“In a way, it does. It involves everybody. You just don’t know it yet.”
31
hb stnds xplded burnin ppl on me #sos
— First known attack-related tweet, Chicago, 19 October 2019
TUESDAY, 11 MAY
Nora took the slate from Paul, then signaled to Juan to join her at the pass-through counter. Paul slipped away to watch from the kitchen. “Remember 10/19?”
“Oh, God, yes,” Juan groaned.
Nora wondered if anyone alive then didn’t have those numbers stamped into the front of their brains, like 9/11 before it. She detached the little data-chip module from the base of her chunky silver pendant, plugged it into the slate’s side, then poked at the screen to bring up the folders. “The 2019 National League playoffs, game five, at Wrigley Field. The Cubs and the Phillies.” She swept the slate’s screen with her fingertip a couple times. “The game was sold out, 42,719 in attendance.” She handed the slate to Juan.
He grimaced at the video frame she’d cued up. “Do I have to?”
“Yes. Twice.”
She didn’t have to look at the screen. How many hundreds of times had this played on the news? How many dozens more times had she examined it frame-by-frame at headquarters?
The security-cam view of traffic flowing by on West Addison Street, a stream of people strolling the brick sidewalk, the line of out-of-service buses waiting along the curb for the game’s end. A few seconds later the truck arrives, a semi with a Budweiser box trailer and North Dakota plates. It curves into the curb ahead of the lead bus, next to the no-parking sign outside the stadium’s Gate F just a few feet away. Then a black four-door sedan pulls past, full of dark faces, its nose disappearing into the camera’s blind spot. Just as before, a dark-skinned guy in gray work clothes scrambles out of the truck cab, then jogs to the sedan’s open back door. The car squirts away before he can even close the door behind him. Then those three security guards and the Chicago cop close in to check out the truck. Ninety seconds of head-scratching. A few frames of pure white. Then static.
Juan sighed, handed the slate back to Nora. The “what happened next” images were still vivid: the fires, rubble, bodies, gray dust coating the outfield wall’s ivy, bleeding people staggering past crumpled cars in the street, that iconic shot of the Cubs flag burning over the stadium.
“Two thousand eighty-one dead,” she said, no emotion in her voice or head. “Including the mayor and six Phillies starters. Over four thousand injured.” She held up the slate to show him pictures of four all-too-familiar dark-brown faces. “Twenty-three blocks north in Lakewood, CPD pulled over a black 2009 Chevy Impala for speeding. These four Yemenis were in it—two of them born here, one green card, one on a busted visa. They said they were late for work. ICE locked them up. You know the rest.
“I joined the Bureau in ’20, the last class that let in Muslims. I’d’ve been happy to stay in the Army, but it was going private and the contractors didn’t have any use for women, especially not Muslim women.”
“Infantry?”
“Military police. Anyway, a few months after Quantico I went to Counterterrorism Division at headquarters. That’s what happens to agents like me who speak Arabic and Farsi. It was a huge career boost—that’s where all the action was back then.”
She’d been so excited at first. Then they started yanking female agents off the streets because the Attorney General and the President didn’t think it was “appropriate” to have wives and mothers in “those kinds of roles.” She was doubly cursed because of her religion, frozen out even though they needed her skills more than ever. Residual anger warmed her cheeks.
“Anyway, there I was in ’29 and the Bureau wanted to do a ten-year review of the Wrigley Field case, pull together an updated history, stuff for the anniversary, all that. I ended up on the history team. The other agents kept saying, ‘Come on, we know what happened, just make it pretty,’ and I’d tell them no, let’s do this right, let’s look at it like a new case. I wasn’t very popular. Anyway, we went through tons of material.” She paused, blew out a long breath. “I started finding things that didn’t add up.”
“Is this where I put on my tinfoil hat?”
She scowled at him. “Just hear me out. Look, I’ve got to defend the Bureau. We were under incredible pressure right after the attack. Everyone in the country screaming at us for one thing or another. And then all the other stuff.”
