Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  The datawall now showed an organization chart. On it all roads led to CROM, including some originating from agencies with household three-letter acronyms.

  “CROM was created back in the mid-nineties as a DOE carve-out from the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program,” Marianna continued what sounded like a well-practiced pitch. “But, whereas CTR proper focused on the material aspects—working with the Russians to decommission weapons production facilities and secure or destroy fissionables—CROM was tasked with what NS A General Counsel Elizabeth Rindskopf had called ‘the human dimension of nonproliferation.’ ”

  Marianna was prowling back and forth in front of the datawall. Her feline movements held far more fascination than her lecture material, most of which Knox knew already.

  “When the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist on December 21st, 1991,” she was saying, “the military-industrial complex it left behind was the second largest in the world capacity-wise, and the largest in terms of population. The nuclear weapons program alone employed over a million workers, housed in ten secret cities. Not shown on any map, known but to God, the USSR Ministry of Defense, and the CIA. Just one of these cities stored more weapons-grade plutonium than the stockpiles of France, Great Britain, and the People’s Republic of China put together.”

  With a pass of the lightpen, CROM’s org chart yielded to a polar projection of the former USSR, ten red stars all a-twinkle. “More to our point, this ‘nuclear archipelago’ was home to some ninety thousand weapons scientists and engineers. While chemical and biological warfare never achieved quite this level of urban planning, adding in their staffs would increase those numbers by fifty to sixty percent. Over half of them now living below any Third World poverty line you’d care to draw.”

  Marianna took a breath, then continued. “Enter the Initiative for Proliferation Prevention, IPP for short. Overshoes and kerosene space-heaters to keep guards at their posts. Food stamps for physicists. Urban renewal in Sarov, Snezhinsk, Zheleznogorsk, all the secret cities. Anything to keep Russia’s weapons experts from selling their services to the rogue nations of the world. Quite simply, that’s us. CROM is the Initiative for Proliferation Prevention. Among other things.”

  The box labeled “CROM” was back, now sporting a smaller IPP rectangle inside it. “The intent back in ’94 was just to provide administrative support for the Initiative. Didn’t turn out that way. There’s more to the ‘human dimension of non-proliferation’ than food-stamps and workfare. If you think it’s hard repurposing a neurotoxin or a thermonuclear device, try retraining the scientists who created them. Even now, IPP has moved less than ten percent of the target population out of WMD research and into the civilian economy. Meanwhile things just keep on getting worse for the ones left behind.”

  Behind her, the datawall filled with stills and clips of soup kitchens in Tomsk-7, picket lines in front of the Arzamas-16 weapons lab, hunger strikes at the Primorskii nuclear power plant, a march on the Ministry of Atomic Energy in Moscow to demand unpaid wages.

  Aristos turned to look Knox in the eye. “Don’t go getting all choked up there, Knox. These are the same guys that thought the Cold War was the glory days. You know what the other Ivans used to call them? The chocolate-eaters!” He snorted. “Special shops and hospitals, trips abroad, exclusive resorts, first class all the way. Now that they’re standing on the breadlines with everybody else, course they bitch and moan about it.”

  “Still, there’s no denying that these resentments represent a very real danger,” Marianna resumed smoothly, “when harbored by a population with marketable skills in mass destruction. By the turn of the century, disaffected scientists posed a greater proliferation threat than did the lax security on the materials they produced. Dozens of outlaw states, and more than a few well-heeled terrorist organizations, were offering top dollar for WMD expertise on the hoof.”

  Aristos added, “Bottom line, IPP alone wasn’t getting the job done. Everybody knew it, nobody gave a shit.”

  Marianna seemed used to integrating her boss’s interjections into her presentation. “That changed come nine-eleven.”

  September 11th, 2001—the day everything had changed. As for the change in CROM, that was reflected in the org chart, where the IPP box had now been joined by one labeled Compliance.

  “Don’t be misled by the name. Compliance’s main responsibility is to monitor the movements and activities of the twenty thousand or so individuals in Russia, the CIS, and elsewhere who pose the highest proliferation risk.”

