotic device, ticking off seconds and minutes, doing the same thing 24/7.
She said, “Your legacy will be not determined by who you are, but by what you do.”
“Yes,” he said. And then, “I should go.”
“Not yet. Pop this bitter old thing into your mouth.” She curled one hand around the back of his head and ushered him close. “You’ve nowhere else to be.”
* * *
West Chippewa Street was a circus. Thinly dressed twenty-somethings thronged the sidewalks. They crowded veneered establishments with names like Platform Eleven and Absolution—weekend superstars, one and all, drinking and dancing, uploading their memories to Instagram. This was young America, adorned and exuberant. The night was an oil spill of color.
Garrett parked on the road between two streetlights, mostly in shadow, and watched from behind a darkened windshield.
Around and around their little lives go. Tick-tock. But where’s the progress, Garrett? Where’s the ambition?
He saw none. He saw waste and taint and indifference.
Ambition relies on moving forward. So tell me … how do you turn a circle into a straight line?
Garrett caressed the control box resting in the center console: a homemade device comprised of a toggle switch, a safety cover, and two nine-volt batteries. Two wires—one red, one black—led from the box to the trunk.
“To begin with,” he said, “you break the circle.”
He’d left the island just after 4 p.m. with his directive sounding in his mind. It had a hypnotic quality not unlike (and yes, he’d noted the irony) a clock ticking. Nolan Thorne had taken him to the mainland, then driven him to Rochester. Nolan—the island’s second-in-command—had handled all the final details. The precision work, he’d called it. This amounted to gathering and storing the necessary materials, and assembling the IED.
The ninety-minute drive from Fisherman’s Point to Rochester had been a blur. Nolan said nothing. It was only when they reached the storage unit in Rochester that he spoke. He handed Garrett the keys to the Altima and told him what was in the trunk. “If you’re compromised, the authorities need to believe you were acting alone. This’ll only happen if you can detail what you’re carrying.” He showed Garrett the red and black wires running from the trunk to the control box in the center console. “This is a two-position toggle switch. Off and on. The safety cover will prevent you from flipping the switch before you’re ready.” Garrett had looked at the control box and nodded, his brain still engaged by that hypnotic ticking sound. “You get into position, lift the cover, flip the switch. Eighteen volts will only a provide a small spark, but that’s all you need.” Then Nolan did something he’d never done in all the time Garrett had known him: pulled Garrett into a clumsy embrace. It lasted no more than five seconds—long enough for Garrett to smell Nolan’s vinegary sweat and feel the moth-like fluttering in his chest. They’d separated to an awkward silence, then Nolan intoned with affected vigor, “I’ll see you in the Glam.”
They’d said their farewells. Garrett’s was lackluster. Dazed, almost. What he wanted to say was, Would you do it, Nolan? For all your loyalty and expertise … would you flip the switch? But every time a negative or resistant thought entered his mind, it was suffocated by that ticking sound.
Live music thumped from a bar called the Bottletop. It was huge, glass-fronted, with a rooftop terrace that bled color into the night. Kids howled and danced, hands in the air. Their silhouettes moved sinuously. Garrett focused on the front windows. Four of them, each as high and wide as a city bus. Garrett saw the people inside, like so many fish in an aquarium. They were as beautiful as fish, too. They dipped and winnowed.
It’s time, he thought, except he didn’t think it; the voice was not his own. He wiped a collar of sweat from the back of his neck and took a photograph from his shirt pocket. It was of a handsome young man with a reddish brush cut and kind green eyes. Jefferson, his brother. More than that: his hero—his world—after their parents died. Garrett’s eyes blurred with tears. It wasn’t Jefferson’s voice, either.
“I’m so confused, Jeff,” Garrett mumbled. “Everything has gone to—”
It’s TIME.
Garrett’s mouth closed with a dry click. He drew his shoulders inward—could almost feel her close to him. If he looked into the rearview, he thought for sure he’d see her there, hovering, her eyes alight.
He slipped the photograph back into his pocket and started the car. One glance at the control box, then he rammed the transmission into drive. He didn’t pull away gradually; he stomped on the gas and the Altima jumped forward. The tires whinnied and smoked and the back end dragged just a little—not surprising considering what was in the trunk.
“These two wires,” Nolan had said, showing how they snaked beneath the driver’s seat, beneath the rear passenger seat, and into the trunk, “are connected to an igniter fashioned from a Christmas tree light. The igniter is inside a thin plastic tube packed with mercury fulminate and potassium chlorate. This is your detonator. The detonator is pushed inside six pounds of a black-market plastic explosive called Kerna-H4. There’s a five-gallon jerry can filled with gasoline on either side of the explosive, but make sure you fill up because that’ll put another eighteen gallons in the tank. That’s quite the fireball, but it doesn’t stop there; the cans are secured by two fifty-pound bags of ANFO: a cocktail of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. This is the payload, Garrett. The shock and the awe. Anyone within a hundred yards is going to get blown into the goddamn stratosphere.”
