The Threat (27 page)

“What about the point location?” Lynch said. “They can dump this stuff out anywhere, right?”

Dan told them he didn't think they were limited to a dumping or spraying scenario. “If these people are part of the group that bombed
Cole
and
Horn,
they don't mind suiciding. They can get wind data as easily as we can. They'll position themselves, if they're driving the plane, upwind of the city. What Marty's giving us is the footprint; they can orient it any way they want.”

Harlowe said, “What have you got on the source?”

“Cesium-137, finely powdered.”

“And how much?”

Dan got on the phone to room 303.

Alvarado answered after five rings. “I'm on the other line with him now,” he said.

“With who?”

“The security director at Laguna Verde.”

“Good. That's real good, Luis! What's he say?”

“Just hold on.” The rapid clatter of Spanish. Alvarado sounded angry. Then a staccato series of phrases. Dan realized he was counting down, or up.

“He still won't say.”

“Fuck.”

“Said he'd lose his job. I said okay, he didn't have to tell me shit. I'd start counting up from ten kilos. All he had to do was listen. He just stopped me. At eighty kilos.”

“Holy shit,” Harlowe muttered. “And it's 137?”

“It's cesium?” Dan asked Alvarado.

“
Cesio radioactivo.
That's what he said. Eighty kilos—without the lead packaging.”

Harlowe sucked air, looking at the screen. Then started typing again.

She coded the powder as base surge, the finely milled earth and dust thrown up by a near-ground blast. She hit the Enter key. The distant mainframe, under some mountain in Colorado, cogitated for several seconds.

Its output appeared as a funnel-shaped, pulsating amber wedge. They stared at it. “Can you print that out?” Dan said at last. Harlowe pressed a button and a wet-paper printer off to the side, huge, old, grimy, hummed suddenly, as if startled out of a long sleep.

A duty officer, holding up a handset: “One of you Lenson?”

It was Bloom. He started off too fast, and Dan had to slow him down. Finally he got on sync. “I talked to the lieutenant governor of Veracruz—the state, not the city. He confirmed material is missing. But he can't say that officially.”

“Well, look, Miles, that's just not good enough. We're getting confirmation through Luis too, but it's still unofficial. We need someone to go on the record about this,” Dan told him. “I don't mean to the press; just to us, here in the Sit Room. Call your guy back. Work the ‘White House is calling' angle. I want a faxed statement. Promise him a medal from the president. A job this side of the line. A date with Sharon Stone, she's always hanging around at De Bari's parties. Just get it.”

It was starting to roll. He felt as if he were riding a snowboard on the crest of an avalanche. He left them all working and went in to see Roald again.

*   *   *

But she motioned him to wait. He hovered as she said into the phone, “Yes … yes … not yet. No.”

When she hung up she looked pensive.

“What is it?”

“The team leader at NORAD doesn't think he can declare an alert.”

“We don't need to launch interceptors. Just click the readiness up, in case we have to.” But even as he said this it occurred to him that it was conceivable, it was just conceivable, that if what he was guessing at was taking place, a plane with those isotopes aboard could be in the air right now. No reason it couldn't be.

For the first time, he really felt afraid.

Roald was saying, “The bottom line is there's no confirmation from the Mexican authorities. And we're not the initiating authority for alerts for most of these agencies. Not for FEMA. Not for NORAD. I can't even get anybody at Transportation. They're supposed to have a duty officer but there's no answer.”

“Well, who's the initiating authority for an alert if not the White House? Presidential emergency authority—”

“Whoa, there. Don't get the Sit Room confused with the national command authority, Dan. Remember, we just answer the phones here,” Roald said mildly.

“Okay, okay, I know.… But how about NMCC? The Pentagon's got to have the authority to get the Air Force moving, and maybe the FBI.”

“The National Military Command Center has no link with the FBI. But they could get interceptors up, yes. If they believed there was an imminent threat.”

