Death Wave

7

Rubens stood and walked to the podium. The briefing session had been going on now for over an hour without a break. The meeting was supposed to end at one o’clock, and Rubens was the last scheduled speaker. These things were always carefully choreographed.

Now it was Rubens’ turn.

“We have a solid lead on twelve of the Lebed nukes,” he told the room, with no preamble.

His announcement created a buzz of background conversation. Several of the attendees looked puzzled, but he was prepared for that.

“I’ll keep this very brief,” he said. “On September 7, 1997, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with former Russian national security advisor Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed. Here is a portion of that interview.”

Rubens touched the audiovisual controls on the lectern, and the screen behind him lit up with Lebed’s bland Slavic face.

“… I’m saying that more than a hundred weapons out of the supposed number of two hundred and fifty are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia,” Lebed said. “I don’t know their location. I don’t know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they’ve been sold or stolen, I don’t know.”

“Is it possible that the authorities know where all the weapons are, and simply don’t want to tell you?”

“No,” Lebed said, his voice flat.

He went on to describe the devices, which he claimed could fit inside large suitcases. The nuclear weapons inside measured sixty by forty by twenty centimeters — about two feet long — and could be detonated, he claimed, by one person with less than a half hour’s preparation. They had been distributed among special covert operations units belonging to the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU, Soviet military intelligence. Lebed claimed he’d learned of the weapons’ existence only a few years before, when Boris Yeltsin commissioned him to write a report on the whereabouts of the devices.

Rubens let the 60 Minutes segment play itself out, then switched off the screen. The room was dead silent.

“Mr. Lebed was national security advisor to Boris Yeltsin from June to October of 1996,” Rubens told them. “He was fired during the period of intensive political maneuvering surrounding the hospitalization of Yeltsin for surgery. Two years later, he went on to become the governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia’s second-largest region. In 2002, he was killed in a helicopter crash … under somewhat suspicious circumstances.”

“Mr. Rubens,” Representative Mullins said from the far end of the table, “we in Congress carefully evaluated Mr. Lebed’s claims and determined that they were without merit. The Russian government also categorically denied that there was anything whatsoever to Mr. Lebed’s rather melodramatic claims.”

Rubens considered the congressman for a moment. The man had been intrusive and arrogant all morning, with an attitude indicating that he thought the NSC meeting was purely for his benefit.

Well, perhaps it was. General James’ expression suggested that the briefing was largely a waste of time. A dog-and-pony show indeed.

“With respect, Mr. Mullins,” Rubens replied carefully, “until now, there really was no useful way to evaluate Lebed’s claims. Of course the Russian government would deny the weapons’ existence.

“It’s important to remember that Mr. Lebed’s claims were corroborated by Alexei Yablokov, a scientist and former environmental advisor to Yeltsin, and by a former Soviet colonel and GRU operative named Stanislav Lunev. And sources within the Russian government did later admit that such devices — built around 105 mm nuclear artillery shells, each containing around fifteen kilograms of plutonium—were constructed for the KGB during the 1970s. It was Colonel Lunev, testifying before a congressional hearing on Russian espionage in January of 2000, who claimed that some or all of those nuclear weapons had already been smuggled into the United States, and were either already in place within a number of American cities and key parts of our command-control infrastructure, or they were hidden in caches out in the country, awaiting the order to have them planted. That’s not exactly something a government admits to the world.”

“Well, that may be,” Mullins said. “The U.S. Army had its own SADM project, after all. But I have been assured that these devices have a very short shelf life. They would have become inert and harmless years ago.”

SADM stood for Special Atomic Demolition Munitions, backpack-portable nukes that could be dropped with Special Forces teams behind enemy lines during a war. The most common had been the W54, a cylinder two feet long and weighing sixty-eight kilograms. Some three hundred of the devices had been a highly secret part of the U.S. arsenal until their removal and disassembly in 1989.

General James leaned over and whispered something close to Mullins’ ear. Mullins listened, then looked angry. “General, I was assured that this meeting would offer the opportunity for a free exchange of ideas—”

“And right now, sir, it’s Mr. Rubens’ turn,” James said. “Mr. Rubens? If you would continue?”

