Perilous Panacea (2 page)

Chapter Two

Ian Deby watched Steve Austin push the empty pizza pan aside and asked, “What brings you to Princeton this time?”

“The usual administrative bullshit. The DOE—your U.S. Department of Energy—is a micro-management disaster area. I’m here to make sure the Princeton fusion program stays on course.”

Three months ago, Austin appeared in Deby’s Princeton office. He said he saw Deby’s name on the Princeton fusion staff list, and he knew Deby was a fellow UCLA alum because he remembered seeing him on campus. Deby did not remember Austin. Since that first meeting, Austin had shown up in his office twice. By coincidence, he called last night shortly after Sherbani left and invited Deby out for pizza.

Austin grabbed the pitcher of beer and filled their glasses. He was shorter than Deby, probably a little over five-foot-eight, and in contrast to Deby’s dark-brown hair and eyes, Austin was blond with bright-blue eyes, and he wore the energetic good looks of many of the youthful UCLA undergrads that roamed the campus and populated the Westwood bars when Deby was there. Austin claimed not to have been like most UCLA students, saying he quickly got beyond surfing and sex, finished his PhD, and moved on.

“Why do you work for DOE?” Deby asked, remembering Sherbani’s statement that Americans were only interested in money and sex. “Isn’t money important to you?”

“You bet your ass it’s important. It’s freedom, escape from the bullshit. I went to DOE to learn how bureaucracies operate. Eventually, I intend to start my own software and consulting firm, so I can work on what I want to work on. The government makes a good customer—a big customer.”

At a previous dinner, Austin talked about some of his life and achievements, beginning when he was nine and his father ran off with his twenty-three-year old secretary. His mother married a Stanford math professor, who tutored the young Austin. When he got to college, he was a math whiz and computer programming expert.

“Playing Grand Theft Auto soon became a bore,” he said. By the time he was seventeen, he’d sold two computer games to a video-game company. Besides that, he’d developed an interest in electronics and built himself an advanced computer. He completed B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science by the time he turned twenty; he had his PhD in computer science by twenty-three. He was now twenty-five.

With that background, taking a job at DOE made little sense to Deby. An expert in computer hardware design and software engineering could write his own ticket. Deby knew Austin would never take a chance on Sherbani’s folly. There was no use asking.

A week ago, Deby was plagued with questions about his next job. Should he take an assistant professor’s position at Wisconsin? Should he stay at Princeton after his post-graduate appointment ended? His UCLA professor e-mailed him about a job at MIT. Now, a job was the least of his worries. All he wanted was to convince Sherbani his idea for an atomic bomb was impossible. But with his father in jail and his mother and uncle at their mercy, he had no choice but to take the chance.

He fingered the cold mug. “How would you like to make a million dollars, Steve?”

“How many people do I have to kill?”

The question stunned Deby into momentary silence. It was something he’d thought about only in passing. The bombs would never be built. If they were, would they be used? Sherbani said they wouldn’t. Not unless they were forced to by their infidel enemies.

“What I’m about to say could get me sent to jail.”

“I promise not to turn you in.”

“You do know I’m Iranian?”

“Iranian? You with that perfect British accent?”

Was that a compliment? He considered himself British. “I am a British citizen, but because of my background, I’ve been approached by the Iranian government to build a nuclear weapon,” Deby said and then waited and wondered. Would Austin leave? Would he go to the FBI or Homeland Security? Was this the end of his dream of a professorship at Wisconsin? MIT? Would he be in jail tomorrow?

Austin stared, eyes wide. “It seems to me,” he said, “Iran has tried a bunch of ways to get a bomb the last few years.” He smiled, his blue eyes sparkling. “All attempts bombed, if you’ll pardon the pun. It always appeared they weren’t too bright. So what are they doing this time?”

“They want to steal nuclear material from the United States.”

“From the DOE?” Austin laughed. “Never happen.”

