Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  The Russian lifted two clear plastic cups from a sizable stack on the credenza and reached down somewhere below, where Gideon couldn’t see. He came up with a liter bottle, not the cheap stuff from a Russian bottling house but Monteforte from Italy with a fresh seal on the cap.

  Gideon seemed surprised to see that the bottle was already chilled and frosted and that Mirnov had no trouble finding ice cubes where he found the bottle.

  The Russian noticed his expression.

  “We still have a few conveniences,” said Mirnov with a smile.

  Gideon grinned and took the glass.

  The Russian lifted another bottle containing a clear fluid and merely held it up as if there was no need to identify its contents, offering some to Gideon.

  “None for me. I’m fine.”

  Then Mirnov poured a little vodka into his own glass and stirred it into the charged water with a swizzle stick.

  “Now, what can I do for you?” he asked.

  “As you know,” said Gideon, “the institute gathers data on nuclear materials. Civilian power plants. Military fissile materials when we can.”

  “I am familiar,” said the Russian.

  “It has come to our attention that there may be some materials missing from your facility.”

  Mirnov’s look suddenly went dark, his expression dour.

  “It may not be accurate information,” said Gideon. “Still, because of the specific nature of this information, we thought it best to check it out as discreetly as possible.”

  “You have told authorities in Moscow this information?”

  “No,” said Gideon. “We did not want to cause undue concern or alarm until we had a chance to talk to people in charge on site. As I said, it is entirely possible that our information is wrong.”

  “What is the source of this information?”

  “I would rather not say. If it is inaccurate, it does not matter. If, on the other hand … ”

  “I see.” Mirnov sipped from his plastic glass.

  “A quick look at some of your records should clarify the matter,” said Gideon.

  “We would be happy to comply,” said Mirnov, “though I am a little shorthanded at the moment. Perhaps if you could give us a little more direction, narrow the area of your inquiry?” He was fishing for specifics.

  “Two field tactical artillery shells, nuclear,” said Gideon.

  “I see.” Mirnov sat up straight in his chair and put his glass down. “We wouldn’t want such misinformation to be reported.”

  “That’s what we were thinking,” said Gideon.

  “I appreciate your concern for accuracy,” said Mirnov. “I assume this error has not spread too far.” He arched an eyebrow. The Russian was clearly referring to outside intelligence agencies, particularly in the U.S.

  “The information has been maintained in-house,” said Gideon. “There is still time to correct it.”

  “Good.” There was a sigh of relief from Mirnov. “Of course, we will be happy to cooperate in any way we can. Where would you like to start?”

  “Your own inventory numbers should make it very easy to check,” said Gideon.

  “True,” said Mirnov. He punched the intercom key on his phone and picked up the receiver. “Dimitri, would you come in here, please?”

  A moment later, the assistant entered.

  “Dimitri. I would like you to pull these files.” Mirnov made a note, pointing to a circled item. The assistant dutifully took the sheets and left the office.

  “It shouldn’t take him long to find them.”

  “Good,” said Gideon. “I have a plane to catch back to Moscow.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “About three hours.”

  “We should have you back at the airport in plenty of time. I can have one of my people drive you,” said Mirnov. “I’m sure Dimitri would love to do it. He has a large new Mercedes,” said Mirnov.

  Gideon looked at him, wondering how a man who hadn’t been paid in two months could afford this.

  Mirnov could read his mind. “Dimitri is also an entrepreneur. He has a small business on the side.”

  In Russia this has become a euphemism for many things. “What does he do?”

  Mirnov shrugged like he wasn’t sure. “There are many business opportunities in the new Russia. I myself will have to investigate them, when I have the time,” said Mirnov.

  Gideon smiled but felt a sick feeling in his stomach. “Thank you for your offer, but I have a car and a driver.” He took a sip from his own glass.

