Perilous Panacea (19 page)

“It had something to do with a demonstration they’re giving in one of those cities. What kind of demonstration? That’s where they’re building the bombs, isn’t it?”

“Not really. Anyway, all this is going to be out in the open tomorrow.”

“Bullshit,” she said and huffed out of the room.

Saul got his laptop from his briefcase, and accessed the e-mail forwarded by Mosely. He forwarded it to Spanner and then dialed his number on his cell phone. Indianapolis or Saint Louis, he thought. They couldn’t have a bomb. Could they? They wouldn’t use it in this country. Would they?

- - - - -

Applenu rushed to get back to his flat for the 10 p.m. news. Last night Hearn called to say the government had identified him—Hearn—as Austin, and that the White House had called a news conference to confirm the theft of the nuclear material, although Sheena Mosely didn’t leave the White House much to disclose, since her story in this morning’s paper disclosed all the latest, including the Austin-is-Hearn information. Applenu wondered how Hearn found out these things that he then turned over to her.

So they knew the Austin/Hearn connection. Would they be able to make the Applenu/Deby connection?

Applenu surveyed the CNN weather girl, who appeared every night just before the news presenters. Newscasters, he thought to himself, the Yanks called them newscasters. This tall reddish-blonde bit of fluff in a tight, bright-orange outfit that displayed her excellent shape strutted in front of the map and chatted about the weather in Boise and Denver and Chicago. Her appearance stimulated memories of his nights with Patricia Hunter.

He’d much rather be thinking of weather girls or Patricia Hunter—being in her snappy apartment in Alexandria would be even better—than being terrified every time he picked up a newspaper or turned on TV, afraid of what happened today, what the news would disclose. Was the FBI getting closer? Then tomorrow he’d have go through it all over again.

Patricia Hunter: a nice bit of work that was, but in the end she bloody well buggered him. If Austin hadn’t fixed him up with her, they’d never have found him out. They should have seen that. Austin probably did see it, but he figured to give them Applenu with no connection to Ian Deby, thus protecting his Deby identification.

Although bone tired from the long day spent processing plutonium, he knew he’d have trouble sleeping. Same as last night and the night before: too much to do during the day, too much to think about when he closed his eyes at night. He leaned back on the couch and sipped whiskey, hoping to take the edge off. Just a drink or two to calm down—Chivas Regal on ice, the first bottle of liquor he ever bought. With almost six-million dollars tucked away in Zurich, he decided he might as well spend some—while he still could.

After the weather girl, two newscasters appeared with the “CNN Evening News.” A perky black-haired piece of skirt named Donna Kelly began: “Today’s top story is the presidential press conference that confirmed reports circulating in Washington for the last several weeks concerning stolen nuclear material capable of being made into atomic bombs. When asked why the government took so long to verify the reports, the President said they needed time to study and analyze the situation and its grave national security implications. For the latest on the story, we take you to our White House correspondent Frank Sesno.”

Applenu drained his whiskey as they showed the President making a brief statement: “I want to make two important points: First, our best scientists believe it highly unlikely the hijackers can ever build a working nuclear weapon. Secondly, I want to assure the American people that the perpetrators will be quickly apprehended and brought to justice. I think the American people know that this Administration will see to it that this is done with no American citizen’s life being placed in danger.”

After the President’s statement, the FBI Director took over and described the hijackings and discussed the investigation. In great detail, he described how they determined that the heist was masterminded by the late Steve Austin, an employee at the Department of Energy, who had also used the alias Derek Hearn.

Finishing his discussion of Austin, the FBI Director said, “We also identified two other suspects, who go by the name of Brian Applenu and Eric, last name unknown. Both names are probably aliases.” Sketches of the two of them with beards flashed on the screen.

Applenu rubbed his beardless face and decided it was time to drop the accent and talk like an American. As long as Deby was isolated from Applenu, he might just walk away from this and start over—somewhere. Trouble was, he needed to ensure his family’s survival. BahAmin’s latest e-mail said that the next step in their family-relocation plan was set to go next week. How would Sherbani react to that?

