Wednesday's Child

by Alan Zendell

  I lay defenseless under the sheets, confronted by a very angry naked woman intent on dispensing caustic chemicals into my eyes and breathing passages. The situation couldn’t have been helped by my inability to keep my eyes from bugging out at the sight of her, nor would her discovery that I wasn’t wearing any more than she was. Still, what choice did I have? I leapt from the bed in a cold sweat, showing her my back and reaching for the robe I’d left on a bedside chair that was no longer there. What now, I thought, desperately, as I turned back to face her, only to find myself alone in the room.

  I sat up in bed, suddenly awake, laughing at myself. Perhaps I’d judged too harshly. From any point of view but my own, the dream would have been an excellent prank, even for an omnipotent entity. If nothing else, it was an object lesson in how quickly my circumstances could turn messy if I wasn’t constantly vigilant.

  ***

  The digital clock on the night table told me that it was 6:39 a.m. on Thursday, July 31. I was where I needed to be, when I expected to be there, glad not to need the TV blaring at me to verify that. Calm once again, I took a leisurely shower and shave, and headed downstairs for a relaxing breakfast by the lake shore. There was no morning Times, but The Washington Post filled in admirably.

  My morning took a turn for the worse when I saw the headline on the lead article. “Two Men Found Shot in Laurel Motel – Terrorist Connection Feared.”

  Laurel was a bustling little suburban city twelve miles to the southeast, populated by government and military workers, young singles and families, and a wide range of working class people of diverse races and nationalities. It first came to national prominence when Alabama governor George Wallace was shot there while campaigning for the 1972 presidential nomination. After that, aside from its race track, no one who didn’t live there paid Laurel much attention until it was revealed that one of the nine-eleven hijack teams had lived there in preparation for the attack on the Pentagon.

  At the time, the media had trumpeted Laurel’s proximity to NSA headquarters, virtually ignoring the fact that it was equally close to BWI airport, the Goddard Space Flight Center, the principal rail lines serving the eastern half of the country, all of Washington, and literally hundreds of government contractors doing highly sensitive work, among which was APL. If I were a terrorist looking for a place to live where I could blend in, I’d pick Laurel.

  According to the Post article, two men of Middle Eastern descent, with Arab names on their driver’s licenses, were found dead in a motel room along US Route 1, Laurel’s main business arterial. Both were armed with silencer-equipped handguns, and bullet holes in the walls and furniture indicated that at least three shots had been fired in addition to the ones that killed the two men. The bodies had been discovered after an anonymous caller phoned 911.

  Fingerprints not matching those of the deceased were found in the room, and there were also traces of blood that didn’t match either of the victims’.

  I headed for the hotel lobby, where several people were watching CNN and FOX News. The only new facts I gleaned were that the names of the two victims were both on the FBI’s terrorist watch list, and the unidentified fingerprints had been matched to a motel housekeeper’s. For once, I almost sympathized with the talking heads spewing theories on what might have happened. Was this a falling out among thieves? Perhaps an undercover operation gone bad? And what about the timing? Could the killings be related to the isotopes we’d been hunting for?

  I hurried back to my room, relieved to not find the naked woman in my dream taking a shower, and called William. He seemed confused when he heard my voice, but recovered quickly.

  “Isn’t your meeting at APL this morning?”

  “At nine, but I need to talk to you before I leave. I just saw the motel shooting story on the news. It happened a few miles from here.”

  “I know. I’m glad you called in.” Again, he seemed momentarily confused. “I should have called you last night when the story broke. I can’t believe something like that slipped my mind.” Normally, I couldn’t have either, but yesterday had been Wednesday. “The cops found the bodies around noon. The locals down there stay in close touch with the FBI when something involving Arabs occurs, but it took a while for the feds to react. I’m sure they’d have tried to keep it quiet, but by then the local media had picked up the story as a double murder.”

  “Are there any leads on who killed them and fired the other shots?”

  “FBI’s handling the forensics. They’ll put off telling the press what they know as long as possible, but we should know what they find later today or tomorrow. They might have preliminary findings on the gun the shooter was carrying by then, too.”

  “Are you thinking this could be related to what we’re working on?”

  “We’re assuming it is until we find out otherwise. Look, Dylan, I know crime scene investigation isn’t your thing, but you’re there. Manzone’s arranging for an agent from the Baltimore field office to meet you at that motel later today. Look around and ask questions. I want to know everything the FBI knows about the case. When’ll you be back?”

  I told him I’d be on a 7:30 train that arrived in Newark after 10:00 that evening. He said he’d meet me at the station, and he’d call me later to let me know when to meet the FBI agent.

  I had a few minutes to call Ilene before it was time to leave to meet John. We’d tried to figure out how we could improve our communication on my skipped days. That proved tricky, but we agreed, before I left on Tuesday, that I’d call Thursday morning to find out if there was anything she wanted me to know.

  Our plan went like this: I’d get home tonight, and presumably, wake up next to her on Wednesday morning having already experienced Thursday. Wednesday evening, I’d tell her about my Thursday, and we’d decide, together, if there was anything she should tell me when I called Thursday morning.

