Countdown: Three Days

by Peter Cawdron

part 2 of 5

“I want to know,” snapped Cohen, surprised by the tone of his own voice as he screamed out, “of course I want to know.”

O’Malley stepped in, saying, “It’s not as straight forward as it seems. We can see into the future, but only in glimpses. We can’t see everything and we can’t determine what we see. We only see fragments, sometimes for a few minutes at a time over an area of a mile or two, sometimes just a single room at random for a split second frozen in time. It’s like a four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of future events.”

“In your case,” Davies added, “we’re working with less than a seven seconds window looping over.”

“So this... This will definitely happen?”

Davies shrugged. “We don’t know. We think we can change the future but so far every prediction has held true.”

Cohen was frantic. His eyes darted around as he spoke. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead.

“What do you mean you think you can change the future? Surely, either you can or you can’t.”

O’Malley took a deep breath, giving both Cohen and himself a moment to breathe before continuing.

“In theory, we use technology all the time to change the future.”

“How?” demanded Cohen.

“OK. Do you remember that twister that hit a small park just outside of Grosse Point in Chicago a few years ago?”

“Yeah,” said Cohen, remembering the news reel footage but not seeing the connection.

“Well, my brother-in-law was going to a company picnic at the park but, before leaving, he checked the radar map on the Internet and saw a summer storm brewing. You know, bands of yellow, orange and red showing the intensity of the growing storm cell on the radar. There were images of funnel clouds forming and the website noted the possibility of tornadoes being spawned so he decided not to go. He used technology to change the future, to change his future. Thirteen people died that day when the twister struck, but my brother-in-law wasn’t one of them, because he saw the future and what he saw allowed him to change his destiny.”

Cohen was shaking as he said, “But you said that so far every prediction has held true.”

O’Malley could see where this was heading. He tried desperately to calm Cohen, saying, “Yes, but it’s only because we see fragments of the future and not the whole thing. For us, it’s like trying to understand the plot of a movie when we’ve only seen a few scattered scenes. It’s just not enough.”

“I’m going to die,” said Cohen softly, looking down at his trembling hands in disbelief.

“We’re going to do everything we can to stop this from happening,” said O’Malley.

“What happens? How do I die?”

“Please, sit down,” replied O’Malley, picking the chair up off the floor.

Cohen slumped down on the stiff seat.

“It’s not pleasant,” O’Malley warned.

Cohen didn’t say anything. He just sat there.

“You were shot through the chest. The bullet missed your heart, but punctured your right lung. The wound bled out for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes before you died.”

“You’re speaking like it’s already happened,” replied Cohen with tears in his eyes.

“Listen,” said O’Malley. “I called you here because we’re not going to let that happen. We know how you die, but we don’t know who killed you or why or exactly when. We don’t have any footage of the actual event. We have our suspicions but really all we know is that it will happen at some point tonight.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”

Tonight. The word itself struck like a bullet. Cohen leaned forward on his knees, his head buried in his hands. He was trembling. It hadn’t occurred to him that all the discussions so far had been around the timing of his funeral, not his actual death. He’d assumed he had several more days to live. It never struck him that he’d be dead so soon. He was shattered to realise he’d die before the day was out. After a few seconds, he composed himself and started to speak. The words were difficult, choking in his throat as he struggled to talk.

“Why?” he asked, turning back toward O’Malley, tears running down his cheeks. “Why are you showing me this?”

“Because there’s something else we’ve seen,” replied O’Malley, “something we need you to be completely open and honest about. Something we think you can stop.”

Davies zoomed back in from ten thousand feet, zooming straight in on the cemetery and up close to the gravestone. Beneath the name, an inscription read, “Who died valiantly in service to his country.”

“Huh?” said Cohen.

“Show him,” said O’Malley.

Davies brought a new image up in front of them.

A tugboat sailed into New York harbour. A young man stood on the aging wooden deck. The Statue of Liberty stood proudly in the distance out across the sea. At first, Cohen didn’t recognise the man. He was clean-shaven with neatly cropped black hair and seemed vaguely familiar, but the camera angle was acute.

Davies jogged the image, skipping forward several minutes and swinging the image around. The UN building was in the foreground now as the tug docked at the Port Authority pier. The name of the ship, The Esperance, was painted on a wooden sign mounted beneath the window of the bridge.

Davies zoomed in again on the deckhand, saying, “Any moment now,” and Cohen watched as the young man turned his back to them and shouted something at the captain of the tugboat up on the bridge. Suddenly, without any warning, the hologram went white.

“Hold on,” said Davis. He scrolled rapidly backwards with the control ball.

As the image zoomed back, moving out to a wide-angle view of lower Manhattan, the reason for the flash became clear. A ball of fire mushroomed up into the air, towering above the buildings. A wall of flame ripped out through the skyscrapers, a blast-wave swelling out around the explosion, reverberating across the city. Clouds of dust billowed through the air as buildings crumbled and fell.

The pressure wave vaporised the surface of the river, sending a wall of steam out across toward Jersey City in the West. As the mushroom cloud billowed up into the sky, the extent of the blast became clear. Within seconds, New York City had been reduced to a pile of smouldering rubble. A thin, glowing mushroom cloud stood towering over the decimated ruins, reaching up into the stratosphere.

Cohen was silent.