“It can be done.” Deby described the literature Sherbani gave him.

“That’s last century stuff. Things are different now. If it could be done, it won’t be done by somebody who’s screwed up every time they tried something.”

Deby knew he was right. “It’ll be different this time.”

“If I agree to join you, what would I do? What are you going to do?”

Sherbani hadn’t provided details, just what he expected, and what he expected was impossible. “If you join up, you and I would run the show, everything from figuring out how to steal the nuclear material to building the bombs.”

“No shit? How did they pick you?”

That was the same question Deby asked Sherbani every time they met. “Like you said, up until now the Iranians buggered everything they tried. That was the old guard, so somebody figured they’d let the next generation have a go.” One of Sherbani’s convoluted explanations went something like that.

“What do you know about building a nuclear weapon?”

Another question he had asked Sherbani. “I’m a reasonably intelligent nuclear engineer. The theory of atomic bombs isn’t difficult. Iran’s nuclear scientists have studied it and have designs. All we need to do is get the nuclear material and build them.”

Austin laughed. “That’s all, huh?”

He told Austin about a report written by Iranian scientists that Sherbani gave him. It summarized bomb designs and information needed to build them. After reading it, Deby was as convinced as Sherbani that a computer expert would be needed—a bloody good computer expert—because computers would be needed in everything from bomb design to machining bomb parts. With an expert like Austin, they’d need only one or two other people once they got the nuclear material.

Austin drained half his beer, a smile spreading across his face. “A million dollars, right? I’d want to negotiate for more money, but first I’d like to see that literature.”

- - - - -

With Sherbani’s permission, Deby turned over the literature. Then he waited for the FBI, waited to be the latest Iranian caught with his trousers down. At least Sherbani would know he tried.

On the third day of waiting, he received a text message from Sherbani telling him to be in New York Saturday afternoon for a meeting at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue near Madison Square Garden.

Sherbani answered Deby’s knock at room 712. Deby stepped around Sherbani into the room and stopped dead in his tracks to stare across two double beds at Steve Austin sitting at a small round table behind a laptop computer.

“How you doing, Ian, old chap?” he asked, mimicking Deby’s British accent.

Deby turned to Sherbani. “What is this?”

“We tested you, Hassan, to see if you were with us. Doctor Austin initiated this brilliant project and brought it to us. He needed a nuclear engineer. You were the logical choice.”

Smiling, Austin waved Deby to a seat at the table.

- - - - -

Austin ran the meeting. “When we talked, Ian, I got the idea you didn’t believe the plan would work. It’ll work, because I’m not in the DOE Fusion Sciences Division, like I told you. I’m in NNSA, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the division responsible for security and for transporting and accounting for bomb-grade nuclear material in the U.S. That’s where we’re getting our nuclear material.”

“You said you came to Princeton to meet with people on the fusion program.”

He smiled. “I came to see you. We played it safe to make sure you wouldn’t go to the police. We figured if you took a chance on recruiting me, you could be trusted.”

“That’s not all,” Sherbani said his smile larger than Austin’s, “he knows where all the bomb-grade material is that will fit the criteria for our bombs.”

“That’s right. Like you said, Ian, you need computers to do anything these days. I’ve got the skills, and I let the right people in DOE know about it. Now, whenever anybody has a computer problem, they call me.”

Austin spent the next two hours laying out their plan. He concluded, “This job won’t be easy and could take six months to a year. It’s already taken me two years, but I’ve achieved our first objective by gaining access to DOE computers containing information on how bomb-grade material is stored and shipped. I run the computers that keep NNSA operating. I keep it operating.”

“Access is one thing,” Deby said, “but your plan will work only if you can manipulate the system.”

“I agree. I’ve had experience hacking other people’s computers. In that case, I first had to get passwords. Here, I’ve got passwords. By the time we are ready to go, I intend to control the computers that will be compromised.”

