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CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

October 6
th
2003 started out as typical as any day. Lovelle was meeting with an account inside McCarran Airport when all hell broke loose. Some distance down a corridor there was an explosion. He could feel it almost as well as he could hear it. Immediately his police training kicked in. While scores of people rushed in the opposite direction, Lovelle pushed his way through to try and find someone to help.

At the end of the terminal, where a cluster of gates were situated in a circle, Lovelle found the source of the explosion. At first, what he saw were slot machines and rows of chairs mangled and strewn everywhere. Then, among the twisted metal, he saw a dismembered arm. As he looked further, he could see more body parts near the crater in the floor. Then further out he could see whole victims, some apparently dead, and others clearly alive and suffering. He spotted a young boy and ran to his aid.

The boy was trapped under a twisted video poker machine. Lovelle took his hand. The boy looked up into his eyes, struggling to focus. “Help my mom!” and turned his head and eyes to direct Lovelle’s attention to a woman slumped lifelessly over an overturned bench. From where he lay, the boy could see most of his mother’s body, but, not her head. Lovelle raised up a little so that he could see more of her and his already sunken heart fell even further. The lady’s head was smashed and bleeding terribly. Lovelle didn’t think there was any chance that she was still alive.

He crouched back down to the boy and lied to him. “I’ll get to her next, but, let me get you out of here first.”

The boy’s eyes dropped for a moment then he said resignedly, “Okay.”

Lovelle assessed the situation and decided he could safely remove the machine. It would probably be quite painful, but, other than minor abrasions, the child was not bleeding, at least not externally. Lovelle was not really qualified to render much in the way of medical care, but, he expected paramedics to arrive shortly. They would be able to more quickly help the boy if he were accessible. “What’s your name?” he asked the boy.

“Jack.” Came the feeble answer.

“How old are you Jack?”

“Nine.”

“Okay Jack. I’m gonna try to get this machine off of you. It’s probably gonna hurt while I move it. You just let me know if it hurts too much and we’ll try something else. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The machine weighed less than Lovelle expected. He was able to pretty much lift it straight off of Jack without having to lever or roll it off. By the time the boy let out a little squeal, the machine was up and off. As Lovelle knelt back down to hold Jack’s hand he heard the sirens. He told the boy that someone else would be around to take him to the hospital.

“Help my mom now.” Jack ordered. Lovelle nodded and left the boy.

He checked the woman and she was, in fact, dead. He knew Jack could see him, so he carefully rolled the woman’s body so that it rested on the ground on the other side of the bench. He paused for a minute by her side as he looked around to see what else he might be able to do. Before he could decide to move the first paramedics rushed onto the scene. He saw them pause to take in the scene and he stood.

“Over here!” he shouted, pointing to Jack. The medic rushed over and Lovelle briefed him on the situation.

*****

For the next two hours Lovelle assisted the first responders. He lent his muscle to helping find and rescue survivors, as fruitless as that process turned out to be. Then, as he and another pair of good Samaritans were searching the crater, they were evacuated themselves.

“We need to clear this area. This whole place is hot.” A fire fighter informed them.

One of the men said, “What the hell does that mean?”

Lovelle knew exactly what it meant. Someone had just figured out that they were working in a radioactive hot zone. A sense of urgency bordering on panic overtook him. He hadn’t felt this way at any time that he could remember. He had been in danger before, both real and perceived. But, he had never felt any great concern for his life. Not that he hadn’t felt fear, or had harbored any sort of death wish. He just never cared like he did now. Later he would come to understand that this was the flip side of love. He had finally come to relish his life as it was instead of chasing after the life he had lost. He finally had something to be afraid to lose.

A series of explosions had gone off in various places around the country. New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas had all been hit within minutes of one another. By the time Lovelle heard that news, the body count was already in the hundreds, with the expectation that it would rise dramatically over the hours ahead.

Lovelle felt sick to his stomach. His dread of radioactive exposure was replaced by regret. He realized now that he had only delayed the inevitable by a couple of years. Just as he had feared, the terrorists had only been inconvenienced. They had been forced to take a different route to their mass destruction, but for them it had been only a minor setback. After all, what were a few suicide bombers and a little bit of time to the Islamic extremists. They had patience that Westerners couldn’t fathom. Long term goals were measured in decades, not years. And barely more than two years after being foiled in their hijack plot, they had again hit the World Trade Center. This time they had bombed the subway station that ran under the towers. At the same time, they had successfully bombed one other subway station and five airports. And it seemed entirely possible that the death toll would rival the 9/11 attacks.

In short order it became obvious that things were easily that bad. Reports were coming in that all of the explosives were dirty bombs, conventional explosives packed with radioactive waste. If true, the casualties would continue to mount for some time as both survivors and rescuers like himself, found themselves affected by radiation exposure.

At about the same time as Lovelle was learning about the dirty bombs, Trina was hearing the same thing. He had called her when the paramedics had arrived and told her that he was pitching in. Now she called him, her voice revealing her own panic. “You need to get out of there!”

“I’m outside of the containment already. They pulled us out as soon as they got word there was a chance of contamination.” Lovelle tried to sound calm for her sake. He managed to calm her down and then went through the process of decontamination. He was given some hospital scrubs to wear and a ride home. They could give him an idea of how much radiation he had been exposed to, but, they couldn’t even venture a guess as to what the long term effect would be. He might die of cancer sometime soon, or he might never suffer a single consequence.

