Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  When he had said, “God is an eagle in dawn light,” his father had given him a shaking. When he had asked his father, “Is God like a horseman on a fine mare?” his father had slapped him and said, “God would not ride a mare.” He had asked his father later if God was like a beggar on the road, and his father had gone to the kitchen and returned to their schoolroom with a broom, and beaten his back with its long wooden handle.

  He had not asked again what God looked like, but the images still danced in his mind when he prayed.

  Then he saw God the eagle with his dark wings, God crying rage into the dawn.

  “The word is ‘purple,’ boy. The English word ‘purple.’ Tell Eshan now.”

  Wasim hurried from the room.

  Aziz felt the Mahdi within him, and the Mahdi’s heart seemed to swell with joy. All would be well, now. Happiness was at hand.

  8

  ESCALATION

  Jim Deutsch’s world had ended. He’d been in plenty of trouble in his life, but not like this. No matter how bad it had gotten—running from one bunch of semi-official thugs into the arms of another, you name it—somebody had always had his back.

  No more, not after the fantastic escalation that had taken place at the motel in Carrizo Springs. In that dingy room, his world had collapsed around him. The Brewster Jennings problem was one issue that he was aware of but was obviously not the end of the compromise of American counterproliferation. The system was deeply penetrated, and at high levels. It had to be.

  What had happened had placed him in the worst position an agent could find himself. He dared not expose what he had discovered to the very system that was designed to support him in his work, because he would be revealing it to the enemy.

  So he had continued on his own, and now an exhausted, scared man moved through the Colorado Springs Greyhound station listening to his Geiger counter tick over and trying desperately to guess where they would have taken the plutonium from here.

  He needed the WMD interdiction infrastructure; he needed satellite lookdowns and the support of CIA analysts; he needed the FBI’s investigatory skills and powers; he needed the local and state police and the entire national enforcement and detection apparatus.

  He’d assumed that the assassination attempt had been a local thing—Kenneally and his buddies trying to protect themselves.

  This was why when an FBI arrest team had appeared at the door of Jim’s room at the little motel he had known instantly that he was facing a far larger problem than he had imagined—than he could have imagined. Local guys on the take couldn’t cut orders that would send the FBI after somebody. That would have to be done from above.

  It had been eleven thirty at night when he’d entered the lobby of the little motel and called out, “Excuse me,” in the gentled voice of a tired salesman. The clerk had appeared. Jim had shown his driver’s license—a driver’s license, not his own—paid his forty dollars in cash, and left the lobby. The whole transaction had taken under five minutes.

  Always careful, always overdoing it, he’d parked the old truck some distance from his room and gone through the interior of the motel to reach it. He hadn’t used the radio or the television, or even turned on the lights.

  He had been in the process of making his emergency call when he had noticed a change in the pattern of light under his door. He’d looked at it. Only one possibility—somebody was out there. He’d thought it might be the clerk, suspicious of so late an arrival. Then Jim had seen the knob move. He’d gone into the bathroom but found it to be windowless. There was a double door that communicated with the next room down the line, and he’d used that. He had no bag with him, no luggage. But he did have some skill with locks.

  The mechanism had clicked, but it had not disturbed the snoring, scrofulous drunk in the cigar-choked room Jim had entered. He’d stepped quickly to the exit door, cracked it, and seen a sight that had, quite simply, stunned him almost to paralysis.

  There were FBI agents there, four of them, an arrest team.

  As he had ducked back out of sight, they had broken down his door. They hadn’t been wearing assault gear, just those inevitable business suits of theirs, muscle-packed worsteds, a cut below the sharkskins the Russian FSB cats wore.

  He’d stepped into his neighbor’s bathroom and stood there for half an hour. Aside from that first crack of the breaking door, there had not been another sound. Given the absence of luggage and the fact that Jim had been in the room no more than five minutes, he allowed himself to hope that they would conclude that they had been misdirected.

  High-end tracking was the only way he could have been found. To gain access to the kind of satellite data needed to track somebody, you needed high clearances. You needed power.

  The FBI team might have been following orders, just executing a warrant. But who could generate that warrant? Certainly not Arthur Kenneally. Jim had to assume that he was facing an organization of unknown dimensions that was embedded in the American enforcement and intelligence communities.

  He’d faced it, he thought, in 2002, when he had first suspected that the U.S. system in the Middle East was compromised. It was big, powerful, and damned effective. It had not taken them long to get on his tail.

  It was the most dangerous penetration of American security in the history of the country, and he couldn’t even begin to think how extensive it was, or who was behind it, or where it went. He couldn’t afford to worry about it, not now, not yet, not with work like this to do.

  Arthur Kenneally’s attack had made it clear that the bridges were a problem, but the appearance of the FBI at Jim’s door told him that he was right about this bomb. It was real, it was here, and somebody very far up the ladder was protecting it, and God help the American people.

