According to Hill, Rescorla concluded that because the World Trade Center was the tallest building in New York, situated at the heart of Wall Street, and a symbol of American economic might, it was likely to remain a target of anti-American militants. At Hill’s urging, he told his superiors that, while the bombing of the Trade Center and numerous other recent acts of Islamic terrorism had been technologically unsophisticated, Muslim terrorists were showing increasing technological and tactical awareness, and were getting better. Hill’s research had uncovered the existence of groups, connected to some of the New Jersey mosques, whose goal was to travel around talking to young people and recruiting the radicals among them.

Rescorla and Hill also sketched a scenario of what the next attack might look like. The city targeted might be New York, Washington, or Philadelphia, or even all three. Drawing on his research for the novel on the air-cavalry unit, Rescorla envisioned an air attack on the Twin Towers, probably an air-cargo plane travelling from the Middle East or Europe to Kennedy or Newark airport, loaded with explosives or chemical or biological weapons. Rescorla also discussed his theories with another close friend, Fred McBee, a fellow-writer he’d met at the University of Oklahoma. He told McBee that he’d spoken up at company board meetings about unconventional threats, such as “dirty” bombs, small “artillery nukes,” and anthrax. He followed events in the Middle East closely. “He assumed that it would be the terrorists’ mission to bring the Trade Center down,” McBee said.

Rescorla concluded that the company should leave the World Trade Center and build quarters in New Jersey, preferably a three- or four-story complex spread over a large area. He pointed out that many employees already commuted from New Jersey and would welcome the change. He warned that Manhattan’s limited bridge and tunnel connections meant that it could be easily cut off, and transportation and communications disrupted. Moreover, the World Trade Center space was expensive compared with real estate in the suburbs.

The World Trade Center lease didn’t expire until 2006, however. Rescorla and his colleagues stayed in Manhattan, and in the meantime Rescorla worked out an evacuation plan for the company’s twenty-two floors. At a command from him, which would come over the intercom system, all employees were instructed to move to the emergency staircases. Starting with the top floor, they were to prepare to march downstairs in twos, so that someone would be alongside to help if anyone stumbled. As the last pair from one floor reached the floor below, employees from that floor would fall in behind them. The drill was practiced twice a year. A few people made fun of it and resisted, but Rescorla tolerated no dissent, demanding military precision and insisting on a clearly defined command system. As he told Hill, he was simply following the “Eight ‘P’s,” a mnemonic that had been drummed into them in the military: “Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”

For Rescorla personally, a company move to New Jersey would shorten his commute, which, he told Hill, was exhausting him. For a while, he considered moving to a place in New Jersey just across the Hudson from the Trade Center—a Portuguese neighborhood in Newark. Rescorla loved Portuguese food and the warm ambience of the Portuguese community, and was even learning Portuguese. He told Hill that he had his eye on a former firehouse that was for sale. His idea was to turn the upstairs into an apartment and use the ground floor as a garage and gym. But then he stopped talking about the firehouse.

Over their long friendship, Hill and Rescorla had often discussed exploits with women. Hill had been Rescorla’s best man when he married his first wife, in Dallas in 1972, and he counselled Rescorla through his divorce. Although Hill respected women, and had been married to his own wife, Patricia, for forty-one years, he otherwise preferred the company of men. What he was interested in, as he put it, was “hunting, fishing, shooting people, good stories, and drinking beer.” His wife wouldn’t go along with the extreme subservience of women practiced in Islam, and had refused to convert, which was fine with Hill, but the Islamic separation of the sexes appealed to him. Most of his conversations about women focussed on sex, so he was surprised when Rescorla mentioned, in one of their afternoon phone calls, that he’d met an “interesting” woman. “Someone I met while jogging.”

“What kind of breast line does she have?” Hill asked.

“This is a nice lady.”

“You better be careful of nice ladies.”

But Susan Greer kept cropping up in their talks. “Christ,” Hill finally acknowledged, “this looks serious. This isn’t just some roll in the hay.”

“I think I met the woman of my life,” Rescorla replied.

“Get off my ass,” Hill said. “You sound like a sophomore in high school.”

