Binder - 02 (26 page)

38

Quigley and Walters formed their opinions of the scene at Jason Paul’s house without me. When we arrived, they were let through immediately, but Nichols was unsuccessful in getting me in. She argued that I’d been on the scene as a guest of the FBI when the crime took place, but the Bureau’s lead forensic investigator from Pittsburgh was having none of it. So I waited just outside the yellow tape while the three of them scoured the scene. It seemed like the more tenured the agent, the less interested he was in cooperating with outsiders.

The house had a big divot taken out of it, like Paul Bunyan had whacked it with a monumental four-iron. The fire crew must have arrived pretty quickly because two of the wings were still standing. But the central structure, the oldest part where I remembered a very solid double oak door with brass fittings, was just a pile of scorched rubble.

“They’ve got part of the device,” Walters said when the three of them met me back outside the security perimeter. Cody had stayed outside with me, perhaps understanding that the smell of soot and ash would overwhelm his sensitive nose. “It’s the kind of rig they’d use for a mountaintop removal operation. Not that different from what we saw underground at Gilroy, but a different brand. They overdid it on the explosives, though. They damn near blew the hell out of this neighborhood. This house is heated with natural gas and the explosion tore into the basement. Came pretty close to the burner and the gas lines.”

“DNA evidence?”

“They’ll find some, but it’s going to be hard to know where it came from. The body was very nearly vaporized. I’m not sure if they’re going to be able to distinguish DNA from the body from anything else that would already have been in that room. And you can forget dental records.”

“So we don’t know if it was actually Paul in that chair?”

“Not with any certainty.”

“And what do you think happened here?”

Quigley weighed his words. “We’ll never know who died here from the evidence at the scene. Since it’s Paul’s house and the FBI was coming to arrest him here and an agent saw a man tied to a chair before the device exploded, the county coroner will issue a death certificate for Mr. Paul. If I was trying to fake my own death, this is how I would have done it.”

“What do you think?” I asked Nichols.

“The only forensic trail that’s going to lead anywhere is financial,” she said. “If we assume he set this up in order to disappear, we’ll want to look for offshore accounts, aliases, and a way that he might have used them to make a bet on energy futures.”

I sat down on the granite stoop, about the only part of the main house that was still intact. In my head I stepped back to the beginning and put myself in Paul’s place. It’s a trick I learned overseas. Not from the army, actually, but from an Arab man I spent an afternoon with while waiting for the sun to set in Yemen. When I traveled in the Middle East, I habitually carried a small chess set with me. Most men in the region played, and it was an excellent way to stay alert while I passed time.

This particular Yemeni asked if we might reverse the board for a moment in the middle of a game, when I’d unexpectedly put his king into check. When I asked why he said, “You must always think of the board from the position of your opponent.” After he’d had a chance to peer from behind my pawns, he laughed as he tipped over his king. “The best players can see both sides of the board in their minds. Not I.”

As I played through events from Paul’s perspective, I saw a break—a flaw in the pattern. I opened my eyes to see Quigley and Nichols staring down at me.

“Let’s say Paul did kill himself and that the FBI never caught on. The National Front would still have known that he was running his own game. They’d obviously know that they didn’t kill him, either. And they’ve got the kind of men who could track him down wherever he went. So why take the risk? Paul could have just holed up on the National Front compound for the time being. If the scheme gets blown, he could always make a run for it later.”

“But we were already coming to arrest him,” Nichols pointed out.

“Good point. But that’s only because Paul screwed up when he blackmailed the Reclaim leader, Roxanne. Now you guys have her in custody and she’s going to testify that he was complicit in the sabotage against his own mine.”

“Which would be a good reason for the National Front to want to kill him before he flipped and pointed it back to them.”

“But what if his disappearance was part of the plan from the beginning? He was always going to be the weak link. If the Bureau brought him in, you’d eventually uncover his connection to the National Front.”

“Unless we weren’t looking for it,” Nichols said.

