Fires of War - [First Team 03]

by Larry Bond

  No plutonium had been found, though the scientists weren’t sure that was because there was none there or because the field equipment they’d taken to Hawaii simply wasn’t strong enough to detect it. A further analysis of the soil would take place in two days at a special CIA lab in California. There, the dirt would be compressed in a chamber and pounded with a variety of radioactive waves in a process one scientist had compared to hightech gold panning. If there were any stray plutonium-239 atoms—actually, there would have to be a few more than one, but Slott wasn’t up on the specifics—the machine would find them.

  There was one technical caveat. The analysis relied on the fact that anyone trying to hide plutonium would go only so far as necessary to prevent its detection by standard equipment. The nano technology the Agency was using was exponentially more powerful; still, in theory a scientist who was aware of the lower detection threshold might be able to counter it. But if that were the case, Slott reasoned, they wouldn’t have found anything in the first place.

  Directly below the report was a response from Ken Bo regarding the plutonium and its possible origin. Stripped of its many qualifications—and complaints about the “unusual” operation that had found it—was a theory that the material had come from the closed TRIGA Mark-III research reactor in Seoul. The reactor had been used in the 1980s and probably the 1990s to conduct experiments testing extraction techniques from depleted uranium. Other experiments, continuing until 2004, had produced other isotopes.

  While not generally known, those experiments had been detected by the IAEA roughly five years after they’d been reported to the president and the Intelligence Committee by the CIA.

  Bo’s contention—he phrased it as a hypothesis—was that the plutonium that had just been discovered was merely waste material left from those activities.

  The theory would make a certain sense to a layman; the readings had been found at a waste dump, after all. But Slott knew that wasn’t what was really going on. First of all, the experiments had never been aimed at or succeeded in producing plutonium. TRIGA Mark-Ill had been shut down, and all the material, even potential waste products, accounted for. Slott knew this because it had all happened on his watch in South Korea.

  But few other people, even within the CIA, did. Much of the data on the experiments was highly classified and had not been found or reported by the IAEA. Information about the program had not been included in any of the briefing papers on the new treaty, and it was obvious to him that neither Corrine nor Parnelles for that matter was aware of it.

  Bo’s theory could get Seoul—and, by extension, Slott—off the hook if they were criticized. By carefully controlling the release of information about the TRIGA experiments, Slott could easily make it seem as if the CIA knew about this material all along and had in fact told Congress and the president.

  Bo would never put this in writing, of course. He was counting on Slott to understand and play along.

  Slott got up from his desk and began pacing around his office. Five people had known the entire TRIGA story from the Agency’s perspective. Slott was one; Bo was another. A third was now dead. That left the former head of the CIA, now dying of Alzheimer’s disease, and an officer now working in a staff position in what amounted to semiretirement.

  He didn’t even have to manipulate the records. If anyone asked, he could say that plutonium had been mentioned but not put in the reports for some reason he no longer knew.

  Had it been found?

  No. Definitely it hadn’t. Definitely not. They had access to the South Korean documents, and it wasn’t there.

  And they were all the documents.

  He knew that, because he’d verified it with the Korean document tracking system. But who in Congress or the administrative branch would know that? Even Parnelles wouldn’t know that.

  They could find it out, if they knew the right person to ask, but it would be difficult.

  Slott rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t lie. And he wasn’t going to play the CYA games. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. That wasn’t who he was.

  Slott stopped in front of his desk, looking at the picture of his wife and kids. It was a year old, taken when they’d moved into their new house. His only boy—they had three older girls—had just lost his first tooth.

  If he didn’t play the games, he might very well lose his job. They’d lose their house, have to move. He’d end up selling cars or insurance somewhere out West where no one knew who he was.

  Or he could just keep his mouth shut and see what happened. Protect Bo, even though this raised some serious questions about Bo’s competency.

  Everyone was entitled to one screwup, wasn’t he? And it wasn’t even clear this was a screwup.

  Slott went back behind his desk. He still had his son’s baby tooth in the top desk drawer, an accidental souvenir he’d retained after exchanging it for a gold dollar.

  The tooth fairy—a little white lie.

  Not even that. His son had brought up the tooth fairy and the promise of money. Slott hadn’t said anything, one way or another.

  Daddy didn’t lie, David. He was just protecting the family.

  Would that be better to tell his boy or his girls than: Daddy’s not the incompetent screwup the congressmen are claiming.?

  Slott pushed the desk drawer closed. He told himself he needed more information before he could decide what to do.

  It wasn’t true, but it was the sort of lie he could live with.