Deby watched, amazed at Austin’s confidence and wishing he was as cocksure of himself. He also wished he was anywhere but here. Two days ago he heard from Wisconsin. They set an interview date. With a little luck, he could reach his goal to be a British scientist teaching at an American university, maybe marry an American girl and raise a family.

Austin glanced at Deby, winked, and turned to Sherbani. “Before we go on, let’s set Ian’s mind straight. Tell him what you told me about what you intend to do with these bombs.”

“Iran is a peaceful nation. All we want is to deal with the United States on equal footing, not from our knees. They have no right to tell us what we can do in our own country. We will get weapons they will not take from us. We will then negotiate as equals. We are no more anxious to use such powerful weapons than is the United States. But someone must show them they cannot dictate what the rest of the world can and cannot do.”

Austin considered the reply, nodded, and glanced at Deby. “I understand, and I think Ian does too. Now that we’ve got the main part of our team assembled, the second thing we need to talk about is payment for services rendered if we are successful.”

Sherbani now wore a constant smile. “Talking about money is difficult, Doctor Austin, but I say to you what I said before and what I told Hassan. You will be well rewarded.”

Austin nodded, smile in place. “First, I want an immediate five-million dollars for bringing you this job. Then Ian, or Hassan, as you call him, and I want ten-million each to do the job. We want two million up front, as a show of good faith. We want further payments as the project proceeds, say two million when we steal the bomb material and two-million more when the first bomb is completed. Then we get the remainder when all bombs are delivered.”

Sherbani’s smile faded. “That is much money.” His smile reignited, somewhat dimmed. “I need to talk to some people, but you will get your price.”

“We also need access to cash, so we want you to arrange for us to get two-hundred-thousand in cash in the United States,” Austin said. “I assume you can do that because you will have to get more cash for expenses for the project.”

Sherbani indicated that would be possible.

Deby knew it was time to speak up. Act confident, he told himself. Be like Austin.

“You promised me something else,” he said to Sherbani. “My family. I want my father out of prison, and then I want my family flown out of Iran before I agree to work for you.”

“Do not be unreasonable, Hassan. It will take time, but we will work something out.”

Deby stood, feeling Austin’s gaze on him. “Either that, or I walk out right now.”

“You know we can make it unpleasant for your father, and your mother. And you.”

“That’s my price.”

- - - - -

Deby followed Austin through the revolving door of the hotel, onto the crowded New York sidewalk and around the corner into an almost-deserted bar. “We did it, Ian. We did it.”

Deby felt as if he were in a daze. “Why? Why are you doing this?”

Austin laughed. “As you would say, my British friend, fifteen bloody-million reasons.”

“But you’re planning to give them a bloody atomic bomb. What will they do with it?”

Austin led him to a booth in the corner. “As our friend Sherbani says: they have as much right to one as anyone else. Where does the U.S. get the right to crash into their country and take their toys away?” Austin turned to the approaching waitress and told her to bring a bottle of Dom Pérignon. He turned back to Deby, laughing. “You talked me into this, remember? And now, I find out you don’t think they should have a bomb.”

“You better bloody well believe I don’t.”

“Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn’t. But they are getting one. We are giving it to them and getting our ten-million. After that, who knows what might happen to the bombs?”

“What does that mean? You’re going to double-cross them? They’ll kill you.”

Austin laughed. “You didn’t hear me say anything about sabotaging the project. I intend to live up to our contract and give them the bomb. Enough of that, let’s get down to the celebration of getting rich. I got the impression in our meetings over the last few months that you’re still an up-tight Muslim and you’ve never gotten laid.” He burst out laughing. “We’re going to remedy that tonight.”

Chapter Three

Ian Debynow had a bank account in Switzerland with two-million dollars minus the two-hundred thousand in cash that Sherbani arranged for him and Austin in the United States. His cash rested in a safety deposit box in a branch of the PNC Bank in Princeton, New Jersey.

