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Chapter 60
THE PHONE CALL
Gary sat silently in his cubicle, growing increasingly frustrated as he listened to the
conversation going on around him. A conversation that took him back to that fateful morning
exactly twelve years and one day earlier. The day the world changed.
He had been a student at Baruch College at the time, and he had seen the first responders
charging toward the towers. Later that morning, as he walked home to Brooklyn across the bridge, the
World Trade Center had crumbled behind him, leaving 2,606 people dead.
In the days after the attacks, as the reality of what had happened to New York City—to America
—set in, Gary had started to learn some of the names and faces of those who perished. Each morning
on his path to school he walked along Lexington Avenue past a building called the Armory, which
was covered in flyers of the thousands of people who were now missing in the plume of dust. It
quickly became clear that none of those people, whose pictures looked back at him helplessly, would
ever go home to their loved ones.
As was true for all New Yorkers, the stories people told of that day could feel palpable to Gary.
But nothing was as real as the conversation taking place in front of him right now, over a decade later
—on September 10, 2013—between the two men on the task force who were now sitting next to him
in adjacent cubicles. These two men, it appeared, had run toward the towers that fateful day and then
spent weeks digging through the dust and debris for survivors, mostly finding death.
“You getting your medical tomorrow?” Gary overheard one of them, an NYPD detective, in the
cubicle in front of him say to another from New York’s Clarkstown Police Department. As Gary
listened, the two men talked briefly about their breathing issues and other ailments that still lingered
twelve years later. They talked about other first responders they knew who had developed serious
illnesses, some who had even died. As Gary overheard this, he grew increasingly irate as he thought
about what terrorists had tried to do to America in 2001 and what he saw the Dread Pirate Roberts
trying to do to America in 2013.
Gary had read all of DPR’s writings (three times) and had seen the Dread Pirate Roberts
proclaiming to his legion of followers that the government’s time was “coming to an end”; that the
state was the “enemy”; that people should have utter disdain for federal authorities, including
everyone who sat in the room with Gary at that moment. The same men and women who had run