Authors: Alan Zendell
The name “Gayle Burdak” on the wall outside her hospital room reminded me of the first time I saw it on her office door. I’d noted the spelling and expected her to be a foreigner with an accent. It turned out that the name was Turkish, but she’d gotten it from Rod.
She was working on her laptop when I entered her room. Whatever they’d given her had obviously worn off. If I knew Gayle, she’d refused to take any more.
She was scowling when I walked in, but her face lit up when she saw me. Gayle was attractive, if you’re not intimidated by toughness and strength in a woman, the classic Hollywood image of an ambitious business woman: five-four, dark-haired, nicely put together. A trifle plump around the hips, but that only made her seem more formidable. She was very different from Ilene, who was a petite blonde and still, in my eyes, as beautiful as the day we met.
Jim had been right about Gayle and me being close, but I wasn’t prepared for her reaction. She pushed her computer aside and held out her arms. Nice, but not at all typical of the Gayle I knew.
I put down the folders I’d brought and sat on the edge of her bed, feeling uncomfortable as I reached for her. The hug we shared was warm, more than warm on her part. She held on longer than I expected, and when I pulled back, her hand slid down my arm to grip mine. Her eyes were wet as she squeezed it.
It wasn’t that I minded the way she held my hand and looked into my eyes with puppy-dog neediness. It simply wasn’t Gayle, and I didn’t know how to respond.
“You’re shook by all this,” I said, describing my own feelings as well.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Only to someone who knows you as well as I do and bothers to notice.”
She almost cracked a smile, which I took as a cue to get down to business. I handed her one of the folders. “This ought to cover you till next week. Your team’s waiting to get started – unless you have a problem with it,” I said, trying to straddle the line between filling in for her and usurping her role. “I’m going to hit the cafeteria. Can I bring you anything?”
“Not unless they serve something a lot stronger than coffee.”
It would be good for her to immerse herself in the proposal, the way writing it had been for me. I contrived to be gone at least a half hour searching for comfort food, something with a lot of chocolate in it. I’d almost reached the cafeteria when I was stopped by a security guard.
“Sorry, it’s closed.”
I looked at my watch. “At 1:20?”
He looked uncertain, then said, “Police lockdown. Someone attacked a surgeon while he was eating lunch. Real mess, I hear.”
The veneer of calm I’d been hiding behind burst like a soap bubble. I’d awakened to a terrifying set of circumstances, and in barely more than a morning encountered three situations in which someone’s reality had been shattered in a single violent moment. I’d just about reached my limit.
“…attacker was a woman,” the guard was saying. ”Her husband died in his OR.”
I stopped listening. With a terrible roaring in my head, I turned and headed for the gift shop. I felt nauseous, dizzy. Everything was spinning, and then I was doubled over on the floor mumbling.
Just a few more hours and Ilene’ll be home
.
A hand grabbed my elbow and I looked up into the concerned eyes of a fifty-ish nurse. Had I said that aloud? My nausea was replaced by embarrassment. Was I a child who needed his mother?
The nurse wanted a doctor to look at me, but I shook off her concern. “I’m fine, really. I was distracted, walking without looking ahead of me. I tripped.”
She watched skeptically as I got to my feet, careful to avoid touching the wall for her benefit, like someone walking a straight line for a traffic cop. She wasn’t convinced, but there wasn’t a lot she could do.
Breathing deeply to calm myself, I made it to the gift shop and back with no further incidents. When I returned to Gayle’s room, she was scribbling on my revised project plan. I felt a sudden flash of resentment.
Just like her. Nothing’s ever good enough…
I caught myself.
This is good, Dylan, you’re overwrought.
It was the real Gayle emerging, the one who needed to put her personal stamp on everything she was involved in. She looked up, no trace of the helpless puppy in her sharp eyes.
“Done in a minute, Dylan.”
She wrote another line and frowned theatrically when she saw what I was holding. “Trying to make me fat?” she chastised, as she tore open the gold wrapper and bit into a mocha truffle with the question mark still on her lips. She savored the taste, took another bite, and smiled rapturously.
“What would I do without you, Dylan?”
I reached for the folders, again discomfited by the unexpected intimacy of her words. “If you’re done with these, I’ll run them back to the office so your staff can get started.” I bent over to plant a brotherly kiss on her forehead, trying not to notice the way the hospital gown exposed her thigh above her cast. “When are they letting you out of here?”
“They’re keeping me till tomorrow because of the surgery. I’ll be setting off metal detectors from now on.”
The idea of going home soon didn’t seem to make her happy, but I couldn’t tell whether it was because of her ankle or being sent home to Rod. This wasn’t the time to pursue it. I settled for, “Call if you need me.”
I was about to leave when my cell phone rang. It was Ilene, sounding exasperated, like she always did when she had to call my cell because I wasn’t sitting at my desk.
