Pinnacle Event

by Richard A. Clarke

  In seconds, half a mile away, Ray, Mbali, and Commissioner Deveaux could hear muffled explosions and a whirring from the helicopters. On a video monitor they could see flashes and smoke around the ski lodge. The radio loosed a torrent of crisp, coded chatter, as ERT men described what they were doing.

  At the lodge, the guards outside had raised weapons toward the rushing commandos and been dropped by the shooters from the tree line. The first wave of ERT Mounties burst into the building, through the front and back doors, through ground floor windows. Nine of the assault team charged up the grand staircase, exchanging places with each other as they moved forward, hit the landing, and moved up, providing protective cover as the point team dashed forward.

  In the darkened Great Room, only the fireplace provided light. There were brief flashes as the first of the assault team threw four stun grenades about the room. Then the first four ERTs into the room saw the shooters, two men who rose from behind furniture with long guns. Both were taken out before they could fire. As other ERT commandos entered the darkened room, one of them yelled, “Gun, three o’clock.” They all looked right and saw two more men with handguns near a large desk. Five of the ERT fired at them, riddling the bodies and the desk.

  At the command post down the road, the chatter on the radio and the noise of the assault seemed to let up and then, they could hear the burst of gunfire again and the chatter resumed on the tactical radios. The ERT commander came back into the mobile command post to report to Deveaux. “The building is secure. There are casualties, but none of our boys. We’ve told the ambulances to drive up now, although I doubt they will do much good. I’m going up there now, Commissioner. I’ll radio you after I get there, but you all should be able to come up in a few minutes.”

  After the ERT commander left, Bowman sat down next to the Deputy Commissioner. “Sir, you have done everything we could have hoped for here,” he began, “but if there are nuclear weapons on site, there is a U.S. military unit from JSOC standing by just over the border in Washington State. They can be here within the hour on their Black Hawks. By agreement between your Prime Minister and our President last night, this will become a NATO military operation and the JSOC unit will take control of the area.”

  Deveaux looked crestfallen. “I suppose your JSOC Black Hawks have already taken off?”

  “Yes, sir, they are circling near the border now and will come in if I see nuclear weapons on site,” Bowman admitted.

  Deveaux looked at Mbali. She shook her head, “Americans.”

  “Let’s go up to the lodge then,” Deveaux sighed. “We will have to do this carefully so that if your guys do come in they don’t see my ERT and shoot them.”

  * * *

  The lodge was now lit up like it was part of a television show. Spotlights from the little tanks and police cars were augmented by mobile light stands that were being set up by the Mounties. The electricity had been restored and every light in the building was on. Ninjas in tactical gear, uniformed police officers, and men and women in civilian clothes moved around purposefully, like a swarm of ants going in all directions.

  There were two bodies on the lawn, the men who had been in the truck in front of the building. The air still stank of cordite from the gunfire and sulphur smoke. Flashes went off as police photographers started to document the raid. A choir of radios at full volume blurted out in uncoordinated dysphonia.

  The ERT commander escorted Deputy Commissioner Deveaux, Mbali, and Ray up the grand stair to the Great Room on the second floor. There were four bodies on the floor. Each had a rifle or a gun nearby.

  “They were about to shoot at my men,” the ERT commander explained. “We had no choice.”

  “Goddamn it,” Ray spit out, looking at the ERT commander.

  Ray moved closer to the bodies and recognized one of the dead men as the man he had met in Vienna, Johann Potgeiter, who had briefly become Wolfe Baidermann. Next to him was the body of an older man who bore a striking resemblance to Johann.

  Bowman turned to Mbali. “Remember the man who died in the car crash with the tram in Vienna, who was identified by dental records because the body was too charred by the fire?”

  “Karl Potgeiter, why?” she asked.

  Ray pointed at the corpse in front of him. “The dead man in Vienna was not who we thought. This dead man is the real Karl Potgeiter, South African nuclear weapons expert.”

