The Threat

by David Poyer

  “You’re really gonna bust the glass on the red box, huh?”

  “You don’t think I should?”

  “Hey,” Bloom laughed, “I don’t know. But it’s about as good a way to go down in flames as any.”

  15

  He gave his daughter money for a taxi and told her he was sorry but that he really had to go. He didn’t like the disappointment in her eyes, but didn’t see anything he could do about it but promise to get together again soon.

  The roads were slick and there were accidents working, strobes searing the mist, so it wasn’t until midnight that he actually got to the Ellipse. He stalked head down through the blowing rain to the West Wing. The marines weren’t out, even in rain gear. That meant the president wasn’t in residence. Dan wondered where he was, but dismissed it as something he didn’t care enough to wonder about.

  As far as he was concerned, the asshole could be grilling in hell.

  Lynch and Alvarado got up as he came into the admin staff area. “Marty’s on her way,” Ed said. “But it may take her a while, there’s flooding in her neighborhood.”

  Dan said fine, looking past them to where the duty officers and comm techs sat in the brightly lit, always flickering-live intensity of the watch center. The night crew here got just as much action as the day people, since night in Washington was day in Asia and the Middle East. He was glad to see Roald’s helmet of dark hair in the director’s cubicle. First he’d see if he could convince her. He’d already resolved on the drive in that if he couldn’t, he’d let it go. He was supposed to interdict drugs, not terror attacks.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t just look away, wait for somebody else to notice. This had nothing to do with Dan Lenson’s job description or counterdrug’s lines of command. But compared to this, they faded into unimportance.

  If there really was an attack impending, he had to stop it.

  He took Lynch and Alvarado into the director’s cubicle with him. Making it crowded, but it was a quick way to get them backgrounded. He still wondered if he should be including the Coastie in this. He’d have to keep an eye on his phone calls.

  Roald listened with her too-pointed chin propped on a finger, gaze locked on his. Questions darted behind those blue windows. But she didn’t voice them. Till at last he ran down and stood listening to the murmur of a desk officer checking a comm channel to some distant corner of the empire. He eyed Alvarado, wondering why he didn’t look surprised.

  The captain’s first question, soft and low-toned: “Why would you think this might be aimed at the Washington area?”

  “The cartel second-ranker we turned after the Haiti raid. He didn’t know what it was. Or when. But he said it was aimed at D.C.”

  “Right. The spring wind thing.” Roald cut her eyes at the cold rain, actually sleet now, lashing the windows. “But this isn’t spring. Not by a long shot.”

  Dan hurried on, realizing this must sound less than convincing. “Actually the specific target doesn’t matter, does it? Something like that, it’s an area weapon. They’d target it against a city. The important thing’s to catch them on the ground, stop them before they take off.”

  The Sit Room director swiveled her chair, frowning. “Who else have you shared this with?”

  “Just my own people. Bloom. Lynch. Marty Harlowe’s coming in.”

  “Your boss? General Sebold?”

  “No … not yet.”

  “Don’t you think you should?”

  “I wanted to run it past you first. A reality check. If we’re jumping out without the ’chute on this.”

  Her gaze flicked from her screen to the overhead clocks. “It might make sense, but … only if you accept a lot of hearsay at face value. What makes you think it’s going to happen soon?”

  “It’s not all hearsay. The documents we found at the Haiti conference. Then the thefts last week from Laguna Verde.”

  “I understood all that. Though the Mexican authorities are still saying nothing was taken. What I asked was, why the big rush?”

  “I don’t know … it just occurred to me … the strike’s going to start the day after tomorrow.”

  “The strike? What strike?”

  Dan nodded to Lynch, who said, “The air cargo baggage handlers’ union is going out day after tomorrow if the airlines don’t sign. And the Wall Street Journal says they won’t. They say this could be a long strike. Meaning air cargo won’t fly.”

  Roald shrugged. “So what? They just wait until it can.”

