Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  CRITICAL

  MASS

  TOR BOOKS BY WHITLEY STRIEBER

  2012

  The Grays

  The Wild

  Catmagic

  Critical Mass

  CRITICAL

  MASS

  WHITLEY STRIEBER

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  CRITICAL MASS

  Copyright © 2009 by Whitley Strieber

  All rights reserved.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  [http://www.tor-forge.com] www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Strieber, Whitley.

  Critical mass / Whitley Strieber.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2253-1

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-2253-6

  1. Nuclear terrorism—Fiction. 2. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. 3. Islamic fundamentalism—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T6955 C75 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008050412

  First Edition: February 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This novel is dedicated

  to the men and women

  who are engaged in the

  lonely and dangerous struggle

  to protect the Western world

  from nuclear terrorism.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to acknowledge the help of technical specialists, Arabists, and so many others who were kind enough to contribute their time and expertise to this project. I wish that I could acknowledge each individual personally, but various circumstances obviously prevent that. Any errors are, of course, my own.

  But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in

  which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and

  the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth

  also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

  —2 Peter 3

  ’Tis light makes color visible: at night

  Red, green, and russet vanish from thy sight.

  So to thee light by darkness is made known . . .

  —Rumi, “Reality and Appearance”

  CRITICAL

  MASS

  1

  NIGHT RIDE

  Jim Deutsch was driving much too fast, but it was urgent that he interview the children before they died. He was not close to the end of this investigation, and they almost certainly possessed crucial information. If he did not get it, he had not the slightest doubt that more people were going to be joining them in death—many more, and soon.

  What he had to find out was something he was very much afraid he already knew: why these little children, just smuggled in from Mexico, were radioactive. He had spent his career in counterproliferation, and the sudden appearance of radiation-sick kids in a border town was a definite worry. Of course, they could have been brought over in a truck full of smuggled X-ray isotopes, or gotten into some other innocuous material. But he doubted that. He had to get solid evidence and work it up convincingly, in order to get the massive search going that he feared was needed.

  When the speedometer moved through a hundred, he forced himself to let the car slow down. He took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. He loosened his hands, and felt blood rush back into his fingers.

  The South Texas countryside rolled past, a wilderness of mesquite brush, the sky to the west deep orange. To his Connecticut eye, it was almost hellishly ugly. But his was a war fought in nightmarish places, and this terrain was certainly better than dry, stripped Afghanistan, or the lethal, magnificent mountains of Iran.

  When the brush gave way to threadbare fields, he glimpsed cattle staring and old oil wells pumping with a lazy sensuality. He could imagine the Texans of the past racing up and down this road in their Cadillacs and Lincolns, whooping. Wildcatters, they had been called, those buccaneers of the oil fields.

  He had been in many of the world’s isolated places, and felt here the same disappointing and reassuring silence. Cities with their bustle and promise lured him, and also repelled him. He liked to hang out at Dom u Dorogi in Moscow listening to blues, or Sway in New York, with its Middle Eastern decor that always drew him into his memories. In the end, though, he would need the night and the silence where he had made his life. He would need the danger, foolish addiction that it was.

  Ahead, a figure rode a horse right down the middle of the highway, a silhouette against the late sky. With foolhardy and trusting slowness, the old man walked his beast onto the shoulder. Jim shot past him at a distance of no more than thirty feet, glimpsing a narrow man on a tall roan. He seemed so needful, slouching along in the last sun, that Jim wished he had prayer left in him.

  Again, he let his rented Taurus ease back to eighty. Mesquite brush whipped past, now. To the west, the sky faded. Texas Highway 57 was as empty as any road he’d known in Siberia or Afghanistan.

  He considered the dying children, ahead in the border town of Eagle Pass. He wanted to believe that they’d been brought across with some piece of smuggled radiological equipment. But that was the sort of thing that the suits at Langley would want to think, and that was what they must not be allowed to think. On his end of the intelligence community, you survived by expecting the worst. On their end, he who made waves was in the most danger. But their danger was demotion. His was death.

  His fear was that a bomb had come across and it was in motion, right now. He needed to find it, or at least find its trail, and he thought it must start with these poor kids. If he got lucky, they’d have some specific information. If not, he’d take what he got and go from there.

