Wallbanger (3 page)

Connolly rubbed a hand over his thinning
hair, and turned away from the window. He wouldn’t think about 3-19
now. There were more pressing matters to tend to.

A yawn broke free of his mouth and he strode
to the fireplace, dousing the flames. In the darkness, he crossed
the span of the living room and mounted the stairs to the bedroom
he and Martha used to share. The sleep he’d been waiting for
claimed him the moment his body hit the mattress.

As the first rays of dawn touched the waters
of Halfmoon Bay, his cell phone danced a jig across the coffee
table.

Bill Connolly slept on.

2

Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean

In the passenger compartment of a swanky
Gulfstream-V, Kizzie sat in a plush leather chair, arms crossed,
brow furrowed, breaths measured. An hour and change before she was
staring out of a circular porthole watching the beauty of Panama
fade away beneath her. She didn’t know when she’d be back. Since
Xander had tracked her down, her home in Casco Viejo was no longer
safe. She’d have to find a new one.

On the up side, she wasn’t starving anymore.
Upon boarding, she raided the galley and found salads, sandwiches,
and drinks. So she’d eaten her fill and waited, trying her damndest
to keep her eyes open. A difficult feat in the comfort of the
luxurious upholstery.

Across the table in the seat facing her,
Xander looked the picture of perfection—
and still sexy as
sin
. Curly dark hair was neat on his head, and his dress shirt
and slacks looked fresh in spite of the fact that he’d spent the
last 12 hours in them. Even the scar over his eye was freakin’
perfect! That it was so early in the morning didn’t seem to bother
him at all. Phil, either, seeing as how he was flying the plane.
The chipper attitudes grated on her nerves.

“All right,” Kizzie finally said, “I’ve been
patient long enough.”

Xander lifted his chocolate gaze from the
laptop. “That you have, Kizzie.” Brilliant white teeth flashed in
his handsome brown face, and he closed the lid of the machine. “And
I know you’re not famous for your patience.”

“Don’t get cute,” she snapped. “I’m holding
you to your word, Duquesne. You dangled Sokoviev and I bit. Now
it’s time for specifics.”

“Sure you don’t want a nap first? You’re
kinda cranky.”

She glowered at him through narrowed eyes.
“Need I remind you I’m risking my career—my
life
—on the
promise of a criminal? I’m on
your
plane, going god-knows
where, my team doesn’t know what I’m doing and neither do I. I
don’t have a single clue as to how I factor in to this game of
yours. I’m tired, I reek of diesel fumes, I want a shower, and I
want answers. So, yeah, cranky is a monumental understatement. Now,
either you talk, or—”

“You hate not being in control, don’t you,
Princess?”

His deep voice was soft-as-silk, and images
she’d tucked away hours before came flooding back to the front of
Kizzie’s brain. She held up a hand. “Stop with the ‘princess’,”
then muttered, “That’s how I got my ass in this mess. In fact, do
me a favor and let’s
not
rehash Mauritius, m’kay?”

“Answer me.”

The command was louder, firm, like when they
were on the boat. Or, more precisely, when she was strapped to that
bench being spanked. For a fleeting moment, Kizzie felt if she
didn’t answer, she’d find herself over Xander’s knee. “I don’t like
being unprepared.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“But it’s all the answer you get.” He sat
there, just staring, and Kizzie’s resolve broke. She shook her
head, remembered that nonverbal responses led to her ass stinging,
and said, “No. I don’t.”

Xander grinned like he’d read her mind. “Good
girl.” He reached across the aisle and pulled a manila envelope
from a briefcase, slid it over to her. “A couple months ago,
Nikolay Sokoviev disappeared. But you knew that, right?”

Pleased to finally be getting somewhere,
Kizzie nodded and opened the package. “There were rumblings he’d
gone missing. Didn’t give it much thought. As you know, Sokoviev
was not my target.” She flicked her eyes up to his and removed the
dossier. Then she studied the black and white picture of the
Russian explosives dealer. “What’s your connection?”

“Been in business together the last few
years. A good man.”

“‘A good man’?” Kizzie asked. “Forgive me if
I consider the source.” She ignored the offended look on his face
and flipped through the file, brain coming awake as it processed
new information. “So, you and ‘Niko-the-holy’ are both
card-carrying members of the International Club for Bad Guys. Poor
Niko misses the latest ICBG meeting, which means you can’t get your
regular shipment of…?”

“We’re not in business that way. I don’t
ordinarily make a habit of blowing things up, Kizzie. It’s messy.
At any rate, the details of my association with Nikolay are
irrelevant. What
is
important is that he found something
huge, and I was buying it.”

“An explosives buyer, are you?” She chuckled.
“You’re a tricky one to pin down, Xander. My Intel says you’re part
contractor, part consultant, part—”

“I’m a survivor,” he interjected. “Back to
Nikolay. Have you ever heard of Project Harvey?”

Kizzie frowned, lifting her head from the
pages she’d just scanned. It was mostly Nikolay’s history:
age—68—birth parents, birthplace, schooling. The facts one strung
together when writing a biography. Very little, if any, would be of
use on this mission. But she would read it all and file away the
tidbits in the event she needed them later. “Harvey…. No, can’t say
I have.”

