A Picture of Guilt (32 page)

I felt stupid. “Are you saying her husband, this Dani, is Samir?”

He shook his head. “Pakistani agents saw Aziz in Peshawar last month. But he has a cousin. And no one has seen him for over a year.”

I paused, trying to assimilate the information, but I kept coming back to a question. “Why are you telling me all this now? What’s changed?”

“You’ve been followed, right? By someone in an SUV?”

At my nod, he pulled out a piece of paper and unfolded it. “Turn on the dome light,
chér
, and take a look at this.”

I stared at the scan of a photo. It was a lousy quality. Grainy. High contrast. Probably a copy of a copy of a passport picture. My stomach lurched anyway. The dark eyes. Mediterranean features. The cold expression. “I know him,” I whispered.

LeJeune’s eyes burned into me. “Is he the one in the SUV?”

I shook my head. “He was at Santoro’s trial the day I testified.”

“You’re sure?”

I remembered how he looked at me as if I were some inanimate object. A piece of garbage to be disposed of. I shivered. “He was sitting in the row behind my father.”

LeJeune reached for his cell phone.

I reached across to stop him. “Wait. I’m not finished. I think there’s a link between Dale Reedy and the financier of the thing. Whatever the thing is.”

LeJeune reached for his coffee instead. “Financier?”

“Abdul Al Hamarani. He tells people he’s related to the Saudi royal family. Spreads money around as thick as butter. Stays in fancy hotels. His cover is that he’s buying a chemical plant from Great Lakes Oil.”

“Abdul, eh?”

“Abdul Al Hamarani. He’s a client of my—of a man I know. He and Dale Reedy have been in contact.” I explained how I found his number on her pad of paper.

Before he had a chance to reply, his cell phone trilled.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-TWO

LeJeune stared through the windshield, his answers short, deferential. A superior giving him orders. When he was done, he twisted around.

“Our men found an antenna on the crib. I have to go. You’ll have to—”

I grabbed his arm. “I can’t—you can’t leave. Not again. Not with Samir—”

“But I can’t—” He checked his watch. “Shit. There’s no time. I need to borrow your car.”

“Only if I’m in it.”

“But I can’t—”

“Nick…”

He looked through the window, then at me. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Relief and fear swept through me simultaneously. An odd duality of emotions. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” His face was grim.

I called Dad as we pulled away and told him where I was going. He didn’t say much. Then, “Rachel can stay here. I’ll wait up.”

“I love you, Dad.”

A mixture of snow and sleet fell as we slogged through traffic. The streets were slick, but rush hour was at its peak. I wiped the inside of the windshield with my sleeve. LeJeune kept up a fast tap on the floor.

Over an hour later, we parked downtown near the police marina. One of their boats took us out, but the ride out was nothing like I remembered. A bitter wind raked the lake’s surface, turning my face numb in minutes. My stomach pitched with the waves, and for the first time I could understand how the
Edmund Fitzgerald
got into trouble. By the time we stepped onto the Carter-Harrison intake crib, almost two hours had passed.

The crib was swarming with men, most of them in FBI jackets. A complement of Chicago police officers was there, too, and a few others, I guessed, from the water department. Arc lights were strung up, and the snowflakes caught in their glare looked iridescent. A boat, which might have been Coast Guard or possibly military, was anchored a few yards away with tanks and scuba diving equipment on its deck. Funny. Rhonda Disapio was right. From this distance, they did look like logs. Metal fireplace logs.

I peered into the lake, watching snowflakes dissolve and disappear into murky black water. What was going on? Was something hidden in its depths?

LeJeune joined a group of men at the limestone and brick structure. Some of them glanced my way. Feeling self-conscious, I studied a bronze fish that sat like a gargoyle on top of the limestone wall. Flakes of snow blew into my face.

Two men up on the suspension bridge pointed at something. I squinted, trying to see. It was a set of double windows near the top of the pink and white structure.

LeJeune came over. “They turned off the pumps.”

“Why?”

“So we could send divers down in the candy striper.”

“What for?”

“So they can find whatever the antenna’s attached to.”

“Where was it—the antenna?”

