Brendan rolled his eyes. “Auras scrubbed squeaky clean?”
“Ye of little faith.” Allison placed a hand on Brendan’s shoulder. “Where are you headed, my little lost grasshopper?”
“Back to the Triangle,” Brendan said. “If I can find my little lost way.”
“Nobody takes me seriously,” Zac sighed. “This is my spiritual practice, people. Can we have a little respect?”
Brendan threw him a wink. “Life is suffering, man, buck up.”
They crossed the intersection three abreast. “I heard Chris’s brother came by,” Zac said. “What was he like?”
“Marshall? When was that?”
“Last night,” Zac said. “I forgot to tell you, Al.”
“That’s what happens when you empty your mind,” Brendan said. He turned to Allison. “But, yeah—I thought I heard you and Jonah come in when they were upstairs. Figured you ran into them.”
She shook her head. “Marshall just showed up?”
“It was weird to see him. After all Chris’s complaints.”
“So what was the takeaway?”
“I don’t know how good an impression I got. Ten minutes, a couple of cranky hermits drinking beers and grasping for something to say. Then Chris came home.”
“Please,” Allison said, “you used to denounce classmates on the strength of thirty-second comments in a lecture hall.”
“Oh, hell,” Brendan sighed. “He’s built a bit like a pear, forms coherent sentences, recognizes a good stout—”
“C’mon, cut to the chase. Has he really turned into the Wicked Brother of the East Bay?”
“I suppose he was on good behavior.”
“What brought him over to the city?” Zac asked.
“Chris said his dad was up in arms about them scrapping last week, when he went over for dinner.”
“Was he worried?”
“Nah. Chris thought it was weird to make such a big deal.”
They stopped for the light at Market Street.
“Walk up Noe?” Brendan asked. “I need to duck into the corner store.”
“Sure,” Zac said.
“So, Brendan?” Allison asked.
“Hmmmm?”
“Was that …” The light turned and they stepped into the intersection. “Were you calling the guys you’ve been trying to get in touch with?”
“Yup,” he said. “Didn’t want to use the house phone.”
“You’ll be able to meet up?”
“Still ironing out details. Everybody’s being careful.”
Allison nodded. “Careful is good.”
They came to the mom-and-pop on the corner of Henry. “Smokes,” Brendan said, as though the others hadn’t figured.
Zac and Allison waited under the store’s shallow awning. “It’s strange,” she said. “Marshall coming by.”
“I wonder if there’s more to it. He never came over before, right?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a first. I don’t even remember him at Carleton Street.”
Brendan emerged from the shop and lit up. “So what’s with this weather? Is it going to rain or what?”
“Wardrobe uncertainty, huh?” Zac asked. “It’s a killer deciding between the fake fox fur and a flowered raincoat.”
Allison and Brendan laughed; Zac blinked coquettishly.
He put on a serious mien as they neared home. “What’s it been like with Jonah?”
Brendan shrugged. “We haven’t crossed paths since Saturday. I figure he’s steering clear of me.”
“He won’t talk about Buzz,” Allison said. “They saw each other, that’s all he’s saying.”
“I guess we’ll want to tread lightly,” Zac said.
“Agreed.”
Zac pulled his hands from the pockets of his baja pullover. “Jonah told me after the movie on Sunday that Buzz talked tough about jail one other time. He doesn’t know where that comes from, though.” Duboce Park was eerily empty. At Sanchez, Zac stopped. “I’m heading to the café,” he said. “Noon to six today.”
Brendan took a last hit off his cigarette, and flicked it into the gutter. “Thing is,” he said, “I’ve got a bad feeling about Buzz.”
Allison followed the butt’s arc, but withheld comment. “Meaning?”
“Not sure yet. Something’s off-kilter.”
“I think he might be in trouble,” Zac said.
“Could be,” Brendan said. “But hard to say how. Or how to come in.”
“Jonah’s friends are our godchildren,” Zac said, not missing a beat. “That’s how we’d come in.”
“I don’t know. I’d rather have a sense how hot a fire’s burning before I mess with it.”
“That’s not real, Brendan,” Allison said. “They’re already tight. We can’t just turn our heads.”