“As I was saying,” Rubens said, “we can not objectively evaluate the claims of Lebed, Lunev, and others. They were politically motivated, and they had both political and personal agendas. I think the point we should be keeping in mind, though, is that if there is even a chance that there are several small, easily hidden nuclear weapons floating around loose out there, we need to take that possibility very seriously indeed.

“Two weeks ago, an informant in the central Asian city of Astana, in Kazakhstan, told Central Intelligence operatives that twelve suitcase nukes stored at a former Russian military facility in the city of Stepnogorsk had been stolen by elements within one of the Russian mafiya and been sold to an extremist Muslim group — quite probably the Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Army of Mohammad, in Pakistan.”

“What does Pakistan want with Russian nukes?” Mullins said, interrupting again. “Pakistan is a nuclear power already.”

“The Jaish-e-Mohammad is operating independently of the Pakistan government, sir,” Rubens pointed out. “The two might have congruent goals, especially where Kashmir and India are concerned, but Pakistan can’t afford to be seen as officially supporting terrorists.”

“India has nuclear weapons, too,” Wehrum pointed out. “Pakistan must be as anxious to catch these guys as we are.”

“The Islamabad government has assured us of their full cooperation in this matter,” the observer from the State Department, Catharine Tognetti, added.

“For whatever that may be worth,” General James put in. “Go ahead, please, Mr. Rubens.”

Rubens gave a wry smile. James was doing his level best to keep the meeting on track. That was no small feat, particularly given the size and number of egos in the room.

“The informant indicated that the weapons were being transported by road south to Karachi, in Pakistan, a journey overland of some eighteen hundred miles. According to this informant, in Karachi the weapons were to be put on board a freighter for transport to their final destination, which he believed to be someplace in the Middle East — most likely Israel.

“The CIA initiated what became known as Operation Haystack, in hopes of intercepting these weapons before they reached Pakistan. They brought the NSA into the operation in order to directly employ our SIGINT and other intelligence-gathering assets for this search.”

Rubens could feel Debra Collins’ cold stare as he spoke. For several years now, Collins, deputy director of operations at the CIA, had been trying to gain control of the NSA’s Desk Three, charging that the NSA’s charter did not allow for field-operational intelligence-gathering teams and that units such as Desk Three were in fact wasteful duplicates of the CIA’s Operations Directorate. In fact, the vast majority of the NSA’s duties were limited to signals intelligence, code breaking, and electronic surveillance. That meant spying at long range from satellites and from eavesdropping facilities at places like Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, England, and Misawa Air Base in northern Honshu, in Japan.

However, not all intelligence could be intercepted by antennas from hundreds or thousands of miles away. As computer and communications technologies advanced around the world, the NSA had developed the technical means for tapping those technologies — but often that meant first sending someone in on the ground to plant eavesdropping devices, steal computer passwords, copy software or records from hard drives not connected to the outside world, or otherwise physically hack computer networks.

Hence, Desk Three.

Rubens thought he knew just what it had cost Collins to actually request the NSA’s help with this op. She hated admitting that sometimes she needed Desk Three’s unique capabilities.

“Just how reliable is this CIA source?” This time, the interruption was from James himself, but it was a good question. Rubens and his superiors within the NSA had debated that particular issue for hours when the CIA’s request had first come through.

“You’ll need to have Ms. Collins address that particular question, sir.”

“Ms. Collins?”

“Intelligence evaluation rated the report as a B-2,” Collins said. She didn’t look at either man as she spoke.

Within the intelligence community, an intelligence source was given a letter code, from A to F, indicating its reliability, while the likely accuracy of the intelligence was given a number, from 1 to 6. B-2 meant that the Agency’s source had been evaluated as reasonably reliable and the information transmitted was considered to be probably true.

“Can you tell us anything about your source?”

“No, sir. There are people in the room who are not cleared for that level of security.”

Did she mean Mullins? Or some of the staffers and aides? Most of the people in the room were cleared for security access at least at the Top Secret level, but Wehrum had warned them early on to limit discussions to Top Secret and below.

“Two days ago, NSA personnel were deployed to several central Asian nations,” Rubens continued. “People on the ground. Their orders were to use various technical assets to find the nuclear weapons, which were to be referred to solely as ‘the shipment.’ In particular, the CIA’s original report suggested that one of the devices might be damaged, that it was leaking small amounts of radioactivity. This left a trail of contamination that could be detected by intelligence operatives on the ground, using small radiation detectors strapped to their persons.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Rubens,” Mullins said. “I must admit to some small confusion here. It was my understanding that the NSA did its surveillance through electronic means and by satellite. Why in God’s name do you need people over there?”

The existence of Deep Black and Desk Three was also classified above Top Secret. The fact that the NSA used sources that included operatives on the ground was not, though the NSA never talked about it. One of the well-known meanings of “NSA” among insiders was Never Say Anything.

He wondered if he could use Mullins to build some support for his agency. He didn’t yet know where ANSA stood on Desk Three’s existence — and he could count on Debra Collins to cut him down when she could.

He remembered, though, that Mullins represented a district with strong connections with aerospace, especially the manufacture of high-grade precision lenses used by Crystal Fire and other optical surveillance satellite programs.

“Sir, you are correct that most of our chartered mission is carried out at long range. Our original mandate was restricted to code-breaking and to SIGINT — signals intelligence. Satellites are vitally important to our mission, and we devoutly wish we had more of them. But some things simply can not be tracked from space. Radiation sources, for instance.”

Rubens glanced at his watch. “About seven hours ago, one of our teams positively identified a contaminated area on the back of a truck that had been abandoned at a military airfield just outside of Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. This suggests that the shipment had gotten at least that far, a little more than half of the distance from Stepnogorsk to Karachi. Unfortunately, our options for continuing the search are somewhat limited at this point. We’ve hit a wall.”

“What wall?” James demanded.

“We seem to be engaged in a small turf war for limited assets with … another agency.”

“Damn you, Bill,” Collins said, sitting up sharply in her seat.

Rubens held up a hand. “I’m not naming the agency,” he said, “and I’m not casting blame. We, all of us, have more critical things to focus on than internal territorial disputes. But what is necessary now is free and immediate access to NRO data — specifically targeted imagery from Crystal Fire. Either that, or we need more satellites.”

General James looked at Collins. “Is the CIA sitting on data the NSA needs?” he asked.

“We … have imagery acquired early this morning from CF-1,” she admitted, “but it’s still undergoing analysis. Raw data must be … processed before it can be disseminated to other agencies.”

“Very true,” Rubens said, “and I would point out that the NSA possesses absolutely the best technology for carrying out that type of analysis. At the very least, we could be processing the data in parallel with our friends at Langley.”

“Which would entail a massive duplication of effort,” Collins countered. “It means a colossal waste of available resources.”

“With the sheer scale of 8X imagery,” Rubens pointed out, “we need to double up on resources just to sift through the data. Remember, we’re dealing with a whole new level of satellite imagery here.”

He didn’t specify that scale, of course, since those parameters carried a classification of above Top Secret. In fact, the data stream from Crystal Fire included real-time streaming video at a one-centimeter-minus resolution across an area of something like half a million square kilometers — a scale and a resolution that far surpassed anything in the Intruder program, to say nothing of earlier Keyhole satellites.

“Mr. Rubens!” General James snapped. “Ms. Collins! I have zero patience for interagency bickering here.”

“Yes, sir,” Rubens said. “However, given the critical importance of this search, I submit that we do need to cut through some of the red tape and compartmentalization. It’s crippling us. I agree that we need to avoid duplication of effort — but right now we have reliable evidence that twelve tactical nuclear weapons are on their way from Dushanbe to the port of Karachi. To get there, they have to travel through Afghanistan — not all of which is under friendly control, I’ll remind you—and through Pakistan, which, though they’ve assured us of their willingness to help, is not entirely under Islamabad’s control. If we’re right, they left Dushanbe yesterday. We need that satellite data before the trail goes ice cold!”

His briefing completed, he stepped back from the lectern. “Questions?”

There were a lot of them.

She called herself Thea, a name she’d once heard meant “goddess.” Cynthia Jane Cramer thought of it as her professional name, both when she was dancing and when she was with a john. She watched Jack Pender roll out of bed naked, and put on her most sultry and alluring pout. “You’re not leaving now, are you, honey?” she asked.

He grinned at her, reached down, and squeezed her left breast affectionately. She managed to smile, to not wince.

Asshole…

“Sorry, babe,” he told her. “I need to shave and shower. Got a big meeting with my publisher this afternoon.”

“But you make me so hot!”

“I’d love to see you again tonight,” he told her. “I’ll have something to celebrate by then — a fat new book contract!”

