Perilous Panacea (26 page)

Chapter Thirty-Three

Saul’s plane landed at Reagan National at two-thirty, and he was in his office at three-thirty. Two days in Chicago, another in Pittsburgh, and he had nothing to show for it. In Chicago, they turned McCormick Place upside down, but uncovered no leads on who booked the Lawless Room or who delivered the wooden box. Nobody at the Palmer House remembered anything about who delivered the note for Saul to the desk.

NEST searched over, around, and through Chicago for any indications of nuclear material, but they came up empty. Bureau bomb experts were still combing the remnants of the car-bomb explosion. Up until now, they had turned up tons of information, but none of it helpful in finding out who set the bomb.

While in Chicago, Saul received reports from the California agents who were trying to learn all they could about Austin, aka Hearn. Agents had been contacted by a classmate of Austin’s at Berkeley, where they each obtained undergraduate degrees in electronics engineering. However, Steven Austin was not the name he used; it was Alfred Montgomery. This friend now worked in an electronics firm in San Jose, and he had helped Montgomery obtain the diodes, Zener diodes, capacitors, relays, MOSFETs, and other electronics components that showed up as parts for the bomb triggers in the design diagrams seen on the slides in McCormick Place.

His friend thought nothing about selling Montgomery the components, since he also helped him get electronics components when he was at MIT getting his PhD. The friend knew Montgomery as an extremely talented computer and electronics engineer, who built two high-tech computers while at MIT.

Following up the Montgomery lead, agents interviewed his mother, a Palo Alto lawyer, and his stepfather, a Stanford mathematics and computer science professor.

Montgomery had built a super-sophisticated computer while a freshman in high school—before he’d obtained his degree in electronics engineering at Berkeley at age 18. When he was thirteen, his stepfather found out he was illegally accessing one of Stanford’s mainframe computers.

The video that showed the facilities for processing nuclear materials—the hot cells, atmosphere chambers, computerized machining equipment, and high-performance cluster computer—gave Saul an idea that produced another lead: companies that sell nuclear-handling equipment. Saul delegated eight agents to canvas all such companies with pictures of Hearn, Applenu, and Eric. They were to examine all big equipment orders to small companies during the last two years. Within a day, they turned up Eugene Slavin, a salesman for Reller Nuclear Equipment in Colorado Springs. Slavin thought he recognized the picture of Eric, who Slavin said called himself Eric Drafton. Slavin had sold him over three-hundred-thousand dollars worth of equipment to handle radioactive material. The equipment was delivered to Margine Nuclear Technology in Pittsburgh.

Saul flew from Chicago to Pittsburgh, where he was met by Spanner. They assembled ten local agents and headed for the warehouse on the north side of the city where the material had been delivered. The warehouse was now a furniture store. According to the building owner, the people who had rented it before were only there for three months. Apparently, they took delivery of the equipment and immediately shipped it out. Saul and Spanner flew back to Washington and left it to a task force of Pittsburgh agents to turn up information on the present whereabouts of the nuclear-handling equipment.

Back in Washington, there was little real progress. Scotland Yard had reported back on Brian Applenu. They had no information on him, and they were unable to turn up anything on him in the UK. An agent in New York City had spoken to a snitch in the Russian mafia, who said there was a rumor going around Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach section that an Iranian diplomat was interested in bringing them in on a job for their government. There was also an indication from Austin’s cell-phone records that he had contacted a bank in New York City that was known to have Iranian connections. They were now trying to determine what his connection was, but they needed a court order to get the bank to turn over any information they might have. Couple that information with Patricia Hunter’s identification of Applenu and the indication that he could be Iranian based on facial ethnicity identification techniques, and it appeared to people like Saul and Spanner that the Iranian connection was verified.

Saul sorted through his messages. Field reports from Albuquerque and Boston indicated they had located the temporarily missing computer machining experts. Both provided satisfactory explanations on their whereabouts for the past few months. As to the missing expert in Oak Ridge, there was a message to call Jerry Fortner.

“There’s something going on with that guy Reedan,” Fortner said. “According to his wife, he’s out of town. That’s not unusual, I guess, because she says he travels almost every week. What’s strange is that she claims she’s not sure where he is or when he’ll be back.” He explained the conversation he had with her and her evasive tone. “All I can figure is they had an argument and he left. She had a bruise on her left cheek, like maybe he hit her. And when I rang the doorbell, I heard her daughter scream, like she was afraid of who was at the door. He probably beat her, too. At Y-12 they said he’s a workaholic. Maybe that’s the cause of their problems. You know how women can be.”

