PM11-The Rule of Nine

by Steve Martini

  I steal a glance at my watch.

  “Your partner’s running late. Is he in court?” she says.

  “No. He’s in the office. Maybe I should run over and get him.”

  “Oh, why do that?” She blocks me with her high-heeled foot from across the table. “We can just sit here and talk. I’m in no hurry. Have another drink,” she tells me.

  “Plying me with liquor will do you no good.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I’m a cheap drunk. I’ll just pass out all over you.”

  “Yes, but do you talk in your sleep?” she says.

  I laugh. “I don’t know.”

  “And how can that be?”

  “Do you hear yourself when you talk in your sleep?”

  “That lonely, is it?” she says.

  “As much as I hate to admit it, it’s been a while since I’ve had any witnesses in a position to tell me.”

  “I see.” She stares at me from piercing blue eyes, her parted, glossed lips now finished with the ice. “Is that an invitation? Or do you just want me to drive you to a sleep clinic?” There is a kind of sensual ozone in the air. I feel as if my hair is being lifted by a static charge waiting for the bolt of lightning to strike me somewhere farther down.

  I take a sip of gin to cool off before I stammer around a little the way men often do when they are frontally accosted by a beautiful woman. I don’t deny the urge. Instead I say: “What difference does it make? You have a flight. And I draw the line at sleep experiments in the backseat of my car.”

  “There’s always another airplane,” she says. “And I noticed a beautiful hotel just across the street.”

  “What about your testimony tomorrow?”

  “I suppose we could talk about precision weapons if you like. But I was thinking we could do some other things.”

  I give her a smirk.

  “There are more important things than Congressional hearings.”

  “Yes, but my ego isn’t sufficiently inflated to think that I’m one of them.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” she says. “You have to remember that there is always the quality of your pillow talk.”

  “Ah, there you go spoiling the moment. And I thought you wanted me for my body.”

  “How could I possibly know when I haven’t seen it yet?” She ups the ante just as Harry comes breezing through the door.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “Go away,” I tell him.

  He looks at me and then turns behind him to see Joselyn seated in the booth. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “Nothing important,” she tells him. “Your partner was just having a dream. Nothing a towel can’t fix. We haven’t met.” She reaches out and takes Harry’s hand, brushing her fingernails along the inside of his palm. “I’m Joselyn Cole. You must be Mr. Hinds.”

  Harry looks at her over the top of his reading glasses for a better appraisal before he grabs the spectacles from his face and pockets them.

  “Nice to meet you.” Harry looks like he’s been hit by a dumdum round. Still holding her hand, he gives her the big, broad grin as she slides to the back of the curved booth to let him in.

  “Joining us for lunch, that’s wonderful,” says Harry.

  “Leave him alone. He’s an old man,” I tell her.

  “I never discriminate on the basis of age,” says Joselyn. “In fact, older is better.”

  “He doesn’t know anything,” I tell her. “Harry has only hearsay.”

  “So he knows what you told him,” she says.

  I give her a face of concession.

  “That’s fine, we can start with that,” she says. “Besides, press conferences don’t have rules of evidence.”

  “What’s this about?” Harry slides into the booth.

  “You don’t want to know,” I tell him.

  “Let me be the judge of that.” Harry is smiling at Joselyn. “Where did you two meet?”

  “How about a drink?” I raise my hand and call the waitress over.

  “I work undercover for the state bar. I’m a female decoy for illicit relations with clients,” she tells him. “I’m wearing a wire and very little else. And you want to know how your partner and I met?”

  “Sounds like entrapment to me,” says Harry. “I’m game. Besides, you’re not my client, and if you nailed him, I own the firm. So I’m not only old, I’m rich.”

  “She’s pulling your leg.”

  “I have two of them,” says Harry. “So anytime you want, just yank away.” He smiles at her. Harry can be a charmer when he wants to be. Suddenly he turns a stern expression on me. “You and I have to talk. Janice told me to tell you some guy is waiting for you back at the office.”

