Pinnacle Event

12

The iPad buzzed. Dugout knew it was Ray Bowman calling. No one else could connect to that device. He had designed the two specially converted iPads as a paired set. Each had the necessary encryption key to communicate to the other, but those keys existed nowhere else. Inside the fat iPad 2, there were chips that created what Dugout called a “sandbox,” a separate hard drive that could only be accessed after a four-factor authentication.

When Bowman had clicked on the Games folder and then the Hearts card game app, two windows had appeared. He had placed his thumb over the first window for a fingerprint read and looked into the second window for an iris scan. Then a number pad appeared and he had typed in an eight-digit pin he had memorized. Finally, a phrase appeared on screen and he had read it aloud for voice recognition. The entire process took almost two minutes. It was not like hitting 911 on a phone, not particularly good when seconds counted.

“I’m in South Africa,” Ray began.

“I know. The iPad has GPS. Besides, I’ve been following reports about you in the Austrian and South African security services chatter,” Dugout replied, setting the iPad up against his desk lamp.

“So you know, half the spooks in Vienna were following me around town. It was like The Third Man. Then some Nigerian fucking drug gang tried to kidnap me here yesterday and I end up with brain splatter on me. Find out who hired them. The Nigerian is claiming it’s some guy name Kranstov, first name unknown. Check it out.”

“Will do,” Dugout said, tapping the name in to his search list.

“I thought you were supposed to be giving me some sort of top cover through cyberspace. Where were the warnings Duggie, huh?”

“I didn’t hear about those problems until after they happened,” Dugout stammered, “but you seem to be okay.”

“No thanks to you. Listen, after the visit here I am pretty satisfied there were six more nuclear bombs than the South Africans reported to IAEA. They may have been shipped to Israel years ago. I am going to go there to see if I can verify that and, if so, where they went from there. Have you gotten anywhere?”

Dugout hit the touch screen on the laptop next to the iPad, pulling up a program that the Minerva software was plowing through. “Maybe. I figure that the five remaining warheads were probably moved after their sale. Likely in shipping containers with special shielding to avoid detection by Geiger counters. So I am looking for unusual movement around then, shipments of containers originating in one place and then being off-loaded and shipped to likely target locations. Looking at aircraft, ships not operated by Maersk and the other big lines, going to the U.S. or Israel. There is a lot of data to crunch. Still running through it.”

“By the way, when you have your next little séance with Winston at the Cosmos Club, tell him to keep the CIA away from me,” Ray said. “Having them tailing me around is like hunting deer with a boombox by your side. Speaking of our illustrious Intelligence Community, have they or any of the others come up with anything?”

“Dry holes. Winston won’t let them talk to any liaison services about it because he thinks it will leak in minutes that we’re looking for loose nukes and then the bad guys could detonate once they know we’re on to them.”

“Well, tell Winston that the South African intel service already figured it out and their President has stepped up searches for radioactivity in shipping containers. The story is going to leak out pretty soon,” Ray thought out loud. “Gotta go.” The screen reverted to a game of Hearts.

Dugout checked what the search program had found for Kranstov. He hit the first entry on the short list. “This growth mechanism for thin film was first noted by Ivan Stranski and Lyubomir Kranstov in 1938.” Wonderful, probably not him, Dugout thought. It had not been a productive day, so far.

As he opened the mini fridge in search of a Red Bull, the first lines of “Rhapsody in Blue” came over the speakers tied in to his server cluster. Good news, the Gershwin masterpiece was what Minerva played when it had found what it had been programmed to look for. Dugout dashed to the screen.

A consignment of five shipping containers had left Maputo on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa four days after the double flash. Each was bound for a different port in West Africa, on a cargo ship flagged in Liberia and owned by a company registered in Vanuatu. The master was a Philippine captain. It fit the pattern he was searching for, perfectly, five bombs, five targets. “Found them,” he said aloud.

Dug tapped in a query for the onward itinerary of each of the containers. They had all bounced around from port to port, ship to ship for weeks. One container had finally cleared customs at Rotterdam, another two had been trucked away from Felixstowe near London. One had entered Mexico at Veracruz. The last one was still at sea, having been transshipped eight times. It was now on a Panamanian flagged ship from Trinidad, bound for the Port of Miami, where it was due to dock tomorrow morning. “Shit!” Dugout yelled to the empty room.

Dugout swiveled on his chair and picked up the secure phone, punching the button on the console that read DHS/NAC. The Nebraska Avenue Complex was the headquarters of Homeland Security and held its twenty-four-hour operations center, connected to Customs, Coast Guard, and a dozen other DHS agencies.

“NAC, Yeoman Burke,” the Coast Guard woman answered. “How can I help you?”

“This is the PEG. I have a Pinnacle event, repeat Pinnacle event. Code Empty Quiver. Give me the Senior Watch Officer.” Dugout had spoken the interagency clear code for a nuclear event, Pinnacle, and Empty Quiver, the specific category of event for a missing weapon.

“Pinnacle, yes, sir. Let me look that up here a minute,” she replied. “Pinnacle, oh, God, stand by, switching you to Captain Mendoza, stand by.”