  He wished that he trusted the system, but he was far too experienced for that. If he had, he would have called this thing in the second he heard about those kids. But he had feared what would happen—he’d find himself looking at orders not to waste his time. Wrong orders, and they would result in catastrophe.

  The front face of the intelligence community appeared formidable, but that was the work of media experts, not a reflection of reality. It was the filter of analysis in the secret rooms that didn’t work, and not understanding that—or not accepting it—had been his potentially fatal mistake. He had assumed that the system would absorb the information that he and his strings of agents gathered, and respond correctly.

  But that hadn’t happened when he was in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Siberia, so here he was in Texas, chasing after nukes that should have been caught before they left whatever benighted place they had come from. Instead, they were here, and the Mexican border was now the front line of a battle that belonged twelve thousand miles away.

  Something had been wrong out there, very wrong. The CIA had extensive operations devoted to monitoring the nuclear materials black market. He had been part of that, operating out of U.S. embassies, and available to do things like penetrate storage facilities and inventory their contents. He was also good at finding people and obtaining information. He was good at running, too. He’d escaped across many a border in his time.

  But he shouldn’t have needed to do that sort of thing. He shouldn’t have been compromised, not ever. After 9/11, there had been a number of decoy companies created by the CIA to draw the interest of terrorists and smugglers by operating things li
ke false weapons sales organizations.

  But there had been dissention about these fronts. They hadn’t attracted their targets because they’d been too far from the centers of Muslim extremism—all except one, Brewster Jennings, which had operated in the Middle East and had been effective.

  However, Jim had believed since he had first engaged with it in 2002 that it was penetrated by somebody. Soon after he began working with this organization, his life had become dangerous. People knew. Turkish intelligence had him identified. Friends in Pakistani intelligence warned him that they were building a dossier on his activities.

  Then had come the Valerie Plame affair in 2003, and the name of her front operation, which was Brewster Jennings, became as famous a name as Microsoft or Toyota.

  The result of all this was simple: too many men like him had been compromised. Some must have lost their lives. He, who had been working halfway across the world, was now working in the United States, because there was now fissionable material in Mexico, possibly in Canada, too, and it was on its way here, no question.

  As he sped toward the dying children, the fear he lived with every second of his life rose up in him, the sick, desperate urgency that dragged him awake nights and haunted his days. He was in the dark and he was falling, and he could not stop falling.

  Somewhere along the road, every intelligence agent meets a demon question, one that absolutely must be answered but that has no answer, and Jim’s fear told him that his was lying in the hospital at the end of this road.

  His stomach forced acid into his throat as he churned down the two-lane highway, speeding through silent towns called Batesville and La Pryor. Between them, he pushed the Taurus hard. Surely there wouldn’t be a highway patrolman hiding along here, to come out with his lights flashing and entangle Jim in delay. His car was waking up buzzards asleep on the roadside, for God’s sake.

  He operated out of Dallas, where he officed in a little cell in the Earle Cabell Federal Building, just down the hall from the FBI. He was now a CIA contract employee, his status a fiction that allowed him—allegedly—to work within the continental United States. He suspected that his activities were not legal. He suspected that if he ever ended up under the bright lights of a congressional hearing, he would be alone.

  He’d been transferred here from Kabul six months ago, after a quarter ton of U-235 had been intercepted on its way into Laredo and his supervisors had finally understood that the danger they had been fighting in distant places had arrived on their doorstep. He liased with the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction coordinator in Dallas, which was another problem. The Office of National Intelligence might have improved interagency cooperation at the top, but the old “stovepipe” system still operated when it came to the nuts and bolts of intelligence gathering. His FBI counterparts shared only what they were legally required to share. Or did they? Did he, for that matter?

  To counteract his lack of eyes and ears, he’d requested the right to recruit in the field, but had been turned down. These past few months, he could have used some good agents along the border, really used them.

  Maybe then he would have been on top of this case before children lay dying. Maybe he would have made an interception. But this was going to be a chase, because whatever had been on its way across the border was now in country and being positioned.

  U-235 didn’t matter. This would not turn out to be about uranium. In fact, he thought the U-235 that had been brought over before was a test carried out to see how U.S. safeguards worked.

