Banquo's Ghosts (28 page)

Johnson sat back in his seat aghast. “Yossi, you’re a sick man.”

At which the Turk laughed again: “I sold program to RUK Kurdish rebels for $5,000 cash. They beam it into Iran from Kurd pirate TV station every day. Pretty soon YouTube get it.”

Johnson reached for his face to slip off the hood. “Can we get out of—?”

But everyone in the car shouted, “
No!
” at the same time, and he desisted, sitting back in discomfort for the remainder of the ride. Well, at least he didn’t have to walk. The swelling had receded, and Marjorie gave him another two shots of the steroid cocktail before the day was over.

“Don’t get used to it,” she cautioned him. “Once we’re back in the world, it’ll be bourbon and bon-bons but no boom-boom.”

The wonderful stuff made him feel like The Hulk: invincible, powerful, and alive. But like every drug when it’s ripped away, a part of you is ripped away with it, an ounce of flesh you sacrificed to the anabolic Demon, leaving you weaker.

But that was for later.

Not now. No, sitting in the back of the car watching as they left town—the unexpected, wondrous green and wooded hills of Iran sliding past the slit in his veil—Johnson felt like a god. Somehow he was going to wrest the best book of his life out of this, the best novel ever written. The hood over his head no longer stifled him but became a dark movie theater of the mind where he saw how it would all come out. Him, safe at home in safe Manhattan, working, with Giselle helping—reading every page in the swell Brooklyn condo. The markups, the polish, the page—warm to the touch—printing from his PC printer. Every wild scene, torture, confession, the gunfight—now in black-and-white, sharp as tacks, sent to a dozen publishers, who all bid more and more and more. The phone rang, and he heard his agent’s voice telling him of the advance . . .

“Hey, wake up. We’re here.”

“Piranha?” The hood was choking him. His mouth like cotton, worse than any hangover he could remember.

“That’s right, the outskirts of Piranshahr. You can take off your burka now.”

Johnson breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the thing off in a great whoosh. His face was sticky with sweat, the cool air like some heavenly blessing. Marjorie now wore a crimson babushka but no face covering. Little Red Riding Hood.

He took some time to look around. The late afternoon sun illuminated all before them. They had stopped on the curve of a road, an overlook. In
the distance, a haze of smog hung over a small city in the lap of low wooded hills, maybe a mile off. You’d think Iran was all scrub and desert, and you’d be wrong. This part was green and forested.

Below their road lay what looked like an abandoned quarry. The place filled with fifty-gallon drums. Some stacked in pyramids. Yossi stared into his laptop. He had managed to track the trucks from the previous night from the Esfahan complex to the railhead in Kermanshah, then right here.

“Don’t understand,” Yossi said. “They side track, make detour. Make unexpected stop. Why?”

Wallets considered for a moment, thinking it through out loud: “We were just thinking a two-part plan, mating triggers from Esfahan to nuclear fuel from Nantanz. But this is a
three-part
plan. Like you said, a detour.” Wallets traced the route and, yes, pure speculation: “So maybe they railed some lead boxes packed with radioactive product from Nantanz, so we couldn’t see it from space. Whatever they’ve got refined. Twenty pounds, a hundred? Didn’t have a signature. Just a moving train, provided we even had satellite cover. Then trucks from Esfahan with some kind of trigger mechanism met the train in Kermanshah, where they mated the mechanism to the payload—as we surmised. But now what?”

They watched the vehicles roll into the quarry, through the gate in a chain-link fence, which opened automatically and closed behind them. Men got out and began to wrestle with the nearest pile of drums, opening them up. The men wore military-grade protective radiation suits, hoods, and gas masks, thick booties on their feet. They moved slowly in their gear, wrestling four drums open and carefully placing the drumheads on the ground. Besides the automatic gate, the place was surrounded by a high fence, twenty feet at least, topped with razor wire and capped with klieg lights pointing both inside and out. The first thing Johnson noticed: “No guards.”

