by Taylor Smith
Neville indicated a group of four deeply upholstered club chairs that encircled a low Plexiglas table. He took one himself as Mariah and Chaney buckled themselves in across the table from him. Mariah glanced around the cabin. The interior had been custom-finished with oak paneling and plush carpets. A desk built into one corner was fitted out with a computer terminal, fax machine and telephone. Farther back in the cabin, there was yet another grouping of chairs opposite a sofa that ran along the far wall of the cabin.
Ignoring the fourth chair in the group where the others were sitting, Dieter Pflanz settled himself into the high-backed leather desk chair, buckling his seat belt as he swiveled to face them. His hooded, beadlike eyes flitted about as he brooded over them, shoulders hunched, fingers clenched around the carved wooden arms of the chair.
Mariah turned away from his hunter’s gaze to Neville, but he was preoccupied with folding his overcoat and laying it on the empty seat beside him. Chaney was watching out the window as the plane rolled onto the runway. As sunlight streamed in, warming the cabin, Mariah shrugged out of her own coat, slipping it over the back of her chair. There was a fierce roar of engines, and then the plane rose, hovered for a few seconds, then hurtled forward. As the aircraft climbed and banked steeply, brilliant shafts of sunshine traveled through the cabin. When the pilot leveled off, the sunlight was falling in narrow slits through the starboard windows; they were headed east.
“We’re going back to Langley?” she asked Neville. He nodded. “Whose plane is this?”
Neville glanced at Pflanz and then to Mariah and Paul, who was watching them now and listening quietly. “It belongs to a friend.”
“McCord,” Mariah said.
Neville frowned, then leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Pursing his lips, he studied his hands for a moment. With a quick glance at Chaney, he turned his gaze to Mariah. “I wonder whether it wouldn’t be better if we didn’t burden Mr. Chaney with more information than he really needs to know. Nothing personal, you understand,” he added to the reporter, “but there’s sensitive material involved, and I wouldn’t want to put you in the position of having to compromise your journalistic principles.”
“That’s awfully kind of you,” Chaney said dryly.
Neville shrugged. “We try to cooperate with the fourth estate.”
“Much appreciated, I’m sure, but I’m having a little trouble figuring out what you intend to do once we land, since your friend here seems to think I know too much already.”
“Well, that’s really the question, isn’t it? What exactly is it that you think you know?”
“He doesn’t know anything,” Mariah cut in. “He’s just been fishing, but he hasn’t learned a thing and I haven’t told him what little I know. Let him go on his way and he’ll drop this investigation. Won’t you, Paul?”
“Don’t bother perjuring yourself, Mr. Chaney,” Neville said, holding up his hand. “Sorry, Mariah, but that’s a little disingenuous, since we already know that he’s aware of what happened in Vienna when your family was attacked, and Mr. Chaney doesn’t have a reputation for backing off. What I want to know is why the two of you came to New Mexico and what you found out here.”
“Noth—”
“Forget it, Mariah. These guys aren’t going to let us walk, so what’s the point?” Chaney turned to Neville. “As you say, I knew about Katarina Müller in Vienna and that she had compromised Mariah’s husband. I figured it had something to do with his efforts within the IAEA to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. When I found out the truth about the truck driver who had attacked David, that pretty much clinched it in my mind. Then I saw a news item about the five nuclear arms specialists who were involved in that tanker accident outside Taos. I knew that one of the Russians, Sokolov, was their best mind in the field.”
“How did you know that?”
“David Tardiff told me he’d met Sokolov in Moscow. He also told me that Sokolov was slated to visit Los Alamos under the Russia/U.S. Nuclear Cooperation Pact.”
No, Mariah thought, that was on the CHAUCER file. He’s covering for my theft.
“I see,” Neville said. “Go on.”
“Well, the accident in New Mexico seemed entirely too coincidental. If it wasn’t an accident, I thought, there were two possibilities. Either those guys were eliminated by our side because they were smuggling arms, or their deaths were staged by a well-organized terrorist group who wanted them to disappear without a trace so they’d be free to help build a secret arsenal.”
