Liberty

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Good to see you again, Mr. President,” said Thayer Michael Corrigan as he shook hands in the Oval Office.

“How’s your family, T.M.?”

“Fine, sir. And yours?”

“Busy,” the president said, and indicated a chair for Corrigan and the national security adviser, Butch Lanham. “This,” the president said, gesturing at a naval officer in whites, “is Rear Admiral Jake Grafton.” As Grafton shook hands with Lanham and Corrigan, the president dropped onto the couch. Corrigan didn’t pay much attention to the naval officer so intent was he on the president.

“T.M.,” the president said, “I know your company has been talking to the government for months about licensing your proprietary sensor technology, and I know we are pretty close to a deal. I asked you here today to try to cut the process short, to twist your arm, make a deal and get on with the program.”

Corrigan laughed easily. “You don’t have to twist very hard.”

“You’ve always been a big supporter — I know that,” the president said earnestly. He meant financial supporter, which in the world of big-time politics was the only kind that mattered. “But this matter is urgent. We have credible intelligence that a terrorist organization has purchased several nuclear warheads from a rogue general in Russia. That is top secret, by the way.”

Corrigan didn’t even nod. He was not a gossip, and the executives who populated the world in which he moved knew it — although they didn’t know that he would not ignore an opportunity to make a profit on someone else’s secret if it could be done in such a way that no one knew that he had done it. That kind of maneuvering never troubled his conscience — he honestly believed that he saw opportunities that others didn’t because he was smarter than they were.

“We need that technology now,” the president continued. “The Customs Service has been carrying ordinary Geiger counters for years. They’re worn on belt clips — about the size of a pager. Simple and unsophisticated, with limited capability. We’re now deploying gamma ray and neutron flux detectors, putting them wherever we think the threat is greatest, but it’s not enough. We must do more.”

“I hear you’re also doing basic research on detecting radioactive material.”

The president nodded. “I’ve ordered a crash program at the government labs to build the next generation of detectors. We’re working on it. But our scientists tell me your technology is better than what we are using, and it’s ready to go into production now.”

“Well …”

“T.M., we need it now! Heck, we need it yesterday.”

“Mr. President, the Customs Service and I have discussed price. They made an offer that I thought low, but I’ll take it. Today. Now.”

Lanham, the national security adviser, broke in smoothly. “We need four times more sensors than the Customs Service and Coast Guard were discussing, and we need your company to drop everything and help us get these sensors produced and operational.”

They discussed the government’s projected needs. Corrigan was willing. “I have the best engineering brains in the country working for me,” he said at one point. “Nothing is impossible for them.”

“When can we start?” the president asked Corrigan.

“Now. This afternoon,” T.M. replied. “As soon as I can get back to Boston. We’ll get to the paperwork later.”

The president stood and stuck out his hand. Corrigan shook it. As they walked to the door, the president said, “Saw the article in Power. Good write-up.”

“Thank you,” said T.M. matter-of-factly, without a trace of humility. Well, it was a good article.

“You know,” the president continued, almost thinking aloud, “in five or six months the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James may come open. I can’t offer you the post at this point. Still, if things work out the way I think they might and I can offer you London, would you be willing to consider it? It would mean leaving the management of your company, which would, of course, be difficult.”

“I’d be honored to be considered for such a post,” Corrigan said, his sincerity evident. “And if it were offered, I’d do everything in my power to arrange my affairs so that I could accept it.”

The president smiled. “I’ll be talking to you,” he said, and shook Corrigan’s hand again.

He came back to the couch. “You’re sure these sensors will help?” he asked Jake Grafton.

“No, sir, I’m not. But I heard Customs and the Coast Guard have been negotiating on and off with Corrigan — they haven’t had the money to buy the sensors — and I thought they sounded good. Hell, it’s only money.”

“So what’s your plan to find these bombs?”

“Mr. President, we’re working on that. Obviously more and better sensors are part of the mix. I’ve had a talk with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Alt, and the army chief of staff, General Cahn. We’re putting together a plan to use army and national guard forces to search trains and trucks going through choke points and entering major cities. Take about a week to deploy the forces and get operational, and we’ll need your authority to make it happen. We’ll search with conventional Geiger counters until we can get better equipment. The Delta Force is on standby to take out anyone found with a nuclear weapon, but finding them …”

“Are bombs the threat?”