  She knelt down to examine the dead bodies more closely.

  “Ah, so it’s father and son,” she replied. “Well, now at least we are getting somewhere.” Ray frowned at her. “Think about it,”she said. “We now know one of the buyers, one of the group who wanted the bombs for … something.”

  Two men approached the ERT commander, one in tactical gear and one in civilian clothes. “Tell them,” the commander said, to the civilian.

  “There are no signs of anything resembling a bomb or a warhead and there are no unusual readings from the radioactivity sensors,” the civilian explained.

  “Swell,” Ray replied.

  “I think you have some Black Hawks to turn around, Mr. Bowman,” Deveaux said. “Now.”

  Ray took his secure iPad out from its case. As he did, he noticed that on the large dining room table where the two Potgeiters had apparently been sitting when they were so rudely interrupted, there were two MacBook Airs. “Okay, no JSOC, but I am going to need those laptops and, since you don’t want my Black Hawks to fly in here, could I ask you to loan us one of your helos to run us and the laptops over the border?”

  “They’re evidence,” Deveaux replied. “There are chain-of-custody concerns. They need to stay here for the trial or coroner’s inquest.”

  “Commissioner, there’s not going to be a trial. Your highly capable team just killed the people I needed to interrogate. Now all I have left to interrogate are those laptops. And I am taking them with me. And since you are keeping my Black Hawks out, I will need one of your birds to take me to Washington State. You can send someone to accompany the computers if you like and you’ll get them back when we have imaged them,” Ray said. “Promise.”

  After the Deputy Commissioner relented, Ray called Dugout, who suggested they take over the largest parallel processing computer complex in the country to crack the encryption on the laptops and to give Minerva extra speed and power.

  Dugout proposed they meet above San Francisco’s East Bay at a national laboratory that, coincidentally, also knew a lot about nuclear weapons. Winston Burrell had, after all, promised him “Whatever you need.”

  As they walked toward a pair of Canadian Air Force twin engine Hueys a half hour later, carrying two laptops, Mbali looked at Bowman. “You’re always borrowing other people’s aircraft. Some people would see that as presumptuous arrogance in a man.”

  “In my case, it’s just expediency. I’m operating without the usual American support structure,” Ray said to her. “As a result, there has been a fuckup. We let the Canadians do the raid and they killed the only lead we had. Those two knew where the bombs are.”

  “Maybe. But sometimes even laptops can tell a story,” she said, looking back at the house. “It’s just harder to ask them questions, but the guy you keep calling, the one I met on the video, what’s his name, Sand Trap, he is some sort of computer whiz, isn’t he?”

  “Dugout. His name is Dugout. He devised this great predictive algorithm for the Red Sox. They’re a baseball team. All he wanted in return was to sit in the dugout, where the players sit when it’s not their turn to be on the field. So we call him Dugout. Yeah, if anyone can make those Macs talk, Dugout can. But it may not be fast. And right now we need fast.”

  “Then let’s go to the Dugout,” she said. “Now, which one of these is our chopper?”

  32

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6

  U.S. ROUTE 50

  PARIS, VIRGINIA

  In the hills of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, as the sun came up and cast a yellow light on the remaining leaves west of W
ashington, there was more traffic than normal for a late autumn, early Sunday morning. It was not enough for anyone to notice, unless they were perhaps an intelligence officer from an embassy in Washington, sitting by the roadside, drinking coffee, reading the paper.

  Such a person would have noted the unusual number of cars with Washington, DC, plates, with only a passenger in each car. Unlike the local traffic of pickup trucks and older Chevys, this trickle of vehicles was made up of Priuses, Hondas, and the occasional BMW. Tracing the plate numbers, the agent would have been able to confirm that there was something going on. They were senior government officials driving west at a time most of them would normally be at brunch in Georgetown.

