“And I’m going to mention your name to the president, General Hatkin.”
“Thank you, Mr. Secretary.”
Hatkin smiles—in his mind is the prospect of another medal or a presidential citation. It hasn’t dawned on him that associating his name with this mission could bring a quick and ignominious end to a long and stellar career.
Naguib has never seen El-Khadr so beside himself. One minute he scrambles up to the monitor and stands gazing at it as if he’s hoping it will make the decision for him—the next he’s rushing back out to Naguib’s workstation—in between he’s bending over the console scanning the NOAA website with its detailed forecasts of East Coast weather conditions. Three times he began dictating a message to Mehran, each one starting with the GPS coordinates and ending with exhortations to glory. But every time he pulled up short, telling Naguib, “No, no, no, save it, don’t send it yet,” and hurrying back into the control room.
From the commotion he’s hearing, Naguib guesses they saw the boat stop for a few minutes, lots of yelling and speculation, then the room went silent as El-Khadr scurried from station to station trying to make up his mind. Hearing the bedlam from the control room, Naguib instantly knows the boat must be underway again. He figures El-Khadr is torn between whether or not he should activate Mehran. Either way he will send him to his death. The only question is how many people he takes with him.
This time El-Khadr comes stomping out of the control room, hands up in the air, a mixture of frustration and consternation on his face, muttering incomprehensibly in Yemeni. But it’s not hard to figure out that El-Khadr has scrubbed the mission.
“We will wait for a better time,” he tells him, turning and stomping off toward his office, slamming the door behind him with such force it rattles the windowpanes.
At the same time El-Khadr is sitting in his office fuming at having to abort Mehran’s mission, his nuclear weapons expert is relaxing in a comfortable chair a continent away, looking across his terrace at the tiled roofs and tapered minarets of the neighborhood where he grew up, listening to the commercial hubbub going on in the bustling streets three stories below and the bouzouki music coming from his next door neighbor’s stereo.
It had been a long flight, three legs, Dulles to Heathrow, on to Bahrain and then to Jeddah. Fourteen hours, no picnic for a man his age but to Jamal Abdullah it stood out as the best flight he had ever taken. It wasn’t the first-class food or the shapely Belgian stewardess with the bright smile who attentively helped him convert his seat into a bed so he could get a few winks between London and Saudi Arabia. It was the incredible good fortune that he was able to savor all the way across the Atlantic.
Jamal had indulged in a rare glass of Perrier-Jouet, and when Marie-Noel served the champagne and asked him what he was celebrating, he proudly told the stewardess, “My son has just picked out a ring for his new wife.”
Allowing himself a second glass of champagne, Jamal reveled in the extraordinary set of circumstances. It was icing on the cake, the cherry on top of the sundae when El-Khadr had ordered Mehran to the upper Chesapeake. Everything had gone like clockwork. The collar was transferred to the boathouse team with plenty of time to spare, the moving crew broke down the gantries and moved them out, he turned off the lights, locked the door to his workshop and hopped a cab to the airport.
For all he cared the Americans could be tearing the place apart. They could run chemical tests to find explosives, bring in experts to examine his machinery. Even if they concluded that he was lathing hollow aluminum rings of various dimensions, and while they could speculate the rings were packed with C-4 and machined to fit the bombs’ noses, that would be as far as they would get.
Only three people in the world knew the secret. And one of them is dead. That leaves two—himself and the co-pilot on the ill-fated mission.
Though the conversation had taken place over forty years ago, it is as clear to him as if it happened yesterday. “They lost contact with the aircraft somewhere over New Jersey,” the weapons control officer at Westover Air Force Base had informed Jamal over the phone. His name was Victor Obinson, Colonel Victor Obinson. By chance, Jamal had noticed his obit a couple years ago in the Inquirer. In the early days before Oak Ridge was fully staffed and funded, engineers often interfaced with their military counterparts at SAC bases. Though they had never met, they had spoken on the phone many times in the three years Obinson was stationed at Westover.