“Where are you?”
“Did you book a flight?” I said, ignoring her pique.
“I’m landing at Newark at 8:20. Can you pick me up?”
“You bet. I’m glad you’re coming home tonight.”
Mollified, she tried again. “How come you’re not in the office?”
“Gayle broke her ankle yesterday. I’m at Sinai going over a proposal with her.”
Then she insisted on talking to Gayle, who completed the transition from neediness to business to the back-fence gossip that was typical of the way she and Ilene interacted.
After a minute I cleared my throat. “Can I have my phone back?”
Gayle called Ilene on her own phone and I took off, quickly losing myself in my thoughts. Gayle’s injury, the hit-and-run, the attack on the doctor…any one of them might have occurred at any time, but all of them right after I’d lost an entire day? It was too bizarre.
***
A taxi ride in Manhattan can be like clinging to a ledge with your fingertips in an earthquake. The wild antics of the mad Pakistani at the wheel pushed me over the edge, and a serious attack of nerves transported me to a different place.
I’m eleven, in Coney Island, strapped to a slab of wood with another supporting my back, being hauled up into the air. I want to scream, “Stop! Let me off this thing!” but they’ll laugh at me and everyone in school will know I wet my pants on the stupid Parachute Jump. Higher and higher I’m lifted, growing more petrified every moment, as my bloodless hands grip the edges of my seat. Two hundred fifty feet above the beach, my parachute bangs into its housing and I’m in free fall. Then, a moment of sheer panic when my right brain realizes the parachute has huge rents in it, a second before my left brain observes that we are not accelerating groundward at thirty-two feet per second squared. It’s all a sham. The damn thing’s just a glorified elevator. My knuckles hurt.
Releasing the armrest I’d been clutching, I seized on the idea that I might be the victim of some conspiratorial prank, but pulling such a thing off would have required an enormous effort that included Ilene’s complicity. Even if I believed her capable of that, how could everything else have been set up so neatly? No, losing Wednesday wasn’t a trick arranged for my benefit.
I’d have accepted any explanation, no matter how unlikely. Not having one was too terrifying. I might as well assume divine retribution for past transgressions.
How ironic would it be, after years of agnosticism, to discover that there really was an omnipotent being with nothing better to do than avenge individual grievances? Did HE, like the Greek gods, toy with mortals HE didn’t like, torturing them just for the hell of it? I’d always considered the Old Testament God a hateful being WHO reveled in acting out HIS terrible wrath. Horrifying as it was to imagine being the target of such a deity, the idea calmed me.
Helplessness breeds passivity.
I got back to the office around 3:00, feeling like I was losing my mind, wanting only to hunker down for the rest of the day. Jim was at his desk, looking a lot more relaxed than when I arrived that morning. He waved me in, obviously in the mood to shoot the breeze. Maybe some meaningless banter would do me good.
After a brief how’s-Gayle-doing exchange, Jim wanted to talk about Roger. “Awful, isn’t it? Charlie Kim from Security was there when the ambulance took him away with lights and siren going. He said the EMTs looked grim.”
I mumbled something, and Jim realized I wasn’t reacting well to that subject, so he switched gears.
“Hey, I almost forgot. Nice goin’ on CyTech. You really nailed it.”
I did? CyTech was a stock I’d been charting for months on a hunch, waiting for it to break out. Not the smartest way to invest, but…I’d talked to Jim about it on Tuesday, telling him I was primed to jump in Wednesday morning. The fact that I hadn’t thought of CyTech at all said a lot about the kind of day it had been.
“I’ve been too busy to look,” I hedged. “What did it do?”
“It’s a good thing you’re sitting down. If you bought it yesterday, when you said you were going to, you were up nineteen percent this morning.”
I remembered deciding on Tuesday that Wednesday would be the day to buy, but Wednesday was a complete blank. I must have had a strange look on my face, because Jim looked concerned.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a rough day. I’m beat. I need to get out of here and check my mail.”
Damn right I did. I also wanted to get online and check my brokerage account. I had to keep from running back to my office. It wasn’t only the prospect of having made nineteen percent in one day. I needed to see whether CyTech had shown up in my account yesterday. My fingers trembled as I logged on and requested Wednesday’s transactions. The screen flashed: “No Data Found.”
The instant profit I didn’t make aside, I was momentarily relieved. I don’t know what I’d have done if CyTech had been there, but at another level I was pissed. Everything that had happened today felt strangely remote, but CyTech was personal. Losing Wednesday had cost me almost two thousand dollars.