He pointed up to the bridge. “It was attached to the wall. Just above those windows. Next to the suspension bridge.”

The suspension bridge. “I left the damaged cassette on the bridge. Right next to the candy striper,” I said slowly.

“Right,” LeJeune said.

A swell of noise on the other side of the crib distracted us. A couple of men gestured. LeJeune went over to listen. Then he got on his cell. He came back over, his face unreadable. “The divers found something.”

I tensed.

“We’re gonna bring in some help. You’re gonna have to clear out.”

I started to object, but he cut me off. “Go home. I’ll call you later.”

I shook my head.

He looked over at the men, then at me. I sensed him come to a decision. “Okay. There’s a white van parked over at DuSable Harbor. No one will be in it. Wait for me there.”

I nodded. “Who does it belong to?”

“A friend.”

“There’s no way you can come?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Are—are you going to be okay?”

He brushed a hand across my cheek “You can count on it,
chér
.”

Twenty minutes later a marine police boat docked at the crib, and half a dozen men in bulky dark hazmat suits and spacesuit helmets disembarked. Seven of us, including the cops and the men from the water department, took their places, and we motored back to shore. We crowded into the semienclosed cabin behind the pilot’s chair to keep warm. Nobody talked. As we approached shore, the Great Lakes Oil building loomed over the cityscape, its pale walls a mosaic of reflected light.

We docked at the police marina, and a cop walked me over to DuSable Harbor. A white van was parked on the semicircular drive. Four stubby antennas protruded through a metal plate on its roof. The plate looked like a stop sign laid horizontally. Two more antennas stuck out from other spots on the roof.

“What is this?” I asked the cop who’d walked me over.

“Don’t ask me. Some kind of radio gear, I think.”

“You sure I can go inside?”

The cop motioned to the police boat that had ferried us ashore. It was just backing out of the marina. “The guy who it belongs to just hopped a ride out.”

There was no answer when I tapped, so I slid the door open. A beam of light spilled out of a tiny desk lamp clamped above the driver’s seat, but most of the van was in shadows. There were no seats in the back, and the space was crammed with equipment. I saw VU meters on a few pieces. Speakers hung on both sides of the wall.

The only other light was a greenish hue from a laptop on the floor of the van. I crawled over and saw a green bull’s-eye, almost chartreuse, with brighter green circles inside it. A bright green splotch in the center looked like one of those TV radar maps of a storm, except here a dotted radius ran from the center of the splotch to the circle’s circumference. Numbers and words, including Display Source, Sector, and Decay Rate, appeared around and on the circle. I had no clue what they meant.

The interior of the van gave off a slightly stale odor, but compared to the crib, it was warm and dry. I hunkered down behind the front seat. The window was streaked with sleet, but I thought I saw a large boat move slowly past, its dark shape massed against the darker black of the lake. A metal chain clanked in the distance. Despite the tension, or maybe because of it, my eyes felt heavy. I yawned.

The next thing I knew, the van door was opening, and a blast of cold air rushed in. I startled awake to see LeJeune.

“Getting your beauty sleep,
chér
?”

“What—what’s happening?”

He climbed in and brushed his lips across mine. His jacket smelled fishy, but his lips were soft. I closed my eyes and kissed him back.

When we broke apart, I was breathless.

He grinned. “For a welcome like that, I’d go back and do it all over again.”

Before I could answer, the door slid open again, and someone else climbed in. A man crawled past me, settled himself in the front, and turned the tiny desk lamp to high. I blinked in the harsh light. The man was in his twenties, I thought. He was wearing a blue warm-up suit with a white stripe down the side, but a thickness around his middle implied the clothes were just for show. A headband around his forehead held back a mane of curly, dark hair.

“I’m Clarence.” He dipped his head. “A friend of Drummer’s.”

“Drummer?”

He pointed to the words
Different Drummer Fishing Charter
on LeJeune’s hat. Now that I was thinking about it, I’d never seen him without it.

“Are you with the FBI?”

“Sometimes.”

I leaned up against the side of the van. “Why is it I can’t ever get a straight answer from any of you guys?”

Clarence cleared his throat and looked at LeJeune. Then he crawled over to his laptop.

