Perilous Panacea (6 page)

Surling stood, went to the table, and grabbed a khaki shirt from the pile of work clothes left by the big goon. They’d be dressed for this job, he thought. No theoretical studies, unless you worked on computers like Reedan. “So we’re south of New York and east of the Mississippi River. So what? The question is, how the hell do we get out of here?”

“There’s no way. I tried that in Miami, and they stopped me cold. They’ve got guns, and one of them is outside the door day and night.”

“Find a way, because we’ve got to escape. If we’re still here when they finish their job, we’re dead.”

Surling watched Reedan’s head snap back as if suddenly awakened. Obviously, he’d have to have his head extracted from his ass.

“They said they’d pay us and turn us loose if we cooperate,” Reedan said.

“And you’ll cooperate? You’ll help those crazy bastards build an atomic bomb?”

“We don’t have a choice. They’ll kill us if we don’t.”

“You mean you’ll help them build a bomb, take their money, and leave? You’ll never worry about how those ten or fifteen bombs we make will be used, how many people they might kill? In other words, if they let you go, you wouldn’t run straight to the police?”

“But they said…”

“They’ll kill us,” Surling said quietly. “They don’t have a choice.”

Chapter Seven

Rick Saul listened to the vocal squirming of the outwardly calm men on the other side of the table as they went into cover-your-ass mode. According to agents who did this all the time, in Washington, somebody—Democrat or Republican—was always trying to save face. Saul knew what came next: whenever trouble surfaced for anyone with power, the immediate reaction was to try to tie the hands of the investigators.

“It’s simple,” George Spanner said from Saul’s side of the table. “Lie-detector tests for anybody and everybody who could be involved. That’s what, fifteen, maybe twenty people?”

Bart Kraft shook his graying, sand-colored head, but not a hair moved. “We can’t,” he said, his calm, blue-eyed gaze on Spanner. “Involve twenty people and the story will be in the Post and Times within twelve hours. Besides, it’s not an internal problem.” Although they were in Kraft’s office, sitting at a small conference table across the room from his paper-free desk, the slim Kraft wore his light-blue sport coat buttoned.

Saul waited for the mundane details of a typical SGP—stolen government property—report. Because government agencies like DOE and DOD were into everything from food and office supplies to gold bullion, some employee was forever trying to get his share. In Washington, it was either stolen government property or some government-type using his influence one way or another to get a little something on the side, like some congressman forcing his affections on one of his female employees.

Since arriving in Washington eleven months ago, Saul had spent his eight-to-ten hours a day in the Bureau’s Crime Records Division manipulating murder, rape, and robbery statistics on a computer. Everybody said getting called to Washington put you on the Bureau fast track, but for Saul, it was a boring track. At times, even Spokane looked good.

Saul didn’t understand why Spanner brought him along on this case, especially considering the two men across the table. Kraft was Associate Administrator for Defense Nuclear Security for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of DOE, and the man next to him, Doyle Logson, was Director of Security for DOD.

“So what do we do?” Spanner asked, his fleshy face reddening, a spark kindled in his pale-blue eyes. “You’ve lost—whatever lost means—some nuclear material and you don’t want us to investigate too closely, at least not so anyone around here gets any dirt on him.”

“You know what we mean, George,” Logson said, smiling like he did every time he spoke, a smile that squeezed his eyelids into a caricature of a skinny, baldheaded Chinaman, although he was as white as most Civil Service employees at his level.

Saul figured Logson’s emaciated look came from an addiction to jogging. Once he started to jog, his face shrank or his ears grew. Logson’s bald head reminded him of his own mop of curly brown hair. Mary claimed he wasn’t balding, but how do you measure recession? Every picture of his father Saul had ever seen showed him with an extremely high forehead.

“This is complicated,” Logson said. “It involves a large amount of sensitive material.”

“Large amount? Sensitive material?” Spanner’s short gray hair and pink face labeled him the twenty-seven-year Bureau veteran he was. He jogged, but it didn’t budge the extra thirty pounds he carted around on his five-nine frame.

Saul leaned forward, realizing he should have expected something big when a senior supervisory agent like Spanner abandoned his desk to trek out to Germantown, and they wind up faced with two high-ranking bureaucrats.

“First, we don’t understand how three truckloads of SNM became involved. We usually ship only one at a time.”

“S-N-M?”

“Special nuclear material.”

“Special?” Saul said quietly, not sure if he should get involved in the questioning or let Senior Agent Spanner do all the talking. “Does special mean somebody could make bombs with it?”