I went back to plan A and hid out in my office with the door closed for the rest of the afternoon. I’d stay in my sanctuary until I had to leave to catch the 7:30 train to New Jersey and wait to have dinner with Ilene. With the Romanelli project under control, I didn’t have anything to do that was pressing enough to penetrate the protective shell I’d crawled into, so I brought Wednesday’s hourly price chart for CyTech up on my computer and imagined watching in real time as it experienced an uncharacteristic flutter of instability and a sudden spike in trading volume at 10:13. My fingers would have been itching to place a buy order.
Buying a stock on a hunch makes as much sense as betting on a horse because its name contains the same letters as your oldest child’s, but it was my private vice, rolling the dice and daring the universe to screw me. I’d spent dozens of hours over several weeks tracking CyTech’s crash and gradual recovery, scrupulously avoiding the opinions of talking heads and Wall Street analysts, convincing myself that it was about to blow.
I pinpointed 10:46 as the moment at which I would have made the plunge, less than an hour before the news of a huge contract hit the wires. I imagined the elation I’d have felt watching the price soar, rising for two hours before it leveled off. If I’d sold it at its peak I’d have profited by more than a quarter. I printed the chart and put it in my pocket.
It wasn’t the money. It was the joy of winning I craved, like hitting a walk-off home run against an all-star closer. I’d have pumped my fist in the air as if I were rounding third ready to leap into the arms of my teammates. That was what HIS BENEFICENCE screwed me out of when HE stole my Wednesday.
YOU might have cost me the money, but nothing can change the fact that I was right. I’d have won if YOU hadn’t cheated.
I don’t know how long I was caught up in my diatribe with the Unknowable. The next thing I was aware of was my cell and office phones ringing simultaneously. When I saw the number on my cell a chill went through me. The other caller was Ilene. I answered it quickly.
“Let me put you on hold for a sec, Hon.”
I took a deep breath, then answered my cell phone. “This is Dylan.”
“Call me back on a secure line,” a voice said. “Make it quick.”
The line clicked off, leaving me aghast, my fingers trembling on my desktop, my nervous system resonating like a struck tuning fork. I needed a few seconds to compose myself before hitting the hold button for Ilene.
“I just boarded my flight,” she said, sounding put out about being kept waiting. “We’re about to pull away from the gate. I should be in Newark in two hours.”
“I’ll be there. Can’t wait to see you.”
“Sorry, they’re making me turn my phone off. See you soon.”
Bolstered by the knowledge that Ilene was on her way home, I closed my office door, unlocked my file cabinet, and opened the bottom drawer. In the back was a dingy-looking six by three by two-inch metal box with no visible markings. Its drab green enamel coating was chipped with streaks of rust showing through. Anyone who casually noticed it would probably avoid touching it. That was the idea.
I located a nondescript key, dull gray like the pennies used to conserve copper in WW-II, whose only notable feature was that it fit the lock on the ugly metal container. Inside was an electronic black box with a female phone connector built into one end and a standard phone jack on a twelve-inch cord extending from the other. I re-routed my phone line through the black box, then dialed the call-back number I’d committed to memory years ago, wondering why this was happening today of all days.
Four rings, a series of clicks, a beep-beep-beep, and a recorded phone company message telling me the number I’d reached was not in service were followed by thirty seconds of dead air, and a final loud click.
“What the hell took you so long?”
I hadn’t heard that voice since the flurry of intelligence activity following nine-eleven, when everyone available had been mobilized, but even through the distortion of a secure line, I couldn’t have mistaken it. “Don’t give me any shit, Wolfie, or I’ll hang up.”
“No, you won’t.” His voice was like ice, firm with the certainty that I wouldn’t. “And don’t call me that.”
Wolfgang Franckel had worked hard to shed his former persona as a German Intelligence operative. He’d taken diction lessons to lose his accent and changed his name to William Franklin, but wouldn’t let anyone call him Bill, either. As American as apple pie, now, William was an investment banker in his day job.
“You’re right, I should know better. It’s been a very bad day, and something tells me you’re about to make it a lot worse.”
“Don’t take it personally, but I’d hoped never to hear your voice again either, Dylan.” I didn’t. William wasn’t a bad guy, if you didn’t mind a highly disciplined military type who acted like he had a wooden stake perpetually up his ass. We both knew we were only having this conversation because there was no alternative.
“I’m hurt, William. What’s the emergency?”
“We’re not sure, but there’s enough chatter on the wires, we decided to bring you in for a consult. How about a short cruise on the river Saturday about noon? Good. See you at the Battery Park Marina.”
The scenario wasn’t new: terrorists trying to smuggle radioactive materials to build dirty bombs into strategic places like Los Angeles and New York. The Agency must have something solid to involve me.
Though its implications were far more frightening than my personal problems, William’s call was something I knew how to deal with. Like everyone in his covert operation, I hoped I’d never be needed, but for the moment, his call created an adrenaline rush that canceled the anxious depression I’d been sinking into all day. I left my office energized, eager to see Ilene. My hyper-alert mood might not last, but it would get me as far as the airport.