“I gotta move,” Zac said after a pause. “Kai’s got something going after his shift. I promised I wouldn’t be late.”
“Thanks for the meditation.”
“Thanks for scaring the shit out of me back there at the pay phone.”
Zac put his palms together and gave a slight bow. “Namasté,” he said, then turned up the street.
EIGHTEEN
December 2003
Steel bars lattice the skylight, casting a shadow-grid across Chagall’s plank table. He shifts, turning his laptop a few degrees to the right. In an hour the watery sun will sink behind conifers surrounding the upper meadow. As the days ebb toward solstice, these acres get a grudging few hours of direct light.
An LED matrix simmers on the east wall, registering signal filtered from microphones arrayed around the perimeter of his land. When a vertical trill emerges from the background, Chagall senses the anomaly out of the corner of his eye. He lifts his gaze to watch traces spike across an oscilloscope’s screen. After a few seconds the peaks die back into baseline chatter. A family of deer, Chagall figures, crossing the road that twists through heavily forested hills. Humans wouldn’t move out of range so quickly.
He doesn’t welcome visitors. Chagall lives in a remote stretch of the mountainous west, surrounded by a scatter of like-minded recluses, libertarians, and methamphetamine cooks. Everybody in the county guards against intrusion. Methods vary, from smart fences and electronic sensors, to mechanical traps, canine patrols, and armed ex-cons. One eccentric, on land several valleys north, was said to employ jackals until the climate did them in. Chagall’s Remington bolt action and 10/22 autoloader wouldn’t raise a local lawman’s eyebrow. Neither would the 12 gauge clipped to the underframe of his bed, or the Glock holstered at his hip. Like millions of his armed American fellows, Chagall relies on ample and obvious capacity to preclude any need to shoot another human being.
Except for engineering diagrams on his laptop’s encrypted hard drive, there’s nothing indictable on the property. Chagall conducts business elsewhere, never risking a domestic inventory of the custom intrusion sensors, spycams, and covert listening devices he crafts in rented warehouses, here and there, for parties willing to pay top dollar. Incendiaries and explosives that advance his political goals are kept even farther from where he lives.
Chagall turns away from the warning system and returns to his laptop.
Public documents on the University of Nebraska website show the institution’s AgBio complex-to-be anchored by a rectangular, six-story structure. Two hundred feet wide by a hundred fifty deep, the building is rising on the outskirts of Lincoln, surrounded by greenhouses, ample paved parking, and broad, flat fields.
Architectural plans procured by Romulus lay out the upper floors as laboratories. The main entrance will open onto a two-story lobby faced in plate glass, ten yards deep and stretching across the building’s width. Profitable advances in agro-engineering will be presented in a grandly proportioned, ground-level auditorium that sinks gently into greater Lincoln’s silty earth. Beyond the auditorium, library patrons will look out over acres of genetically modified crops.
As Chagall studies its
plan views and elevations half a continent away, the building’s bones have already been erected. He stares at the drawings until he can see, until he can all but feel the vertical steel that bears deep transfer beams spanning the auditorium and the library. Until he can sense how columns will be stabilized by spandrel walls. Until he can fully imagine the labs that will soon float on concrete slabs bonded to ribbed steel decking.
Plumbing, ductwork, electrical cable, and the facility’s data backbone will ascend through risers on either side of the auditorium. Each of the upper stories is set to be hatched with thick concrete pads for lab benches and heavy equipment. Between these masses, the diagrams show wide underfloor channels for ventilation, through which utilities will fan across the building’s working space. The channels are just deep enough for a lean man to army crawl. He would need to train, but that’s the least of his worries.
Construction on this scale lies outside Chagall’s experience. Dynamiting electrical towers, torching tract homes, blasting the innards out of heavy equipment: his credentials for wreckage and ruin in these veins are in order. He cut his teeth taking down abandoned miners’ cabins for sport, in secluded wilderness near his boyhood home. Roughly framed, saddle-notched log shacks, however, bear only distant resemblance to engineered structures of concrete and steel.