- - - - -

Curt stared at Surling’s calendar and diary, a series of tick marks on the wall next to the couch, one for each day of captivity. Surling started it shortly after they got there, but back dated it to June eleventh—the day Curt arrived. It ended today, August fourteenth. Surling occasionally lengthened marks and scribbled memorable events, like Drafton’s death.

What a week, Curt thought. Ever since Drafton left, Curt’s mind cooked a stew of thoughts and dreams with Drafton haunting every one: Drafton as corpse, Drafton as lover, Drafton as friend willing to sacrifice his life for him and Surling, Drafton and AIDS, and always, Drafton and Lori. Drafton understood Lori. Deep down, Curt knew Lori would understand Drafton. He could not understand either of them, much less himself.

The turmoil hammering his brain drove him to the computer. In its electronic thoughts, he created the order his brain lacked. As long as he established contact with an island of calm and logic in the deranged sea that raged all about, there was hope, at least the hope for peaceful isolation. He knew if he could just concentrate long enough, the computer would spring them out of there. They didn’t need Drafton. They never needed Drafton.

While Curt wrestled with his demons, he became aware of Surling plummeting into his own sea of mental discord. His confidence in the future oscillated, but mainly deteriorated. Every evening, he sat at the table and stared across his beer, like a lost sailor searching for land he knew he would never see. Dark half moons glowed beneath his eyes, and his glasses now rimmed the eyes of the eighty-four-year-old man he was. Below the table, his right leg jiggled away the hours. Momentarily in touch with his inherent need to compute, Curt estimated a rate of 200 leg jiggles a minute, 12,000 in an hour.

Tonight, Curt sat for a while with his own beer and listened to Surling, who more and more fit into the mold of his embittered Dad after the accident. When he could no longer stand the jiggling leg, Curt stood and paced.

Surling’s conversations inevitably involved death: Drafton’s death, their impending deaths, and the death of his son Al. At least once every night, he said, “We can’t just sit around here and wait for the fucking United States Cavalry.” Tonight, he added: “They’ve machined all of the uranium, and it’s been shipped out of here. We’ve also got about half the plutonium processed. Today, Applenu casually dropped the bomb that they won’t need me much longer. We both know what that means.” Surling slashed his hand across his throat.

“Applenu wants to finish with me at the same time. He’s been learning the programs and says he intends to take over the computer operation when the plutonium is machined,” Curt said.

“That means we’re both fucked.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I think I’ve come up with an insurance policy.”

“What? How?”

“The computer, I’ve…”

“You and that fucking computer. You make a big deal about what your wife will say about you and Drafton. She’s used to you having a lover that takes up most of your time and energy. How long have you been in love with that fucking machine? I bet you’d rather diddle a computer any day than fuck your wife.”

Surling’s words stung because of the truth they held. He would change after this was over…if he could forget Drafton.

“I’ve even been thinking that maybe we should be praying,” Surling said without a smile to indicate he might be joking. “My wife’s forever after me to go to church with her, to be born again. According to her, that would get me back on track. I used to go to church back when my kids were younger. I don’t know if I ever believed. You got religion? You believe?”

“I was raised Lutheran, but I quit going back in college. My insurance policy isn’t prayer. It’s a little sub-routine I wrote for the plutonium-machining programs. None of the programs will execute properly unless the subroutine is run first, and a password is needed to get to the subroutine. And I’m the only one who knows the subroutine and password.”

“What if the password isn’t used?”

“The computer will butcher anything in the machine.”

“How do we use it? At most it will keep you alive a while longer. Then you’re back where I am now.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“So it’s a goddamned hoax,” Martin Dowel said from the head of the mahogany conference table, “another fucking wild-goose chase.”

A corner office with windows and carpet, Saul thought, everything his own office lacked. In this three-man meeting, Saul sat to the Associate Director’s right, Spanner to his left. It was Saul’s fourth meeting of the day in somebody else’s office, three of them in Indianapolis, his plane arriving from there less than an hour earlier. This followed meetings yesterday in Saint Louis. All he wanted now was to go home, have a couple of beers, something to eat, and then get some sleep.