  It was a ticklish situation. I was worried about creating a causation loop, that is, doing something on Thursday, telling Ilene what I’d done on Thursday when I saw her on Wednesday, then doing what she told me I said I’d done when I actually experienced Thursday. That was a problem because I was now convinced that I was living Thursdays before Wednesdays for a reason. It gave me a unique point of view, an edge I was supposed to use to accomplish some as yet unspecified objective. But that required me to have free will to use my initiative. I couldn’t allow my Thursdays to be pre-ordained, which was what might happen if Ilene told me everything I was going to do before I did it.

  On the other hand, we agreed that there ought to be exceptions to that rule. What if I realized, tonight, that I’d made a terrible mistake earlier in the day, or there was an action I could have taken to avoid a catastrophe if I’d known something Thursday morning that I didn’t learn until afterward? I needed to be able to use hindsight to change my decisions, or what was the point of all this?

  Given all that, her answer when I called to ask if there was anything I should know, was anticlimactic.

  “No,” she said, “everything was remarkably normal. You must have gotten home from Maryland late tonight. You were here yesterday morning when I woke up.”

  “I didn’t say anything about today that I should know?”

  “Nope, nothing.” We chatted a bit more and it was time for me to leave.

  Things had happened so fast, I didn’t process my conversation with William until I was in my rental car. His attitude toward me had changed markedly. I’d always been a valued member of the team, but no one, least of all William, had had any illusions about my value as a field operative. Frankly, neither did I. The others all had a finely honed hardness about them, the result of many years in the field that I didn’t possess. Sure, I’d been through the same required self-defense and hand-to-hand combat training as the others, and I scored above average on the shooting range, but I’d never fired my weapon in anger or been in a physical struggle with my life in jeopardy.

  I was still surprised at how automatically I’d used
physical coercion on Achmed. At the time, I’d attributed it to the rage he evoked in me, convincing myself that such behavior was an aberration, but deep down, I knew I’d merely been salving my conscience. I was no different from the others. I’d do whatever was necessary when the time came without having to think about it. The unspoken message in my conversation with William was that he knew that too.

  ***

  The warm handshake with which John and I greeted each other spontaneously morphed into a heartfelt hug. We’d always liked each other, and more importantly, we’d known we could rely on each other the way only people who’d been teamed together on critical, demanding jobs understood.

  “Damn, Dylan, it’s good to see you,” he said, his eyes smiling above his full, neatly trimmed beard.

  “Likewise, John. I checked after we spoke, by the way. It’s been fifteen years since that bash we threw for Norm.” The last time we’d seen each other had been at the party celebrating the retirement of our former boss at the NRC, two years after we’d both moved on. I wondered how we’d managed to lose touch for so long.

  He took me back to his office and we spent the better part of an hour reminiscing. Then it was time for business.

  “I know you have other things to do, John. I’d better get to what brought me here.”

  “No worries, I blew off a couple of meetings. I’m clear until 1:30.”

  I looked around the room, not sure where to begin.

  “What’s wrong, Dylan?”

  “Honestly? I was wondering if there’s any chance of us being overheard. I know what kind of work goes on here.”

  “You’re asking if my office is bugged?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I am. This is delicate.”

  He looked hard at my serious expression and burst out laughing. “Jesus, Dylan, this is a research facility. We’re scientists. Security’s tight, but they wouldn’t dare eavesdrop.”

  They sure as hell would if they thought there was a reason to, but I didn’t press the point.

  “We could do a walking tour of the campus – they can’t bug us out by the pond.”

  “No, that’s all right.” I knew he was teasing me, and worse, I wasn’t sure how much to tell him. William had said to use my judgment, but…“All right, I’ll get straight to the point. What would I have to do to get a list of the people who’ve tested one of your submersibles in the Princeton-Rutgers project?”

  “The list is no problem, but I’m not authorized to release details of the proposals. Some of them have enormous dollar potential. A lot of noses would be out of joint if I did that.”

  “I understand, John. I wouldn’t put you in that kind of position. I don’t care about the commercial interests, that’s just my day job.” I waited for a response, but he just watched me, waiting for me to continue.

  “Look, John, I trust you, and I’m empowered to use my discretion in what I tell you. I just want to be sure how much you really want to know. Telling you too much isn’t necessarily in your interest.”

  He thought that over for a few seconds. “This is obviously pretty heavy stuff. Tell me what’s going on and who sent you, and as long as it doesn’t involve committing a felony, I’ll help however I can, even if I have to bend a few rules.”

  I told him about William, and that we suspected someone on his list of using one of his submersibles to help terrorists smuggle deadly isotopes into the country. And that if this ever came back to bite him he should have his bosses call Carlton Manzone.

  He gave me the contact information for everyone on the list who’d recently had use of a submersible in the New York area, and after eliminating the State of New Jersey, the City of Philadelphia, and an environmental group interested in protecting the Jersey shore from toxic wastes and oil spills, he had his secretary copy the remaining proposals for me.

