American Subversive (17 page)

Bobbing three stories above the water, the CEO stared disdainfully at the correspondent. That's not my problem, he stated dispassionately.

But how can you say that? she persisted. Since the discovery of oil, Ecuador's national debt has increased from $200 million to $13 billion, while the poverty rate has risen seventy percent. And that's not your problem?

His anger evident, the CEO motioned to someone off-camera. Words were exchanged, then the camera was dislodged and the interview ended abruptly. Keith had joined us by now, and we watched the wrap-up in stony silence. When it was over, Lindsay wheeled around to face us. Let's blow up that guy's house, she said.

I looked at Keith.

Sounds like a plan, he said.

I'm being serious, Lindsay said.

So am I, Keith responded.

And so it was. Later, at dinner, Lindsay laid out the scenario—a glorious August morning on the East End of Long Island rocked by an explosion felt from Sag Harbor to Amagansett. Just think, she said. The height of the high season! A huge fucking bang and a thousand porcelain brunch plates smash to pieces.

But the plates were only the beginning. We all started chiming in, imagining the moment—men striding down Maidstone fairways; women power walking to morning bridge games; bloated trust-fund sons sleeping off marathon nights; skeletal daughters
slinking home in dance-club tube tops; morning swims and morning papers; bodies already tanning on boats and beaches; small talk at farmers' markets; big talk at real estate offices—all of this . . . this
idleness
suddenly rocked by its opposite, a wake-up call that would reverberate through the hedgerows of Further Lane for generations to come.

Even Keith was grinning now.

Early the next morning I started reading everything I could find on the man. Through property records I found his Hamptons address (one of seven worldwide) and plugged it into Virtual World. The house was highly vulnerable; it bordered the beach and was surrounded on the three other sides by low trees and dune brush. Perfect cover: we wouldn't even have to break in. We could plant a bomb up against the foundation walls and the whole place would come down. The CEO was the scheduled headline speaker at the Global Energy Conference in Stockholm during the last weekend of August, which would, in theory, mean far fewer people coming and going from the house. I printed out maps and wrote up an analysis that looked a lot like my old reports at the institute. Back then, of course, I was trying to save the world, not ignite it.

At dinner the following night, I presented my findings. Lindsay flipped through the pages, vibrating with excitement. Keith remained stoic. He circled sentences and made margin notes. Then he sat back and thought while Lindsay and I cleared the table. When we were done, we moved to the living room. Keith cleared his throat.

I'm afraid it's not worth it, he said.

Why? Lindsay and I asked, in unison.

Think about it. The bomb goes off. What then? There'll be a few days of headlines, interviews with concerned neighbors and famous friends. When the commotion dies down and the police still haven't made an arrest, TCI's publicity machine will get out in front of things; they'll turn this guy into the biggest victim you've ever seen, the ultimate martyr of American achievement. Hell, before it's all over, people will be sending him money to rebuild. We need to find a target that won't elicit sympathy, an institution rather than an individual. And
we need the Action itself to disrupt, to uncover, to
change
whatever iniquity has come before. We can't afford to lose in the court of public opinion.

I digested Keith's words and slowly realized they made sense. We'd been caught up in the moment. Lindsay understood as well, although it took her the rest of the night to get over her disappointment. When I came downstairs the next day, she was sitting at the laptop, watching the segment again.

He's still a fucking asshole, she said.

I burned up the TCI report and started over. A week passed, then two. I began taking walks in the mornings, when the world was still damp and pregnant with promise. Often, in those early days, Keith and I met for lunch on the deck. Sandwiches and salads. We'd talk about my work—never his—swatting ideas back and forth like shuttlecocks. Keith was thinking big thoughts, and still he was careful, measured, considered. Everything was about reaction and response. Tone and perception. He thought several steps ahead, could envision exactly what would happen, how things would turn out. It was a rare gift, foresight of that magnitude, and it had been the key to his success (Lindsay once said he'd have been a mainstay on the FBI's Most Wanted list if he existed in official circles as anything more than a rumor). Keith simply knew what he was doing. And he knew why. We were moving toward some kind of national reckoning. We all felt it. America had passed an invisible tipping point, had strayed too far from the noble tenets of its founding, and taking it back would require drastic measures.