“You will this time,” LeJeune said. “I want to tell you what we found.” He took a breath. “It was a watertight, hermetically sealed box. The size of a suitcase—maybe thirty-six by twenty-four by eight. When we opened it up, we found two compartments. One contained radio equipment: a small transmitter, a receiver, and built-in power source. The other held—” His face was impassive. “An explosive device.”

“A bomb?” I clamped a hand over my mouth.

He nodded. “Don’t worry—it’s been disabled by now.” He flicked his eyes over to Clarence. “But—” He faltered. “—it was nuclear.”

I bit down on my hand to keep from crying out. I’d heard about suitcase nukes. Small nuclear bombs. Both the Soviets and the U.S. made them, but some had gone missing when the Soviet Union collapsed. Experts feared they’d ended up in the hands of terrorists.

“Was it—was it—one of the Russians’?”

“We don’t think so.” He shifted. “Let me rephrase that. It’s unclear if any Soviet nuclear tactical weapons would even work after twenty years. They need regular maintenance and upkeep, which, given what’s going on in that part of the world, isn’t happening. But someone may have gotten one to use as a prototype. Or maybe they built one from scratch.”

“That’s possible?”

“Given enough money, there are plenty of disaffected Pakistanis, former Soviet nuclear scientists, even Iraqis, who would do it in a heartbeat.”

“I thought the technology was way beyond—well, too sophisticated for terrorists.”

“The hardest part is getting weapons-grade uranium. We’ve heard rumors it’s been coming out of Turkey.” He waved a hand. “Who knows? Assuming you can get your hands on some, you can cut corners, and—well—it can be done.”

I felt sluggish and heavy, as if I was trying to tread water but was sinking into its depths. I wondered if I was in shock. “How small?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said it was a small device. How small?”

“It’s just a guess at this point, but probably less than a kiloton. One fifteenth of what they used at Hiroshima.”

“But powerful enough to take out a couple of city blocks,” Clarence said.

“Or the water supply of Chicago,” LeJeune said.

“That’s what they were doing? Sabotaging the water supply?”

Clarence and LeJeune exchanged another glance.

“What? What is it? Why are you looking at each other like that?”

“Because that’s the good news,” LeJeune said. “If it had detonated, the radiation would have made parts of downtown Chicago uninhabitable.” He paused. “For at least a century or two. And, if the wind was blowing the other way, the lake would be poisoned for about that long.”

I opened and closed my mouth like a fish, half expecting him to break into a grin and tell me this was all a joke. A prank he and his Bureau buddies were playing. His expression was hard as granite.

“That’s just for starters,” he went on. “A blast like that, if it had gone off in the Loop, would incinerate anyone within a one-block radius. A quarter mile away, over 250,000 people would die within a day from radiation sickness. A half mile away, you still have thousands dead. Within five to ten miles, the environment would be irreversibly poisoned.”

“Did you know there’s only one fucking hospital in the entire country that knows how to deal with radiation sickness?” Clarence said. “And that’s in Tennessee, for Christ’s sake.”

“There’s something you can take to ward it off, can’t you?” I asked.

“Iodine tablets,” Clarence said. “But they only work when you know it’s coming in advance. And even if you knew, how are you gonna get enough to everyone in Chicago?”

“But they didn’t target the Loop,” I said. “They sank it on the crib.”

“I guess we can be thankful for that,” LeJeune said. “Although obliterating the water system is plenty serious. Humans can’t survive without water more than three days. What happens when all the bottled water’s gone?”

I pressed my lips together.

“Order would break down. You’d have looting. Panic. Chaos. Hospitals would be overwhelmed. And don’t forget downtown Chicago’s evacuated. Abandoned. No commerce. No transportation. Nothing. For decades to come.” He shook his head. “
Chér
, you’re looking at something that would make September eleventh look like a birthday party.”

I covered my face with my hands. A tenuous silence settled over the van, broken only by the whine of the laptop.

LeJeune gently pried my hands away from my face. “But that’s not going to happen, Ellie. None of it.”

I looked up.

“You know why?” He tipped up my chin with his hand. “Because you came forward at that trial.”