by Ward Larsen
TWENTY-FOUR
Slaton made Mordechai drive while he watched every move from the passenger seat. They passed a great windmill farm, rows of massive blades turning lazily in the starlight. Snow-bordered fields all around stood waiting for spring. After fifteen minutes civilization reemerged, a few cars and pitched-tile roofs at first, until a place called Mistelbach was introduced by a road sign.
Mordechai claimed to be hungry, and Slaton decided an hour of good cop might be in order—a decision perhaps colored by the fact that he himself hadn’t eaten a decent meal since breakfast. He saw bright light spilling from a window in the center of town. It was a corner café, and from the street the place looked modestly busy—probably because there were few other options in Mistelbach at eleven o’clock on a weeknight.
They parked directly in front of the café, and were led to an outdoor patio. It was less busy than the main room, and not unpleasant with multiple space heaters cooking away. Slaton requested a corner table, both for its discretion and the proximity to one of the radiant furnaces. After a brief study of the menu, a busy waitress in a frilled blouse pinballed to their table. Mordechai ordered roast lamb, Slaton the chicken goulash special, and she was gone in a flurry of flowered embroidery.
“Tell me again,” Slaton said. “The exact message you sent.”
Mordechai was rubbing his wrists where the flex-cuffs had dug in. “Give me my phone back and I’ll show you.”
Slaton put the phone flat on the table, but anchored it with two fingers—trust was still an issue. It forced Mordechai to swipe and type in plain view. He navigated to his messages, tapped on one, then turned the screen to face Slaton.
My name is Paul Mordechai. You know me as the technician who tried to locate the wreckage of Polaris Venture. I urgently need your help on a matter of national security. This Wednesday evening at 8:15. Meet me on the north shore of Danube Park in Vienna, the westernmost semicircle backed by three benches and three trees. Please come—this is of utmost importance. I can think of nowhere else to turn.
Slaton took his hand off the phone. He sat back and looked at Mordechai. “I never got that message.”
His tablemate looked stymied. “But you must have … you came tonight.”
“I got the time and place. But the message I received didn’t say anything about a meeting. It said you would be there, and that I was to eliminate you. Once I’d done so, the sender promised I would get my family back.”
Mordechai went ashen. He looked at his phone blankly, the message glowing like an electronic omen. His eyes came up to meet Slaton’s. “But you didn’t go through with it.”
“Killing you? Of course I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“For the same reason you don’t negotiate with terrorists—it doesn’t work.”
“Yet you killed three other men.”
“I didn’t see a lot of options.”
“Who were they?”
“A good question. Thugs, presumably. On appearances they were Middle Eastern. Beyond that I have no idea. They could have been Palestinians or ISIS. Maybe home-grown Austrian jihadists. I think it’s a mistake to assume that’s relevant—their heritage may have had nothing to do with why they showed up tonight. I can only tell you they were at Danube Park to kill me. I would have preferred to talk to one of them, but circumstances didn’t allow it. So my goal now is to find out who sent them—which circles back to my earlier question. Who would want you dead?”
Mordechai averted his gaze, scanning the room. He looked like a schoolboy about to spill a secret. As Slaton waited patiently, he made his own survey of the surroundings—one that he hoped was more subtle.
“I work for the deputy director general at IAEA,” Mordechai said. “He heads up the Department of Safeguards. Our division is responsible for inspecting nuclear facilities and safeguarding material thought to be at risk. It’s a big undertaking. Last year we visited over a thousand sites. Power plants, uranium mines, research and enrichment facilities. It’s a lot to keep track of. But I also have a secondary job—when I’m not in the field, I’m responsible for auditing our inspections.”
“Auditing?”
“I go over the records of site visits, check for discrepancies. We have a multi-layered system for tracking material.”
“One would hope,” Slaton said dryly.
“Roughly six months ago, I was going over the inventory numbers from a visit—it involved the extraction of fuel from a research reactor.”
“Where?”
