Dark Zone

6

Rubens stared at the large screen at the front of the Art Room. “When did you last hear from her?” he asked.

“It’s over ten minutes now,” answered Telach. “She was in this room here.”

The red dot from Telach’s laser pointer moved through the boxes on the schematic of the airport terminal building, skimming across the lower left-hand side of the screen. Their information on the layout of the terminal was sketchy, based largely on Lia’s observations when she had arrived a few days before. The building was only one story and not very large, and they knew exactly where Lia was thanks to the small implant of a radioisotope in her body. They also gathered that the belt controlling and powering her communications system had been removed, since the signal and feed had died without being turned off. As a security measure, the communications gear only worked when close to the implant in an operator’s skull.

“It’s nearly eleven o’clock their time,” said Telach. “Nighttime.”

“I see that,” answered Rubens. He glanced at Lia’s runner, Jeff Rockman, who was sitting a few feet away, staring at his computer screens. His head slumped forward and his face looked like the color of a bleached bone.

“You’re sure she was struck?” Rubens asked.

“No doubt at all,” said Telach, though the question had been directed at Rockman. “The blows were pretty loud. The plane took off five minutes later.”

“No indication that they knew she was an agent?”

“As I said, we think the officer was looking for a bribe.”

“And Lia didn’t give him the money?”

“She tried. He just seemed — she didn’t act submissive at first….”

Telach’s voice trailed off, but Rubens could easily picture what had happened. Lia had run into a young officer who expected to be treated as a god. Suddenly confronted by someone who didn’t cower at his sneer, either he or his minions had lost it.

The man wouldn’t have been assigned to the airport because he was a genius or a stellar officer. And in his eyes, women — even Chinese women — would be lower than animal dung. Hopefully he was smart enough to realize that killing a foreigner would cause him difficulty.

Not much to pin one’s hopes on.

“She could be dead,” blurted Rockman.

Rubens glared at him. “Let us remain calm. We will watch the situation as it develops and respond accordingly.” It was a cold reply but the correct one. The Art Room needed to operate with quiet detachment. “Contact the terminal manager,” Rubens told Telach. “The civilian. Have the call come from someone from the airline who noticed that she wasn’t aboard the plane, looking for her. Then the military people there, then the people in town. Everyone she’s spoken to since she landed.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone in Korea if you have to. I want it clear that people are asking about her. Don’t blow her cover; be judicious.”

“Yes, boss,” said Telach. She nodded to Rockman, who began arranging the calls with the translators.

“Have the Russian plane move in,” said Rubens. “Have them just fly in. I want them there.”

“Just go there? It’s nearly an hour from the border and they won’t be able to get fuel.”

“Just go. We’re paying them enough, aren’t we?”

“They’ll just take off if she doesn’t show up.”

“Have them wait as long as they can. Get Fashona in place.”

Rubens could send in an extraction team from South Korea, but that would blow the entire operation. More important, if that was actually necessary it would probably be too late.

He had to get Lia back, at all costs. But it was critical to do so in a logical, calm manner — and his job now was to communicate that to everyone else. The matter was as under control as it was going to get for the time being; he had to signal confidence by moving on to the next problem.

“What is going on in London?” he asked Telach.

“The police brought Dean and Tommy to the station for questioning.”

“Was the victim our messenger?”

“We believe so. He had a brown beret. But he didn’t have anything with him, not even a scrap of paper. And neither we nor the police have an ID.” Telach punched the control unit on her belt and the screen at the front of the Art Room flashed with a grainy video image of a man with a brown beret walking along a park path. She watched the sequence intently, then jabbed her thumb hard on the controls to stop it a few frames before the man was assassinated.

“That’s the messenger?” said Rubens.

“Yes,” said Telach. “Whoever shot him was in the bushes on this side of the park. It’s about two hundred and fifty yards away. Well planned. Probably escaped through the fence there, into that apartment complex.”

“What’s Johnny Bib working on?” asked Rubens.

“His team is slated to review the Biowar file,” said Telach, referring to a mission Deep Black had recently completed. The Biowar mission had taken the Deep Black team around the globe to Thailand and Burma (or Myanmar, as the dictators there preferred), where they had stopped a designer virus. “They’re in the process of setting up interviews with scientists so they can get background information on the virus biology before proceeding.”

“Give him the information about the two Web domains, the sites on the World Wide Web that were supposedly used to send messages. Tell him to find out what he can about them.”