  “I trust that the people at the institute are not too concerned about this mistake. They do happen,” said Mirnov. “I myself have found records from our own facility where overworked employees have entered incorrect numbers.”

  “I am sure the people at the institute will be relieved as soon as I can call them,” said Gideon.

  “If it is our mistake, it reflects poorly on us,” said the Russian. “As the manager of this facility, I am responsible. We would not want the institute to have a bad impression of us. We do our best.” He was now talking somewhat nervously. They both noticed that minutes were passing, and there was no sign of Dimitri or the files.

  “Of course,” said Gideon.

  “Either way,” said Mirnov. “The information will be quickly corrected. We completed a fresh inspection only yesterday. So our records are accurate, up to the minute.”

  They waited while the Russian tapped out a pattern of thumps on the surface of his desk and Gideon emptied his glass. Finally Mirnov got tired.

  “Let me check and see.” He picked up the phone and dialed a number on the intercom. There was no answer. He dialed another number. This time it was picked up, and Mirnov spoke in Russian.

  “Is Dimitri there? … What do you mean he left? … I see … I see.” Finally he put the receiver down.

  “Excuse me for one moment,” said Mirnov. He rose and left the office, closing the door behind him. Gideon listened. He couldn’t make out words, but he could hear voices rising in volume outside the door.

  A moment later, Mirnov reentered the room. His face was ashen. There were beads of perspiration on his forehead.

  “You will have to excuse me,” he said. “We seem to have a small problem.”

  “A problem?” said Gideon.

  “Dimitri has left the building. My staff is looking for him now.” He wiped his lip with a handkerchief and took a deep swallow of vodka and water from the glass on his desk.

  “Have they found the files?” said Gideon.

  “No. That is part of the problem. It seems the records for the two items in question … They are missing,” said Mirnov.

  “And Dimitri has left to look for them?”

  There was a blank expression on the Russian’s face, followed by a slight shrug of the shoulders.

  Gideon got out of his chair and headed for the door. He retraced his steps back out to the long corridor, followed closely by Mirnov. The two started at a walk and then a slow jog until they were running headlong toward the parking lot outside.

  Gideon threw open the door. The Mercedes was gone.

  SIX

  PADGET ISLAND, WA

  He was short with dark brown hair, thinning on top, and soft brown eyes, the son of a Kansas banker. Scott Taggart had been many things in the space of his forty-two years. In his youth, after an argument with his father, he left home and drove a truck for a local freight company to put himself through college. He worked nights busing tables in a restaurant to finish graduate school.

  Scott’s field was American history, and he wanted to teach. Jobs were hard to find, but what he lacked in credentials he made up for in persistence. He found a job at a small college in western Washington State, first as a teaching assistant, then as a part-time faculty member. It was there that he met Kirsten.

  She could have been the poster girl for Norwegian beauty. When she ended up in one of his lecture series, Scott couldn’t keep his eyes off of her. The feeli
ng seemed to be mutual. The college had strict rules against faculty dating undergraduates, and for nearly a year he fought off the urge to ask her out.

  The school solved this problem for him in the early spring when it passed him over for a tenured position. It seemed they wanted someone with an Ivy League pedigree. Taggart was forced to move on. But in the summer, he struck up a relationship with Kirsten, and when he moved, he didn’t go alone. They lived together for five months and were married the following November. Together they started over, this time in eastern Washington, where Scott found another teaching assignment. It was a step down, only a community college, but he liked the work and enjoyed the students, though most of them were not as serious as he would have preferred.

  To make ends meet, Kirsten started a small bookkeeping business. She had studied accounting in college, though she hadn’t finished her degree. A year later, they had their first child, a boy they named Adam, after her father. Kirsten’s business grew rapidly. She was affable and outgoing, as blessed with social skills as she was with numbers. In less than three years, her business had blossomed so that by then she employed two other people.