  Quietly, while the nation focused on the last few days of the frenetic presidential election campaign, while the locals in the little Shenandoah and Blue Ridge towns went to church, senior federal bureaucrats had been activated. The day they hoped would never come seemed to be in the offing. They were told to pack for a week away and to tell their families only that they were going on a surprise and secret trip. With that, they drove west trying to find the cave, or the bunker, or the old Forestry Service facility where they would wait to see if a nuclear bomb went off in Washington. If it did, their impossible task would be to try to govern the country from the bunkers. None of them really thought that would work.

  LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

  NEAR SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  “The bombs will go off today,” Bowman said. “It’s Sunday now, right?”

  “It has been Sunday for an hour here. In California. We are in California, in case you were wondering. Why today?” Dugout asked, distracted, while he watched data whizzing by on a screen in front of him. “Why not tomorrow?”

  “They’ll want Washington to call off the election. If they explode today, there will be time to react, to cancel the presidential election,” he replied, laying on the couch with his eyes closed.

  “Why don’t you just let it happen, just go to sleep?” Dugout asked.

  “I’m taking a power nap, just twenty minutes, then I’ll be all rejuvenated.”

  “You know Mbali is smarter than you?”

  “Probably, but why do you think so?” Ray asked.

  “Lots of reasons. One of which is she had enough sense to go to sleep. You can’t possibly think straight when your body does not know what time zone it’s in. You realize you have flown all the way around the world?”

  “Not completely,” Ray replied, sitting up. “I have only done twenty-one time zones, I still have three time zones left. How long till you crack the encryption?”

  “I told you it doesn’t work that way. It’s not a microwave, you don’t just put something in for five minutes on high. It’s a massively parallel processor array, the largest and fastest in the world, which is why we’re here, which is why I bumped the climate change guy off this system, which is why he hates me,” Dugout babbled as he moved from screen to screen in the computer control room.

  “How long ’til you crack the encryption, then?” Ray repeated.

  “Any time between now and never, since I don’t know what kind of algorithm they used, I can’t answer that, so we are making multiple different assumptions and trying them all simultaneously, hence the massively parallel part.”

  Bowman yawned and poured a mug of black coffee for himself. “Well, if you don’t do it today, it may not matter.”

  “NSA is working on it, too, back at the Fort,” Dugout observed, taking the mug out of Bowman’s hand, “but I think this hunk of junk has a better chance of getting there first, or ever.”

  Bowman poured himself another mug of black coffee. “I talked to your boss.”

  “Which one? Winston, Grace, or did you just talk to yourself again?”

  “Grace,” Ray replied. “She thinks we’re missing something, thinks we’re too close to the forest or something. Taiwan did not pan out. When the State Department confronted them, they denied they had bought nuclear weapons and then they had a high-level meeting to try to figure out why we would ask them such a crazy thing like that. They didn’t seem to be acting.”

  “So why were the three Trustees there in Taipei six weeks before the test blast?” Dug asked.

  “They actually seem to have been buying a hotel and shopping mall,” Bowman reported. “But, according to Taiwan’s National Security Bureau, their spooks, Karl Potgeiter did meet with some retired generals while he was there. Even after the meeting, the generals weren’t sure why they met. Potgeiter said something about looking for ways of investing together, using their expertise.”

  “That doesn’t add up,” Dug replied.

  “It does if the late old man Potgeiter was telling the other Trustees that he was arranging the sale of the nukes to Taiwan. Maybe the meeting was just a show, an act, to convince the other Trustees that the buyer was acceptable, that it was Taiwan,” Ray thought aloud. “The others see him meet with Taiwan generals, but they don’t sit in on the meeting. Potgeiter says the Taiwan guys are the buyers.”

  “When actually it was someone else?” Dugout asked.

  “Someone who Potgeiter was dealing with, someone who the other Trustees would probably not have agreed to sell nukes to, maybe,” Bowman continued.

  “Like al Qaeda?”

  “No, I’m pretty sure al Qaeda is not involved. CIA and NSA are all over the AQ groups. They would have picked it up. Besides, I have my own special source, who came back to me this morning. Said they weren’t doing it, said maybe it was Hezbollah.”

