Perilous Panacea (22 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Saul had just settled into his office for another day of slogging through e-mails and phone calls when Agent Jerry Fortner of the Knoxville, Tennessee, office contacted him. “We located Barry Everly,” Fortner said. “He’s on a job in Idaho.”

Everly was one of two unaccounted-for computer-controlled machining experts who had left the Y-12 weapons plant in Oak Ridge within the past three years to become private consultants. Everly moved to California, and they had been unable to contact him immediately.

One down, three to go Saul thought. One more at Oak Ridge, one in Boston, and one in Albuquerque. “What about the other Oak Ridge possibility?” Saul asked as he rifled the reports on his desk for the name. “Curtis Alfred Reedan.”

“People at Y-12 say he’s a metallurgist who’s an expert in computer applications to metal fabrication. I didn’t check on him because the Y-12 people know what he’s up to: technical consulting out of his home in Oak Ridge. He talks to Y-12 regularly, because he consults for them.”

“Check him out like you were told. Find out what he’s been up to the last month or so.”

“Hey, okay,” Fortner said, anger creeping into his voice. “I just got on this job yesterday when Abbot came down sick. I barely got any information on what the hell you guys want.”

“So now you know. And we want it yesterday.”

“What is this anyway, another drug case? Money laundering? If so, it doesn’t sound like Reedan’s our man.”

Jesus, where has this guy been? Even if he just got on the job yesterday, he was an FBI agent and should have put it all together. “All you need to know is we’re looking for a missing scientist.” Saul hung up.

The telephone rang, and the secretary who was answering his phone to keep away reporters said, “I’ve got a Miz Mosely on the phone. I tried to get her to talk to a PIO, but she insisted on talking to you. She says it’s a matter of life or death.”

Mosely came on, her British accent suppressed by her anger. “I thought you and I were working together. So why don’t you tell that bloody bitch to get me through when I call? I don’t want to talk to any goddamned Public Information Officer and get a lot of P-R bullshit.”

“Well, she…”

“I don’t have time for that crap now. I just had a phone call from our guy, who told me he was sending an e-mail with some important information. Remember back when he told me they were going to demonstrate that they know what they are doing when it came to making bombs?”

“I remember. I wasted two days in Saint Louis and Indianapolis.”

“Yeah, yeah. I didn’t say those were the cities just that they were possibilities. Anyway, they’re ready to give you that demonstration.”

“Where? When?”

“Today, in Chicago.”

“The President is in Chicago.”

- - - - -

When Lori got to the Garden Apartment complex parking lot at four-forty-five, over half the parking spaces were empty, and there was no big black car with out-of-state plates. She parked in the sun as far as possible from where Beecher had parked, determined to wait until six. She reasoned that if they kept regular working hours, they would return shortly after five.

With her Taurus 1911 .45-caliber pistol snuggled in the shoulder bag on the seat beside her, she hunkered down, locked in her thoughts, a suffocating heat building in her burgundy Honda Accord. Sweat beaded her forehead, and she started the engine to run the air conditioner. Three barefoot kids playing in the yard in front of the building nearest her stopped to watch. Kids reminded her of Beth and her lost child, who would never run barefoot in the grass.

She fought drowsiness, the aftermath of another sleepless night. Each night her mind replayed words and actions, her still stiff and sore body a constant reminder of that frightful day.

By five-fifteen, home-from-work cars began filling parking spaces. People in arriving cars studied her. At five-twenty-five, a man and a woman got into the car parked next to her and drove away. What if Beecher came back and parked there?

She remembered Beecher standing in front of her, grabbing her chin in his huge hand and twisting her head so she had to look up at him. What was she doing here? What about Beth if they caught her? If they didn’t see her, they would go into the apartment and leave her sitting there sweating. Then what? She touched her shoulder bag on the seat next to her. Would she go in and shoot them? Even if she could pull the trigger, how would that help Curt?

She started the motor and went to pick up Beth.

Five minutes after they got home, the phone rang. Just like the last time. Were they actually watching? Did they really know when she came home?

“Hello?”

“Hello. Mrs. Reedan? This is Special Agent Jerry Fortner of the FBI. I’d like to speak to your husband.”