How women can be, Saul thought, as he tried to make it all add up. Austin had made several trips to Oak Ridge when he was setting up the hijacking. Last month they had the Knoxville bureau check out the movements of Austin when he was there, but they drew a blank. They turned up no information except for the Double Tree Hotel in Oak Ridge that he stayed in on his trips to Y-12 ostensibly to confer on DOE computer business. Could he have known Reedan and recruited him for the job? Or was Reedan already in at that point?

“See if you can trace Reedan’s travels the last few months,” Saul said. “Find his bank and do a PPI. See if there were any large transactions lately.”

“This is on the bomb thing, right?”

“Right. But that’s not for release.”

After hanging up, Saul called Philadelphia and Phoenix to check on the Surling case. Nothing. He was about to leave for the day when the phone rang.

“Boychik,” Uncle Nathan said. “Glad I finally got you. I just wanted to let you know the Senator is grateful for your help.”

“My help?”

“Enough already with the playing dumb.”

“You mean my help with Saint Louis and Indianapolis? He had that all wrong.”

“Like I know the klutz he can be sometimes, but we need him. Once I make it to the governor’s mansion, I won’t need him as much. Maybe then, he’ll need me. Until then, well…I know I make like a nudnik every once in awhile, but we’re going to make it. By Hughson getting to Chicago right away, he scored in the media. And now this latest info you gave him ought to seal things for us with the Senator. I never heard him so happy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“So play the schlemiel. Hughson said you found a new way to pass him info. That’s what we need: creativity. Next year in Harrisburg.”

- - - - -

Applenu sat on the couch and sipped whiskey, watching the TV. He glanced left at Atkinson, who sat on the recliner next to the couch. Over twenty minutes of CNN ten o’clock news had already been devoted to the missing bomb material and Chicago. Now they were reporting on the Energy Secretary’s latest news conference.

“Do you think whoever stole the bomb material can make a workable bomb?”

The husky retired admiral with close-cropped gray hair glanced at the ceiling, as if thinking about the question, which he had answered several times from reporters the last few days. “No, it’s not possible,” he said. “I say that because…” and then he droned on about the difficulty of building a bomb, how it took over four years and over one-hundred-thousand people for the Manhattan Project to successfully build a bomb.

“What an asshole,” Atkinson said. “It almost makes you want to explode one of ours, and maybe then they’ll shut up.”

Atkinson had spent the last three days with Applenu, sleeping in the other bedroom and going to the factory with him every day. He was leaving in the morning. At the factory, he spent most of his time in the office on his laptop, presumably communicating with Sherbani, although he did not tell Applenu what he was doing. It was obvious Atkinson was studying Applenu as he toured the facilities. He seemed impressed at what had been accomplished.

“He’s like every bloody politician,” Applenu said. “He’s got to follow the script, cover his arse and his boss’s arse because they let the material get stolen. I’m sure his technical people told him differently.”

“You bet your ass—your arse—they did once they saw what we gave them in Chicago. Right about now they’re pissing their pants.” He laughed and turned to look at Applenu. “I thought you were trying to develop an American accent. You need to drop words like arse and bloody from your vocabulary.”

Applenu felt his face heat up. “I know.”

Atkinson stared at him. “I’ve been in touch with Sherbani. He’s not sure he can trust you, since you moved your family without telling him.”

“Why should he know my family’s whereabouts? My family has nothing to do with this job. You saw what I’ve accomplished at the factory. I’ve done everything that has been asked of me. I’ll finish what we started.”

“I told Sherbani you did a good job, and everything is in place to finish all the bombs. I think he bought it. Just don’t get any ideas of disappearing like your family did.”

On the TV, the Energy Secretary took another question: “Maybe they can’t build a workable bomb, but what if they were to build a dud that spread a lot of radioactive material around when they tried to set it off?”

Pausing to reestablish his serious thinking-about-it look, the Energy Secretary said, “Obviously, that would be disastrous. Plutonium oxide is an extremely toxic material. If it were released in a populated area, even if it wasn’t in a bomb, it could have horrendous consequences for the population living in that area. That’s why I urge the people with this material to return it immediately. You’ve got to be highly skilled in the use of sophisticated equipment to safely handle plutonium. Should they be careless, they could very easily inhale a fatal dose.”

Applenu drained his drink. The old sod had a point there, one that worried him every time he got near the plutonium-handling rooms. Images of Drafton’s emaciated corpse flashed in his mind. He turned to Atkinson.