  Janice is my secretary. Somebody waiting in the office catches my attention since I don’t have any appointments on my calendar for this afternoon.

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know who he is,” says Harry, “but he’s insistent. When Janice told him you might not be back for the rest of the day, he apparently planted himself in one of the chairs in the outer office and told her he’d wait.”

  Ever since the events in Coronado and the warning from Thorpe, I get edgy when visitors show up at the office unannounced. “What did he look like, did you see him?”

  “Tall, lanky, sunny side of fifty maybe, well dressed, suit and tie, dark…” Harry’s gaze rises as he talks to me. “Speak of the devil.”

  Before I can turn, a shadow settles across my shoulder and onto the table in front of me.

  “Are you Paul Madriani?”

  I look up and he is silhouetted against the bright daylight from the window behind me. The stupid things that race through your mind at a moment like this. His face has the shadowed clarity of the dark side of the moon. I find myself looking down toward his hands to see if they’re packing anything.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “My name is Bart Snyder. I think you may have known my son, James.”

  FOURTEEN

  Zeb Thorpe stormed into the small conference room at FBI headquarters like a man running on afterburners. “Gentlemen. Sorry to be so late.” He had been racing all day through a series of meetings. This one had been dropped on his calendar at the last minute in a telephone call from his assistant, Ray Zink, with no time to talk—only a message that it was urgent.

  “I take it everybody’s here?” Besides Zink there were only two others present, an air force officer sporting brass birds on the epaulets of his dress jacket, and another man, a civilian Thorpe didn’t recognize.

  He moved at speed toward the head of the table, took his seat, and opened the file in front of him. Thorpe started to scan the file as he talked.

  “Hope this won’t take too long. I’ve got a dinner meeting with the director in a little over an hour. And somehow between here and there I have to struggle into a tux that’s down in my car.” He looked at a photograph in the file, a large military transport plane parked on a tarmac, its cargo ramp down and the rear bay open. “You want to do introductions or should we just get started?”

  “Greg Sanchez, National Security Agency.” This from the man in the suit at the other end of the table. He looked to be in his early thirties, with short dark hair and intense eyes.

  NSA operated out of a set of glass towers at Fort Meade, in Maryland.

  “I don’t think we’ve met before. What division at NSA?”

  “Infosec, international relations.”

  “That covers a lot of sins,” said Thorpe. “How long you been out of the navy?”

  “Is it that obvious?” said Sanchez.

  “Lucky guess,” said Thorpe.

  “Two years.”

  “When you see George Simmels, tell him Jughead says hello.” Simmels was Sanchez’s boss. He was an old salt who never hired anybody who hadn’t first paid his dues bounding on the main. He and Thorpe, a former marine, went back almost twenty years.

  Thorpe also knew that Simmels
was soon for retirement, whether he wanted it or not. For decades the navy held a firm edge in the field of encryption, code making and breaking. Throughout the Cold War this was the NSA’s fundamental mission. But no longer. That had all changed with the attack on 9/11. Now the NSA’s job was to read everybody’s e-mail and listen to their telephone communications, or at least as many of them as could be sucked out of the ether by the supercomputers at Fort Meade. The job was to scan it all, searching for the code words of terrorism. On that score the air force held the whip hand. They controlled most of the critical communications satellites.

  “Sir, I’m Colonel Nelson Winget.” The man in the uniform slid a business card down the table toward Thorpe.

  “You can call me Thorpe, Zeb, anything but sir,” said Thorpe. “That one’s reserved for my five-year-old grandson and only when he knows he’s been really bad.” He looked at the business card: ASSISTANT COMMANDER, AIR FORCE SYSTEMS COMMAND, WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE. “Who wants to start?”

