Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

“They produce a database. Information on weapons of mass destruction. Several of our agencies subscribe. CIA, DOE. Some of their people have participated on U.N. inspection teams.”

  “Their information, is it usually accurate?”

  “Yes.”

  There was silence in the room, a look of grim resignation on the president. The ultimate fear of every man of power: his options had suddenly been limited by events he could not anticipate.

  “Sir, the longer we wait, the greater the risk that they could move the device,” said Hirshberg. “If they do, it could be very difficult to find it again.”

  The president said nothing.

  “Sir, the Marines will need time to muster.”

  SAN JUAN CHANNEL, WA

  They turned toward Iceberg Point, and Thorn, alias Belden, pushed the throttles forward on the twin-engine outboard. The bow lifted out of the water and the boat began to plane out across the sound. The harbor at Cap Santé was at least an hour away even in good weather and at top speed.

  The sea picked up a chop as dawn approached. Taggart settled into the seat across from Thorn and zipped his jacket, turning the collar up against the cold, damp air. His gaze fixed upon a distant island in a daze as if there were nothing there.

  At the moment, his mind was occupied with thoughts of Kirsten. Increasingly, in the last days, he had spent more time thinking about her and wondering what their lives would have been like had she lived. He could see the features of her face as clearly as if she were standing in front of him. At times when he was alone, he would actually speak to her, confident in the belief that she was with him wherever he went. And he worried about Adam, who was now five years old. He wondered what kind of a world he would be leaving to his son.

  “What time’s your flight?” Shouting over the noise of the engines, Thorn interrupted Taggart’s thoughts.

  He looked at his watch. “Eleven-forty.”

  “You’ll have time to drop me off,” said Thorn. “You’ve got your ticket?”

  Taggart nodded.

  “When you transfer planes in Denver, call for further instructions.”

  “I know.”

  “Use the cellular number.”

  “We’ve been over all of that,” said Taggart.

  “Just checking,” said Thorn. “You’ve got the cellular number?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  Thorn was a definite type-A. He was neurotic. He believed that unless he said it out loud, it wouldn’t happen.

  Then out of the blue. “You’re not planning on contacting anybody else?”

  “Who would I be calling?”

  “Maybe not a phone call,” said Thorn. “I was thinking maybe a letter.”

  Taggart reached into his inside coat pocket. The letter he’d written the night before to his son Adam, something for the boy to read when he got older, some explanation from his father. The letter was gone.

  When he looked over, Thorn was holding the envelope between two fingers. It was stamped and sealed. At least he hadn’t read it.

  “Give it to me.”

  “I took the liberty of checking your coat just before we left.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Thorn didn’t say a word, but just held it up in the wind as the boat skimmed the water.

  “I suppose you went through my bags as well?”

  Thorn made a face of concession. “I understand the urge to let your boy know something about his father. But I couldn’t take the chance that you might have mentioned my name.”

  “I don’t know your name.”

  “Good. At least something’s secure. It’s only natural,” said Thorn. “You want to explain to him why you did what you did. Hell, if I killed a hundred thousand people and had my name attached to the act, I’d want the entire world to know why.”

  “My son’s the only audience I care about.”

  “It won’t do to have this floating around in the mail.” With that Thorn let loose of the letter.

  Taggart lurched from his chair and tried to grab it, but he was too slow. The envelope flipped up into the wind like a leaf, then landed on the churning prop wash behind the speeding boat. Taggart stood and watched as it disappeared in the distance.

  “I wasn’t gonna mail it now.” Taggart shouted above the wind and the noise of the engine.

  Thorn was hunkered down behind the boat’s windscreen.

  “I was gonna wait until we were done. Until the last minute,” said Taggart.

  “And when would that be?”

  “I don’t know. You haven’t told me.”

  “Precisely,” said Thorn. “And for very good reason. The fewer who know, the better. You would have mailed that letter from the target city. If the authorities got their hands on it before we had a chance to detonate the device, they would have been able to piece together the target and concentrate their forces. You don’t give them an edge. Not if you’re smart.”

  “That assumes they would have been able to intercept the letter.”

  “Oh, they’d have found the letter all right. Your boy is staying with relatives, right?”

  Taggart didn’t have to respond. Thorn already knew the answer from the address on the letter.

  “Your wife’s parents?” Thorn didn’t wait for an answer. He knew he was right.

  “You’re not doing them any favors by sending them mail from the grave. The government will be all over them when this is over. Anybody you’ve ever talked to—your friends, family, girlfriends you haven’t seen in twenty years. They will all be getting visits from the FBI. There will be search warrants for their homes, any property they own. They will ransack their lives looking for evidence. A letter like that will only cause your family more trouble.”

  Taggart didn’t say a word. Anger consumed him. Almost a minute passed in strained silence as the two men looked straight ahead through the windscreen.

  “If you want to talk to the boy, leave a tape-recorded message.” Thorn reached into his pocket and pulled out a small microcassette recorder. He reached over to hand it to Taggart, who remained stone silent, looking at the man who had just destroyed the last words his son would ever receive from his father.