“The official word is that it went down offshore,” Obinson went on to tell Jamal. “But for my money that’s a smoke screen. I don’t think anyone really knows for sure. Now security is clamped down so tight chances are you’ll never hear about the incident again.”
“So you need a replacement Mk-15 mod 0?” Jamal asked. In emergencies, weapons were often flown directly from Oak Ridge.
“Yes, with a nuclear capsule.”
“The capsule also was lost? It was loaded into the bomb?”
The weapons control officer uttered the words Jamal would never forget. “We’re lucky the damn thing didn’t go off. Wherever the hell it is, let’s just hope it rusts away quickly.”
For almost forty years, the fact that the lost bomb was fully armed stayed buried under layers of evasion and confidentiality so even the top Pentagon officials aren’t aware of the threat it poses. When Mehran had found Collyer’s website and had alerted them to the opportunity, Jamal hadn’t imagined there would be a connection between the location of Mehran’s lost bombs and the one his associate had told him about so many years ago.
But Collyer has found the location of the weapon—the same one— the bomb with the nuclear capsule. Even if he learns the truth about the bomb from the pilot it will be too late to do anything about it. The Americans’ horrible secret is no longer hidden away in the mud somewhere. Mehran is going to find it.
Jamal smiles as he sits looking out at the Jeddah skyline.
And when he does, what a shock it will be.
41
Kalorama, DC, Monday morning
Jimmick stands over the side of the bed gently shaking his wife’s shoulder as he buttons his shirt. “Cassie, I need to ask you a question.”
His wife opens one eye. Seeing the lights on in the bedroom, her husband half dressed with an unsettled expression on his face, she bolts upright. “What’s going on?”
“Tell me everything you know about dahlias,” Jimmick says to her as he quickly folds down his collar and buttons his cuffs. She’s propped up, groggily rubbing her eyes, squinting at the clock on the bedside table.
“Dahlias? Are you out of your mind? It’s not even six o’clock in the morning.”
Jimmick tightens his tie. “Take me to school on the damn things, and don’t leave out a detail. I made some coffee for you,” Jimmick points at the mug on her bedside table.
Rathon had woken him up at 5:30 to tell him the news. The lab was halfway through the analysis of the swimmer’s hard drive. “It’s raw data, needs to be thoroughly analyzed,” Rathon explained on the secure line. “I just glanced through it but one thing jumped out at me. Kid logged on to a couple websites five and six times a day. And you’d never guess what he was looking at.”
Porn was Jimmick’s instinctive reaction. But he was as surprised as Rathon was when he heard the answer.
“Flowers.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Dahlias, to be exact.”
“How did you find it?”
“Stroke of luck—I tripped over it.” Rathon didn’t mention all the spadework he’d done to get into the website, logging on the first site, following the link to the second, then spending over an hour on its innocuous-looking homepage clicking on every square millimeter until a window popped open. He used a password-generating program FBI computer experts had written to come up with the magic combination of letters and numbers to unlock the file. Recently developed to bust child molesters on the web, the program ginned up random combinations until a series hit paydirt.
&nbs
p; Inside, Rathon had found a string of posts, all kinds of talk about flowers—dahlias specifically. The last post in the string said, Meet with Cindy as soon as possible. She has a prize dahlia she wants to dig up.
“Jesus,” Jimmick said as Rathon read the intercepts to him over the phone. “I’m no cryptoanalyst but that sounds pretty damn ominous.” That’s when he decided to wake up his wife.
Hiked up on one elbow and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, Cassie takes a sip of coffee. “I can’t believe you’re up at the break of day quizzing me about flowers.”
“You’re the big garden clubber. While I finish getting dressed, give me everything from A to Z.”
“Why dahlias?”
“Sorry, that’s as much as I can tell you.”
Cassie sighs and takes a second sip. “Okay—dahlias are perennials, very colorful, lots of varieties. Some are as big as dinner plates. But unlike most bulbs like tulips that you leave in the ground over the winter, in this part of the country you need to dig dahlias up before the first frost.”
