Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  “Did you pay a normal price?”

  “It was a good buy.” He conceded this like a wily businessman. “I wouldn’t call it extraordinary. As I remember, it was on the low side of competitive,” he said.

  “How far on the low side?”

  “I mean it was within reason.”

  She sighed. A request for immunity may not be an idle act after all.

  “Was Mr. Sperling selling chips to anybody else at the time?”

  “Oh sure. Everybody in town.”

  “To your knowledge were you one of his major buyers?”

  “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t think so. There were others.”

  “Who?”

  “Off the top of my head, I don’t know.”

  “So you might have been one of his major buyers?”

  “Could have been,” said Belden.

  “But it’s your position that you had no reason to suspect or believe that anything was wrong in these transactions? That they could have involved stolen merchandise?”

  “Absolutely not. I was simply doing business. He was selling, and I was buying.”

  “That is usually the case with stolen property,” she told him. “It’s what you reasonably believed that’s important.”

  “I reasonably believed that these were legitimate,” he said.

  “Do you have any records of these transactions? Receipts? Purchase orders?”

  “I might. I’d have to look.”

  There was a moment of silence as she studied the subpoena once more.

  “What’s wrong? Is there something there?”

  “No. It’s what’s missing that I’m worried about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, you would think that if your dealings with this Sperling were the issue, the government would be asking for your business records. Any evidence of your dealings with him.”

  He looked at her and shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “But they didn’t.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. My dealings with Sperling are the only thing I can think of.”

  “Well, if that’s what it is, I would say you probably don’t have anything too much to worry about. I think they probably just want to know what you know. But to be safe, you should demand immunity.”

  There was a palpable sigh of relief from the other side of her desk.

  “I would go, make the appearance, answer any questions truthfully, but only if they give you immunity, otherwise remain silent and take the Fifth.”

  “What do you mean? You’re not going with me?”

  “I don’t know that it’s necessary.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “It will cost you a good deal of money.”

  “I don’t care. You’re my lawyer.”

  “They’re probably on a fishing expedition, and your name appeared on a document or was mentioned by another witness.”

  “That’s probably it,” he said. “Still, I want you to be there.”

  “If you insist.”

  “I do. Name your fee.” He reached for his checkbook again.

  “I’d have to charge you for travel time.”

  “That’s all right.” He started writing before she could say anything.

  “Have you ever done this before?” he asked.

  “Not before a federal grand jury. But I’ve had clients indicted by the state.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a recommendation.” He looked up at her, and they both laughed.

  “There’s no need to pay me now.”

  “Nonsense.” He continued writing.

  “I’ll call the U.S. Attorney’s Office. My guess is they won’t tell me anything over the phone, but I can try.”

  “Sure. Try.”

  “Really, there’s no need for another retainer. I’ll bill you.”

  He smiled and kept writing. “You’ve been too good to me. I don’t want to stiff you on the fee.”

  “You’re not going to be stiffing me.”

  “Trust me,” he said. He finished writing, tore out the check, and slid it across the desk.

  She was looking at the $5,000 written in the “amount” space when he said, “You know where Roche Harbor is?”

  On an island, you tend to know where everything is. She nodded. He was moving toward the door.

  “I’ll meet you there on the dock Wednesday morning, seven o’clock.”

  “Wait a second. Are you sure that’ll give us enough time to get down to Seattle?”

  “Not to worry,” he said. “See you then,” and he was out the door.

  FIVE

  YEKATERINBURG, EAST OF THE URALS

  It was six hours by air from Moscow, and Gideon was having a hard time sleeping. The climb over the Urals was like riding a sled down a rock-strewn mountain. Aeroflot did not use its European airbuses on this route. Those were reserved for national face-saving to Paris and London or for overseas flights to America.

  On the Siberian runs, they used their aging fleet of Tupelevs, heavy lumbering planes that looked as if they would defy the physics of flight. Sometimes they did. There were no oxygen masks overhead, and only the foolhardy wondered if the seat cushions would float.

  Gideon was used to all of this. He had spent his early life bumping around Europe between his father in Amsterdam and his mother in Moscow.

  But he had never been to the eastern part of the old Soviet Union, beyond the Urals. Here there were pine-covered slopes, millions of square miles of trackless forest, a region rich in mineral wealth where Stalin housed his gulags and subsequent Soviet leaders hid their nuclear arsenal. It was an area that could swallow Western Europe whole and never belch.

  It had taken him three days trekking between various bureaus and departments in Moscow, using every chit and buttonholing old friend, to obtain the government clearances just to get through the gates at Sverdlovsk. He was to be met at the airport by a government car and driver.

  As the plane began to descend through the clouds, Gideon could see a strange and surreal landscape, a green carpet of pine and birch, spreading east as far as the eye could see. Periodically, strands of paved road would appear like curving ribbons out of the trackless forest, only to disappear once more, into the verdant sea of pines. He could see no traffic, even where the roads were visible for long distances. It was as if the plane were descending onto some vast uninhabited planet.