“They are one of the possibilities, certainly. Another is that a warhead will be seeded in with a truckload of conventional explosives — like the Oklahoma City bomb. The explosion will spread deadly radioactive plutonium, creating a major ecological disaster. Every time I see a tractor-trailer I think about that.”

“So you want to use the army to search trucks and railroad cars?”

“Precisely. The load would be pretty hot and easy to detect with conventional Geiger counters.”

“I’ll approve that.”

“We’re also talking to the Coast Guard, FAA, and Customs about harbor searches, ship searches, airplane searches. The agencies are doing everything in their power. If we can find something they aren’t doing, help them do more, I’ll make recommendations and offer assistance. I’m getting people and offices and computers and money. We’re up and running.”

“I’ve given the orders,” the president said, “but you’ll have to get the cooperation.” He rose from the couch and went to the window. As he stood looking out he said, “We’ve hundreds of years of statutes, federal regulations out the wazoo, and armies of career bureaucrats all trying to protect their rice bowls. Getting the government to do anything is a major triumph. Harry Truman said he spent a large part of his time kissing ass, trying to make things happen.”

“Amen,” Jake said.

The president turned to Lanham. “What do you think, Butch?”

“I don’t think we have many choices, sir. The challenge will be to keep from panicking the public.” He opened both hands wide. “We don’t need another stock market meltdown or everyone deciding to stay home, bankrupting the airlines and gutting the economy. The press will learn we are using troops with Geiger counters and ask questions. You need to decide what you want us to say. It will be impossible to keep the activity of thousands of soldiers and guardsmen secret, and we’d be fools to try.”

“Do we want to keep it secret?. Wouldn’t we be better off letting the world see what we’re doing to counter the threat?”

“It’s telling people about the threat that I’m worried about,” Lanham remarked.

“What do you think?” the president asked Jake Grafton.

The admiral took a deep breath before he answered. “If we can search a high enough percentage of the nation’s cargo, we can dissuade the enemy from doing something conventional. That means they’ll get creative. The challenge is to prevent a really creative attack from succeeding.”

“Thanks for sugarcoating it, Admiral.” The president slapped his leg. “The public is entitled to know what their government is doing to ensure their safety. Obviously intelligence and intelligence sources are secrets and must stay that way. We’ll tell the public that we’re taking security measures that we deem appropriate and stop right there.”

“I’ll brief the press secretary,” Lanham said, and excused himself.

“The age we live in …” the president muttered sourly. “I can tell you for a fact that stopping ‘right there’ will prove impossible. Too many people will know too much. Sooner or later the secret will get out, and God help us then.”

Jake Grafton was philosophical. “When you wake up in the morning, turn on your television. If the crowd on CNBC is talking about stocks, America is still in one piece. I listen to about half a minute of that, then say, Thank You, Jesus, and get out of bed.”

Jake Grafton wasn’t sleeping nights. He had a plan, although he didn’t like it very much. He hoped to use Zelda Hudson — soon to be Sarah Houston — and Zip Vance as key members of a team to bring information together from disparate places to see if they could find patterns. And terrorists. The main thrust, he thought, should be to find out what anyone knew about the Sword of Islam. He wasn’t sanguine — he needed a crack to pry at. And he didn’t have one.

The government was deploying an army to search for radiation with conventional equipment. That was strictly a short-term solution. He needed high-tech sensors so he could turn the job over to a small cadre of searchers. Of course, the United States was a huge place, with thousands of ports of entry, and it would take years to procure and deploy enough sensors to cover every intake hole. Still, some ports of entry were more probable than others … it shouldn’t take long to have a significant chance of finding radioactive material being smuggled in.

Significant chances … terrorist hunts.

It was enough to make a grown man cry. After his meeting with the president he went back to Langley and huddled with his new staff. He had asked for and got an officer he knew from several years ago to be his chief of staff, Captain Gil Pascal. He had three people from Customs, three from the National Security Agency, and two from the Coast Guard.

