Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  “The device may have already been delivered,” he said.

  By now he had Hirshberg’s undivided attention.

  “We think the weapon was transshipped by vessel across the Pacific. The ship itself sank, possibly in a storm. The Coast Guard has confirmed that much.”

  “If the ship sank, how do we know the weapon didn’t go down with it?”

  Bowlyn opened his briefcase and pulled out a copy of the FBI lab report. He passed it across the desk to his boss.

  Hirshberg opened it and read. It took several minutes to absorb the salient portions of the report. There were two key items of critical evidence. The first was that the tattered cargo lines that had linked the cargo to the diesel-filled flotation bag above had been cleanly severed, probably by a knife, according to the laboratory report. This was a clear indication that someone had cut the cargo free from its flotation, probably after pulling it aboard a vessel, and then jettisoned the flotation bag and the buoys over the side.

  The second finding in the report was vastly more critical.

  “Refresh my understanding of physics. It’s been a long time,” said Hirshberg. “A rad, as I recall, is the basic unit of radiation absorbed by the human body.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And the outer skin of this flotation bag contained enough radioactive contamination to cause cancer in a thousand people?”

  “According to the analysts,” said Bowlyn. “As soon as they found out, they shipped all of the recovered items from the Isvania to Oak Ridge for final examination and disposal. They had to decontaminate the lab at Quantico.

  “Based on what they’ve seen, the device in question contains aging weapons-grade plutonium that has been exposed to the air for some time. It’s begun to oxidize. Still, the physicists tell us that plutonium would not be emitting these levels of gamma radiation. There is something else there. We don’t know what. The Coast Guard tried to decontaminate the chopper that picked the stuff up. When they couldn’t, they simply pushed it over the side. Gave it to Davy Jones. The flight crew and everybody else who came in contact with the items have been quarantined. They’re under observation.”

  Hirshberg went back to the report. The analysts suspected that whoever took the device from the Russian munitions bunker had dismantled it before shipping. They had exposed the plutonium core to the air and possibly wrapped it in the deflated flotation bag before crating it up. The bag itself registered exceedingly high levels of radiation. He laid the report on the desk.

  “Do they have any idea of the size of the bomb?” asked Hirshberg. “Any sense as to its destructive force?”

  “No. Only that there’s a danger of contamination. Whoever shipped it apparently didn’t know what they were doing.”

  “Let’s hope they’re equally ignorant about detonation,” said Hirshberg. “What are the Russians saying?”

  “Dan Murphy at State has some of his people checking with their Ministry of Defense. The problem is that what little we know comes from intercepts, some of them on commercial telephone lines. We can’t very well tell the Russians that we’ve tapped into their domestic phone system. We’re not sure what they’ll tell us publicly. We’re hoping they’ll cooperate. CIA has dispatched an agent to the facility in Siberia to see if he can find out anything. We’ve been working on decoding some of the intercepted transmissions, but so far nothing.”

  “So what can I tell the president?” said Hirshberg.

  “That’s the problem,” said Bowlyn.

  “What do you mean?”

  Bowlyn took a deep breath. “We have reason to believe that the weapon in question was obtained by the Russian Mafiya, a group out of Yekaterinburg in Siberia. It was stolen from a government arsenal in that area. The documentation for a shipment of machine parts, which we think was the weapon, was made out in the name of a Russian corporation. That corporation is operated by Viktor Kolikoff.”

  Hirshberg turned his face up toward the ceiling and paused a long moment before he exploded. “Son of a bitch. I knew it.” He shook his head, got up out of the chair, and began to pace toward the big window with the Capitol view.

  “We warned him. We told him not to get involved with the guy. And what does he do? He invites him to the fucking Oval Office and shakes his hand in front of cameras. Invites him to dinner, sits down with him at coffee klatches. Does everything but give him the key to the front door of the White House.”

  “He gave the money back,” said Bowlyn, trying to look on the bright side.

