Perilous Panacea (12 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Rick Saul eased his head from the pillow, checking the heft. Not too bad, considering all the Glenfiddich and the wine with dinner.

The phone beeped in the other room. Spanner? Emergency?

Mary answered. He hadn’t heard her get up and wished he could roll over on top of her and continue the celebration.

Besides Saul and Spanner, SWISILREC now had about thirty other agents pursuing leads around D.C. and helping keep track of the e-mails and telephone calls deluging headquarters from about eighty agents around the country investigating various aspects of the case. Twenty-to-thirty new agents were being added each week as different areas for investigation became evident. None of the agents knew the exact nature of the case, just enough to allow them to operate.

Although Spanner coordinated SWISILREC, he spent most of his time explaining to “people in high places” why they hadn’t found the bomb material and the people who stole it. That meant Saul spent most of his time coordinating the investigation and assimilating information for Spanner’s daily reports to upper management.

SWISILREC boiled down to Steven Austin. Saul’s big investigation, his ultimate opportunity for Bureau recognition and advancement by way of the Washington fast track, quickly degenerated into a series of dead ends and petering-out leads. Steven Austin had all the trappings of a twenty-first century citizen, from birth certificate to social security number to PhD degree. His reality was a virtual one that had no correspondence with official electronic memories around the country. No Steven A. Austin appeared in the electronic memories of computers at Columbia and Carnegie Mellon Universities, which according to his job applications were the universities he had graduated from.

The Steven Andrew Austin on the birth certificate died in Detroit in 1984 at the age of eleven months. The 2011 Austin with properly validated death certificate was just as dead, his tracks since the 1990s as ephemeral as the electronic signals that conferred his self-generated existence. Although Steven Austin crossed the lives of Marge Alsop and Bart Kraft, he left no traces of the intersection, only memories of his youthful charms.

Instead of chasing Austin through his mind, Saul turned his memories to last night: Italian food and dancing afterward, their private celebration of Mary’s promotion to become the Senator’s press secretary.

In the other room, Mary chatted away, her words indecipherable through the door. Across the room, his pants and shirt lay on the floor, inside out. Mary’s pink dress hung across the chair. They got in about two and started making love in the living room: her panty hose off, his pants and shorts down around his ankles, groping and poking their way into the bed. Maybe after she got off the phone, he could coax her back.

When Saul got to the kitchen, Mary was perched on a stool at the breakfast bar, hunched over a story in the Post, her stocking-clad feet propped on the stool, knees poking out from under her skirt. She grunted a greeting without looking up.

Ambling up behind her, he slipped his arms around her waist, pulled up alongside her satin-smooth cheek, and buried his face in her long, thick blonde hair. As he inhaled the fragrance, his cock did an expectant jig under his robe.

“Don’t mess my hair,” she said, unloosening his grip from her waist. She swiveled the chair to face him, her dark-blue eyes searching his face before she pecked him on the mouth.

His expectations sank when he realized she was dressed for work: tight navy dress with white polka dots. A perfect outfit to go with the long blonde hair and blue eyes, just like all of her clothes these days. Nothing like the washed-out Levis and shapeless sweat shirts she lived in at Notre Dame and Spokane. Her dress, which she would say was appropriate for the press secretary of the Honorable Stanley M. Hughson, accented the fact that in the past five years she blossomed from a skinny blonde giggler to a beautiful full-bodied woman, the woman he had always desired. That’s what worried him.

Saul bent forward for a real kiss, but she pecked at his lips and pulled back. When he reached for her, she grabbed his hands. He jerked back to free his hands and get at her body. “Come back to bed for awhile. We’ll finish what we started last night, finish the celebration.”

She laughed and tightened her grip on his hands. “I’d say you finished pretty well. Besides, I’ve got to get to work.” She sucked at her lips, like she always did when she debated what to say or how to say it. “That was the Senator on the phone.”

“What did that pompous ass want this early in the morning?” He regretted the words as soon as they were out, knowing that the probability of getting her to bed had just hit zero.