“We have four problems to solve,” Jake said, “before we can deploy and use these new sensors. First, we have to figure out where and how we will employ them. What is an acceptable level of probability of detection? Is it fifty percent? Sixty? Eighty? What is achievable with the technology and sensors we have? And what can we do to counter attempts to thwart or evade the search?”

Everyone nodded.

“Second, we must decide how we will respond if we detect radioactive material. It could be anything from hospital waste to a ticking bomb. If it is a bomb, we must gain control of it before the bad guys detonate it.”

“That’ll be a snap,” the senior Coast Guard officer, a captain, commented.

“To accomplish this, we must decide on and appoint someone with real-time tactical decision-making authority. We are talking a major responsibility. It almost goes without saying that the consequences of those decisions could be catastrophic if they turn out badly.”

Silence followed that comment.

“Finally,” Jake continued, “we need to devise a plan to control public and insider information about our search efforts. The news will get out, and if we don’t manage it right, we could have mass panic, which might lead to a public safety or political meltdown. Or both.”

After an afternoon of intense conversation, Captain Pascal drafted a memo to the president outlining Jake’s four issues and proposing answers. Toad Tarkington delivered it to the White House.

When Toad left on his errand, Jake called his FBI liaison officer, Harry Estep. “What are you doing on the Doyle investigation?”

“Interviewing everyone in the government, Admiral, who knew that Ilin named Doyle.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll follow leads, if any. The thinking here is that we should follow up the interviews with polygraph exams.”

“How accurate are they?”

“Well …”

“Oh, hell, let’s do it. Tarkington and I will be first.”

“Stop by this evening, around seven, at this address.” Estep gave it to him.

At six that evening Toad brought the memo he had hand-delivered to the White House back to Jake in a sealed envelope.

Jake opened the envelope at his desk. The president had written in longhand at the bottom of the memo, below Jake’s signature: “Approved. You, Admiral Grafton, are the tactical decision maker.” Then the president’s signature, written boldly.

Jake tossed the document to Toad, who read it, then commented, “You knew he was going to do that.”

“Yes.”

“Boy, he didn’t initial it — he wrote his full name in big letters.”

“That’s for me,” Jake muttered, rubbing his head. “If it goes badly, he wants the congressmen to be able to read his name without their glasses.”

“Goes badly? You mean if it blows up in our faces?”

“No more puns, Toad. I’m not in the mood. Don’t get comfortable. You and I are going to take polygraph exams. Let’s lock everything up and set the alarms and go do it.”

“Darn,” Toad said with obvious disgust. “They better not ask me about my old girlfriends. Or that time I got in trouble in the fifth grade. Or the night of the senior prom — I did a lot of lying about that evening afterward. How come I have to do this anyway?”

“Rita gave me a list of questions she wants answers to.”

“Uh-oh. Another life-threatening experience.”

The polygraph operator asked if either of them had ever taken a polygraph exam before, and they both had, several years ago, when they were being processed for Special Intelligence (SI) security clearances. Jake went first. A cuff was placed around his arm, a sensor put over a finger, and a multitude of contacts placed on his head.

The questions were straightforward — his name, Social Security number, military rank, address, then a series of yes or no questions. Did he know Janos Ilin? Had he ever met him? Then he was asked about Richard Doyle. Using his statement that he had given earlier, the operator went into possible unauthorized disclosures while he watched his printouts and used a pencil to mark them after every question. Finally he handed Jake a stack of photos facedown. “Please read the number on the back of each photo and turn it over and look at it. Then place it facedown and do the same for the next, and so on. If you recognize any of the photos, please tell me who that person is.”

Jake didn’t recognize the first or second picture, but the third was of Janos Ilin, and he said so. The shot had apparently been taken by a surveillance camera while Ilin walked along a New York sidewalk — at least the city looked like New York. Ilin seemed oblivious to the camera.

There were nine more pictures, a total of a dozen, and he recognized none of them.

As Toad went into the room for his session, Jake headed for the Metro and home.

How was he going to find those damned bombs and make sure they didn’t explode?

Jake Grafton thought about that question every spare minute, riding the Metro, in the head, even when he was out walking with Callie in the evenings. She knew he had a new assignment, knew he was worried, yet she didn’t know what the job was or what he was worried about.

He wanted to go walking when he got home, regardless of the hour. “Aren’t you too tired?” she asked that evening after dinner, which was leftovers from the fridge.

“I want to make sure America is still there.”

As usual, they strolled the sidewalks, looked in windows, smiled and said hello to people they recognized as they made their usual pilgrimage to the Potomac. “It’s a grand river,” Jake had once said as he stood watching the brown water and listening to the people and traffic and airliners. Callie thought of that this evening as she stood beside him, watched him take everything in.

He was thinking of people as he walked along. The lady who sold coffee from a pushcart near the Metro stop was a Filipino … she married an American sailor who brought her to America, then deserted her. She had raised a son and owned her pushcart and worked every day, rain or shine, selling coffee and pastries. For years she sold sticky buns, then bagels when that fad hit, now she was selling doughnuts. Jake habitually bought a cup of coffee and a doughnut on his way to work. He always drank the coffee, sometimes he threw away the doughnut — but he bought one whether he wanted it or not.

The art gallery-well, it sold prints and framed whatever you carried in — was owned by a black woman whose father was murdered in Mississippi during the civil rights marches of the 1960s. She wrote up the orders and gave good advice on colors and frame styles. Five years ago her son had been convicted of shooting someone in a dope deal gone sour; he was still in prison somewhere. The guy who did the framing was a Brit who lost a foot in the Gulf War. He came to America to live with a woman. The romance didn’t last, but he stayed.

The neighborhood Italian restaurant was owned by a guy from Hoboken who got angry at his brother ten years ago and left the family business, moved here, and started over. One of the daughters wanted to be an opera singer. Occasionally she sang the old Italian songs on Sundays at the restaurant. Alas, the music didn’t help the food, which was only so-so.

Most of the business at the Chinese restaurant was takeout, so they had just three tables. It, too, was a family place — only the son spoke English; he took orders and the parents cooked. Jake and Callie liked to eat there. When Jake walked in the son always asked if he wanted Tsingtao Beer. He never did. When he ordered a glass of chardonnay, the son filled it to the brim. “Three dollars, seventy-five cents, you get full glass,” he told Jake.

So it was a neighborhood, like tens of thousands of neighborhoods all over America, filled with people living their lives well, poorly, or screwing them up beyond redemption.

“We’ll put Corrigan’s damned sensors in vans,” he muttered.

“What did you say, dear?” Callie asked. She was holding on to his arm as they climbed the hill away from the river.

“I was just thinking about people,” he told her. “I like these people.” He gestured with his free hand.

She gripped his arm tightly as they climbed the hill toward home.

The following afternoon an FBI agent and two CIA internal investigators interviewed Coke Twilley and Sonny Tran individually, apart from each other, about the Richard Doyle matter. They wanted to know the names of everyone who knew that Janos Ilin had named the missing Richard Doyle as a Russian spy. They asked all the usual questions and reviewed office security procedures. They went over the report that Tran had prepared for Twilley’s signature, questioned both men closely about drafts, counted the copies, and exchanged the hard drive of Tran’s computer for a new one. They took the old hard drive with them. The entire process took six hours.

The hard fact was that the Russians might have whisked Doyle off to Russia or eliminated him. If he fled to Russia, the CIA would eventually learn that fact. If he were never heard from again, one would be forced at some point to conclude he was dead. He might have been betrayed and killed by the SVR because his usefulness was about over or they wanted to score points with the Americans but didn’t want Doyle listing his thefts through the years. Or the SVR might have killed him after they learned that Ilin had betrayed him. Sorting through tangled conumdrums like this would take years, untold man-hours, and would probably never provide a conclusive answer.

Coke and Sonny also knew that regardless of the outcome of the investigation, their careers also on the line, so they cooperated fully and cheerfully with their colleagues, answering every question. Only when the ordeal was over did their resentment flare.

When the door closed behind the interrogators, Twilley muttered, “The prez promotes Grafton and the snoops start harassing us. Anyone who thinks that isn’t cause and effect is a dope. The snoops can’t find Doyle but they can afford to harass us at their leisure.”

“At least they didn’t ask us to take polygraph exams,” Tran said philosophically.

“Oh, they will,” Twilley grumped. “When their little investigation leads nowhere, Grafton will probably order polygraphs for everyone. He’s that kind of guy.”