  “Yeah. Right. After the Post drove twelve inches up his ass on the front page.”

  The problem was that the president had taken $240,000 in the last election, money that was ultimately traced to Kolikoff and was laundered through straw donors. When party officials got caught, they returned the funds. Kolikoff was a foreign national. To knowingly take political contributions from him was a crime. But they couldn’t prove the president or any of his people knew the money was from Kolikoff.

  “No one’s going to prosecute him,” said Bowlyn.

  “Certainly not that rube of an attorney general,” said Hirshberg. “Besides, the president has sold the public on the principle that if it isn’t a crime, it’s fine, and even if it is, it might be OK,” said Hirshberg. He looked at Bowlyn. “Don’t you get it? The voters have given the president a complete pass on matters pertaining to ethics, both in and out of government. Now they may get a slow nuclear burn in their beds for the favor.”

  Bowlyn looked nervously around the room, wondering if it wasn’t bugged and cabled for cameras. He knew the White House Situation Room was. Hirshberg had a temper, and when he lost it, all judgment flew out the window.

  “Problem is,” said Hirshberg, “the public’s bought off on all of it. This country’s in for a hell of a future.”

  “It’s not the president. It’s his political handlers,” said Bowlyn.

  Hirshberg looked at him and arched an eyebrow. “If you want my job you’ll have to speak a little louder into the pen set on my desk,” Hirshberg told him.

  Bowlyn’s face flushed. “You have to admit Williams is a snake. To get caught with some hooker while he’s talking to the president and have the gall to continue offering advice as if he were indispensable … ”

  “I give you Williams and the rest of that nest of vipers.” Hirshberg lifted a glass of water from the desk and took a drink as if in toast. “But I ask you, who is it who has his lips wrapped around the flute playing music to coil by?”

  Hirshberg looked at him through the glass of water. Bowlyn didn’t have a reply.

  “He was warned by the CIA and the State Department. Both told him before he ever met with Kolikoff that the man had ties to organized crime in Russia, that he had links in the illicit arms trade. Did he listen? No.”

  Kolikoff had gotten more than the usual grip-and-grin photo session with presidential handlers telling him where to stand, like a cardboard cutout. He had spent days in the White House, filling the president’s Rolodex with phone numbers and addresses of hefty contributors. The State Department and even the CIA had cringed. The president didn’t care. All he wanted was the campaign cash, and he was willing to do anything to get it.

  “Now, if there is a weapon of mass destruction on U.S. soil and Kolikoff is involved, I guarantee you that our commander in chief is not going to want to hear about it.”

  “He’s going to have to do something,” said Bowlyn.

  “I remind you,” said Hirshberg, “this is the administration that led the charge against private ownership of guns, that made the NRA a four-letter word. Have you forgotten?” said Hirshberg. “Our president is for children, education, and the environment, children and social security, children and Medicare, and children.

  “How can a man with that kind of a political mantra tell the public they might wake up tomorrow and find one of their cities missing, their children dying of radiation poisoning, that is, if they weren’t incinerated in their beds? Oh,
and by the way, your president took money from, and shook the hand of, the man who delivered the device to your doorstep.”

  SEVENTEEN

  FRIDAY HARBOR, WA

  A ferry with an accident overboard is like a small village. The rumors quickly spread from the crew to the passengers. They couldn’t find anyone belonging to the car that went to the bottom. Consensus was growing that there may have been a fatality.

  Joselyn wanted to tell the captain the truth, but she had no idea who’d tried to kill her. Whoever it was was still on the boat. She’d be putting her life in the hands of an unarmed crew, perhaps putting them in jeopardy. It seemed much safer for the moment to remain dead.

  The truck driver whose diesel had run her car off the ferry’s bow apparently was having a cup of coffee up in the cafeteria when someone borrowed his truck. Five witnesses saw him there.