She paused. “He’s not here. He’s away on business.”

“Where is he? When will he be back?”

Should she tell the truth? “He’s…he’s in Pennsylvania.” She told that lie several times before to Curt’s clients and to MIT and the Colorado School of Mines when they wanted Curt’s decision on their job offers. It’s what they told her to say. “I’m not sure when he’ll be back, probably in a couple of days. What do you want with him?”

“Just some routine security clearance questions for his consulting job at Y-12. Can you be more specific about where he is and when he’ll be back?”

She rubbed her hand lightly across her swollen cheek, now taking on a blue tinge below and around the eye. She could tell the FBI. If anybody could help, they could. What about Beecher? What would they do to Curt? What if they were listening to this phone call?

“The last time he called, he wasn’t sure when he would be back. He goes to Pittsburgh quite often. Call back the day-after tomorrow. Maybe he’ll be back, or if he calls, I’ll tell him you want to talk to him.”

“Please give me his cell phone number or his hotel so I can call him.”

How to answer? “When we talked, he mentioned his cell phone wasn’t working. I’m not exactly sure where he is in Pennsylvania.”

“Well…Okay, I’ll call back.”

Lori collapsed onto a kitchen chair. Day after tomorrow, she thought. What will she say then?

- - - - -

As soon as Saul got off the phone with Mosely, he called Spanner, which spawned another meeting in Dowel’s office, this time with the Director present. The Director had notified the chairman of the White House Planning and Operations Committee for SWISILREC of the message, and the POC was to meet in an hour. After some discussion, Spanner and Dowel recommended that the Director tell the POC that the President should go through with his Chicago talk, since the bomb makers would not tell Saul and some nuclear experts to be in Chicago for a demonstration at the same time the President was speaking if they were planning to detonate an atomic bomb.

At 7:25 pm, Saul, Spanner, and Chicago Special Agent Mel Hubbard entered the Monroe Street entrance of the Palmer House as instructed by the latest e-mail Mosely forwarded forty-minutes ago. Hustling up a long stone stairway, they entered the cavernous two-story hotel lobby with its ornate columns and cornices and murals on the curved ceiling. A piano and violin duet superimposed “Old Man River” onto a rumble of voices emanating from the suit-and-tie and evening-dress crowd clustered around the glistening lobby bar.

Hubbard, a tall, well-built black man, walked with Spanner, fifteen feet ahead of Saul. Once in the lobby, Spanner and Hubbard separated, and Saul strolled toward the registration desk, a long marble counter straight ahead as he came up the steps. Following instructions in the e-mail, he asked the girl behind the counter if there was a message for him.

Saul read the note she handed him, wadded it, and casually dropped it to the floor for Spanner to retrieve. As instructed by the note, Saul headed for the phone with the out of order sign at the end of a bank of four phones in a narrow corridor next to the counter.

Spanner and Hubbard strolled around the lobby, checking to see if anyone watched Saul. Three other Chicago agents had entered another door and were watching the lobby from the balcony.

At seven-thirty sharp, the phone on the end rang.

“Saul speaking.”

“This will not take long, Mr. Saul. What was your wife’s maiden name, her home town, and what was her major in college?”

“What is this, twenty questions?”

“Just answer the question, or I will hang up.”

Saul didn’t recognize the accent, maybe Russian—Iranian?—which meant he wasn’t talking to Applenu or Austin.

When he didn’t say anything, the voice said, “Answer the question or else I hang up.”

“Her name was Jahn, from Jasper, Indiana, and she majored in communications.”

“Good. We just wanted to make sure the FBI was following our commands. I’ll also assume you brought nuclear experts, as we requested. The item you came to see is in Chicago’s convention and exhibition center, McCormick Place, only about a mile from where your president is supposed to be giving a speech tonight. Am I to assume his speech is still on?”

“Yes it is. Where exactly in McCormick is this exhibition, or do we have to search all of the building?”

“We set up an exhibit for you in the Lawless Room. It’s set up like a museum display. You will not be disappointed. By the way, Chicago has some excellent museums, as you will soon find out.”

He hung up.