“Don’t need them. No one would want to go there,” Wallets told him.

“Looks like landfill. A waste dump?”

Wallets was impressed. “TRU waste. Transuranic. Meaning ‘between Uraniums.’ Neither here nor there, get it?”

“Not really.”

“There’s a lot of waste when you process fissionable material. You can’t use it, but you can’t flush it down the toilet either. You can put it in a New Jersey landfill or stick it in asphalt-lined drums out in the middle of—”

“I get it,” Johnson said. “So those are asphalt-lined disposal drums. With waste inside.”

Like slow-moving robots, the men moved stiffly in their protective suits, hoods, and filter-masks. The Iranians shoveled some of the contents from each drum, about half into a wheelbarrow, and then dumped the contents in a nearby pit, until all four were half empty. Then the top robot motioned to one of the others leading him back to the truck. He lifted up the flap in the back, and the two men lugged out what looked like a yard-long tube wrapped in some kind of protective metallic covering. Three other tubes inside. The protective covering fell away from the tube for a moment, and there was a glimpse of titanium—the tube shiny silver metal. Then the protective covering was wrapped back in place.

Laboriously, they slid yet another bag around the tube, but this one was thick canvas, with handles so they could carry it. A kind of cradle. You could tell the object or device was heavy, eighty or a hundred pounds. Other robotic drones came to assist.

“What in the world?” Marjorie wondered out loud.

“Those tubes are bombs,” Wallets said softly. “What kind of bombs I don’t rightly know.” He thought for a moment. “Something we haven’t seen before. My guess is some kind of mini-bomb. There’s a trigger assembly and detonation device at one end, igniting a payload.”

Now the men placed one titanium tube into an open waste drum to see if it would go in smoothly—like they wanted to see how well the tubes slid into the drums. And how much waste to remove from the drum to get a snug fit.

The slow-moving men hefted one titanium canister in its cradle from the truck. At the first drum, they paused, lowered the covered tube into the half-empty drum. The cylinder vertical, sizing the hole. Did they take out too much waste? Too little? No, just right. Thence onto the
next drum. Carefully they lowered the tube into its new cocoon—making sure the hole would comfortably accommodate the canister. Then took it out again. As each titanium cylinder was the same size, they only used one for their “fitting.”

Satisfied that the poisonous drums would accommodate each of the tubes at last, they slid the now contaminated canvas cradle free of the last tube and dumped the cradle unceremoniously into the pit. The sizing tube they returned to the truck.

Marjorie nodded. “Say it’s something simple. Say the trigger at the top of the canister has fifty pounds of C-4—enough common explosive to take out a bridge or a building. But they’ve added a little bullet of highly purified plutonium—this they manufactured at the trigger place, Esfahan, the
really
guarded place. Say the remainder of the tube is filled with semi-refined material from Nantanz, an even larger radioactive wad. The tic-toc tube goes boom, driving an ounce of plutonium into a hundred pounds of hot, semi-refined uranium. 70 percent or 80 percent pure.”

Wallets nodded. “Pure enough to get . . . what would we call it? A
semi
-reaction? So when the C-4 nuke tube goes off, not only will it level a building but will drive the little bullet into the larger wad inside the canister and blow the cocoon of the waste drum for a mile in every direction. A radioactive cloud. Fallout. The ultimate dirty bomb.”

Already the other slow-moving handlers set about sealing the half-empty drums, pounding the tops back, then crimping the lids tight with heavy pincers. Finally, they hefted them on hand-trucks, wheeling them up an aluminum portable ramp into another truck. Soon all four drums were inside. The men wriggled out of their protective gear, leaving them on the ground, then climbed into their vehicles. The trucks’ engines gunned, belching exhaust, and they rolled out the automatic gate.

Marjorie completed the circle. “So they came here right on the border to insert the device in a drum. Step three: make it fit. Sink your tic-toc tube in Transuranic waste, all inside a fifty-gallon asphalt-lined waste drum. Take it out again. Ship it in pieces. Reassemble and arm it near the intended target.”