So I barely raised an eyebrow the first time Keith mentioned it. We were eating on the deck, under the shade of the house, the air heavy and pressing against us. Keith, in cutoff jeans and running sneakers, was poking at his food with a plastic fork when he suddenly looked up and asked if I'd ever heard of Indian Point?

I nodded. It's a nuclear power plant on the Hudson River. They use it in all those worst-case scenarios because it's so close to the city.

That's right, Keith said. And I've been thinking . . . maybe we could use it in our own little scenario.

His idea, like all of his ideas, was tied to a larger theory. He knew
the world was a place of truces and compromises, marginal friendships, uneasy alliances. He understood every shade of gray, from darkest coal to silver lining, and the complex issue of nuclear power contained them all. We'd talked about it before, and I remember being surprised by his views. It was a question of time, he'd told me. America needed to move beyond fossil fuels and foreign oil immediately, but it would take decades of research and implementation to effectively harness the weather or find some purer source of power. Nuclear energy could fill the gap, could save the century. It was reliable, affordable, produced domestically, and environmentally clean (until, of course, it wasn't). Mostly, though, it was inevitable. The developed world would pass through a short nuclear age on the way to someplace better.

It's already happening in Europe, he said.

Now, as the sun beat down on us, I sat dead still and listened to words so unsettling, so massive in meaning, that it was all I could do to process them. Keith led me inside and spread out several sheets on the dining room table. They were photocopied blueprints of Indian Point. I stared at them wide-eyed, but instead of demanding to know—as any normal person would have—how he'd got his hands on them, I helped him smooth the corners down. They were incredibly detailed, and showed not only the plant's reactors and buildings, but its perimeter—the walls, the fences, the gates—and surrounding area. Keith had already pencil-marked various locations with the letters
POE
(place of exploit), and now he pointed at one and circled it.

The reactors are protected by the Feds and the NRC, he said, which means heavy walls and well-trained guards, but the rest is left to rent-a-cops hired by the company that runs the plant. Look here, by the cliffs above the river. It's just barbed-wire fencing. I'm sure there are sensors, too, but it's like aviation radar—you just have to stay low.

But, Keith, I said.

Hold on. Just hear me out. The point is to save lives, not take them.

By blowing up a nuclear facility?

Not exactly. I mean, yes, but not the reactors. What I'm talking about is a small, controlled explosion right . . . here, Keith said,
pointing to a blank area surrounded by unmarked warehouse-type buildings. See, it's a good two hundred yards from the reactor walls. Nothing would actually get damaged.

Then why do it?

Come on, he said. Think it through. He looked at me expectantly, a teacher waiting for an answer.

Well, obviously they'd immediately shut down the plant, I ventured. And if the government didn't keep it closed indefinitely, then the community would.

Exactly, Keith replied. Which is something, considering Indian Point's location and safety record, that should have happened years ago.

But I don't understand. We'd be killing the very cause we're promoting. Look at Three Mile Island: the smallest of reactor meltdowns and it crippled the American nuclear industry for decades. Have they even commissioned a new reactor since then?

Nuclear energy fell out of favor long before 1979, Keith said. But, yes, I get your point. And that's why we'd release a communiqué clearly stating the reason behind our action: safety. Just think about it. Every plant in the country would immediately reevaluate and drastically ramp up security procedures. The Feds would set new mandates and regulations. We'd avert a major catastrophe by creating a very minor one. Not even.

And you honestly think we can detonate a bomb
inside
the grounds?

Yes, I do. Because nuclear power plants still operate under the old model of keeping radiation in, not keeping people out. We'll breach the outer fencing with a remote-controlled device, so we won't have to enter the facility ourselves.

You're talking about some kind of toy?

Sure, Keith said, a grin spreading across his face. Why not? A miniature dump truck or something. We just tape a payload onto the back and off she goes. . . .

