The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller

by Andrew Britton

  Twenty-six Jarir was a schoolhouse. It was a religious school for children and it was only occupied during the late afternoon, when the secular education at several schools came to an end. That was one reason Boulif had selected this building and converted it a decade before: it was occupied only three hours a day.

  It was a brick structure, two stories tall, with a mosque on the eastern side and a playground to the west. The building had a basement, accessible by a side entrance; it was marked “Electrical Room.” The windowless bunker was much more than that. Professor Mustapha Boulif and his Sword of Fire collective had purchased the building in 1998 with the express purpose of turning the small concrete basement into a research lab.

  When Boulif received his doctorate in nuclear physics from MIT, he had it in mind to combine his skills with masters of other sciences—chemistry, biology, math—to further the cause of jihad. A few military officers had joined them, mostly refugees from Iraq and Syria who had settled in northern Morocco. There, they sold information on their former regimes to the Americans based in Rota.

  The lab was not well equipped with anything but great minds; most of the work they did was on networked laptops that they took with them after each of their weekly meetings. This was highly intentional. Although they had at their disposal the resources of one of the world’s wealthiest men, a Saudi banker and jihadist named Khalid al-Otaibi, they preferred to work as low under the radar as possible. They designed the tools and outsourced the usage. It was their designs for IEDs that helped to kill invaders in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was their analysis of household goods that provided formulae for homegrown terrorists to manufacture bombs. It was their application of science and ordinary objects to create the horror they hoped soon to release on the West: toxin-infused bar codes activated by scanners on goods coming through ports.

  They had a transparent, trunk-sized containment shell for handling small amounts of radiation. It was made of lead with gloves for handling hot materials; it was an old Soviet unit with a black-and-white video monitor for observation. It was surrounded by other tools of the trade, including a small centrifuge for separating chemicals and a small freezer for storing bacteriological samples including the smallpox virus acquired from a Japanese who had once worked with the nation’s notorious wartime Unit 731. If Mutual Assured Destruction ever became necessary, unleashing a disease for which there was no longer immunity or stores of vaccine would ensure the ultimate triumph of Islam. There was also a small refrigerator with food and a little vegetable bin next to a sink. Sometimes it was necessary to stay here and work through their modest meals.

  Boulif was already at the lab when Mohammed pulled up in his van. He had bicycled the short distance from his flat and brought the conveyance downstairs with him. Mohammed looked exhausted. His clothes were thick with perspiration and his beard and hair were unkempt. But there was a light in his dark eyes that made Boulif happy and proud. It was for young men like him that their work was done. The brave, eager soldiers of Islam who were willing to risk everything to advance the True Faith.

  “Thank you for making time—” Mohammed began.

  Boulif cut him off. He did not leave the doorway. “Bring the package inside.”

  Mohammed hurried to the back of the van and put his arms around the box wrapped in the X-ray apron. He hefted it to his chest and walked briskly toward the doorway. Boulif had turned on a Geiger counter. It was clicking dully, slowly on the wooden lab table behind him. He suspected the box itself was providing most of the shielding; the apron alone would have been insufficient to stop raw nuclear material.

  “Put the box on the table, beside the Geiger counter,” Boulif told him, shutting the door behind him.

  Mohammed did as he was instructed. He released his burden gratefully, shaking out his arms.

  “It is definitely lead,” Boulif said.

  “How can you tell through the apron?”

  “The sound,” Boulif said. “It is like a musical instrument to me. Have you ever had anything like that in your life, Mohammed?”

  “Music?”

  “Something you knew so well it was like a part of you.”

  “Only the Koran,” he replied.

  Boulif smiled at the fellow’s beautiful innocence. It reinforced what he had believed about the man and about so many Muslim young men. The scope of the world was between the covers of that book. It was like having a garden where no weeds could grow.