“How about calling the FBI direct then?”

“They're in the crime-fighting business, not round-the-clock command stuff. They don't have a 24/7 operations center.” Roald considered it. “I could probably punch the book and get somebody's pager, or contact a phone watch. Ask for a callback. But I doubt we're going to get any live people to talk to this late on a Friday. Let alone somebody who can order a raid in California. We'd do better to wait till eight or eight thirty in the morning, catch people as they open for business—no, then it'll be Saturday.”

“How about the CIA?”

Roald bared her teeth. “Believe me, you want somebody to actually do something, Dan, you do not go to Langley. Just trust me on that one.”

Dan stared at her, then reached for her phone. Her hand closed over his. “Hold on, Commander. I've presented the issue where it needs to be presented. They're doing the notifications according to their lists. If they think it's worth going to general quarters for, they'll go.”

“But how long will that take?”

For answer he got his hand back. “I don't know. But I'll keep pushing the other buttons. Maybe try the Los Angeles Police Department.”

“Call the Pentagon again. Damn it, let me talk to them.”

“
No
. I have a call in to the deputy assistant. If she thinks we have something worth pursuing, she'll call Mrs. Clayton. Who will then, if she agrees, be the one to really light things off. That's how we're going to do it. By the book.”

He was about to burst out that while they were playing Mother May I and making sure no one got offended, terrorists might be loading an aircraft with the most dangerous payload since Nagasaki. But then he remembered how deftly Jennifer Roald had handled a call from Eritrea. How she'd defused that situation, and probably saved a general officer's career. If she thought he was getting tunnel vision, maybe he was. He took a deep breath. “All right. We'll do it your way. Until I see that's not working.”

He felt her cool gaze brush him. As if about to ask: And then what? But she didn't, just picked up the phone and tapped a single button.

“This is the White House Situation Room,” she said. “I need you to call me back just as soon as you hear this message.”

*   *   *

But no one did. Roald left other messages, left her number on pagers. Still no response. By 4
A.M
. Dan was getting nervous. Where was the CIA? The FBI? He couldn't believe no one else had picked up these clues. Or maybe they weren't clues, and he was seeing mirages.

He was sitting with eyes closed, worrying, when Ed Lynch shook his shoulder. “I'm awake,” he snapped.

“I called the UPS hub office in Los Angeles. Told them I was the warehouse manager at International Blessings, and wanted to check on our shipment.”

“That's underhanded and brilliant, Major. What did they say?”

“Three containers. That's a big shipment, apparently.” He read off the back of a phone message form. “They're marked for Sudan. Flight 3913. I got the shipment number.”

Once more Dan thought of the empty containers air transportation security had noticed being shuttled around. He was starting to see what that must have been about. Getting familiar with the air carrier's procedures, schedules, maybe even doing a dry run. Smoothing out any snags, so the final operation would go smooth as silk.

“Routing?”

“Ontario, California—that's near L.A.—to Washington, D.C., via the UPS national hub in Louisville, Kentucky. Container transfer at Washington International for the overseas flight to Sudan.”

“Great work, Ed.” He slapped the major's shoulder and walked the info back to Roald, realizing on the way that Washington International Airport, more commonly known as Dulles, was only about thirty miles from the White House.

A man with slicked-black hair had his head bent together with the captain's. When Dan tapped a knuckle on glass Brent Gelzinis looked up, annoyed even before he saw who it was knocking.
Uh-oh,
Dan thought. Roald beckoned him in.

“What are you trying to do now, Lenson?” the assistant national security adviser snapped.

This wasn't going to be easy, trying to deal with the man he'd called a weasel only yesterday. He laid the printout in front of him, trying for professionalism. “Trying to abort a terrorist strike, sir. Flight 3913 from Los Angeles to the Sudan, via Washington International. Taking off at 0130 local time, that's 0430 Washington time. This morning. Carrying three containers from International Blessings, an Islamic charity based in Pomona, California. That's a suburb of Los Angeles. The containers will transfer at Dulles. If we're right, you'll find enough radiocesium in them to contaminate most of the District of Colombia.”

