minutes of the video, Buckett railed semi-coherently about the iniquity of the anti-freedom, anti-human rights, anti-American socialist Washington government. Then Hodgkin took over, calmly declaring that he and Buckett were launching the United Taliban of America. They had seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that the only way to wear down a great colonizing power was through the dedicated, unanswerable attrition of the suicide martyr. There was no power greater, he said, than the socialistic communist government in Washington and no colonization more oppressive or predatory than its rule over the once-free states of the republic. Therefore, in Denver, they were going to unleash on the Washington government a suicide storm that, he claimed, would be joined by a legion of followers inspired by their example and grow in power and ferocity until it engulfed the socialist oppressors of Washington, just as the flames that those same oppressors had unleashed had engulfed the temple of the holy martyr David Koresh in Waco.
The NRA handed over the memory stick to the FBI, but not before someone had made a copy of the file. Snippets of the video began to leak. Soon the faces of Walter Hodgkin and Andrew Buckett, sitting in full combat gear and clutching their M16s in what appeared to be a cheap motel room with the stars and stripes on the wall behind them, had became familiar across the world. The FBI refused to confirm or deny that the video was genuine. It was only as their investigation wound down that they released the full footage.
But that would be weeks later. On the Wednesday afternoon of the bombing, none of that was known. In the office on top of the frozen yoghurt store on Ramona Street, the Fishbowl staff, now forty-one strong, gathered in knots of fours and fives around computer screens and watched the stream coming live out of Denver in horror and confusion. Across town on the Homeplace campus, the press conference that had been scheduled to relaunch Worldspace, with no chance of receiving any airtime in the face of what had happened, was cancelled. All across the country, people were watching on television or computer or smartphone or any other device capable of showing the images from the Mile High City, slowly beginning to understand the scale of what had taken place. James Langan, who was a devout Christian but usually kept his faith strictly out of the office, went to a corner of the room and knelt in prayer. A number of people joined him, holding hands.
In the days afterwards, everyone at Fishbowl shared the shock of the nation, the disbelief, the numbness. They watched the president address the country that evening, his face solemn and grim, his voice choking at times as he spoke of the men and women who had died in the blast, of the brutality of a man who could stand and shoot at survivors and the public servants who had come to their aid. They joined up, like 34 million people the world over, to Fishbowl Schools repudiating what had been done and offering support to the people of Denver. They stood with the rest of the nation the next Wednesday at 12.14 p.m. Mountain Time and shared two minutes of deep, reflective silence.
And the following day, like the rest of the nation, they first heard the name Fishbowl mentioned in connection with the attack.
The rumour first surfaced in the blogosphere. Reports emerged that Buckett had been an active member of a Fishbowl School including both domestic extremists and radical foreigners that discussed resistance to the US government and had even used the site for instructions about bomb detonation. The rumour spread quickly into the Grotto. Someone notified James Langan. James walked over to Andrei’s desk. There ensued a quick, hushed conversation. Every eye in the large, unpartitioned room was on the two men. But whatever conclusion they might have reached, they didn’t have a chance to get there before two FBI agents came through the door.
The familiar figure of John Dimmer was accompanied by a woman who announced herself as Fay Carver, Special Agent in Charge of the San Francisco field office. There was nowhere for them to talk. This was going to be way bigger than a routine National Security Letter and, as the agents waited, Fishbowl’s legal officer got on the phone to find a lawyer with expertise in federal terrorist investigations. The agents said it was only an initial discussion and they didn’t think there was