- - - - -

Hubbard maneuvered their dark-blue Ford Taurus through light evening traffic, heading south on Michigan Avenue. Saul and Spanner sat in the back, Trent Marshall, the head of the Chicago office, sat in the front. The car behind them contained two more agents from the Chicago office and two nuclear weapons experts, Tom Sukiomo from Los Alamos and Ted Lassiter from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. When Spanner heard about them being flown in, he said, “It verifies my suspicions: there’s nobody in Washington anymore who knows how anything works.”

They swept past the Chicago Art Institute with its two dirty stone lions guarding the entrance. A few blocks later, they passed the Hilton, where policemen formed a barrier to keep a crowd of demonstrators back, their signs castigating the president for not protecting them from nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. A knot of sign-waving demonstrators also patrolled the sidewalk across the street.

After wasting nearly half an hour being directed and misdirected by various guards and managers of the seemingly endless complex, they were met in the parking garage for McCormick Place East by Janos Lubanski, night security manager for all of McCormick Place, and his two black assistants, both of whom were on cell phones. Lubanski led the entourage into the deserted building and down a long dimly lit corridor past meeting rooms 20W 1-14, the Olive-Harvey and Jane Adams rooms to the Theo Lawless Room.

Although eight enormous chandeliers blazed from the ceiling, most of the light seemed to be sucked away by the dark-brown acoustical tiles on the ceiling, the reddish-brown carpet, and the dark-stained wainscoting on the walls. In the front half of the room, straight-back, brown leather-covered metal chairs were set up for a meeting.

“Are you here to review the slides?” Lubanski asked.

“What slides?” Spanner asked.

“We just helped two guys set this room up for a meeting of the Bootstrap Bombers tomorrow morning,” Lubanski said, leading them to the raised stage at the front of the room. A lectern on the left end held a laptop computer. “They said Mr. Saul would be here later tonight to review the slides on that laptop.”

“I’m Saul.”

“They said they left instructions on that crate,” Lubanski said, motioning to a large wooden box the size of a refrigerator on the other side of the screen.

Saul found an envelope on top of the box. “It’s addressed to Mr. Saul and interested people.” Although he knew it was a futile gesture, he took a pair of surgical gloves from his pocket, pulled them on and opened the envelope.

“So what the hell does it say?” Spanner asked.

“It says they’ve got a slide show set up for us.” Saul went around the wooden box and simply lifted off the side, reached in with both gloved hands and brought out a small digital recorder. He set it on the wooden box, then reached back into the box and came out with a long roll of blueprints and a three-ring binder filled with graphs and tables. “That’s it.”

“That’s all that’s in that big box?” Spanner asked, looking back at the two weapons experts at the back of the room and motioning them forward. “Have a seat, and we’ll play the thing.”

“You want to dust for prints first?”

“Later. You know there aren’t any. For now, we’ll play it and look at the slides,” Spanner said. He turned to Marshall and told him to get everyone but the scientists out of the room, including Hubbard and himself.

Saul brought the tiny recorder over to the scientists in the front row of chairs and pressed PLAY.

“Gentlemen: what we are about to demonstrate should convince you that we have constructed several atomic bombs,” a deep voice said with a slight unidentifiable accent.

“It’s not Austin,” Spanner said.

“Or Applenu,” Saul said. “Not a British accent.”

“First, the wooden box you see is the size we would use to transport one of our bombs. Had we chosen to, we could have easily placed a bomb in this room or anywhere in Chicago, as close to the president as we wanted to. Even in the Hilton, although for the type of bombs we have constructed, such proximity is not important. Of course, we could place our bombs any place, say the Empire State Building in New York, the Capital Building in Washington, or the Arch in Saint Louis.

“We considered showing you a real bomb, minus the nuclear material. But why should we give up something we worked so hard to produce? Instead, we conceived another method to convince you we mean business. Now, please turn off this recorder and have someone dim the lights and touch a key on the computer. Then double click the icon on the desktop. Everything we have to show and tell you is in the slides and video you are about to view.”

Saul took care of the lights and then touched the space bar on the computer, which brought the monitor and screen in front of the room to life with the desktop and a PowerPoint icon, which, after several more clicks was in slideshow mode, and a PowerPoint title slide appeared: