Meantime, FBI had detached four specialists in missing-persons cases. NSA had sent a team of its own. In other words, even more guys in khakis were roaming around than usual. And no one had much to do. Taylor felt certain that despite their efforts, Reza would beat them. The man knew that they would have the dogs out, and he’d outquicked them three times already. Nothing for Taylor to do but keep his phone charged and wait.
The call came as he sat at his desk at 5:15 p.m., another gray day come and gone.
“Reza?”
“Seventy-four Gonca. Number six. In Bahçelievler.” A fast-growing, densely packed neighborhood northeast of the airport.
“It’s time to come in.”
“A present there. It speaks for itself. Bring a Geiger.”
“Did you check your account?” After the Kara Six intercept, the CIA had moved another three hundred thousand dollars into Reza’s UBS account. The money remained untouched.
Reza didn’t answer. Brian watched the little digital timer on the phone tick away . . . Forty-two, forty-three . . . Not long enough. Keep him talking. “What about your friend? Your family?”
“Pray for me, Brian. Even if neither of us believes in Allah.”
“You need our protection, Reza, you need—” But Taylor was talking to an empty line.
Hunt walked into his office. “NSA says he’s in Fatih, possibly on Vatan.”
Not good enough to find him, as they both knew. Vatan was a boulevard that ran through Fatih, a poor, densely packed neighborhood in the Old City. If Reza was in a taxi, he could step out and vanish into Fatih’s back alleys. If he was walking, he could get on a tram. If he was driving himself, he would reach the inner ring highway in minutes. He would be long gone before the first operative reached Vatan.
“I’m going to Bahçelievler,” Taylor said.
“Trap.”
“I’m going.”
“I’ll get two detectors.”
She was already walking to the locked closet where the station kept its pager-sized radiation detectors. Taylor stuffed his pistol in his waistband holster. “You really do care,” he shouted down the hall.
“Keep telling yourself that.”
—
Without debate, they took a taxi directly from the front consulate gate. Not great tradecraft—terrible tradecraft, in fact. But they both wanted to get there as fast as possible. They barely spoke along the way. Taylor didn’t think he’d ever see Reza again. Either the man was one of the greatest sources in the agency’s history or a dangerous fraud. Taylor wanted to believe, but he was losing confidence. More cesium wouldn’t convince anyone, either. According to the Counterproliferation desk, that stuff was available. Hard to get, but not impossible.
Seventy-four Gonca stood in the center of a row of identical six-story apartment buildings, concrete and painted a bright lemon yellow, with sliding glass doors that opened onto small smoking balconies.
Taylor pulled on gloves and Hunt did the same. He reached for his pistol, but she tapped his arm. “Not yet. Too many kids.” She took an autopick from her pocket. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” Taylor said, and wished he hadn’t.
Ten seconds later, they were inside. The first floor smelled of dinner, lamb with plenty of garlic. The building had two apartments per floor. Number six was on the right side of the third floor. Its front window had been dark from the street, Taylor remembered. He didn’t see any light under the door.
He motioned Hunt to the left side of the door and pulled his pistol. He pointed to the lock: You pick, I’ll open. He half expected that Reza would have doped the lock with Krazy Glue, one last hurdle. Instead it clicked smoothly. Taylor held the pistol low in his right hand, reached for the knob with his left. Reza could easily have rigged a shotgun behind the door. If Taylor had been alone, he might have hesitated. But not with Hunt looking him over with her ice-blue eyes. He grabbed the knob, shoved open the door, ducked inside.
No shotgun.
Behind him, Hunt closed the door. They left the lights off, let their eyes adjust to the light trickling through the front window. The apartment had one big front room, a combination living area and galley kitchen. It was sparsely furnished, only a futon and a coffee table. It gave off a distinct hotel feeling.
Hunt pointed to the radiation detector on her belt. The single light on the side was a steady green, meaning that it wasn’t picking up emissions. Yellow for alpha, orange for beta, red for gamma. Red meant get out.
Hunt pulled open the door beside the kitchen. Behind it, a corridor ran past two more doors, ended at a third. Hunt went to the end. Taylor took the first door on the right, found an empty room. Not even a bed. In the closet, a prayer rug that looked like it had never been used. Maybe it had come with the place.
Behind the second door, a narrow bathroom, basic toiletries, an unopened pack of L&M cigarettes under the sink. Reza’s brand. Taylor picked them up with his gloved hands, put them in his jacket. The techs would test everything for prints, though Taylor couldn’t imagine Reza making that mistake. All along, the radiation detector stayed green. He walked out of the bathroom just as Hunt emerged from the third door, shaking her head.
Back in the kitchen, Taylor pulled open the cabinets. Cooking oil, rice, bags of pita bread. A Quran tucked next to a spice rack. And a tall brown bottle of Amarula, a milky South African liqueur, instantly recognizable by the elephant on its label. An old girlfriend of Taylor’s had liked the stuff. Strange to see it here. He put it on the counter.
In the living area, Hunt checked under the futon’s cushions. Her BlackBerry buzzed. “SOG got to Vatan. Nothing. Your friend’s jerking us around.”