* * *
Garrett Riley was born in Indianola, Mississippi in the fall of 1983. The younger of two children, his upbringing was—for the first thirteen years of his life, at least—perfectly normal. His parents were upstanding Americans, former college sweethearts. Daddy was a track superstar who’d missed making the US Olympic team by the narrowest of margins. He went on to start his own adhesive label business, which flourished in the Reagan era. Mama was a reporter for Sunflower County’s Rapid News team. She had aspirations of anchoring at one of the bigger stations, but the arrival of Jefferson, then Garrett, derailed those plans. Not with any regret. Friends of the Rileys maintained that Lynda Riley was an unselfish, caring sweetheart of a mother, who raised those boys with open-hearted, Christian love and unwavering American principles.
For all the digging in the dirt, for all the right-wing and antiestablishment ties the media endeavored to make, the worst that could be said of young Garrett Riley was that he tried too hard to please, and that he was easily led. This fueled sp
eculation that he was led on the night of April 14, 2018—that somebody else was pulling the strings. There was no evidence to support this, however, and Garrett marched alone into infamy. He wasn’t alone once he got there, of course. The New York Times likened Garrett’s crime to that of Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh’s, who’d bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168. The Boston Globe drew comparisons to Andrew Kehoe and the Bath School disaster of 1927, in which forty-four people—including thirty-eight children—were killed in a series of devastating explosions. A Christian fundamentalist website declared with absolute earnestness that Garrett Riley had been possessed by the “hateful spirit” of Osama bin Laden. Further comparisons were made to Ted Kaczynski, Ramzi Yousef, and the devil.
With no connections to known terror organizations—domestic or foreign—investigators looked to Garrett’s mental stability, and here, particularly in later life, the weaknesses were evident. He and Jefferson were orphaned in 1997 when a drunk driver bounced his Chevy Silverado across the median on I-55, slamming head-on into the Lincoln being driven by Hank Riley. He and Lynda—returning home from a friend’s birthday party—were killed instantly. The brothers went to live with an uncle in Louisiana. Letters from Jefferson to his girlfriend in Mississippi, revealed that neither boy was happy there, and it went beyond being taken away from everything they knew. We’re not abused, or anything, Jefferson wrote. We’re just ignored … unloved, which is a kind of abuse, when you think about it. In subsequent correspondence, Jefferson wrote how Garrett begged Jefferson to run away with him. He’s been reading all these books about surviving in the wild. He’s got this idea we’d live like bears, maybe speak some secret language and scare away hikers. I told him we’d be more like Yogi and Boo-Boo.
Jefferson joined the armed forces in 2000, cutting the apron strings tethering him to his little brother. The people who knew Garrett at that time said he was more like a ghost than a person. “He’d just float in the background,” Aunt Bea said. “Wouldn’t say nothing to nobody. Randy called him Balloon Boy—just bobbing around, waiting to go pop.”
This detachment only deepened with Jefferson’s deployment to Afghanistan in 2002. Garrett was eighteen at the time. Other kids his age were going to parties, getting drunk, getting laid. Garrett’s interests were limited to reading European literature and writing angry poetry. In a 2004 email to Jefferson, he asked why Jefferson—by then on his second deployment—would want to be a part of such a dishonest war. Because I love my country, Jefferson replied. America has taken its share of knocks recently and we need to move some mighty big pieces to get things back the way they were. One person can’t do that. It’s the work of MANY people, pushing in the same direction. And that’s what I am, Garr … I’m one man pushing.
There are no images of Garrett burning the flag. He never sent threatening letters to his congressman or subscribed to hate propaganda. His response to Jefferson’s estimable patriotism—If you get killed over there (KILLED FOR NO GODDAMN REASON!) then I’m going to do some pushing of my own—was the only indication of a potentially violent temperament. It was jumped on by the media, sensationalized first and analyzed second.
“Here’s a man,” said Dr. Clyde Brisk, a noted forensic psychiatrist and author of Murder Nation: A History of Mass Murder in the USA, “who is clearly depressed and angry, but who is not, at this time, displaying signs of sociopathic behavior. He is on the precipice. With the right help, he can turn his life around and engage agreeably with society. Conversely, with a nudge in the opposite direction, or even in the absence of help, he can lose whatever grip he has and become incredibly dangerous.”
Jefferson left the army in 2010 and returned to Louisiana, where he started his own truck repair business. He bought a house in Lafayette and Garrett moved in with him. This was no doubt a happier time for Garrett. He landed a job in construction and even had a string of girlfriends. None were particularly serious, but it was evidence that Garrett had retreated from the precipice. The photographs of him from this time showed a smiling young man who appeared to be enjoying life. His Facebook profile picture was of him and Jefferson, arms slung around one another, clutching bottles of Budweiser. Ninety percent of the photos he posted were of him and Jefferson: fishing on Spanish Lake; riding the Flyin’ Tiger at Dixie Landin’; standing shirtless in the rain at some washed-out barbecue. He loved his big brother, no doubt about it. But it was more than that. Jefferson was his stabilizing force. His center of gravity.
