Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  Women were falling down the stairs in their heels, others dropped their sequined bags, men stepping on them, running, visions of the carnage in Oklahoma City playing in their minds. They had no idea that the bomb was nuclear.

  UNDER THE BELLY of the Enola Gay, the phone came to life in Gideon’s hand. It rang, and the liquid crystal screen lit up.

  Gideon didn’t hesitate. There was no time. He reached up with his fingers and pressed the clip on each side of the wired fitting at the base of the cell phone. The end of the cable disconnected from the phone.

  It rang again. As he looked at Joselyn, her eyes peering over the top of “Little Boy,” the same question crossed their minds: with the phone locked away inside of the casing, who would have ever answered it?

  The solution came with the third ring. Suddenly there was the hiss of an open line. They could hear someone breathing at the other end. Belden had programmed the phone with an answering chip.

  He said only two words, but his voice carried crystalline and clear:

  Critical Mass

  Gideon looked at it for a moment, then held the mouthpiece of the phone to his lips.

  “I’m sorry. You have the wrong number.” Then he pressed the “end” button.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  BETHESDA, MD

  The ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital was quiet, almost deserted. This section of the floor was now off-limits to all except a handful of doctors and specially trained nurses.

  Joselyn had been coming by for three days, camping there most of the day. Still they wouldn’t let her see him.

  “Why not?” she said.

  The doctor shook his head.

  “Why can’t I see him?”

  “Because he’s very ill,” said Hirshberg.

  It was the look that passed between the two men that told her it was much more serious than she had been led to believe. She had thought it was for security. That they were debriefing him.

  “He’s not going to die?”

  Hirshberg and the doctor merely looked at each other, but neither of them spoke.

  Then finally Hirshberg reached out and placed his hands on her shoulders. “He’s absorbed a tremendous amount of radiation.”

  “We were all there,” said Joselyn.

  “His arms, inside of the casing, were exposed for too long,” said the doctor.

  “There must be something you can do.” She looked at him with pleading eyes.

  The doctor shook his head as Hirshberg released her and turned away.

  “I want to see him now,” she told them.

  “That’s not a good idea,” said Hirshberg.

  “I’m going in there.”

  She turned toward the room, and one of the guards started to move toward her.

  “That’s all right,” Hirshberg shot him a look, and the guard backed off. He looked at the doctor.

  “Only if we set up a shield. And then only for a couple of minutes,” said the physician.

  Joselyn waited outside the room in the hall while a device like a small dressing screen was rolled down the hall and into the room. A few seconds later the attendant, wearing a lead vest, came back out and nodded.

  “You can only stay in there for two minutes,” said the doctor.

  “I will be watching you from the control booth. You have to stay behind the shield. And whatever you do. You are not to touch him.”

  The guard opened the door, and Joselyn looked inside. It was dark. There were no windows. It was a large X-ray room. She saw the doctor walk quickly into a booth from another entrance somewhere down the hall. She could see his shadow moving in the booth through a thick glass window the size of a postcard.

  She entered the room, and the guard closed the door behind her. For a moment, she stood looking at the hospital bed rolled against the far wall, just beyond the X-ray table. She could hear his rasping breath and see his long form under the single white sheet that covered his body.

  “Please get behind the screen.” The doctor talked to her from beyond the shielded booth where he watched.

  She walked over behind the shield that stood at the head of the bed. Tears began to well in her eyes. She could see his arms resting on top of the sheets as she approached, bleeding and blistered. They appeared to be covered with some kind of a gel.

  Joselyn turned toward the booth and the doctor inside. “Can’t you do anything for his arms?”

  “We’re making him as comfortable as possible.”

  With the sound of her voice close now, just beyond the shield, Gideon slowly rolled his head toward the side of the pillow and looked at her face through the specially shielded glass, a small window in the screen.

  “Hello.” Joselyn tried to smile.

  “Hi.” Gideon’s face was marked with lesions and his lips were blistered and broken.

  She wanted to reach out and grab him by the hand, pull him from this cave of a room out into the bright sunlight where life was fine and the world continued. Her hand hit the screen as she leaned forward.

  Instead all she could do was look at him. “How are you feeling?”

  “Oh.” He was breathless, tried to smile, but started to cough. His respiration was ragged; his chest rose beneath the single sheet as he fought for breath. A trace of frothy blood formed at the corner of his lip.

  Gideon’s golden hair had turned to straw, and lesions had formed under the skin on his forehead.

  She tried to keep herself from crying. She didn’t want him to see her that way. Quickly she brought a hand up and rubbed her eyes with the back of it.

  “I had to see you,” she said.

  He smiled. “You did the right thing,” he told her. “If you had not told me about the phone, I would never have looked for it, and we would all be dead.”

  “Oh, God.” Now she looked at the ceiling, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “It’s not your fault,” he told her. “There was nothing else we could do.”