I decided to walk to the Thirty-third Street station. Even after nine-eleven, Manhattan and the solidity represented by its mountainous buildings always had a therapeutic effect on me. My chest swelled with pride as I strode through those magnificent canyons. My blood ran hot with the protective zeal that had been ignited by William’s call, as I thought back to how my involvement with the Agency began.
My first job had been as a Radiation Safety Officer for the fledgling Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Vietnam draft had ended in ’73, but by 1980, there was talk of re-instituting selective service registration. Fresh out of school with a Masters in nuclear physics, I wanted a job that would keep me out of the army.
Except for the panic over Three Mile Island, the work was pretty dull. When the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks turned serious about international inspections, I got myself into the planning group, where I attracted the attention of the Agency. One day, I attended a top secret briefing.
The subject was radiological weapons, dirty bombs in the common vernacular. In the late eighties, the United States’ chief ally in the Arab world, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was trying to build dirty bombs for use in its war against Iran. People in the know whispered that the U.S. and Germany were supplying Hussein with the necessary radioactive materials and encouraging their use in the war. Ironically, my effort to avoid a draft that never materialized was what got me conscripted into the shadowy work of Intelligence.
Talk about irony. My cover had been so deep, I hadn’t heard from William since a few months after nine-eleven, and he picked today to call. I wondered fleetingly if that might be more than coincidence, but I couldn’t see how, and after feeling terrified all day, I wasn’t about to negate my improved mood worrying about it. At that moment, merely granting the possibility that everything I’d experienced since waking up and discovering it was Thursday was somehow connected would have left me catatonic.
The feel of the city, solid, familiar, and predictable was exactly what I needed, something I only fully realized on the train, speeding under the Hudson River. I’d ridden that train a thousand times, confident that it would exit the tunnel in New Jersey, but nothing would have surprised me that afternoon. I breathed a sigh of relief when we pulled into the Journal Square station and my car was still where I’d left it that morning.
The secure cell phone lot at the airport where people waited for arriving passengers was my undoing. At the best of times, I hated being corralled in my car armed only with my phone, and Thursday-cum-Wednesday was hardly the best of times.
Ilene knew about William in the vague way spouses of people involved in spook work have always known, but my conversation with him wasn’t something I could share with her, so I pushed it to the back of my mind. With nothing else to distract me, my thoughts returned to losing Wednesday. All day, I’d been denying that it might be a delusion; now, the terror that had been stalking me flooded back. Maybe I had a brain tumor. For all I knew, a mini-stroke had wiped a day from my memory. God only knew what else it might be. The lack of overt physical symptoms had made it far too easy to ignore those possibilities, but I had to face them. Ilene wouldn’t let me get away with ignoring them.
I’ll call Doctor Feldstein in the morning
, I promised myself
.
I’d have a thorough neurological workup, a CT scan and an MRI. Even Ilene couldn’t say I was in denial.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when the phone rang.
“Hi, Dear, meet me in front of the United terminal?”
“Okay,” I croaked, “be right there,” ending the call before Ilene could react. I had two minutes to get myself together. I didn’t want to greet her with the frightened puppy dog look I’d seen in Gayle’s eyes that morning.
Focus on Ilene. She’s home. Everything’s going to be fine.
She was just coming out of the terminal, looking sharp as ever in tailored slacks and a silk top when I pulled up. For once, the maze of vehicles cutting each other off as drivers spotted their quarries worked in my favor. One quick kiss as she climbed in and tossed her carry-on in back, and I gave all my attention to driving, avoiding her gaze. It wasn’t a bad act, but this was Ilene.
“What’s up, Dylan? I knew something wasn’t right on the phone this morning. You look like a wreck.”
I grimaced at her, feigning hurt feelings, then turned back to extricating us from the traffic. “That bad?” I tried to sound like I was joking. I knew she wasn’t buying it, but she apparently decided to wait for a quieter moment.
“Let’s stop at Pho Nam. I’m starving,” she said.
We drove in silence until we were out of the congestion. “How was Chicago?”
“How would I know? We had dinner near the airport and worked in a hotel meeting room. I was barely even outdoors, which was fine because it was hot and muggy.”
“How’d the negotiations go? You get everything you wanted?” A law firm had hired Ilene as a consulting biochemist in a drug patent infringement case.
“It couldn’t have turned out better. Both sides left satisfied.” She probably knew I was trying to divert her, but she was excited about her success and wanted to talk about it, which she did for the remainder of the drive to the restaurant. Once inside, we put off the main event as long as possible, ordering wine for her and tea for me, reading the menu, and placing our dinner orders. Then it was just the two of us in a quiet corner at nine o’clock on a Thursday evening.