  “They can’t just sit on their hands. Every day they keep this stuff in the U.S. is a day more they can be discovered,” Dan told her. “Plus think about this. This material they’ve stolen has what’s called ‘inherent security’—meaning it’s dangerous as hell to be around. Even if they’re just in the same building with it, hiding it, or guarding it, they’ll be getting neutrons through the walls. They might not have figured on that. They might know, at least the higher-ups, but not have bothered to warn the foot soldiers. But once you start getting radiation sickness, you know it. I’ve seen it. It’s not something you ignore. And it happens fast.”

  She tried to interrupt but he hurried on. “Okay, dying might not stop them. If there’s the jihadist connection we suspect, from this Blessings organization. Or they might just shoot the first people who go down, if the guards are cartel. But if they all get sick, they’ll be useless, and it’ll be too late. Ed says the last air cargo strike lasted for three months.

  “So my call is they’ll do whatever they’re going to do just as soon as they can turn the isotopes around, just as soon as they can get them into whatever dispersal mechanism or packaging they plan to use. And then—they’ll go. They won’t delay a day, not an hour. Because they can’t afford to.”

  Roald thought about that. Then swung to her terminal. Her fingers danced. Dan saw she was accessing a Los Alamos National Laboratory site. Then a list of classified papers. Finally, a monograph on medical radiological sources. She scrolled down, speed-reading at an impressive rate.

  “‘Uses range from radiation treatment of cancer, to well testing, sterilization of food, seeds, and medical equipment.’ What’s the isotope again?”

  He told her what Bloom had told him, from his unnamed source: that it was mostly cesium.

  “Cesium-137.” Roald pulled up another screen. “‘Most often employed in the form of cesium chloride … product of uranium fission … millions of times more radioactive than uranium … ‘Chemical treatment is required to extract the cesium,’” she read off.

  “That’d be the process at Laguna Verde.”

  “Let’s see, this says … ‘Cesium chloride. A fine, talcum-powder-like precipitate.’ God … yeah.” She ran her hand over her hair, the same self-comforting gesture, Dan noticed, he used sometimes himself.

  “What is it?”

  “The half-life’s thirty years. After area contamination, it takes six half-lives for decay to safe levels.”

  “Six times fifteen’s 180 years,” Alvarado said behind them.

  “And you’re sure this was what was actually stolen?” she asked them.

  Dan explained that was a weak point. All they had was cop-to-cop liaison, anonymous background—nothing in writing. “But Miles, my DEA guy, says the federale he got this from, he’s a good source.”

  “You say you think the cartel, this Baptist guy, was behind the plant hit. But the people who were into air cargo were a charity foundation?”

  “An Islamic charity foundation. Out of Pomona. They were shipping cargo containers across the Mexican border. Empty, but that could have been a rehearsal. And you know NSA’s been reporting back chatter between the terror boys and the drug people. They’re starting to work together.”

  She looked doubtful. “This is all pretty thin, Dan. We could get burned if we take this seriously, and it turns out to be nothing.”

  “I know it’s thin. But look at the downside, too.” He tried to make his voice earnest. “Captain, prudent marin
ers don’t wait till somebody comes out of the fog at us. If we hear something out there, we stop the engines. All I’m saying is, let’s call the skipper. Put Transportation, the FBI, and Customs on alert. Maybe they’ve heard something too. Maybe they’ve got a piece we’re missing.”

  She thought a bit more. Then, with a quick gesture, flipped open a binder and ran her finger down a list. “Put one of your people on finding out if there’s actually anything going on in L.A. At the charity. See if they can persuade the local FBI to go over and check them out again. I’ll call a couple of people on the alert chain. I also want to know how big a threat this thing would be. Whether cesium chloride would disperse in a brisk wind, the effect of precipitation on dispersion, and so on. Get me some numbers. Get me some facts. Then maybe I can help you.”

  Dan said he’d do that, and went back out into the admin area. Alvarado and Lynch trailed him to one of the vacant terminals. The same one he’d sat at during the futile run-up to the Eritrean retreat. He logged in, wondering again what he was supposed to do if Alvarado really was dirty. Somebody inside the counterdrug establishment was leaking. But who?