“Some FBI type is leading the hunt for Doyle.”

“Sure,” Twilley replied acidly. “With Grafton breathing down his neck. Remember his little cover-my-ass speech in this office? A mess like this is made to order for an amateur climber. It’s a goddamn snipe hunt, that’s what it is. He can stir the shit for years, getting money and staff and attention from the very top, all the while looking for a leak that may not be there.”

Tran puttered desultorily in his office until quitting time. Coke Twilley grabbed the latest copy of Chess Monthly from his in-basket and went home early. Tran locked the safe and filing cabinets, then armed the office zone alarm on his way out.

Olympic Voyager was an old, tired, single-screw freighter of ten thousand tons. She made her living hauling bulk cargo — usually grain, steel, or fertilizer — between the Indian subcontinent and Europe. Profit margins were razor thin, so her owners had not spent a penny more than absolutely necessary on maintenance — her sides were so rusty that from a distance she appeared to be orange.

Her captain — Pappadopoulus — was Greek, her first mate — Erik “Dutch” Vandervelt — South African, and her second mate — Lee — from Singapore. Her crew were lascars. Vandervelt was new, having just joined the ship four weeks before in Marseilles after the previous first mate was hospitalized following a bar brawl.

This evening, with Olympic Voyager moored to a pier in Karachi, Vandervelt stood on the wing of the bridge smoking as a crane loaded the last of the cargo. Lee was in the engine room with the black gang; Captain Pappadopoulus was drunk in his cabin. The old man had been in a state of continuous inebriation for the entire three weeks Vandervelt had known him. He varied between tipsy, walking drunk, puking drunk, and dead drunk, depending on the time of day and the state of the moon.

The pungency of the cigar Vandervelt smoked helped make the air palatable tonight. Karachi was a large, filthy Third World city often obscured by a noxious pall of smoke, engine exhaust, and the smells of rotten garbage. The sewage floating in the black waste of the harbor didn’t help, not on an evening like this, with the breeze off the land.

Dutch Vandervelt checked his watch. Three and a half hours. Where was Zuair?

Vandervelt had spent most of his adult life around rough men ruled by their passions and addictions. He understood what motivated them. But not the Egyptian, Dutch thought, who was a maniacal, homicidal zealot, and perhaps the most dangerous man he had ever met. On the other hand, there was that American …. What a pair they were, one driven by a warped vision of God, the other driven by greed. Truly, he was a fool to allow them to learn his name or see his face. Or to take money from men like that.

Dutch had accepted money. One million American dollars. Would he live to spend it?

Despite the heat and humidity, Dutch Vandervelt shivered.

As Frouq al-Zuair wheeled the truck into the warehouse at the head of the pier, one of his men stood by the door. The door was closing before Zuair turned off the engine. He slapped the side of the truck’s cargo bay three times, then opened the door. Eight of his men climbed down.

“Everything all right?”

“I have men on buildings in every direction. No strangers or strange vehicles in sight.”

Zuair inspected the four empty shipping containers sitting inside the dark, dirty building. He used a flashlight. Meanwhile, his men rigged chain hoists and wheeled dollies.

It took two hours to get the four warheads into the containers — one to a container — and secure them. Properly securing the warheads was critical.

The Egyptian inspected each weapon when his men were finished. Satisfied, he then watched them fill the container with stuffed animals, each wrapped in cellophane to keep it clean, then loaded into a clear plastic bag containing fifty of them. The bags were thrown in until the container was as full as possible. Anyone opening the container to inspect its contents would only see the bags.

An hour later, Zuair watched from the bow of the ship as the four containers were loaded aboard Olympic Voyager. At his feet lay an RPG launcher wrapped in carpet. The pier was dark — the area was lit only by floods mounted on the ship. One by one, the ship’s forward gantry picked up the containers and swung them to the ship’s main deck, where they were stacked two deep and chained down.

Finally the lights were extinguished, leaving only the ship’s running lights. A man the Egyptian knew to be a port official went down the gangway, then motioned the dockworkers to remove it.