  He had waited in what turned out to be the bathroom of a guest called Charles E. Madison, and fortunately the agents had made no effort to extend their search into Mr. Madison’s room.

  An hour later, Jim had taken Madison’s driver’s license and a couple of his credit cards, then opened the door and observed a clear hallway.

  In the parking lot, Jim had spotted a stakeout car. So he was being advertised internally as a pretty big fish. He wondered what the FBI officers’ arrest warrant said. Above all, where it had originated.

  He had left the motel by a rear exit. Even though following a man on foot in a city by satellite was damn hard, he did not choose to underestimate the skills of his enemy again, and he walked under trees and along the very nicely turned-out local riverfront, keeping hidden from above as much as possible.

  As there was no way for him to tell what was wrong, his professional responsibility was to assume that everything was wrong—which was not far from the truth, given that whoever was pulling the strings could control FBI arrest teams.

  Experience had taught him that the only chance of survival under official pressure of any kind was to be very fast indeed, so he had stolen a car he’d found parked in a driveway and driven north on 83 until it hit Interstate 10. Then he’d headed west.

  He was now thrust into a situation that was totally new to him. His information was crucial, but how could he communicate it when he no longer trusted the system? Obviously, orders no longer applied. Not only that, he feared that it was only a question of time before they found him again. His car had been almost the only vehicle on 83, and still virtually alone traveling into the dawn on I-10. Someone like Nabby’s brother, Rashid, would make quick work of locating Jim.

  He had one objective now: stop that bomb. He must take no risks except those that related directly to gaining control over the weapon.

  He’d driven hard, ditched the car in Fort Stockton, and taken a bus to El Paso—from which he’d gone from stop to stop along the Greyhound route westward, finally picking up the trail of the bomb in Roswell, New Mexico, in the form of an increase in the clicking of a Geiger counter he’d bought from a hardware store that stocked mining supplies. From Roswell he’d followed it to Colorado Springs,
and here the trail had stopped.

  He decided that the only person he could now safely inform of his activities would be the president of the United States, but the president was far away and unreachable, hidden behind a wall of officials and guards. Jim’s CIA creds—the real ones—might get him as far as the chief of staff, Thomas Logan. Might. But could he get past Logan, a lowly contract employee like him, working outside the chain of command?

  He even wondered about the Office of the President. The Plame affair had led back to Lewis Libby, who was just one tier below Tom Logan’s level. Jim knew little beyond the press reports, but he had to wonder, now, just how high up this thing went.

  A lot of individuals and countries had motive to harm America’s ability to track illicit nuclear materials abroad—arms dealers, smugglers, nations, and groups hoping to acquire nuclear weapons.

  But this—it was way larger than any of that. The conclusion was hard to escape: somebody was trying to suppress interdiction of an actual bomb in this country, and, incredibly, they could call on the power of the FBI to do their dirty work.

  There seemed to be only one choice open to him—move fast and interdict the weapon himself, then find somebody he could trust with his discovery.

  The bomb had been removed from a bus’s cargo bay here, he was sure, and probably within the last day or so. So, was it still in Colorado Springs? No, they would keep it running toward its target, and now that they knew he was on their trail, they would be doing that as quickly as they could.

  They would want to get the bomb in the air, and maybe that’s what was happening right now . . . or had already happened. They wouldn’t take it near Colorado Springs Muni, too much danger of detection. So they’d fly out of a smaller field. If they were going to hit Denver, he could be seeing a flash on the northern horizon at any second. But there were bigger prizes farther west.

  The bus station phone book revealed a general aviation airport outside of town and a couple of air cargo operations with the same address. Would he find the bomb there? If so, he was liable to end up in one hell of a firefight over its possession—which would be interesting, given that he had no gun.

  A lone cab stood on the rank outside the bus station. At this hour, the driver was asleep. Jim approached the vehicle, looking first at the tires. Mismatched, worn. That worked. And the paint was old, the cab scraped and dented. No question this was a real cab, but was that a real driver? He was Mexican, looked about sixty. Peering down, Jim could see that a small billy club protruded from the door bucket. Was that the driver’s only weapon?

  Jim tapped on the window until the driver opened his eyes.

  “Kreist Air Charter,” Jim said as he got in. “2121 Burlywood.”

  The driver started up. As they moved through the empty late-night streets, Jim watched the man’s reflection in the rearview mirror. The guy kept to his business, driving efficiently. Jim let his eyes stray to an ad for Fiddler on the Roof playing at the Paramount Theater. He didn’t do amusement. When he was a kid, he’d enjoyed things like daring onrushing trains to smash him to bits. Down behind the family farm, there was a quarter-mile trestle. When he heard the first blare of the Amtrak diesel’s horn, he’d start running ties. It was a near thing, always, and if you didn’t make it, you had to climb down the pilings and hold on for dear life as the train highballed past a few feet over your head. It beat everything except sex.

