The Threat (23 page)

“I can see I'm not getting through. There's something in your head. The torture thing. Losing your ship. And now whatever you saw in Bosnia. But snap out of this. Believe me, you're making up something that's not there.”

It felt like someone else picked up the serving dish. The sound of it crashing into the mirror, of everything shattering, was the most satisfying thing he'd ever heard.

“Dan.
Dan!
”

He said in a thick voice, “Then how about in St. Petersburg. At the Pribaltskaya. That night, in his suite. How about that?”

She'd jumped to her feet when the mirror exploded. Now she turned for the bedroom. But paused, looking back. “It was business. But I see I can't convince you of that. You can't even control your actions. So I don't see any point in continuing this conversation.”

He heard the snap as the lock went home. Leaving him clenching his fists. Looking at his bloodshot, crazy, shattered reflection in the shards that littered the sideboard.

Maybe it didn't matter in the great scheme of things, the way a massacre in a distant land mattered. Or maybe that didn't make any difference either.

The guilt, the rage, the shame, hammered through him. He wanted to smash more things, smash everything.

He was mad enough to kill.

13

She was already up when he lurched into the kitchen the next morning. The couch had been stylish but uncomfortable. She was dressed, made up, and was eating a toasted sesame bagel. They didn't have much to say. Just the “Did you want coffee?” and “There's more of those in the freezer” nonconversation of a couple who didn't want to talk, didn't want to be near each other.

At the door she said, “This house is half yours. So I can't exactly ask you to leave.”

“You want me out? I'll get out.”

“Let's talk about it later. I've just got too much going on to deal with this right now,” she said, and was gone. Leaving only her scent, and the lingering smell of toast.

Meilhamer was in when he got to the office. “Jeez,” his assistant said, looking at his eye. “You have that looked at?”

“It'll go away,” Dan told him. “Let's get to it.”

“Okay.” Meilhamer fitted himself like a puzzle piece into the window chair and unloaded a sheaf of correspondence folders onto Dan's desk. The first alone was an inch thick. “We got catch-up to play. First off, this GAO report on automated information-systems management. The counterdrug systems inventory. Here's their draft report and recommendations, our draft response.”

Dan sat with chin on his fist, looking at page after page as the assistant ground through why NSC-CD could not agree to this obscure recommendation for this or that arcane reason, but on the other hand, how the working-group reports could not be considered in the final IRM draft documents. He was into pointer index systems and the National Counter-Narcotics Information Protection Architecture when Dan broke in. “Can we move ahead on this, Bry? Kind of give me the one-pager. Or we're never going to get through it.”

“Sure, boss. Bottom line's that the draft National Drug Control Information Resource Management plan, as currently configured, should not receive support from within the NSC-CD staff. Without a major redrafting, it'll end up in the “too hard” box. This eventuality is underscored by the problems we're having getting letters of promulgation signed for the TMP and the DETIP. Even if it comes back in a more benign form, it's too expensive. Half a billion my little birds tell me isn't going to be in the budget.”

Dan cradled his skull. “But I understood—the president went on record in Cleveland saying we were going to improve information sharing, get the various resources and centers talking to each other better—”

“That's right. We can't shrink from implementing this project. So we need to remassage these documents so they are professionally presented, provide recommendations acceptable to the budgeteers, and reach conclusions that are not blue-sky like GAO's.”

Dan gave up. He signed letters to Sam Nunn, John Warner, and Charlie Schumer saying how important information-resources-management leadership was to the War on Drugs, and a long letter back to the GAO that took apart its proposals and regurgitated them in even more obfuscatory bureaucratese. This, Meilhamer explained, would serve the purpose of NSC-CD appearing to cooperate while postponing actually having to do anything into the next budget cycle. Dan felt sick, but once it was done there was another file, another smooth explanation by his rumpled, slovenly assistant.

Meilhamer was leaving when Dan called, “Wait. Give me back that letter to GAO.”

The assistant didn't move. “That was the right decision.”

“No it wasn't.” Dan held out his hand. “We owe them a better response than that. I might not get to it today, but I'll take it home tonight and think about it.”