  He finally told himself it didn’t matter. It might even work to their advantage. If Luis was their leaker and passed the word to the other side that the operation was compromised, they might abort.

  Which would be fine with him. They might lose track of the conspirators, but if they stopped whatever was going on before it got off the ground, he’d settle for that. In fact, that might be the smartest thing he could do.

  “Okay, let’s split this up. Luis, I want you on the phone to anybody and everybody you know in Santa Cruz and Mexico City. Use that excellent Spanish. Find out if what Miles got is the straight skinny. Anything they’ve uncovered. How much material’s missing, if you find anybody who can drill down to that level of detail. Call in all your chips and don’t be afraid to beg. Tell them something wicked might be coming our way, and we need the facts.”

  “I need to go back to the office to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “All my phone numbers are there.”

  Dan hesitated, then said that was all right.

  Marty Harlowe came in, shaking wet off her raincoat. She hung it carefully. Underneath she was wearing black slacks and a lacy, clingy white blouse. “Miles said you needed us.”

  He explained again. Midway through she said, “The dirty-bomb concept. A radiological-dispersal device, like we used to think about for area denial.”

  “That’s kind of our sense of what we’re looking at. Yeah. Ed’s working the airline end. Luis’s backtracking with his contacts south of the border, trying to confirm what Miles heard, get specifics on the isotopes. We need hard data for Captain Roald to pass up the alert chain.”

  “Hard data, meaning what?”

  “Exactly what got stolen. Where it is, and what they’re planning to do with it.”

  The marine said, “I can’t help you with the first two. But maybe I can with the third.”

  “Yeah?”

  She looked toward the back of the admin area, where a beige steel workstation with a small wire-gridded screen stood. Red-striped burn bags bulging with shredded paper lay stacked against it, on it, adding to its air of dusty neglect.

  “Let’s go back to the Wimmicks,” she said.

  * * *

  WWMCCS, the Worldwide Military Command and Control System, was a late-sixties-era forerunner of the Internet. Dan knew it as a secure data exchange system that had linked the Pentagon to the old Strategic Air Command and the rest of the country’s military headquarters. It kept tabs on every unit in the defense establishment; you could use it to access or generate operational plans, to communicate and pass orders, supposedly even during a nuclear war—though that had never been tested, of course. The Global Command and Control System had replaced it years before. But Harlowe’s fingers flew over the grubby, worn black keys of the Honeywell Datanet 8 like an accordionist playing a polka. Roald, seeing them, came out of her cubicle. “What are you doing with that thing?”

  “Accessing the NORAD mainframe. If they haven’t gone to distributed processing.”

  “Can’t you use Geeks? I’ve never even seen that thing turned on before.”

  “Do they have fallout models on GCCS, Captain? I don’t think they do.”

  The answer must have been no, because Roald went back to her cubicle. She returned with a worn ledger bound in green cloth that she said her predecessor had left in the desk.

  Harlowe punched in the personal ID, project code, and password ballpointed inside the front cover. An old-fashioned amber-on-black screen swam up.

  She muttered, “I used to be a RECA puke. Residual Capabilities Assessment. Meaning what we’d have left after a nuclear strike. They axed the specialty after the Wall came down. But I think the templates are still on the system … and here we are.”

  Engineered long before Windows, the little screen, phosphors etched with the ghosts of decades, pulsated the color of orange marmalade. Harlowe palmed a trackball, hunted through special-function keys. Pressed one. Then banged it, cursing. The screen blanked, then came up again with a menu. She trackballed RADFO and banged the key again. “Can you get me a wind speed and direction?” she said over her shoulder as they waited some more.

  One of the desk officers came back with the local weather printout.

  Leaning over her shoulder, noticing her perfume, Dan saw an outline. No detail to speak of. Just an amber-glowing drawing, angular and stylized. A flickering square tipped on its side, with a crooked Y laid over it.