Despite Deby’s insistence that his parents be out of Iran before he began work on the bomb, Sherbani insisted that would take time. In the meantime, he arranged for Deby to visit Iran. Deby considered taking BahAmin, his older sister who emigrated with him and now lived outside of London with her British husband, Malcolm Wilson, and their three children. Sherbani mentioned Uncle Behrouz, but not BahAmin. Why draw Sherbani’s attention to her? Deby worried about not being trusted by Sherbani and therefore being watched or having his phone bugged, so he called her from a pay phone and told her what was happening. To keep from compromising her safety, he had her set up an anonymous e-mail account on Yahoo, and he did the same. They would use those accounts only to communicate with each other.

When he left for Iran, he told his Princeton colleagues he was going to England for a visit. Sherbani made arrangements under his Iranian name with an Iranian passport for an Iran Air flight from Amsterdam to Tehran.

The parents he found only vaguely resembled those pictured in his mind all these years, mental scenes enhanced by the few photographs Auntie Goli brought out of Iran. Streaks of gray pushed his forty-eight-year old mother’s appearance to that of a sixty-plus grandmother, a change hastened by twelve-hour days spent cleaning government office buildings. On his first visit with his father, he discovered a completely gray prisoner with deep facial wrinkles that pushed his appearance well past his fifty-four years.

During his visit, Sherbani arranged for him to consult with the Iranian scientists who had produced the report on atomic bombs that he had been given. These were older men, most of them older than Sherbani. Deby wondered if they would not rather be spending their time on other technical tasks.

When he returned to Amsterdam, he rented a car for a side trip to Zurich to check his new bank account and set up other accounts for later use. He spent a day looking for a place to settle his family when they arrived, but he then changed his mind about having them relocate there. Since they would come out of Iran on Iran Air, and since Iran Air had no flights to Switzerland, he decided to tell Sherbani to fly them to Amsterdam. Before his return to the U.S., he contacted an Amsterdam real-estate agent and used some of his new-found wealth for a six-month lease on a three-bedroom apartment in the Kinkerstraat district.

Back in the U.S., he e-mailed BahAmin with a tentative plan for when his parents were released. He included numbers for Swiss bank accounts for BahAmin and Uncle Behrouz, who was part of the plan.

He spent his last month at Princeton interviewing for jobs at Ohio State, MIT, Drexel, and Wisconsin. All but Ohio State offered jobs, which he turned down. When his postdoctoral appointment at Princeton ended, he announced he had a job with Conrad Engineering Consultants in Salt Lake City. Conrad Engineering’s website described a virtual 90-person firm with e-mail addresses for the ninety phantom employees, thanks to Steve Austin. Ian Deby’s new e-mail address, [email protected], would be used to communicate with friends and colleagues at Princeton and elsewhere. According to Austin, this would allow him to resume his former life once the bombs were built. At that time, he would return from a long-term consulting trip from somewhere on the other side of the world—Korea, China, or South Africa—and announce that he was looking for an academic position.

Three months after the New York meeting and a week after Deby left Princeton, they again met at the Sheraton. As before, Austin ran the meeting and with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation on his laptop computer, he laid out a bomb program that included preparation of facilities, bomb design, acquisition of nuclear material, and building and delivering the bombs. According to Austin, when the project was completed he and Deby would return to normal society. Deby had a difficult time believing it; he wondered if Austin felt the same way

After Austin laid out his ambitious program, Deby spoke up. “You sort of skipped over how you expect to steal the nuclear material. You said yourself that this isn’t the 1970s when the Curve of Binding Energy was written, saying nuclear material could be stolen easily.”

“Twenty-first century technology—cyberspace—makes it a piece of cake. I’ll take care of it.”

“You’ll need other people to help with different parts of the project,” Deby said. “It’ll leak out. Nine-eleven changed everything in this country. Security has been upgraded considerably the last nine years.”

“I agree. The more people that are involved, the greater the chance somebody will leak it. That’s why we’re minimizing the number of people involved, at least those involved voluntarily.”