Obeying orders shouted from the deck of the ship, the dockworkers removed the giant hawsers that held the ship to the pier. They had removed the rat guards earlier. When the last rope end was tossed onto the pier, the ship began to move. She backed away from the pier under her own power, drifted to a stop, then began to move forward. Her head began to swing as she answered her helm. Slowly increasing her speed, she made her way between anchored ships into the harbor, heading for the sea beyond.

Using his binoculars, Zuair searched the harbor for boats. If someone wanted the cargo badly enough, the harbor, he thought, or perhaps just outside it, was the most likely place to board and hijack the ship. That was how he would have done it if another group had weapons he wanted. He had learned through the years that there were other men just as clever as he, although few as ruthless. His willingness to do whatever needed to be done regardless of the consequences made him a leader, a man who could accomplish the impossible.

And he had done it! He felt the rush of victory as the breeze began blowing from ahead of him as the ship gained way. He scanned with the binoculars. A few fishing boats, a harbor fuel boat, a Pakistani customs boat … none of them attempted to approach the ship or turned to an interception course.

Zuair turned his binoculars to the bridge. He saw Dutch Vandervelt there with the pilot beside the wheel. One other man on the bridge, one of the crewmen apparently.

Beyond the breakwater were several ships on their way into or out of the harbor. They made no attempt to approach Olympic Voyager. The ship was an hour outside the harbor, with the lights of Karachi making a smudge upon the horizon, when the pilot boat loomed alongside.

Zuair looked it over as it came against the rope ladder. He knew the man at the wheel of the boat, and he was alone. Not another boat in sight.

The Egyptian retrieved his rocket launcher and walked back to the rope ladder amidships, almost under the bridge. He motioned to the men who had come aboard with him. There were three of them, all armed. They joined him at the rail, then followed the pilot down the ladder. The little boat pitched and rolled and bobbed in the swells, its single-cylinder diesel engine thudding lazily and spewing noxious fumes. Bracing themselves against the gyrations of the boat, the men with weapons went forward and hunkered down to stay out of the bow spray. Frouq al-Zuair was the last man down the ladder. When he was aboard the boatman paused, timing the swell, then spun the helm and gunned the engine. The pilot boat veered smartly away from the freighter’s rusty hull.

Up on the bridge, Dutch Vandervelt breathed a sigh of relief and rang up ahead two-thirds on the engine telegraph. He glanced at the four containers on the deck, then turned his back and lit a cigar. Later tonight, after he was relieved by Lee, he would stop by the radio room and tell the man in America that the weapons were aboard and the ship was under way. Months ago they had agreed on a simple, unbreakable code — ten nonsense words, one for every possible contingency, launched into the ether on a pre-agreed frequency. He ran through the list in his head again, reciting the words silently.

Well, they were pulling it off. A man would come aboard when the ship docked in Marseilles and pay the rest of the money owed to Vandervelt, the captain, and the crew. The man from Cairo who recruited him for this job had originally proposed half in advance, half when the job was done, but Vandervelt balked. The risk of getting stiffed was too great, and who was he going to complain to?

He demanded eighty percent in advance. The man from Cairo was smooth, a true fanatic. He reminded Vandervelt of a snake he once saw in a zoo staring at a mouse. When the haggling began Vandervelt settled for seventy-five. Two days later a man brought the money, $750,000 American, in a cheap, hard suitcase, the kind one rarely sees anymore.

Vandervelt had paid the captain a hundred grand and shared a hundred with the crew, promising more. He didn’t intend to pay it, of course. He intended to collect the additional quarter million and vanish as quickly as he could. Although Lee and the captain didn’t know it, Vandervelt’s maritime career was ending in Marseilles.

He already had a false passport, Dutch no less. It belonged to a sailor who had been lost at sea one stormy night a year ago. Vandervelt took it to a man he knew in Amsterdam, who had substituted his picture for the one of the dead man, for a price, of course.

Smuggling bombs. The truth of it was that if he hadn’t agreed to do the job, someone else would have. It was that kind of world.

Standing on the deck of the pilot boat, Frouq al-Zuair watched Olympic Voyager gain way. She grew smaller and smaller, shrinking in the darkness as the pilot boat hammered through the swells back toward the lights of Karachi. Soon the freighter’s lights disappeared into the sea haze and she was lost in the vastness of the night.