“Sometime in November?”
“Often earlier—and store them so they will bloom again in the spring.”
“So if you had a prize dahlia, you wouldn’t dig it up now?”
“We’ve had at least three frosts already. It would be dead as a doornail.”
“So someone who’s talking about digging up a prize dahlia in December—”
Cassie completes the thought, “—doesn’t know anything about flowers.”
“Thanks, that’s what I needed to know,” Jimmick says, leaning down and giving his wife a kiss on the cheek, the phrase she has a prize dahlia she wants to dig up ringing in his ears.
As she listens to her husband dashing downstairs and out the door, Cassie reaches up to flick off the lights wondering how much more she can take. Friday her husband woke her at two in the morning and she was up again at some ungodly hour making him a fried egg sandwich after he was out most of the night. Last night he left at three. And now it’s five something and she’s fielding questions about flowers. The clock radio reads 5:43. As her head sinks back into the pillow, her eyes wide open, Cassie Jimmick stares blankly up at the cream-colored ceiling wondering what in the world is going down.
It’s still dark as Jimmick tells the driver to pull up on the 10th Street side of the Hoover Building. Rathon steps out of the shadows at the corner of E wearing a topcoat and hat. He turns and quickly checks up and down the block.
Jimmick pays the driver and climbs out. “You certain no one else knows about this?” he asks as the cab drives off.
“If they did, I wouldn’t have been able to get it out of the lab.”
“Where is it?”
Rathon turns and nods around the corner at a row of leafless trees bordering the sidewalk. “I stuck it between the branches of the fifth one down. I didn’t want anyone to see me handing it to you. Better go grab it before some overzealous security guard decides there’s a bomb in it.”
Jimmick is tempted to say, There might be, but he thinks better of it. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“I’ve got to go,” Rathon says, looking over his shoulder. One thing to be seen surreptitiously meeting with a cabinet member at six in the morning, another to be giving him confidential FBI information.
“I’ll let you know what happens.”
“Hope I don’t read it in the paper first. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” Jimmick says, turning the corner and heading down the block. He checks up and down the street before snatching the package out from between the limbs and tucking it under his arm. He quickly starts down E Street thinking he’ll cut back over to Pennsylvania Avenue and grab another cab once he’s sure no one is following him.
He remembers an espresso joint around here somewhere. As much as he could use a triple cappuccino, he knows he can’t take the time. He’s got to get his butt out to Langley. When he called Straub to tell him about the website Rathon had ferreted out, Straub had told him to get out to CIA headquarters as fast as possible, telling Jimmick he’d arrange for a CIA bird to fly him down to The Farm.
“And read me those posts the minute you get your hands on them,” Straub told him before he hung up.
Listening to Jimmick on a speakerphone at Peary, Straub sits at a table with a team of CIA analysts gathered around.
“Digging up dahlias takes patience,” Jimmick reads from the FBI file he’s juggling in the back of the cab. “Often they are not where you remember you planted them. So gently and carefully digging up the entire area is necessary to find the missing tubers.”
“What was the time on that post?”
“Yesterday afternoon, 3:54.”
“The same time Howie was out on the bay looking for the bomb.”
“Listen to this: ‘Time and forbearance are critical qualities to dahlia seekers. Once your dahlias are brought to light and secured in a safe place, they will provide you with lasting delight in the upcoming season.’”
“If that isn’t code for finding a lost nuke, I don’t know what it is. Get down here and let’s get to work on it.”
“See you in twenty minutes.”
“One more thing—”
“Yes, Winn.”
“Transfer Warren. Make him believe the mission is winding down and you need him somewhere else.”
“Actually I do.”
“Good, get him the hell out of there.”
“Vector Eleven got to him?”
“A crewman told Howie on the QT that Warren ordered him to shut a valve down. There was no mechanical malfunction. Warren scuttled the damn boat himself.”
“Why would he do that?”