  It was about this time that the trouble began. It came in the mail, with a return address to the Internal Revenue Service in Ogden, Utah. Kirsten and her business were being audited. She couldn’t imagine why. She’d made money, but not that much. She looked at the notice and discovered that they’d made a mistake. The notice of audit contained her name and the name of her business all right but the employer identification number was wrong. It seemed that they had mixed up her business tax records with someone else’s.

  She called the telephone number on the notice, but no one could help her. They told her to tell her story to the auditor when he arrived. She didn’t know whether to gather receipts and ready her books for audit or not. She assumed that when they discovered their mistake they would go away, leave her alone. She was wrong.

  A month later, her first meeting with the auditor did not go well. The revenue agent was a middle-aged woman worn down to a humorless nub by years of civil service. When Kirsten suggested that they’d made a mistake, she was informed that “the service does not make mistakes.”

  When she tried to show the woman the erroneous information on the notice, the auditor merely gobbled up the document, told Kirsten she would review it, then demanded to see Kirsten’s business ledger and receipts.

  The audit dragged on for months with an ever-increasing demand for more documents, more receipts. When Kirsten insisted that they had made a mistake and wanted to know why the notice listed someone else’s identification number, the revenue agent lost her temper. She told Kirsten that if she wanted to be difficult, her business would not be audited for one year, but for two. Within days, a second formal notice of audit for an additional year had issued. That would teach her to question the authority of the auditor. A level of personal venom now seemed to be driving the audit.

  Scott tried to console his wife. He told her not to worry. Sooner or later it would be straightened out. They would discover their mistake, and it would be taken care of.

  But for Kirsten there was no peace. The IRS gave her thirty days to gather her records for the entire additional audit year. Meeting the quixotic and ever-changing demands of the auditor became a full-time job for Kirsten. She no longer had time for business or for her family. She was forced to let one of her employees go. Her business suffered, and her income dropped. For seven more months, it dragged on with no indication from the government that they were getting any closer to the end. Kirsten still did not know what the IRS was looking for, whether she owed back taxes, interest, or penalties. Whenever she met with the auditor, the woman was unpleasant. Nothing Kirsten seemed to say or do was ever the right thing. The auditor would tell her nothing. Whenever Kirsten asked a question, the auditor would take a note and tell her she would get back to her with the answer, but she never did. It was as if Kirsten’s every inquiry either was met with open hostility or disappeared into the vast black hole of government bureaucracy. Whenever the auditor called, it was always the same thing, a constant and unceasing demand for more records.

  Now the government’s search had led the auditor into Scott and Kirsten’s personal tax returns. To Kirsten it seemed that the failure to find anything amiss only fueled the auditor’s hostility. The IRS agent now had to justify an audit that had dragged on for fifteen months.

  The auditor demanded an extension of the statute of limitations so that she could go back farther into their records, beyond the three-year limit. When Kirsten objected, the auditor told her that if she didn’t agree to the extension, the IRS would file a tax deficiency with the courts, and they would be required to hire a lawyer. At one point the auditor even hinted at criminal penalties. Kirsten wanted to know what she had done wrong. The auditor wouldn’t tell her.

  Kirsten was losing weight. It seemed a day didn’t go by without the auditor calling and demanding something. Kirsten couldn’t sleep at night. Scott was worried about her. He tried to intervene with the IRS. He called the auditor and tried to discuss it with her. The auditor took a dodge. She told Scott that since the original audit was for his wife’s business, he was not the taxpayer. She could not discuss the matter with him and promptly hung up.

  Every time the phone rang, Kirsten feared it was the auditor with demands for more documents or, worse, the addition of still another audit year. Life was becoming unbearable.

  Now when Adam cried at night, Kirsten became irritable. Nothing Scott said or did seemed to reach her. There was no easing the constant anxiety.