“What do you mean: voluntarily?”

“Don’t worry about it. Only you, Mr. Sherbani, and I will know the whole plan. Everybody else will know only what they need to know. They won’t know the other people involved. Those doing the hijacking won’t know what’s being hijacked. Only a few people besides us will know you’re involved, and they won’t know your real name. Everybody will be well paid to keep their mouth shut.”

A week after that meeting, Ian Deby was reborn as Brian Applenu, and Steven Austin was reborn as Derek Hearn. The idea according to Austin was to keep their real names clean, so they could resume them when the job was completed. They had the required papers—birth certificates, social security numbers, credit cards, credit histories—everything a twenty-first century man needed to lead a respectable life in the USA in 2010, all thanks to Steve Austin—computer hacker extraordinaire—and a forgery expert Austin knew. Austin also gave Deby two other sets of identification papers should Applenu be compromised.

They would use their new names whenever working on the project, which for Ian, a.k.a Brian, was now a full time job. Since he was still a full-time NNSA employee, Steve didn’t have the luxury, and would sometimes forget to respond when Ian called him Derek.

Austin had Deby buy two laptop computers, one for his communications as Ian Deby, the other for his communications as Brian Applenu. On this one, Austin installed an encryption program. When the job was complete, he could destroy the latter computer if necessary. He also bought a second cell phone, a Siemens S65, from which untraceable calls could be made by Brian Applenu.

Deby moved from Princeton to Washington, and as Applenu, he began designing a facility to safely turn nuclear material into atomic explosives. Actually, Austin had begun the process before Applenu arrived. After searching the country—the internet mainly—posing as Derek Hearn, he found and leased a new hot-cell facility down south that had been built but abandoned by a bankrupt nuclear fuel-element manufacturer before any nuclear material had been put into the facility. It was up to Applenu to modify the facility for their job and have it ready when they acquired the plutonium and uranium bomb material.

Applenu also helped Hearn design bombs. The ones in the Iranian report were not suitable for the nuclear material available for stealing. They would either have to be modified or new ones designed. As they struggled to estimate critical masses for uranium and plutonium, Applenu found it hard to believe they would ever build workable bombs. They lacked data to determine how explosive efficiency depended on mass and energy generation rates. They needed equations of state for bomb materials, which they finally obtained when Austin acquired the Rare Metals Handbook and Glasstone’s Sourcebook of Atomic Energy.

The struggle eased considerably once Austin gained access to the DOE classified library and carted home copies of everything from designs for advanced weapons to critical mass summaries for fissionable materials. In reality, he didn’t have to cart it home. He scanned the literature—actually, he had a librarian scan it—and carried it out of the library in his pocket on a tiny flash drive. In addition to information on designing atomic bombs, they assembled all the information they needed to process plutonium hexafluoride and uranium hexafluoride into plutonium metal and uranium metal, respectively.

While searching the DOE library files, Austin discovered that in the early 1950s before the hydrogen bomb—code named SUPER—became a reality, Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) scientists developed numerous atomic bomb designs with the objective of maximizing explosive yields while minimizing size. Bombs with names like Mike, Viper, and S.O.B.—Super Oralloy Bomb—were just three of the projects detailed in the classified reports he scanned.

With that information and computer-aided design programs, they developed new bomb designs. Hearn as Austin somehow acquired access to one of the world’s fastest computers, a new CRAY supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a computer used by DOE weapons scientists for their calculations. For good measure, he also acquired access to a second supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Tasks that took the Manhattan Project thousands of man hours to complete, took them but a fortnight. In some AEC reports, computational procedures had been worked out, and all they had to do was translate them into codes for the CRAY.

Hearn developed a computer code for simulated explosions he called EXPLOVIEW. With it, they could change bomb parameters and determine explosive yields (kilotons). They designed bombs that approached a megaton, all of them vast improvements on the old AEC designs. To maximize the number of nuclear bombs they could build from material they intended to acquire, they decided on bombs averaging 40 kilotons, over three times the yield of the two dropped on Japan—and with much less weight.