“Right. If what looks like a hit job at first glance quickly starts to look like a disappearing act by Jason Paul, that changes the story, doesn’t it? Imagine that you find a bunch of financial bets that Paul made against his own company and his own industry. He makes a quick score, converts his offshore accounts to bearer bonds or something and disappears while the FBI is still trying to figure out whether he’s dead or not.”

“Then it would look like this whole business was a get-rich scheme Paul cooked up on his own. The tapes and everything else would prove that he was trying to implicate Reclaim. And Roxanne could testify that Paul had blackmailed her.”

“That makes sense. But what does the National Front get out of this?”

Nichols answered quickly. “They’re much more sophisticated in their financial dealings. They have the ability to get thousands of individuals to place bets for them. They might not even need to. If you buy the shares of a company right before it takes off and make a windfall, there will be an investigation. But natural gas futures are widely held. If the price spiked, so many people would make a killing that the National Front could get lost in the shuffle.”

“But this leaves some open questions, doesn’t it?”

“Right. For instance, why has the National Front been trying to kill you? Why is the girl important? Were they afraid she’d warn someone about the Gilroy mine?”

“Harmon certainly would have known the plan, so it’s possible,” I suggested. “But in the note she wrote to her mother last week, Heather said she was going to run out of insulin tomorrow, not today. She was specific about the day. Gilroy was clearly timed for today. So what if she was trying to warn us about something else?”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but it might still involve energy. We don’t know why the National Front would want to sabotage power stations in South Africa. How does that help them blow up a coal mine? They already know how mines work.”

“Yeah, I agree. We’re still missing something.”

“So you folks think the whole business today was some scheme to blow up energy prices?” Quigley asked.

“Not oil but maybe natural gas or coal.”

“Shutting down a coupl’a mines in West Virginia wouldn’t do that. Production out west’s way bigger than here these days.”

“Right, that’s what the analyst told us,” I agreed. “At first we thought they might try to sabotage Wyoming surface mines where Paul worked previously, but that seems unlikely.”

“And your analysts think a terrorist strike on Gilroy would have a big effect on prices?”

“They don’t know. Maybe, because it’s hard to tell with terrorism. But it’s not certain. Commodities analysts know that it’s not too difficult to mess with an underground mine. But surface mines use blasting to get at the ore, and they’re enormous. They’re not so vulnerable to terrorism. We can’t see how you’d threaten them.”

“Oh that’s easy,” Walters said. All three of us swiveled toward him.

“Easy?” I asked.

“A dirty bomb.” Walters crossed his arms when he said it. I looked around, suddenly concerned we were being overhead. But the cops manning the tape were swarmed with reporters.

“How would these guys possibly get hold of the materials to make a nuke?” Nichols asked.

“I didn’t say a nuclear weapon, I said a dirty bomb. For a dirty bomb, you don’t need weapons grade uranium or plutonium, just highly radioactive material. The bomb itself is conventional, but it spreads out the radiation pretty widely.”

“I thought the whole idea was discredited,” I said, trying to recall what I’d heard from the WMD briefings during the Iraq war.

“As a way to kill people, it sucks. You never get high enough radiation levels to do much damage. Conventional weapons like a fuel-air bomb work much better. But if you’re trying to turn a working mine into a superfund site, you couldn’t do much better. If you took the kind of charges we saw yesterday and upsized them for the kind of demolition work they do at surface mines, then packed a bunch of radioactive material around it, you’d create about a century’s worth of EPA litigation in a heartbeat. Nobody would be able to touch that coal in our lifetime.”

“Is there any chance that one of the power plants the National Front targeted in South Africa was nuclear?” Nichols asked, straightening up.

“I’d better find out.”

39

Alpha reached me on the tarmac of Chuck Yeager airport, which had temporarily re-opened to allow a single government plane to land. “I just spoke with the South Africans. You may find this interesting. The reactor that experienced the incursion last month does not create weapons grade plutonium as a byproduct. The spent fuel rods from that facility primarily contain thorium and reactor grade plutonium. Shortly after the security breach, the database that tracks inventory at the nuclear waste facility co-located with the reactor became corrupted.

