Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  It was only two years old, and on the inside it was like a country club. Those in custody were usually held here only a short time, pending trial. If convicted, they would be transferred to one of the permanent state or federal prisons to serve their time.

  There was a large dayroom on the ground floor with a thirty-inch television set bolted to supports suspended from the second-tier balcony. A Ping-Pong table and six stainless steel tables with fixed benches all bolted to the floor did double duty for cards and meals. There was exercise equipment, a weight machine, and two-and-a-half-pound barbells for running in place.

  Within minutes of being booked, strip-searched, and given orange jail togs and rubber thongs for his feet, Chaney was issued a blanket and marched through the dayroom to a cell up on the second tier.

  The Russian saw him when he came in behind the guard. Chenko was playing Ping-Pong.

  Chaney waltzed into the cell.

  “You get the upper bunk.” A grizzled loser with a gut like a canvas water bag was lying on the bottom bunk with his bare feet, toe jam and all, poking up toward Chaney.

  “Not to worry, hotshot. I won’t be here that long.”

  “Right. You’re really with the Secret Service. They just put you in here for training.”

  Chaney ignored him. He threw his blanket onto the empty bunk up top and disappeared out the cell door. He headed down the stairs to the dayroom and caught Chenko’s eye. The Russian immediately put the Ping-Pong paddle down and walked away. He and Chaney found a quiet corner.

  “Who’s in the room at the end of the corridor?” Chaney nodded with his head. “On the left. Down there.” There was a short hallway with cells on both sides, each with a solid steel door and small observation window of wired plate glass for the guards to look through.

  “That’s Tattoo and Homer,” said Chenko.

  The Russian’s cell was up top, on the second tier, just like Chaney’s.

  “Get ‘em for me.”

  “Who?”

  “Homer and Tattoo.”

  “What do you want them for?”

  “Just do it.”

  The Russian hesitated. “Tattoo is very ugly guy.”

  “Fine. Tell him I want to kick his ass. He might see it as an opportunity for upward mobility.”

  The Russian looked at him, shrugged as if to say “your funeral,” and did the jailhouse strut, cool and casual, over to two men working up a sweat on the exercise equipment. One of them was stripped to the waist, with more tattoos than the lady in the circus. The Russian said a few words in his ear, and the guy with tattoos started giving Chaney mean looks. He draped a towel around his neck and flexed his pecs like Rocky Balboa, then led the way over to Chaney, followed by another misfit who Chaney figured must be Homer.

  “My man here says you wanna kick my ass.”

  “As soon as I figure out which end it’s at,” said Chaney.

  It took the synapse in his brain a moment to make the connection. Then Tattoo’s expression went lethal.

  “No skin off my ass, you wanna die,” he told Chaney. “But just so I understand. Why?”

  “Ugliness offends me,” said Chaney. “I like to stamp it out before it can breed.”

  The Russian was looking at him like he was out of his mind.

  “Where ya wanna do it?” Tattoo got up close now, right up in his face, a show of prison manliness. Chaney’s face didn’t seem to flex a muscle as his knee shot up like a spring-fired catapult into the guy’s groin. Tattoo’s eyes dilated like two glass marbles as his testicles were pulverized. Chaney’s right hand moved so quickly that the Russian wasn’t sure he actually saw it. What he was sure of was that Tattoo couldn’t speak any longer, and both of his hands were occupied feeling his Adam’s apple, making certain it hadn’t been forced up, and out through his mouth.

  Tattoo slid to his knees, coughing as he went.

  Homer stood transfixed, either terrified or fascinated. He’d never seen someone disabled so quickly, especially someone as fit as Tattoo.

  Chaney slapped Tattoo on the back a few times as the other man coughed his guts out kneeling on the floor.

  “What’s goin’ on over there?” One of the guards saw him down on the floor and started to come over to investigate.