  “We could have run,” said Joselyn. “We could have left this place.”

  “No,” he said. “No, we couldn’t.” He smiled at her, his soft blue eyes, the only part of him that seemed untouched, melting her soul.

  “I love you,” she said. Joselyn had no idea where the words came from, only that she could not control them.

  All he could do was smile.

  “Oh, God. I’m gonna lose it,” she said. She turned away so that he couldn’t see her face. She ached to touch his hand, to hold him in her arms and comfort him. She was two feet away and it was as if for all the world he was alone.

  “No.” He was breathing heavily. “Don’t. Don’t. Please.” He was hyperventilating, struggling for breath as he spoke. He knew time was short.

  “You must not feel this way,” he said. “We did good.”

  As she turned back to him, his blistered face the picture of serene acceptance, Joselyn suddenly realized that it was not her actions or her words that night that brought him to this place, but what Gideon himself believed in. “Yes. We did good.”

  “You know,” he said. “We never did get to exercise our constitutional rights.”

  She smiled, laughed, with tears running down her face.

  It was the last thing she heard as the monitor above his bed began to scream, and the blip on the screen ran to a flat line.

  Doctors and nurses in heavy lead vests streamed into the room, pulling a crash cart behind them.

  Before they could hook up, the doctor in the booth stopped them. He shook his head, and slowly they filtered out of the room, leaving Joselyn alone, standing behind the screen, looking at Gideon’s smile and his lifeless blue eyes.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, MD

  Sy Hirshberg made the arrangements to fly Gideon’s body home to Amsterdam, aboard an Air Force jet with a full honor guard.

  Joselyn was at Andrews Air Force Base when the hearse arrived.

  The United States government paid for the special lead liner and c
oordinated with the Dutch government for burial. But the hearse itself bore a simple wooden coffin that had been requested by Gideon’s parents.

  Joselyn had never met them, but she wanted to. They spoke by phone the day after Gideon died and agreed that in the summer they would meet. She had much to tell them about how their son had lived his last days. They had a lifetime of stories to tell her.

  Hirshberg had arranged for a separate plane to take Joselyn back home to Seattle. They met on the tarmac and watched as the coffin was carried from the hearse with military precision. The flags were folded, Dutch and American.

  They offered the stars and stripes to Joselyn. She took it, but later handed it to Hirshberg with a request that it be given to Gideon’s mother. The final tears made their way down her cheeks as the casket was slowly lifted and finally disappeared into the cargo hold of the big jet.

  Hirshberg sighed. He choked. His voice cracked as he turned toward Joselyn. “I am sorry that this had to happen.”

  She looked up at him without missing a beat. “It didn’t.”

  “I know. You’re angry. You’re bitter. You have every reason to be.”

  “No. He had every reason to be.” She pointed to the open cargo door on jet. “Tell him that you’re sorry.”

  Hirshberg didn’t know what to say.

  “You know, I read in the paper that there was an incident at the Air and Space Museum.” She looked at him for a few seconds to allow the word to sink in.

  “There was nothing on the news about a nuclear bomb. Nothing about Belden or Taggart. He died of a heart attack,” said Joselyn.

  “We know it was cyanide,” said Hirshberg.

  “Well, now, that’s a start. Have you found Belden?”

  “No.”

  Belden had called two more times to the cell phone at the museum, uttering the same message each time, before he realized what had happened. The NSC was able to trace the last call to a pay phone in Augusta, Georgia. By the time authorities got there, there was no sign of Belden.

  “You don’t understand,” said Hirshberg. “There are important policy issues here. Matters of immense strategic concern.”

  “I would hope,” said Joselyn. “The man tried to kill a few thousand people in your city. Hell. He tried to destroy the entire government. He managed to kill some good people on that island. And… ” She looked at the Air Force plane with its cargo door still open.

  “I don’t understand how you can just let him go,” she said.

  “We are not letting him go,” said Hirshberg. “He is as good as dead.”

  “Really.” Joselyn looked at him, incredulous. “What’s he going to die of, old age?”

  A chill wind swept across the runway as jet engines screamed their high-pitched whine in the background.

  “Why haven’t I seen his name in the papers? A picture? You have one. Or has the president lost it?” said Joselyn.

  Hirshberg took a deep breath and stared off in another direction. She was waiting for an answer.

  “There once was a man named Dean Belden, or Thorn, or a dozen other names, none of which we’re sure of. But he died in a plane crash near Seattle.” Hirshberg found it impossible to look at her as he said it.

  It was breathtaking. She stared up at the side of his face as he looked off into the distance at nothing in particular, then spoke the only words she could think of. “I don’t believe it. You people are incredible.”

  “Joselyn, you have to understand what is happening here. The men on that island in the sound may have paid for Belden’s services, but they didn’t hire him.”

  Joselyn looked at him.

