Gimel sighed deeply and nodded. “It will make the detonators easier to rig.”
The timing of the Jewish march had to be figured into their plans. The trio did not want to kill Jews, of course. Heaven forbid their work should be misinterpreted as an attack against Jews.
It was Thursday morning, the day before the march was to begin in Washington. The men were exhausted. They drove the van to the rear of a Ramada Inn in Rockville, Maryland, a half-hour’s drive from Washington.
They took three separate rooms using Aleph’s credit card. He’d asked for the motel’s best rooms, joking afterwards that it was not as if he’d be around when the credit card bill arrived. The men rested, ate a tremendous dinner, and prayed before going to sleep for what they expected was the last night of their lives.
President Quaid’s speech dispelled any doubts the three young men may have had about the righteousness of their intended action. They gathered in Aleph’s motel room early Friday morning and prayed together one final time. They chose to skip breakfast, tacitly acknowledging they were too nervous to eat.
The stolen National Park Service van cruised the streets of Washington. Bet held the printout of the route through the city they’d downloaded from Google Maps before leaving Maine. The radio in the van was tuned to an all-news station.
Reports on the decreased attendance at the march caused by the president’s threat to bring in troops pleased the three men. Whatever they did, they did not want to kill Jews. They navigated closer to the target until, after a left turn onto Fifteenth Street, they saw it directly in front of them, thrusting upward, more than 500 feet of granite and marble.
The Washington Monument.
They’d studied the monument as if it were a research project assigned by their high school civics teacher. They’d studied it the only way people of their generation knew how to do research—sitting in front of their home computers. They assumed that every fact they needed was available simply by reading enough web pages returned by Google.
They weren’t disappointed by what they learned. The monument was built in the shape of an Egyptian obelisk. The exterior was white marble. The interior was granite. The walls at the base were fifteen feet thick, tapering to a thickness of eighteen inches at the top. At the time of its construction, it was the tallest building in the world. It remained the tallest masonry construction.
An elevator ran up its hollow interior.
The men were especially interested to read about an incident in December 1982 when the monument was held hostage by a nuclear arms protester for ten hours, claiming he had explosives in a van he drove to the monument’s base. Police shot the man dead and found his van was empty.
Aleph had discovered a post-9/11 report from the General Accounting Office concerning the security of government buildings. The report, posted online by the GAO, said a seven-pound explosive charge set off inside the hollow core near the top, where the walls were the thinnest, would bring down the monument’s entire facade.
That was good news.
The van stopped as the towering monument came into full view. The monument was more impressive in the flesh than on the Internet. Aleph, who was driving, turned to the other two men sitting on the bench seat beside him.
“Any doubts, any hesitation?” he asked.
“It’s our time,” Bet answered.
“If not now, when?” Gimel said.
“Okay then,” Aleph said. “One last stop before we go in.”
He pulled the van away from the curb and drove for two blocks. There, just as Google Maps had told them it would be, was a Starbucks.
Aleph parked in front of the coffee shop and got out of the van.
“A dozen or so coffees ought to do it, right?” he asked.
“And get pastries, a real mix—donuts, cakes, cookies,” Bet said. “There’s gonna be a lot of cops, park police, there.”
CHAPTER 54
President Quaid’s speech convinced at least half the marchers to turn around and go home. Parents who traveled across the country with their children intending to attend a peaceful rally were terrified at the prospect of confronting armed Virginia national guardsmen.
By starting time Friday morning, the crowd filled only the half of the National Mall closest to the Capitol, leaving a half mile of open grass before the Washington Monument. The sixty-foot-wide speaker’s platform was in front of the Capitol Reflecting Pool. Rather than the exuberance with which most mass civil rights gatherings began, the mood was cautious.
Rabbi Garfinkle stood at the microphone on the platform for several minutes looking out at the crowd. He’d dressed the part that day, wearing a suit conservative enough for a banker, except for the brightly colored crocheted yarmulke on his head. He lifted both hands high above his head, waited for silence and chanted in Hebrew, “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad. Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”
A murmur went through the crowd as people softly said the traditional response to the most sacred, most fundamental statement of Jewish faith. “Barukh Shem k’vod malkhuto l’olam va-ed. Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.”
The rabbi nodded, as if thanking the crowd, the largest audience he was likely to address in his lifetime. He’d struggled over what he would say and was anxious to begin. Before he could say a word, he noticed a disturbance at the edge of the crowd in front of him. Young people pushed through the crowd, carrying handfuls of plastic shopping bags. A young woman burst from the front of the crowd and ran toward the podium. She carried two plastic shopping bags in her right hand.
Rabbi Garfinkle stepped back. A bomb, he thought. She’s going to throw a bomb. She stopped. Stared at him. Smiled and tossed both bags onto the podium.
They landed softly at his feet. He looked out at the crowd, where most people were staring at him expectantly as he spread the top open, looked in, then dropped the bag as if it actually were a bomb. All the color washed from his face.
The rabbi then kneeled on the floor and carefully picked up the bag. He reached in and withdrew a small piece of yellow cloth. Without a word, he walked to the people seated on the platform and distributed the contents of the bag, more pieces of yellow cloth, one at a time to the people to his right and then did the same for the people to his left.
He returned to the microphone and held the yellow fabric straight out in front of him, displaying it to the crowd, then slowly returned his hands to his chest and carefully pinned the yellow, six-pointed Star of David to his chest. In the middle of the star somebody had printed in black Magic Marker Jude, the German word for Jew.
Rabbi Garfinkle knew the badge was the same the Nazis forced millions of German, Polish, French, Dutch and Russian Jews to wear. He leaned into the microphone.
“President Quaid,” he said, his voice quivering, “you want me to wear a badge saying who I am.” His right hand, knotted into a first, pounded against the star, against his chest.
“This is the badge I will wear. This badge at least tells the truth. This badge says what you really mean, Mr. President. You say I cannot be both a Jew and an American. I say you are wrong, Mr. President. But even if you are right, sir, this badge declares who I am.
“Mr. President, I am a Jew.
“Do you truly believe you are the first political leader to tell Jews to stop being Jews? We have such a long history, we Jewish people. We teach our history to our children. We teach our history so that our children will not forget what has happened to us throughout our history, again and again and again.