The other part of the plan involved DOE, where six months earlier Austin submitted a massive report to redesign NNSA’s nuclear transportation and security system. Everything was to be computerized, and the process coordinated on a classified website. This included hiring and assigning drivers and guards to trucks that transported nuclear material, organizing and approving the schedule for transporting nuclear material, automating inventory of nuclear material, etc. The report was immediately approved and funded. Austin was in charge of implementing the plan, and by now, the redesign of the system was nearing completion.

In conjunction with his work in Washington with Hearn, Applenu commuted from Washington to the bomb-making facility he was setting up down south. The plan was for Applenu to manage the factory where they would process the hijacked nuclear material that was liquid into powder and the powder into a solid that could be machined into a nuclear explosive for the bomb. Hijacked solid material would be machined directly.

To make it official, Hearn built a website for the factory, which they called Margine Nuclear Technology, a fuel-rod manufacturing facility, complete with e-mail accounts for dummy names that worked at marginenuclear.com. He said the site was for recruiting purposes.

Hearn recruited a young chemist, Eric Drafton, to work on processing the liquid and powder. Drafton visited Washington for three weeks to confer about the project. Hearn, who was vague on how he met him, turned over a large amount of classified literature to him and Applenu on procedures for processing the plutonium and uranium from liquid through powders to metal. Drafton spent most of his time at the factory getting it ready, thus allowing Applenu to spend most of his time in Washington.

Applenu figured Hearn worked fifteen-to-twenty hours a day—some as Austin on his DOE job, but most as Hearn on the project. Although Applenu’s own twelve-hour days had him exhausted, Austin and/or Hearn never faltered. He even squeezed in time to party and spend some of his new-found wealth on a red Porsche Cayman. He knew how to party, and thanks to him, the former Ian Deby was no longer a virgin. That status changed in New York after their first meeting with Sherbani. After that, Austin introduced him to Patricia Hunter, a nice bit of stuff he had begun sleeping with on a semi-regular basis.

Simultaneously with designing the bombs, Hearn worked to acquire the bomb material. For that, Sherbani and Hearn brought in Bill Lormes, who Hearn described as a Russian ex-KGB officer who now “managed various enterprises,” one of which was truck hijacking.

Applenu participated in the meetings to devise hijacking plans. The first part of the plan involved getting men hired as drivers and guards for NNSA’s Transportation Division. Again, Hearn’s computer skills greased the skids, as he was able to devise appropriate backgrounds for each man to ensure they got the jobs. As part of the redesign of the Transportation Division, Hearn made sure he was on the hiring committee. In essence, he was the committee—he and the Department of Human Resources computer.

Lormes—undoubtedly not his real name—was a burly, craggy-faced man in his late fifties, always in an expensive suit and tie. He spoke with a strong Russian accent. Meetings generally began with Lormes objecting to various aspects of Hearn’s plans and then listening to Hearn convince him it was the best way to proceed.

Four months after Deby became Applenu, Hearn decided they should celebrate the successful completion of phase one of the project—bomb design, acquisition of manufacturing facilities, and planning for the hijacking. They sat across from each other at Morton’s Steakhouse in Arlington, Hearn cutting a slice of “double-cut” filet mignon, Applenu chewing a mouthful of porterhouse. Between bites, Hearn quietly brought him up to date and then surprised him. “Lormes has everything in place for the heist of the century. You’ll be manufacturing bombs in less than a month.”

As they finished their meal, a young black man stopped at the table and spoke to Austin. “Steve, did you get hit yesterday? We were down all day.”

“We weren’t affected,” Austin said. “We’ve worked hard on upgrading security.”

“Maybe I’ll come over to your place and get a rundown on your procedures.”

“Sure,” Austin said. “Call me next week.”