As soon as he walked into the hotel room’s bathroom and closed the door, she was out of bed. She pulled on her dress and heels and tucked her discarded panties into her handbag. Pender’s clothes were lying on the dresser. She began rooting through them, searching. She was sure she’d seen him tuck it away in here …

There it was. She extracted the magnetic room key from his wallet. She eyed the wallet’s other contents for a moment. She’d been warned, but …

He had a bit over a hundred dollars in cash and a couple of credit cards. Cards and cash both went into her pocketbook, along with the two hundred those guys had already paid her a couple of hours earlier. Not a bad take for half an afternoon’s work, and it was going to get better. She could spend the afternoon maxing out those cards, then drop them on some drunk down in Edgewater, and if they ever tracked the missing cards they’d find the drunk and not her.

A paperback book lay faceup on the dresser, next to Pender’s briefcase. The title was Death Wave: The 2012 Prophecies Fulfilled, by Vincent Carlylse and Jack Pender. She shrugged. She wasn’t much of a reader.

“Hey, honey?” she called out. “I’m gonna step out and get me some cigarettes. But I’ll be right back, okay? I wanna wish you good luck for your meeting in a really special way!”

“Okay, babe!” he called back from inside the bathroom. “Just bang loud on the door, and I’ll let you in!”

Yeah, in your dreams, she thought as she let herself out. Men were so fucking predictable. Give them the adoring puppy look, shake your titties at them, and they’d fall all over themselves. Even when they knew you were a whore, they ended up thinking it had to be True Love.

They were waiting for her in the hotel lobby. As promised. Two men stood up as she clicked into the atrium on her heels.

“You have it?” one asked.

She held up the white keycard for the room. “Right here. Room 225. You have the rest of the money?”

One of the men reached into a jacket pocket and extracted a roll of bills. He peeled off three hundred and handed it to her.

“Bintilkha-ta,” the man growled. It didn’t sound like a compliment.

“Whatever,” she said. “Nice doin’ business with ya.”

The two turned and walked toward the elevators. They looked foreign — Arab, maybe, but they might be Sicilians with that olive skin. Or Greeks. Thea watched them go, wondering if they were enforcers for the mob. Maybe Mr. Pender hadn’t kept up with his payments.

She shrugged. Too bad for him. The goddess walked out into the bright New Jersey afternoon.

She didn’t see the third man waiting for her in the parking lot.

“Mr. Rubens,” Catharine Tognetti said slowly, “just how powerful are these so-called suitcase nukes?”

“We don’t know the exact designs, of course,” Rubens replied. “In particular, we don’t know if the warheads have been fusion-boosted. But our best technical evaluation suggests that each device would have a yield of between one and ten kilotons — that’s one to ten thousand tons of TNT.

“The nuclear device exploded over Hiroshima in 1945, by way of comparison, was between fifteen and twenty kilotons. We’re not talking about city-busters here. A one-kiloton blast would wreck downtown Washington, D.C., but most of the city would remain more or less intact, except for the windows, maybe. However, these smaller devices also tend to be rather dirty. Lots of radiation, lots of fallout, at least if they’re detonated at or above ground level.”

The room was quiet after that, as each attendee considered the possibility of a one-kiloton nuclear blast in the heart of an American city.

There were more questions, and some discussion after that, but the meeting finally broke up. Rubens decided he would check in with the Art Room as soon as he got back to street level and could get a signal on his cell phone.

As he was packing up his briefcase, however, he was aware of a movement beside him.

“Hello, Debra,” he said, not looking up.

“That was damned unprofessional of you, Bill. You made me and the Agency look bad.”

He sighed, straightening up and turning to face her. “Debra, you should know me by now. I despise politics, and I do not play these silly turf games. The only thing I’m concerned about here is getting the job done the best, quickest, and most efficient way possible.”

“You could have come to me personally,” Collins said.

“I submitted the usual requisitions through the usual channels,” he told her, “ and e-mails,and phone messages. My people also talked to the NRO directly. The data was Agency-encoded.” He smiled. “It seems Langley has been tying up both USA-202 and

Crystal Fire since yesterday. You were hogging our two best orbital assets. Wouldn’t it be better if we shared?”

“There … may have been an oversight,” Collins admitted. “Or a delay putting your request through. But we were not ‘hogging’ those satellites, as you put it.”