She swiveled the chair back to face the counter and slid the newspaper to her left “He told me that you made the Post.” she said as she pointed at a story on the front page:

NUCLEAR BOMB MATERIAL STOLEN IN TENNESSEE

Sheena Mosely, Associated Press

Washington—Associated Press has learned that a truck or trucks loaded with nuclear bomb-grade uranium and plutonium were hijacked in Tennessee on June 6, shortly after they left the Y-12 nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, TN. The trucks were en route to the Savannah River National Laboratory outside Aiken, South Carolina. An unspecified number of men—drivers and guards—were killed. The hijacking occurred on a lonely county road near Lenoir City, Tennessee.

Julia Vargas, the spokesperson at DOE’s Washington Headquarters, stated there was “no information to report on stolen material,” and that “for over 25 years the department has transported weapons-grade nuclear material in convoys of special tractor-trailer sets called Safe Secure Trailers (SSTs) over four-million miles without ever losing any material…

“How the hell did Mosely get all this?” he asked as he read about how the cargo had enough nuclear material for 10 bombs like those dropped on Japan that killed 100,000 people, how Kraft did not return her calls, and about what Kraft’s predecessor had to say about it.

According to AP sources, who wish to remain anonymous, the FBI has launched Operation Swift Silent Recovery (SWISILREC) to recover the nuclear material. Special Agents George Spanner and Richard Saul from FBI headquarters in Washington are heading the investigation. Three weeks ago, Saul spent several days in Tennessee, South Carolina, and New Mexico investigating the case. When reached in Washington, Saul declined to comment on the investigation…

After quickly scanning the rest of the article, he headed across the room for coffee. Sheena Mosely had struck, and he’d wound up a target. How the hell did she learn about his trips? Thank God he didn’t have to go to the office until after his visit to Germantown.

“Did somebody really steal nuclear material?” Mary asked.

“What you see is what you get.” He poured coffee and brought the mug back to the bar so he could study the article.

Mosely had covered much ground—the bitch. She found out Amos King of Aiken, South Carolina was killed, and she interviewed his daughter and the undertaker. She didn’t get much there.

“Come on, Rick, the Senator needs you,” Mary said. “If he can get on top of this, we can generate media space and time. It’ll help with name recognition when he makes his move.”

“What move?”

She chewed at her lips. “It’s still hush-hush, but he’s going to run for president.”

“That asshole is running for president?”

“Rick, he’s as capable as the other people being talked about. In the past few years, he’s generated good media capital out of the nuclear proliferation issue and the thing with Iran before the Israeli raid. This is right up his alley.”

Media capital, media space, he thought. Media: How many times a day did she use that almighty Washington buzzword? When she went for coffee, his eyes were assaulted by the amount of long legs revealed by the short dress.

“Jesus, that dress is short.”

“Not that again, Rick. It’s the style.”

“A skirt up to the crack of your ass is style? It looks like advertising to me. You know what guys at the Bureau call those dresses? C-skimmers, and C doesn’t stand for cute.”

She ignored his comment, brought her coffee to the counter, and sat down next to him. “You can help us, Rick.”

He didn’t answer. Her dress reminded him of Julia Thornton. Florida Congressman Clarence Morgan finally got back from his fact-finding trip to Southeast Asia, and they got a chance to talk to Morgan and his top assistants. Austin worked for Morgan for seven months, just as the IRS and congressional payroll records indicated. It turned out Austin got the job by seducing Morgan’s office manager, Julia Thornton, thirty-three-years-old and not as attractive as Marge Alsop. Thornton’s skirts swooped toward her ankles, but Austin didn’t mind lifting them. He got into the government classified computer files by first getting into her pants.

“It’s to your benefit to help the Senator,” Mary said. “He can help Uncle Nathan—and you.”

“Help him with a media opportunity? I could write my own ticket, huh?”

“You could. He likes Uncle Nathan. He’d like you, too, if he got to know you.”

To get to know his staff, Hughson had invited them and their families to his Pennsylvania farm one weekend earlier in the summer. Saul refused to go. He’d met the guy a couple of times at Nate’s house. Did Nate really like the guy? The only thing Saul could see that the Senator and Nate had in common was their political need for each other. Their friendship began at Penn State, where they became Republicans to piss off their fathers. Uncle Nathan worked his way from a powerful Philadelphia city councilman to mayor. While doing that, he helped Hughson, a former mayor of Pittsburgh, become a senator. Now Nate needed the Pittsburgher’s help to become governor.