  The scientist turned his attention fully to the black container. Though it was unmistakably made of lead there was something unique about it. He gently lifted the edges of the apron as he listened to the Geiger counter. There was an uptick but it was small. Mohammed instinctively stepped back.

  “That won’t help,” Boulif said. “But you’re all right. This isn’t much more than you’d get from standing in front of the microwave oven over there.”

  “I have never used one,” Mohammed told him. “Only a hot plate. What do you use it for?”

  “Truly—just soup,” he replied. “Tell me, Mohammed. Did you know Hassan before today?”

  “I did not,” Mohammed said.

  “He has very good instincts, a fine judge of men,” Boulif said. “He was raised among us, the son of our chemist. He has been instrumental in raising money for our cause.” Boulif laid the apron aside. Above him the room’s sole air vent clattered like rattled dice. He looked more closely at the faded markings on the box. “This is astonishing.”

  “They are German markings, yes?”

  “Very much so,” Boulif replied. “Mohammed, have you any idea where this device was found?”

  “An Iranian had it in Rabat—”

  “You took it from him?”

  “That was not my initial intent, but yes.”

  “And before that?” Boulif inquired. “Do you know where he found it?”

  “I know nothing more than that.”

  “It couldn’t possibly have been in Morocco all this time,” Boulif said. “The Nazis were reported to be working on a nuclear project in France.” He circled the box slowly, admiringly. “Incredible, but no matter. It is here now. Miraculously, it is ours.”

  “Not miraculously but by the hand of God,” Mohammed gently corrected the other.

  “Is that not a miracle?” Boulif asked.

  “The only miracle was the revelation of the text to the Prophet,” Mohammed said. “That is what I have been taught. All else, everything we do, is by His divine direction.”

  “You are right, of course,” Boulif replied. “I was speaking in a secular voice. It is indeed an act of divine intervention that this has been delivered to us. God be praised for this.” His voice choked when he said it. “You have no idea how long I have waited for something like this—for something to justify all we have done, all we have wanted to do.”

  With a small level on top to make sure the lid remained centered, Boulif and his companion moved the lead case to the slightly larger containment box. After the lid was secured with bolts on all four sides, Boulif switched on the camera. Using the insulated gloves, he removed the top of the lead container. It was a tight fit, with just enough room to slide it to one side. The camera could not be moved: it was set inside the lid and looked down. What it revealed literally caused Boulif’s heart to race.

  “This casing is remarkable,” Boulif said. “It appears to be some kind of spun lead—almost like layers of fiber. Lightweight. Like the girders of the German airship Hindenburg,” he went on as he studied the device itself. “Those support structures were made with big holes in them, reducing the weight considerably while barely impacting their strength.”

  Mohammed did not understand; he was glad Boulif did. It made him feel as if he were in the best of hands.

  Boulif was silent for nearly a minute. Then he said,

  “They nearly did it. They nearly finished a suitcase bomb.”

  “A nuclear bomb?”

  “Yes, my friend.”

  “What were
they missing?”

  “A firing mechanism,” he said thoughtfully. “You see? There are actually two sources of plutonium in here. In essence, one is fired at the other to achieve critical mass—that is, the point at which the chain reaction that leads to the explosion is self-sustaining. The Germans would have needed a place where they could experiment without poisoning the scientists and actually cause detonations. It wasn’t that the process was beyond their grasp. Only it had to be done in secrecy.”

  “You’re saying it isn’t difficult to finish this device?”

  “I’ll have to examine it more thoroughly,” Boulif told him. “The components are nearly seventy years old and we have to work carefully to avoid radiation leaks. But, yes, my friend. I believe it can be made to function.” He smiled, still staring at the monitor with disbelief and gratitude. “We need not go searching for fissionable material. That has always been the difficulty. You—and God—have brought it to us. The dawn of the last jihad is finally at hand.”