  ~ * ~

  25

  DAEJEON, SOUTH KOREA

  Ferguson stuck his head under the shower’s stream, shaking as the ice-cold water sent shivers through his body. It was a poor substitute for sleep, as was the weak coffee he got in the lobby.

  “Corrine wants you to talk to her,” said Corrigan when he checked in.

  “What, does she think I’m working for her now?”

  “You are.”

  “You find anything else out about Science Industries?”

  “Thomas Ciello got a list of some of the people who work there,” said Corrigan. “One of them is pretty interesting.”

  “Who dat?”

  “Guy named Kang Hwan. Wrote a paper on extracting nuclear material using some sort of laser technique. Real technical stuff.”

  “Jack, you think a shopping list is technical.”

  “Har-har. This is. I can upload a copy of it for you.”

  “In Korean?”

  “You’re a laugh a minute, Ferg. What if I busted your chops like this every time you called in?”

  “You mean you don’t do it on purpose?”

  Ferguson laughed, picturing Corrigan fuming at the communications desk in The Cube.

  “Post me a file of the open-source information on him that I can access from a cafe,” Ferguson said.

  “Anonymously?”

  “No, Jack, I’m going to walk in and tell the people there I’m a spook. We lost the laptop, remember?”

  “You can get the open-source stuff with a Google search. There’s nothing there. I can’t send the report that way.”

  “I don’t want you to,” said Ferguson.

  “You can get it at the embassy.”

  “Don’t send it to them.”

  “Jesus, Ferg. You sound more paranoid by the minute.”

  “Yeah, I’m channeling my Irish grandmother. Just do what I say.”

  “All right, but...”

  After he’d finished with Corrigan, Ferguson called Corrine.

  “It’s the Black Prince,” he told her cheerfully when she answered. “What’s going on?”

  “Your friend is arriving in Seoul at six p.m.”

  “Very nice. He may be returning home a little sooner than I expected with some things I want you to check out.”

  “What’s going on, Ferg? Why are you bypassing the usual channels?”

  “Insurance.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against things disappearing. Memories going bad. Interpretations of f
acts that can’t be trusted.”

  “Who don’t you trust?”

  Ferguson lay back on the bed in his room. He hadn’t planned on getting into this discussion right now—and, hopefully, ever.

  “Maybe I’m just being paranoid,” he told her.

  “You don’t trust Slott?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You trust me?” said Corrine finally.

  “I pretty much can’t stand you, Corrine. But I think you have a different agenda than those people do.”

  “You saved my life,” she said.

  Ferguson had to think for a moment before remembering. It had been in a nightclub in Syria. Or was that Lebanon?

  “Yeah, well, that was a job thing,” he told her. “Anyway, don’t get your underwear all twisted up. I don’t know that anything’s going on. I just want to make sure I’m not screwed by it if it is.”

  “Well—”

  “A deep subject. Now how about that flight number?”

  ~ * ~

  F

  erguson spent a few hours looking for more of the National Truck Company vehicles. None of the ones he checked out seemed like very good candidates for the truck he’d seen at the waste site. Four of the seven had open beds in the back. One was painted a garish pink that he thought would have glowed in the dark. The other two were in various states of disrepair and looked as if they hadn’t been moved in months or maybe even years.

  Checking on the trucks was the sort of necessary but tedious detail work that Ferguson had little patience for. The more he did it, the more he was convinced that Science Industries was the best lead he was going to get for the time being, and that he ought to concentrate there until something told him he was wrong.

  In the early afternoon he took the train to Seoul but got off a stop before the city, showing up at a hotel that advertised it had a “business center” with high-speed computer access. Ferguson inserted what looked like a small memory key into the hotel computer’s USB slot and trolled for information on Kang Hwan, the scientist Corrigan had mentioned. The key contained a series of programs that enabled anonymous surfing and allowed him to erase any trace of the web pages and files he looked at.

  The Google search brought up several hundred references, but most were about a half-dozen papers the scientist had written. The English synopsis of two of the papers said they were on the possibility of using lasers to speed up the separation of radioactive isotopes, especially in uranium.

  Almost as interesting was a fact Corrigan had neglected to mention: The scientist, fifty-three, had died two months earlier. None of the obituaries in the translated Korean newspapers gave the cause of death, but a small item in the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal said it was suicide.

  ~ * ~

  26

  NORTH P’YŎNPAN PROVINCE, NORTH KOREA

  Tak Ch’o took one last look around the small apartment where he had lived for the past year. It was not a look of nostalgia; he was glad to be gone. He just wanted to make sure that he wasn’t leaving anything that would show where he had gone.