But Taylor didn’t think so. Reza hadn’t lied to him. Played him endlessly, but never lied. He tried the refrigerator, found it empty aside from a pomegranate and two water bottles. In the freezer, a frozen rack of lamb angled against the back wall. Taylor started to close the door. Then stopped. He pushed the lamb aside. He found a letter-sized envelope. Behind that, a plastic-wrapped tube, four inches tall, an inch-plus around, the size of a stack of half-dollars. He pulled the tube out with his fingertips, gingerly, like he was afraid of freezer burn—
His detector alerted. A steady beeping, the light flashing yellow. Alpha. Safe to hold, at least that’s what the Counterproliferation guys had told them in their briefing. Which had lasted all of forty-five minutes.
“Martha.” He held up his detector. Hunt joined him. For a moment, they stood stupidly in front of the open freezer door, looking at the tube like a couple of stoners trying to figure out which ice cream to eat next.
“Whatever it is, let’s get it back to the station.” He dropped the tube and envelope in her purse and reached for the Amarula.
He held up the bottle. A chunk of glass in the base had been cut out, replaced with a brown plastic plug. A dime-sized slot on the plug’s face allowed it to be tightened or loosened. Taylor pulled the plastic-wrapped cylinder out of Hunt’s purse, checked it against the hole. The cylinder was slightly smaller.
“Unscrew it, pour out some booze, drop the thing in,” Hunt said.
“Thing being the technical term.”
“But won’t the weight be wrong? The density?”
“Pack the bottle in a suitcase, who’s checking? Especially because the bottle and whatever’s inside must be enough to hide the radiation. Then you fly anywhere. One bottle of liqueur, no customs agent in the world will care.”
“How did you know?”
“Reza’s weird, but Amarula didn’t make sense even for him.” He checked the other cabinets, just to be sure. Nothing else.
Hunt spun a finger in the air. Time. Taylor put the Amarula bottle in a plastic bag, took one last look at the kitchen, and followed her out, keeping his pistol unholstered. No chances now.
—
At the consulate
, they went for the coms center, ignoring the questions from the SOG team leader and everyone else. In what now seemed like a major mistake, a nuclear emergency team hadn’t been sent to Istanbul. The Air Force was sending radiation experts from its base at Incirlik, but they would need hours to arrive. Hunt had already asked the Turkish Interior Ministry if police could find the apartment’s owner, interview everyone in the building. As a cover story, she said the FBI had connected the apartment to an al-Qaeda operative in Chicago.
Meantime, the DOE nuke experts had warned them not to unwrap the tube. Taylor figured that was one piece of advice they wouldn’t follow. He pulled the Amarula bottle from the bag. “Drink?”
“Funny.” Hunt extracted the plastic-wrapped tube and the envelope from her purse, slid him the envelope. “This first.”
Inside, two sheets of paper. First, a handwritten itinerary. Turkish Airlines from Istanbul to Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa to Luanda, Angola, on TAAG, Angola’s national airline. Then Luanda to Havana, again on TAAG. Several dates were listed for each flight.
“I hope he’s flying first class,” Hunt said.
“Only airport on that list that would have radiation-detection equipment is Atatürk. He gets out of here, he’s good.”
“So he lands in Havana. Ninety miles from Key West. Then what?”
“Goes out into the Gulf and leaves it for whoever made the pickup from the Kara Six. Same way, a homing device.”
“Or he just hands it off, ship to ship.” Reza could easily find a Cuban fishing crew to help make the transfer for a few thousand dinero. “Or even brings it to Florida himself.”
“Not clear from this if he actually made the reservations,” Taylor said.
“That is a checkable fact. What else does he have for us?”
Taylor looked over the second page:
1.3 kilos Uranium. Bomb-grade. Come over border two days ago. We change plan with ship because other ship doesn’t get through.
Did not expect material so quickly. Please don’t blame apartment man. I pay cash, he know nothing. Best for everyone if I disappear.
Khodafez
“Reza”
He slid the letter to Hunt.
“A smiley face? He’s giving us a kilogram of what he says is weapons-grade uranium and running with the hellhounds after him, and he throws in a smiley face.”
“That’s him. His way of taking credit for the interdiction. I wish you could have met him.”
“Khodafez?”
“Good-bye.”
“He must know we’ll do anything to find him.”
“How’s that been working out for us?”
“I need to call Langley,” she said. “But first things first. One-point-three kilos is about three pounds. How much HEU in a bomb?” she said.
“More than this.”
They both knew the stuff couldn’t blow up just sitting on the table. No doubt it was safer than regular explosive. But that truth couldn’t close the pit in Taylor’s stomach. They were looking at the seed of a million nightmares.
She fished through her purse, came out with a Swiss Army knife. “Should we?”
“A Swiss Army knife? Thought you were cooler than that.”
“My ex-boyfriend gave it to me.”
Taylor wondered if he was hearing things, or if she had just put a not-so-subtle emphasis on ex. If this piece of metal really was what Reza said, the world had moved much closer to nuclear midnight. But if he’d impressed Hunt today, the news wasn’t all bad.
He reached for the knife.
