The Unknown Knowns (21 page)

Roland helped the Mills girls into the Bucket, pulling the straps across their ample chests. He took his time with the belt-tensioning mechanism. After he was done seating the girls, he rubbed his forehead. I could see he was making a mental calculation.

“Okay, folks. We got to draw straws here. The Oaken Bucket seats four. Which means one of you's got to stay behind.”

“I will.” Keesha and I volunteered more or less simultaneously. We giggled. She slapped my arm.

“Come on, Kee.” This was the Mills girls, also simultaneous. “I'm sure your boyfriend doesn't mind. Jump in.”

The Nautikon's face lit up, the filament of inspiration burning in his skull. He gestured with the damp tube socks. “Hey, girls,” he said. “No need to argue. It's cool. I don't need to go this time. You two jump in.” He draped one arm around my shoulder and started shoving me toward the Bucket. I resisted.

“No way, Lester,” said one of the Mills girls. “This was your idea, dude. You get in this Bucket this instant, young man!” We all looked at him. His expression was not that of humble magnanimity, or even annoyance. He looked terrified. But after a few deep breaths, he complied.

“I'm staying here with Jim,” said Keesha. Roland shot me a questioning look, then he swung the door shut and slapped the side of the Bucket.

“Let's roll!” he said, stepping behind the console to flip a pair of switches. Somewhere inside the fake boulder a motor began to chug and grunt, building up momentum and attitude. The staves
started creaking again. “Let's roll,” they said. “Let's roll.” Roland gave the Bucket a good shove with his boot, and it started the suspenseful creep out of the holding pool. It lurched forward, and the goose-bump music of shrieking girls accompanied its fateful descent.

At the first hairpin turn I heard a loud metallic snap. The Nautikon gave out some kind of aquatic war cry as the Bucket crashed down a staircase of small waterfalls. At the second hairpin turn came a second snap, but softer this time, more miserable and resigned. With Flatiron Falls dead ahead, the laughter of the Mills girls was baffled by the shouting cataract. White froth sprayed up all around the Bucket, then the water parted for one horrific long clear slo-mo instant to reveal to me the Nautikon's mortified face. He was gripping one of the Mills girls by the arm. His mouth hung open but nothing came out.

It wasn't the cabinetmaker. Did I mention that? Jean never hooked up with the cabinetmaker. It was Josh, from her office. But that was a rebound situation. Now she's alone and, from what I can tell, living back in our old town house. How do I know all this privileged information? Corey the night clerk called me the other evening when I got back from the hearings. No idea how he got my number. Jean wants to sell the condo, he said, and she needs your permission. I can't see why. The place is in her name. She paid for it, or her mother did.

Roland elbowed me in the arm and winked. “This is the good part,” he said.

The Oaken Bucket leaned out over the edge of Flatiron Falls, and even through the white nonsense of water I could hear a pair of bone-chilling metallic thunks.
Thunk
. And:
Thunk
. The Bucket tipped farther out and then it just—hung there. Roland, close
beside me, chuckled. This was the good part. Oh, was it ever. I caught one last glimpse of the Nautikon's wide brown eyes before the Bucket upended and flipped over the cliff.

Then came a slide show of terror. A frozen plume of water. The Oaken Bucket upside down in the water. The Oaken Bucket right-side up in the water. Two yellow ponytails flinging hair water in the summer air. The top of the Nautikon's head, lustrous and bald in the sun. I knew he'd been wearing a wig. I knew it. Keesha screamed. So did Roland. So did I.

When the Bucket came to rest on the bottom of the pool, the three passengers were up to their chests in water. The Nautikon was leaning back, eyes closed. If you didn't know better, you might have thought he was enjoying himself, soaking up the sun, taking pleasure in a Rocky Mountain summer's day with a pair of all-American blondes. Then you saw the blood. A cloud of pink erupted inside the Bucket, like hibiscus tea in a big broken cup. One of the all-American blondes, Jenny Mills, was clawing wildly at her sister Brenda's seat belt. Brenda's head was bent to one side at an unnatural angle.

Roland covered his eyes with his hands and I saw the face of the Helvner. It was 2:19 p.m.

Rep. Frost:
This was at approximately 2:20 p.m., correct?

 

Diaz:
I believe so.

 

Rep. Frost:
Go on.

 

Diaz:
The first thing I heard was a noise in my ears. It wasn't like a ringing. It was like the noise a balloon makes when you stretch the little nozzle end and let the air out. It felt like somebody'd stuck a balloon nozzle directly inside my left ear canal.