  Yazdi’s arrival at the university was accomplished without subtlety, quiet, or discretion. He had found the place without difficulty; there were signs everywhere in the old quarter, and the pockets of students got thicker as he progressed. When a security guard stepped from a small booth and stopped him from entering the parking lot allocated for professors, Yazdi got out of the car. He told the older man it was an emergency and demanded to see Professor Boulif.

  “I will call his department so you can—”

  “I must see him now.”

  “Sir, he has already left for the day. You may make an—”

  “Where can I find him?”

  The security guard, in a neat brown uniform and shorts, did not take his eyes from the new arrival as he reached into the booth for his radio.

  Yazdi pushed the man bodily into the booth, took the radio, and threw it to the concrete floor. It cracked somewhere along the black plastic shell and hissed static.

  “Listen to me,” Yazdi said. “I’m a government official. The professor is in great danger. Where is he?”

  “It does not matter who you are,” the guard informed him, undaunted by the aggression. “I do not have that information.”

  “Get it!” Yazdi yelled.

  “How?” The man nudged the smashed radio with the toe of his shoe.

  Yazdi looked around the booth, saw nothing that looked like a layout of the university, and went back to his car. To be this close to his target and be unable to find him—

  He backed from the booth and pulled onto the narrow main street that ran along the south side of the university. He pulled up next to students, asked for the professor. Many did not know him. Those who did knew only where he taught and gave him the number of the room. That did Yazdi no good.

  He pulled to the curb, called his office, asked them to find the professor’s address. They gave it to him. He drove to the academic housing maintained by the university a few blocks to the north. Yazdi found the address, a modest, very narrow townhouse, and went to the door. No one answered. He glanced around for security cameras; there weren’t any. No one was around; students and professors were all in class. Placing his shoulder against the door, close to the jamb, he gave it a few test shoves. There were no bolts at the top; there was only the knob. He pushed in and the frame cracked. He was able to jiggle the knob loose of the latch and the door opened. He shut it behind him with a hat rack. He switched on a light.

  The living room was simply furnished. There were no photographs, paintings, diplomas, nothing to identify the occupant. Except for a prayer mat and a weathered copy of the Koran, there was nothing personal. Yazdi searched the living room and kitchen, went upstairs to the bedroom. There were several bookcases filled with science texts in several languages. He didn’t find a computer. In the closet were cardboard filing boxes filled with articles clipped from magazines, also in many languages. The diagrams and charts suggested they were all scientific texts. It wasn’t as if the site had been scrubbed; it had never been used for anything dangerous.

  The windows were closed and the sun cooked the place mercilessly. Yazdi was sweating heavily as he checked for a false ceiling in the closet, looked under the bed and mattress, examined the inside of the toilet, shook out every book to make sure there were no hidden maps or papers or addresses.

  He went to the phone on the nightstand. It was a dial phone. There was no memory to access. No redial function. Any important calls obviously went through his cell phone. Getting those records would take time. Even to a trained eye, the man was nothing but what he appeared to be. Yazdi kicked a footstool in the bedroom.

  Could the boy at the beach have lied to him?

  The logical thing to do was to wait outside for the professor to come home.

  But what if he doesn’t? Yazdi thought. The Yemeni may have turned over the device, and Boulif could have taken it somewhere else.

  Calm yourself, Yazdi thought. It had been years since he had been in the field. He had done everything he could think of, everything he used to do. It was time to think of things he had not considered.

  The man did not work here. He slept here. He stored old records here. He would not work at the university; there were too many educated eyes around him, many who might not share his radical thoughts. That meant he had another local base of operation. He checked the soles of the man’s shoes. There was nothing on the bottoms to indicate where he might have walked—scuffs from concrete, abrasions from sand. He looked in the pockets of his pants. He checked the shirt drawer, the sock drawer. The man’s hamper. There was nothing to suggest a location, a smell—clothes near a factory retained a smoky odor or the scent of whatever was made there. He looked in the medicine cabinet. There was nothing unusual—

  A new box of aspirin. Yazdi smiled. He picked it up, examined it.