  “Take it,” said Thorn. “I’ll see the tape gets delivered. In a way that the government doesn’t find it, after this is all over. You can tape it in the car when we get to Cap Santé.”

  “Why would you care about my son?”

  “Call it an inoculation against disaster. Human nature being what it is.” Thorn shouted above the noise of the engines. He looked straight ahead at the swells as they slammed under the bow of the small boat. “If I didn’t give you a way out, you’d just write another letter.”

  “How do I know you’ll deliver the tape?” said Taggart.

  “You don’t. But you can be sure of one thing. If the government gets its hands on anything you write, you can be sure your boy will never see it. And they’ll probably twist whatever you say for their own purposes.”

  He had a point. The government probably already had Taggart’s name on a list, taps on his in-laws’ phones, and court orders to monitor incoming mail. It was why the men on the island had cut themselves off from the outside world. Taggart took the tape recorder.

  “Now tell me,” said Taggart. “A question I’ve been itching to ask. How much are you getting paid for all this?”

  “You ought to know. You’re paying the freight,” said Thorn.

  “Don’t insult my intelligence. You’re gonna tell me there was a white sale on nuclear bombs? You got a discount at the home show? We tried for three years to make contact, even to get a price. We never got close. Then you show up and, just like that, magic. For a long time we thought you were the federal government.”

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  “Because the radiation on those boats was real. As well as the guys coughing up their lungs.”

  “Let’s just say you’ve got friends,” said Thorn.

  “Who?”
/>
  “Your government has managed to piss off half the world. Take your pick.”

  “And how much are these people paying you?”

  “You’re being well subsidized. Don’t tell me this offends you. Undercuts your pride of anarchism. You can be sure you’ll get all the glory,” said Thorn.

  “And what’s in it for them?”

  “Cover. It’s very simple. Your goals are entirely mutual. You want to destroy your government. So do they. You want the world to know you did it. They want the world to believe it. To that end they will waste no resources, spare no expense. Witnesses, documents. It’s all been arranged.

  “All they want is to avoid retaliation,” said Thorn. “Your government is on record. The use of weapons of mass destruction by a foreign state against U.S. interests will be met with nuclear retaliation. If on the other hand what is left of your government can be convinced that it was entirely a domestic matter, what are they going to do—bomb Seattle?”

  “So you just brokered the deal?” said Taggart.

  “That’s my business. I must admit, it is the biggest deal I’ve ever done. In the end, your government will thank us for blaming you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Thorn was amazed. As bitter as Taggart was, he was naive.

  “You think the politicians are going to be anxious to start World War Three? Why do you think they centered on Oswald so quickly after Kennedy was shot, and why they insisted that he acted alone? They were shitting little green apples for fear that the Russians might be involved, and that they might have to do something about it.

  “You pull this off, and they’re not going to be looking very far for answers. They’re gonna be bending over, grabbing their collective asses, and trying to figure ways to keep a grip on power. To demonstrate that they’re on top of the situation. What they’ll want are some heads they can roll quickly. I’m not particularly interested in offering mine, and if we’re successful, yours won’t be available. They’ll take what they can find and call it justice,” said Thorn.

  “Not if we’re lucky,” said Taggart.

  “And what’s gonna stop them?”

  “The people.”

  “The people?” Thorn was now laughing out loud. His hair blowing in the wind. “Right. The people. I forgot about the people.”

  “If they act quickly, they’ll have a chance,” said Taggart. “They’ll respond.”

  “That assumes they can find the off button on their remote controls. Within twenty-four hours, there’ll be a thousand experts getting face time on the tube, all analyzing the nuclear cloud and offering bullshit as answers. Geraldo can show pictures of fried politicians with lard melting off their bones like a barbecued roast, and everybody can argue whether Democrats or Republicans smell worse when charred. Within forty-eight hours, the public will be bored with the story and flipping channels again. Take my word for it. The only thing this is going to do is up the ante in the ratings war.”

  Thorn didn’t have much confidence in “the people.” He also knew that once they detonated the device there were not going to be a lot of places to hide. He had spent twenty years working for dictators in banana republics and kings who’d traded in their camels for armor-plated Mercedes. This job was the capstone of his career, one final and great shake of the money tree. The men involved could never work again. They would be international outlaws. No country on earth would dare to give them asylum. It was why Thorn, in his incarnation as Belden, had gone to great lengths to die and to do it in such a public way. It was why the woman, Joselyn Cole, had to die—to keep his secret.

  Suddenly Thorn’s gaze out through the boat’s windscreen became focused and hard. He squinted into the early-morning dawn. Then without saying a word he turned the wheel and brought the vessel into a curving right-hand turn. They cut a wide arc, sweeping across the open channel.

  Taggart was jostled in his seat and looked over at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” Thorn was peering into the distance.

  The water’s surface took on the heaving silvery hue of mercury under the breaking dawn. For a second Taggart thought it was just the cresting tip of another wave. But as the water shifted, the object took on a permanence, dark and angular. It was something floating on the surface, caught in the pull of the tide, being carried toward the straits.