  Now the wall was showing flyovers of multiprocessors in serried ranks, fisheyes of banks of workstations staffed by analysts in office casuals and headsets, lingering close-ups of room-filling climate-control and uninterruptible-power installations—all the paraphernalia of a large IT operation, served up to impress visiting Congress-critters and other dignitaries. Knox yawned.

  “Satellite feed, communications intercept, media analysis, physical surveillance,” Marianna narrated, “—it all flows into Compliance for cross-correlation and action recommendations.”

  “And,” added Aristos, “as a sideline, they keep tabs on the KGB.”

  “It’s not called that anymore, is it?” Knox said. “Don’t you mean the, uh, FSB?”

  “Don’t I wish!” Aristos said. “Russia’s Federal Security Service is working with us on this. No, I mean the good old Ka-Geh-fuckin’-Beh, pardon my French.” He twitched a smile in Marianna’s direction, then turned back to Knox. “See, not everybody made the cut when they transitioned to a kinder, gentler police state. Some balked. Others just plain weren’t asked—Soviet-era excesses, that sort of thing.”

  “And, not being the sort to ‘go gentle into that good night,”’ Marianna added, “they’ve banded together into a so-called ‘shadow KGB.’ A cabal dedicated to restoring the dictatorship of the proletariat—and, not incidentally, their own privileged positions within it.”

  “But, Dylan Thomas aside,” Knox said, “how is any of this CROM’s concern? I’d have thought you had your plate full just with the proliferation problem.”

  Aristos shook his head. “The shadow KGB is the proliferation problem, Knox. Nobody else has got the contacts to set up these deals. I’m talking close working relationships with global-reach terrorist networks stretching back three, four decades. The scientists are just merchandise; it’s the KGB does the sales and provisioning.”

  “And,” Marianna picked up her cue, “it’s largely due to their craft-work that Compliance loses track of as many disaffecteds as it does. When that happens, it’s up to our working group to reacquire the targets.” The org chart was back, having grown a third rectangle labeled “Reacquisition.”

  “It’s breadth versus depth.” Marianna ceased pacing and hiked herself up onto a corner of Pete’s desk, improving Knox’s view of well-turned leg no end. “Compliance is in charge of the big picture. Reacquisition focuses on individual cases.”

  “Such as misplaced magnetohydrodynamicists?”

  “Marianna filled you in on that part, huh?” Aristos shot her a vaguely disapproving side-glance. “Actually, MHD only rates a yellow alert. The magnet guys wouldn’t even be watch-listed if it weren’t for the Tokamak connection. You know about that?”

  “About Tokamaks? They’re, um, magnetic bottles, aren’t they? Electromagnetic arrays that generate a containment field for plasmas of subatomic particles. Pinch the plasma, and you’ve got thermonuclear power generation. That’s the theory, anyway; I don’t think it’s ever worked in practice.” Knox, the closet popular-science buff. “If they’ve got any military application,” he finished, “I don’t know about it.”

  “Turns out they do,” Aristos said. “It’s called a pure-fusion bomb—a fissionless H-bomb.”

  That made sense: A normal thermonuclear device used a plutonium trigger—in essence, a small atom bomb—to generate the million-degree heat needed to jumpstart the fusion reaction. But a really tight magnetic pinch might achieve the sam
e effect. The yield would be small, maybe no more than a kiloton or two. But with no radioactives on board . . .

  “Jesus Christ! The damned thing would be undetectable.”

  “Yeah, your ideal suitcase bomb, if anyone could figure how to build one.” Aristos shrugged. “Hasn’t happened yet, far as we know. But pure-fusion tech in the wrong hands would be destabilizing as all hell. And nobody’s about to take chances anymore. So CROM adds magnet guys to the watchlist, and, when Compliance loses them, we get to go find them.”

  “Which sums up the Reacquisition mission as a whole.” Marianna was nothing if not adept at keeping a meeting on track. “It’s gotten easier since the Russians started playing ball after nine-eleven. Between us, we’ve cranked the flood down to a trickle.”

  A trickle—that didn’t sound so bad. Knox relaxed ever so slightly.

  “Too bad these days even a trickle can kill you.” Aristos sent an evil grin his way.

  “Still,” Marianna hurried on, “most often, it’s much ado about nothing: a radiology technician off on a lost weekend with her best friend’s husband, or an assistant biolab director attending an out-of-area conference unannounced. Stuff like that.”