“Do they really need to do the same thing to Reedan that they did to Surling? They’re just technical guys like you and me. I never signed up for anything like that.”

“I just told you Sherbani and I think you’re doing a good job. Your job is to machine the plutonium. You keep doing your job, and somebody else will take care of the other jobs. I might add that should you decide to suddenly do what your family did, we will hunt you and your family down. Without hesitation, they will give you what they gave Surling.”

- - - - -

Lori turned off Vanderbilt Drive for one more try. She felt bad about waking Beth and making her walk to the car at eleven o’clock. Curt could have carried her.

With Beth asleep on the back seat, Lori headed for the dark parking lot she’d visited six or seven times during the last week, but only during daylight hours. If they left in the morning and came back at night, surely they’d be there now.

She turned left into an aisle that paralleled their building and ran between the curb on her right and the parking lot on her left with the first row of cars parked at an angle to the street. Their building loomed less than fifty feet to her right.

She stopped at the first out-of-state car: Alabama, wrong color car. She moved on to the next out-of-state: Indiana, not the right size car. At the end of the row, she made the U-turn into an aisle flanked bya double row of angle-parked cars.

Then she saw it. Parked to her left was a black Lincoln Town Car with New York plates.

She glared at the building they had gone into. “I’ll be back,” she said into the quiet.

Chapter Thirty-Four

With Beth again asleep in the back seat, Lori drove into the parking lot at five-thirty in the morning, two days after her previous late-night visit. Her breathing deepened to fight the tightness in her chest every time she saw the apartment building they went into, only more so today.

She parked across from the row of cars with the Lincoln, about ten cars down from theirs. After adjusting the outside and inside mirrors so she could watch the entrance to their building, she settled in with her thoughts to wait for Beecher and Maxwell to appear.

Daylight gradually brightened the sand-colored box behind her. Early risers brought movement in the form of two joggers and the driver of a car parked two spaces from hers. Drowsiness attacked, activating a string of yawns. She rolled down the window for an allotment of the chilly morning air. Although she got to bed after midnight, sleep eluded her, arriving only after endless hours of trying to scrub her mind of the awful visions that spewed from her brain.

Six-thirty. Two more cars drove from the lot. After another yawn, she looked up, and Beecher stood in the mirror, staring her way. She slid down in her seat, pulled her shoulder bag closer, and watched on the outside mirror, trying to blot out thoughts of what happened so she could reason clearly about what to do.

Another man joined Beecher, a dark-complected man with gray hair. She checked the inside mirror to see if Maxwell might be out of her field of vision. No fat slug in view.

Beecher paced the sidewalk, smoking and checking his watch, while the other man stood off to the side. Just as Beecher flipped his cigarette onto the street, a third man joined them. They headed for the Lincoln, and she turned to peer over the seat for a better look. The third man was not Maxwell.

She considered taking the forty-five from her handbag and confronting them, forcing them to free Curt. Before she could move, the Town Car backed out of the parking space. As they drove past, she flattened herself across the front seat, clutching the shoulder bag, her right hand inside and wrapped around the handle of the forty-five.

- - - - -

Applenu sprawled in the passenger seat next to Beecher with Simmons in the back, heading toward another day at the factory. He had just bid farewell to Atkinson, who had an early flight—he didn’t say to where. It would be a better day with him no longer looking over his shoulder. Now, if only he could leave this place. Oh, to finish the job, he thought, and cut away from people like Beecher and Lormes. Although Atkinson didn’t say it directly, he knew that Lormes and his men would be keeping an eye on him. So be it. His family was safely settled in Loughborough, England, a small town north of London where Malcolm Wilson, BahAmin’s husband, had contacts at the university, and where Applenu’s father might be able to resume his teaching career.

Applenu glanced at Beecher and remembered the phone call four days ago, telling him of the “trouble” they had in getting rid of Surling. Reedan saw them kill him, and somebody would have to calm him down the next morning and convince him that the same thing wasn’t going to happen to him. That somebody was Applenu. A ghastly show. Did Reedan believe him when he told him that everything would have been okay if Surling had not run?

Applenu remembered Atkinson’s reaction when he told him about it. He registered no surprise, no revulsion that Surling had been killed. He considered it part of the job, just as killing those people in the hijacked convoy was.

Applenu wondered if he was now technically a murderer, an accessory after the fact. No way did he want any part of it. At least don’t tell me about it, he thought. Trouble is, he knew that they had no choice. Surling and Reedan could identify Lormes and his men. Applenu knew they could also identify him, but he could never agree to murder them. Applenu knew that besides Reedan, the only other people who could identify Lormes were Atkinson, Simmons, Sherbani, and himself. Not a comforting thought, that one.

