About two weeks ago, a security team spotted scorch marks on a basement doorway below 4 World Trade Center, on the east side of the ruined complex, according to officials.
Even in a place of mass devastation and death, those scorch marks got fast attention. They had not been noticed by a patrol team a few hours earlier, and behind the damaged -- but intact -- door were nearly a thousand tonnes of gold and silver. To security officials, it looked as if someone had tried to break in.
Within hours, a video surveillance system was installed to keep at least an electronic eye on the precious metals until their custodian, the Bank of Nova Scotia, had a chance to remove them. That work began this week.
A team of 30 firefighters and police officers is helping to move the metals, a task that can be measured practically down to the flake but that has been rounded off at 379,036 ounces of gold and 29,942,619 ounces of silver.
As layers of debris are peeled away, recovery workers are opening gangways to intact portions of a 6.4 hectares basement that was largely unseen but was a place of spectacular scope in its own right. Just the basement area of the World Trade Center enclosed twice as much space as the entire Empire State Building.
Nearly a quarter of a mile below the spectacular vistas from the towers was their upside-down attic dropping 21m below the ground, a strange world with enough room for fortunes in gold and silver, for Godiva chocolates, assault weapons, old furniture, bricks of cocaine, phony taxicabs and CIA files. With so many people still lost, the owners of this stuff have maintained a discreet silence during the recovery operations. But that doesn't mean they're not interested.
Beneath the Customs House -- 6 World Trade Center -- was an armada of government vehicles, including dozens owned by the Secret Service, in a fenced-off area. Within that area was a garage where a single armored limousine was parked under the tightest security.
The limousine was so long that it needed straight-line access to the street, because it could not clear tight corners in the basement.
That car had been used to carry heads of state visiting the city, said Tony Ball, a spokesman for the Secret Service. (The president's limousines are stored in Washington and flown everywhere he visits.)
In the 1993 trade center bombing, an armored Secret Service limousine was parked about 30m from a truck bomb. Although the bomb crashed through five stories of concrete and the concussion destroyed cars all over that floor, the Secret Service limousine "did not even have a broken windshield," according to a government official on the scene that day. The condition of the limousine after September's attack was not known Wednesday. "We haven't gotten anything back yet," Ball said.
Asked about reports that his agency also kept what looked like ordinary taxis and telephone company trucks in the basement, Ball laughed. "What I would say is that it is not unusual for law enforcement agencies to have these kinds of things," he said.
Besides the Secret Service, the building named for the US Customs Service also housed an office of the CIA.
That building is now partly collapsed, with a rubble pit 9m deep. Somewhere in there are drugs, weapons and contraband seized by the Customs Service at the region's airports. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms also lost two evidence vaults, according to a spokesman for that agency, Joseph Green. They have not yet been recovered.
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