“A manual count was ordered, and it appears from the existing paper records that two fuel rods might be missing. But there was a gap of some weeks in the physical paperwork, so that was thought to be the source of the discrepancy. Because the rods in question did not contain weapons grade plutonium, this was not reported to international agencies.”

It was a few hours to midnight and the West Virginia governor had declared a state of emergency. An exhausted flight controller told me that Charleston was expecting a foot or more of snow and blizzard conditions overnight. The rain had picked up and the wind was gusting heavily.

“Could they have gotten radioactive material out of the country and into the U.S. undetected?”

“It would have been difficult, but not impossible. The control rods are not as large as you might think. Breaking them down would be hazardous but not complex. Major airports and ports in both South Africa and the United States have radiologic detection equipment. But there are thousands of private airports in both countries. We’ve observed jets taking off from South Africa under visual flight rules, flying to Namibia and then diverting to international routes from there. It could have been done.”

“I thought the South African incidents were intended to cripple the power industry?”

“It appears so. A technician who performed an inspection ahead of schedule because she was about to go on vacation found a device that would have exploded and triggered a containment leak and a major nuclear crisis. Stealing some commercial-grade spent fuel is a minor crime by comparison.”

“Do we have enough evidence to make this scenario plausible?”

“We have another new piece of information,” Alpha responded. “We sent over Mr. Harmon’s photo to the South Africans and asked them to check it against their plant records. There was a visual match—he had been issued a contractor pass for that day. We’re cross-matching photos of all the other visitors at the facility on that day with National Front members. We’ll send photos and profiles to your device in the next twenty minutes.”

“One of Heather’s friends—her roommate at the commune—mentioned Harmon had taken a trip while the two of them were together.”

“Given his familiarity with the Hobart mine, it’s a cause for concern. But if a radiologic device is anywhere near that mine, they’ll find it.”

I heard the squeak of rubber as a jet touched down and then the whine of engines reversing before a Gulfstream appeared. The cold, driving rain beat against the fuselage of the executive jet. We were just a few degrees away from snow. I jumped back into the Suburban with Nichols and we drove onto the runway, followed by two other black Chevys with flashing lights. As the doorway to the plane opened and the staircase dropped down, I had my first glimpse of one of the specialists who had made it to Charleston less than two hours from the moment I first called Alpha.

There’s just one agency that deals with radiologic threats in the U.S.: NEST, the Nuclear Emergency Support Team. I didn’t see how we could call them in with unsupported speculation. But when I spoke with Alpha and laid out our suppositions, he had no qualms. He notified NEST immediately, then contacted the South Africans.

The NEST team mobilized from Andrews Air Force Base so quickly that we had to leave the crime scene at Jason Paul’s house abruptly to prepare for their arrival. Nichols liberated two extra Suburbans from the FBI carpool and Quigley called in the State Police SWAT unit to meet us at the mine entrance. A team of eight rumpled looking men and women filed from the jet. I greeted the man at the front of the line, a thin, graying scientist with rain-splattered, steel-rimmed glasses and a firm handshake.

“I’m Michael Herne. It’s my fault that you’re getting wet. This could be a false alarm.”

“Dr. William Harris. Call me Bill,” he said as he shook my hand. His voice rose as the Gulfstream’s engine powered back up and the plane glided off toward a hangar. “Don’t worry, Mr. Herne—most of what we do is chase down false alarms. But the last time we found a functioning radiologic device, the woman who called us in said the exact same thing.”

“We found explosives set in an underground mine today a few hundred miles north of here. We’ve tied them to the guy running a surface mine about twenty miles from here,” I said as I looked at the rest of his team. They were male and female, young and old. They all carried various backpacks and pieces of luggage that I’d been told contained testing equipment rather than personal essentials. They looked a little like an American tour group preparing for a safari.