Kraft nodded. “The shipments carried both plutonium and enriched uranium.” He proceeded to lay out the scenario that somehow involved changes in the shipment contents made by unknown persons. All of the material was bomb grade, and it was considerably different from the original manifest.

“We haven’t been able to determine who authorized changes in the shipment,” Kraft said. “Then there was the convenient computer crash. This happened during the cyber-terrorist incident that hit the internet and all those other computers four weeks ago?”

Logson explained that the computer crash happened about thirty minutes after the shipment left the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant in Tennessee headed for Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina. DOE’s super computer in New Mexico crashed, just like thousands of computers around the world. Before the computers went down, Albuquerque had direct voice and computer communication with the convoy. They were tracking it by GPS. All contact was lost when the computer went down. When the computer came back online over two hours later, they were unable to reestablish contact. GPS contact was also lost. The three trucks had disappeared.

Spanner shook his head. “Unless there’s been a change I haven’t heard of, the FBI’s got jurisdiction in all SGP cases, including nuclear material. Looks like that’s what we’ve got here. Homeland should have been notified, too.”

“We know, George,” Logson said. “We didn’t call you or Homeland sooner because of special circumstances.”

“There are always special circumstances. But this was four weeks ago.”

“We wanted to get you in right away, but the White House ordered us to look into it before you were called.”

“The White House? You mean they couldn’t come up with a quick plan on how to blame the previous administration?”

“I took a team of CID investigators to Tennessee,” Logson said. “At DOD we’ve got excellent investigative capabilities, and we thought CID could handle it quickly.”

Kraft broke in. “We knew the hijackers couldn’t pull much of a terrorist act with the material in its present state. Some is liquid, and some is warhead material from dismantled nuclear missiles. They’d need considerable expertise to transform the stuff into bombs, and that takes time. We figured they’d contact us and try to ransom the SNM. The White House wanted that to happen without the public—the press—getting wind of it.”

“You say some of it is liquid?” Spanner asked.

“There were over four-hundred gallons. It’s stored and shipped as an aqueous solution. Before it’s used, it’s put into solid form by precipitation.”

“So did the trucks ever show up?”

Logson nodded. “They were found in the woods early the next day, just outside of Loudon, Tennessee. Out of the ten people assigned to the convoy, only four bodies have been found, three dead and one critical. The dead included a driver, a guard, and the convoy commander. The critical was a driver. He’s recovering.”

“What do the others have to say about what happened?” Spanner asked.

“We haven’t found them. They disappeared along with the nuclear material.”

Saul remembered the nuclear disarmament rally Mary dragged him to shortly after they moved to Washington. One of her new interests, once she discovered it was one of the Senator’s interests. Most speakers ranted about thousands of nuclear warheads the U.S. and Russia continued to hold—even in this time of supposedly cordial East-West relations. If only a few of them exploded, they would tear the old globe a new asshole. The speakers were mainly blaming the U.S. and wanted the U.S. to act unilaterally.

Somewhere between the repetitive tedium of young howlers and old squealers, a scrawny, middle-aged professor from Dartmouth got up and said the real danger lay in any number of petty dictators around the world that might somehow get a bomb, perhaps by stealing nuclear material. He mentioned Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. Then he talked about the terrorists always on the lookout for ways to make a dirty bomb—use conventional explosives to spread nuclear material around a city. The nuclear material would not kill anyone immediately, but it would spread havoc and require a long time to clean up the mess to avoid people becoming ill in the long term.

Saul spoke up. “What if whoever stole the bomb material decided to get it out of the country, somebody like Iran. They weren’t too happy about what the U.S. and Israel did to their nuclear program last year. This might be their way to get bomb-grade material without having to make it themselves.”

“You mean like your people did,” Logson said, the smile on his shiny face expanding, further slitting the eyes. “By the way, the U.S. was not involved in the raid on Iran. That was your people, too.”

So Logson was that kind, Saul thought, his face growing warm. He knew what Logson meant, because the professor had mentioned it. He forced himself to smile and said, “My people?”

“The Israelis. They stole a boat load of uranium ore to make their first bomb.”

“I don’t think we’re worried about the Israelis here,” Spanner said. “Besides, if I read you right, the stuff these people got is a lot easier to turn into bombs than a boat load of uranium ore. How much stuff was stolen, all totaled?”

“Enough for fifteen, perhaps twenty atomic-type bombs,” Kraft said. “Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-type bombs.”

“Twenty atomic bombs?”