  There was a price tag on it. And an expiration date.

  And the name of a shop. It was not from any of the streets he had noticed and remembered around the university. With the box in hand, Yazdi ran down to his car and texted his office asking for the address of the dispensary.

  Then, as he sat in his car waiting for the information, he saw something that would need attention.

  “I am not going to be able to finish the work in this fashion.”

  Boulif’s statement caused Mohammed’s spirits to sink. The professor removed his hands from the gloves and sank on the stool. Mohammed, who had been standing beside him, looked at the scientist’s grave expression.

  “What is the problem?”

  “Room,” Boulif said. “There isn’t enough room to maneuver inside the box.”

  “Is there somewhere else we can take the box?”

  “Not locally,” Boulif said. “There is a facility in Libya—but I do not know who currently controls it.”

  “Then what can we do?”

  Boulif considered the problem. “You see this box here?” He pointed to an object between the large and small balls of plutonium that were designed to fuel the explosion. It was a squat H-shaped object. “Initially, I believe clamps were going to be connected to the four prongs. They would, in turn, have been attached to a device that was the key to the bomb’s operation: a smaller explosive that would start the chain reaction without destroying the plutonium container. The German scientists were looking for some kind of box that would house the initial explosion. We can do that now, of course, with remote detonators and a small explosive charge placed directly inside the box.”

  “You mean like nitroglycerin?”

  “That is too unstable,” he said. “A small block of a plastic bonded explosive, so-called C-4, would achieve the desired result. It would break the container but it would not impact the plutonium before fission occurred.”

  “Do you have that?”

  “Easy to make,” he said. “The problem, as I said, is installing the workings.”

  For the first time Mohammed became aware of the sounds around him. The traffic in the street. The occasional lo
w-flying airplane. His own breathing.

  “Can I do it?” Mohammed asked. “If you remove the lid—can you tell me what to do?”

  “You are an honor to the faith, but you will not have the time. This level of radiation will weaken you within minutes. You will die before you are finished.”

  “Even with this?” he asked, picking up the X-ray apron.

  “Even with that,” Boulif told him. He snickered. “It is the problem we have always faced. Men of courage, men of conviction, men with knowledge. The righteousness of our cause. Yet physical limitations so often stymie us. Obtaining raw materials. Transporting them.”

  “Can we not use this as a dirty bomb? Blow up the container and simply disperse the radiation?”

  “We can, but I am not yet willing to go that route,” Boulif said. “The destructive power of a nuclear bomb, even a low-megaton-yield device as this one, will devastate an entire metropolis, kill and sicken millions, instead of irradiating a few blocks and affecting one-tenth that number of nonbelievers. Why poison a part of Washington or Tel Aviv when you can erase it from the map?”

  “You mean, like the bombs in Japan?”

  “Exactly so. A way must be found for you to transport this to the enemy’s beating heart and cause it to go still.” Boulif looked around with growing excitement. “It is possible. It is possible.”

  “What is, professor?”

  “We needn’t use the original wiring,” he said. “We shouldn’t. We don’t know anything about the integrity of the circuits inside. And . . .”

  Boulif’s voice trailed off as he went to a cabinet stocked with powdered chemicals. He selected potassium nitrate, sulfur, and carbon that had been extracted from shaved graphite. He shook the bottles to free the particles from inevitable bonding due to condensation. He brought the vials to the table and took a set of kitchen measuring spoons from a drawer. There was a box of oatmeal near the sink. He filled a glass with hot water and brought it and the oatmeal to the table. He stirred the oatmeal into the water and let it sit. Then he removed his cell phone from his pocket and snapped off the back. He opened a wooden drawer in the table and drew out a small package. He pierced the back with a long fingernail, removed one of two cadmium batteries, placed it inside the phone. He got another phone from the drawer and did the same thing. He gave Mohammed the first phone.