“We already had the information checked on. It was authentic,” said Telach.

“Yes. But I want Johnny Bib to look at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rubens glanced at his watch. He had a meeting at the White House he couldn’t miss — just couldn’t miss. And yet he couldn’t leave the Art Room now, not with Lia’s fate unknown.

“Should I alert the embassy in London?” Telach asked. “To get Dean and Karr out?”

“Yes. Suggest to Tommy — no, better make it Dean. Tell Dean to call the embassy. As soon as the call is placed, alert them there and get someone to pick them up. No sense having them waste more of the day with the police.”

By “them there” Rubens meant the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Lia’s moving!” said Rockman from his console.

Telach went over quickly. Rubens followed as well. “Moving or being moved?” he asked.

“Impossible to tell.”

Rubens looked over the runner’s shoulder at the terminal building schematic on the computer screen. Lia’s position was marked by a small green dot that moved to the right along one side of the building. The dot stopped near the area they had identified as the reception area — but not quite inside.

“Still no audio,” said Rockman.

“Did you get through to anyone there?” asked Rubens.

“The civilian manager,” said Rockman.

“He assured us there was no problem,” said one of the translators nearby. “But of course he would say that.”

“Keep making the calls,” said Rubens. “Prudently, please. Polite concern, nothing more. They are very sensitive, and at the moment they have what we want. Where’s the Russian plane?”

“On its way,” said Rockman. “We may have to bribe the people at the terminal again.”

“Do it.” Rubens looked at Telach. “Whatever it takes, Marie.”

“Thank you,” said Telach.

Rubens wanted to stay, but the meeting was far too important.

Surely his boss could handle it. Rubens’ place was here.

“We have the terminal manager back,” said Rockman. “He says there was a mix-up in papers, but she is fine.”

“Tell him there is another plane on the way. Imply very strongly that she must be on it. No — state that directly. And there will be no repercussions so long as she is. And alive.”

“Go,” said Rockman to the translator. The runner looked at his screen — the words were being translated there by a special program — then held up his thumb.

“I’m going to the White House,” Rubens told Telach. “Keep me informed.”

Traveling to the White House with his boss, Vice Admiral Devlin Brown, meant a quick helicopter ride rather than the more tiresome car caravan down to D.C. It also meant a few minutes of uninterrupted conversation, a rare occurrence in a typical workday.

“I saw the General this morning,” said Rubens as the helicopter, a specially equipped civilian version of the Sikorsky Blackhawk, lifted off.

“How is he?” asked Brown.

“Very bad,” said Rubens.

“A shame. A friend of mine’s mother had Alzheimer’s. She was very violent toward the end.”

“He’s not that, thank God. Not in his nature, I think.”

“A feisty old bird like him, not violent?” There had been several directors between Brown and Rosenberg, but many tales about him still circulated.

“I don’t know if he was so much feisty as determined,” said Rubens. “If you crossed him, I would imagine then it might seem like uncomfortable.”

“I hope you stick up for me as well when I’m packed on the top floor of a nursing home.”

“His daughter has gone ahead with her threat,” said Rubens. “I expect the suit will be filed any day. I’m to talk to the attorney about it tomorrow.”

“She really is a piece of work, isn’t she? Very greedy. How much is his cousin worth?”

“Fifteen million, in that neighborhood.” The General stood to inherit everything his slightly older cousin owned when he died. The cousin was also in a nursing home and suffering from Alzheimer’s; physically, he was in somewhat worse shape, and not given very long to live.

“If we make it clear that she can have access to the money, will she drop the suit?”

From Brown’s point of view — and the NSA’s — the proceeding wasn’t about the General at all. The General had a vast store of personal papers and other effects, presumably containing a great deal of information about the agency. It was rumored that he had been working on a memoir before he got sick. Rubens’ protests to the contrary, General Rosenberg was a feisty old bird, and it was very possible that he had recorded his thoughts on a wide range of agency projects. The agency had a series of confidentiality agreements and the resources to legally prevent anything he wrote or said from being published, and there was no question it would move to do so if necessary. However, discretion was always the better part of valor as far as the NSA was concerned, and heading off a potentially messy — and public — confrontation was infinitely better than arming the men in black with subpoenas and sending them to confiscate a moving van’s worth of uninventoried papers, notes, tapes, and computer disks.

But in this matter, Rubens was not acting on the agency’s behalf.

“I don’t know that there is a basis for compromise with her,” said Rubens.