“And which theory is correct? Have you decided?”
“Neither.”
“Neither?”
“Nope,” Chaney said. “I found out in Los Alamos that both of the Americans, as well as Sokolov, were disenchanted with the nuclear arms race. I have to imagine that the other two Russians were, as well, since they were handpicked for this trip by Sokolov. So I don’t think any of them would have been involved in spreading nuclear weapons. We followed their trail to Taos, to the bar and then to the site of the accident. There were no bodies after the accident—no identifying evidence of any kind. But lots of people had noticed them in the bar, so that was supposed to suffice for an ID of the victims. The feds—your people, I’m guessing—moved in quickly to squelch any in-depth investigation.”
“Why would we want these scientists dead?”
“I didn’t say you did. You just wanted it to look like they were dead. But those men weren’t killed in that fire. They slipped away in the confusion after rigging the tanker to destroy their van. Picked up a raft down the road at Pilar and floated down the Rio Grande under cover of darkness. Were met by your people, I would imagine.”
“I see,” Neville mused aloud. He glanced at Pflanz, whose glower had deepened. “An interesting speculation. Anything else?”
“Well,” Chaney continued, “there is the matter of Pflanz here. I saw him keeping an eye on Katarina Müller in Vienna.” Pflanz’s eyes focused directly on the reporter. “I know you two are old comrades-in-arms and I know Pflanz now works for Gus McCord. And I’m pretty sure that McCord got me fired from CBN. That was stupid, if you don’t mind me saying,” Chaney added, looking up at Pflanz. “Very unsubtle and it really pissed me off.”
“And I was right about McCord running arms, wasn’t I?” Mariah said angrily to Neville.
“Mariah!” Neville and Chaney admonished in unison, spinning to face her.
She looked at them in turn. “Oh, the hell with it,” she said. “I told Paul about that report of mine that you squelched, Mr. Neville, and about CHAUCER—so sue me. And you said it yourself, Paul, they’re not going to let us walk. Let’s just get all the cards out on the table, shall we?”
Neville sat back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrest. “So what’s your conclusion? You think that Dieter here and Gus McCord and I have gone into peddling nukes for our own profit. Is that it?”
Mariah studied the deputy closely. He was arrogant—too used to operating in the shadows, too used to ignoring the rules that others are bound by, writing his own, instead. It was the kind of professional deformity that plagues the world of covert operations, where the name of the game is violating other countries’ laws and where ends too often come to justify any means. Moral standards become blurred, ethics a matter of relativity—do unto others lest they do unto us. It was why CIA covert operations had so often landed the Agency in hot water, obscuring its defensive surveillance and analytic work.
The question was, had Neville also fallen prey to the most banal kind of personal corruption—simple criminality in pursuit of the almighty buck?
“Why don’t you stop playing games and tell us?” Mariah said impatiently. “You wanted to know if we would listen to reason. Well, let’s hear a reasonable explanation for all of this.”
Neville paused, his focus shifting to the middle distance, apparently weighing his options. Then he nodded and looked at Mariah.
“It was CHAUCER that started it,” he said. “We lo
cated those weapons that Tatyana Baranova told you about. Management at the research facility was corrupt. As long as the Soviet Union was functioning, workers in the weapons program had elite status and received the best consumer goods available. But when the country unraveled, Moscow’s preferential treatment of them disappeared and people in those isolated communities were cut off from even the most basic commodities. It didn’t take some of them long to figure out that they had something valuable that they could trade for what they needed, something for which outside buyers were willing to pay a premium price.”
“And McCord’s gunrunning?” Mariah asked.
“The shipping company that McCord bought had for years been engaged in a profitable sideline peddling surplus East bloc weapons—Kalashnikovs and such—to various guerrilla groups and terrorist organizations. McCord took over the operation, with our knowledge, to use it as a front for acquiring illicit Soviet nukes.”
Chaney shifted forward in his chair. “Why did he need this shipping company?”