  “Something went down the wrong pipe,” said Chaney. “He’s all right.” Chaney slapped him a few more times on the back, put his hands under Tattoo’s armpits, and lifted him to his feet before the guard could cross the dayroom floor. As he did it, he whispered something in Tattoo’s ear. Then pulled his lips away.

  Tattoo’s hand went up, and he waved the guard away.

  Chaney was now back in his ear whispering again, then he pulled away. “Understand?”

  Tattoo couldn’t talk, but he could nod, and he did it eagerly.

  “Good man.” Chaney slapped him on the back again. “Do it now.”

  Tattoo’s face was a shade of reddish purple. Tears ran down both cheeks. His hands were now busy holding his groin. He turned and waddled away toward his cell at the end of the hall. Homer wasn’t sure if he should follow him.

  “You’re moving out of your cell,” said Chaney. “You got a problem with that?” Homer was a short-timer. He didn’t know why they wanted the cell, and he didn’t care. He was due to be released in ten days. He smiled and disappeared down the hall.

  “You could have given him cigarettes? A few dollars?” said the Russian.

  “Like feeding fish to seals,” said Chaney. “He’d be knocking on the door all night for more.”

  “Now he may turn us over to the guards.”

  “By the times he lowers his balls back into place, we’ll be gone. Get your stuff. Your blanket and whatever else. We’ll be bunking at the end of the hall. Down there.” Chaney pointed toward Tattoo’s cell.

  The guards didn’t care. As long as there were two warm bodies in each cell when lights went out, prisoners could wheel and deal for accommodations. One of them had even worked a deal with the guards to sleep out in the dayroom at night, a solution the jail practiced when it was overbooked.

  Five minutes later, Chaney and the Russian, each with a handful of possessions, toothbrush, soap, and blanket were setting up housekeeping in the ground floor cell at the end of the hall.

  This was critical to their plan. Each cell had a window, not large, but big enough for a man, if he wasn’t too fat, to slip through.

  On the inside, the windows were covered by a half-inch screen of solid acrylic, bolted by six heavy screws to the masonry wall. The screw heads were fitted with a special slot that permitted them to be tightened, but not unscrewed.

  Beyond the acrylic screen was a light shaft that ran at a slight upward angle, so that the prisoners couldn’t actually see out to the street or get their behinds up high enough to moon the public as they drove by outside.

  Eighteen inches beyond the acrylic barrier, set far enough inside the window shaft to be unnoticed from the outside, were four one-inch steel bars. These were made of case-hardened tool steel. They could probably be cut with a hacksaw, if you had a month to do it and an inexhaustible supply of blades.

  For Chaney, time was essential, not only because they needed Chenko to assemble the device, but because the longer they took to engineer the escape, the greater the chance of discovery.

  He set to work immediately. Chenko hung one of the blankets over the window on the cell door and cut a deal with another inmate for cigarettes to sit outside the door and tap out a warning if anyone headed down the corridor.

  The most critical obstacle was the acrylic screen. Unless they could get that off, there was no way they could work on the bars.

  Chaney had planned ahead. He spent ten minutes taking a dump in the single open commode and, on the fourth push, heard a splash in the stainless steel bowl.

  He stood up halfway and looked down into the commode. Mission accomplished. Delicately he fished something out of the toilet. The rubber prophylactic was still smeared with KY Jell
y and sealed at the open end with a rubber band. He unwrapped this and shook the package until a piece of metal about four inches long, the size of a fountain pen, dropped out onto the cement floor and bounced with a metallic clank.

  The Russian caught it on the second bounce. Both men held their breath and looked nervously at the door for several seconds, until it was clear that no one had heard it.

  In Chenko’s hand was a small tungsten carbide chisel, flattened with a sharp hatchet-like edge at one end.

  “You got a hammer up there, too?” said the Russian.

  “I’m gonna use your flicking head,” said Chaney. He was not happy that Chenko had put him through this. Right now Chaney should have been back on the island, putting the final touches on the truck, welding the steel tank onto the bed. As it was, he would be up for three nights running in order to finish the job. That was if they could get out.