Dr. Brisk said, “Any level of dependency is a double-edged sword; what happens when the person you’re leaning on is no longer there? Ultimately, Garrett Riley needed to stand on his own two feet, and he was never able to do that.”
On October 6, 2016, Jefferson went to the Eezy-Mart on the corner of his street to buy milk and cookies for his pregnant fiancée. Moments later, a man wearing a Ninja Turtles mask entered the store and leveled a double-action revolver at the cashier. Instead of emptying the register, the cashier leveled a gun of her own. Shots were fired. The assailant fled the scene with the cashier in pursuit, while Jefferson lay facedown in a puddle of milk and blood. He’d taken a bullet to the throat and died before his cookies hit the floor.
Garrett disappeared a short time later.
“Gone,” Madeline Burns—Jefferson’s fiancée—said blankly. “I figured he’d taken a dive off the Horace Wilkinson Bridge and his body was never recovered. Can’t say I missed him. He was like a rag after Jeff died, just laying around all gray and limp. I only realized he was AWOL after his boss called my house looking for him.”
Garrett spent at least a portion of the next eighteen months in New York City. He’d used his credit card to purchase a Greyhound ticket from Lafayette to Port Authority, and made three sizable cash withdrawals from the First Pioneer Bank in Brooklyn Heights. Other than that, his electronic footprint was nonexistent.
“He removed himself from the system,” senior FBI agent James Wilding said. “No online presence. No known address or place of employment. On record, he disappeared. In reality, he was likely working for cash and sleeping on a friend’s couch. Suffice to say, Garrett Riley’s whereabouts during this period, along with the identities of any known associates, is of great interest to us.”
The common theory was that the cash withdrawals (totaling $22,800 of Garrett’s inheritance money) went toward securing the bomb-building materials. Garrett’s electronic footprint next appeared in March 2018 when he used his credit card to rent a storage unit in Rochester, New York, and again a month later when he rented a Nissan Altima from Meridian Car & Truck, also in Rochester.
Footage from security cameras showed the Altima striking the plate glass windows of the Bottletop bar in downtown Buffalo at 23:48 on Saturday April 14, 2018. Within ninety minutes, authorities had infiltrated the storage unit in Rochester, where they recovered snippets of multi-strand wire, a small amount of scattered ANFO prills, and a USB flash drive. The eighty-three second video on the flash drive showed Garrett standing in front of a plain white wall. The recording was steady and in focus, suggesting use of a tripod or other stabilizing device. Forensic audiologists confirmed no ambient sound to indicate the presence of a third party.
Garrett introduced himself: full name, date, and city of birth. His eyes were glazed and there was a robotic stiffness to his voice. He appeared sedated.
“My brother was a true and valiant American,” he said after a moment. His empty gaze wavered and he took an unsteady breath. “He served his country for ten years, including two yearlong deployments to Afghanistan. He didn’t die at the hands of Taliban insurgents. His transport helicopter wasn’t shot down over Kabul, and he didn’t step on a landmine. He was killed in a convenience store in Lafayette, Louisiana, while buying cookies for his pregnant fiancée. That’s right…’Murica: a different kind of warzone, where repetition and lack of progress are the enemy, and everyone’s got blood on their hands.”
He wiped his eyes
and stared at the camera for a full twenty seconds. Here he appeared most haunted, and haunting. Of all the photographs of Garrett, it was a still from this portion of the video that was used most widely by media sources.
“He used to bark at me when I’d call him a hero.” The slightest of smiles cracked his face, there and gone in a second. “Garr, he’d bark. I ain’t no hero. I’m just one man pushing. That’s what he always called himself: one man pushing. Well, that didn’t work out too good for him, did it? So maybe the secret is you’ve got to push a little bit harder.”
The blast from Garrett’s rolling IED punched a hole the size of a football field into downtown Buffalo. It obliterated the Bottletop and several of its neighbors, with structural damage reaching to within a three-block radius. It wasn’t as large in scale as the truck bomb that rocked Oklahoma City in 1995, but had it beat in terms of casualties: 228 killed and 406 injured, making it the second-deadliest terrorist attack within the United States.
It being an act of terrorism was never debated, despite Garrett (apparently) being a lone wolf, declaring no affiliation to known terror organizations, or taking any real political stance. He did have an axe to grind: the “repetition and lack of progress” that he held accountable for his brother’s death. But this was no act of revenge. As the president himself said: “If your grievance—however vague—is against a system or ideology and you’re killing innocent civilians, then make no mistake, you are a terrorist.”
“It’s difficult for people to quantify a disaster of this magnitude with one person,” Dr. Clyde Brisk said to Wolf Blitzer on The Situation Room. “We associate terrorism with antiestablishment organizations … with resources, money, people. That one man, with his own set of grievances, could have done this is terrifying. As a psychiatrist, I’m interested in why, and so we go back to the precipice. How does someone go from being depressed and disillusioned to being one of the most hated figures in American history? The answer lies in the eighteen months that Garrett Riley was absent from society. He encountered something during this period that had a profound effect on him.”