Play it Again Sam Pt. 06

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...

If we hadn't had lawyers constantly by our side we might have 'disappeared' for a while.

Almost all the questions focused on me.

According to our story, Julie and Sung stayed in the car the whole time. We had been careful to wipe down anything they had touched outside the vehicle. Julie had made an effort to touch as little as possible in the security suite, and clean up after herself.

So their stories were very simple. They faced the same questions about the lead up to the assault, but they could deny any knowledge of what happened outside the lobby of the building.

Mi-Sook had to describe what she had done in the high rise, but she could tell 99% of that truthfully. The only things she had hide was tampering with the sniper team's radios. She could even admit having advance knowledge of where they had set up- we said we heard them talking about it.

By prior arrangement, if one of the others was confronted with a question they didn't know how to answer, they referred it to me. I'd had a lot more time to think about this than them. It was my plan. We presented a united front in telling the authorities that I had led the assault.

There was some skepticism that the Wall Street trader had been the driving force behind a counter-terrorism strike, but there was ample proof of it.

My fingerprints were all over the steering wheel of the car, which wiped out the lobby guard. Four of the terrorists had been killed with the same gun. Not only were my prints on the gun, but I was the only one other than Mi-Sook who had any gunshot residue on them.

Then of course there was the video.

The video was my ace, incontrovertible proof that I was on the side of the angels. No one could watch that video and not break into a cold sweat at how close we had come to the death of millions. The North Koreans made it abundantly clear that they were on a suicide mission, that they were there to burn Manhattan down in righteous flame.

The video also prompted my first threat of jail time. It showed me going over to the terrorists' laptop and stopping the video feed.

That pissed them off. They immediately raked me over the coals for even touching it. What if tampering with it set off the nuke? Blah, blah, blah.

When their techs told them that I had used the laptop to copy and send out those video files... Holy shit!

Homeland Security went ballistic. They immediately demanded access to the cloud account where I had sent it, as well as the email accounts of mine and Julie's parents. They made threats of charging all of us with treason if we didn't turn over all copies. Actually my cloud account "disappeared" the next day.

I told them to go pound sand.

It was a sticky legal question as to whether they could classify material I'd had first. They probably could, in the interest of national security. But it would be a cold day in hell that they could ever convicted me.

If I made the video public, and I told them I would if they fucked with me, no jury in the country would convict me. There would be riots if they even tried to charge me.

I've made my interactions with the government seem very adversarial. And they were, to a degree. But for every "bad cop" who was trying to sweat answers out of me, there were a hundred "good cops" who thought I walked on water.

My father, who had caught the first flight from Florida, along with the local law firm he had brought in, protected our interests. But looking back, I believe we would have been okay. We were surrounded by men and women who worked or lived in Manhattan, and literally owed me their lives. We had earned some serious goodwill. I think every single hardass who grilled us had flown in from Washington.

Our hotel looked like a government convention- FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, even the ATF. The only non-government employee that I saw was the NYPD chief of police. I believe they only allowed him to hang around as a courtesy. This whole event was classified to hell and back.

But since almost everyone in our hotel had a high security clearance, most of them had seen all or a portion of the terrorists video.

"Why do all these people keep offering you bubblegum?" Julie asked.

I laughed.

The first day, all the various government agents had been standoffish as they tried to figure out what had happened. After the video had made the rounds, our reception warmed considerably.

When a woman from the CIA offered me "bubblegum," I didn't understand right away. That was a strange thing to offer. When I declined, she cringed dramatically, and her partner broke out laughing. Then I was laughing too as I caught on. From then on, I had a steady stream of government agents offering me bubblegum.

I explained to Julie my 'heroic' speech that I had made to the North Koreans- "I'm here chew bubblegum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubblegum."

"You really said that? When you knew people would see it? You dork."

I just smiled.

Speaking of my wife...

The week we spent as guests of the government were eye opening for Julie. She had gone to bed Thursday night with a devoted husband, and woken up with an indifferent stranger. Perhaps it wasn't fair to her, but I'd spent four years putting distance between us, while she had no way to fight it.

I'd told her that I knew about her affairs, but I wasn't acting angry. I didn't really feel that upset about it anymore. It was like the world had slept while I had evolved into a completely different person. I'd spent almost as many years in the loop as I had in my marriage.

To get angry at Julie, I would have to delve into an emotional pool that had dried up long ago.

This was all very disconcerting for Julie. I'd discovered her infidelity, read her diaries, gotten some petty revenge, and moved on with my life...all in the space of a day from her perspective.

We were sharing a room with two queen beds. We existed more as roommates than husband and wife. I was cordial towards her, even friendly. But that was it.

She dearly wanted to talk about our relationship, but I put her off until we were through with Uncle Sam. Any talk about 'us' would inevitably involve talking about the loop. I was too paranoid about the government listening in somehow, so we had to keep our conversations innocuous.

After a week, we'd had enough.

We communicated through our lawyers that the government could have one more interview, and then we were going home. My dad said they had blustered a bit, but their hands were tied. We had been cooperating thus far, but they couldn't legally hold us unless they were to detain us in the name of national security. I'd made clear that I would release the video if they did that. By this point they had no idea how many copies had been made, or who had them. Even I didn't know where they all were, since I had left that to my dad.

So I was sitting by myself in a conference room for the final interview.

My father wasn't with me. The government had requested a one on one meeting. Dad had been reluctant, but I'd accepted. By now I had my story down pat. I wasn't going to reveal anything by accident. I was hoping my cooperation would be remembered when I walked out of the hotel that afternoon.

Plus, they had already given the okay for Julie, Sung, and Mi-Sook to leave. I was curious about what they wanted to ask me specifically, and who would I be talking to. All the interviews to this point had been conducted by 'teams' of agents.

A balding, bespectacled man in his sixties or seventies entered the room.

"Hello Mr. Watley, I'm General Bradley Pembroke, retired. I'm the President's national security adviser. I've been monitoring you and your companions this week. I wanted a chance to speak to you before you went home."

"It's a pleasure to meet you General. If you've been following this... process for the last week, then I'm not sure what else I can tell you. I feel like I've been wrung dry."

Pembroke gave me a wry look.

"I think we both know that's not true. We may have exhausted you with all our questions, but you have been less than forthcoming with your answers."

I didn't bother to deny it. He hadn't sounded angry. More like a father whose son had disappointed him. I had to fight the urge to apologize to this stately gentleman. He just had an air of authority that demanded respect.

"Well," he said. "Be that as it may. I'm not here to try and glean anything new from you. No, I'd like to talk about where we go from here. What are plans Mr. Watley?"

"My plans? I'm not sure what you mean."

"Are you going to be able to put this behind you? You've done a great service for the people of this country. By rights, we should be celebrating what you have accomplished. But to do that would expose the country and yourself to fresh danger."

My dad had already brought this up to me, but I wanted to hear it from an authority.

"How could I and the country be exposed to danger?" I asked.

Pembroke steepled his fingers and looked at me over them.

"We can never reveal just how close to disaster we came. Never. At least not in any of our lifetimes. Think of the fear that gripped the nation after 9/11. How long it took before people felt safe to fly, or attend large events. How would the nation react if they knew that a terrorist organization managed to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the middle of Manhattan?"