“She’s that much of a witch, eh?” asked the admiral.

“Stubborn. Like her father,” he answered.

“Is his care adequate? Perhaps we could arrange for him to be moved to the facility she suggested. Mount Ina, was it?”

The facility in question was a private nursing home where care cost about ten thousand dollars a month. It was an excellent facility, and if the decision had been his, Rubens would have gladly moved the General — and footed the bill personally, if necessary. But the General had expressly forbidden it: his cousin was there, and whether the General stood to inherit his money or not, he hated him. In fact, if he were in his right mind, he probably would have denounced the inheritance somehow or given it away to a charity — preferably one his cousin couldn’t stand.

“Have you thought about moving him?” asked Brown when Rubens didn’t answer his question.

“Yes.”

“You’d pay with your own money, wouldn’t you?”

“For the General there is nothing that I would not do. He would, however, have felt betrayed if I offered it. He did not take charity. But from an objective point of view, his care now is as good as is possible. The people who watch him are decent people. They are genuinely concerned. That would appear the most important thing.”

“Do you need additional legal help?”

“I believe the lawyer I retained will be sufficient,” said Rubens. “And a lawyer from the NSA would only help Rebecca make her case.”

“Keep me informed,” said Brown, turning his attention to the papers he’d brought along.

Despite the fact that the two NSA officials were running ten minutes ahead of schedule, Secretary of State James Lincoln and his two aides had beaten them into the Oval Office. Lincoln was holding forth on the importance of rewarding France for its steps over the past year to align more closely with American Middle Eastern policies — a relevant if not uncomplicated point, given the President’s pending visit to France at the end of the week.

“Ah, there you are, Admiral. Billy, hello,” said President Jeffrey Marcke, swinging upright in his chair. “Secretary Lincoln is just reminding me that the French helped with our Revolution.”

Lincoln’s smile seemed a little pained.

“Maybe Admiral Brown will tell us about John Paul Jones,” added the President. He loved to tweak his advisers, and Lincoln was an easy mark. “Didn’t the French give him a ship?”

“The French have been interesting allies throughout history,” admitted Lincoln. “But they are coming around. They’re trying to make up for their miscues before the Second Gulf War. Better late than never.”

“Billy has a château in France, don’t you?” said the President, changing targets.

Rubens winced internally but tried to act nonplussed. “To be more precise, the château is my mother’s.”

“It overlooks the Loire near Montbazon. Heck of a view,” said Marcke. He had been there when he was still a senator, a few years before. “But if I recall, William, you don’t particularly like the French.”

“I try not to let personal opinions cloud professional judgment,” said Rubens.

Jake Namath, the head of the CIA, appeared at the doorway, followed by the deputy director of the CIA for operations, Debra Collins. George Hadash, the national security adviser, was right behind them.

“Gentlemen, Ms. Collins. Please sit down,” said the President. “The Secretary of State and I have been discussing French history. Mr. Rubens has come to talk about something slightly more recent, with unfortunate implications for the future. William, you have the floor.”

“In the late nineteen-fifties, the French shifted their nuclear weapons program into high gear,” Rubens said, launching into his brief. “They began refining plutonium and shifted to that as a basic weapons material after working with uranium. In 1960, they exploded a sixty- to seventy-kiloton weapon in Algeria near Reggane in the Sahara. Within roughly a year’s time, there were three more explosions. These were billed as tests, although at least one was a hastily arranged detonation to keep a half-finished weapon from falling into the hands of the so-called mutineering generals.”

Rubens glanced at Hadash. The revolt of the French generals was not well known outside of France and Africa, and even some of the histories that reported it confused basic information such as the dates and locations. Rubens and Hadash, however, knew it all very well: Fifteen years before, Hadash had devoted an entire week of his seminar at MIT talking about it. In his opinion, it not only represented Europe’s last attempt to hold on to African colonies; it also showed the futility of military insurrections in an industrialized democracy.

That was Hadash’s view. Rubens had written a rather long paper arguing that it did not.

He’d gotten an A-minus.

“There was at least one other warhead close to completion at the time,” continued Rubens. “This was the so-called Chou weapon—chou as in the French word for cabbage or kale. It was also apparently a reference to the small size and shape of the bomb.”