Gelzinis didn't look impressed. “‘If we're right'—what does that mean? Who reported this? CIA? FBI?”

Dan didn't answer. Neither did Marty Harlowe, whose presence Dan sensed behind him by her scent. Roald cleared her throat. “Commander Lenson's people have put together some indicators. Pretty strong ones, I think.”

“Confirmed?”

“We're checking them out. But we don't have confirmation yet.”

“What about the intelligence agencies? Did you bother asking them?”

Roald said quietly that she'd tried, but couldn't reach anyone. Gelzinis snorted, made a pushing-away motion. “Which means they have no indicators. Or they'd have someone at the airport.”

“Not necessarily. They may have no idea—”

“I'm surprised you called me, Jennifer. Not that I mind coming in, but … obviously our counterdrug people, Lenson here, they've picked up some rumor. He's to be … complimented for bringing it to your attention. But if you've done your best to check it out with the proper agencies, left messages for action in the morning, as far as I can see, our responsibility ends there. And you have the morning summary to prepare.”

Dan saw Roald stiffen. Gelzinis waited. Then added, when neither responded, “Don't you agree?”

“Yes, sir,” Roald said.

*   *   *

But Dan didn't leave when the assistant did. He couldn't. The others stayed too. They didn't say much. Just watched him until he went back to Roald and asked if there was any other way they could get that aircraft looked at before it took off. Get someone to check it out. Confirm what he suspected, or prove him wrong.

“Brent made it clear he's not going to wake Mrs. C.”

“Right. But damn it, he's assuming the CIA knows everything. You and I both know, Jennifer, there have been times that wasn't true. Not to mention that we can't get them to actually do anything in the middle of the night.”

“Well, there's the DOMS route,” Roald said.

“What's that?”

“Director of Military Support. Another way to get Defense to react if NMCC won't.”

She explained that the secretary of the army was the executive agent for military support to civil authorities. “We use DOMS a lot when U.S.-Mexico border issues crop up. Which I guess this might fall under, in some sense … But we can't just tell active-duty forces to go do this, go do that, inside the U.S. That's just not our bailiwick.”

“How does that work? And how long does it take?”

“Well, that really should go through channels too. I convince Mrs. Clayton. She calls the secretary of defense, Weatherfield. And he—”

“And that's faster … how?”

“Point taken. Maybe, considering it's off-duty hours, I could just get her verbal authorization to call the DOMS contact in the Pentagon. I can almost always get hold of him, even at night. He's the one who can ask the governor out there to authorize whatever's needed.” Roald paused. Then her voice changed, and he heard an edge. “Of course what we should
really
be doing is our
important
work—like getting the morning summary ready. Did you hear that one?”

Dan drummed his fingers. It wasn't that he didn't see the need for the national security adviser to approve alerts, or that the armed forces couldn't go into action on U.S. territory without getting the permission of the civil authorities. But it seemed like the whole system had been designed a long time ago, when things moved a lot slower. “Do we
have
to go through all that? There's no way to declare an emergency?”

“If we want to use active-duty forces inside a state, we have to get the governor's permission.”

“How about his state troops? The National Guard?”

“We don't have access to them until they're federalized,” Roald told him.

Dan had been looking at the clock as they talked. Now Lynch put his head in. “Excuse me. That flight's taking off in ten minutes.”

“Call and do your shipping-manager act again. Tell them you want to hold the takeoff. You forgot something. Under no circumstances do you want it to go out tonight. Or you'll sue them. You'll never send another thing UPS.”

Sweat broke under his armpits and ran tickling down his ribs. He hoped they were right, the people like Gelzinis who had to check off every block before they acted. Who thought if the intel agencies didn't know about a threat, there was no threat. “Damn it—we've got to stop that plane!”