“Bona fides,” Mariah said. Neville nodded.
“What?”
“You don’t just walk into the illegal arms bazaar and start peddling, Paul,” she explained. “You have to have a legitimate—if that’s the word—reputation as a reliable dealer before sellers or buyers are going to trust you. You have to establish your bona fides.”
“Especially if you’re going to get into the very tricky specialty of nuclear weapons,” Neville added.
“Okay,” Chaney said. “So McCord and his buddy Pflanz buy their bona fides in the arms market through the acquisition of a company that’s been dealing in arms for a long time. Then what? They corner the market in smuggled former Soviet nukes, is that it?”
“That’s the general idea,” Neville said.
“Well, gee, why didn’t you just say so?” Chaney said, leaning back in his chair. “It’s the epitome of the American entrepreneurial spirit—exploiting new commercial markets. Who could object?”
Neville scowled at the sarcasm and Mariah could have sworn she heard Dieter Pflanz actually growl. She shook her head thoughtfully.
“There’s more to it,” she said. “The five experts who disappeared in New Mexico were obviously needed for the safe handling of the smuggled Soviet nukes. But we already determined that they were philosophically opposed to spreading these things to terrorists and other crazies. So how do they fit in?”
Neville sighed. “It’s a double sting operation,” he said. “First we try to get our hands on the weapons whenever we hear about a corrupt Russian source. After we do, a team goes in and plugs the leak that we’ve identified. That’s sting number one. A few former KGB officers are cooperating with us on this.”
“The KGB!” Mariah exclaimed. “But it was they—or their successors—who kidnapped Tatyana Baranova!”
“A case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, I’m afraid. One of their more traditional operators in Vienna found out she was in contact with us and had her spirited away. We tried to locate her, but our trusted sources inside the Russian security apparatus are limited, and we have to be careful not to compromise this other business.”
“You said a double sting,” Chaney said. “Does that mean you’re tapping the buyers, as well as the sellers?”
Neville nodded. “The team of scientists from New Mexico has been set up in a secret offshore facility. There they disable the weapons’ detonators and remove the radioactive fuel, then plant an electronic tracing device. Once the dud nukes are transferred to buyers, the bug will send an intermittent signal too brief to be detected by them—a signature pulse once every two hours that only lasts a millisecond. Long enough, though, to be picked up by one of our satellites. We track the location of the dud and, by extension, the baddies.”
“Taking them out at your leisure,” Chaney said.
“That’s our hope. We haven’t actually transferred any yet, although we’ve acquired several of the portable nuclear weapons that CHAUCER put us onto. And we’ve recently had some nibbles from potential customers.”
Mariah and Paul stared at Neville, stunned by the audacity of the thing—and by the realization that this elaborate scam might actually work. But there was no escaping that it had one glaring, fatal flaw. It was Chaney who pointed it out.
“And while you’re waiting for customers for the dud nukes, McCord and Pflanz peddle conventional weapons to these same crazies,” he said.
“A few deals here and there to keep up appearances,” Neville said with a shrug. “It’s a small price to pay.”
“Oh, come on!” Mariah exclaimed.
“Come on yourself, Mariah.” Neville protested. “You’ve studied this, you know how many conventional arms dealers are out there. The market’s wide open. If a terrorist wants to buy guns or explosives, there’s no end of willing suppliers. We have to establish the connections somehow, and dealing in arms is a language they understand.”
“Not to mention the fact that it underwrites the costs of the sting operation,” Mariah said dryly. “Even Gus McCord’s pockets aren’t bottomless.”
“But it’s highly illegal under U.S. law,” Chaney said. “The congressional intelligence oversight committees go nuts over unauthorized CIA arms dealing, regardless of the motive. They’d throw a fit if they knew about this operation. That’s why you need McCord, isn’t it? To keep it off the Company’s books.”
“Gus McCord is a patriot and a humanitarian.” They all looked up at Dieter Pflanz, who was now perched on the edge of his chair. “He’s not doing this for himself. He’s doing it for the good of America, to keep it safe.”