  Zink jumped into the void. “The plane in the file photo is Russian made, an IL-76, registered in the Georgian Republic. As to who owns it, it’s anybody’s guess. Title seems to be a bit cloudy. The aircrew is a mixed bag, three of them out of Belarus, and one Chechen. They were flying out of North Korea. The plane was forced down by mechanical problems and landed at Don Muang airport in Bangkok two days ago. Thai authorities found thirty-five tons of arms and munitions on board, all of it in violation of the UN Security Council ban on exports from North Korea.”

  “And who says serendipity never works for our side?” said Thorpe.

  “We did tip off Thai customs as to what we thought was on board,” said Sanchez.

  “You don’t have to explain to me,” said Thorpe. “As long as they land outside the country and it doesn’t start a war, you got my vote. So far it sounds like an issue for the State Department or Defense, not us.” He started to close the cover on the file in front of him.

  “We don’t know the intended final destination,” said Zink. “You can probably draw a big circle around the Middle East and throw darts at it.”

  “But there appears to be a problem,” said Sanchez, “and if we’re right, it’s gonna likely fall in your court sooner or later.”

  “Go on,” said Thorpe.

  “Yesterday we intercepted telephonic communications between an individual in Pyongyang, North Korea, and someone in the area of the northern Caribbean,” said Sanchez. “They were using a satellite link we don’t control, part of the old Soviet system. And the receiving end in the Caribbean wasn’t using a cell phone. It was an old analog landline.”

  “Cuba,” said Thorpe.

  Sanchez nodded. “It gave us some problems with transcription since our computers and our software are weighted toward digital signals. So we didn’t get the entire conversation.”

  “Was it encrypted?” said Thorpe.

  “No. It was clear and in English,” said Sanchez. This meant it probably wasn’t the North Korean military or its government talking to their counterparts in Cuba.

  “It appears to have been a private-party conversation. The transcript is in your file, the parts that we were able to pick up.”

  Thorpe had the file open again and was turning pages until he found the transcript and started to read.

  “The scanning software at one of our stations picked up the phone call because of the location from which the call originated, in North Korea. It became a full intercept when key words were recognized,” said Sanchez. “You’ll see those words highlighted in the transcript.”

  “The man calling in from Pyongyang was reporting to his friend in Cuba that a certain cargo plane was forced down in the ‘land of smiles.’”

  “Thailand,” said Thorpe.

  “It was clear there was something on board they were interested in. The man at the Cuban end of the conversation seemed to be in charge. He was worried that the communication might be intercepted. They beat around the bush for a while and finally out came the words ‘big guy’ and ‘little kid,’” said Sanchez.

  “And that’s when all the lights and buzzers on your computer went off.” Thorpe had already keyed on the highlighted words in the transcript.

  “It’s not just words or phrases, but usage,” said Sanchez. “The way these words are employed in a conversation that triggers the computer to recognize them. They were among a number of similar words or phrases designed to capture a particular reference.”

  “Fat Man and Little Boy,” said Thorpe.

  “Yes,” said Sanchez. These were the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end World War II.

  “We lost bits and pieces of the conversation. But it appears that the subject in the Caribbean asked the man in Pyongyang which of the two was on board the plane. And the man in North Korea said ‘the big guy.’”

  “I see it.” Thorpe sits up straight in his chair. “Do we know what was on that plane?” He looks at Zink.

  “We sent two agents over from the embassy in Bangkok late yesterday, before we knew about the telephone intercepts,” said Zink. “But Thai customs wasn’t sure how much they could cooperate until they had approval from a higher authority.”

  “So we still don’t know what’s on that plane?” said Thorpe.

  “We do now,” said Sanchez. “When the phone intercept came in, we alerted the military. The navy dispatched one of their nuclear weapons officers from Subic, in the Philippines. When the Thai military saw the guy in a Hazmat suit with a yellow Geiger counter the size of your mama’s kitchen stove, they stepped aside and set a world speed record for deplaning.”

  “And?” said Thorpe.

  “Good news and bad news,” said Sanchez. “Good news is, there was nothing nuclear on board.”