*   *   *

He went through the e-mail, the intel summaries. The first interesting thing was a report from Belize that had located the Baptist in Morawhannä, on the coast of Guyana. The silt Bloom had talked about was settling. Unfortunately, by the time the extradition paperwork got there, he'd left. Dan remembered his suspicions about a leak, but didn't come up with any new ideas about who it might be.

He read the
Early Bird,
then flicked through the cables and messages the Sit Room watchstanders had filed in his queue. One was based on his request for anything about air cargo. It looked like there was going to be another airline strike. Since freight volume had been falling, due to the recession, the companies had been trying to circumvent the baggage handlers' union. The union was going out, just to remind them who was boss.

Message traffic about Bogotá, arrangements for the conference. He started an e-file on that, figured he'd probably be going. Major busts were going down in Colombia. Tejeiro was on the warpath. On the other hand, interception rates through the Bahamas were back up. A single factoid told you nothing in this business. It had to be part of a tapestry before it made sense. And even then, two people could use it to back up opposite conclusions.

What was the point, anyway? When marijuana got scarce everybody went to crack. If they stopped every gram of coke at the border, the Hell's Angels would cook up more meth. If that dried up there was still alcohol, the most destructive drug ever. He wondered what they'd do when it went digital, when you just clamped a headset on and downloaded the latest buzz.

He jerked his mind back to what was in front of him. A message from the CIA feed. A raid on a Mexican power plant. He made himself read it.

He read it again.

Then went downstairs, trotted across West Executive in a cold drizzle, and let himself into the Sit Room. He stood at the director's cubicle, looking out her window. Dead pansies thrashed in the window box, whipped by the wind.

Captain Roald glanced up. “You look terrible. What's wrong with your eye?”

Dan dropped the printout on her blotter. It was marked “Secret,” but it hadn't been out of his hands, and if the Sit Room wasn't a secure space, what was? “See this, Jennifer?”

“The Laguna Verde break-in. We got the first cables at zero-six. They wrecked the place. Shot three guards.”

“But didn't take any of the nuclear materials. What was that about?”

“Made me wonder too. I had the watchstanders make some phone calls. See if it was worth passing up the line.”

Roald said they'd finally decided it wasn't immediate action, though she'd phone-notified the deputy NSA, and it would go in the daily summary. Took place on foreign soil, no U.S. forces or interests involved; and it hadn't succeeded. She gave him the facts.

Laguna Verde, Green Lagoon, was on the Gulf of Mexico fifty miles north of Veracruz. The Mexican government ran two nuclear reactors there, for power and production of isotopes. Ninety percent of nuclear isotopes used in the U.S. for diagnostic X-rays, nuclear medicine, and radiation therapy were imported. A sizable percentage, Roald said, came from Laguna Verde. They included iodine-131, technium-99, cobalt-60, iridium-192, and cesium-137.

According to the police command center in Mexico City, two vanfuls of armed men had crashed the gates. They'd shot down the guards, then been taken on in a firefight by more security personnel from deeper in the plant.

The security force held its own, dropping two attackers while losing one man to fire, and eventually drove the intruders back outside the perimeter fence. But meanwhile, using the gate action as a diversion, another team landed from a boat flying a huge Greenpeace flag. There were often demonstrations on the gulf, and Greenpeace often crowded the security zone. So no one had thought much of the boat until it ran up on the beach, disembarking six men who blew the seaside fence and penetrated the complex.

Only the timely arrival of a Mexican Army helicopter drove them out. The helo machine-gunned the boat and set it on fire. Both parties of intruders had left in the vans, abandoning one dead man. None of the reactor pressure walls, waste pools, or isotope storage areas had been breached.

“This time,” Dan muttered.

“‘This time'?”

“There are three valuable things in that plant. Fuel, waste, and isotopes. They couldn't steal the fuel, not if the reactor's operating. The waste, pretty much the same, as I understand it. But the isotopes: small, light, and valuable. They were after the isotopes.”