“Scroll forward a couple of days,” said O’Malley.

The hologram flickered. As far as the horizon, there was nothing but the decimated, shattered remains of skyscrapers. A dark haze hung over the city. The jagged edges of hundreds of broken buildings reached up toward the clouds for miles, rising up out of the smouldering ruins.

“We estimate the detonation at around three-quarters of a megaton,” O’Malley said coldly. “From what we’ve observed from newspaper reports the death toll is just under seven million, although that’s expected to be revised downward once displaced persons are accounted for.”

“Who?” asked Cohen, unable to say more than a single word.

“White Jihad. An Islamic extremist group based out of Kazakhstan.”

“When?”

O’Malley looked at his watch and said, “In nineteen hours and fourteen minutes. At roughly ten thirty tomorrow morning.”

Cohen was shocked.

“Can’t you just find the Esperance?” he asked.

“ The Esperance has been in dry dock in Baltimore for over a year, undergoing a complete hull refit. She won’t be seaworthy for another six months. This one’s a fake. Same name, same registration details, but a different boat. The name’s a false positive, a dead end.”

“So what has this got to do with me?” asked Cohen.

“The man on the barge,” O’Malley replied. “Do you know him?”

Cohen wanted to say no, and he almost did in spite of himself, but there was something about the man. Davies focused on a close-up view of the terrorist and Cohen felt his blood run cold.

“Ah, he’s...”

He choked on the words. His throat felt dry. He couldn’t believe it.

“This sounds crazy,” he continued. “It sounds absurd, but he’s John Mathers, the coach of my daughter’s soccer team.”

“We know.”

“But how? Why?” asked Cohen, confused by the connection.

“You tell us,” replied O’Malley coldly.

Cohen’s mind was racing at what seemed like a million miles an hour as he struggled to take in the reality of what he’d just seen. A variety of possibilities flashed across his mind. Years of analytical training took over as he forced himself to think coldly and unemotionally about the implications of what he’d just witnessed. He pushed his mind to find the connection. As much as he hated to admit it, the link to Mathers had to be both intentional and personal. It wasn’t a coincidence. Cohen didn’t like where this was going.

“This is crazy,” he said. “How do you even know this is real? How do you know this will actually happen? What if this is just some kind of optical illusion, some kind of distortion of possible future events?”

“Up until this event, Mathers was clean,” said O’Malley. “No police record. No unusual affiliations. No radical tendencies. But then, four days ago, he and his wife had simply dropped off the net. Just disappeared. He didn’t show up for work. She stood up a physio appointment. Neither of them have used any credit cards or accessed an ATM. They haven’t contacted any friends or relatives. We’ve got wire-taps in place along with covert surveillance, but they’re gone. The trail is cold.”

Cohen swallowed hard.

“What do you know about him?” asked O’Malley.

“How much does anyone know about a soccer coach? He seemed like a nice guy. He was good with the kids, friendly, loved the game. I just don’t get it. What do you know about his background?”

“His parents immigrated from Afghanistan before he was born,” said O’Malley, flicking through a file. “Although they’re devout Muslims, he never showed any thing other than a passing interest in religion as a teenager. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Iowa, but dropped out in his second year and moved back to D.C. For the last three years he worked as a store manager for Radio Shack. He occasionally attends a moderate mosque in Georgetown. Married Korma Dareen, an immigrant from Saudi Arabia.”

“What do you know about her,” asked Cohen, cutting O’Malley off. His eyes were blinking rapidly as his mind raced ahead, following a train of thought.

“Not a lot, I’m afraid,” said O’Malley, handing him a series of photographs from out of the file.

Cohen flicked through the photos quickly, barely glancing at them. It always surprised him just how much visual history the NSA could drag up on someone. There were photos from high school year books, photos from the local newspaper coverage of a minor league baseball game dating back a couple of years, photos from various driver’s licence renewals, wedding photos and even the odd personal photo downloaded from the Internet.

After working through the small stack he shuffled the thirty or so photographs between his hands a second time, looking a little more closely at both Mathers and his wife as he said, “There’s definitely a connection here.”

O’Malley just listened.

“Look at this. The older photos, when she’s in college. Look, she’s wearing a traditional Muslim headscarf. But once Mathers appears on the scene, the scarf is gone. And look at how dominant she is: in this shot in the park, she’s the one pulling him along. And this photo in the bowling alley, he’s sulking on the bench while she’s the life of the party.”

“So?”

“So... Muslim men are traditionally protective of their wives. They shelter them. They see themselves as shielding them from prying, adulterous eyes. But look at her. She’s wearing long skirts before they get together and jeans in these later photos. She’s wearing loose, baggy tops before they marry but now she’s wearing tight t-shirts that reveal her figure.”

“Don’t you think you’re reading too much into it?” asked O’Malley.

“If he ends up as the state manager for Radio Shack, yes. But he doesn’t. Mathers makes Timothy McVeigh and Mohammed Atta look like preschool teachers. Mathers ends up as the worst mass murderer in history of the United States and there has to be a reason why. The whole thing has to be a cover: the marriage, the coaching, even the job.”

Cohen paused, gathering his thoughts. He held his hand up, making a gesture for quiet as his thinking crystallised. “I think I know what this is.”

To be continued...

to Challenge 329...