  Thorpe issued a deep sigh of relief and settled back into his chair.

  “The plane contained a bandit’s bazaar, everything the well-armed terrorist wants for Christmas,” said Zink. “RPGs, rocket launchers, missile tubes and the missiles to go with them, shoulder-fired surface-to-air stuff, enough Kalashnikovs to restart the Russian Revolution. All of it crated up in wood and labeled as tools. Thai customs is still doing an inventory.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” said Zink, “’cause we’re not off the hook yet. There was one big surprise, a wooden crate about half the size of a small house, marked ‘oil drilling equipment.’ It took us a while, but we finally convinced the Thais to let us take a peek. At first nobody knew what it was. It looked like a very large, oversize hot water heater.”

  “Go on,” said Thorpe.

  “They tested it for radiation but it wasn’t hot. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that yet.”

  “Why not?”

  The air force colonel leaned forward at the table. “Because according to our ordnance people, it’s thermobaric, and it’s the biggest damn thing they’ve ever seen,” said Winget.

  “You mean like McVeigh’s truck bomb in Oklahoma City?” said Thorpe.

  “Similar principle,” said Winget, “but on a much higher order of technology, and far more destructive. It is a fuel-air device and considerably larger than anything we have in our own arsenal. We don’t know the exact magnitude. So far our experts have only seen pictures of it. We have two of them on a plane now, on their way to Thailand to examine it. But based on the photos they’ve seen, they’re telling us it looks like a Russian design.”

  “Why would the Russians—”

  “We don’t think the Russians built it. It probably has ‘Made in North Korea’ stamped on the bottom of it, part of the technology transfer from back in the eighties. The Russians got a big jump start on us in the field of thermobaric weapons before the Soviet empire went down. We had to play catch-up when we first went to war in Afghanistan. You remember the mountain caves at Tora Bora?”

  Thorpe nodded. “I remember seeing pictures.”

  “We used B-52s and bunker-busting thermobaric bombs in an effort to penetrate the caves and incinerate whoever w
as inside. We believed it was Bin Laden. If it was, he slipped away.

  “Based on the size of the device in the photographs, if its power is true to scale and if you could set it off in the right spot under the right conditions, you could boil a fair amount of the water in the Chesapeake.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Thorpe.

  “I wish I was,” said Winget. “It’s only half a step to a step down from a nuclear device. There’s no fallout from radiation and the blast effect is more confined. That’s the good news. The bad news is that once you master the technology and perfect the design, which isn’t that difficult, the weapon is easily replicated, and the technical know-how is readily transferable to others. We know that terrorist groups have been experimenting with fuel-air designs for some time. The bombing in Bali a few years ago showed signs of fuel-air design.”

  “It stands to reason that this is the cargo the man in Cuba was talking about with his friend in Pyongyang,” said Sanchez. “The big kid.”

  “What you’re saying is that somewhere there’s a smaller one still floating around,” said Thorpe.

  “Worse than that,” said Winget. “Look at the rest of the telephone transcript.”

  Thorpe turned back to the file and read to the end of the transcript. “The North Koreans have a replacement for the one on the plane.”

  “It looks like it,” said Winget. “We’re talking a very serious problem here. Grounding that plane may have slowed them down but it didn’t stop them.”

  “It appears the North Koreans are selling this stuff to private contractors,” said Sanchez. “There’s a lesson to be learned here, if you ever get a chance to testify and they ask your opinion.”

  Thorpe looked at him.

  “Before the embargo the North Koreans were shipping their military wares mostly to other friendly regimes in return for hard currency,” said Sanchez. “As we push the UN to tighten the screws on the embargo, all indications are that more of this stuff is going underground. Major weapons systems finding their way onto the black market and into the hands of people who don’t own territory or possess national flags. You want my opinion, embargos are not only weak because they’re hard to enforce. When you do enforce them, the result can turn out to be even more dangerous.”