“And . . .
hide it?
” She glanced at the Turk, with a touch of doubt. “What do you think?”

Yossi stared into his laptop. A satellite shot. The quarry glowed, but the trucks didn’t. “Asphalt-lined drums, no signature. Silver tubes, no signature either. Shielded.”

Wallets nodded his head. “Right. When you’re back in civilization, match it up again. Deliver it by panel van. Take out a building? A city block? Leaving twenty blocks in every direction poisoned. Fallout for twenty miles. People exposed would take from two months to two years to die. Forty thousand casualties?”

He looked from Marjorie to Yossi. Plausible?

“Pick your city,” the Turk growled. He turned the key in the ignition, and the car crawled off the overlook as the sun sank into the hills. They drove the rest of the way to the border, a mere few miles into the mountains, in silence. And somehow the last twenty minutes of their trip seemed longer than any that went before.

Dusk came on fast. But Johnson could still see quite a bit as a three-quarter moon rose in the east. They had finally come to some kind of plateau at the end of a paved road in a tragic state of disrepair. Of all things, an abandoned drive-in movie theater nestled into a forest of trees, the kind of outdoor entertainment that went out of date forty years ago, even before the Shah’s time. The projection booth sat in ruins. The high billboard screen had been shot through with gaping holes and plastered over with a huge banner of the Ayatollah Khomeini—now so faint and faded he’d be unrecognizable if it wasn’t for his power-mad eyes, his bitter beard, and the cruel twist of his mouth. A large black bird sat on the billboard screen and cawed once as if to mark them.

So this was where civilization’s road ended. Beginning as a shiny bauble of Western decadence, mutating in anger to an outdoor stadium where the faithful chanted “Death to America, Death to Israel,” then dying in obscurity, only to be born again as a smugglers’ camp. The Crow of history’s last harsh laugh.

Teams of horses and pack mules stood tethered to a few of the metal poles that once held the window speakers. Now most of the poles were
gone, metal and wire too valuable to simply lie around to rot. Groups of men stood by their horses, quietly talking, waiting for the night to close in. But no lit cigarettes, no camp fires. Below them and across a shallow valley lay the small city of Piranshahr, blazing and lit up like a toy town with far more bright lights than Johnson ever imagined in such a remote place. The hills behind the city were strung with lights as well and reminded him of the favelas, the slums of Rio perched on their clay-chiseled hillsides overlooking the swank hotels and beach at Ipanema. But here there was no beach, just a rundown drive-in movie theater from the Shah’s 1950s heyday, sitting on the edge of a forest below the mountains. He could see Yossi and Wallets haggling with some men.

“Seeing a man about a horse?” Johnson wondered.

Marjorie nodded, “A mule more like it. But you get the idea. It’s for you. We’ll walk. See their packs?”

“No.”

“That’s the whole point. They don’t have any. They’re vice merchants. They smuggle in liquor and cigarettes by horseback, but not much goes the other way, except guns and bombs. Iran has nothing worth exporting that doesn’t go bang. And that’s what they’ll think we are too, just another gang of cigarette smugglers.”

Just as she finished speaking, engine noise from the broken-down road rose into the air. The trucks from the waste dump site, lights blazing, entered the concrete apron of the drive-in. They pulled up side-by-side some ways off and killed their engines. But kept their lights on. The headlights blazed into the crowd of horses and mules. The haggling men turned to face the trucks, and Yossi, Wallets, and the smugglers all shouted and waved at the drivers to kill the lights. But the truck lights didn’t die. These guys weren’t afraid of making their presence known.

Instead, four armed men got out. They pointed their guns at everyone, barking orders, taking over the scene, as though used to being in charge. You could see how disgusted the muleteers were, making apologetic gestures to Wallets and the Turk, who shrugged, turning away without an argument.