The other reason he detested Beecher was the Lori Reedan incident. After Beecher showed Reedan the video of his wife and kid, he showed Applenu the entire video. Applenu had never seen anything like it. The video Beecher showed Reedan was bad enough: It stopped after Beecher had ripped off her blouse and copped a feel of her tits.

That one bloody picture was all they needed to convince Reedan to give them the password. While Applenu watched the video, Beecher laughed as he narrated the part where he and that clot Maxwell were having a bash at her. Maxwell on top of her was like a bloody bull humping a collie dog. Beecher forced her to perform oral sex on them, the kid sometimes calling for her mother from some other room. At the end, they had that nice bit of crumpet flat on the floor, like she’d been run down by a lorry. He wondered: did that make him a rapist, too? Accessory after the fact, maybe?

While Beecher watched the video, he joked about taking Applenu along the next time they visited her. When Applenu brought up the police, Beecher said she wouldn’t go to the police: “We fucked any thought of going to the authorities out of her,” he said. At least that’s how he saw it now. Would he see it the same way after they killed Reedan?

Beecher pulled into the parking lot of the Shoney’s Restaurant, and he and Simmons got out for a newspaper and breakfast to go. Applenu rubbed both hands across his beard, good and black now with only a little skin showing through. Beard or not, he felt trapped, no longer able to go into the restaurant in case that blonde hostess would connect his face with the pictures in the paper and notify the police. She always made a thing about his British accent, because she’d been born in Britain.

Beecher handed Applenu a newspaper, a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and a bag containing his breakfast. “Looks like you made a good choice to re-grow your beard, Doc. Today they’ve got you in there with and without one.”

Applenu grabbed the paper and found another story. It contained the now-familiar bearded sketch of him along with an artist’s sketch of how he might look without a beard. It didn’t look like him—at least he didn’t think so.

Beecher roared into a laugh. “You better let Mr. Lormes get you a plastic surgeon to carve you out a new face.”

Applenu concentrated on the Mosely story, everything in it attributed to an anonymous source. It began with the FBI now suspecting that Austin was still alive because of trap door and Trojan horse programs found on FBI and DOE computers. The FBI attributed the programs to Austin, and because they had been accessed recently, the assumption was that Austin was the only person that could access them.

“According to the paper, Senator Hughson says Iran is behind the hijackings,” Beecher said as he pulled out of the parking lot. “It also says you are Ey-ranian. Are you an Ey-ranian, Doc?”

“Not really.” He wondered if there was some way the FBI could identify all the Iranians in the country. His only hope was that his British passport would keep him from being singled out. If they got on to him, his only choice might be to play his Ey-ranianess for all it was worth and let Sherbani get him back to Iran. That, or rot in a bloody Yank jail.

“Does Mr. Lormes really know some discreet plastic surgeons?”

Beecher broke into a cackle. “Mr. Lormes can take care of anything you need for a price. But don’t worry, those sketches of you are not very good.”

- - - - -

When the Lincoln Town Car pulled into Shoney’s, Lori drove on to the parking lot for the Days Inn Motel next door. Now back on the road and a safe distance behind the Town Car, she headed toward the rising sun. After two turns that took them away from residential areas, they turned into a wide, deserted street with three long, identical one-story buildings on each side. A sign at the entrance to the street announced that they were entering the new Melton Hill Industrial and Warehouse Park with space available for lease or purchase.

She continued past the entrance on a road that curved around the back of the buildings. After turning around and waiting to give them enough time to park their car, she turned into the park entrance and saw the Lincoln in front of the second building on the left. A small green car pulled away from the same building and headed toward her.

Was it one of them? She considered a quick U-turn and realized she couldn’t make it. She whipped the wheel right and skidded into a parking space in front of the Morrison Tool and Die Company just as the other car shot by.

She shifted into neutral, her heart pounding wildly in her throat. It was Maxwell. He sat in the passenger seat with another man driving, and he wore something on his face, something white. A disguise? She wiped sweat from her forehead with a tissue and tried to calm down. Slowly, she turned and looked back. They were gone.

For several minutes, she stared through the windshield, wondering what she was doing there. Could they have Curt in that building?

“Mommy, where are we going?” Beth asked from the back seat.

“We’re going home,” Lori said.

