Fallout (39 page)

“What about the school? You guys shut it down after the attack.”

“The government still wants you operating.”

“If I go, I want your word. The school goes on, with me or without me. Win or lose in India.”

Morrissey hesitated. “You have my word.”

Luke saw the hesitation. He looked at Helen, who nodded her agreement. “What do you think, Katherine?”

She looked at Morrissey, then Helen. “I’m sorry. I’ve seen the government at work too many times. They’ll lie right to your face if it’s to their advantage.”

“I wouldn’t,” Morrissey said, stung by her comments.

Katherine raised her eyebrows. “You’re with the CIA and you wouldn’t lie to him if you thought it was in the national interest to do so?”

“No. I wouldn’t.”

Katherine smiled. “I might have been born yesterday, but I wasn’t born at night.” She looked at Luke. “Unless they put it in writing and I keep the document, I wouldn’t count on it.”

Luke went to the kitchen and took out a piece of paper from a drawer. He handed it to Morrissey. “Put it in writing.”

Morrissey hesitated. “I’ll have to be vague, at least about what you’re doing.”

“Just put in there that the school is to remain open and that that is the will of the United States government.”

Morrissey’s pen hovered over the paper, and then he began writing. When he finished, he handed the document to Luke, who passed it to Katherine without even reading it.

Katherine read every word. Then she nodded at Luke. “This will do it.”

“Bring them in,” he said to Helen who left quickly.

Katherine was somber. “You don’t have to prove anything,” she said to Luke.

“I know. But somebody has to stop him.”

“India can do it without you.”

“Probably. But if they can’t, it’ll start a war,” he said.

“You really think so?” she asked.

“I’ve got to stop Khan. I didn’t get it done here. I’ll do it there.”

Morrissey closed his briefcase and handed Luke a passport and a ticket. The passport had his picture on it but was in the name of Robert Boswick.

Luke looked at it and frowned. “What’s this?”

“We don’t want Khan hearing about this. He has a lot of friends. We want him to assume that if we’re onto him, all we’d ever do is pass it to India. He has no fear of them.” Morrissey’s face was dark. “He’s much more resourceful than we gave him credit for.”

They got up and headed toward the back. As they walked, Luke asked Katherine, “You okay with this?”

“You’re taking a risk you don’t have to take. India can take care of itself.”

Luke shook his head. “It’s not about India. It’s about Khan. He tried to ruin us, Katherine. I owe him. I owe Thud.”

“He’s not a threat to us anymore.”

He stopped. “I wouldn’t ever be the same person if I just let this happen. I’d be cowering in a corner somewhere,” he said. “I’ve got to get this done.”

There were a lot of things she wanted to say, but she could tell by the look on his face that none of them would make any difference.

They went to the back of the house. He heard the deep rumbling of a jet-powered helicopter and looked in the direction of the noise. He watched as the dark Sikorsky S-76 settled quickly onto his runway, throwing sand all around on either side. The side door came open, and a man in a flight suit and helmet motioned for him to climb aboard quickly. Luke looked back at Katherine and waved awkwardly before dashing for the helicopter.

The special agents pressed their backs against the wall outside Merewether’s apartment. They’d been waiting in shifts in their cars for days. No one had tried to enter the apartment since Merewether’s disappearance. No cleaning service, no friends, no family—no one. Not even the manager. No lights had come on, the phone didn’t ring once—they had it tapped—and no one showed any interest in Merewether at all. It had made for a dull stakeout.

Then, just at dusk, Merewether had driven up in his antique Volkswagen Bug with the rusted bumper and parked on the street. The FBI agents had thought they were hallucinating. They expected someone to come at some point, but not Merewether himself. Not in his car, not so obviously.

Merewether had gotten out of his car and gone to the elevator. The FBI agent stationed outside had immediately radioed the others, then hurried to the elevator and to Merewether’s floor.