In my right ear I heard shrieking. Just the longest, most freaked-out scream you've ever heard in your life. My left eye was swollen shut, but I could open my right one enough to see Jenny grabbing her sister, trying to, I don't know, unbuckle her seat belt, I guess.
Then I saw the blood next to me in the water coming over to touch me. You'd think all that water would have, I don't know, diluted it or washed it away, but there was too much of it. I couldn't get away, I was strapped in and my arm felt broken.

The Bucket had come to a resting position on the bottom of the pond. One side was caved in, so we were up to our shoulders in water. Jenny was screaming and Brenda wouldn't move. I sat up a little and saw that her head—her head was at a weird angle. And then I saw where the blood was coming from. Part of her scalp had kind of popped open.

I must have blacked out again, because the next thing I knew I was wrapped in one of those foily thermal blankets on the walkway. Somebody said I was in shock. Down the hill I could see where they'd backed an ambulance up to the Waterin' Hole. I don't know how they got it on the patio, but there they were loading a gurney into the back. I could see Brenda's feet sticking out one end. She had this South American friendship bracelet on one ankle. The next thing I remember is being in the hospital and the light hurt my eyes and some doctor was sewing up my shoulder.

I remember thinking, This is a prime illustration of what I've been talking about all along. Which is that while our public attention drifts from matters of terrorism to the social agenda and health care, a huge blind spot is opening up right directly behind us. That blind spot is the water. Enemy combatants and extremists and fascist ideologues and undocumented workers, they're all pouring in through the water. And we're doing nothing—we aren't doing two
to close the gap. Not even one single
. I mean,
.

Congressman, we had a chance to stop Jim Rath from hurting those girls. We could have stopped him from putting that young lady in a wheelchair and sticking tubes inside her for the rest of
her life. We let Brenda Mills down. We let her sister down. We let me down.

Rath gave us ample opportunity to nab him. Maybe he even wanted to be nabbed. But we were too stupid or too scared to look in the water. We missed our chance when he funneled corrosive compound into that Denver river thing. That was a shot right over the bow and we were, like, too busy playing shuffleboard to notice.

But you want the good news, Congressman? The good news is we have another chance. There's more Raths to disable. More water-based terrorists to render inoperable. There are Raths out there we can't even imagine. Our job is to imagine them and shut them down, one by one. All we need to do is think the unthinkable and then prevent it from happening.

 

Rep. Frost:
That's the good news?

 

Diaz:
To quote a personal hero of mine, it's the unknown unknowns that are going to come back and bite us. It's all those scraps of intel that we can't confirm and we don't know. All those evil schemes that reside outside the perimeter of our Western mind-set. They're like some kind of scary fish with a thousand teeth and a fluorescent thing hanging in front of its face like you see on nature specials. What kind of lure do you use to catch them? Where do you drop your net? You don't know, because you never even dreamed a fish that ugly could ever exist.

Am I making myself clear? We live in a world of surprise. That's the real weapon of terrorism. Surprise. And explosions too. But mostly it's surprise. So how do we prep for the unexpected?

Think big. We need to recalibrate ourselves as a society, like Harry Truman did at the outset of the Cold War. But Truman? He was
lucky. He had World War II to kick history in the back pocket. His enemy? It was a bunch of drunk guys banging their loafers on the table. And plus he knew where the bastards lived. Harry could've bombed them back to the Stone Age any time he wanted.

Us? We got 9/11. In the scheme of historical flash points it wasn't exactly Iwo Jima. And for enemies, we got the worst. A bunch of slippery cowards with Ivy League degrees and a big wad of oil money.

 

Rep. Frost:
Wait—who are we talking about again? Our guys or theirs?

 

Diaz:
Theirs. Jesus.

 

Rep. Frost:
Just asking.

 

Diaz:
The upshot is we need to recalibrate our whole society to deal with this asymmetrical bullcrap. How do we do it? Easy. We've got to project ourselves forward. Put ourselves in the worst-case scenario and then think backward from that hypothetical spot to where we're standing right now. How would you arrange yourself and the government so that you have sensitized the people in the country to know the urgency and magnitude of an event before it happens? That's the task.

 

Rep. Frost:
Are we talking about a time machine?

 

Diaz:
Time machines don't exist, Congressman. And if they did, don't you think that'd be classified? And even if it was classified, the enemy could just travel to the future when everything's declassified,
read the file on the time machine, and travel back through time to use it against us. That's the trouble with the elected official: they don't stop to think these things through. No offense.

