by Mats Vizarof Matthew could worry about babies and the Internet all he wants. Here is what Luke could not stop from throbbing in his fevered mind with the relentless intensity of a gambler counting cards at the blackjack table: two. “Two people is all it would take,” he drove his fingers back through his hair and paced rapidly back and forth beside the sandwich shop in the middle of the vast parking lot out by the airport. One to do all the necessary work, and another to hire him, to be the person who would want 9/11 to happen. That’s it.

The point that Luke was stuck on, the one he realized with increasing excitement—the breakthrough, he kept thinking, the concept that makes his novel go, finally—is that a scenario need only explain the absolutely essential elements of the overall event. A novel about 9/11 from the point of view of the inside job, a novel that tried to develop a story that covered all the questions raised about that huge event, would of course be impossible to write and unwieldy to read. But when he began to strip away all the parts of that day that were not necessary to the main event, he found the whole puzzle falling clickity-clack into place.

Point A for Luke: The main problem with all conventional theories of 9/11, including the official theory, is that they all require more people than can reasonably be involved in a conspiracy. You’ve got WTC security guards, air force pilots, stock traders, cell-phone callers, hijackers—literally heaps of bodies. But once Luke began to strip away any role or event not essential to the main show, he found the number of necessary people involved dropping precipitously, and eventually all the way down to two, in fact.

“All you really need to achieve the full effect of 9/11,” now Luke leaned over the passenger seat from the back of John’s cab, “is the planes flying into the buildings and the buildings falling down. You don’t need passports, Arab flight manuals, cell-phone calls, security guards, engineers, Zionists, investigators, officials, commentators in the newspapers, or even presidents.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Just one hired gun could do all the essential preparations.”

John nodded. He was okay with it so far, and why not? he thought. Let him get so deep down his own rabbit hole he can’t tell the way back up. There’ll be no novel from him.

Luke was in the back of John’s taxi-cab where it was parked “in the weeds,” as the vast taxi holding area at the airport was called. When John was called up to the airport exit doors after a couple of hours sitting in the weeds, Luke would get out and sit in the cabbies’ sandwich shop or stand around outside thinking and making notes until John got back for his next airport trip, and they’d carry on the conversation for another couple of hours. John was the resident logician among the three. If a story line didn’t hold together, John would spot the crack. Luke found it worthwhile sometimes to spend the whole night with John in the weeds.

Here is how Luke was setting up the back-story to his novel: “First the hired man accumulates a sufficient quantity of standard building demolition explosives months in advance, certainly not a very hard thing to imagine a resourceful person doing.” John stared ahead, the way he does when he’s driving.

“Then he acquires fake ID as an office employee, one of a hundred thousand at the WTC towers, among whom there must be hundreds of new ones every week in the normal turnover of staff at companies with offices there.

“The resourceful man then gets a key to the service doors leading into the elevator shafts, of which there must be hundreds, and there must be plenty of keys around, too. Over the course of several months, he drives into the basement parking levels of the WTC towers, gets out of his car wearing a business suit and pulls from his trunk two ordinary lawyer-type briefcases.” “The thick heavy document kind on wheels,” John added.

Luke could see it so clearly when he stared with John into that inky blackness behind the airport landing strips. “He walks to the elevators like everyone else, but with no one looking, he slips instead through a service door, takes off his suit so it doesn’t get dirty, and removes from his briefcases standard building demolition explosives which he proceeds to place on the internal columns up through the core of the towers, moving through the elevator shafts where no one would ever see him.”

“What about other service guys, they must all know each other, they eat sandwiches together,” John pointed out, now gripping his steering wheel tighter as though careening down a highway, even though his cab was frozen in place in a sea of 300 other waiting cabs. John got positively excited the more insane Luke appeared. He loved greasing his slope.

“How often does anyone have to go into an elevator shaft? Come on!” Luke pursed his lips and moved on. “He locates the charges where they can’t easily be seen by anyone entering the shafts later for routine service, and there are no wires necessary since all the explosives are outfitted with wireless cell-phone-technology detonators—technology and know-how available even to insurgents in Iraq who place roadside bombs and trigger them remotely. A computer-controlled sequence of transmissions could precisely arrange the order and timing of the detonations necessary to bring the towers down properly and at the right time. A bit of building demolition know-how can’t be that hard to learn, given some time and an internet hook-up.” Luke rolled back into the seat, just starting to hit his stride.