  “And sometimes it’s not,” Aristos again. The man seemed to positively delight in stoking Knox’s already considerable consternation.

  The datawall behind Aristos now showed a close-up of a somber, donnish-looking gentleman in winter coat, fur hat, and handcuffs. Its caption read: Ivan Alekseyevich Kruglov, former head of the Arzamas-16 nuclear weapons lab, reacquired Tbilisi December 20th 2002 en route to Teheran.

  “We call them proliferation threats,”’ she said, “ ‘proles’ for short. Nice Orwellian touch, don’t you think?”

  Kruglov’s image telescoped down to a thumbnail in the upper left-hand corner and another took center stage—Marina Aleksandrovna Golytsina, chief of toxicology, Bayun-17 black lab—then another, and another. By the time the sequence had run its course, the entire datawall was filled with miniature mug-shots of “reacquired” fugitives, a rogues gallery of Russian science.

  “These, of course,” Marianna voice-overed, “are only the ones we managed to reacquire while in transit. Them, we hand off to Russian or CIS authorities for the actual arrest and detention, under a codicil to the Cooperative Threat Reduction program. If, on the other hand, a prole is located only after the buyer’s taken delivery, reacquisition gets problematic. In that case, the file is turned over to Interdiction for final disposition. We point, they click.”

  A new rectangle took its place on the org chart, displayed in halftone, presumably to signify that Interdiction was in the organization but not of it. Sure enough, dotted lines ran from it out of the CROM frame entirely, to terminate in the external “field agencies with operational responsibilities”—a case study in the matrix management of mayhem.

  Knox shifted in his chair. “And ‘final disposition’ involves what, exactly?”

  Aristos exchanged a glance with Marianna, then turned back to Knox. “We could tell you, but then we’d have to shoot you,” he joked. At least Knox hoped it was a joke.

  “Which brings us back to me,” Knox said. “From what I’ve just seen of your IT ops, you’re up to your bikini briefs in systems analysts. What do you need me for?”

  In response, Marianna called up a new slide, blank except for security markings and three names:

  • Viktor Il’ich Komarov

  • David Yakovich Dinershtein

  • Galina Mikhailovna Postrel’nikova

  “Like you said earlier, Jon, it’s all about magnetohydrodynamicists. These three in particular. CROM is trying to reacquire them as we speak.”

  She did a creditable job of pronouncing the names, then filled in the details: “All three are Ph.D. laureates of the All-Union Institute for Magnetohydrodynamics in Moscow—doctorates awarded ’89, ’98, and ’90 respectively. All involved in Tokamak research till its defunding in 2001: Postrel’nikova and Komarov as staff at Akademgorodok, Dinershtein as a postdoc at Mendeleyev in St. Pete. On IPP maintenance thereafter. Last sightings: Komarov, in Lisbon, February 11th a year ago; Dinershtein, in Cherbourg, September 3rd, same year; Postrel’nikova, lower Manhattan, just two days ago.”

  That explained the non-alphabetical listing: order of evaporation.

  Marianna turned from the wall display to look straight at Knox. “Part of the reason you’re here is your personal relationship with one of the subjects—Postrel’nikova. In addition, though, there’s another, even more promising connection . . .”

  “The name ‘Rusalka’ mean anything to you?” Aristos asked.

  Knox furrowed his brow. “Um, something out of Russian folklore. Ethnology 101. It’s a, a mermaid of sorts, I think.”

  “Really? Didn’t know that.” Aristos flicked a smile on and off.

  “Anyhow, that’s not the one I meant. Rusalka’s a ship. A ship registered to Grishin Enterprises International, Arkady Grishin’s conglomerate.”

  “But a rusalka isn’t your standard-issue Hans Christian Andersen-type mermaid.” Knox had remembered the rest of it. “More a kind of water demon. She entices sailors into the depths and drowns them. Hardly an auspicious name to give a boat.”

  “Tell me if this looks auspicious to you.” Aristos tapped at the keyboard in his lap. The CROM org chart went away. In its place, the 3-D image of a ship now floated in the datawall behind him. “ ‘Luxurious’ doesn’t even come close. You name it, she’s got it: helipad, banquet hall the length of a football field, nailed-up downlink from the Sviaz-12 geosynch satellite—the whole nine yards. You sure you never heard of her? She was in all the papers when she called on New York this week.”