  Gideon knew better. Yekaterinburg was a city of two million people, one of the fastest growing and most prosperous regions in the Russian Federation. Named for Catherine the Great, it was a fur-trading town when Jefferson crafted the Declaration of Independence. Gideon had seen pictures of mansions built by the fur czars, massive Georgian structures that still dotted the central area of the city, though they were now dusted by the soot of industry.

  During the Bolshevik period the city got a new name: Sverdlovsk, after Yakov Sverdlov, first secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. The Bolsheviks were anxious to wipe the name of Yekaterinburg from the map for a single reason: During the early morning hours of August 16, 1918, in the basement of one of its larger homes, an appalling act of murder was committed that stained Russian history. Nicholas and Alexandra, the czar and czarina, along with all of their children, the last of the Romanovs, were shot to death. Their bodies were trucked into the forest and buried outside of town.

  As if continuing some thread of history, nearly seventy years later the city gave up another of its citizens to lead the country. Before becoming premier of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin had been mayor of Yekaterinburg. One of his acts while in office was to demolish the house where the dynastic executions took place, an act that he later claimed to regret.

  In the early 1990s, with the fall of Communism, the city reclaimed its heritage and once again became the City of Catherine.

  So much of Russian history had played out here that Gideon had an abiding interest to see the place. As the plane dropped lower, he could see a sprawl
of dismal white buildings on the horizon, an industrial complex that he knew only from photographs taken by satellite. It had been numbered during its heyday, and known only as Sverdlovsk-45. The areas around it were highly secured and Soviet citizens were required to possess special passes to travel in the area around Sverdlovsk.

  The plane dropped below the sea of pines, and its wheels skidded on the tarmac, the engines reversed, and the old Tupelev shuddered to a slow roll down the runway.

  It took Gideon more than an hour to collect his luggage and find his driver and the government car in front of the terminal building. Fifty minutes later he was passing through the gates at Sverdlovsk-45.

  It was an immense dingy complex of buildings, the kind you see in every developed nation where industrial decay starts to nibble at the fringes of a community. Here it was gnawing. Flat roofs and broken windows seemed to predominate, though there was none of the graffiti that marked similar sites in the West.

  Everywhere there was activity: heavy vehicles pulling trailers, men in overalls wearing hard hats, guards with Kalashnikovs. The driver pulled to a stop in front of an austere building, just inside the gates. There were two Russian-built cars, Ladas with considerable wear, a lot of dust and a few dents in them. And next to them, a spanking new Mercedes SL convertible, a gleaming powder blue.

  The parking lot was strewn with the remnants of rusted out seagoing containers too large to be carried away and steel bands that had probably encircled wooden crates long since transformed into ash in some enterprising worker’s fireplace. Gideon assumed that the building adjoining this parking lot had to be the administrative center.

  Gideon knew that the bunkers that lay buried in the incline of gently rolling hills beyond were the focus of his inquiry.

  It was known that there were 30,000 nuclear devices in storage or on launch pads in the Russian Federation. In addition to these, there were more than a thousand tons of highly enriched uranium and in excess of a hundred tons of plutonium in the country. It was these raw materials for bomb making that had most worried nuclear experts, both those in the West and their Russian colleagues.

  There had been several episodes of smuggling in Germany and Italy, as well as other places in Europe and the new eastern republics. In all, about fifty cases documented so far. Almost all of these involved low-grade materials, some of it approaching weapons grade, but in very small quantities.

  It was not the first time that a nuclear device or raw materials had shown up missing on paper in one of the institute’s reports. Almost invariably these turned out to be recordkeeping errors. In this case, however, it was the nature of the missing items that caused concern. Two small devices that might be easily transported would be at or near the top of any terrorist shopping list.

  Gideon was familiar with tactical field nuclear artillery. These had been items of discussion and negotiation in treaties.

  The United States had developed an eight-inch nuclear artillery shell in the early 1950s. Over the years, they had perfected and increased its destructive capacity by reducing barrel length and tamper bulk and by adding beryllium reflectors and more powerful high explosives to trigger the chain reaction. In their final incarnation, these shells measured no more than three feet in length, eight inches around, and weighed less than 250 pounds. Yet in this compact package, they could unleash ten kilotons of destructive force.

  These were meaningless statistics until applied to the real world. The Oklahoma City bombing, which took 162 lives, would have leveled three square miles of the central city if one of these shells had been detonated instead of fertilizer and diesel oil. The death toll would have been measured in hundreds of thousands instead of hundreds.

  If a nuclear shell had been detonated at the World Trade Center instead of a conventional truck bomb, the lower part of Manhattan would have disappeared, everything from the Financial District to Gramercy Park would have been totally destroyed.

  The Soviets had developed similar artillery shells. This was what Gideon was looking for, hoping and praying to find at Sverdlovsk, two small packages lost in a monumental accounting glitch.