They waited outside his door, their guns drawn. The lead agent knew very well what his instructions were. If Merewether returned, they were to wait to see if he called anyone or tried to make any contact with anyone that might lead them to the Pakistani who’d set up the entire thing—who had himself conveniently disappeared.

The lead agent stood next to Merewether’s door. He could hear the television: CNN. Typical Washington, he thought. In D.C. everybody does their work, then runs home to see how much of it was legitimate, determined by how much of it makes it onto CNN. In D.C. if you’re not on television, you don’t exist.

The agent checked his watch and looked at the other three agents. They were to wait thirty minutes or until Merewether left. Whichever came first. Then they were to arrest him on a list of federal offenses as long as his excuses were sure to be. The lead agent carried the arrest warrant in his suit pocket. He waited a minute and checked his watch again. He knew Merewether wasn’t leaving. He must have something else in mind, some specific purpose that would make him come back to this apartment, after being gone long enough to have seen his name in the papers. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to escape. His apartment was on the seventh floor of a high-rise with no way out except through the door next to the agents.

CNN droned on in the background as another seventh-floor resident came out of the elevator and passed the FBI agents in front of Merewether’s apartment. He looked at them and their drawn guns and hurried by, quickly turned the corner, and glanced back, horrified and intrigued.

Twenty-seven minutes. The agent had waited long enough. He reached across the door with the back of his right hand and rapped sharply. “FBI, open up. We have a warrant for your arrest!” The agents breathed more deeply, ready for whatever Merewether had in mind.

“FBI! Open up!” he repeated with an insistent, no-nonsense tone.

Still nothing.

“Open up! FBI!” he demanded. No response. He looked at the other agents. They were all in agreement. He nodded. They all knew what the plan was and what each one’s role was. The lead agent tried the doorknob. It was locked. He examined the construction of the door. The usual hollow-core apartment door with cheap hardware. One kick, he thought. He went to the other side of the hallway, across from the door, took one quick step, and kicked with all the force of his leg right next to the doorknob.

The door flew open. Merewether had closed the dead bolt behind him, and it tore through the frame and the wallboard as it was forced open. “FBI!” the agent yelled as he moved rapidly into the apartment with his gun ready, looking for any danger. The other three agents flowed into the apartment behind him and fanned out to cover the entire hallway from the living room to the kitchen. The apartment lights were on in all the rooms they could see. The television was on, too, but no one was watching it.

The lead started working his way through the apartment from the living room. He turned off the television to allow them to listen more easily. The silence was eerie. They could hear their hearts pounding. The lead pointed to the kitchen, where one of the other agents looked, then entered. Nothing unusual at all.

The lead agent headed toward the bedroom. The door was closed. He considered his options. He tried the knob, but the bedroom door was locked. It was a thin door with no internal strength. He stepped back, kicked the door open in one motion, and moved away from the opening in case Merewether was waiting for them with a weapon. There was no sound at all. The lead agent glanced around the door and saw a small white television on a dresser playing to an empty room. He turned it off. There was nothing out of order. They searched the room carefully, checking the closets and the bathroom, but there was no sign of Merewether.

“There any more rooms?” the lead agent asked, confused.

“Nope,” his second replied.

“Where the hell is he?”

They all looked around the three-room apartment—the kitchen, living room, and bedroom. No Merewether. They quickly checked the bathroom. It was empty. They stared at each other.

“Maybe he jumped,” one of them said suddenly.

The lead agent hurried to the balcony off the living room and wrestled with the sliding glass door. He had difficulty pushing the door open. It felt as if the slide rail were made of gravel. He tried to look down to the ground through the white steel railing, but they were too high for him to see the ground immediately.

He noticed in his peripheral vision that a light coming from his left was blocked, then not blocked. He realized that two legs hung in front of him, dangling, lifeless. “Help me get him down!” he yelled as he grabbed Merewether’s legs and pushed up. One of the other agents tried to get at the balcony of the apartment above to release the belt that was knotted to the railing. The end was slipped through the buckle, allowing it to cinch tight when pressure was brought to bear, which it certainly was when Merewether stepped off the railing of his own balcony.

