The Rule of Nine

SEVENTEEN

Josh Root sat at the committee rostrum, gavel at hand, completely oblivious to the noise and commotion going on around him. This afternoon his mind was on other things. The Old Weatherman had struck again. This morning Root had gotten up and found it on his personal computer at home, another e-mail in the middle of the night, like a bomb blast.

But this time the fear that had been so palpable in Root following the first two communications was replaced by anger. The Old Weatherman was demanding an additional two million dollars, and he was giving Root only two days to come up with it.

The prick must have thought he was made of money. The thought of it produced bile in his throat. He coughed a few times and covered his mouth with the back of his hand. He took out a handkerchief and wiped a bit of phlegm from his lip.

“Are you all right, Senator?” One of his aides was hovering over his shoulder.

Root took a sip of water from the glass in front of him. He cleared his throat. “I’m fine. We’ll get started in a minute.”

“Sure. Can I get you anything?”

“Nothing.”

The kid sat down again.

Root was beginning to suspect that someone at the Swiss bank had talked. How else could anyone know that he had that kind of ready cash on hand? Two million dollars. People with that kind of money usually had it tied up in investments. It could take anywhere from a few days to a week to sell stocks and reduce them to cash. But the Old Weatherman seemed to know that it was just sitting there, waiting to be wired from one Swiss bank to another. For the moment, how he knew wasn’t the problem. Getting rid of him was. And by now it was clear that buying him off wasn’t an option. Knowing the man as he did, Root knew that this would only serve as an invitation for him to come back for more.

The trick was to find him. The key was the Old Weatherman’s e-mail account. Somewhere there had to be a record with an address, some point of physical contact. Ordinarily Root would turn this over to one of his staff members and within a short period they would have an answer for him. But this time Root couldn’t do that. He would have to do it himself, in the same way that he would have to deal with the Old Weatherman.

He looked up at the clock on the wall at the far end of the room, picked up the gavel, and slapped it hard, twice. “The committee will come to order.” He cleared his throat again, took another quick drink of water, and slapped the gavel once more. “The committee will come to order.”

The voices in the room began to quiet. “We’re going to pick up where we left off this morning.” Root looked down at his schedule of witnesses. “Next witness is Joselyn Cole. Is Ms. Cole here?”

A man was sitting at the witness table. “Are you here on behalf of Ms. Cole?”

“No, sir.”

The next thing Root knew there was a hand on his shoulder from behind and lips in his ear. “Senator, I think you’re looking at the wrong schedule.” One of his staffers was pushing a piece of paper in front of him. “You’re looking at Tuesday’s schedule.”

“Ah, sorry,” said Root. “My mistake. Seems I’m getting ahead of myself.” He laughed. A few in the audience laughed with him. But to Root his was a nervous laugh, a small measure of the forces now coming to bear on him. The Old Weatherman’s e-mailed threats, Root’s diminishing physical and mental condition, and all the other pressures and demands were now descending on him.

Ever since the destruction of the World Trade Center, the authorities had tried to erect a series of impermeable security barriers around the entire southern tip of Manhattan. Probably nowhere on earth was there a piece of hallowed ground more protected than this. Thorn was certain that if the local police and the federal authorities could shrink-wrap the whole area in Kevlar, they would.

This evening he stood on the pedestrian overpass and surveyed the work spread out below through a small rip in the blue plastic tarp. The overhead pedestrian walkway was bounded on both sides by chain-link fencing, which in turn was wrapped in plastic tarp material to keep prying eyes from seeing what was happening down below.

Where the twin towers once stood there now existed only a cavernous concrete hole three or four stories deep, housing communications equipment, generators, and the other machinery necessary to run the subway sixty feet down, below the streets. For nearly a decade arguments raged over whether the twin towers should be rebuilt in some manner, or if the site should be transformed into a park or a memorial for those who died on 9/11. In the vacuum of leadership that marked the new century, the concrete cavern remained as a symbol of American indecision.

It was nearing five in the evening, and the stream of human traffic scurrying across the overpass was beginning to resemble some of the rapids on the Colorado, people running to catch the subway down below or one of the buses on Broadway.