- - - - -

Rick Saul dragged himself out of bed and into the kitchen, where he found Mary in her pink robe at the breakfast bar, concentrating on the front page of the Post. Although she’d been in the kitchen for ten minutes, no coffee brewed. Bad news for the Senator? Not Mosely again. Bad news for Rick Saul?

He glanced over her shoulder at the headline of the story she concentrated on:

MASTERMIND OF NUCLEAR BOMB MATERIAL HIJACKING ALIVE

He glanced quickly through the article. She had all the latest information they had dug up.

Mary glanced up, and he braced himself for her assault for not giving Hughson the information, but she went back to reading.

“What the hell is this,” he asked. “How did Mosely get that about Applenu when we just got it the day-before yesterday?” He continued reading.

It was all there. “How did Hughson get onto this? She’s inferring that Hughson gave her the story on Applenu and Iran. What do you know about this?”

“We’ve got our sources, too.”

“Can’t you see what this will do to me? They’ll think I leaked it to him.”

“If you’d have helped us earlier, we’d have made out even better. But this will translate into name recognition and get him up there in the polls with Mitchell and Morgan. By primary time…”

“It’s as if somebody’s setting me up.”

“You’re paranoid, Rick, paranoid and delusional. First, you think every guy that talks to me is trying to get into my pants, and you think I want him to. And now you think somebody is trying to set you up.”

“How did you get this?”

“I can’t say.”

“I was one of the few people who were privy to this. Could this be what Uncle Nate was talking about last night?”

“Actually, I don’t know anything about this. Senator Hughson set up the interview on his own. He just told me Mosely was coming in, and when she did, he talked to her in private.”

“Find out what’s going on, Mary, will you?”

Her blue eyes flashed. “The worm has turned, Rick. I’m supposed to help you, but all this time you wouldn’t give me crap. I’ll see what I can find out, but then I’ll expect something in return.”

- - - - -

Curt sat behind the monitor and typed: HIT.

The computer typed back: JACK OF HEARTS. BUST. I WIN.

Although he had been sent to the computer room to work on another machining program—the last one, according to Applenu—he’d spent most of the last two days teaching the computer to play blackjack. Anything to forget. He owed the computer twenty-two-thousand dollars.

Applenu gave him the job the day after they shot Surling. It came after he and Lormes spent an hour trying to convince him they had intended to turn Surling loose, and if Curt and Surling had not tried to escape, Surling would now be in Arizona, a quarter-of-a-million dollars richer. Curt wanted to believe, but knew better. Beecher just pointed the gun and fired into Surling’s chest. At one point in the rambling discussion, Curt refused to do anything else for them.

Up until then, Lormes had let Applenu do the talking. When Lormes finally spoke, his voice was calm and quiet, but his gray eyes blazed. “You can reconsider now, Reedan, or I’ll have Mr. Beecher and Mr. Maxwell visit your wife again.”

Curt ached to ask about what Beecher and Maxwell did to Lori on their last visit, but he wasn’t ready for the answer and remained silent. He knew the answer.

He typed: DEAL. With Applenu’s new program finished, all he could do was wait and hope for one last chance.

Maxwell jerked open the door. “Simmons wants you in the machine room,” he growled, barely looking at Curt with his open eye. A large white bandage covered the left side of his forehead, all the way back to his ear; his black-and-blue left eye was squeezed to a slit and toned down by his purple-tinted glasses.

At the sight of Maxwell, Curt waggled his jaw, and when he stood, he flexed his right leg to work the aching thigh where Beecher kicked him. Even Surling’s gloom would have cheered the endless nights that large quantities of beer and wine wouldn’t hurry. Loneliness and death haunted his every thought, dealt as arbitrarily as the computer dealt the jack of hearts.

In the machine room, Curt found Simmons at the grinder, gripping the frame of the machine and staring at the opposite wall. His shoulders and arms shook, like a man on the bed of a truck traveling a rough road. When he turned to Curt, he stared right past him, his eyes wide with fright.

“You look like you saw a ghost,” Curt said.

“Maybe I did. Mine.” Simmons stumbled over to the computer keyboard and monitor and collapsed onto the chair. “If we don’t close this operation down soon, we’ll all wind up like Drafton.”

“And like Surling.” Simmons never said much, but unlike Beecher and Maxwell, he did still talk to Curt.

Simmons ignored the comment about Surling and pointed a shaking finger toward the other end of the building. “That furnace room is as contaminated as a sewer rat. We’re working in protective masks.”

“Why don’t you decontaminate again?”

“No time. We want to be out of here in two days.”

“That soon?”