“He’s in flagrant violation of American law,” Chaney argued. “The law is designed to keep this country safe, too.”
“What do you know about it, Chaney?” Pflanz spat. “You never fought for this country. Where were you when the rest of us were slogging through the jungles of ’Nam?”
“In college, drawing a high draft number, thank God,” Chaney countered. “Because I’m not sure what I would have done if I had been called. I didn’t support that war and I make no apologies for it—I think our leaders made a drastic mistake there. But that doesn’t make me any less a patriot than you or Gus McCord, Pflanz, so don’t give me this garbage! You guys hold in contempt the laws and institutions of this country, the same country that Gus McCord wants to lead as President. What kind of patriotism is that?”
Pflanz rose from his perch, his shadow falling across them. For a moment, he said nothing and the roar of the plane’s engines seemed deafening. “I told you,” he said finally, turning to Neville. “I told you it was pointless. He doesn’t want to see reason, he just wants a goddamn exposé to get his face on the tube!”
“Take it easy, Dieter. He’s simply expressing an opinion. He has a right. Why don’t you go up to the cockpit for a while and let me talk to these people?”
Pflanz hesitated, watching them glumly. Then he turned and disappeared into the cockpit, pulling the door shut behind him. The others sat in silence for a second.
“Now what?” Chaney said.
Neville glanced up, then sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “I was really hoping I could make you see the importance of keeping this under wraps. We could make it worth your while, you know.”
“Are you trying to bribe me?” Chaney asked, incredulous.
“No, no, nothing like that. I’m just suggesting that the Agency has a policy now of trying to be helpful to the press—especially its more sympathetic members. We need people to understand what we’re doing, and you could develop some contacts that would make you the envy of your colleagues in the press corps. We’re not monsters, you know. If we occasionally get carried away in our zeal to accomplish an objective, it’s with the best of intentions, I can assure you.”
“Tell that to the families of the forty-seven people who were killed in those terrorist bomb attacks in New York and Paris and London,” Mariah said. “Tell them you let McCord sel
l weapons to terrorists—with the best of intentions.”
“There’s no link between McCord’s operation and those attacks!”
“You hope not,” Chaney said. “But it doesn’t really matter whether you sell to terrorists in Africa or the Middle East or Europe or wherever. Those groups are interlinked and trade amongst themselves.”
“If we don’t put a lid on the spread of nukes,” Neville said, “the next time a bomb goes off, it could wipe out Paris or London or New York City.”
“I know that, but making the world safer for conventional terrorism is not the answer. You can’t get in bed with the bad guys and expect to keep your virtue intact.”
“You don’t know what it’s like out there,” Neville said angrily. “Neither do the good congresspeople on the Hill. Gus McCord does, and that’s why he volunteered to step in and help us, in spite of the constraints that Congress would put on us.”
“You’re wrong, Neville,” Chaney said. “I’ve spent my life out there on the front lines, trying to make Americans aware of the issues so they can make informed choices about what they want their government to do. I’ve seen plenty of rich, powerful dictators who operate in secrecy, megalomaniacs like Gus McCord who think only they know what’s best. In the end, it’s ordinary people who always suffer.”
“You think the American people care how we do this job, as long as it gets done?”
“We have checks and balances on covert action for a reason, Neville. Churchill used to say democracy’s the worst system in the world—except for all the others. Nobody in America elected Gus McCord to ‘save’ them, especially at the cost of trampling on the law and doing deals with terrorists. Not yet, anyway. God help us if we do.”
As Chaney spoke, Mariah was conscious of a change in the sound of the engines. She glanced around the cabin and noted that the sunlight was traveling around the walls in a steady path. “Why are we circling?” she asked, watching out the window. “We’re losing altitude.” Below them stretched vast, empty tracts of eastern New Mexico.
Neville and Chaney looked out as the aircraft moved into a hover pattern. Neville unbuckled his seat belt. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll find out.”