“I think, Lawrence, that you need to worry less about history and more about what you are doing to good people in America right now,” she said. “The wonderful man I’ve loved and admired all these years would not create—there is no other word for it, Lawrence—would not create concentration camps, would not tolerate torture, would not do away with laws that for hundreds of years have been the foundation for liberty and freedom.
“Lawrence, I know you don’t think of yourself as a bad man. But—and I hate to use the analogy, but it is the only one that comes to mind—Lawrence, do you think Adolph Hitler thought of himself as bad either? Can’t you take a step back and look at what you are doing? Forget about history. Just do the right thing now. History will write itself.”
Quaid’s head snapped back as if he’d been punched. His wife had equated him to the most evil man of the twentieth century. He felt wounded, shaken. Pundits could criticize him, but his wife, his most trusted advisor, his biggest supporter? He’d trusted her judgment throughout every moment of his political career. It occurred to him more than once that she would have made a better president than he could ever be.
As Quaid paused in the doorway to the Lincoln bedroom, the image of the Washington Monument surrounded by a cloud of dust, tilting at an impossible angle, then falling like a timbered tree filled his mind.
“Catherine, I’m no Hitler, and I resent the implication. It’s hurtful and it’s wrong. My job is to protect this country, to keep it safe. And, whether you want to believe this or not, our nation is under attack. This is not about persecuting Jews. It’s about saving America. The people at that march were hard-core and anti-American. They were being incited to commit violence—and they did.”
Quaid strode from the East Wing and into the West, settling into his office and asking for an update from the march. Within minutes, key members of his administration were in the conference room.
The final count on detainees from the march was around 420,000 people, the president was told. Seventy-four people taken into custody from the speakers’platform were driven to nearby Bolling Air Force Base, near Reagan National Airport, and flown to Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. The assumption was that the people on the platform were organizers who could provide information about the coordination between the march and the bombing of the Washington Monument, and about the missing atomic bomb.
On arrival at Cape Cod, they were turned over to the Echo Team interrogators.
The big issue facing Quaid was what to do with 420,000 detainees. The Cape Cod facility, even crowded far beyond its holding capacity, could take no more than 25,000 people. Neither the Federal Bureau of Prisons nor the immigration service, two agencies holding the majority of federal detainees, could cope with an immediate population increase of that magnitude. Besides, this wasn’t a civilian problem. The marchers were military detainees, and Quaid wanted them held as war criminals.
Even Guantanamo was briefly considered. And rejected. Too small.
“What are we going to do with them?” Quaid asked. “We don’t even have a stadium large enough to hold this many people. If they start dying from dysentery or God knows what, we’ll have a humanitarian crisis on our hands. We need a solution.”
Harry Wade, the Federal Emergency Management Agency director, leaped at this problem.
“We’re clearing out all our mobile home parks from the hurricanes,” he said. “Take the trailers. String some razor wire around ’em, throw up some guard towers and you’re all set.”
The last Hurricane Jack and Jill refugees were in the process of moving out of FEMA-provided travel trailers and emergency mobile home parks throughout Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
“I can stuff 400,000 people into these trailer parks,” Wade told the president. “We’ve had more than 200,000 living in them for the past ten months, and they were comfortable. No problem doubling up. Just bring in a couple hundred thousand cots—no problem finding ’em—and we’ll have plenty of capacity.”
The camps would be operating within days while the Jewish detainees and their sympathizers were transported there.
“Do it,” Quaid ordered. “I’ll call the House and Senate leaders and get emergency funding. We’re at war.”
Next, Quaid asked for his daily briefing on the Israelis held in New England.
“Anything new?” he asked.
The Echo Team interrogators were producing results. Few people could tolerate more than a week of high stress confinement. The detention cells were isolated from all outside contacts. The fluorescent ceiling lights were always on. The ceiling-mounted speakers were never silent; in fact, they were rarely at any volume less than that of a lawnmower. Music selections were at the option of each interrogator.
Other techniques included forcing a detainee to maintain what was referred to as a “stress position” for hours at a time, positions such as holding arms straight out from the body. A favorite was to have a detainee squat on the floor while his wrists and ankles were chained to a ring bolted between his feet, his urine and excrement accumulating around him. More aggressive interrogation methods included the revived use of waterboarding and electric shocks to men’s genitals and women’s nipples.
Detainees quickly disclosed the identities of the Israel Defense Force teams on the two ships. The soldiers said there was no central planning effort to place them on the ships. Each person said he or she made their own way to the docks and boarded the ships with whatever weapons they’d managed to save from their military units. As the interrogations intensified, detailed descriptions of vast hordes of nuclear devices, including mind-boggling killing machines and vast stores of chemical and biological weapons, were all disclosed.
“Unfortunately, sir, some of the people we interrogated died,” the homeland security chief said.
“Casualties of war,” Quaid responded.
The briefing on the interrogations did nothing to calm Quaid’s concerns about the still-undiscovered nuclear device. Reports of stores of anthrax grenades and nerve gas agents in Israel’s arsenal created new nightmares for him. The scope of the Israeli weapons of mass destruction arsenal disclosed to the interrogators, except for the previously known nuclear weapons, was a complete surprise to the American military intelligence community.
Detainees’talk about Israeli atomic machine gun bullets, anthrax spread by pressurized hair spray containers, and laser machine guns began to sound far too Buck Rogers to be believed. Eventually, all such information squeezed from detainees after torture sessions was discarded as fabrication.
The government was left with its only credible information being what it knew almost from the beginning. Israel had smuggled some amount of U-235 into New England in a sailboat. Where that material was, who had the material, and whether it already formed the core of an operable bomb was still all unknown.
CHAPTER 60
The first night at the Portland house, Sarah let Shapiro and Katz decide sleeping arrangements. Shapiro said he’d be fine on the living room sofa. Katz settled into the guest bedroom.
Katz lay in bed, stunned by the sudden turn her life had taken. Just a few weeks earlier she was happily chasing gangsters. Now she was hiding from her own government, hiding with a group of strangers who seemed unlike any criminals she had ever encountered.
Worst of all, there was no answer at her grandmother’s house. She tried calling the few friends she knew her grandmother had. Nobody answered. Of course, her nana’s few friends were all Jews, all part of what they called their Canasta Crew. They’d all gone to Washington. It had been an adventure for them, chaperoned by their rabbi, joined by their entire congregation of elderly Jews.