“Kazakhstan.”
Slaton wasn’t surprised. Even decades after the fall of communism, many of the Soviet-era republics remained awash in nuclear detritus. “What kind of material?” he asked.
“Our department is concerned almost exclusively with the two fissionable products that can be weaponized—plutonium and highly enriched uranium. This was HEU.”
“Enriched to what level?”
Mordechai looked at him appreciatively. “You know your physics. The tranche in question was documented as ninety-two percent U-235.”
“Anything over ninety percent is weapons grade.”
“Effectively, yes.”
“So what happened? Did this material go missing?”
“No—that would have been a full-blown crisis. To begin, you should know that we go to extreme lengths to track and store samples securely.” Mordechai launched into an explanation of IAEA procedures for analyzing and recording radioactive material. Slaton let him talk, suspecting the relevance of his briefing would soon become apparent.
“Every batch of HEU is unique, and once logged, its signature remains in our database forever. Regarding the shipment from Kazakhstan, I went over the entire acquisition process. The audit procedures were followed to the letter—everything checked. The material was transferred to a French facility to undergo downblending.”
“Downblending?”
“Weapons-grade material can be made safe by diluting it with depleted uranium. Taken to the right concentration, it can actually be reused as fuel in commercial reactors. Most people don’t know it, but for nearly two decades ten percent of the electricity in the United States came from downblended HEU sourced from Soviet-era nuclear warheads.”
“But you’re saying everything checked in the audit,” Slaton said, steering Mordechai back from his excursion. “So where was the problem?”
“I had been giving thought to how our inventory methods might be made better. To test one of my ideas, I went a step beyond the usual audit procedure. I looked back at the original plan for that site visit to Kazakhstan. Going in we had expected to extract forty-one kilograms. The records showed that only thirty-six kilos were recovered—material that is now incontrovertibly secure on Austrian soil.”
“It hardly seems damning—not recovering as much as had been promised in a planning document.”
“I thought the same thing. But it caused me to keep looking. I studied protocols, signatures, interviewed a few of the team members—all of that was uneventful. It affirmed that the lower amount was received. But as a last resort I went to a highly unconventional source.”
“Let me guess—a Kazakh source?”
Mordechai’s expression changed. He was either impressed or alarmed that Slaton had made the same connection.
“Yes.”
The waitress interrupted, sliding a plate in front of both of them. As soon as she was gone, Mordechai picked up his story. “You should understand that the relationship between the agency and the countries it monitors often borders on hostility. Yet among scientists there are sometimes relationships.”
“Even between Kazakh and Israeli scientists.”
“I studied for a time in France, and was friendly with a Kazakh who later became a senior researcher at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He is now the director of nuclear security in Kazakhstan. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the country was left with huge inventories of nuclear material, but little fun
ding to maintain and track it all. Other countries stepped in to keep inventories secure, and the IAEA did its best to remove high-level waste and surplus fuel stocks. Still the government struggles.”
“So you reached out to this friend,” Slaton surmised.
“Yes, in a strictly unofficial capacity. He supplied me with inventory numbers from internal records.”
“And these confirmed a discrepancy?”
“Very precisely. Five kilos of HEU were unaccounted for after the IAEA transfer. The more I looked, the more I realized that only one person could know what really happened—the team leader for the site visit is the final authority for verifying quantities and signing off.”
Slaton nodded, more pieces falling into place. He felt his world shifting ever so slightly, something heavy and ominous blanketing his quest to find his family.
“There is more,” Mordechai said. “Once I discovered the discrepancy, I quietly performed audits on other recoveries. I went back two years and found three other visits in which the numbers didn’t add up—all extractions of HEU that were destined for downblending to commercial-grade reactor fuel. There was one kilogram from a research reactor in Ghana. Six each from molybdenum-99 production facilities in Belgium and South Africa.”
Slaton composed a very cautious reply. “You’re telling me that an inspector at the IAEA has been skimming highly enriched uranium?”
