49

Kady Jones was reading e-mails, an affectionate smile on her face. A few days ago, two of her favorite people at Los Alamos, Henry Wong and Mae Lee, had got married. They’d gone on a honeymoon to Rome and, being techies, they hadn’t sent postcards home by snail mail. They’d found an Internet café instead. Mae’s message to Kady was chatty, detailed, and intimate: one close girlfriend to another. Henry’s had consisted of a couple of lines, assuring her that Rome was pretty cool, plus a bunch of digital holiday photos, with captions attached.

His favorite was a shot of Mae posing in a park on the Aventine Hill, with a view across the Tiber to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. She looked great, her face suffused with a happiness that seemed to light up the whole shot.

“Man, am I one lucky bomb-geek!” he’d written on the caption.

Kady was looking at the shot on her lab computer, whose screen was far larger, with much better resolution than the one in the Roman café. So she noticed what Henry hadn’t, that there were two guys talking in the background of his shot, and the perspective made them look like weird midgets growing out of Mae’s armpit. Out of idle curiosity she zoomed in on them to take a closer look.

And then she gasped. “Holy shit!”

The man on the right was only vaguely recognizable, but his companion was all too familiar. If the two of them were having anything other than a casual, social conversation, this innocent holiday photograph had suddenly acquired a whole new level of significance.

She dialed a number in Washington. FBI Special Agent Tom Mulvagh, the man who’d supervised the operation at Gull Lake, had been transferred to D.C. to work on the secret team searching for the Russian bombs. They’d built up a good working relationship. She told him to expect an e-mail and waited a few seconds.

“Do you have the picture on your screen?”

“Yeah, thanks for sending me that, though e-mailing shots of hot broads is most often a guy kind of thing.”

Kady could picture Mulvagh’s grin. He liked to kid around a little when the situation allowed. She didn’t have any problem with that.

“Very funny, Tom. That ‘broad,’ as you call her, is Mae Wong, the beautiful, sensitive, and highly intelligent wife of my associate Henry Wong. And she’s not what I want you to look at. Go in on the two guys…”

“What, the ones in her armpit?”

“Exactly… Recognize them?”

There was silence on the line while Mulvagh thought, then: “The one on the right looks familiar.”

“That’s what I thought,” agreed Kady. “I’m pretty sure I saw his picture in a magazine. He’s that general. His assistant got killed in the park in D.C.”

“Vermulen,” said Mulvagh. “Right, I remember. But what’s the significance to you or me?”

“Well, it’s not him that caught my attention. It’s the other one, with the darker hair. He’s Dr. Francesco Riva. He’s Italian, came over here in the late seventies, got a masters at MIT, and worked at Lawrence Livermore National Lab for more than a decade. That’s where I got to know him, and you can take it from me, Mulvagh, Frankie Riva is really a fantastic nuclear physicist.”

“And I should care about this because…?”

“Because, for one, Frankie’s specialty was the miniaturization of nuclear weapons; and for two, he quit the lab five years ago and disappeared right off the map. You’ve got to understand, pretty much everyone in our business knows everyone else, by reputation or in person. We know who’s doing what, and where. But for the last few years, Frankie Riva hasn’t been doing anything. Not in public, anyway.”

“And now you’re going to tell me what he’s been doing in private.” said Mulvagh.

“Well, I don’t know. Not for sure. But the thing about him was he didn’t live like a nerd. He wasn’t at home with his PC and his pizza boxes. He liked European sports cars, pretty girls, and dinners for two at the kind of place where the maître d’ had to translate the menu.”

“So he needed money.”

“Exactly,” Kady continued. “That’s why he quit Livermore. He said he wanted a private-sector salary. That’s not unusual. Plenty of guys go to commercial research labs. But Frankie’s not at any lab I know. The word on Nuke Street is he’s been selling his skills to people who want bombs, and who’ll pay whatever it takes to get them.”

“How come we’ve never heard of this guy?”

“If he’s gone back home to Italy, he’s not in your jurisdiction.”

“But no one from the Agency’s mentioned him to me at any of our briefings.”

“Well, you know, Tom, I don’t want to sound disloyal or unpatriotic, but the Agency’s not always as well informed as it could be…”

Mulvagh laughed. “I hear that!”

“Okay, so now ask yourself, What would Frankie Riva be doing with General Vermulen? I checked out the general’s clippings on Lexis. There are claims he’s a middleman in international arms deals. His old assistant gets murdered in a park where no one’s been killed in years. He takes a sabbatical from his job to travel in Europe, and a couple of the gossip columns say he’s taken his hot new assistant along for the ride. And now he’s in Rome, having a private conversation in a secluded park with a nuclear scientist who knows everything there is to know about the kinds of bombs we’re looking for. I mean, doesn’t that strike you as… I don’t know… interesting?”

“I don’t know how it strikes me, Kady,” said Mulvagh. “I don’t exactly understand what you’re telling me here.”

“I’m telling you that a man who has high-level contacts all over the world, who deals in weapons for a living, and who is supposed to be on holiday screwing his secretary, is having secret meetings with a guy who could make a basic gun-design suitcase nuke with his eyes closed, and upgrade an existing one even easier. I’m telling you that we may not be the only ones who know that Lebed was telling the truth.”

“I get that,” said Mulvagh. “But I don’t know that I buy it. And even if I did, I’d want to be damn sure of my evidence before I took this any further. Vermulen has friends, the kind that could end my career and yours if we start making false accusations-”

“We don’t have to accuse him of anything,” Kady interrupted. “Not yet… But you could check him out, you know, discreetly. I mean, if Vermulen met Frankie Riva in Rome, maybe he had other meetings in other cities. And if we knew who he talked to, that might give us a picture. Plus, and you can put this down to feminine intuition if you want to be sexist about it, I just think it’s kinda convenient that secretary number one-a woman in her fifties, by the way-gets knocked on the head, and five minutes later, in comes a hottie who just happens to be hanging on the general’s arm as he tours the romantic hotspots.”

“Maybe you’re just jealous,” suggested Mulvagh.

“Now why would I be jealous of a woman younger than me who hooks up with a great-looking, unmarried general? Seriously, Tom, this could be worth looking into. It’s not like we’ve got a million other leads to distract us. Just run a few checks through a few databases. I’ll buy you a drink next time you’re out west…”

“Well, in that case, Dr. Jones, how could I say no?”

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