Performance Anomalies (17 page)

“And you think if you can stop the transfer to them, this will be the big score that makes the Americans give you your freedom. At last.”

“My handler, Simmons, before he got called back … he said they couldn’t deny it to me if this one thing went right.” There it was again—the slight change of timbre in her voice that had earlier made Cono sense ambivalence.

“Katerina, buy your own freedom. I’ll give you the money to do it.”

She put her hand on Cono’s knee. “But I know too much now. If I run … if it’s not with their backing … they know everything about my mother, my father, my brother, my little sister.”

Cono saw his own mother in his mind, teaching him to dance on the beach, her bare brown abdomen beading with sweat before his eyes. She was dead. His father too. His grandmother. There was no one else to worry about.

There was a splash and another splash as two kids dove into the pool, followed by a shout of praise from the instructor.

“And what of Mr. Kurgat?” Cono asked. “You seem to have reconciled with him. I’d make him your backup plan in case the Americans ditch you. He’s a friend in the know, after all.” Katerina’s little finger contracted against Cono’s knee for an instant, and then, as if to conceal the involuntary movement, she made her hand retreat in a titillating glide across his thigh.

“He’s older now.” Katerina’s voice lowered. “The pills don’t even work for him. He just wants me to lie naked with him. And there’s no choice. It’s part of my assignment, the reason the Americans hired me in the first place.”

“No more biting?”

“No more biting.”

“Ah, men losing the power in their dicks. When they can no longer fuck their women, they fuck the world.” Cono slid down the steps to douse himself in the water, and pressed with his arms to lift himself back up. The movement caused his triceps to ripple.

“I took a chance, telling you all this.” Katerina was stern. She had changed in the intervening years, but there was still truth in her voice. Either that or she was a witch of deception. “Now tell me what you were doing with Zheng Lu Peng.”

Cono’s eyes returned from their scan of the perimeter of the pool deck and the fence around it. “So that’s his name. He didn’t have the good manners to introduce himself, despite being dressed like a gentleman. I’d guess he’s a fan of yours too.”

Katerina waited in silence.

“It was my little assignment, to meet with him,” Cono said, “in exchange for the liberty of my trapped woman friend. I was just an errand boy who happens to speak Mandarin. You’re a busy woman, in so many places at the same time, listening in on so many telephones. I can see why the Americans want to keep you under their thumb. Makes me wish I was on that long flight out of here.”

“I didn’t tell the Americans, Cono. I didn’t tell anyone you’re here.”

Cono searched for the telltale signals of dissimulation on Katerina’s face, but her wet hair was draping her features. He leaned back and let his head sink until the water reached his earlobes. “What else?”

“Zheng Lu Peng is Beijing’s new man here. I don’t know what he’s up to. Simmons thinks it’s more than oil.”

“Katerina, Katerina, you have so many worries on your shoulders. It’s a good thing they are so strong.”

“They aren’t strong enough for this. Not alone. The big problem is the uranium. How will you ever enjoy a meal or make love again after you see the news? How would you live with yourself? Half a million people killed, no matter what city it blows up in. Thousands of little kids like those over there.” Katerina pointed at three children poised to dive. “And after half a million dead, the dying continues for the ones who weren’t incinerated; they die later from the radiation, like at home, in Ukraine.”

Cono’s forehead creased in puzzlement. “You mean the reactor that blew up.”

Katerina’s face flushed instantly. “Yes. Chernobyl. Two of my cousins and their families lost everything.” Her rising voice was thick with anger. “One cousin’s baby was born with no arms or legs. And there was a little girl who died of leukemia, daughter of my cousin Nadya, a mother of three who now has tumors growing out of her skin. In a full nuclear explosion, they’d be counted as the lucky ones, not like my sister, who ...”

Katerina stopped. “I don’t think it’s possible for you to understand,” she said quietly, “unless you have seen it yourself.”

The children at the end of the pool dove in and rose up and slapped the water, trying to find the edge. Cono saw their little fingers clawing for the lip of the deck.

“What do you want me to do?”

“You’re buddies with Timur Betov; he’s your friend. How that can be, I don’t know. Help us get close to him, get a device or a tracker on him, so we’ll be there to squelch the transfer of the uranium. Please, Cono. I need your help.” Katerina held his gaze as he searched her eyes.

A long moment passed.
Friends,
Cono thought.
What is my friend Katerina not telling me?

Despite the wringing he’d given them, Cono’s boxer shorts were still uncomfortably wet as he sat in the car he’d flagged several blocks away from the bustle of Avenue Abay.

Katerina was certain the transfer was due to take place the next day, she had told him. Cono had said he’d try to help and had taken her private phone number, but he hadn’t disclosed to her the location he suspected. If she were to call in the bumblers at the embassy … he’d seen that before. It smelled like a mess in the making, a mess with the highest stakes. Cono could simply walk away from the stench. And yet, maybe he had become addicted after all—addicted to being the pivot point, to being as central as that crucial joint between copulating man and woman, but with a danger that did not know the bounds of orgasm. What was more, Katerina was right about one thing—if he didn’t do his utmost, and the high-U was later detonated, how would he ever live with himself?

What Katerina had said, if it was true, combined with what Cono knew, meant that Timur was arranging two wings to lift him to the top. Beijing, in its quest for control of the country, would lift one wing, and the jihadis, with their desire for the high-U, would lift the other. Cono’s inadvertent presence in Almaty had provided Timur with an arm’s-length way to play Zheng Lu Peng, who had said that the timetable for the oil bid had been moved up by Cono’s “boss,” who was obviously now dealing outside the chain-of-command. Timur’s instructions to Cono, in his darkened apartment, to make the rounds as an oil-contract auction boy, were a decoy, a ruse. Only support from the Beijing sow mattered, and it had to come fast. Being seen with the Chinese during Xiao Li’s rescue at the Hotel Svezda had endangered Timur’s plans, Cono saw more clearly now. It had confirmed Kurgat’s suspicion of Timur’s intentions to cut a deal with Beijing, provoking both men to act now.