The lead yelled, “Get up there and get the belt off!”

“I can’t reach the other end!” the second agent protested as he considered climbing up on the railing to reach the balcony above.

“Then get up there and get onto the balcony!”

The second agent ran out of Merewether’s apartment and up the stairs to the next floor.

The lead agent and the others tried to keep Merewether from hanging from the belt. They tried not to look at his blue, swollen face.

“Is he still alive?” one asked.

“I don’t know. He sure doesn’t seem to be breathing. Get an ambulance here!” the lead replied.

Finally they heard the other agent above them and two voices they didn’t recognize. “I just need to get onto your balcony,” he was explaining as he pushed by them.

“Hey! What could you possibly need out there? We haven’t been out there all day!”

He ignored them and leaned down to examine the knotted belt. “Shit, this is tight! Can you get any more pressure off?”

“No,” the lead replied.

“I’m just going to cut it,” the second said, pulling a buck knife out of its belt holder and slicing through the leather.

Merewether tumbled into the arms of the three agents waiting below.

They laid him on the concrete slab that constituted the balcony and felt for a pulse. Nothing. “We’re too late.”

The other agents grimaced. They knew that those who had decided to stake out Merewether’s apartment around the clock were much less interested in securing a conviction against him than in being able to question him about the Pakistanis. Now they wouldn’t get the chance.

“We did it right, boss. Thirty minutes—”

“Shut up.” He looked at the body. It was still warm. There was still some color in his hands. They were only a few minutes late. While they were out in the hall, Merewether was ending his life. “We’d better call Li.”

“I’ll call her,” another agent said.

“No, I’ll call her.”

“It wasn’t our fault.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not political with her; it’s getting to the bottom of things.” He finished dialing and waited for the cell phone to connect.

Luke and Vlad walked through San Francisco International Airport trying not to look conspicuous. Every television continued to broadcast the unending news on CNN and every other news station about the attack at San Onofre. The immediacy of it had subsided slightly, only because the nuclear cloud had not yet decided where to go and was hovering over the Pacific. It was apparently caught in the middle of contradicting weather patterns, which resulted in its staying put, a not altogether unpleasant development, although a marine layer was starting to form and threatened to engulf the California coast in a low-hanging, radioactive fog.

The televisions showed nonstop video of the crumpled San Onofre building, with accusatory reports about nuclear waste. Interstate 5, the main artery that ran along the coast from San Diego to Los Angeles, was closed for the indefinite future.

Luke and Vlad stood in line at the gate. The passengers in front of them spoke of little else. The entire world was transfixed by the attack and by following the drifting, dissipating radioactive cloud. Luke tried to count the number of times he heard the words “Chernobyl” or “Three Mile Island” or “malicious,” or some other unflattering adjective applied to the Pakistanis. Luke watched the television out of the corner of his eye, especially when Pakistani officials were answering questions about how their pilots might have pulled this off without governmental assistance. They claimed to be baffled and angry.

His and Vlad’s innocuous bags had been checked, even though they contained flight gear, flare guns, and other things that were never supposed to be checked. They’d been assured that their bags would not be inspected or confiscated. All they carried with them were two small Air India flight bags that contained shaving kits and paperback books that looked to them to be particularly boring and ridiculous.

They stopped at the desk to check in with the airline attendant. Luke started to sweat as he stepped to the counter and handed her his false passport.

Vlad was completely unperturbed behind him, in spite of the fact that his passport read “Billy Walters” and listed an address in El Paso, Texas. Luke glanced at Vlad and whispered, “Do you even know where El Paso, Texas, is?”

“Sure,” Vlad answered.

Luke tried to look bored and preoccupied. Nearly everyone getting onto the airplane appeared to be of Indian descent. There were very few American passports in the group. “Good morning, sir,” the attendant said, taking his passport. She checked it against his appearance, then against the ticket. “We have you assigned to seat 27A,” she said in her Indian accent.