Cell

By Visayas Outpost

The following is a work of fiction from circa 2012. Dusting it off now in light of recent warnings and events in the Narrative News.

Summer, 1993

Alan Harris mashed the gas pedal of the ’86 Ford van, kicking the transmission down into second.  The wheezy 302 engine roared as the van leapt forward, just making the yellow light before it turned to red, the worn out suspension bouncing as they sailed through the intersection.  In the passenger’s blue vinyl bucket seat, his work mate Tyrone was sitting with arms folded, cap pulled down over his eyes. 

“Easy!” yelled Tyrone, without looking up, “Trying to get my beauty rest over here, dude!”  It was 7:20, and traffic was thick as usual at this time in the morning on Washington, DC’s Constitution Avenue.  Despite Tyrone’s casual outlook, Alan was determined not to be late for work.

He reached for the radio, and cranked it on.  At least the old Ford had a good radio.  MC Hammer blared through the speakers.  “Up and at ‘em Tupac, we’re almost there,” yelled Alan, wheeling the van through a hard right turn. 

“Dayum, son!  Cain’t no one sleep when you’re drivin’!”  Tyrone sat up and adjusted his cap, feeling the upper pockets of his blue jumpsuit for a pack of smokes. 

Alan, focused on the traffic, rummaged for the clipboard on the console with his right hand.  Finding it, he stole a quick glance at the MATA work order.  “Here we go,” he yelled, handing it over to Tyrone, “Capitol South terminal, sub-basement utility.” 

A hard left a few blocks later, and they were bearing down on the MATA employee parking lot.  Tyrone puffed on his cigarette, casually looking over the work order with disdain.  Pulling into the parking lot, Alan fished overhead for the van’s parking pass, smoothly feeding it into the automatic time punch machine as they rolled to a stop in front of the yellow and black drop gate.  The machine clunked, the drop gate raised automatically, and they were on their way again.  Their white van with the big M on the door was just one of many, as it wound its way through the Metro Area Transit Authority service parking lot.

By 8:00, both men were standing in front of a service access door in the utility sub-basement of the station.  The concrete subcontractors had arrived just after them, and were now congregating in the dimly lit corridor, dragging tools behind them.  Alan twisted the key with one hand, clutching the roll of plans in his other hand. 

“This is where you’ll be, fellas,” he said, flipping on the lights. 

As the fluorescents flickered to life, a 36’ X 20’ space was revealed.  A maze of pipes clung to the ceiling.  There was plenty of headroom as the group shuffled to the far end of the damp room, heavy boots and tool belts clinking.  Overhead, the rumble of a train could be felt and heard.  Spaced evenly along the long walls of the room protruded a series of pre-cast support columns.  Alan pointed them out as they neared the end of the room.

“This is where I want the wall, spanning between these last two columns.  We’re makin’ a separate utility area with its own access point,” he said, gesturing to the ceiling, “so this wall needs to be fireproof.” 

In the ceiling was a round hole, with an iron ladder extending down.  The men were setting their tools down, and sizing up the job.  In one corner of the space was already installed a rather large piece of equipment, maybe a pump or a boiler of some kind.  It had heavy sides that could be cast iron, and was bolted together and painted Industrial Green.  Three runs of 2-inch conduit led from it along the floor a few feet, turning up into a newly mounted 3’X6’ Square-D electrical panel, mounted to the end-wall of the room.  Above the electrical box, the end of a six-inch diameter conduit protruded from the ceiling, with cabling hanging out of it.  

“Always waitin’ on the Electric guys, ‘ay Bud?” asked the Foreman. 

“Yeah, somethin’ like that,” said Alan with a grin.  “Tyrone is gonna stay in case you guys need anything.  Your radios won’t work down here.  Don’t work too hard,” he paused, “on second thought…”  Everyone laughed.