  Within seconds the boat overtook it. Taggart grabbed a boat hook from a tray that ran along under the gunnel. He tried to snag whatever it was but missed.

  Thorn maneuvered the boat in a wide turn to take another pass. This time he pulled alongside and cut the engines completely. He left the wheel and took the boat hook. He reached over the side and snagged a line.

  It was connected by a metal hasp that joined a number of lines. The lines ran to the water and disappeared into inky darkness. Thorn knew instinctively what floated beneath the surface. Without saying a word, he pulled a folding knife from his pocket and cut the shrouds to the parachute, then ripped open the protective rubber covering the floating pallet.

  “What is it?” said Taggart.

  “It’s trouble.” Thorn reached in his pocket for the cell phone and punched the auto dial button for the number on Padget Island, then hit the “send” button. He had programmed the number on the island into the phone but never called it for fear that the government had a tap. Now he had no choice.

  It rang once. Then again. “Damn it. Pick it up.”

  “Hello.” Finally somebody answered.

  “Thorn here. You’ve got company on the island.” He could hear laughter and a lot of bluster on the other end. No doubt they were all in from their bunkers, getting coffee and warming their feet in front of the fire.

  “Quiet.” The man on the other end was hollering for them to shut up so that he could hear.

  “Get the men into the bunkers,” said Thorn, “and send out patrols.”

  “Is it the military?” asked the voice on the other end.

  “We got an M-60 machine gun floating in a package out here.” said Thorn. “What do you think?”

  The voice repeated everything he said at the other end and now the sounds coming from the house on the island were the sounds of panic.

  “Get to those bunkers,” said Thorn. “And listen.” He couldn’t tell if the man on the other end had dropped the phone.

  “Are you there?” said Thorn.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “The woman. Kill her. Now.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  PADGET ISLAND, WA

  Joselyn heard the phone ring. A moment later there was a lot of shouting coming from the other room. She was tied and gagged, lying on her side on the bed. One of the men guarding her had gone the extra yard of tying her feet and looping the rope through the one on her wrists, pulling it tight so that her body was now strung like a bow. He hadn’t bothered to replace the blindfold. Joselyn took it as an ominous sign.

  She struggled with the knot on her wrists, trying desperately to free her hands. She couldn’t tell what was happening outside, but something was causing a lot of excitement. Men were running around, the sound of heavy boots on the wooden deck of the porch. Somebody was shouting orders from outside the window to the room.

  “Who’s got the B-A-R?”

  “Tom, I think.”

  “Tell him to get his ass down on the beach. How many Brownings we got?”

  “Two. One of ‘em’s out of commission. Bent firing pin. I been telling Thorn to get it fixed for a week. Where’s Oscar?”

  “He left this morning, right after Thorn.”

  It sounded like two men had closed the distances, so that their voices now dropped to conversational tones right outside the window.

  “That was Thorn on the phone. Says we got company.”

  “Locals or Feds?”

  “He found a pallet floating in the straits. An M-60 and a lot of other gear, You figure it out.”

  “I’m surprised they waited this long. Do we know how b
ig the force is?”

  “No. I want you to get the men on the beach and keep ‘em busy. Break out the two Brownings that are still working, and make sure they got plenty of ammo. The Feds want fireworks, we’ll give ‘em a fifty-caliber light show, followed by one big fucking bang.”

  “Where’s the boat?”

  “Tied up in the cove on the west end.”

  “None of them know about it?”

  “No. And let’s keep it that way unless you want it to look like the Cuban boat lift. Thorn made it clear before he left. Any trouble, we get off the island, make for the truck, and get the thing moving. Oscar left early this morning. He’s already headed that way. To get it ready.”

  “What about these guys?”

  “Dead bodies tell no tales.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Thorn had me wire the bunkers last night. Those crazy fuckers are gonna be shootin’ from on top a pile of C-4. One round in those sandbags, and God’s fringe element’s gonna get some heavy reinforcements.”

  “What about the woman?”

  Joselyn stopped struggling with the ropes on her wrists and did some heavy listening.

  “Like I said, the dead tell no tales. Now move. And if shooting starts, don’t go diving in any bunkers.”

  Now she was frantic, struggling with the ropes. She heard someone come back inside the house. The front door slammed shut. There were footsteps, heavy boots on carpeted wood. Then she heard it: the slide and click of metal. Joselyn was no firearms expert, but she knew the sound of a gun being loaded with a clip and chambered with a bullet.

  Now she could hear the creak of footsteps coming down the hall toward the room. She rolled on the bed toward the wall until her back slammed against it. She tried to wedge her body between the bed and the wall. A key turned in the lock. The knob moved, and the door started to open.

  Joselyn wiggled her hips and pressed down hard with the weight of her body. Her eyes bulged as she saw the shadow come through the door. She never looked at his face. Instead she was mesmerized by the pistol in his hand, a semiautomatic with a bore the size of an elephant gun.

  His head centered down the sights as he took aim.