“I know it seems incredible, given the security measures in place—but I’m not talking about just any inspector.”
“Who then?”
Mordechai hesitated, then said, “This is the reason I tried to reach you. The lead inspector on all four suspect acquisitions was the deputy director himself—the man who oversees the Department of Safeguards.”
“What’s his name?”
Mordechai told him.
TWENTY-FIVE
Tarek El-Masri tore the seal off a plastic bag. It contained a standard swipe kit: two pairs of latex gloves, a box of aluminum foil, ten cotton swabs, and ten small ziplock bags, each labeled with a distinct tracking code. He looked around the room, wondering where to begin.
El-Masri and his team were situated fifty-two meters underground, deep inside the PAAR II nuclear research complex outside Islamabad, Pakistan. The room was the size of a handball court and dominated by lab equipment. There were three others inside: two of his inspectors standing by with equipment, and the facility director, Dr. Khan. Khan was a pug-faced man with light-adapting glasses that had gone rose-colored in the laboratory’s harsh glare—El-Masri thought the lenses resembled the bottoms of two tiny wine bottles. Khan stood squarely at the entrance, putting him, perhaps coincidentally, directly beneath the only clock in the room.
As head of the Department of Safeguards, El-Masri did not spend a great deal of time in the field. He was selective in the assignments he took, and even more so in choosing his support staff. That he ventured from his plush Vienna office at all was a departure from the practice of his predecessors. The inspectors who worked under him took it as a positive sign that the head of their division was not afraid to get his hands dirty—a word never used carelessly among nuclear scientists. What none of the rank-and-file could know was that this particular site visit had long been on El-Masri’s radar.
It was two o’clock in the morning, and the bleary-eyed Dr. Khan had met them at the gate. The groundwork for the transfer was complete, having been laid in recent months, and the material had already been loaded for shipment. All that remained was a final inspection of the reprocessing lab. The unconscionable hour was quite by design—transporting highly radioactive material on public roads was hardly a task for rush hour, particularly in places like Pakistan where the observance of traffic laws was aspirational at best.
El-Masri spun a slow circle to check the cameras near the ceiling. There was one in each corner of the room, fish-eye lenses that left no angle uncovered. All were secured in hardened housings with tamper-proof seals, and from there the units were hard-wired to a computer. The computer, kept in a secure vault of its own, retained a digital record of everything. From there a satellite dish on the roof uplinked the feeds to monitors in Vienna. El-Masri wondered idly if anyone at headquarters was watching them at that moment. He decided it was unlikely. All the same, he knew his every move was being recorded for posterity.
He donned a pair of gloves, smoothed out the sheet of aluminum foil that would serve as his workspace, and selected a swab. He dragged the first swipe over the metal grill of an air conditioning intake, then for good measure ran it along the foot of the exterior door. The swab went into the first bag. He sealed the bag, labeled it, and photographed the bar code using an application on his smartphone. Nothing on the bag itself revealed the site, or even the country where the sample had been taken—a necessary measure of anonymity, as per procedure, for samples that might be tested anywhere in the IAEA’s constellation of oversight laboratories.
His assistants joined in, and thirty minutes later they had what they needed—twenty-one samples that would be scanned for the most minute signature of telltale radioisotopes. Unused seals, labels, and components of the swab kits were retained in a designated trash bag. All of it would be inventoried back in Vienna—one more layer in the onionskin of security measures.
El-Masri deemed their inspection complete, and he and his assistants headed for the elevator. Dr. Khan fell in behind. They all rose to ground level, and at the main security station El-Masri was met by his second-in-command for the visit, a young Frenchman named Henri.
Henri said, “Here is the HEU sample taken from the first cask.” He presented El-Masri a golden metallic vial, along with a clipboard with authentication forms and duplicate verification seals.