“The detonations would all occur inside the central core of the buildings,” he went on with the certainty in his voice of someone reciting a poem they’d known since childhood, “providing no evidence of explosives to anyone standing outside looking at the towers. The only hint that the core was brought down first would be the sinking of the central part of the roof into the building just prior to its total collapse, a piece of evidence sure to be obscured by the tremendous smoke of fires from the airplane crashes.”

John rubbed his chin. “Okay, but that’s part two. What about the airplanes? They come first.”

Luke’s eyes scanned across the blank front window as though his mind was retrieving that file. “The control of airplanes might not be much more complicated to explain, and could still be set up ahead of time by the same one guy. The critical question is,” he rested his eyes on the back of John’s head, “can flight control computers be overwritten and reprogrammed? And the answer is yes, of course they can.” He was relying on crazy Chuck now.

“Someone would not have to get inside any specific plane, just any old four planes in the entire fleet of thousands that fly every day between cities in America would do. And all one would have to do is import some code into the computer flight control system, code that replaces a flight path on one particular day at any time in the future so that the plane follows a different course. The code, once placed, could sit there undetected, awaiting the minute, hour, and day to kick in and take over the controls.” His novel looked so clear to him in moments of clarity like this, why was it so easy to hold it all in his mind when he was in the back of John’s cab in the weeds, but when he was at home in front of his computer, it was all so muddled? “It would explain,” Luke came to his point, “how jet aircraft high over Ohio, once taken off their usual computer-controlled flight plan, could be so accurately pointed to a city hundreds of miles away, and steered there with no apparent need for correction all the way, even straight into a particular building, as though the hijacker could eyeball the World Trade Center from Ohio. How would a hijacker steering manually take such accurate aim?” he put it to John.

The chief clue that led Luke to this scenario was something he noticed on that fateful day. It was in one shot of the second plane hitting the second tower, a video tape segment shot from high up in a nieghbouring building over which the plane flew directly before carrying on into the tower, and it records an odd event. From almost directly behind the plane, as you see it approach the tower, you can see in the last two seconds, while it’s going 500 miles per hour at a slight angle, the plane makes a minute correction. The left wing, already down about 20 degrees, dips a couple more degrees, then comes back up halfway. It’s very slight, and you would maybe miss it if you weren’t looking for it.

Luke, his chin on the floor of the café next door to the bookstore along with everyone else’s chins when they watched the plane hit, immediately caught the strange course correction. With the tower at that point occupying the entire field of vision of someone in the cockpit, with less than two seconds to go before slamming into it at such a terrific speed, with the hit a sure thing at that point, would a hijacker actually think to make a slight, unnecessary adjustment to his trim? Only a computer following a preprogrammed path would care to make an adjustment at that point. The adjustment is odd too: it isn’t smooth as one would expect of a person steering it manually, it is digital-like, rapidly and precisely changing angles, before rapidly and precisely cutting the increase in angle in half, machine-like. “The planes were on automatic pilot all the way,” Luke concluded for John, “they were following a flight plan dictated by the computer control system, as usual, only a different flight plan.”

John moved the cab up to the front of the line, the next car to be called up to the airport exit levels. He left the car running this time, staring thoughtfully ahead into the abyss. “The rest of what happened that day all falls into either the false-information, bad-lead, or over-zealous and over-excited reporter category, or the unessential event category,” Luke was leaning over the back of the passenger seat again. “It is not necessary, for example, for such a plot to include an explanation of why or how the FBI arrived just moments after the fact at a gas station near the Pentagon to seize video tapes of the crash. Maybe the official version of events is correct on that part, but it isn’t essential to the overall plot. Even if they didn’t show up to seize the tape, the same overall event of 9/11 and its effects would still occur without significant alteration.”

John stared straight ahead, saying nothing. He had already stopped listening. He was thinking instead of his own novel now, because it had a similar event: the terrorist destruction of Timbuktu, a thousand years earlier. Luke’s character reduction technique had just given him a great idea.