  The ferry crew searched the water for twenty minutes with lights, until a Coast Guard boat showed up and took over. Two of the Coast Guard officers boarded the ferry to interview the crew and any witnesses. The Tillicum slowly picked up speed and motored for Friday Harbor. It took nearly forty minutes.

  Joselyn waited in the restroom until she felt the ferry dock. Walk-on passengers were always the first off as the crew readied the car deck for off-loading. As she left the restroom, the passenger deck was empty. She quickly made her way down the stairs to the car deck. The crew was busy removing the chocks from the car wheels as Joselyn walked off the ferry. She held her breath, waiting for someone to call out, to try to stop her. No one noticed her.

  The sigh of relief was almost palpable as she headed up the dock toward Front Street.

  She hoped the Coast Guard wouldn’t spend too much time out on the frigid waters looking for a body. Still she had no intention of being dragged in by the authorities tonight. She was exhausted, both mentally and physically. She would stop in the sheriff’s office in the morning and tell them what happened. There would be plenty of time for them to pick up the pieces of the investigation then.

  Joselyn walked quickly to the end of the dock and took a right toward the Spring Street Landing. Vehicles coming off the ferry would have to make a sharp right along Front Street for a block before making a left up Spring Street to pass through town. On the waterfront, it was a one-way street. They would have to drive under bright streetlights before heading up the hill, Joselyn could get a good look at the drivers and passengers under the lights.

  She wished she had a pencil and something to write on. The only thing she had at the moment were the clothes she was wearing. She fished in her skirt pocket looking for change, something to make a phone call. Nothing. She would have to bum a phone call from somebody, maybe one of the restaurants down the street. Call Samantha to come pick her up.

  She looked at her watch: nine-thirty. It was possible Sam might still be at the office. She often worked late.

  Joselyn hunched down in the shadows under a tree and sat on the end of a wooden bench outside the offices of Western Princess Cruises. Everything in town was closed, except a few of the night spots. She could hear muted strains of music coming from a tavern down the street.

  Slowly vehicles began to emerge from the ferry, one at a time as they cleared the checkpoint set up by the Coast Guard. This made it easy for Joselyn to study each of the cars and their occupants. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking for, perhaps anything out of the ordinary, somebody that stood out, who wasn’t a local, not that it would be that easy to tell. She had one advantage: there weren’t many cars on the ferry. Whoever had tried to kill her was still onboard. Of that she was sure.

  The first two vehicles had Washington plates, one belonging to a family with small children. The other was a pickup truck with a local business name and phone number on the door, a masonry contractor. She dismissed them both.

  The third vehicle drew her attention. It was a late-model white sedan with two men in the front seat. They were dressed in business suits and the passenger was talking on a cell phone. It wasn’t until they made the turn up Spring Street that Joselyn saw the federal license plate over the rear bumper.

  She looked intently at the car for a moment as it disappeared up the street, then she dismissed the thought. If McCally was going to have her followed, the FBI wouldn’t have used a car with government plates. Or would they? The two guys were probably agriculture inspectors here to roust some dairy farmer on the island.

  Her attention was quickly distracted by the next car, an older-model sedan with a lot of rust and dents. It had seen better days. Joselyn squinted under the bright lights to get a look at the driver. It was an old woman, a lot of gray hair with a bandanna holding it in place. She took the next car in order. There were kids in the backseat.

  In all she counted eighteen cars and the diesel truck. She saw the driver, got a good look at him. Maybe he was lying about being up in the cafeteria. Still, if what she heard on the ferry was correct, there were witnesses who saw him there.

  Her thoughts returned to the car with the federal plates. If McCally had had her followed, why hadn’t the agents helped her? They must have been watching, unless they figured she couldn’t go anywhere on a ferry and went upstairs to get coffee like everybody else. At the moment, she had a lot of questions and no answers.

  Without wheels, Joselyn hoofed it toward her office near the courthouse. It was only a few blocks from the ferry dock through downtown Friday Harbor. She could hear strains of guitar music coming from Herb’s Tavern on Spring Street, some loud conversation from a few patrons inside.