“Of course you weren’t.”

Rubens knew all too well how it worked. There would be no policy, no actual directive put out to exclude the NSA from the intelligence loop — but requests to expedite key requests, clearances, director approvals, and the like might accidentally be left in an electronic in-basket, or conveniently ignored for a few hours while other and more pressing matters were addressed.

Such a delay might give the Agency’s analysis teams an extra few hours to develop important intelligence before the NSA had a chance to look for the same hidden gems. And if Agency teams turned up the goodies, it would be the Agency that got the credit — and the funding at the next round of budgetary meetings.

“Don’t patronize me, Bill,” Collins told him.

“I’m not. Don’t you play cute political games with me.”

“At the director’s level, politics is a part of the job description. You know that as well as I do. And the only one playing games here this morning was you, sabotaging me in front of the ANSA to build up your own position.”

“Debra, it was not my intent to make you look bad this morning — no more than it was your intent to sequester that data. We need access to that imagery, though, and we need it now. I have people on the ground over there. Their lives, and the success of this operation, both depend on what we can turn up from those satellites, especially Crystal Fire. It is my intent to talk to ANSA personally if I have to — I have his attention now, don’t you think? I’ll take it to the Oval Office if I have to.”

She stared into his face for a long moment, as though testing his resolve. Rubens didn’t have direct access to the President, but the President’s advisor on national security did.

Then she looked away. “I’ll authorize transmittal as soon as we get out of here,” she told him.

“Thank you, Debra. Together I think we can crack this.”

She was already walking away.

The two men used the stolen keycard to let themselves into room 225. One held an automatic pistol at the ready as the door swung open, but the room’s occupant was still in the shower. They could hear the rush of water, taste the steam in the air. Quietly, they walked into the room and moved the desk chair to an open space near the foot of the king-sized bed.

Both wore thin disposable gloves. The one with the keycard wiped it carefully with his handkerchief and placed it on the bureau; then the two of them sat down in the remaining chairs over by the closed curtains to wait.

Soon the sound of the water cut off, and a few minutes later Jack Pender walked out of the bathroom, rubbing himself with a hotel towel. In the darkened room, he didn’t see his visitors, not until they grabbed him from either side.

“What the fuck—” he yelled, and then one of the men jammed a rolled-up sock into his mouth. Pinning his arms, they slammed him into the desk chair.

“I am sorry, Mr. Pender,” one of the intruders said. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a knife. Pender’s eyes opened wide, fixed on the blade, which flashed once in a gleam of light from the curtains at his back. He started to struggle, but the man holding him was strong, too strong, his grip on his wrists like steel. Pender tried to kick the guy with the knife, but the man sidestepped the attempt, reached down, and pulled Pender’s left arm from behind his back.

“I really do dislike doing this,” the man with the knife said. He dragged Pender’s arm forward and down until it was pinned against the chair, palm up. “I actually am one of your big … what is the American word? Fans. Yes. I am a big fan. It is really too bad you decide to suicide.”

The intruder slipped the point of the knife into Pender’s wrist and sliced deep, dragging the blade up the struggling man’s arm, rather than across. Blood welled up from the sudden wound, dark and slick. Pender screamed through the sock, thrashing violently now, but the big man behind him kept him pinned as the other made a second deep slice up his wrist … a third …

On the fourth cut, the knife hit the artery, and blood splattered across the unmade bed, across a wall, across white ceiling tiles.

After a time, the intruder began cutting the other wrist; by then, Pender was so weak he could barely struggle.

Ten minutes more, and Pender was no longer moving. The man with the knife felt for a pulse at his throat with a gloved finger, peeled back an eyelid, then nodded.

“Taiyib!” he said.

They released Pender, letting him slump back in the chair, naked, his arms, legs, and torso sheathed in blood. The killer pulled the sock from the man’s mouth, then carefully wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the handle of the knife. When the man let go, the knife dropped from limp, blood-gloved fingers and fell beside the chair. The sock went back on the floor by the bed, next to Pender’s shoes. Very carefully, then, the intruders stepped past the body, watching where they put their feet, careful not to step in the blood now soaking into the cheap hotel room carpet. There was a lot of blood …

They were as careful about footprints as they’d been with fingerprints. Bloody gloves were peeled from their hands and went into their pockets, and they wiped the doorknob clean behind them as they let themselves out.