The other stuff: riots, mosque burnings, Muslims getting beaten to death or shot, women in hijab stripped in the streets, mobs torching the beards off Muslim men. That orgy in Buffalo, two hundred dead Yemenis, sixteen blocks burned out. Cops standing by and watching or helping, firemen letting Muslim houses burn. She’d watched from Somalia as it unspooled on the web, terrified for her parents and brother, sick at being helpless to protect them.
“That was a scary, scary time. So I was ready to excuse loose ends, you see? But they kept piling up, and pretty soon I couldn’t anymore.”
Keep going? She’d hadn’t planned to tell him everything, in case he decided to get rich by killing her and stealing the story. But now she’d started, it was hard to stop, as if she had to purge this huge weight she’d been carrying, the faster the better.
“The first thing that bugged me was what happened on the 21st. The Bureau took custody of the Yemenis from ICE way before anyone had seen the video or even knew what kind of car left the scene. The AG announced it that night—that’s what kicked off the worst of it.
“What really got to me was that even with all those records, there were holes. Craters. Canyons. There was so much missing stuff. I’d figured the meat of the case was in the classified material, but there wasn’t much more there. The guys had ammonium nitrate on their clothes, but they were all landscapers, of course they would. The traffic cams didn’t pick up the Impala until it turned onto Clark off Lawrence, from the wrong direction. That kind of thing. The way I’m wired, when I find a loose end, I want to tie it off. So I kept trying to track down the lost material, and I put in a request to interview the Yemenis.”
After a few seconds of silence, Juan asked, “What did they have to say?”
Nora sighed. “The EAD turned—”
“EAD?”
“Sorry, Executive Assistant Director. He turned me down. I found out later all four of them are dead.” She checked Juan’s face, covered with his surprise. “Officially, two committed suicide, one died in a fight, the other supposedly of a ruptured appendix. Quite the coincidence.”
“Are they really dead?”
Paul chuckled in the kitchen. “Now you’re getting it.”
Nora shot him a glance, then gave Juan a thin smile. “I have no idea. Probably. Anyway, we put together this whitewash report, which I’m sure was what they wanted in the first place. I went back to my cold cases and FOI requests and monthly polygraphs. And it ate me up that so much was gone. So I kept digging, off the books, but I didn’t find much.
“Then I went out for lunch about a year and a half ago, and someone left a note in my purse. A phone number, on flash paper, really old-school. It was this old-line agent I’d interviewed for the report. He’d been on the Pile after 9/11 and got some weird kind of cancer from it. Wrigley Field was his last case before he went out on disability. We started talking, and he gave me scraps of stuff from the 10/19 case, and I got interested because I hadn’t seen any of it before. Then one day, he gave me this.” She tapped the slate, then turned it over to Juan.
“Again?”
“Just watch it. Carefully.”
He tapped “play.” The screen in her mind played the video, too. Same camera, same street, same buses. The same semi parked, followed by the same sedan. The same driver abandoning the truck.
Only it wasn’t the same driver.
This one was white. The three faces in the sedan were noticeably lighter, too.
Juan rewound and replayed those few seconds of video four times. He looked up at Nora. “What the he
ll?”
Her same reaction the first time. “That’s the original security footage. Remember how they supposedly couldn’t get to it right off because of the rubble? It turns out they found the video eight days after the bombing, in the basement where the recorders lived.”
Juan’s face crunched in confusion. “Why didn’t they announce it then?”
“Are you serious?” Paul asked, a half-laugh in his voice. “The FBI Director had already told the world they’d caught the bombers. The Attorney General called American Muslims ‘vipers in our house.’ The President said he’d wipe out every last jihadi in America, no matter what. My office was getting hundreds of calls a day about the pogroms happening all over the country. The FBI and ICE had already rounded up ten, eleven thousand Muslim men for questioning. Including a cousin of mine, by the way, though they let him go after six days.” He turned up his palms. “Do you think the FBI would stand up and say, ‘Never mind’?”