  “There is no way they could have raised the money needed to pay for an intact nuclear device,” said Hirshberg. “Maybe some fissile materials, a chemical bomb, but not a nuclear device. Not with the expertise needed to make sure that it would function as designed. Gideon knew that,” he told her.

  “Then who?”

  “That’s the question no one wants to answer,” said Hirshberg.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The United States government has a long-standing policy of maximum retaliation,” said Hirshberg. “Any foreign nation that employs or attempts to employ a weapon of mass destruction on U.S. soil would face retaliation of a similar kind.

  “Don’t you see? We’re not anxious to find Mr. Belden. At least not through any public channels of law enforcement. If we do, we run the risk of discovering the link between Belden and whoever sponsored his activities.

  “If the government ever made a public acknowledgment that it knew who was behind that device, who paid for it and who hired the man you knew as Dean Belden, then national honor and credibility would require that we do something about it.”

  “What if the bomb had gone off?” said Joselyn. “Would you continue to stick your head in the sand?”

  “If the bomb had gone off, it would have become someone else’s problem,” said Hirshberg.

  “So we have a policy that we’re afraid to carry out.”

  “The consequences for this nation and the world were that to happen are too horrific to contemplate,” said Hirshberg. “In such cases, ignorance is bliss.”

  “And in the meantime, Belden just walks away,” said Joselyn.

  “I would not wish to be in his shoes,” said Hirshberg. “Whoever hired him, he took their money, and he failed. What’s worse for Mr. Belden, he is now a very dangerous loose end in a game of nuclear brinkmanship. If he were to fall into the wrong hands, and if his story were to be made public in ways that it could not be denied … ” With his furrowed brows, Hirshberg put an expression on the face of the obvious.

  “His employers are not going to be anxious to have him wandering around. No,” said Hirshberg. “If I were Lloyd’s of London. I would not be writing any policy on Mr. Belden’s life.”

  EPILOGUE

  CHIAPAS, MEXICO

  It was a small café with three tables in the sun out near the street. There were strains of mariachi music in the distance, signs that a wedding had just concluded at the Catholic church two short streets away.

  The man had a growth of beard and straggly hair, an old Mexican blanket cut at the fold and worn so that his head went through the hole in the center and the blanket rested on his shoulders.

  He had weathered three attacks on his life in the last month, killing one of his assailants with a knife and another with his hands. The third assassin planted a bomb that did not go off until he found it under the seat of his own car.

  He carried a pistol tucked in his belt under the serape, and his gaze never rested in one place for long.

  He had friends, but they no longer slept near him at night or rode with him in the same vehicles.

  The Americans were relentless. They had eyes and ears everywhere. They may not have maintained diplomatic relations with some of the countries of the Middle East, but a note like this, detailing his whereabouts, they would willingly slip under a door.

  He would have to leave Mexico soon, and he knew it. His funds were running out, and the local guerrillas were not going to hide him for much longer. The numbered accounts in Europe had been frozen. He saw the deft fingers of the American State Department visible in this.

  By now he should have been lying on a private beach in Bali, sipping coconut milk and rum, earning 30 percent on his money. Instead they were hunting for him, his dreams of retirement, if not destroyed, certainly deferred.

  He opened the U.S. newspaper. It was yellow with age, a copy of the Santa Crista Herald. It was three months old and spattered with oil from a hundred baked tortillas. Some of the pages were missing and others were torn, but he carried it like a relic.

  He slapped it on the table as he ate and looked at the photo under the fold on page three. It was not much of a story, only four inches, along with a two-column photo of a group of people standing in front of a bronze plaque embedded in the wall of a Spanish Colonial bungalow.

  It was a monume
nt to a Dutchman named Gideon van Ry, awarded by an organization known as the Institute Against Mass Destruction.

  He was not interested in the plaque, or the story that was sparse on details, but in the woman standing on the chair, lifting the cloth that had covered the bronze shield.

  The image of her face was grainy and smaller than the nail of his small finger. The tips of her blond hair danced just off her shoulders in the wind as her eyes darted toward the lens, as if the photographer had caught her by surprise.

  It wasn’t much of a picture, but there was not a doubt in Thorn’s mind that it was Joselyn Cole.

  She had walked away from the house on Padget Island, how he would never know. Thorn had left her for dead on two occasions, and twice she had come back to haunt him.

  His gaze burned a hole through the yellowing photograph on the table. She had cost him twenty million dollars and a life of ease. Now he would have to work again and watch his back while he did it.

  He chewed with determination as he looked at the photograph and tried to imagine the expression on her face if she ever saw him again.

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  Titles by Steve Martini

  DOUBLE TAP

  THE ARRAIGNMENT

  THE JURY

  THE ATTORNEY

  CRITICAL MASS

  THE LIST

  THE JUDGE

  UNDUE INFLUENCE

  PRIME WITNESS

  COMPELLING EVIDENCE

  THE SIMEON CHAMBER