  “Special sauce, what are you, Ronald McDonald?” Dugout laughed. “By the way, Winston called earlier. He wants us to do a video link with him at eight his time. You might want to, uh, comb your hair or something.”

  “I can’t believe I heard that coming from you,” Ray said, as he wandered off to the men’s room.

  Two hours later, Winston Burrell appeared on the large monitor in the computer control room, looking as strung out as Ray and Dugout were. It appeared he was in his West Wing office, alone.

  “It’s decision time, boys. The President wants to know first thing this morning if he should order evacuations in New York, Washington. If we think that nuclear bombs are going to go off before the election Tuesday, now is the last time to order the evacuations. It’s all prepared, FEMA has activated all of its response teams for an exercise, the Vice President has already come off the campaign trail allegedly because he lost his voice. He’s actually gone into a bunker in Virginia. The President has been holding off deciding on evacuation orders until he saw if you found anything on the computers.”

  “Oh, God, blame me, go ahead,” Dugout muttered while they were still on mute. “Dugout couldn’t crack the code in time and so they all died.”

  Bowman pressed the TALK button. “Winston, we don’t really know that there are bombs in the U.S. There was no trace evidence of bombs at the site in British Columbia. If there are weapons in New York and Washington and you start to evacuate, the terrorists will decide to ignite them before the cities empty out. If there are no bombs in those cities, you will have killed dozens of people who will get run over in the panic of an evacuation, to say nothing of what you will do to the economy and the election.”

  “I know all that, we have been saying that to each other for weeks now,” Burrell replied. “I was hoping for a recommendation from you.”

  Bowman bowed his head for a brief moment and then looked into the camera. “I have a report that maybe the group buying the bombs was Hezbollah, but I don’t believe that. Doesn’t make sense and besides the subsource really wouldn’t know if Hezbollah was doing it. He’s not in a position to know what they are up to.”

  “Not al Qaeda, not Hezbollah, not Taiwan. Telling me who it isn’t doesn’t help,” Winston Burrell said, gesturing with his hands in the air. “Tell me who it is that has the bombs. Tell me what I recommend to the President, what does he do now?”

  “Do nothing,” Ray responded. “You h
ave insufficient grounds for knowing what a prudent course of action would be.”

  “That is the same situation I was in a week ago. You were supposed to put some facts on the table to help with the decision,” Burrell snapped. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, you have actually added lots of facts, it’s just that they haven’t got us to the fundamental questions of who, where, when, and why.” Burrell stood up. “I have to go give my recommendation to the President.”

  “What’s it going to be?” Ray asked.

  “I don’t know yet.” His image faded.

  SIXTY-FIFTH FLOOR PENTHOUSE CENTRAL PARK

  SOUTH MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY

  “I think this Park view was worth every penny,” he said looking down at the last leaves of autumn, falling off the trees in the middle of the city, leaving little color to counteract the grayness of the sky. “I’ll miss this apartment, but I did make a huge profit on it in less than two years.”

  “It was an extravagance and it drew unneeded attention to you,” she said, moving up next to him. “You always have to have the newest, the best, the most expensive, and that’s what it was when you bought it. Now it’s not the newest anymore.”

  “You’re wrong, I don’t always need the newest, but always the best,” he said and kissed her briefly. “Which is why I leased the 787. We’ll be flying that today to the meeting in London. What did Sergey tell you? Did he find out what happened?”

  “Their source in the Mounties in Vancouver reported that the Canadians essentially found nothing. The Americans, Bowman, took some computers, but the disks were encrypted and they won’t be able to get anything off them,” she told him.

  The older man nodded at his daughter. “When I heard from Potgeiter that Bowman knew about the test blast, and the storage area at Antsakabary, and the tritium heist, I thought for sure the President would order the evacuation of the cities before the election, but they didn’t,” he said. “They have no balls.”