“So Vector Eleven could flush out the terrorists and ride in for the rescue.”
“You’re convinced this is the way it was supposed to go down?”
“I heard it from a good source.”
“Who’s that?”
Straub pauses to heighten the drama before he drops the bomb. “The president of the United States.”
No answer on the other end of the line for a long while.
Then Straub says, “Pick up a Washington Post and read all about it.”
Jimmick jumps out of the cab at the next paper box and is back in a flash in the backseat, a copy of that morning’s Washington Post opened in front of him.
He can hardly believe his eyes.
42
Camp Peary, outside of Williamsburg, Monday morning
Mr. Straub, it’s your wife, she insists on talking to you.”
Straub gives his aide a pained expression as if to ask, Why in the hell can’t you screen my calls? The last person I need to talk to is Barbara.
“Sorry, sir,” the aide shrugs. As hard as his aide had tried, Barbara Straub wasn’t taking no for an answer. The woman was known for her short fuse. When he asked her to leave a message she practically blew out his eardrums.
Winn gets up, excusing himself. His team is minutes away from breaking the code. For the first time they will have a window on the terrorists’ activities. He is on the verge of feeling elated—until he hears his wife’s voice on the other end of the line. From her tone, he instantly knows what the call is about. Their daughter’s been having marriage problems.
“Sandy swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills last night after a knockdown drag-out with Harold,” she tells him.
“Is she okay?”
“They pumped her stomach in time.”
“Where is she now?”
“Georgetown Hospital.”
“What are the docs saying?”
“They are discharging her this afternoon but she’s an emotional basket case. I’m afraid that deadbeat husband of hers has driven her off the deep end.”
“Let’s get her over the physical part then we’ll deal with him.”
Barbara launches into a tirade, she hasn’t had any sleep and is coming unglued. Doesn’t help that he’s been keeping crazy hours. It takes Winn ten minutes to scrape
her off the ceiling.
It isn’t surprising given Barbara’s emotional state that she demands that Winn come home immediately and when he demurs—claiming that he’s in the midst of a crisis—she screams, “What could be more important than your daughter’s welfare? You selfish son of a bitch!” and slams the phone down.
He’s heading back into the operations room wondering how long it will take to repair the domestic damage when a second call comes in. It’s Abner Dickson. He sounds flustered, almost panicky, his voice an octave higher than normal.
Straub holds the phone away from his ear as Dickson raves, “You sent me out with bogus information, Straub, the White House is coming down on me like a ton of bricks. They say there’s no bomb, no terrorists, it was all a CIA plot to undercut the Pentagon.”
“What the hell are you talking about? I read in the Post that the president gave Kessel a chewing-out at the dinner last night.”
“That was yesterday, now they’ve turned the tables. And they are pointing the finger at you.”
“Last night the president was patting me on the back.”
“Things change fast in this town. Now you’re on his shitlist and the whole White House staff is gunning for me.”
“What do they want?”
Dickson sighs, “My job and your ass. They’d bring charges if they could. Bunch of pissed-off people. You’d better keep your head down.”
“Give me two days, Abner.”
“And then what?”
“I’ll make you a hero. The CIA is going to save the day and you will get the credit.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Trust me, Abner, this is going to bring the Pentagon down. And your name will be written in history.”
Dickson has a vain streak a mile wide. Two more sentences and the conversation is over. Straub says a quick goodbye and hangs up, thinking, I might have bought two days but I’ll be lucky if I get a couple hours. When they turn the heat up on Dickson, the boy’s going to melt fast. He picks up his cell phone to make two calls, the last ones he’ll make on his CIA mobile.
After an initial testy exchange at the state dinner, Charlie Kessel was able to take the president aside and reassure him that the nation was never at risk. Kessel maintained it was inter-agency politics run amuck and promised a full briefing the next morning. When the president seemed unconvinced, Kessel leaned close and whispered, “No nuke and no terrorists— what does that tell you, Mr. President? Someone’s crying wolf, that’s all.”
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