*****

Once at home Lovelle was torn between burying his head in his pillow, and watching the news as things happened. He had always been one of those people who could sit and watch the 24 hour coverage of a big ongoing story. He had done it as far back as the Reagan assassination attempt when he was only 12. So on this day it was as natural as anything for him to set himself down in front of the tube and watch the events unfold. And after a little while, he finished brooding and did just that.

Lovelle watched as more and more facts, and more and more video made its way into the news rooms. He swung back and forth from anger to sorrow to regret until finally Trina found him crying, unable to get his emotions under control. She wasn’t sure if he was crying over what had happened to him, or what had happened to all of the other victims. He had never shown a penchant for this sort of empathy for strangers. But, he also was not the type to fear for himself that way. What she could never know was that he was crying over his own guilt and remorse. She comforted him as best as she could without prying. He knew it was hurting her that she didn’t know what was wrong, but, he couldn’t explain himself. All he could do was let her wonder, and it made him feel even worse.

In time it was confirmed that all the bombs truly were radioactive. The terrorists had been accumulating powdered caesuium-137, a highly toxic radioactive isotope used in the medical field, along with other less dispersible, or less potent, contaminants. They had packaged these in suitcases along with a generous helping of plastic explosives. This meant that not only were the blasts themselves a devastating blow, but, that the heroes of that day, those first responders and bystanders that rushed in to try and save lives, found themselves with a lungful of radioactive dust. The bombs were designed to not only destroy everything in the vicinity, but, also to kill the very people that came to the aid of the victims. It had come about in a different way this time, but again the police and fire departments, in their rush to save others, had been condemned to extraordinary casualties.

Many of the most exposed people, those that survived the initial blast, became ill quite quickly, and sometimes quite violently. In a matter of days there were a large number of cases of Acute Radiation Sickness. How many other people would eventually fall ill due to exposure would not be known for years to come. The massive radioactive doses would most assuredly kill years into the future.

It seemed that after the plot to hijack and crash airliners was foiled, Al-Qaeda focused even more heavily on their attempts to put together dirty bombs. They had already started to accumulate materials for this purpose, and the unraveling of the 9/11 plot caused them to hasten that process. At the same time, the American government took its success in foiling the 9/11 plot as a sign that they were on top of things. This, despite any warnings from Rosewood and the other people who were directly aware of Lovelle’s role in what was now called the ‘suicide hijacker plot’. The redoubling of efforts from the terrorists, and the lack of a corresponding effort on the part of American counterintelligence, was a deadly mix. The airport terminals were not cut off from non-ticketed individuals and security screening was not stepped up, and the terrorists took advantage.

It seemed entirely possible that Lovelle had caused even more deaths by his actions than he had saved. At the very least, he certainly had traded the lives of one group of people for those of others. All of the many families that he had spared from terrible suffering two years earlier had been traded for a whole new set of families. He could hardly stand the guilt. He tried to tell himself that an attack like this might well have occurred sometime in the future even if he had let the 9/11 attack go forward. There was certainly no way he could ever know that. And even if Lovelle chose to believe this, he still couldn’t help feeling like he had been playing God. He had unwittingly chosen who was to die and who was to live. Of course, his intentions were good. Heck, he had nothing but the best of intentions. But there is that old saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

Lovelle could not help believing that, had he only given the necessary time and consideration to what he was doing, he certainly could have foreseen something on this order. He was wrong. Very early on he had  considered the effect his actions would have on future law enforcement activities. That had been why he had abandoned his plan to forestall the attacks with bomb threat on the airports. He had expressed concerns to Agent Rosewood about how his efforts would affect government counter terrorism activities. He had been worried that not having the arousal of the public would hamstring those activities as well. It was not a lack of foresight that had caused this. If anything, it was poor planning and poor execution.

In hindsight, Lovelle was sure he should have taken different actions. He should never have gone to Germany. He should have known better than to think he could play spy in a foreign country and go undetected. And there was no good reason why he couldn’t wait for Atta to come to America before looking for him. He had been foolishly full of himself. He suffered from delusions of grandeur. He was sure he could have gone ahead with his plan to foil the plot with only a few days to spare. Whether he had filled in any of the gaps in his knowledge or not, he certainly could have gotten action with his Felix the CAT persona. He had acted prudently when he set up that identity, then had almost thrown away the capital that the move had earned him. If he had waited, he could have stopped the attack without giving the FBI the impression that they had succeeded themselves in any way whatsoever. Even if he had been less than completely successful, then at least the public outcry would still have followed. In either case, it seemed to Lovelle that the outcome would have been better than the one he had created. And, he could not help blaming himself for not realizing that fact.

This put him again into a funk which he could not explain to his wife. Trina had seen him go through some pretty strange times. She had been patient with him, allowing him his privacy in the past. But, this was worse than ever, and Lovelle was no longer just her friend. He was her husband, and the father of her precious daughter. She no longer felt like he had the right to keep things like this from her. She was right, of course. But he was helpless to do anything about that. He could no more explain himself now, than at any time in the past.

Experience had taught him that, while little white lies were relatively simple to carry off, big lies were next to impossible to maintain in the face of even a little persistent scrutiny. Each question would invariably lead to another lie. That sort of elaboration of the story would turn it into a house of cards. Lie upon lie just waiting for a little misstep. Invariably you would either be found out, or be so entangled in your falsification as to be worse off than telling the truth in the first place.