Tall and thin with intense blue eyes and thick white hair, Dowel was an easy-going Texan in his sixties. Although his words indicated anger and his normally pink-white face reddened, his words oozed in a soft drawl. “That Mosely bitch holds back on publishing the names of the cities, just like she promises, and then about the time we decide there is nothing in Saint Louis or Indianapolis and we wouldn’t have to say anything about those cities, that fucking Hughson announces there are atomic bombs in Saint Louis and Indianapolis.”

Here it comes, Saul thought. Spanner said Dowel was upset at Saul “about the Hughson thing.”

Dowel glared directly at Saul. “And Hughson’s announcement sends people into a panic,” he growled.

Although he could have retired several years ago, Dowel served as the Director’s drinking buddy and stayed on as Associate Director because the Director liked the way Dowel handled the details he couldn’t stomach—like dealing with Saul and Spanner. Dowel collected details, and then later over drinks, he pumped them into the Director for use tomorrow morning or whenever he was called on by important members of the government.

“So, Mr. Saul, what’s in Saint Louis and Indianapolis? An atomic bomb?”

Saul, tense and waiting for the explosion on Hughson, ran a hand through his hair while his mind changed gears. “As you know, DOD immediately got NEST to both cities, and NEST concluded there are no bombs out there.”

Dowel jotted something on a pad of paper and then looked up. “Tell me again what NEST stands for.”

“Nuclear Emergency Search Team. They’re based out of Andrews Air Force Base. They were established in the 1970s specifically to locate terrorist nuclear weapons should any ever be planted inside a city or anyplace else in the country.”

“At least we were prepared for something. How are they supposed to find them?”

“They admit it’s like looking for a diamond in a gravel pile. They’ve got the latest nuclear detection technology mounted on helicopters and in trucks. If they get a fix on nuclear material, they’ve got panel trucks loaded with detectors to zero in on it. They’ve even got detectors in briefcases.”

“And they didn’t find anything?”

“We didn’t figure they would,” Spanner said. “Those people wouldn’t tip us off where the bombs are so we could go out there and find them. They’re playing head games with us.”

“Mosely didn’t say they told her they were going to show us a bomb in those cities,” Saul said. “She said those cities were mentioned.”

“So they used Mosely to throw us off,” Dowel said.

“That’s my bet,” Spanner said. “Trouble is, we’ve got to respond to every tip, and they know that.”

Saul reported details on Saint Louis and Indianapolis, from the search by NEST to the panic of the citizens, who were driving the FBI and local police crazy with calls of suspicious characters carrying suspicious packages, to the pickets around the federal buildings in both cities. All the panic hit after Hughson’s announcement.

That report finished, Spanner moved them on to other business. “We now feel certain that Professor Surling was kidnapped, although his wife disagrees. She says he called her four times since he went to Philadelphia. One call came last week.”

“So why don’t you believe her?” Dowel asked.

“We believe he called her, but the fact that he hasn’t told his people at the university anything is highly unusual based on his past actions. Besides that, we’ve learned that he worked on the Manhattan Project. He’s an expert on the chemistry of plutonium and uranium, just the type of expert we thought they might need.”

“Anything on what might have happened to Surling?”

Spanner reported how Surling checked into the Hershey Hotel in Philadelphia on June twelfth and checked out on June thirteenth. According to his secretary, he was going to consult with Margine Nuclear Technology, a company with a website that says they are located in Blacksburg, Virginia, but the address is an empty lot.

Saul reported on the search for a missing computer-controlled machining expert by checking the whereabouts of each expert from DOE weapons plants. Until now, everything was negative, although they were still trying to verify the present location of two men in Boston, one at Argonne, and two at Oak Ridge. If those also proved negative, the simple portion of their search—government facilities—would be exhausted.

“What was the reaction on high when you passed on the information Saul got about Applenu being an Iranian?” Spanner asked.