Over the next months, Hill hardly recognized his best friend, so giddy was Rescorla on the subject of Susan. Finally, Hill decided to see for himself. On the way to Rhode Island for a shotgun competition, he and his wife stopped off in Morristown, and Susan made dinner. It was obvious to Hill that Susan was from a higher social class, which made him a little self-conscious. Still, he could see that she was smitten with Rescorla, and he with her. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Hill had trouble understanding this behavior in a fifty-nine-year-old man, but there was no denying it.

A month or so later, Rescorla told Hill that he and Susan wanted him to be the best man at their wedding, and they wanted to be married in St. Augustine. He asked Hill to look for a large oak tree where the ceremony could be held. Like much of the population of Cornwall, Rescorla’s family was of Celtic descent, and the oak figures prominently in Celtic lore. Rescorla kept an old Celtic shield and thought of himself as a Celtic warrior. Hill knew just the place: an oak that stood outside the Castillo de San Marcos, built in the seventeenth century, which would appeal to Rescorla’s love of history and Celtic myth. And it was right next to the ocean.

Rick Rescorla and Susan Greer were married on February 20, 1999. The bride wore a Versace suit that the groom had chosen for her, and carried a single calla lily. He wore a pin-striped suit. Hill asked a friend, a local judge and retired brigadier general, to preside at the ceremony. Rescorla’s friend Fred McBee came from his home, in South Florida. Afterward, Hill and his wife hosted a reception at a nearby restaurant.

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Once Rick and Susan were back in New Jersey, their life settled into a comfortable routine. Every weekday morning, Rescorla drove to Convent Station and caught the six-ten train. He was at his desk in the World Trade Center by 7:30 A.M., and invariably spoke to Susan at eight-fifteen, after he had checked to make sure all of his security staff were at their posts. Sometimes he was so jubilant after their calls that he broke into song. When he arrived home, a little after 6 P.M., Susan and Buddy would be standing at the door. Rick and Susan kept a nature log of life on the pond, recording the births of geese and ducks. On weekends, they continued their explorations of historic sights, art galleries, and antique shops. Susan wasn’t deeply religious, but she had always prayed, asking for the strength to get through her marriages, to care for her mother, to educate her children. Now she thanked God every day that she had met Rescorla.

The word “cancer” was never mentioned between them, but Susan was convinced that, in return for everything Rick had given her, she could restore his health by giving him the peace of mind he sought. He was undergoing treatment at a cancer clinic, which required painful injections directly into his stomach every month. He never complained about them, but Susan knew they were an ordeal. He had to lie quietly for hours afterward. He also took an array of pills, which made him constantly thirsty and caused his body to swell. Susan herself had had to quit her job at the bank, because she was suffering from extreme lower-back pain, but she had benefitted from visits to a holistic practitioner. Now she persuaded Rick to accompany her. With Susan’s prompting, Rick adhered strictly to the healer’s regimen of Chinese herbal liquids, while continuing to get the injections and take the pills.

Hill was skeptical about Rescorla’s holistic approach, but he had his own medical problems, and had suffered two heart attacks in two years. Both men, having once been at the peak of fitness and stamina, now chafed at their physical limitations. Rescorla was incensed after the massacre at Columbine High School, in Colorado, in April, 1999, when police surrounded the school but a SWAT team failed to storm the building until the two killers had shot themselves. “Can you believe it?” Rescorla said to Hill. “The police were sitting outside while kids were getting killed. They should have put themselves between the perpetrators and the victims. That was abject cowardice.” Hill emphatically agreed. If they were younger, Rescorla said, “we could have flown to Colorado, gone in that building, and ended that shit before the law did.”

In May, Rick and Susan took a delayed honeymoon to his boyhood home of Hayle, a harbor community that once bustled with ships exporting tin from Cornish mines, now defunct. He’d been telling her about Hayle since the day they met, and she was eager to see it and meet his friends and relatives, who turned out to be virtually the entire population of the village. Rescorla had played rugby for the town, and was such an outstanding player that many had expected him to make a career of it. Instead, he’d gone off to America, disappearing from their lives. But for the past fifteen years he’d returned every spring, renewing old friendships and visiting his mother, who still lived in a modest stone cottage near the center of town. His best friend was Mervyn Sullivan, who had attended the same grammar school, taking the train with him every day to Penzance. Rescorla’s cousin John Daniels owned the local pub, the Cornish Arms. As a boy, Rescorla had been bigger, stronger, more coördinated than anyone else, and he was a natural leader. He’d set a school record in the shot put, which still stands, and he was an avid boxing fan. Once, a professional match was scheduled between a British boxer and an American heavyweight contender named Tami Mauriello. When his friends backed the Englishman, Rescorla proclaimed, “I’m for Tammy.” Mauriello won the fight, and the nickname stuck. Everyone in Hayle knew him as Tammy, long after the boxing match had been forgotten.