  The bed was unmade; the medicine he had obtained for his supposed stomach ailment lay open on the table. It would look as if he had just stepped out when he left.

  Ch’o had no way of knowing if the Greek girl on the inspection team had found either of the messages in the cigarette box, let alone if she had passed them along or been able to arrange for help. It didn’t really matter; he knew that his time at the plant was over. He’d only been kept on because the governor did not want to cause any problems before the inspection team came.

  Tomorrow, Tak Ch’o would be fired. If he was extremely lucky, he would be stripped of his job and made a nonperson, allowed to scrounge his way back to his ancestors’ village on the eastern side of the country.

  If he was not extremely lucky—and Ch’o had never been a man who believed much in luck—he would be put in prison for the rest of his life.

  Not because he had committed a crime or even because he had failed to do his job well. On the contrary, he was being persecuted because he had dared to tell the ministry that several trucks had been turned away from the gate because they did not come with the proper paperwork.

  Ch’o hadn’t even mentioned that the men in the trucks had thrown their barrels into a field along the highway. He had not said that the waste was from Pyongyang’s hospitals. He had not made a guess about the threat it might pose to the villagers who farmed the field and drew their drinking water from shallow wells nearby; in truth that was difficult to assess precisely, and Ch’o would not make an estimate without a great deal of study. The fact that the number of birth defects in the region, long used for haphazard dumping, was significantly higher than elsewhere in the country, was alarming, but not necessarily relevant to this particular case, from a scientist’s point of view.

  Even so, Ch’o knew that simply writing the report would have severe consequences. It implicitly alleged all of these things, and implied that powerful men were not doing their jobs.

  But reporting it was his duty. And so he did.

  For a while, he naively believed that it would not have dire consequences.

  No, he’d always known. What he hadn’t known was that he would be willing to leave Korea behind. Not to preserve his life, but to help his countrymen. The IAEA people would help him get the word out, and there would be a crackdown.

  The officials, of course, would deny it. But then, quietly, the material would be picked up and dumped, the countryside scoured for similar transgressions. Party members would be reminded that they must follow the proper procedures—procedures Ch’o had helped write—or face dire consequences.

  That was the best he could hope for.

  Assured that everything was ready, Ch’o closed the door on his apartment and went outside, walking swiftly down the street to the shed where he had left the bicycle two days before. The bike lay against the brown grass where had left it, wet now from the day’s intermittent rain. Ch’o picked it up, tried in vain to dry the seat with the sleeve of his coat, then gave up and got on. He had a long way to pedal—more than seventy kilometers—and five hours to do it.

  No matter. If he missed the rendezvous—if, as he feared, no one showed up—he would continue on. He would pedal south all the way to the border area, then find someone to help him across. Others had done it.

  The wind blew a fresh spray of rain in his face. Even Nature was against him, he thought, as he started to pedal.

  ~ * ~

  27

  SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA

  James Sonjae stepped through the Customs area, joining a surge of people flooding into the reception terminal at Incheon International Airport. He looked around at the waiting limo drivers, unsure whether Ferguson would send someone for him or meet him himself. When he didn’t find his name on a placard, he began walking around the hall, scanning slowly and expecting at any moment to spot Ferguson’s grin and raised eyebrows.

  He didn’t, though.

  For nearly half an hour he walked from one end of the terminal to the other, unsure exactly where to wait. He felt off balance, his equilibrium disturbed by the cacophony of sounds around him. The chatter sounded both familiar and strange at the same time.

  Though born in America, Sonjae had been taught Korean as a child and had used it a great deal at home and with close relatives. Over the past two decades, he’d practiced it less and less; with the exception of some old people he looked in on for his church every few weeks, he rarely used it these days. The Incheon terminal overloaded his ears, overwhelming him with a strange sense of déjà vu and eliciting all sort of memories and associations—grandparents visiting when he was a child, distant relatives tearfully saying good-bye at Dulles. He struggled to keep his mind focused on the present, looking for Ferguson.

  Sonjae tried to have Ferguson paged, but found it impossible to correctly decipher the operator’s instructions. Finally he gave up and found a place to sit where he could gathe
r his wits and decide what to do next.

  Thirty seconds after he plopped down, Bob Ferguson hopped over the row of seats and sat down beside him.

  “Had a good tour of the airport?”

  “Ferg.”

  “Were you making sure you weren’t followed?” Ferguson asked. “Because you know, you walked back and forth about twenty million times.”

  “A dozen. I wasn’t followed,” said Sonjae defensively.

  “You’re right. At least I think you are,” said Ferguson. He pointed to the small carry-on bag perched on Sonjae’s knees. “That all you got?”