“According to the Director, the White House and the State Department are consulting on how to handle that,” Dowel growled. “There’s a rumor of ongoing private diplomatic talks with the Iranian government exploring better relations. It sounds like they’re doing the Neville Chamberlain waltz with the bastards that run that country and kill their own people—women and kids for God’s sake—when they want a little freedom.”

He shook his head in frustration. “It’s over two months since the hijackings. We figured to have SWISILREC wrapped up long before we had to go public.”

“We’ve still got time,” Spanner said. “Our nuclear weapons experts figure it’ll take months, maybe even years, to build a bomb. Besides that, if they had to kidnap at least one expert to help, that’ll slow them down. That crap about showing us a bomb was a confusion factor to keep us off guard and keep the media stirred up.”

“We’ve got to get those bastards and quick,” Dowel said, his face darkening. “There are all kinds of pickets across from the White House. Then there’s the newspapers and TV. Did you see the Today show? Good Morning America? Fucking so-called experts are coming out of the woodwork to tell us what’s wrong with our government, saying they told us so. And, of course, our old buddy Senator Hughson’s been anywhere and everywhere he can squeeze his ugly mug onto the tube.”

At last, the Hughson scene, Saul thought, knowing the script Dowel was playing. He and the Director were on a search-and-destroy mission for scapegoats below them to take the heat off. They played the Kraft scene during the government’s announcement, stating that they had accepted his resignation. Eventually, they’d need somebody else. Spanner might be a possible stopgap sacrifice, although he was not big enough to take all the blame. Dowel would get to Saul soon enough.

“That’s to be expected,” Spanner said. “It’s just politics as usual.”

“But it’s going to get worse, unless the Administration can show they’ve stopped these people. The President’s scheduled for a speech in Chicago in two days, and there are at least five groups organizing demonstrations at the airport and outside the Hilton where he’s speaking.”

“We’ve now got over three-hundred agents on it,” Spanner said.

“Do you think organized crime is involved?” Dowel asked. “Was this a for-profit caper, like drugs?”

“If they are, we haven’t been able to verify it. We’ve alerted all our undercovers, and we’ve drawn blanks.”

After a short pause, Dowel looked at Saul and said, “That leaves just one more thing: leaks. As I understand it, the information Mosely published on Austin using the alias Derek Hearn was not released by the Bureau, yet she somehow got hold of it.”

Spanner was ready. He again explained the calls to Saul from Mosely and how she had all the information the FBI had by way of the e-mails that she sent to Rick. He reviewed the information on the trap door and Trojan horse programs on the FBI and DOE computers and how computer experts at each agency had observed the computers being accessed by an outside source. “That’s got to be the leak source, and it means Austin must still be alive. He accesses our computer and then forwards the information to Mosely. Once he knows what we’ve got, it doesn’t matter to him if it gets out to the public, because he knows that when it gets out there it will get everybody in government who isn’t in the know all stirred up, which makes it harder for us to do our job of catching him.”

“Three days ago you told me you had him blocked from getting anything important from our computer, but you were allowing him to get false information that you arrested two people in New York. That wasn’t in Mosely’s story, but the information you uncovered day-before yesterday on the Austin-Hearn connection was.”

“We have that remedied now,” Spanner said.

Saul explained how they found Austin’s Trojan horse sniffer program and how they allowed only fake e-mails into the file. “However, although Austin or somebody else accessed the file with the fake information after they discovered it, for some reason they decided not to pass it on to Mosely. When Mosely got the Jarome leak about Austin’s pseudonym, Slaughter put a watch on the trap door and found that Austin, or whoever came in the trap door, went to another file that was now being used by the sniffer program. Slaughter found the original program was written so that if the first file was discovered, the sniffer program would send e-mails and other pertinent information to another file. Unfortunately, that was only discovered after they got the Hearn information. The trap door has now been blocked and the Trojan horse program removed.”