This isn't about time travel, Congressman. It's simply about using your inner gyroscope to lead you into the future unknown and then back to the present-day known to alter that known in such a way as to prevent said unknown. I mean, you want to be at different ends of the temporal rubber band, simultaneously. That's the only way to bring justice to the enemy before you have to bring the enemy to justice. Get it?

 

Rep. Frost:
Well, I guess I get it. As an elected official, you'll excuse my limited capacity to think such matters through, but I'd like to put it to you in a way you possibly haven't considered. The problem to my mind, Agent Diaz, is that when you get these hypothetical threat scenarios fixed in your head, what you're grappling with isn't “unknown unknowns,” it's “unknown
knowns
.”

 

Diaz:
Beg your pardon, sir?

 

Rep. Frost:
I'm just thinking out loud here, but in your parlance, the “unknown knowns” would be the facts you can't confirm that you know, but you're damn sure you know them. You might call it faith. Or fantasies. Or delusions.

If we take it on faith that the world contains these unimaginable threats, then the unimaginable threat becomes our guiding principle. Our inner gyroscope, if I might borrow a phrase. As a consequence, we begin to make foreign policy based on bugaboos, myths, make-believe. Son, you don't go to war because there's a bump under the bed. And I'm not saying that's what we did, or
might do. Or that people like yourself aren't acting in the national interest.

 

Diaz:
Fair enough, sir. You're entitled to use my logic against me. That's an American right, enshrined—if not in the Constitution, then in the spirit of it. But—

 

Rep. Frost:
I'm not using anybody's logic. You yourself have pointed out that elected officials aren't smart enough for that level of discourse. I'm just acknowledging that it takes imagination to lead, but you can't let your imagination do the leading. There are consequences to imagination.

 

Diaz:
All I know is there's bad stuff out there that we can't even begin to know, and it's not going away just because we don't believe it exists. We have to pursue the unknown with certainty or it's going to jump up and bite us. This is a new age, Congressman. Absolute proof can't be a precondition for action.

I mean, nobody could have foreseen them using airplanes, right? What else can we not foresee? What can they do to our water that we haven't thought of, that we can't even begin to think of? Before you let the public dip one single toe in the national Jacuzzi, you've got to think ahead to the unknown unknown scenario where the jihadists dump in a jug of lye or loosen the wheels on the bucket, and you bring the hammer down hard on whoever might do that before they can even think of doing it.

The absence of evidence, somebody once said, is not evidence of absence. The only way to fight this thing is to alter behavior. To force people who believe in freedom to redress that balance between freedom and security. Maintain the freedom, but modify
it with an eye toward security. If we don't, the terrorists win. Full stop.

 

Rep. Frost:
If we could leave the realm of the unknown for a moment. [
laughter
] Oaken Bucket—now that you've had time to reflect, are there any tactical or operational lessons that you've learned from this episode, as an analyst?

 

Diaz:
I swore an oath of frankness, so let me be frank. Part of me is glad. Part of me is okay in my conscience about the Oaken Bucket incident. Why? Because how else were we going to sit up and take notice, as a nation, to the vulnerability of our recreational waters?

Does it pain me that people suffered? Sure. I suffered too. Not like Brenda Mills, but I took my lumps. I got stitches and a dislocated shoulder—looked like something out of the Baghdad morgue. But part of me's grateful for the pain. Because now we've got a national dialogue going.

You elected officials, you're so goddamn smug. You can sit there and debate what gets earmarked for this or that, whose barrel gets the pork, but we don't have that luxury. We're on the front lines on this water issue. It's a war. And what we did at Prospector's Bend was just the first shot—

 

Rep. Frost:
I believe the agent has misspoken. This isn't a “we” scenario. The quote unquote “shot” here was fired by Jim Rath, and by him alone, as the preponderance of evidence indicates. That phase of the investigation is complete, son, and it's time we moved on.

 

Diaz:
Sure, Congressman. Let's just move on. Until the next incident, or the next. What's it going to take for you to stop moving on? A
dirty bomb in your Jacuzzi bath up there in Chevy Chase? Or how about a bucket of industrial solvent in the congressional lap pool? Or a capsule of Ebola in your wasabi mashed potatoes over in the House commissary?

 

Rep. Frost:
I'm not entirely comfortable with the direction this dialogue is taking here.