  Gideon showed his pass to a guard at the door, who passed it to an officer inside. Two minutes later he was led into a small waiting room, where he took a seat on a hard wooden bench and waited.

  He checked his watch. Ten minutes passed. Finally the door opened and a tall slender man, balding and with glasses, came out.

  He was holding the pass in his hand and spoke in Russian. Gideon answered him.

  “I am Mr. van Ry.”

  The Russian looked him up and down. “What is this about?”

  Speaking perfect Russian, Gideon gave him a business card from the institute and watched to see if the man could read the English printed on it.

  The Russian’s eyes darted between the business card and Gideon’s face. The next words he spoke were in halting but clearly discernable English. “What is this about?”

  “I am authorized by authorities in Moscow to speak with your director. He is available?”

  “He is very busy,” said the Russian.

  “I think he will see me. Please, tell him I am here.”

  The Russian looked once more at the business card, then the signature on the security pass from Moscow.

  Gideon could read his mind. He was wondering what a Russian citizen was doing working in the United States for an institute that dealt with nuclear weapons.

  “Wait here.” The Russian turned and closed the door behind him.

  Gideon looked at the clock on the wall, turned, took a seat, and waited. A few moments later the door opened again, and the Russian stepped out. “Follow me.”

  The Russian led the way down a long corridor and through a rabbit warren of small offices and cubicles, most of which were empty and looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned in months. A uniform film of dust covered the floors.

  Their feet left concrete, and suddenly Gideon found himself walking on carpet. A few steps farther on, they stopped in front of a set of double wooden doors. The Russian opened one of them and stepped to the side for Gideon.

  As he entered the room, he saw another man, seated behind a massive mahogany desk. There were pictures on the walls and several pieces of African art, masks and carvings of some expense, which seemed out of place against the stained acoustic ceiling tiles and drab walls of the office.

  The man behind the desk stood to greet Gideon. He was dressed in a suit and tie. Well-pleated sharkskin, not something from Russian clothiers.

  “Dimitri tells me you are from the institute at Santa Crista.” He was smiling and held Gideon’s card in one hand.

  “Yes. That’s correct.” Gideon planted his best smile, crossed the office, and extended a hand that was eagerly taken by the Russian.

  “We are not used to visitors here,” said the man. “Please have a seat. You must be tired. Dimitri tells me you have come all the way from Moscow.”

  Gideon nodded.

  “How is the weather there?”

  Gideon sat down and Dimitri closed the door, leaving the two men alone.

  “The weather was pleasant,” said Gideon.

  “You see what we have here. Overcast. Always overcast,” said the Russian. “You must have some beautiful weather in California?”

  “It can be nice.”

  “You know, I’ve always wanted to visit your institute. You must tell me how you obtained a position there. It is on the central coast, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it close to Hollywood?” The man spoke perfect English.

  “No,” said Gideon.

  The Russian seemed disappointed. “You must excuse me,” he said. “Where are my manners? I am Yuri Mirnov, director of Sverdlovsk. Or what is left of it.” He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “You have already met twenty percent of my staff.” He was referring to Dimitri. “But then you know the difficult times we are having here.”

  “I am very much aware,” said Gide
on. “It must be very hard.”

  “You have no idea,” said Mirnov. “Dimitri hasn’t been paid in two months. I myself have had to endure three salary reductions in the last year. And the work, it just keeps piling up.” He gestured toward stacks of paper on the floor strewn around his office.

  Gideon was wondering who, under such conditions of austerity, owned the Mercedes outside in the parking lot. But he possessed sufficient diplomacy not to ask.

  The area around Sverdlovsk was like few others in Russia. Since the fall of Communism, there had been a crippling crime wave. Those who did not know Russia attributed this to political dislocations for a nation trying to find its way. The fact was that crime flourished under the Soviet regime, particularly from the 1960s on. Artificial shortages of everything from sugar to nuts were state-manufactured in order to establish a thriving black market, which in turn was controlled by bureaucrats and other high-level party functionaries. They mingled freely with an underworld that was inbred in the Russian culture. Three hundred years of oppression had made the children of Mother Russia adept at avoiding the strictures of the law. Beneath the statue of Lenin, under the banner of Socialism, they had created shadow capitalism to avoid the failures of their own planned economy and proceeded to line their pockets.

  With the demise of Communism, they were now free to come out into the open, a new age of robber barons, applauded by the West. It was a free-for-all on the order of Tombstone in the 1880s. There were a dozen shootings a day in Moscow, “businessmen” assassinating their competition. The only place where things were rougher was Sverdlovsk.

  Here was a land of wide open opportunity if you had a private army and were willing to look under your car with a mirror every morning before leaving for work. What made it even more dangerous was that the region possessed thousands of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, a veritable bazaar of mass destruction.

  Mirnov swiveled around in his chair to a credenza behind him. “Can I offer you some mineral water?” he asked.

  Gideon was thirsty and tired after the long flight. “Yes. Thank you.”