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naturally be in either conscious or unconscious assent with our plan. Most scientists, you know, depend in some form or another on government funding. So they’ll be highly motivated to sign off on our dastardly mass-murder plot, since they know their salaries—some of these people make almost a hundred thousand a year, you know—ultimately depend on our ability to secure fifty billion additional barrels of oil per day by 2010 by fooling the population into invading Saddam Hussein’s secular Iraq by faking a terrorist attack against the World Trade Center at the hands of a bunch of Saudi religious radicals loyal to the Afghan-supported terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

WOLFOWITZ: No, I get it, I really do. It all makes sense.

CHENEY: Also, we have to knock down WTC 7, this very building, in order to get rid of the evidence. I think it goes without saying that we’ll need a command center for these operations, and I can’t think of a place that would be better or more appropriate than an office right next to the point of attack. From these very offices, gentlemen, we will coordinate the military war exercises that will be held in this region on that very morning, war exercises that will so thoroughly confuse our own military that they will be unable to identify and intercept the hijacked planes we will be sending at the towers like so many deadly guided missiles.

KRISTOL: But, Dick—how can we be sure that the air force won’t find a way to intercept the planes anyway?

WOLFOWITZ: I’ll answer that, Dick. Irv, the best way we can guarantee that will be to issue stand-down orders in addition to implementing the war games.

KRISTOL: I see. We order the war games in order to stymie the air force intercepts we don’t control, but just in case those fail, we’ll control the air force intercepts.

CHENEY: Now you’re catching on.

KRISTOL: And the control center for those war games and for all our other plans, including the demolition, will be right here. These rooms are secret and utterly impenetrable to the general public at the moment, but after the attacks they will be vulnerable to forensic inspection by whichever city or federal agency goes through the wreckage of this doomed building.

CHENEY: Exactly. That’s one of the reasons I thought we should choose this space. If we chose some other spot as a base of operations—a warehouse in Queens, say—we might be able to keep it secure forever. But if we set up here, we can be sure some snooping official will end up poking around in the ruins. And we want that, it adds intrigue to the whole deal. Because it goes without saying that we won’t be able to control all the cleanup agencies, except those that might be inclined to find our bomb fragments. Those we can count on one hundred percent.

KRISTOL: Right, but still, we have to really be sure we destroy everything here. Especially all the papers and computer records of the conspiracy plans, which we will naturally leave behind, banking on the fact that they will be destroyed in the hellish conflagration.

FEITH: Guys, I’m lost. You’re saying we have to detonate this entire building in order to cover up the evidence of the crime?

ALL: Of course.

FEITH: Why don’t we just not leave the evidence behind and not blow up the building? Why should there be any evidence to leave behind at all?

CHENEY: Doug, you’re not being realistic. You always have to leave evidence of covert operations behind for the public to maybe find.

WOLFOWITZ: Well, except that we never have before.

CHENEY: Right, except for that. (A phone in the middle of the conference table rings. Kristol picks it up.)

KRISTOL: Hello? Who’s this? Oh, hey, Larry. A gast in shtetl! I’ll put you on speaker! (cups phone, presses speaker button; addresses others) It’s Larry Silverstein, the WTC landlord.

SILVERSTEIN: Hey guys! Vos makht ir?

CHENEY: Not bad, Larry, how goes it?

SILVERSTEIN: In dr’erd afn dek! Just awful! But we get by, you know.

CHENEY: What can we do you for, Larry?

SILVERSTEIN: Oh, hey, well, a little birdie told me that