El-Masri regarded the vial, checking the tracking number against those on the clipboard. This was the primary objective of today’s mission: the removal for downblending of twenty-nine kilos of 93 percent highly enriched uranium. The inspection of the reprocessing lab was a secondary errand—in effect, filling an administrative square in the quarterly Verification and Reviews quota. The nuclear inspector’s equivalent of two birds with one stone.
Convinced the paperwork added up, El-Masri signed his name and meticulously printed his IAEA employee number in the correct box. He then handed over the vial, which was promptly—and within his view—slotted into a lockable carrying case. Six other vials were already so secured. That done, the carrying case was itself sealed, and both El-Masri and Henri scribbled their initials on the paper-thin security strip.
“Are we done below?” Henri asked.
“Yes,” said El-Masri, “the Tier-3 inspection is complete.”
“The aircrew reported in. The preflight of the airplane is complete—they are ready to receive the shipment.”
“Good. Then we won’t take up any more of Dr. Khan’s time.”
* * *
Everyone followed El-Masri outside. There, under the tall floods surrounding an asphalt parking apron, a minor convoy had formed. There were two heavy SUVs, and between them a great flatbed truck that seemed to suffer beneath three ponderous shipping casks, each the size of a Volkswagen. Certified to Type B standards, the containers had been tested to withstand a forty-foot drop onto a hard surface, a thirty-minute immersion in fire as hot as 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, and even a broadside strike by a speeding locomotive. Notwithstanding these attributes, the casks had been securely chained down for the journey.
Henri placed another clipboard in El-Masri’s hand, and as the final authority, he climbed onto the flatbed to certify the load. He moved between the casks, comparing inventory numbers, and verifying that one frangible security bolt had been affixed to the lid of each. The bolts had unique numbers of their own, along with an embedded RFID chip.
Satisfied everything matched, El-Masri again signed, one scribble on each of three sets of paperwork. He patted the last cask on the rump as one would an obliging trail horse, and stepped down to the parking apron. He took shotgun pos
ition in the lead SUV, and soon the formation began to move. They rolled toward the main gate, and once outside were surrounded by an armada of security: eight armored personnel carriers, three troop trucks, and a pair of light assault vehicles—one took the lead, while the other played caboose. The convoy set out at an unconscionably safe speed toward PAF Murid, a military airfield twenty miles south.
In the lead SUV, a mystified Henri sat in the back seat behind El-Masri. The Frenchman had been with the agency less than a year, and this was his first trip into the field. In preparation, and because he was accompanying the head of the department, he’d asked colleagues what to expect from El-Masri. The response had been virtually unanimous: El-Masri was outgoing and garrulous, and everything he said came at a fast-forward pace, as if his lips couldn’t keep up with the rapid-fire thoughts in his mind.
As the convoy crawled through dark Pakistani countryside, Henri saw none of it. Indeed, he wondered if it had all been some kind of joke. El-Masri sat in the front seat looking precisely as he had since they’d left Vienna: adrift in utter silence. Henri had twice seen him surreptitiously pop pills into his mouth, and a stolen glance at the bottle told him they were for pain. At the moment El-Masri appeared to be staring forlornly at something in his hand. In the dim reflections of light from the instrument panel, Henri couldn’t quite make it out.
After nearly a minute, curiosity got the better of him.
Henri pulled out his personal phone as if checking email, tilted it slightly so the screen’s illumination cast between the front seats. It did the trick. El-Masri was holding a standard film badge—the personal dosimeter they all wore to measure cumulative radiation exposure. Having no idea what to make of it, Henri turned off his phone, pressed back into his seat, and got comfortable—they were in for a long day of travel.
Back at the PARR II facility, Dr. Khan watched the convoy patiently. It took ten minutes for the last taillights to disappear. As soon as they did, he sent a one-line text on his secure phone. Seconds later, behind a nearby equipment shed, a lone vehicle rumbled to life. In that moment, it was the only vehicle in the compound not owned and operated by the Pakistani army. A standard box delivery truck, it was neither new nor old, although the diesel engine churned with well-tuned smoothness.