5:03
I'd made it to Saturday.
My feelings were conflicted. The time loop had been soul-crushing at times, it could make everything seem pointless. It was a lot like purgatory.
But in some ways, I was quite thankful to have been caught in it. Besides the obvious- averting millions of deaths, I thought I was coming out the other side better for the experience.
I'd never thought twice when I saw a way out, but already I was second guessing myself over things I could have accomplished if I'd stayed in the time loop a little longer. The loop had been an unprecedented opportunity for self-improvement, but I could only truly appreciate the good parts now that I had proof that it wasn't endless.
For what felt like the millionth time, I contemplated what the time loop actually was, how it worked. I was resigned to never get any real answers. The tie in with the nuclear blast had at first given me the thought that the loop had a scientific explanation. That the awesome power unleashed had somehow warped time.
But that explanation was unsatisfying, not least because I was the only one affected, and I wasn't even in the blast zone originally. Also, it didn't explain how I had just "happened" to acquire a skill set and acquaintances uniquely qualified to deal with the problem.
No, more than ever I was convinced that there was some sort of intelligence at work here. But who, or what had guided the loop? And just as importantly, why me?
I snapped out of my reverie. There were more immediate problems to deal with.
Sung and Julie were already in the Maybach, and I quickly joined them. I wanted us all in the armored vehicle just in case the police stormed the building. No point risking getting caught by friendly fire, especially now that I was sure my death would be permanent.
So far the police were just surrounding the building, but they wouldn't just sit on their hands forever. I assumed they would be trying to make contact with the terrorists. Later, I found out from Mi-Sook, that the first police had arrived less than ten minutes after I called them. They were greeted by two bodies lying in front of the building with deflated heads. That made them take my reports of armed terrorists with a bomb seriously.
It had taken them almost an hour to get all their ducks in a row. The street outside was filled with special terrorist response task forces, SWAT, the bomb squad, and hostage negotiators. I don't know what the standard response is to this situation, but I certainly didn't envy them the job. My own dealings with these terrorists had taught me that they would have detonated at the first sign of a cop. Luckily for them, I had taken care of it.
Sung, Julie, and I were burning up the air waves on our cell phones.
Sung was talking to his sister in the high-rise across the street, telling her to drop any weapons she had taken off the sniper team and get somewhere to wait for the police. Preferably on a different floor, away from the bodies of the men she had killed. We were all expecting a lot of tense reactions from the cops when they walked in to find four civilians and eleven dead bodies (19 if you count the innocents the terrorists had killed when they entered the building).
Julie called her parents, waking them up and directing them towards the emails I had sent them, before hanging up and calling a TV news station. She didn't give them any details, just that there was a terrorist situation at 57
th
and Park. We wanted to make sure the media was aware something was going on, if the police presence hadn't already tipped them off.
As for myself, my first call was to my dad in Florida. He had always been an early riser, so he was already up.
"Hey dad. I need you to check your email. I sent you something."
"It's not another cat video is it? I told you to stop sending me those Sam."
I'd never sent my father a cat video. He was just busting my balls. It made me smile when I thought of the shock he was going to get when he saw the video I
had
sent him.
"What is this? It looks like some extremist propaganda video. I can't understand what they're saying."
"They're speaking Korean. If you watch the whole thing, they switch to English occasionally. I sent you four video files. They all show the same thing from different angles. I'll want you to watch it all eventually, but right now I need you to skip forward to the last few minutes. I'll wait."
There was a pause as he did so. I could faintly hear the video playing over the phone. I heard my dad gasp when the door burst open. There was a pregnant silence after my father watched his son, the Wall Street trader, kill three men.
"Sam... Son, what did I just watch? Was that real?"
"It's real dad. All I can say for now is that they were very bad men. You'll see when you watch the rest of the video. I promise I'll answer all your questions later, but right now I need Jim Watley the feared defense lawyer, not Jim Watley my father."
Even though he was now retired, my dad was a mean son of a bitch when it came to defending his clients. I couldn't ask for a better man to have in my corner.
"Right," my Jim said, his lawyer instincts taking over. "What kind of trouble are we looking at here?"