Thorn waded into the stream and through the escalating rush-hour crush of people to the other side. At one point he had to grab the chain link to keep from being washed along with the masses. He found a short section of the fence where the walkway widened for just a few feet. He settled in and staked out this little nook as if he owned it.

The plastic tarp blocking his view cracked in the stiff breeze off the Hudson. He looked around to make sure there were no cops on the walkway. Then, using two fingers, he reached up and ripped the tattered tarp just a few inches so that he could claim a clear view out.

He wasn’t interested in the site of the World Trade Center. Instead his attention was drawn to an area a few blocks to the south and east of where he was now standing. It was the intersection of Fulton and Broadway, almost dead center in the middle of the Financial District. Wall Street was only a stone’s throw away.

The Cold War may have been over, but the Russians and Americans were still locked in a death spiral of ever more lethal weapons. When the United States introduced its largest thermobaric device on record, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), and nicknamed it “the Mother of All Bombs,” the Russians responded with the largest vacuum bomb ever constructed. Dubbing it “the Father of All Bombs,” it was used to level an entire block of multi-story steel-reinforced concrete buildings. In testing it, they set off the largest man-made nonnuclear blast in history.

Now that the Russian cargo plane had been forced down in Thailand, Thorn had to assume that the American government was well aware of the type and size of the device on board. While he hadn’t planned it, the downing of the Russian plane played right into his hands. Like a big, flashing neon sign.

The feds would be racking their brains looking for high-risk targets. Thorn was already well ahead of them. The solid fuel-air device was much more effective in an oxygen-controlled environment. If you could introduce the device inside, solid concrete walls would serve only to magnify and focus the blast. The stronger the walls, the higher the pressure wave, the farther it would travel. Of course, American military ordnance experts would know all of this. They would be advising the FBI and other law enforcement agencies accordingly.

Identifying prime targets wouldn’t be too difficult. The problem was there were too many of them. The authorities couldn’t possibly cover them all. Adding to their problems, Thorn was already engaged in devilish games of misdirection, forcing them to look in one place while he was in another.

He wondered if anyone had ever considered what the blast from a large thermobaric weapon might do to the hardened concrete structure surrounding the reactor of a nuclear power plant. Particularly if the device were delivered from the air in the form of a bunker-busting bomb.

That reminded Thorn. He was going to have to make a call for more cash. His estimates of the cost to buy the airplane were too low. You would think that with the dismal state of the airline industry and the number of commercial jets now littering boneyards all over the desert, there would be a fire sale. But it wasn’t the case. He had gone online and checked prices.

The banks that held the mortgages on these planes were now sitting on piles of taxpayer cash. Having been bailed out, they were demanding top dollar for their securitized loan assets, in this case airplanes for which they had vastly overpaid during the boom-boom times before the crash. The politicians and the central banks had stepped in it big time, up to their hips. And why not? They knew that if the banks went under, there wasn’t enough money in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to cover even a small fraction of the claims filed by depositors. So they ran the presses, printed more cash, and deferred the inevitable to a future date when some other new regime could be left holding the bag. To Thorn it was a rat’s nest of political and financial corruption, with a new generation of liars at every turn. At least for the moment, acquiring more money didn’t seem to be a problem for his employers. What the devil could do if he had cash.

Even if the feds were able to track each of his moves, as long as he could stay ahead of them, Thorn knew they would have their hands full trying to guess what was coming next.

He trained his eye through the hole in the tarp toward the Fulton Street project. He could see the boom of a high-rise crane moving slowly, like the neck of some gentle giraffe, over the site. It was the answer to Thorn’s dreams, nearly half a billion dollars in federal stimulus money for a single piece of construction. It was the once abandoned Fulton Street Transit Center. Total cost, 1.4 billion dollars for a transportation palace, complete with a crystal dome that would have shamed the Wizard of Oz.

Scheduled completion was four years off, but Thorn didn’t care. All that mattered was that they had broken ground. The giant excavators had already ripped a two-hundred-foot wound in the earth directly above one of the busiest subway hubs in New York. According to the project schedule, the hole would be open for at least four months while they worked on foundations. This gave Thorn plenty of time. With the city providing the open aperture above the subway, the method of delivery became simple-gravity. The only question was how? And Thorn already knew the answer to that one.