  “District of Columbia. The Y is the intersection of the Potomac and the Anacostia. Ever work with FM 3-3?” Harlowe asked him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Fallout prediction. I thought you might have, when you guys got hit on Horn.”

  “We used radiological tables, but they weren’t computerized.”

  “Well, this is the same, only faster. When it works,” Harlowe said to the screen. “Assume the point of release is over National Airport. Surface wind’s southeasterly at ten knots. Wimmick’s used a modified Gaussian plume equation to generate the footprint. It’ll show you the hazard zones, normalized dosage rates, a lot of info, depending on how deep in the program you want to get. But remember, I haven’t thought about this stuff for years. After the cold war, it just dropped off the radar.”

  “It might be coming back on,” Dan told her. “But that’s for a fission burst, right? The materials and decay rates are going to be different for a radiological dispersal.”

  “Not a problem. I just select the smallest possible weapon yield and change this fission product table.”

  “What about the point location?” Lynch said. “They can dump this stuff out anywhere, right?”

  Dan told them he didn’t think they were limited to a dumping or spraying scenario. “If these people are part of the group that bombed Cole and Horn, they don’t mind suiciding. They can get wind data as easily as we can. They’ll position themselves, if they’re driving the plane, upwind of the city. What Marty’s giving us is the footprint; they can orient it any way they want.”

  Harlowe said, “What have you got on the source?”

  “Cesium-137, finely powdered.”

  “And how much?”

  Dan got on the phone to room 303.

  Alvarado answered after five rings. “I’m on the other line with him now,” he said.

  “With who?”

  “The security director at Laguna Verde.”

  “Good. That’s real good, Luis! What’s he say?”

  “Just hold on.” The rapid clatter of Spanish. Alvarado sounded angry. Then a staccato series of phrases. Dan realized he was counting down, or up.

  “He still won’t say.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Said he’d lose his job. I said okay, he didn’t have to tell me shit. I’d start counting up from ten kilos. All he had to do was listen. He just stopped me. At eighty kilos.
”

  “Holy shit,” Harlowe muttered. “And it’s 137?”

  “It’s cesium?” Dan asked Alvarado.

  “Cesio radioactivo. That’s what he said. Eighty kilos—without the lead packaging.”

  Harlowe sucked air, looking at the screen. Then started typing again.

  She coded the powder as base surge, the finely milled earth and dust thrown up by a near-ground blast. She hit the Enter key. The distant mainframe, under some mountain in Colorado, cogitated for several seconds.

  Its output appeared as a funnel-shaped, pulsating amber wedge. They stared at it. “Can you print that out?” Dan said at last. Harlowe pressed a button and a wet-paper printer off to the side, huge, old, grimy, hummed suddenly, as if startled out of a long sleep.

  A duty officer, holding up a handset: “One of you Lenson?”

  It was Bloom. He started off too fast, and Dan had to slow him down. Finally he got on sync. “I talked to the lieutenant governor of Veracruz—the state, not the city. He confirmed material is missing. But he can’t say that officially.”

  “Well, look, Miles, that’s just not good enough. We’re getting confirmation through Luis too, but it’s still unofficial. We need someone to go on the record about this,” Dan told him. “I don’t mean to the press; just to us, here in the Sit Room. Call your guy back. Work the ‘White House is calling’ angle. I want a faxed statement. Promise him a medal from the president. A job this side of the line. A date with Sharon Stone, she’s always hanging around at De Bari’s parties. Just get it.”

  It was starting to roll. He felt as if he were riding a snowboard on the crest of an avalanche. He left them all working and went in to see Roald again.

  * * *

  But she motioned him to wait. He hovered as she said into the phone, “Yes … yes … not yet. No.”

  When she hung up she looked pensive.

  “What is it?”

  “The team leader at NORAD doesn’t think he can declare an alert.”

  “We don’t need to launch interceptors. Just click the readiness up, in case we have to.” But even as he said this it occurred to him that it was conceivable, it was just conceivable, that if what he was guessing at was taking place, a plane with those isotopes aboard could be in the air right now. No reason it couldn’t be.