In this case, small was a relative term; the weapon weighed roughly several hundred pounds. At the time, American intelligence believe it was similar to the American W-9, which had been developed several years before as a warhead for artillery shells. Its yield was calculated at anywhere between forty and ninety kilotons. Little Boy, which was exploded over Hiroshima, had a calculated yield of “only” fifteen to sixteen kilotons, with some sources figuring it as low as thirteen.

At the time, American officials — not to mention the French — feared that the unfinished warhead had been confiscated by the mutineers. That turned out not to be the case — it had in fact been spirited away by a junior officer and placed in a desert storage facility. After the mutiny, the unfinished bomb was moved to a nuclear storage facility that became an underground dump for radioactive materials. The weapon wasn’t forgotten, but the program that it had been part of received a low priority for a variety of reasons and it remained in storage.

“Wasn’t its plutonium very valuable?” said Collins.

Rubens frowned but answered her question. “Of course. But in the immediate aftermath of the mutiny there was a certain amount of slippage in information and priorities, and there is some question of whether the technology the French had would have been well suited to safely reworking the warhead. In any event, there was an entirely new regime in place with different aims for their weapons. Even at the highest estimate, this would have already begun to seem like a rather small yield, certainly compared to American and Soviet programs. The captain who had moved it happened to die in a car accident before the mutiny itself was fully suppressed, and so he wasn’t around to, shall we say, advocate for the warhead.”

“And we know where it is?”

“We’ve known since the mutiny, and tracked it since 1982,” said Hadash. “William did a paper on it for me.”

The fact that Hadash remembered the paper pleased Rubens — though he feared that his former professor might share the fact that it had yielded another A-minus.

Come to think of it, A-minus was the only grade Hadash had ever given him. He would point that out.

“The NSA had a program called Seed Finder during the early Reagan years,” said Rubens. “By that time the French had misplaced the weapon — on paper only — at least twice and located it again. Their estimates of its size and bulk in the nineteen-eighties — well, their calculations were incorrect. They clearly underestimated its potency.”

The NSA had “contracted” with the CIA’s Special Collection Service — in some ways the predecessor to Desk Three — to place sensors at the site to help evaluate the warhead and judge its potency. A CIA officer had lost his life in one of the operations, and two agents (foreign employees of the CIA) had also been killed before the sensors were successfully planted.

“The sensors are regularly checked and updated,” said Rubens. “Two weeks ago, a change was detected.”

“The warhead is gone?” asked Collins.

“Part of it,” said Rubens. “Although a portion of the bomb structure remains.”

The unfinished bomb’s nuclear “kernel” consisted of several disks of refined plutonium, which were designed to be compressed by a special girdle of high explosives to create a nuclear explosion. At least one of the disks was still in place, because the French monitoring system had not detected the change.

“How could they miss it?” asked Lincoln.

Rubens was tempted to say it was because the French were arrogant and pompous imbeciles who couldn’t see past their noses — but he merely shook his head.

“Their technology is not particularly effective. And they have underestimated the size of the material from the beginning. The error is compounded greatly over time,” Rubens pointed out. “I must say, our technology frankly has some drawbacks as well — the units in place must be checked in person, and it may have been moved at any point over about six weeks between inspections.”

“I think what you need to address,” said the President, “is how the material is likely to be used.”

Rubens nodded. “There are two possibilities. One is as a bomb. There would be enough material to construct a weapon with a yield of sixty kilotons, more likely less, possibly more, depending on the state of the plutonium and of course the design of the bomb. The material could be inserted into a properly prepared bomb; anyone with access to the plans from the time should be able to construct a high-explosive shell to set it off. Anyone without access to that could engineer a solution. In neither case is it easy, but it’s certainly do-able. More likely, in our opinion, the plutonium could be used in conjunction with other radioactive materials to create a number of dirty bombs.”

Rubens turned to his theory that the material had been stolen by a private criminal organization with the idea of selling it on the open market. It did not appear to have been sold already — or at least the NSA detection net had not spotted it in the Middle East.

“Our best guess is that it is still somewhere in Algeria. Alternatively, it may be in France.”

“France?” asked Collins.

Rubens didn’t think so himself, but a radiation counter on a ship to Marseilles had some anomalies that were still being investigated. The ship had docked in Bilbao, Spain, after visiting the French port — and there the anomalies had disappeared.

“Either there was a problem with the device, which is not unheard of, or the material was carried into France. As you know, it can be somewhat easier to move things into Europe than the Middle East,” added Rubens. This was because the Arab and northern African countries were covered by a network of American, Israeli, and NATO sensors. Scrutiny at European ports was not nearly as intense.