“Hughson’s a phony,” Saul said, “always playing to the press.”

“He’s not,” Mary said. “He does what’s necessary. In this town, communication is key to everything. Communicate to legislate, communicate or vegetate.”

She spoke like a new press secretary with a degree in communications, Saul thought. “This town is bullshit or forget it,” he said.

She slid off her stool and sidled up to him, leaning her body against his back. “Come on, Rick. That Post story means it’ll all come out soon. Let us be on top of it from the start.” She wrapped her arms around his chest, rubbing her breasts against his shoulders. Her hand slid under his robe.

Seduction? Would she go back to bed for his secret? Was that their modus operandi now? Julia Thornton and Marge Alsop with Steven Austin? Mary Jane with…?

Although tempted, he slipped off the stool and out of her arms. “I’ve got to get to work.” He slapped his hand on the newspaper story. “An interesting start to what should be an interesting day.”

- - - - -

Saul straightened in his chair, wishing for a cup of coffee to help keep his eyelids pried open and his head upright while he concentrated on what Doctor Tomomuro—”you can carr me Tom”—Sukiomo was rambling on about from the head of the table, occasionally switching his pronunciation of “Ls” and “Rs”, as the Japanese are wont to do. Sukiomo was a nuclear weapons specialist from Los Alamos, who Logson brought in to brief them on nuclear science.

Across the table, Ralph Ebert and Doyle Logson fought their own battles against sleep. Ebert suffered occasional setbacks, eyes glazing, head sinking forward slowly and then bouncing quickly off his chest to an upright position, eyes wide open. Next to Saul sat a squat young man who Ebert introduced as Kyle Orman, the new System Administrator for the NNSA computers—Steve Austin’s replacement. Orman appeared wide awake, his full attention focused on Sukiomo’s slides. Spanner cancelled out of the meeting because of two other ones where he would battle the raging Mosely fire.

They sat around the conference table in Bart Kraft’s old office, which was now Ebert’s due to his new role as Associate Administrator of NNSA’s Security and Safeguards Division (acting). Although there had been no public announcement, Kraft had been “reassigned” to a non-position. Later, if the shit hit the fan and it looked like some important people would get splattered, Kraft would be dealt with publicly. According to Spanner, this was one of many aspects of crisis management strategy being diagrammed by the White House Planning and Operations Committee for SWISILREC.

White haired, in his late fifties, the short and skinny Sukiomo addressed the intricacies of nuclear chemistry and the manufacture of reliable nuclear weapons. PowerPoint slides flashed onto a screen at the front of the room: graphs of kilograms of nuclear material required for bombs that deliver kilotons and megatons of TNT, tables and diagrams of damage parameters and zones of destruction, and charts describing how many kilograms of uranium or plutonium were needed to take out New York City or just the Empire State Building. After several more bounces of Ebert’s head, Sukiomo finished and sat down next to Logson.

Saul waited for someone to speak and realized they were waiting for him, hoping he had new leads. “That’s interesting,” he said, “but how’s it going to help us find these guys?”

Logson nodded, his Charlie Chan smile in place, looking more oriental than Sukiomo. “We thought you needed a background briefing on nuclear weaponry of the type these people are probably planning to build.”

“So now you think they’re going to make a bomb?”

Logson turned up his smile. “Face facts: the information you turned up on what Austin got from the classified library can only lead to that conclusion.”

In Washington, people believed in facts, especially if their bosses believed them. “They might still be smuggling the material out of the country.”

“No way,” Sukiomo said. “The materials they store are too bulky. Only way they smuggle liquid material is after they transform it to sorids. They can then machine the sorids for bomb parts to make them compact enough to ship.”

“So you think they’re making bombs right here in the U.S.,” Saul said.

When there was no reply, Ebert told Orman to brief them on what he had learned about how Austin had used DOE computers to pull off the hijacking.