There are common threads. Columns joined to beams, compression and shear, gravity. As Chagall pores over the diagrams, he is looking for gravity and shear: vulnerable junctions of vertical and horizontal where the structure can be knocked off its frame.
—
Terabytes have been posted to the internet on the structural failures that felled the twin towers in 2001. For Chagall the attack on New York is neither a tactical model nor a strategic ideal. Morally, it’s a cesspool. Still, September 11th is a rich lesson in the physics of demolition.
Published analysis of Al Qaeda’s attack reduces to a simple narrative. Burning jet fuel weakened load-bearing structures already compromised by impact. Beams and connections failed at each of the towers’ crash points, collapsing stories directly hit by two hundred tons of Boeing 767. Once a single floor buckled, the downward-cascading mass pancaked one story after the next like vertical dominos, all the way to bedrock.
Six stories, of course, are not a hundred and ten. Chagall is neither a pilot nor suicidal, and a single lost life, with the possible exception of his own, would render his mission a failure. Lessons to be drawn from the World Trade Center, then, are more general than specific. Heat can weaken structural steel to the point of failure. The collapse of long beams—over an open auditorium, for example—releases potential energy locked in a building’s upper stories.
Timothy McVeigh, no less a mass murderer than the Al Qaeda hijackers, destroyed an Oklahoma City office block with a fertilizer bomb in 1995. The scale of Nebraska’s AgBio complex is on a par with McVeigh’s target; though, unlike Oklahoma City’s federal building, the AgBio complex will be empty when Chagall strikes. The Nebraska structure is about as wide, twice as deep, and is supported by a column grid on thirty-foot centers, versus the Oklahoma City building’s twenty. Chagall would have no trouble driving a truck packed with ammonium nitrate into Lincoln. An airplane is out of the question. The essential physics are the same.
Chagall intends to inflict enough damage that the AgBio building will have to be scrapped. Enough to pierce the nation’s indifference for long enough to achieve an immediate purpose. In the hush that will precede an unbridled media scrum—Terrorism in the Heartland!—he and Romulus will offer Americans a challenge: either render ecotage obsolete by bending politics to constrain industry, or suffer an escalating cascade of bombings and burnings committed by those who refuse to stand by while the planet is sacked.
In the time left to pull Earth out of its nosedive—manufactured heat roiling weather into peril, monoculture wringing out the planet’s arable land, radiation concentrated to poison vast landscapes in the wake of inevitable nuclear meltdowns—no one can credibly argue that scattered cells of eco-saboteurs will save a biosphere. Yet paralysis is a coward’s response. Hope dwindles, but Chagall’s world is dying and he’ll fight for it, as long as he lives.
The chances they’ll succeed, in the long run, are vanishingly small. But despair confers no exemption from responsibility.
Chagall is equally certain that despair makes poor argument. He will do what he does best, but crafting a credible justification requires belief in a future, and faith that disparate and self-interested communities might join together to confront crisis, might act for a common good. His own outlook is too dark to rally others. As he argued to Romulus, there is tactical advantage to cloaking their message in a voice insulated from operational planning. But hope is the key reason to bring a third party into their circle.
Four months and change are all that remain before their window of opportunity closes. He has identified candidates: an academic in Ann Arbor, a journalist in Chapel Hill, and two activist types nominated by Romulus, both on the West Coast. After the turn of the year Chagall will initiate contact. By the time he selects their propagandist-to-be, logistical planning will be largely complete. He’ll be free to focus on implementation. With messaging and broadcast outsourced, his part will be to bring the building down.
—
Chagall slides a fresh split of oak into his woodstove.
The structural drawings suggest two options.
The first involves compact caches of Thermate-TH3 planted where transfer beams meet supporting columns along the auditorium’s perimeter. Ignited remotely or on a timer, underfloor charges would vaporize steel in a half-meter radius, severing the building’s key joints and deforming its upper stories. If the library were already furnished, fire and smoke might spread, damaging costly equipment in the labs.