  Chaney told the Russian to sit tight. He left the cell for a minute, and when he returned he was carrying one of the iron two-and-a-half-pound molded barbells from the set in the exercise room. He wrapped it in a piece of Chenko’s blanket off the bed and went to work with the chisel.

  It made quick work of the six screw heads holding the acrylic screen in place. The heads popped off neatly and bounced on the floor. Using the sharp edge of the chisel, Chaney levered the acrylic screen until he could get his fingers under the thick panel. He lifted it off the broken screw shafts that were still sticking out of the concrete wall.

  He reached up and grabbed hold of the iron bars in the window well. They were secured solidly in the concrete walls surrounding the window.

  Carefully he then put the acrylic window back in place. He retrieved the screw heads from the floor and, using small amounts of chewing gum, stuck the heads back in place so that if the guards checked during the day, the acrylic would look as if it had never been removed.

  “Now what?” said the Russian.

  “Now we wait.”

  SEVEN

  YEKATERINBURG

  To Gideon there was` a certain irony in all of it, as if this place with its soil poisoned by the bones of the murdered czar was now playing out one more fateful hand in the game of history.

  He had spent three days in a dingy hotel room guarded by security police. They did not allow him to make phone calls or post E-mail to the institute in Santa Crista. If Caroline didn’t hear from him soon, she would be calling the State Department. Like the surrounding landscape, his face took on the appearance of a sprouting forest, a two-day growth of stubble under eyes that were bloodshot pools clouded by sleep deprivation.

  For someone who had worked in the vineyards of nuclear control as long as he had, it was a depressing scenario. Gideon felt like a prophet wailing in the desert. The Cold War was over. The precarious balance of power that governed the globe for fifty years had been swept away. The two sides were awash in awesome weapons that could, in a single ignition, take a million lives. And now, one of these powers lacked the means to secure these tools of death.

  At eight o’clock in the morning Gideon had been roused from his hotel room by two stern-looking guards carrying Kalashnikov automatic rifles. For a while, in the backseat of a car with one of the guards, the thought actually crossed his mind that they might be taking him into the forest to be shot. The forest around Yekaterinburg held many dark secrets.

  But ten minutes later they pulled into the parking lot outside of Mirnov’s office and led him down the familiar long corridor. When he walked through the door of Mirnov’s office, he could see that the Russian was himself a wreck.

  Mirnov had been up all night. He had informed his supervisors in Moscow only that morning of the possibility that two nuclear devices were missing. He had waited as long as he could, hoping his staff would locate the two artillery shells. Instead what they found was more ominous.

  Reports and allegations of missing devices had been made before but never by someone with Mirnov’s position and access to information. The authorities took it seriously. Mirnov’s boss was now on his way from the capital with a team of Russian experts, apparently to close the barn door after the horse had escaped. They would be looking for a scapegoat, someone to take the fall if the incident became international. Mirnov knew enough about the Russian bureaucracy and human politics to see himself being sized up for this role. He had begged them for more staff and better security. But the government in Moscow pleaded poverty.

  “You look awful,” said Mirnov.

  “You should see yourself.”

  “Yes, well, I have a reason. I have been working. Around the clock.”

  “Yes. Well, I haven’t been sleeping too well. I’d like to get to a phone. I have been asking for hours now to make a phone call,” said Gideon.

  “In time, my friend. Sit down, please.” Mirnov gestured to one of the chairs in front of his desk, and Gideon sat down.

  “It is ironic, is it not?” said Mirnov.

  “What’s that?”

  “That for fifty years we were at each other’s throats, that the only thing that kept us from destroying one another was the threat of mutual annihilation. What was it the Americans called it?” He touched a finger to his nose as if it would come to him through the alcohol haze. “The doctrine they called MAD?” said Mirnov.

