Critical Mass

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

CRITICAL MASS

Copyright © 2009 by Whitley Strieber

All rights reserved.

A Forge Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

[http://www.tor-forge.com] www.tor-forge.com

Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strieber, Whitley.

Critical mass / Whitley Strieber.—1st ed.

p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2253-1

ISBN-10: 0-7653-2253-6

1. Nuclear terrorism—Fiction.  2. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction.  3. Islamic fundamentalism—Fiction.  I. Title.

PS3569.T6955 C75 2009

813'.54—dc22

2008050412

First Edition: February 2009

Printed in the United States of America

0   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

I would like to acknowledge the help of technical specialists, Arabists, and so
many others who were kind enough to contribute their time and expertise to this project. I wish that I could acknowledge each individual personally, but various circumstances obviously prevent that. Any errors are, of course, my own.

But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in

which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and

the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth

also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

—
2 Peter
3

’Tis light makes color visible: at night

Red, green, and russet vanish from thy sight.

So to thee light by darkness is made known . . .

 
—Rumi, “Reality and Appearance”

CRITICAL

MASS

NIGHT RIDE

Jim Deutsch was driving much too fast, but it was urgent that he interview the
children before they died. He was not close to the end of this investigation, and they almost certainly possessed crucial information. If he did not get it, he had not the slightest doubt that more people were going to be joining them in death—many more, and soon.

What he had to find out was something he was very much afraid he already knew: why these little children, just smuggled in from Mexico, were radioactive. He had spent his career in counterproliferation, and the sudden appearance of radiation-sick kids in a border town was a definite worry. Of course, they could have been brought over in a truck full of smuggled X-ray isotopes, or gotten into some other innocuous material. But he doubted that. He had to get solid evidence and work it up convincingly, in order to get the massive search going that he feared was needed.

When the speedometer moved through a hundred, he forced himself to let the car slow down. He took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. He loosened his hands, and felt blood rush back into his fingers.

The South Texas countryside rolled past, a wilderness of mesquite brush, the sky to the west deep orange. To his Connecticut eye, it was almost hellishly ugly. But his was a war fought in nightmarish places, and this
terrain was certainly better than dry, stripped Afghanistan, or the lethal, magnificent mountains of Iran.

When the brush gave way to threadbare fields, he glimpsed cattle staring and old oil wells pumping with a lazy sensuality. He could imagine the Texans of the past racing up and down this road in their Cadillacs and Lincolns, whooping. Wildcatters, they had been called, those buccaneers of the oil fields.

He had been in many of the world’s isolated places, and felt here the same disappointing and reassuring silence. Cities with their bustle and promise lured him, and also repelled him. He liked to hang out at Dom u Dorogi in Moscow listening to blues, or Sway in New York, with its Middle Eastern decor that always drew him into his memories. In the end, though, he would need the night and the silence where he had made his life. He would need the danger, foolish addiction that it was.

Ahead, a figure rode a horse right down the middle of the highway, a silhouette against the late sky. With foolhardy and trusting slowness, the old man walked his beast onto the shoulder. Jim shot past him at a distance of no more than thirty feet, glimpsing a narrow man on a tall roan. He seemed so needful, slouching along in the last sun, that Jim wished he had prayer left in him.

Again, he let his rented Taurus ease back to eighty. Mesquite brush whipped past, now. To the west, the sky faded. Texas Highway 57 was as empty as any road he’d known in Siberia or Afghanistan.

He considered the dying children, ahead in the border town of Eagle Pass. He wanted to believe that they’d been brought across with some piece of smuggled radiological equipment. But that was the sort of thing that the suits at Langley would want to think, and that was what they must not be allowed to think. On his end of the intelligence community, you survived by expecting the worst. On their end, he who made waves was in the most danger. But their danger was demotion. His was death.

His fear was that a bomb had come across and it was in motion, right now. He needed to find it, or at least find its trail, and he thought it must start with these poor kids. If he got lucky, they’d have some specific information. If not, he’d take what he got and go from there.

He wished that he trusted the system, but he was far too experienced for that. If he had, he would have called this thing in the second he heard about those kids. But he had feared what would happen—he’d find himself looking
at orders not to waste his time. Wrong orders, and they would result in catastrophe.

The front face of the intelligence community appeared formidable, but that was the work of media experts, not a reflection of reality. It was the filter of analysis in the secret rooms that didn’t work, and not understanding that—or not accepting it—had been his potentially fatal mistake. He had assumed that the system would absorb the information that he and his strings of agents gathered, and respond correctly.

But that hadn’t happened when he was in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Siberia, so here he was in Texas, chasing after nukes that should have been caught before they left whatever benighted place they had come from. Instead, they were here, and the Mexican border was now the front line of a battle that belonged twelve thousand miles away.

Something had been wrong out there, very wrong. The CIA had extensive operations devoted to monitoring the nuclear materials black market. He had been part of that, operating out of U.S. embassies, and available to do things like penetrate storage facilities and inventory their contents. He was also good at finding people and obtaining information. He was good at running, too. He’d escaped across many a border in his time.

But he shouldn’t have needed to do that sort of thing. He shouldn’t have been compromised, not ever. After 9/11, there had been a number of decoy companies created by the CIA to draw the interest of terrorists and smugglers by operating things like false weapons sales organizations.

But there had been dissention about these fronts. They hadn’t attracted their targets because they’d been too far from the centers of Muslim extremism—all except one, Brewster Jennings, which had operated in the Middle East and had been effective.

However, Jim had believed since he had first engaged with it in 2002 that it was penetrated by somebody. Soon after he began working with this organization, his life had become dangerous. People knew. Turkish intelligence had him identified. Friends in Pakistani intelligence warned him that they were building a dossier on his activities.

Then had come the Valerie Plame affair in 2003, and the name of her front operation, which was Brewster Jennings, became as famous a name as Microsoft or Toyota.

The result of all this was simple: too many men like him had been compromised. Some must have lost their lives. He, who had been working
halfway across the world, was now working in the United States, because there was now fissionable material in Mexico, possibly in Canada, too, and it was on its way here, no question.

As he sped toward the dying children, the fear he lived with every second of his life rose up in him, the sick, desperate urgency that dragged him awake nights and haunted his days. He was in the dark and he was falling, and he could not stop falling.

Somewhere along the road, every intelligence agent meets a demon question, one that absolutely must be answered but that has no answer, and Jim’s fear told him that his was lying in the hospital at the end of this road.

His stomach forced acid into his throat as he churned down the two-lane highway, speeding through silent towns called Batesville and La Pryor. Between them, he pushed the Taurus hard. Surely there wouldn’t be a highway patrolman hiding along here, to come out with his lights flashing and entangle Jim in delay. His car was waking up buzzards asleep on the roadside, for God’s sake.

He operated out of Dallas, where he officed in a little cell in the Earle Cabell Federal Building, just down the hall from the FBI. He was now a CIA contract employee, his status a fiction that allowed him—allegedly—to work within the continental United States. He suspected that his activities were not legal. He suspected that if he ever ended up under the bright lights of a congressional hearing, he would be alone.

He’d been transferred here from Kabul six months ago, after a quarter ton of U-235 had been intercepted on its way into Laredo and his supervisors had finally understood that the danger they had been fighting in distant places had arrived on their doorstep. He liased with the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction coordinator in Dallas, which was another problem. The Office of National Intelligence might have improved interagency cooperation at the top, but the old “stovepipe” system still operated when it came to the nuts and bolts of intelligence gathering. His FBI counterparts shared only what they were legally required to share. Or did they? Did he, for that matter?