  “Guess I’ve got to start reading the shipping news. But that timeframe is suggestive.”

  Marianna nodded. “Uh-huh. It was during Rusalka‘s New York layover that Galina, or someone posing as Galina, got herself disappeared.”

  “You’re suggesting Galina was abducted by someone on Rusalka?”

  “Hell, no—she arrived on Rusalka.” Aristos ran fat fingers through thinning hair. “They extracted her right off the roof of a downtown skyscraper. Caught Compliance with their pants down. No sightings since. The ball’s in Reacquisition’s court.”

  Marianna’s cheeks looked flushed for some reason. “There’s more to the story than that,” she said. “You flashed on it yourself yesterday, when I showed you that snapshot. The extractee was almost certainly not the same Galina Mikhailovna Postrel’nikova who boarded Rusalka on June 27th in Cherbourg.”

  “But, whoever she was, she disembarked, right? So why all the interest in the ship?”

  “Common denominator. The first two, Komarov and Dinershtein, were routine disappearances, not extractions like Galina. But there’s a Rusalka connection there too, if you go looking hard enough.” Something in Marianna’s tone said she was the one who’d gone looking.

  “So, if Galina never really left . . .”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “We’re guessing all three of those proles are still onboard.”

  “What’s Galina doing on a yacht, anyway?” Knox asked. Precious little luxury in the lives of Russian physicists these days, if CROM’s stats were even halfway accurate.

  “For public consumption?” Aristos shrugged. “Taking a cruise with an old flame, is all.”

  “Wait a minute . . . not Sasha?” So that’s why they’d called him in.

  “Right the first time. Arkady Grishin’s second-in-command, heir apparent, and, by a strange coincidence,”—this time Aristos’ broad grin seemed genuine—“your old drinking buddy, Aleksandr Andreyevich Bondarenko.”

  Sasha.

  This assignment sure was raising old ghosts. First Galina, now this: the specter par excellence, the memory Knox had consigned to oblivion lo, these past twenty years. The friend he’d never intended to make in the first place.

  Making friends with Russians in the waning days of the Soviet era was contraindicated for an
American exchange student. The xenophobia was mutual, to the point where the only Russians eager to hang out with foreigners were dissidents or, worse news, KGB snitches. Either way, they spelled trouble.

  Trouble was exactly what Jonathan Knox didn’t want. He’d pretty much resigned himself to a solitary ten-month tour, to moving wraithlike through Soviet society, a detached, immaterial observer.

  Meeting Galina in the Metro made short work of his plans for immateriality. Stevie’s adventure on the escalator had raised his clinginess index to where any attempt to disengage him from his rescuer threatened another squalling fit. For her part, Galina didn’t seem to want to let go either. The three of them wound up riding together all the way into central Moscow. With the little boy perched on her lap in the rocking subway car, the young woman even managed a hesitant, whispered, getting-to-know-you conversation with Knox. It was as if all her ingrained Soviet wariness of foreigners had melted away in the presence of this foreign child. As if childhood were a country unto itself, any of whose natives could claim dual Russian citizenship.

  If Galya was shy and soft-spoken, the friend who met them at the Lenin Library station more than made up for it. Aleksandr Andreyevich Bondarenko—“Sasha” to his many friends—was large, loud, and dauntingly gregarious. Born and raised in Bratsk, north of Lake Baikal, he epitomized the expansive, wide-open character Siberians are justly famous for. Even before Galina could break from his embrace to make introductions, Sasha was holding out a hand to Knox, his face crinkling in a grin so wide it almost made his eyes disappear.

  “Aleksandr Andreyevich Bondarenko,” he announced in a voice exuberant enough to draw stares from passers-by on the Metro platform.

  Knox gave the beaming, sandy-haired stranger a dubious onceover. Young, perhaps only a year or so older than Knox. Taller and thinner than your average Russian, with broad peasant features redeemed from plainness by the lively intelligence shining out of his blue eyes and the way his mouth kept breaking out in a slightly gap-toothed grin.