  John went over them with me in detail. Suddenly, he slammed his palm down on his desk. “I think this is what you want – a local group fronting for a European consortium who need to be able to recover items lost in shipping accidents. They want to put transponders on critical items so they can be tracked under water. The sub performed a simulated recovery.”

  He checked a file on his computer. “Let’s see, the test was successfully conducted on Friday the eighteenth, almost two weeks ago.” The day before William took us on a cruise around New York harbor. “The sub they used was trucked back here on Tuesday. It’s due for a complete overhaul of its systems. It’s still in the loading area waiting to be moved into the lab. The pilot’s around somewhere, too, if you want to talk to him.”

  “I’d also like to check the sub’s storage bay for traces of radioactivity. It’s even possible that there’ll be some in the pilot’s bloodstream.”

  22.

  The pilot met us in the loading bay, a cavernous space filled with hoists and miscellaneous equipment, like something out of Dr. Frankenstein. The steel and fiberglass minisub was roughly cylindrical, sixteen feet long and eight in diameter. It weighed six tons, carried six passengers, and had three hundred cubic feet of inboard cargo space, but external, waldo-operated grappler arms could carry more.

  Peter Dignan looked like he should have been piloting a sportsub around Seaworld, in his flowered shirt, white Capri pants, and sockless, white canvas boat shoes, but he turned out to be down-to-Earth and serious about his job. He remembered the two men he’d taken on a tour of the floor of New York harbor, showing off the submersible’s capabilities. William would interview them later, but I wanted Peter’s impressions.

  Reiterating what John had said, Peter told me they wanted to test the ability of the sub’s electronics to detect and track transponder signals on the ocean floor. “They’d dropped some capsules into the harbor a couple of days before, just off the main shipping lanes. We simulated the sub’s ability to find and recover them without knowing exact locations, but if we failed, they’d lead us to the right spots to get their canisters back.”

  “What can you tell me about them, personally?” I asked.

  “Well, they certainly weren’t novices. The way they dressed and their behavior both told me being in a sub wasn’t new to them. The first time down, most people spend their time oohing and aahing. The rest are too busy fighting claustrophobia.”

  “Did they sound like Americans?”

  “They both spoke perfect English, if that’s what you mean. One of them had a mild accent that I couldn’t place, but I’d guess he was Mediterranean or Middle Eastern from his complexion.”

  “What about the canisters? Did you store them on board?”

  “They wanted to use the grapplers, but there are only two of them, and it would have been impossible to recover all four canisters that way unless I went outside the sub and lashed them together. We were only in about seventy feet of water, so I could have, theoretically, but John would have had my hide if he found out I left them alone in the sub.”

  “So you brought the canisters inside?”

  “Two of them. We let the grapplers hold the other two.”

  Peter caught me exchanging glances with John. “Is there a problem?”

  “Probably not,” John said, wrapping a reassuring arm around the younger man’s shoulders. “But just as a precaution, we’d like you to go down to the infirmary, let them take some blood and skin samples, and piss into a cup.”

  “Jesus, John, what the hell was in those canisters?”

  “Probably nothing that was dangerous for you,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. “There may have been radioactive materials in them, but if they were properly sealed, leakage would have been trivial if there was any at all. I wouldn’t worry.”

  “No wonder those guys were so edgy. Sonofabitch! If you don’t think it’s dangerous, why are you testing me?”

  “Any traces we find will help us identify what you recovered from the harbor.” I tried my best to look stern. “Listen to me, Peter. This is a highly classified federal investigation. Just do what John asked and keep quiet
about it, for your own sake. In the remote event that you need it, John’ll make sure you get immediate medical attention.”

  Peter’s perfect suntan seemed to have faded, but he nodded compliantly and headed off toward the infirmary. When he’d gone, John said, “Do you think he’ll be all right?”

  “Shit, John, you know how deadly that stuff is. Let’s test the walls of the storage bay and the grappler arms.” I put the case I’d brought on the floor and worked its combination lock. “I always come prepared, like a doctor with a stethoscope.”

  We donned heavy, lead-lined gloves and protective goggles, and John marveled at my state-of-the-art detection gear. We found traces of radioactivity that was marginally stronger than what Samir found on the ship, then used diamond-tipped tools to obtain samples for later testing. I got a significantly higher reading off two teeth on one of the grappler arms, not enough to make us run for cover, but sufficient to raise our eyebrows.

  “The grappler must have dug deep into one of the canisters, maybe even caused a hairline crack,” John said. A more serious crack could have exposed Peter and the others to enough radiation that they’d have long since showed symptoms like internal bleeding and hair loss.

  “You’d better get this thing out of here till we know what we’re dealing with,” I said.

  John ordered the loading bay evacuated and sealed, and called one of his Navy contacts to arrange to have the submersible quarantined. We left the bay and headed down the link to the main complex, entering an area that looked like the inside of a university engineering building.

  “Everyone on this floor works for me,” John said. He gave me a tour as we walked through the building, poking his head into various offices and working labs, telling me what was done in each. We passed one in which the largest work table was piled high with cartons. Its occupant was sealing the last one as we looked in.