“It only takes fifteen pounds or so to make an atomic bomb,” Kraft said. “That assumes they know how to use the material efficiently, which is highly unlikely. They also got some other radioactive material they’ll have a hard time turning into bombs. In fact, if they’re not careful with it, it’ll burn them good.”

“This is supposed to be 2011, not 1970,” Spanner said. “Back in the seventies, the Bureau and the old Atomic Energy Commission worried about somebody stealing nuclear material. These days, DOE has a security system second to none, invulnerable. At least that’s what you’ve been telling people.”

Saul enjoyed watching Spanner cut through the bullshit. Although Saul hadn’t seen much of Spanner, he’d heard Harry Bryson’s story that Spanner, among others, had DOed— diversified out. According to Bryson, the diversity policy drove promotions at Spanner’s level, so most mid-level, middle-aged white men hit a dead end. Morale for most agents suffered when they discovered they’d topped out because older white men at the very top had to justify their professed diversity policy. Many of the DOed quit or retired. For Spanner, however, being DOed gave him freedom to deal head-on with the bureaucratic chicken shit that came down the pike.

“Our security is excellent,” Kraft said. “We knew we had a few problems given the funding restrictions we’ve operated under the last couple of years.”

“We don’t think they’re terrorists,” Logson said. “Or else we would have heard from them by now.”

“They wouldn’t have had to steal that much material to pull a terrorist act,” Kraft said.

Watching Kraft operate made Saul pull himself upright. Kraft’s upper body never moved. All business, hands resting on the table, he sat as if he had a steel rod shoved up his ass.

“So it’s a foreign country, like my people,” Saul said, remembering to smile. Mary insisted a Jekyll-and-Hyde character hid in the intensity of his dark-brown, deep-set eyes, and his charm only broke through in the carefree youthfulness of the smiling curly haired boy that first attracted her to him. Critical comments by her seemed to come more frequently lately, perhaps because his smiles didn’t break through to her as often as they used to.

Logson’s smile flickered. “I didn’t mean your people to be taken personally. We agree. Either a foreign agency is behind it, or some enterprise hijacked it to sell to a foreign country.”

“Who: Iran? North Korea? Venezuela?”

Logson shrugged. “We’ve got the CIA making discreet inquiries.”

“You’ve what?” Spanner asked, almost coming out of his chair. “You called the CIA in before us, too?”

“Well, if a foreign country’s involved…The White House suggested the CIA. Their man runs the agency.”

After a brief silence, Kraft glanced at Saul, sighed, and spoke to Spanner. “George, you know it’s always like this in Washington. You’re asked to do a job, and then you don’t get the money to do it. Cost cutting is the latest bureaucratic buzzword. My budget was cut twenty percent since I took over two years ago. Before this happened, the administration talked about more cuts. I don’t have the people to do the job right. We protested, but nobody remembers that when something like this happens. If the media gets a hint of this, I’m through.”

The bottom line, Saul thought. Kraft and Logson were stuck in the quagmire Uncle Nathan was trying to suck Saul into: a political career. Thanks to Uncle Nathan, Mary was already trapped. He should never have let her take the job on the Senator’s staff. As if he could have talked her out of it after Nate dangled it in front of her like the keys to a BMW. Nate probably saw it as a way to guide Saul in what he considers the right direction—Nate’s way of bestowing fatherly generosity.

Uncle Nathan called as soon as Saul got to Washington. He “gently” urged Saul to get in touch with the Senator if he ever got wind of something the Senator could use politically. Shortly after Nate talked to him, the Senator called to deliver the same message. Until now, Saul had spent his time behind a computer console massaging numbers, and there was nothing the Senator could use.

“So how do we fit into this case?” Spanner asked. “I’m sure somebody’s concocted the rules we’ll work under.”

Logson nodded, smiled, and glanced at the ceiling. “It’s been decided on high, very high. You got certain directions from the Director’s office before you came over here, George, and you’ll be getting more. The Administration isn’t taking this lightly, no sir,” Logson said, smiling at Saul. “It’s Operation SWISILREC, Swift Silent Recovery. Bart and I will report to the Assistant Secretaries of DOE and DOD, respectively. George, you’ll report to your Associate Director Dowel. The Justice Department, Homeland Security, DOE, and DOD have formed a joint oversight committee for SWISILREC that includes the Attorney General, Director of Homeland Security, the FBI Director, and the Secretaries of Defense and Energy. Finally, there’s a White House POC—planning and operations committee—with those same people, plus the President’s National Security Advisor, the head of CIA, and the President’s Chief of Staff. Of course, the President will be involved in SWISILREC on every level as he sees fit.”