The Wrong Man

95

I stood on the Lerner Street Bridge, part of the Pearl Harbor Day procession route that would lead three blocks north to the federal building. It was a clear day but not sunny. The sky was the color of ash, which I hoped was not foreboding.

It was eleven in the morning. Traffic was light over the bridge, and it would soon be non existent. The city would rope off the bridge for the marchers, who would begin at noon and probably hit the bridge about twenty, twenty-five minutes later.

I had my cell phone with me, and Lee and I had promised to stay in touch, but I wasn’t really needed anymore. The federal government didn’t need me to tell them how to stop truck bombs.

Lee, in fact, had told me to leave the downtown, but it felt odd to me to do so. Nobody else was evacuating. Why should I?

I wasn’t really sure what to do. I crossed the bridge that split the commercial district and walked north toward the federal building again. The barricades surrounding the building had been fortified, and the Army had been called in as well to defend the building. Lee had mentioned air protection, too-fighter jets, presumably. The good news, as Lee had noted, was that all this military presence would fit right in with a memorial honoring the fallen at Pearl Harbor.

Overhead, well beyond human sight, American satellites were shooting down, searching for suspicious vehicles, for three seventeen-foot You-Ride trucks.

I ambled north and then west and passed the state building, an ugly structure composed in large part of glass. It would be a great target for a truck bomb.

Then I completed my lap of the targets. I headed south. I wanted to be down by the Hartz Building at noon.

The Pearl Harbor Day marchers were gathered on South Walter Drive near the Hartz Building. Over seventy-five people had assembled, some veterans of World War II, some children or grandchildren of the fallen at Pearl Harbor. At the front and rear of the procession were Army tanks, which, again, seemed perfectly normal and symbolic in this context. Members of the military-Army, I thought, maybe Army Rangers like Tom Stoller-stood at attention in their combat fatigues, weapons aimed upward.

The politicians were absent. They’d been briefed and presumably thought better of serving as terrorist bait on this particular day. I knew this because I was part of the inner circle now. But nobody else did. The feds didn’t want this telegraphed in advance, because it might get back to the bombers and affect how they operated, and we didn’t want them to know that we knew. So as far as the general public knew, the mayor and governor and Senator Donsbrook were supposed to be here but for some reason weren’t. So the procession would now be led solely by a retired brigadier general who had been stationed in Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack.

It felt wrong that these other marchers weren’t told of what might be happening. I had to assume that the immediate area had been thoroughly searched, and there was sufficient fortification to stop a You-Ride truck long before it reached this group.

Still. The downtown was filled with people, people working in offices, people strolling the streets. It felt wrong. And I felt complicit.

I caught Lee Tucker’s eye, who gave me a nasty look, unhappy to see me here.

It was ten minutes until noon. There was no sign of a truck approaching, or Lee wouldn’t be standing still.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I didn’t recognize the caller. I looked at Lee and it wasn’t him, so it didn’t matter.

Five minutes to noon. Someone was herding the marchers into some semblance of order on Walter Drive. Lee Tucker was in full concentration, his index finger placed against his earpiece, but he wasn’t registering grave concern. Nothing yet.

And then it was noon.

Nothing exploded. No truck came barreling toward us. I looked at Lee, who returned a blank stare back.

The march began.