Alan smiled.  Nothing to see here, folks, just continue about your business.  The men started taking measurements and unrolling the plans on the concrete floor.  “I’ll check back on you guys at lunch time, and we can talk about timing for completion, and what else you’ll need.”  He shook the foreman’s big bear paw, looking him in the eye with a nod.  He saw a man who would get the job done on time, and be eager to move on to the next job, without being too inquisitive about the things that didn’t directly concern him.  That was good.

Climbing back up into the seat of the van, Alan unclipped the work order pad from his clipboard, and made a few notations.  He flipped the pad to the next page, and inserted it back into the big spring clip, then grabbed the MATA radio.

“Dispatch, this is Harris.”

“What’s up, Alan?” came the woman’s voice.

“Hi, Steph, can you call the second contractor for me and try to set up something for 10:00 down here at Capitol Hill South?  I’ve got another work order to fill.”

“Well aren’t you on the ball,” she said, in a teasing tone.  “Let me see what I can do.  ByeBye.”

Bye Bye, you stupid twit, thought Ehud Al-Hassan.

---

Four months later, a black van with government plates pulled into the Capitol Hill South service parking lot.  A Secret Service team unloaded their equipment, and prepared for a bi-annual full security sweep of the Metro station.  Their sensor package would scan for unusual video or radio signals, airborne pathogens, heat signatures, and radioactivity.  They would perform a thorough visual inspection of anything and everything that seemed out of place.  They would examine anything that had been added recently, even if it seemed to belong.  Their trained dogs would sniff for any explosives.

In the utility sub-basement of the station, a team member twisted the key that opened a service access door, which several different contractors had been in during recent months.  He flipped on the lights, revealing a 28’x20’ room, with its maze of pipes that clung to the ceiling.  He wheeled in his equipment, and began checking out the room, not really expecting to find much.  It seemed very ordinary.  Checking the work order list provided by Metro, he could see that there had been no work done in this area since the station was built, except for a recent paint job.  He sniffed the air, his nostrils confirming the scent of Industrial Beige enamel, and checked a box on his memo pad.  He shone his flashlight around all of the corners and crevices, looking for anything out of place.  As a precaution, he did a quick full spectrum scan of the room, registering only a slight rise in radioactivity on one of the walls.  It was nothing, he had seen radon give off a similar reading many times before, and to be expected in a damp Metro basement.  He checked his watch, packed up his equipment, and proceeded out the door, locking it behind him. 

Elsewhere in the station, another agent was examining the tunnel walls of Track 2, looking for anything different or suspicious.  He paid special attention to the lights, since there was a work team that had recently replaced all the bulbs.  He came to an access door in the side of the tunnel that he didn’t remember being there before, but a quick check of the Metro plans he was carrying with him showed that the door had been part of the original design.  He noted the welds that prevented the door from being opened, and cross-checked it against a notation on the plans indicating the door was sealed in 1989.  If he had tried the key that MATA had given him, he would have found that it didn’t fit the lock, but he wasn’t that curious.  In fact, no key in the entire MATA system fit the lock in that door.  If he had been extremely curious, he might have insisted on grinding down the welds and breaking out the lock.  Had he done so, and pried open the rusty door, he would have found the opening to be bricked off.  Only if he had known what he was looking for would he have bothered to break through the brick wall and climb down the iron rungs of the ladder, finding a rather warm and heavy piece of equipment painted Industrial Green.  The agent simply made a note on his memo pad, and continued his search down the tunnel.

---

Alan Harris, nee Ehud Al-Hassan, had been a first-generation Saudi immigrant.  As such, he had not benefited from cosmetic surgery, and Saifullah deemed it unwise for him to live in one city for too long.  Shortly after his successful completion of the project at the Capitol Hill South metro station, Saifullah moved him to the Port of New York, where had put his skills to use managing work crews on tankers and container ships.  Within a few years, he was intimately familiar with the ships, the shipyards, and the crews he worked with, just like he had been in Washington DC working for the Metro.      