With one wing ready to soar, Timur must have revved up the jihadis. He’d probably sequestered the high-U years back, when he’d shot to the top of the Bureau. “Maybe a little thanks to you,” he’d said on the phone when Cono had tracked him down from Istanbul. No doubt Timur had been waiting for his chance to use the high-U as a lever for a long time.

With both wings rising, Timur could regard the premier as irrelevant. Minister Kurgat, on the other hand, was taking potshots at Timur twice a day on average, so far.

And what winds were set to blow under Katerina’s wings? The Americans were using her and her talents like fodder. They would continue to string her along; she must know this, unless she was blinded by some illusion of allegiance. On the other side, dear toothy Mr. K could offer her a sealed marble mansion among the embassies and new high-security expat enclaves strung along the boulevards up toward the mountains. She could stroke his fat belly as he promised a Western passport that would never come, and she would stare out the windows until the day arrived when Kurgat’s protection of her crumbled, and he couldn’t even protect himself.

And yet with that bleak horizon before her eyes, Katerina had said the first problem was the uranium. All the children dying. It came to that: women and their children. Even women and the children who did not belong to them. It was the only force in the world resisting the centrifugal destructive rage of men.

Katerina didn’t add up. He could feel that she wasn’t being straightforward with him, but her sense of urgency about the high-U danger was real, and Cono was relieved that beneath her slightly hardened skin, her motives seemed to extend beyond her selfish survival impulses. And what a survivor she had proven herself to be.

Cono’s impromptu taxi passed an Internet café. Four blocks later he told the driver to pull into an alley and stop next to a row of garbage containers. He got out of the cab and stepped into a gap between the containers, waiting to see if anyone was following him. After several minutes he walked briskly through a maze of back alleys, eventually doubling back to the café. He wanted to see if he could find any information on the Web to confirm Katerina’s story, and to reacquaint himself with HEU. He had no choice now. Do nothing when his fingers were on the fulcrum of a disaster? Impossible.

The young man minding the café was Chinese; he looked like an eager college student, with black plastic glasses riding low on his nose.

“How’s business?” Cono asked in Mandarin, surprising the youth and making him smile.

“Well, there
is
business.”

“Almaty a new home for you? Like it?”

“Home is always China, but we’re here to stay.”

“Why?”

“We can do what we want. My parents and I can stuff the piggy bank for the future. No government guy taking our operation or shutting us down. Bribes, sure, but the protection’s worth it. Money’s coming into the country. Game’s open, like the Wild West.”

“Wild West?” The expression was new to Cono.

“Wild West, you know, America in the good old days. You living in a seashell? Like in
High Noon
. You seen it?” He drew his fingers out of imagined holsters. “Bang, bang, be your own marshal. You can get it on DVD.”

“Thanks, I’ll look for it.” Cono said, pointing back with his own finger-pistol, then raising it to his mouth and blowing over the tip.

He took a seat and began to click through links on HEU hazards. The only previous brush he’d had with high-U was a tontería for an “unnameable Western nation” hoping to detect an illicit shipment of the material on a container vessel due to pass through the Bosporus. The plug was pulled at the last minute, for undisclosed reasons, but in his apartment near Galata Tower in Istanbul, Cono still had two rather cumbersome multiple-wire proportional radiation counters, sampling gear, and a plastic suit with a rebreather, all stashed behind a panel in an empty closet.

He’d prepared himself for that assignment with the details of emission stats for various degrees of enrichment, the handling and safety procedures, the types of containment—whether the HEU was in simple ingot form, metal-oxide shavings, or beryllium pellets. But it had all faded from memory now, like the words to a song he hadn’t sung since childhood, when he had stolen oranges and crackers and the occasional slippery fish only because he was hungry. Over time the stealing had extended to uncomfortable secret facts and even inconvenient people—not kidnapping exactly, but a sort of temporary relocation. Now he was hunting for uranium. He was moving up the food chain. And he was still hungry. Hungry for what? Money? No. Power? Over people? That was like having power over clams. Hungry for what? He didn’t know.

The search results flashed by in a rapid series.

Sixty to seventy pounds of HEU would be more than enough to enable a primitive gun-type explosive device that could be engineered in any machine shop.

When contained in canisters, highly enriched uranium is of no immediate danger to persons nearby.

The refined ore and semi-purified metal can exist in several chemical variants and oxidative states …

Blah, blah, blah. Click, read. Click, read. Click … Cono was momentarily dazed by the flicker of the computer screen—it was an old type of CRT, probably with a vertical scan frequency that was in the sweet spot for rasping his brain. He stood up and composed himself as the painful throb deep in his head subsided.

He sat down again and searched for Project Sapphire, keeping his eyes off the screen except for short glances.

… On 21 November 1994 1278 pounds of HEU were transferred from the Ulba Metallurgy plant near Ust-Kamenogorsk to the Y-12 plant at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in a highly secret project code-named “Sapphire” …

1300 steel canisters for shipment by two C-5 transport planes from Kazakhstan to the U.S.…

The United States agreed to compensate Kazakhstan for the material, though the transaction was “not handled as a straight business deal” …

The value of this quantity of HEU is difficult to ascertain, but it certainly is far less than the billions of dollars the Kazaks could have garnered by selling it on the black market …