  As she walked, her mind swarmed with a dozen thoughts, none of them related. Belden was dead. What few notes or documents she had concerning his grand jury appearance were now at the bottom of the sound. There was probably nothing there. Still she would have killed to get one last glimpse at them.

  She’d have to get a new driver’s license, call the credit card companies and have them issue new cards. What else was in her wallet? Her state bar membership card. She made a mental note to call the bar.

  She hoped Sam was at the office. At least she could get a ride home. She turned down First Street, past Christy’s and the Clay Café, then left on Court Street, and walked quickly across the road and in front of the county courthouse. As she cleared a few trees and the corner of the building, she could see lights on upstairs under the covered walkway in front of Sam’s office. She was in luck.

  Joselyn picked up her pace and looked at the lights. She was halfway across the street directly in front of the office when she realized it wasn’t Sam’s office that was lit up—but her own.

  She was sure she hadn’t left the light on in her office. Maybe the janitor was inside cleaning.

  Given the events of the day, she was taking no chances. She walked past the building and approached from the rear, through the small garage on the ground floor. It was deserted. Sam’s car wasn’t there.

  Slowly and very quietly, she took the passageway that led to the wooden landing and the stairs, then began climbing, two half-flights, to the outside corridor that ran in front of the doors to the office suites on the second floor.

  There was a beauty salon on the ground floor at the front of the building. Joselyn could see the reflection from a display of flickering lights in the window as they flashed on the grass and a few shrubs near the sidewalk out near the street.

  She stopped at the top step, pressed her back against the stuccoed wall, and took a deep breath, then a quick peek around the corner and down the corridor. The overhead lights were out. Usually they were left on all night. Joselyn realized that it was the dark corridor outside that made the light in her office so visible and obvious from the street. Why would someone go to the trouble of turning off the outside lights to break into her office and turn on the office light? It had to be the janitor.

  For a moment, she hesitated. She thought about running down the stairs to the sheriff’s office near the courthouse. Somebody would be on the desk. She could wait th
ere for a patrolman to check her office. And what if it was the janitor? She’d look like a fool. Worse, she’d have to tell them what happened on the ferry; otherwise she’d have a hard time going to them with the truth in the morning. They’d haul her back to the dock and the Coast Guard, and she’d be in for a million questions. She’d spend half the night under bright lights. The U.S. Attorney’s Office would get wind, and McCally would be in her face again. This time he’d be sure she knew something she wasn’t telling him.

  The thought caused her to edge her way past the last step, around the corner, and down the corridor. She hugged the front wall of the building, so if there was anybody inside she’d see them first. She passed two locked office doors, came up to Sam’s door, and tried it. It was locked. There wasn’t much chance she’d be inside with the lights out, but Joss had hoped.

  She stopped and listened. She couldn’t hear anything, but the door to her office was partially open, and light was streaming out onto the dark decking outside. It wasn’t until she took another step that she felt something under her bare feet. Joss looked down and realized it was the crunch of glass. The lights overhead hadn’t been turned off after all. They had been broken. At the same instant, she lifted her eyes and saw the frame of the door to her office. The wood was splintered, and Joselyn could see the tool marks in the paint where a pry bar had been inserted.

  With this realization, Joselyn started moving away from the open office door and the light. She retreated three or four steps and felt the crunch of glass followed by a sharp pain in the heel of her right foot. She hopped, trying to catch her balance, and finally steadied herself against the wall. A razor-thin shard of glass from one of the broken bulbs had penetrated her sock and buried itself in her heel. She scratched gently with her fingernail, trying to pluck it out, and felt a warm trickle of blood on her fingers. A quick-moving shadow broke the shaft of light behind her.

  Joss tried to run, but as soon as she put weight on her foot her knee buckled in pain as the glass was driven deeper into her foot. She collapsed on the wooden decking, turned, and saw the towering silhouette of a man backlit in the open door of her office.