"Hopefully none," I replied. "I'm clearly in the right here, but that metal case in the video is a nuclear bomb. Heads are going to roll, and there is going to be heavy involvement from the government. I need you to make sure that none of the shit that is going to start flying lands on me or my friends."
"Holy shit. Nuclear..." My father got over his shock quickly and got back down to business. "What friends? Who else is involved?"
"Julie and a couple people you don't know- Sung and Mi-Sook Kenji."
"Listen," I said, before he could ask any more questions. "I'm sitting in the building where that video was shot, waiting for the police to storm in. I don't have time to talk. Right now, I need you to make sure that video is safe, where nobody from the government can take it from us. As long as there is video evidence, I should be safe from any backlash."
"Okay, I'll make some copies and make sure they're secure. I love you son, be safe."
"Love you too Dad. Thanks."
My next call was to the police. We had all turned our phones off before the assault. Police dispatch had been trying to contact me continuously since I had used my phone to call in the terrorist report.
I called and identified myself. I gave the dispatcher a partial explanation, explaining that all the terrorists were dead, the ambassador's family was safe, and we were waiting in the car parked in the lobby. Except for Mi-sook, who was across the street.
The cops took about ten minutes to verify my story as much as possible. They went and collected MI-Sook, and took a gander at the bodies of the sniper and his spotter. They tried calling various phones in the embassy until the ambassador answered. He confirmed what I was telling dispatch.
Twenty or so men in full military kit rushed into the lobby. The branched off in different directions to clear the building. One guy came over to the car and motioned us to stay put.
What followed was several days of intense scrutiny. Sung and Mi-Sook still didn't know that the bomb had been nuclear. Julie and I
did
know, but hadn't yet volunteered that information.
The presence of foreign terrorists already had government agencies swarming the site. When the bomb squad got a good look at the bomb... the river of g-men became a flood.
The intense scrutiny I had been expecting became a reality.
I had managed to talk to my dad again, even though the FBI, who had an agent watching me every second, had strongly objected. They wanted me cut off from the rest of the world until they had wrung every detail from me. But my earlier call had got the ball rolling. My father had been burning up the phone lines, demanding access to me.
The downside was that lawyering up made the interview process adversarial. Our interviewers went from skeptical to suspicious.
On the plus side, my dad had contacted a law firm in New York, and all four of us had a lawyer by our side at every interview. And the government couldn't sequester us away and grill us indefinitely, which I suspected they were itching to do. We spent our days in a hotel close to the FBI offices, for easy access.
They tried to keep us separate, but the lawyers had nixed that. We would cooperate. But we refused to be treated like criminals. So no day long interrogations, and no keeping us closed off from the world.
Despite all my planning, there was no way to frame our assault on the terrorists in a way that didn't draw suspicion. Plus, some of the things I had done to cover my tracks left traces, even if they obscured the real truth.
While we had set up a flimsy excuse for how we had come to discover the terror plot, it defied credulity that four civilians would charge in and attack eleven armed terrorists on the spur of the moment. We had turned off the internal security cameras before entering the building, so the only part caught on tape was me storming into the ambassador's office and taking out the final three North Korean's.
Of course, the sudden stop to the video feeds drew massive suspicion. No one believed it was a coincidence that the cameras stopped working when we began our assault. Everything about the security room rang false to them.
Why would the terrorist there turn the cameras off? He hadn't cared about them prior to that.
How did I get in there? The door could only be opened with a code.
Why was the North Korean in there shot
and
whacked in the head?
My answers- I don't know... the door was open... I whacked him after I shot him, couldn't tell you why, adrenaline maybe.
The first question was the one that really bothered them, because I couldn't provide a logical answer. I knew going in that turning off the cameras would draw suspicion. Just not as much suspicion as if the police had been able to actually see what we had done.
The straw that broke the camel's back was the radio encryption. Why had the terrorists brought expensive encrypted radios with them, only to broadcast over an open channel? Unfortunately, the FBI fingerprinted pretty much everything, including the radios. They didn't find any of our prints, because we had been careful about that. What they
did
find were suspicious smudges where we had used our shirts to turn the dials, and more importantly, partial prints from the terrorists.
If the terrorists weren't using the encryption on their radios, why were their fingerprints all over the encryption dials? Combine the prints with clean areas that looked like they'd been wiped...