“Well, that'll juice 'em to beef up their security,” Roald said.

*   *   *

He ate at his desk, a plastic sandwich from the cafeteria. Trying to ignore the abyss that beckoned whenever he thought about doomed things. Condemned, surrounded Sarajevo. Slumped bodies … when his mind recurred to that vision blackness shaded his sight, his stomach teetered between terror and nausea.

By early afternoon he'd gotten through his callbacks. He even wrote a little on his white paper, the one he'd been doing on the Threat Cell. Thinking about Laguna Verde, he added a section on radioactive materials.

Which reminded him, in turn, of
Horn
. Even now, with a Yankee White clearance, he couldn't access certain files on the incident. Al Qaeda had modified that weapon, in some not-yet-comprehended way, to generate an enormous fallout. Detonated in the right place, dispersed by the prevailing winds, it would have made hundreds of square miles uninhabitable for years.

He closed the file—didn't want to leave something like that glowing on his screen—and went out to Major Lynch's cubicle. Rapped on it. “Ed.”

“Holy smoke. I've heard of riding the red-eye—”

“Everybody's got to make a joke. Remember that thing about FedEx? The guys who were trying to import empty containers?”

“You mean UPS?”

“Yeah. The relief organization. Ever come up with anything more on that?”

Lynch told him he'd followed up as directed. “That's what I was starting to tell you about yesterday, when you got the ring from Mrs. C. Transport security put out a closure bulletin on it. They didn't find anything illegal, and the outfit's clean.”

“Where were these containers going to, again?”

Lynch told him L.A., there was a big hub airfield near there. Dan nodded. “Okay … Where's Miles these days? I meant to ask Bry this morning, but…”

Lynch said the DEA operative was at a forward location in Ecuador, where the Colombian, U.S., and host militaries were setting up a combined surveillance center. Dan thought this over and asked if DEA could forward a message. Lynch thought so. Dan sat at the agent's desk, logged in, and typed a message from his account. He queued it and logged off.

He was headed back to his office when Gil Ouderkirk, the sergeant the Pentagon had sent to replace Ihlemann—a big taciturn guy with a shaven head that looked strange with a sport coat—said, “Commander? Call for you. State Department.”

It was a staffer responding to Dan's inquiry on the stuff he'd left with Buddy Larreinaga. His uniform, wallet, passport, and so forth. Dan especially wanted his class ring back. It had gone too many places with him, bore too many dings from the ships he'd served on. The staffer said he'd located it, but it wasn't in State's system. It was coming back through a UN pouch. So it would go to New York, not D.C.

*   *   *

Around five he finished the report on Bosnia that De Bari had asked for, then wondered whom he should turn it in to. Sebold? Gelzinis? That would invite delay, maybe second-guessing from CIA and State. Dan wanted his words read unvarnished. Maybe it was futile, but he was trying to separate the president, the chief executive it was his duty and obligation to counsel, from Bob De Bari. For whom he was starting to cherish a real loathing.

Normally anything from NSC staff went through the executive secretary, in a nook off the Sit Room spaces, and from there to the president's staff secretary. This could take anywhere from a day to a few minutes. He'd noticed anything political got a higher priority than national-security matters. Everything that went into the Oval was monitored. Even the scrap paper the president doodled on was accounted for. He'd gotten back copies of two of his counterdrug reports with the red “President has seen” stamp. Copies only; the originals of everything that went before that sanctified sight came back to the Sit Room, thence into the classified archives.

At last he decided the most direct route was through the chief of staff. If he could get it past the dragon's guardians, into the Secret Cave. He printed off a clean copy and put it in a regular file folder. Holt's office would slip it into one of the blue leather presidential jackets.

*   *   *

The west wing again. The chief of staff's space was past the vice president's. The usual reception area, then Holt's office off to the right. Neither was large, but the upholstery and carpet were of such luxurious-looking dark blue cloth, with small gold figures on them, that the effect was incongruous, as of infinite power compressed into a shoebox. He told the receptionist that he had an NSC report the president had requested. She held out her hand. “You can give it to me.”