  Nuclear materials are hard to detect if they’re properly shielded. The most reliable detection systems react not only to radiation but also to the presence of the kind of bulk necessary to conceal it.

  Whatever he was chasing now had been highly radioactive, and it had been brought across with illegals, probably in a truck. Could it be plutonium dioxide, perhaps, ready to be transformed into a metal, or intended to be used in some sort of low-yield bomb? It was shipped as a powder, which could have leaked. But if that was the case, why hadn’t the radiation detectors on whatever bridge it had crossed screamed bloody murder?

  Maybe, while the truck was on the bridge, there had been nothing to detect. No leaks. But the new systems were designed to see shielding as well as emissions, and there were new brand-new detectors in Eagle Pass; he’d seen the installation reports. They would have seen a bomb, surely.

  But for whatever reason, they hadn’t.

  At this morning’s meeting, the regional Weapons of Mass Destruction coordinator, Cynthia Spears, had read a report from the Laredo Field Office about the radioactive kids. “They are illegals aged ten, eight, and four, believed to have been off-loaded by coyotes when they got sick.”

  The moment he’d heard those words, he’d booked a flight to San Antonio, then been compelled to drive from there because of the lack of air service to Eagle Pass. He knew little about the community. In 2007, the mayor had refused to allow Homeland Security surveyors to enter the town to survey for the wall. Later, it had been built, but it was of no concern to Jim. Walls had no relevance to him. The things that concerned him came across bridges in disguise, not through the river under cover of night.

  The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he was dealing with plutonium and that these children had somehow been exposed during handling, after it had crossed the border.

  Plutonium was potentially much more of a threat than highly enriched uranium. It took far less plutonium to make a bomb, and therefore it was more portable. But it was also harder to make plutonium go critical and explode. If the builders had the right parts, though—well, it was possible. You could even get a low-yield plutonium bomb out of a simple gun-type detonation system of the kind used with uranium bombs.

  Every country that had ever produced nuclear weapons materials had experienced some loss. Most highly enriched uranium and plutonium that had been lost by Western governments was accounted for in one way or another. But that was not true of Russia. During the collapse of the Soviet Union, highly enriched uranium and plutonium had gone missing and so had numerous critical parts.

  He drove harder than ever, pushing the car relentlessly. In the movies, he would have had access to a government-issue Gulfstream or something. In the real world, no chance.

  He fought the illusion that the road was actually getting longer, stretching away in front of him like an expanding rubber band.

  This came from the desert lights phenomenon, the sense that distant lights weren’t getting closer. For a fair amount of time, he’d seen lights ahead—but at least it was a city, and not the dim cluster of lanterns that marked most settlements along the ragged edges of the world.

  “Come on,” he muttered. Were the lights receding?

  Nah, the Global Positioning System now had him twelve miles out. Experimentally, he opened his cell phone. Nope. Okay, noted. At least he was not going into some squat Kazakh burg full of bored sadists in threadbare uniforms who would thoroughly enjoy a night of waterboarding an American.

  Gradually, the lights resolved into individual buildings, an Exxon station, a trailer back from the road, and he was soon moving through the outskirts of Eagle Pass.

  But no, this was the middle of town. Eagle Pass appeared to be all outskirts, but it was low-slung, that was all, and quiet at this hour. A peaceful place.

  Towns like Ozersk and Trekhgorny and Seversk, where he’d worked from time to time, might be isolated, but they were more lively than this at night. Drunk Russians—which after a certain hour in Siberia is, essentially, everybody—do not go gently. But here in this little border town, you sensed a peace, the same peace you felt throughout the developed world. He called it profound peace, soul peace. Eagle Pass enjoyed the same soul peace that blessed the rest of America. People felt safe here, which was another reason that things like 9/11 were so destructive. They slammed the American spirit right in the face.

  Of course, human and drug smuggling were big business on the Mexican side
of the border, and the violence involved was certainly known to cross over. Still, this was very certainly not the third world.

  In cities like Islamabad or Kabul or Tashkent, you can smell the old, sour stench of hate, and see the fear that lives in people’s eyes, the blood-soaked remembrance of crimes long past, and waiting retribution. You come back to this country after a few years of that and you want to kiss the ground.