25
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The Oval Office had six visitors this time. The Four Horsemen. The National Security Advisor. And James Shaham, director of the Global Security and Nonproliferation Program at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee. Shaham was a nuclear physicist from his square wire-framed glasses to his scuffed black oxfords. He was there for a technical briefing, but he was suffering a severe case of OOFS—Oval Office Fright Syndrome. His face was slick with sweat, and he squeezed his hands together so tightly the President worried he would break a finger.
“When you’re ready, Dr. Shaham.”
Shaham untwisted his hands long enough to mop his forehead. A cloud of white flakes snowed out of his curly gray hair. “Little nervous, sir.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” The President smiled and Shaham seemed to relax.
“The situation, Mr. President. Seven hours ago, a CIA team delivered an ingot of one-point-three kilograms of uranium to Oak Ridge for review. The agency reported this material is believed to be a product of the Iranian nuclear program and was recovered in Turkey. I have no further details on where or how it was found. For my purposes, those facts are largely irrelevant. A preliminary on-site analysis of the ingot found it to be weapons-grade enriched uranium, approximately ninety-four percent U-235. Our task was to confirm the analysis, which we did, and then to match the ingot to known repositories of fissile material. Meaning, did it come from a national stockpile, whether ours, Russia’s, or another country’s.”
So far Shaham hadn’t said anything that the President and everyone else in the room didn’t already know. “How does that matching work?”
“After the end of the Cold War, the major nuclear powers shared samples of their fissile material, highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium. The feeling was that if a piece like this turned up, everyone would want to know where it came from. The physical samples were sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to be assayed by scientists there. The data was then shared with the contributing countries. I assume you’re not interested in the technical details, but everyone’s HEU looks different. Impurities, enrichment levels, radioactive signature, levels of tertiary uranium isotopes. Plutonium has similar differences, though that’s not at issue in this case.”
“And every country with weapons has joined?”
“Except North Korea, sir. That includes Israel, even though it isn’t a declared power, as well as Pakistan after its first nuclear test.”
“Can we be sure they’re providing representative material?” Donna Green said.
“Excellent question, ma’am. We can’t. As a condition of joining, every country agrees to let IAEA inspectors sample their stockpiles every three years. Even so, it is possible that a country could try to fool the program by de-enriching and then re-enriching material. There might be some similarities with the existing samples, but our scientists can’t say for sure that they would prove a match. That’s an interesting technical question we’re looking at right now. But this material, as best we can tell, is fresh. That is to say, it doesn’t share a signature with any existing samples.”
The room was silent. The President had known this, too. The answer had come back a couple hours before. But hearing Shaham saying it was a different matter. He came off as the opposite of a warmonger. Everything about him broadcast precision, caution, professionalism.
“Two hours ago, we put out a Yellow Alert through IAEA. That means we’re asking the other nuclear powers to check their stockpiles. We don’t have to explain why. Just, as a courtesy, please let us know if you’ve had significant losses since your last report. We’ll get answers in the next forty-eight hours, but I’m not optimistic. A loss of this size would surely have been reported already.”
“But you can’t say for sure that the material’s Iranian,” Green said.
“That’s correct, ma’am. We don’t have an Iranian sample. We’re not even sure the Iranians have reached this level of enrichment. All I can tell you for certain is that we haven’t seen material like this ingot before.”
“Could a private group have done this?” Hebley said.
“General, I never say never to anything except perpetual-motion machines. But enriching a kilogram-plus of uranium to this level req
uires large facilities that can’t be hidden. Hundreds of scientists. Billions of dollars—tens of billions, if they’re going to be put underground.”
“So no?”
“It’s very unlikely.”
“What about North Korea?” the President said.
“That’s a possibility, but we believe this grade of enrichment is beyond them.”
“Next question. How close is this to a bomb?”
“Depends on the size of the bomb, and the skill of the scientists putting it together. Our own scientists can build a one-kiloton nuclear bomb with two and a half kilograms of HEU.”
“That’s only two of these.”
“Correct, sir. A bomb that size is tiny by nuclear standards, the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT. Fifty tractor-trailer loads. During the Cold War, we regularly detonated bombs with ten thousand times as much power. Even so, a one-kiloton bomb explosion in midtown Manhattan would kill tens of thousands of people. More realistically, assuming a cruder bomb design, a bomb like that would require four to seven kilos of HEU. A bomb ten times as big, ten kilotons, would require six to twelve kilos. That’s Hiroshima-sized. It means a half-square-mile hole.”
“Five of these ingots could do that?”
“Between five and ten, sir.”
“And how hard is it to build the actual bomb?”
“Compared to enriching the uranium, easy. The basic designs have been public for decades. An engineer and a machinist could put one together in a couple weeks, especially if they had access to the right explosives.”
The right explosives. Shaham didn’t know about the Semtex that Commander Ivory had found on the Kara Six, but everyone else in the room did.
“Thank you, Dr. Shaham,” the President said. “If we have any questions—”
“Mr. President, sir. If I might make one last comment.”
No one interrupted the President in this room. He cleared his throat, and Shaham suddenly took great interest in his shoes.
“Sorry, sir.”
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