A visit from Rescorla was an occasion in the small town. The villagers had a vague idea that he had been decorated for heroism in Vietnam, but he never talked about it. He cherished his Cornish heritage, even though he’d gone off and become a success in America, earning a law degree and working for a wealthy investment bank. In some ways, Rescorla seemed more Cornish than his friends who had stayed in Hayle. He knew all the old Cornish songs and the local history. He’d invite people to the pub, throw open the bar, and have them all singing. Rescorla never seemed to forget anyone in the village. One year, he asked John Couch, a former schoolmate, if there was anything he could do for him. Couch thought about it, and said that one thing he’d always wanted was an American silver dollar. A year later, Rescorla brought him one. Rescorla also made a point of visiting his mother’s friends, many of them now confined to nursing homes. One of them, Stanley Sullivan, a man in his late eighties who had lost his sight, loved the old British military songs and Cornish folk songs as much as Rescorla—songs like “The White Rose” and “Men of Harlech” (a song featured in one of Rescorla’s favorite movies, the 1964 “Zulu”). As he did each year, Rescorla sat on Stanley’s bed with his arm around him, and they sang together. Rescorla waited until the announcement that visiting hours were over to sing “The White Rose,” which was Stanley’s favorite. Stanley tried to sing along but faltered as tears ran down his face.

Throughout the visit, Rescorla seemed eager to show Susan off. When Mervyn Sullivan told him how much he liked her, Rescorla replied, “This is the best thing that ever happened to me.” Despite his cancer, he said, he was feeling better than he had in years. “No one’s got me yet,” he said, referring to his many brushes with death, “and this cancer is not going to get me.”

Last April, Rescorla was chosen for induction into the Infantry Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame, and was invited to participate in ceremonies at Fort Benning. After meeting Susan, he had avoided most such occasions, attending few reunions of veterans of the battles in the Ia Drang Valley. He had given some interviews to his Vietnam commander, Lieutenant General Harold Moore, who was working on a book about the campaign, called “We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young.” But when Rescorla received a copy of the finished work, which featured a combat photograph of him on the cover, he put it aside without reading it. When he learned that the book was being made into a movie starring Mel Gibson, he told Susan that he had no intention of seeing it. As he frequently said to her, he felt uncomfortable with anything that portrayed him or other survivors as war heroes. “The real heroes are dead,” he said.

Rescorla made an exception for the Hall of Fame, because it was an opportunity to see Hill, who was having more heart trouble. And Susan was looking forward to the trip, because she was curious to know more about his war experiences and to meet some of the people she’d heard about. But as the trip approached Rick told her he wanted to go alone, so that he could devote his time to Hill. The night before the induction ceremony, Rescorla, Hill, and Patrick Kelly, an engineer who was close to Rescorla in Vietnam, retreated to their room. After a few drinks and some reminiscing, Rescorla said, according to Hill, “Look at us. Hill with a heart attack. Me with cancer. Kelly—he’s tall, dumb, and ugly. We’re old men and we’re going to die with people spoon-feeding us and changing our diapers.” They nodded. “Men like us shouldn’t go out like this,” he said.

“Hear, hear,” Kelly said, and they downed their drinks.

Later that month, Rick and Susan took a vacation to New Mexico. Though they had separately travelled all over the world, neither had seen much of the United States. Rick remained fascinated with the West, and they were eager to experience the spiritual aspects of Indian culture. They visited the art galleries and shops in Santa Fe, and drove to Taos, where Rick bought Susan a blouse with hand-painted eagle feathers on it. Rescorla revered the eagle, as a symbol of both American freedom and Native American mysticism. But the trip was cut short. Morgan Stanley was about to lay off fifteen hundred people, and it was the job of security personnel to escort employees out of the building the day they got the news that they had been fired. Rescorla felt it was important that every employee be allowed to leave with dignity, and he escorted some longtime employees himself. But he was shaken by the experience. Some of the people let go had been with the firm for twenty-five years or more. They were expected to pack their belongings and leave by the end of the day. Some broke down and cried in Rescorla’s presence.