“But, cover it up?”
“That’s what worked best for all of them,” Nora said. “They were stuck with the story they’d created, so they buried the truth and went with the myth. Which included altering the video.”
Juan shook his head as if it hurt. “How do you know this agent guy didn’t fake up the video himself?”
“He could barely work a cell phone. He invited me up to his house out in West Virginia a few days later. He was dying by then—he’d stopped his chemo—and he said he had a present for me. He had eighteen boxes of paper copies of 10/19 records that got shredded. He also had all these CDs—CDs, I told you he was old-school—full of files the Bureau deleted. It was exactly what I’d been looking for. He said he didn’t want the secret to die with him, and he was sorry for all the pain it caused…people like me.” She recalled Hugh’s ravaged face from their last meeting. Dead about a year, now; at least he didn’t hurt anymore. Nora held out the slate to Juan. “Here, take a look.”
Juan riffled randomly through the hundreds—thousands—of files and folders. From time to time he’d scratch his head or cup a hand over his mouth. Nora watched him and relived that sucker-punched feeling when she’d learned that everything she’d known about the most important event in the past fifteen years was a lie.
“What’s REDCAP?”
She leaned toward him to see the document on the screen. The Druganic statement from the 23rd, marked TOP SECRET// REDCAP//NODIS. “That’s the compartment they created for the sensitive stuff. I’m not read in, so I shouldn’t have seen any of it, but what was I supposed to do, burn out my eyes?”
Juan gamely trudged through more files, but he’d slowed as if the weight of it all dragged him down. He finally slumped his elbows onto the counter, stared at the boarded-up kitchen window. “So who really did it?”
Nora tapped and wiped the screen a few times. Pictures of four white men appeared, three square-faced and thick-necked like laborers or bodybuilders, the fourth thinner and darker. She shuddered, just as she always did when she saw their faces. “Dugan, MacRonan, Seybold and Conners. Paid-up members of the Free Montana Militia. Hooked up with Christian Identity, hooked up with the sovereign citizen movement, anti-everything, highlights in their copies of The Turner Diaries, the whole picture. Seybold started mouthing off on the phone a week after the bombing, and NSA picked it up, and we rolled them up five weeks later. Of course, it was too late by then.”
“Why’d they do it?”
“The race war was taking too long to get started. They didn’t like the public race-mixing they saw in the big cities. They thought pro sports had been taken over by Jews and nigger junkies and it was ruining good white kids’ morals.” Juan winced at her words. “So they decided to make The Turner Diaries come true. Dugan was a truck driver—that was him in the video—Seybold ran a farm, MacRonan had worked EOD in Iraq, Conners was a painter in an auto-body shop. That’s all the brains it took. The Bureau just helped them get away with it.”
Juan examined the four pictures. “What happened to them?”
“I hope they’re on the bottom of Lake Michigan. The Bureau put them in a place that doesn’t exist and sweated their statements out of them. I’ve got them if you want to read them. It’s really sick, sick stuff—they were actually proud of themselves. There’s no paper trail on the rest, but the best I can work out, some contractors took the four of them and they were never seen again.” Nora slipped the slate from his hand and cradled it against her chest. “Now you know what I did and why they’re after me. Sorry you asked?”
Juan nodded, looking lost.
There was more, but he didn’t need to know the rest—not yet. What he already knew could kill him.
32
This will be the fourth consecutive national election for which the United States has refused to admit international observers… An estimated nine to ten million otherwise qualified voters have been excluded by voter ID laws aimed primarily at the poor, the young and racial minorities… Documented claims of voter intimidation, vote buying and widespread ballot tampering have been ignored to date by government officials.
— 2032 U.S. Election Assessment Report, Democracy International
TUESDAY, 11 MAY
All the rubble from Wrigley Field seemed to be piled on Luis’ shoulders. He trudged across the living room and back, his head throbbing from everything he’d just seen and heard. Could this be real? Would Nora even bother with all this if she was some kind of bad-ass felon on the run? Probably not; she’d just shoot him and move on. But that meant…“If you’re right, then it’s all a lie,” he said, half to himself. “All of it. The laws, the camps, the roundups, the ID checks, invading Yemen. It’s all because of a lie.”