And so, a half hour later, off
I
went. This was a tougher assignment—most websites of interest were government-run—but the information was out there, and slowly I found it. I needed to know what
happened in the buildings closest to the potential blast site, so I found the layouts of six other nuclear plants and compared them to Indian Point.

It didn't take long for a problem to emerge, in the form of spent uranium. Keith had assumed the used-up nuclear fuel was trucked away. But that wasn't the case. There was still no federal depository for radioactive by-product, so most plants, including Indian Point, kept their waste on-site. But where? Since spent uranium was every bit as radioactive as the live stuff, it was stored in underwater tanks protected by impervious steel structures and positioned far from the reactors. These by-product buildings were labeled on some of the other layouts (in one Alabama plant, the building was actually shaded a lovely nuclear yellow), but the location of Indian Point's spent fuel wasn't clear. Three buildings were large enough to contain waste operations, and unfortunately two of them bordered Keith's courtyard-like ground zero. Radioactive material wasn't flammable like gasoline—it wouldn't ignite or explode—but it didn't matter. To my mind, even the possibility of instability, of a leak or spill caused by our Action, made everything else moot. If we couldn't eliminate the nuclear-fuel equation—and I spent several days trying—then we couldn't move forward.

Presented with the evidence, Keith finally, grudgingly, agreed.

I can't say I was disappointed. The idea had disturbed me from the get-go. Part of it was the unfeasibility of the Action itself. But what really got me was Keith's and Lindsay's blasé approach. Lindsay had come home the day Keith brought it up and, after hearing him out, quickly endorsed the plan. Her big blue eyes lit up and that was it. No one acknowledged that we were flirting with the ultimate taboo, the climactic chapter in everyone's private book of fear. Were we truly willing to go that far? I'd found Keith's arguments theoretically sound, but still . . . something goes wrong with a bomb and a town house explodes; something goes wrong with uranium and mankind pays a price.

The mood in the house changed during our nuclear flirtation. Maybe the word itself was too much. It was a psychic wound, a word meant for nightmares, for death, and just as it hung over America, so it hung over us. The air turned stale. Our tempers grew taut. Keith had
said our Actions should speak for themselves, but now he was talking about communiqués, explanations—brochures to highlight the destruction. But, afterward,
we
were suddenly the ones who couldn't communicate. Keith squirreled himself away in the garage for three days. I think he even slept in there. Then, one searing afternoon, he slipped up behind me as I sat at the computer.

Find anything interesting? he asked.

I must have jumped half a foot.

Stop fucking scaring me like that, I said.

Soon, though, I did find something interesting: an article—on
Slate
—about the construction of a pan-Asian oil pipeline. It mentioned a company called Indigo Holdings as the money behind the project. The name sounded familiar but I couldn't immediately place it. Had I come across Indigo during my time in D.C.? Or was it the name alone that caught my eye? I started nosing around, and almost immediately things fell into place. The company, I discovered, was a giant consortium—part private equity firm, part global consultancy—that operated at the crowded (and confusing) intersection where government, military, and industry met. Three masters to manipulate, to play off one another, with a single unambiguous goal: the generation of obscene amounts of money. Indigo relied heavily on access to power, and its board was littered with former presidents and prime ministers, Allahs and sheikhs, CEOs and generals—a veritable private-sector (and privately held) administration. They went to great lengths to avoid the press, but nothing so lucrative could operate completely in the shadows. The more I read about their international projects, the easier it became to imagine them as a target. For oil was their objective, the engine behind every investment, every shady inside deal. Here was the military-industrial complex at its obscene best. The nightmare endgame of the capitalist state. Corrupt as man could get.

Indigo was the grand stage we'd been looking for, and Keith knew it, too. He'd heard of them in the same vague and unsettling light, and as I delved deeper, he started sitting with me, taking notes like a stenographer. If we hit them hard, he said, the media spotlight
would linger long after the violent fact. And best of all, though they were headquartered in D.C., they had a smaller presence in New York. The location wasn't ideal—it was in a Madison Avenue office tower above the famed department store Barneys—but we'd figure something out.