  “Know anything about this place?” he asked the driver.

  “Don’t get much custom. Looks like a dump, far as I can tell.”

  Their kind of place, then.

  As the field was open twenty-four hours, there would likely be somebody on duty in the FBO.

  The cabbie pulled up to the front, stopped.

  “I’ll be a few minutes,” Jim said. He didn’t want to lose the cab.

  “How many minutes?”

  “Give it fifteen.”

  He pushed the worn glass door of the FBO open and went into the lobby. There were a couple of black sofas, some old magazines, and one of those vending machines that sold dead sandwiches. A guy with a white ghost of a beard and deep, vague eyes sat behind a counter fingering his way along the lines of a Bible.

  “Excuse me.”

  He almost threw the Bible into the ceiling. Then he unfolded himself. Six feet two of angles and elbows, a laugh like an engine dying. “Well, hell, I thought you were a ghost.” He looked Jim up and down, his face registering curiosity, then confusion. Then the eyes glanced away. He’d grown suspicious of this past-midnight stranger. “Got nothin’ due in, mister,” he said, “and nobody’s goin’ out until tomorrow. No plans on file, and it’s too late to put in a new one.”

  “Nobody’s ready to fly?”

  “Not a soul. And nobody’s prepping. It’s just me and the cat. We got a airport cat.”

  Three possibilities: He was early. He was late. The bomb was not being moved through this airport. “Any traffic out of here earlier?”

  “Tonight? We had a couple of landings. No takeoffs.”

  “I’d like to take a look around, if you don’t mind.”

  “Well, you can sure look around here in the lobby, but not out on the apron or in the hangar. Them new regs. What’re you lookin’ for?”

  Jim drew out his DEA identity card. Silently he showed it to the guy.

  “Oh, for the love’a—we got nothin’ like that here. No suspicious traffic.”

  “I’d like to just walk through the hangar, if you don’t mind.”

  “Hell no, I don’t mind. We’re clean as a whistle.” He became confidential: “Lemme tell you, but I guess you guys already know this. Them Mex cartel boys’re goin’ direct in DIA now. Private jets, don’tcha know. Nobody touches them boys.”

  “You have many of ’em come through here?”

  “Private jets? Sure. Every day. Hunters, you name it, goin’ back in the mountains.” He stepped over to an elderly computer. “You want me to bring up the log? Whatever you want, I’ll do.”

  “Well then, I just need two things. First, don’t log my visit.”

  “Oh, nossir, I understand. I understand that.”

  “Then I’ll need to go out to the hangar on my own.”

  “The door’s rolled down, but it’s not locked. Plus, we got twelve tie-downs on the apron. There are two working charters, both of ’em hangared. Ressman Air Service has a Cheyenne, shit plane, always givin’ him problems, gonna look at the fuel system in the morning. Kreist has his Baron in for cleanup; he had a passenger do a toss.”

  Jim walked out onto the tarmac, in the sharp air of night. The stars always made him think of the truly dark places he had been. Siberia, the taiga, where the forest echoed with the cries of animals and the stars were so bright you could believe that it was the first night of the world. He looked east across the faint glow of the apron and the runway with its green guide lights. Beyond it was the glow of a back porch light, maybe a house, maybe a convenience store along the road.

  He remembered seeing that porch light down in the brasada, and knew that he would take the memory of it with him forever, adding it to the moment he’d found the car—strangely, a Buick—that had gotten him out of Russia, and the first time he had known that Nabila was naked in the dark, from the way her breathing became shallow and sharp.

  He went into the hangar. Under the dim, high lights were three planes—the Baron, the Cheyenne, and a trim Citation with an opened-wing access. Hydraulics.

  He removed his Geiger counter from its small carrying case and turned it on, then waved the paddle around the hangar. Tick. Ticktick . . . tick. Nothing. He looked toward the equipment bays, went closer. If the thing had been repackaged, maybe it wouldn’t be emitting much radiation anymore. Previously, it had been dropping dust, which was what had enabled him to track it. Now, maybe not.

  So maybe they’d show up later. Or maybe they weren’t going to Denver at all but moving the bomb farther west. There was one hell of a plum out there, after all. If th
ey hit LA, the radioactive dust clouds would be contained by the mountains and turn into the most poisonous damn smog in history. Nearly half of U.S. import-export went through the LA Long Beach port complex. Plus, people couldn’t get out of the LA basin, not when they were all going at once. No, a nuke, even a small one, would turn Los Angeles into hell on earth.

  9

  THE SUN RISES

  AT MIDNIGHT

  Jim paused to examine the planes. One of these charter guys could’ve unwittingly flown the bomb west a couple hundred miles, then come back here, no problem. Could’ve done it last night.