“Yes,” Paul said. He leaned back against the kitchen sink, half-lit by reflected lantern light. “Can you imagine what would happen if the truth came out now?”
Luis tried, but it required hope and trust, which had mostly been ground out of him. “That’s your plan?” he asked Paul. “Tell everybody?”
“Pretty much.” Nora’s folded arms still pressed the slate against her chest. “We’ve been working with some people in the government in Britain. They’re really angry about the NSA hacking the Prime Minister’s network. I’ve sent them about three-quarters of the data over the past year. This is the last of it. It’s slow because I can only send a little at a time so the NSA doesn’t notice. When I turn over the rest of it, the Brits will give us asylum and new identities. We’ll need it, believe me.”
“The Guardian’s already committed to running the story,” Paul said. “It’ll go global. Even with all our anti-piracy laws and web blocks and everything, it’ll get back here.”
Nora edged a bit closer to Luis. “I made them promise to wait until I got out with Paul and the kids. Once the story runs, the Bureau will know I leaked. If they can get to us, they’ll make us disappear like we never existed. But I guess they already know.”
Luis shook his head. “Why would anybody believe it? I remember the conspiracy crazies, blaming aliens and shit. Why aren’t you just another nut?”
“Because the crazies don’t have this.” She held up her slate. “This is just part of it. As far as I know, we have nearly all the case records. MI-5’s been comparing our documents to Bureau paper they’re gotten from other cases. The Guardian’s lined up a couple ex-agents to vet the material. It helps that the Bureau’s been stonewalling the FOI requests—I know, I’m one of the people doing it—so it already looks like they’re hiding something.” She hugged the slate again. “Nobody else has this kind of evidence. Only us.”
“So all that about Paul going in a camp—”
“Is true.” Paul circled into the living room. “That’s why we’re leaving now and not a couple months from now when she’s had time to move the rest of the data and do some more groundwork.” He wrapped an arm around Nora’s shoulders. “The story has to run by August so there’s enough time to affect the election.”
Luis had followed them up to now,
but this was one step too far. “The election? You seriously think this is gonna change who wins? I mean, it’s bad, yeah, but it’s ancient history.”
“Maybe not so ancient,” Nora said, her words suddenly wary. She and Paul exchanged a serious look that made Luis think she hadn’t told him the whole story.
Paul set his jaw. “The people involved in this…well, let’s just say they’re pretty senior in the Administration now. A lot of people don’t like the way things are, but they’ve given up on voting. This should give them a reason to vote again. Even if it doesn’t work, we have to try. Someone has to try. Everyone needs to know.”
“There’s a passage in the Qur’an I really like,” Nora said. “‘And mix not up truth with falsehood, nor hide the truth while you know.’ That kind of says it.”
Luis had gone into this work thinking like them—someone has to try, someone has to fight back. But not one damn thing changed. The utter futility had driven him out as much as that bullet had. He’d never had a weapon as big as this in his hands, though.
His survival instinct—the devil on his shoulder—asked, how much is it worth?
Dealing with the FBI himself would be the dumbest move ever. But he could give Nora to Ray in exchange for tearing up his debt. Get out from under in one shot, and let the Cartel figure out how to make money off her story.
He glanced at Nora. Her big, dark eyes searched his face. Gifting her to the Cartel meant that one way or another, she’d end up in the FBI’s hands, and then she’d be locked up forever or dead. This secret—this truth, if that’s what it was—would die with her. The people who built the lie, who’d been taking apart the America Luis had grown up in and loved and fought for, would keep winning and getting richer and wreck things even more.
Then again, maybe they would anyway.
If he helped Nora and he was caught, the FBI might do to him and Bel the same thing they did (according to Nora) to the Yemenis and the militia tontos.
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