  “Mutually assured destruction,” said Gideon. “Part of game theory.”

  “That it is,” said Mirnov. “Leave it to the Americans to come up with some catchy letters, an acronym they call it. That is why their culture is dominant. They did not conquer the world with armies, but with words, with their motion pictures and movie stars, McDonald’s, and Disneyland. But you are Russian.”

  “And Dutch,” said Gideon.

  “Ah, the Dutch. They are wonderful people. I have been to the Netherlands, you know. Oh, yes. The Hague.”

  “If you have traveled to The Hague then you know that we are noted for our diplomacy,” said Gideon.

  “Indeed,” said the Russian.

  “Then I would suggest that you allow me to make a phone call to my office.”

  “I cannot allow you to do that. At least for the moment.”

  “Am I a prisoner?”

  “Of course not.” Mirnov issued a broad, beefy smile. “You are our guest. My superiors will be here shortly, and I am sure they will be able to answer all of your questions.”

  Mirnov did not want to incur the wrath of Western nations. There might be an international incident that would only worsen the publicity when van Ry was freed. There would be more blame for Mirnov.

  “Please,” he said. “Relax. Bear with me just a few more moments. A few more questions.”

  Gideon settled back against his chair, having no other choice.

  “This game theory—is there a strategy to retrieve devices if they fall into the wrong hands?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what their goals are. The West might be able to purchase the devices off the underground market, that is, if the objective of whoever took them is purely economic, to obtain the highest possible price. If on the other hand, it is political… ”

  “The West would submit to this?” said Mirnov. “Purchasing the weapons even though they had no hand in losing them?”

  “I do not speak for any government. But I believe they would do whatever is necessary to take them off the market. As I am sure your government would. The other side of mutually assured destruction,” said Gideon, “is mutual self-interest.”

  “And what if whoever has them has no goal other than to use them? What does this game theory say about that?”

  “We find them, before they can use them. We are no longer talking theories at that point.”

  Gideon’s words seemed to sober the Russian, who looked at him across the desk as if they had perhaps reached some spoken watershed. There was a long period of silence as he studied the Dutchman.

  “I can tell you a little,” he said.

  Gideon’
s ears perked up.

  “We know that the devices do not show up on our current inventory. Your information is accurate,” said Mirnov.

  “I assumed that when I came here.”

  Mirnov’s eyebrows arched a little. “Then your people in California, they have reason to believe that this was no error in paperwork?”

  “If I don’t contact them soon, you can be sure of it.”

  Mirnov was spurred on. “The two devices in question are not in the bunker where they were supposed to be stored.” He took another sip of coffee as if this was needed to strengthen himself for what was to come.

  “Can I have a piece of paper and a pen?” said Gideon.

  Mirnov thought about it, then figured it was better not to have mistakes of memory made. He handed over a sheaf of paper and a pencil, and Gideon set up to take notes on a corner of the desk. At least for the moment he was not demanding to leave.

  “It’s possible, I suppose,” said Gideon, “that they could simply have moved the two devices to another location inside the facility.”

  “I don’t think that is likely,” said Mirnov.

  “Why not?”

  “The movement in this case does not appear to be an inadvertent act.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “First, there is the question of their disappearance from our inventory records,” said Mirnov.

  “Surely it could have been an error in counting.” Gideon had learned by sorry experience that the Russians’ system of accounting for these weapons was primitive. There were no computerized bar codes as on the U.S. inventory of weapons, so they could not be tracked with a master computer as in the West. Here they did it the old-fashioned way, by finger count, if they did it at all. For more than two years, national security experts in the U.S. had feared the worst. Nuclear accounting in Russia was abysmal. The Russians had no firm idea of the precise quantity of fissile materials in their possession. So how could they know if any was missing? What Gideon was coming to realize was that their accounting for tactical weapons was also flawed. From the perspective of terrorists, why get materials if you can have the bomb instead?