The second borrows from the Oklahoma City attack. Fertilizer is plentiful in the farmland surrounding Lincoln, as is gasoline and propane. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to turn a truck into a missile. As McVeigh himself proved, any moderately trained tweaker can manage. The trick would be to send a vehicle hurtling on autopilot into the heart of the building. It won’t be enough to simply park outside and amble away, as McVeigh did. The site is too isolated, and to get that close would risk capture. Just as crucially, an explosion on the perimeter might fail to dislodge interior transfer beams. Chagall has sketched extensions to adaptive driving equipment that could steer a truck its final quarter mile under mechanical guidance, enough to open a plausible chance of escape. The execution would be risky, but the effect vastly more dramatic than a remotely triggered burn.
As he calculates angles and payloads and margins of error, Chagall sees that a third tactic might combine the two modes of attack. Looser tolerances in each element would be possible if he employed both. Smaller charges could weaken critical welds, and they’d be easier to place solo. A lesser blast in the lobby, even if it struck some yards off an ideal center, would still fracture shear connections if they were already compromised.
The laptop’s hard drive spins in the cabin’s silence. Chagall stares through his mullioned window, past a fenced, December-spare garden to the meadow beyond. He is thinking of Nebraska, blanketed in snow, a kilometer lower in altitude but thousands distant from the moderating Pacific.
There won’t be time to wait for kinder weather before paying a visit. Groundwork needs to be laid before spring, and he’ll have to take care not to cut a memorable figure. Sensible men don’t loiter in the icy plains. He’ll want to be passing through, on business set to ripen later in the year.
A clipped motion on the far side of the vegetable plot catches his eye, some small mammal rustling through the sedge. Now stillness. After a few moments he makes out the dark, pointy tips of elongated ears among the thingrass and spikerush. It’s the jackrabbit he spotted a week or so before, looking for a way past his chicken wire.
Chagall rises stealthily, careful to avoid a sudden step or scrape that might carry through the floorbo
ards. He slips the Ruger 10/22 from its rack and glides toward the door. Outside, by the cabin’s southeast corner, breathing soft clouds of steam into the chill, he scans the near quarter of the meadow.
Nothing.
Perhaps he’s missed his chance.
Minutes pass and damp penetrates Chagall’s woolen shirt. Then, a telltale movement beyond a patch of curly leaf kale. The only shot he’ll get is through the fence. Not ideal. Still, even if he fails to bag stew meat, the attempt will scare the varmint off his cabbage and carrots for a while. Chagall raises the Ruger and steadies his aim.
A thin wedge of gray-brown face pokes into the cleared gap around his garden. Ears folded back, the jackrabbit sniffs for trouble. Chagall trains the rifle on a spot just his side of the uncut wild, waiting for the critter to inch into the open. The hare, three kilos if it weighs a pound, emerges warily, whiskers aquiver. Chagall presses the trigger.
His shot scuffs short, raising a spray of gravely loam. The twanging fence tells how the bullet went off its mark.
In long, arcing leaps, the jackrabbit flees to the near tree line.
NINETEEN
Christopher held the door for Suvali as they left the theater, a low-slung building on Irving Street, not far from the medical center where she interned. A woman of a certain age followed, and he held the door for her as well. Red cashmere sweater, a necklace of squarish, wooden beads. Associate professor, he guessed. The woman nodded thanks, and Christopher caught up with Suvali.
“So what did you think?” he asked. “I’m curious how that period looks to someone who didn’t grow up on the Weather Underground’s legend.”
“As a documentary?” Suvali turned up the collar of her coat. “The issues around militancy were universal, I think. The tension between retrospective justification and horrified regret. But the group’s politics were hard for an outsider to follow.”
Christopher assumed she was horrified, justifiably, that three members of the group’s New York collective had blown themselves up in 1970, as they prepared explosives to inflict Vietnam-scale carnage on an Army dance at Fort Dix. He suppressed an involuntary shiver. “I was in preschool myself when those guys were active,” he said. “Nobody admires them for that Greenwich Village bomb lab, and thank God they failed. It’s how they responded afterward. The collective’s complete disavowal of violence against people, their commitment to avoid injury in all their subsequent actions—without backing down from attacking and exposing the death and destruction for which we all were responsible. Every person in the United States. Our government was murdering millions in Vietnam, in our names.”
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