“Okay, but it’s the Saint Louis and Indianapolis thing that’s got the White House on the Director’s ass,” Dowel said. He glared at Saul. “They want to know if, you, Mr. Saul, gave Hughson that information. You told us Mosely agreed not to put those cities in her story, and then Hughson goes public with it. Some people in the Administration want you off the case. The Director’s fighting that, insisting the Bureau is nonpolitical. Are you nonpolitical, Mr. Saul? What is your relationship with Hughson?”

“I have no relationship with Hughson.”

Dowel turned to Spanner. “We really fucked this one up, George. We took Saul away from diddling statistics because we wanted a Washington-scene virgin, one without local contacts that would lead to leaks. So we have Dickson in personnel run it through his computer, and he comes up with Saul, who has been in D.C. less than six months and mostly riding a desk. Now, after a little investigating, we find out his wife is Hughson’s press secretary.”

So some of the three-to-four- hundred agents on the case were snooping on Hughson and Mary, Saul thought. “I didn’t tell my wife anything that wasn’t in the press. She overheard me talking to Mosely and mention Indianapolis and Saint Louis. She assumed that was where they were building the bombs, but she said she didn’t tell Hughson. The next day after the Mosely story appeared without mentioning those cities, she said Hughson’s office received an anonymous e-mail with the information on those cities. She said she then corroborated it.”

“Hughson’s a rabble-rouser,” Dowel said, the pink in his face drowning in red. “Rumor has it he intends to run for president. That’s all this fucking country needs.”

“Sir, it seems to me this is beyond politics. If somebody made a bomb, and…”

“You mean somebody might try to blow up Washington…like your friend Hughson suggested. Never happen. Right, George?”

“We’ll get them, sir. Before anything happens.”

Dowel cleared his throat and looked at Saul. “Even if somebody else gave Hughson that information, there’s still pressure to get you off the case.”

Spanner broke in. “Rick’s done a hell of a job coordinating this case for me. Perhaps if he keeps a low profile…” He glanced quickly at Saul, his eyebrows raised in exasperation.

“I can do that, sir. Except for Mosely, I’ve avoided the press.”

“Okay. But if your name winds up in the news again, or if Hughson winds up with any new information, you’ll be wiped off this case quicker than birdshit off the President’s limo. And that won’t be a political move. It’ll be a Bureau necessity, for the protection of the Bureau’s good name.”

- - - - -

Curt cashed his insurance policy the next morning. They were back in the hot-cell room preparing to machine the first plutonium, when Applenu announced one more dry run.

“And this time,” Applenu said, “Simmons and I will handle everything.” He motioned Curt to get up from behind the keyboard, and he sat down. “The sooner we know the complete operation, the sooner we’ll be able to send you two home.”

A live demonstration, Curt thought, glancing quickly at Surling. This was much better than their planned announcement. Once Applenu saw the consequences of the program adjustment, he would have no choice but to deal with him and Surling on their terms.

Curt and Surling moved to the back of the room to make way for the other two men.

Simmons reached over his head for a pair of the remote manipulators. He shoved and twisted with both hands. On the other side of the window inside the hot cell, two three-fingered hands on the end of their long metal arms moved to open the door to the transfer chamber—a small airlock in the wall between the furnace room and the hot cell. Two metal hands grabbed the dummy sample from the chamber and carried it to the lathe at the front of the cell.

Applenu typed commands for the computer, his black head bobbing over the yellow keyboard like a bumblebee over a daffodil. After typing several statements, he stood and watched the lathe on the other side of the window go silently into motion. As if operated by an invisible hand, adjusting wheels spun, and the cutting tool advanced to contact the dummy plutonium sample.

Curt and Surling stared into the cell, waiting.

To Curt, everything in the room flared into sharp clarity, like the effects of the crazy cigarettes, but in an atmosphere charged with energy different from the relaxation that percolated through his body on the smoke molecules. His brain clicked into a ready state; he concentrated on the sequence of events about to unfold, analyzing alternate possibilities and responses he and Surling might have to make to Applenu’s response. He searched his imagination for a reaction by Applenu that they may not have anticipated.