  Still, Scott made the best of it, trying to ease his wife’s anxiety, until one Friday afternoon when he came home early from work and told Kirsten that his teaching contract had not been renewed for the following year. Without notice, the IRS had attached his wages for the failure to pay unspecified back taxes. The college received government grants, and its students applied for government-guaranteed loans. It couldn’t afford for its faculty to have problems with the Internal Revenue Service. The federal government was crushing Scott and Kirsten Taggart’s lives.

  The agony of the audit dragged on for two more months with no word as to closure. Scott and Kirsten received a foreclosure notice on their home. Without Kirsten’s income, they were now unable to meet their mortgage payment.

  On a Saturday morning in June, shortly after the end of the school year, Scott took Adam to the park for a ride on the swings while Kirsten cleaned out her office. Word of her troubles with the IRS had seeped into the local accounting community. Her last client had departed two weeks earlier, fearful that Kirsten’s problems might be contagious.

  At two-thirty in the afternoon, Scott returned home and called his wife at the office. There was no answer. Thinking that she might need help carrying boxes to the car or comfort in a moment of emotional anxiety, he left Adam with neighbors and headed to Kirsten’s office. Inside, he found her at her desk, head slumped on the blotter as if she were taking a nap. It wasn’t until he saw the thin line of spittle, a milky froth running from the side of her mouth, that he realized something was wrong. Kirsten had taken an entire bottle of prescription sleeping pills.

  She survived on a ventilator for sixteen days, until the doctors determined that there was no hope. Kirsten was brain-dead.

  At her funeral, Scott wanted to crawl into the grave with her and pull the dirt in on top of both of them. He was racked by grief. With Kirsten he could bear anything, surmount any problem, deal with any questions the IRS could throw at him. He could have found another job, started over. Without her, he couldn’t find the will or the strength to get out of bed in the morning. He didn’t know what to do with Adam. He finally took the child to Kirsten’s parents in Seattle while he regrouped and tried to find a reason to live. Strangely enough, it was the IRS that gave him that reason.

  Three months after Kirsten’s death, Scott received a computer-generated letter. The IRS advised Kirsten Taggart that t
he agency had made a mistake. Somehow a keypunch operator had entered the wrong employer I.D. number on Kirsten’s estimated quarterly tax payments, crediting them to another taxpayer’s account. Kirsten showed up as delinquent in their computer. She owed no taxes, interest, or penalties. The government, rather than investigating Kirsten’s information that it had made a mistake, assumed that she was lying, that she had received income, and that she had failed to make estimated quarterly tax payments. For this, Kirsten had been badgered and pursued until ultimately she took her own life. Scott had lost his family, his career, and his home, and his infant son had no mother.

  Scott Taggart didn’t bother to inform the government of the price that he and his family had to pay for bureaucratic arrogance. He would deliver the message in his own time—and in his own way.

  KENT, WA

  The Victor portable was a honey of a torch. Chaney had picked it up at a tool shop in Everett for five hundred bucks. It came in its own handy carrying case, the size of a large attaché, with two spare tips. He had ordered an extra bottle of acetylene, fearful that he might run out.

  The torch was specifically designed for working in small places where a full-sized cutting torch wouldn’t reach. It could cut through inch-thick case-hardened steel in a matter of minutes.

  He had spent two days with a team of handpicked militiamen setting the mission up, finding out where the Russian national Grigori Chenko was housed at Kent, and sizing up the jail. It was a two-story brick structure in an area of light industry on the fringes of town. The building didn’t look like a jail. The architects had done what they could to mask it in order to avoid public controversy in its placement. Fortunately for Chaney, they had also compromised its security.

  There were no high chain-link fences surrounding the facility and topped by rolls of concertina wire. Instead, the unit where Chenko was housed backed up to a street used mostly by trucks during the day to make their deliveries to warehouses in the area. At night, the road was mostly deserted. The jail was pleasantly bordered by a ten-foot strip of well-manicured grass with shrubs planted against the exterior brick walls. From the outside, it was designed to blend in. It looked like most of the other commercial buildings in the industrial park.