Unlike the mission in DC, however, the mission in New York was simply to look for opportunities and report his findings back to a contact in Curacao.  If Saifullah decided to pursue any operation involving the Port of New York, Alan would be their man. 

One snowy evening in 1996, another piece of the puzzle fell into place for Saifullah.  Alan was off work, putzing around his apartment in Hoboken, waiting for his Giants game to start on TV.  He pulled a TV dinner out of the microwave, peeled back the cellophane, and flipped the channel changer until it landed on the 20/20 news show.  It was part-way through an in-depth reporting episode.  Elizabeth Vargas was describing how difficult it was for Customs to keep track of what shipments were coming into US ports.  Although everything was containerized and computerized, there was no real way to verify what was actually in the containers.  “That’s true, Liz,” spoke Alan to the TV, “I’ve been saying that for years.”  He reached out and pushed a blank VHS tape into the VCR, which was always cued and ready, then hit RECORD. 

Vargas went on to describe how they had decided to test the system, to see if a radioactive container could make it into the Port of Baltimore without being discovered. 

“No kidding, Liz?” said Alan, grinning as he grabbed his spiral notebook and began writing. 

The reporters had placed some low-level radioactive material inside a 50-gallon drum in Morocco, and put the drum in a shipping container.  The container was loaded on an old freighter called the Baraka, bound for Baltimore, and the news crew followed it during its journey.  The ship had docked at Conakry, Guinea, in Western Africa to take on scrap metal.  Not surprisingly, the dock workers in Conakry were quite lax.  Next, the Baraka had sailed for Caracas, Venezuela, where the radioactive barrel was also missed.  Although the officials in Caracas actually did perform an inspection, they only opened up a few of the 500 or so containers for a look inside.  1200 barrels of oil were added to the cargo, and the ship sailed for her final port of call. 

Alan continued to write in his notebook, “Tell me more, Liz, this is really interesting.”

At Norfolk, in the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, the Baraka was met by a US Customs boat, whose officials looked at the ship’s manifest, and toured the vessel from end-to-end.  They asked the crew to open up one of the scrap metal containers, then stamped the captain’s paperwork, and the ship was on her way up the Chesapeake.  At the final stop in the Port of Baltimore, the same process was repeated.  Nothing fishy on the manifest, no containers from Pakistan or Syria.  There was a radiation scanner at the port facility, but it was a pain to use, and slowed down the dock crews’ productivity.  So it was never utilized unless they had a reason to be suspicious.  The container with the radioactive barrel was taken by gantry crane to a holding area, where it sat for a week.  It was then loaded on a flatbed trailer, hitched to a bright blue Freightliner truck with chrome stacks, and hauled up I-95 to New York City.  The camera crews were there to meet the truck when it pulled into a warehouse in mid-town, and filmed as the cargo was unloaded, looking exactly like it had in Morocco.  Finally, there was the barrel, looking as innocent as any other 50-gallon steel drum. 

Elizabeth Vargas looked into the camera for a final word, “Would you ever have thought it would be this easy to sneak radioactive cargo into the US?  And right under the noses of the Port Authority.  I’m Elizabeth Vargas, and this is 20/20.”

“No, Elizabeth,” answered Alan, shaking his head, “I never would have thought so.”  He forgot all about the football game, and fired up the Compaq PC that Saifullah had supplied him instead.  Alan spent the better part of an hour composing a report in Microsoft Word, using his written notes as a guide.  When he was finished, he inserted a blank 3.5” pre-formatted floppy disk into Drive E, and saved his report to it.  20/20 had been a revelation, and Alan’s mind was filled with ideas on just how the logistics of such a plan might be worked out.

The next day at lunch, Alan left a little early to make sure he had time to run by the post office.  A week later, his Saudi contact in Curaçao opened a package wrapped in brown paper, with a New York postmark.  Inside was a VHS tape and a floppy disk. 

-End