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By Root 719 0

for a hundred days. All during that time, the acrid stench penetrated the office of the FBI, a sickening reminder of their failure to stop the attack and their own narrow escape from death. One active agent, Leonard Hatton, a bomb technician, did not survive. He had worked the embassy bombings and the Cole with O’Neill, and he died trying to rescue victims in the towers. In the hectic, endless months following 9/11, the members of the I-49 squad were sorting through their shock, their grief, and their shame. Better than anyone in the country, they had known the danger America faced. And yet the I-49 squad had been largely alone in its efforts. Since the embassy bombings they had labored tirelessly, spending months and even years out of the country, many of them losing marriages or significant relationships because of the toll the investigations had taken. They were exhausted even before 9/11. Now their trauma was compounded by the stigma that was assigned to them because they had not prevented the tragedy they had known was coming.

O’Neill’s face was one of thousands on the handmade posters plastering the walls of the Port Authority and Grand Central Terminal and telephone poles all over Manhattan. Against all odds, Valerie’s brother, John McKillop, a paramedic in Chicago, vowed to find O’Neill. He and twenty-five of his colleagues drove to New York, with a police escort all the way. They were one of many spontaneous caravans of emergency services that poured into the city from all over the country. It was strange to see military forces on the streets of an American city, with gun emplacements protecting the bridges and significant buildings. Airports were shut down everywhere in America, but military jets scurried about like angry hornets.

When McKillop got to Ground Zero, he was staggered by the immense burning mountain of debris. Rescue workers were digging night and day hoping to find survivors, but the sight sucked the hope out of McKillop. “All I could think of was, What am I going to tell my sister?”

Many of the bodies of the people who died in the Trade Center were never found, but on September 21 rescuers digging in the rubble near the corner of Liberty and Greenwich streets found the corpse of a man in a blue suit. His wallet was in his breast pocket. It was John.

In so many respects, the Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing sixty-two countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world. There was an ex-hippie stockbroker, the gay Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadoran sous chef, a Barbie Doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant…. The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction that the taking of a single life destroys a universe. Al-Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it struck all of humanity.

As bits and pieces of the dead were extracted from the site, they were cataloged and identified, often using DNA that emergency workers had secured from family members who supplied strands of hair from a victim’s brush, for instance. Each part of each body was given the same treatment, with one exception: When anyone of the more than four hundred deceased members of the uniformed services was discovered, there was a special protocol, which was accorded O’Neill. An American flag was draped over his body, and the New York City policemen and firemen who were digging through the rubble stood at attention as his body was carried to the ambulance.

When he was growing up in Atlantic City, John O’Neill had been an altar boy at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church. On September 28, a thousand mourners gathered at St. Nicholas to say farewell. Many of them were agents and policemen and members of foreign intelligence services who had followed O’Neill into the war against terrorism long before it had become a rallying cry. In the nervous days after the attacks, the streets around the church were barricaded and an army helicopter prowled overhead.

Dick Clarke