“We have some additional information from an eavesdropping source in Morocco,” added Rubens. “It ties the ship to a charity used by different terrorist groups. It’s circumstantial, however.”

“Which means you have no real information,” said Collins. She was angry because Rubens hadn’t shared the information about the missing material privately before the meeting. The fact that Hadash had ordered him not to — a fact that neither Rubens nor Hadash would volunteer anyway — was beside the point.

“That’s true,” said Rubens. “It’s merely a suggestion, not hard data.”

“Are you pursuing that source?”

“We’re working on it,” said Rubens.

The “source” was actually an eavesdropping device in Morocco. As luck would have it, the battery that powered the device had died twenty-four hours before; Rubens was scrambling to plan a mission to replace it.

“We want to locate the bomb and raise the issue with the French,” said Hadash. “The difficulty is how to do it. We don’t want to give away our intelligence-gathering methods.”

Or embarrass the French too severely, thought Rubens, given their recent trend of cooperation with America. The French had only recently woken up to the fact that Islamic fundamentalism posed at least as great a threat to Europe as it did to America. Now that they were finally cooperating, they had to be handled delicately.

“How long would it take to make this into a bomb?” asked Namath.

“Impossible to know for certain,” said Rubens. “Weeks rather than days. Months most likely. But it could even be years.”

“So it could have already been constructed?”

“Very possible,” said Rubens. “As I said, the most likely use is as a dirty bomb, and that could be put together relatively quickly.”

“The French have to be notified,” said Hadash. “We need their help tracking it down.”

“I believe they’ll help us,” said Lincoln. “But they’ll ask us to share information. And if we want help, we’ll have to do so.”

“The NSA concurs,” said Brown. “My suggestion is that we indicate we came by the information via an intercept.”

“What if they want more?” said Lincoln.

“I don’t think mentioning the monitoring project would help one way or the other,” said Namath. “And that’s what you’re worried about. Intercepts — we can be vague.”

“In the past the French haven’t taken much seriously unless they have very strong corroboration,” said Lincoln.

“Telling them we’re watching over their shoulder isn’t going to make them cooperative,” said Hadash.

“I agree,” said Lincoln. “But they may not take an intercept very seriously.”

“They may not,” admitted Rubens.

“Well, let’s take the chance that they will,” said the President. “They’ve been shaping up. Their cooperation in Africa over the past few months has been very useful. How many terrorists have been arrested?” he asked Namath.

“At least a dozen.”

“And now we’ll reciprocate,” said Marcke. “Since we’ll be there on Friday, I think State might bring this missing warhead up at a high but informal level, and refer the French to Admiral Brown. He can take it from there.”

“That sounds reasonable,” said Lincoln. “Since we’re on the topic of Europe, I have some concerns about some of the alerts that the NSA recently passed along concerning high-level Americans being targeted there. That was the phrase used in the Philippines last year just before an attack on one of our ambassadors. I want to issue an alert to embassy personnel.”

“‘That’s premature,” said Hadash.

The debate zigzagged from there, Lincoln worried for his people, Hadash trying to put it in perspective. Brown took Lincoln’s side; the CIA people took Hadash’s. Rubens said a few words backing up his boss, but the alert system was not under his jurisdiction and, frankly, he didn’t care much for it. Besides, Lincoln was operating on emotion rather than logic; he wasn’t going to be mollified by technical arguments about the worth of the data.

“What we need is more information,” said Marcke finally. “Admiral, let’s find out what’s going on.”

“Absolutely,” said Brown.

“I have to protect my people,” said Lincoln. “Let me tell the embassy staffs something.”

“I think if you want to discourage unnecessary travel by close dependents, that would be in order,” said Hadash — very likely offering a face-saving compromise because he would be in Europe with Lincoln and didn’t want him grouchy the whole time.

“All right,” said Lincoln. “I will.”

As the others filtered out, the President asked Rubens if he was feeling OK.

“Yes, sir. Why?”

“You look a little tired. You should get more rest. Take a vacation.”

“Yes, sir.”

Marcke smiled at him. “I’m serious.”

“I will. As soon as I can.”

“If I didn’t know you hated France so much, I’d suggest you come with us.”

“The only thing wrong with France is the French, Mr. President. I’m as ambivalent about the French as they are about us. But I wouldn’t want them to be blown up by a nuclear weapon.”

“We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen, William. Not on our watch.”