“Then I’ll start at the beginning. From the
1940’s to the 90’s, the Soviet Union and America were embattled in
a cold war.”

“Men and their pissing contests.”

“To put it mildly.” He smirked. “Decades of
mistrust filled with espionage, propaganda, and competition in
every facet of life; from sporting events to technological
advancement. The most pivotal being the nuclear arms race.”

“The Manhattan Project,” Kizzie bobbed her
head, leaned back in the seat, “We’d been working on nuclear
weaponry since the 30’s. That’s why we were able to bomb Japan in,
what—‘45?”

“True, and that event did nothing to help
already tenuous Soviet-American relations. At the time, the US was
the only country with specific information on the raw materials
needed to make a nuke; and they thought that secret
ingredient—uranium—was limited.”

“We hoped since we held all the cards,
everyone else would fold.”

He nodded. “Except the Soviets had an ace or
two up their sleeve. Aside from the fact that there were spies in
the Manhattan Project feeding sensitive Intel back to Stalin, the
USSR upped the ante and beat America to space. In ’57 they launched
Sputnik, took the US completely by surprise, because now there was
a satellite that could potentially spy on
and
launch
ballistic missiles at America. Which brings us closer to the crux
of our current venture.

“In one of the responses to Sputnik, the US
founded what is known today as DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agen—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard of DARPA,” Kizzie
interrupted. “Not-so-secret secret agent, remember? Basically the
tech engine for the Department of Defense. How do they relate to
Harvey?”

Xander held up his hands in apology. “In the
early 70’s, DARPA went from being an open source for brilliant
scientific minds to being specifically tasked with military
applications. During that shift, information regarding this
assignment—Project Harvey—was leaked. It was an idea with roots in
the end days of the nuclear arms race.

“Your standard nuke,” he explained,
“generally gets high energy yield from a small amount of fissile
matter—plutonium…uranium. Upon detonation of a nuclear warhead,
there’s the initial blast and then there’s radioactivity from the
fallout—but that usually disperses within the first 72 hours
post-incident. The majority of the loss, in terms of human life and
property, is caused by the explosion.”

Kizzie shook her head. “Why are we so intent
on our own annihilation?”

“Idle minds?”

“All right, what makes Harvey so
special?”

“What if you sacrifice the size of the blast,
but exponentially increase the radioactive fallout?”

She thought on it a moment. “You’d still have
a massive death toll on impact, but a lot more casualties would
come later from the secondary effects of the radiation…the area
would be uninhabitable for decades if not centuries, totally
destroying the ecosystem of the target and miles around it. It
would crash an economy—depending on where it’s detonated you could
wipe out a population….” Her eyes widened, realization dawning.
“Harvey’s a salted bomb?”

“‘Harvey’ is the acronym for H. R. V.,”
Xander smiled, “Highly Radioactive Variant. Remember, it’s just a
theory: Wrap your nuclear-grade plutonium in a casing of cobalt, or
gold, or any other metallic, high-intensity gamma ray emitter. Drop
the bomb—some of the radioactive energy from the explosion gets
transferred to the casing; that newly energized casing is vaporized
and scattered, but the atoms are heavy enough to fall out of
atmosphere and keep emitting harmful rays for years. The bomb that
keeps on killing.

“The scientist who thought it up was actually
using it as an argument to
stop
nuclear proliferation by
bringing attention to the very fact you just mentioned: If we kept
at it, eventually we’d wipe out mankind. No salted bombs have ever
been tested, because reportedly none were ever built.”

“But that’s a lie?” Kizzie said. The question
was rhetorical. That they were even discussing it meant Harvey was
a scary reality.

“The Soviets took the idea and ran with it.
Even though they signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in the
70’s, apparently they still didn’t trust the US and wanted to be
prepared.

“Enter Nikolay. Sokoviev wasn’t into the
heavy stuff, dabbling more in plastics and—” Xander held up a hand,
halting Kizzie’s rant. “I understand plastics are heavy, but
nuclear they’re not. Mostly he supplied various rebel factions with
guns and a special version of RDX he’d modified with the help of a
Japanese engineer to make more…impactful. In the grand scheme of
things, it was slow money, unsteady pay, and didn’t justify the
risks. But Nikolay was a lucky man; never got jammed up. A couple
of years ago, he stumbles upon Harvey—and not just the theory, the
actual bomb.”

Kizzie wiped her hand over her hair. A
nuclear weapon—a
salted bomb
—in the hands of an explosives
dealer with ties to rebel factions? This was bad. Very,
very
bad. She kept a lid on the litany of expletives and managed,
“Where?”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Try me.”

“Kurchatov, K—”

“Kazakhstan?” she finished, quickly
interpreting the implication. “Holy shit.”

With the aid of Kazakh troops, America had
been guarding the abandoned Soviet weapons production site for the
last twenty years. The entire operation was hush-hush, leading the
few people who knew that tidbit to wonder why what amounted to a
couple buildings on an empty lot would need the protection of the
US army. Now she knew—Harvey. And it had been stolen out from right
beneath America’s nose.
Or smuggled…
.

“And you’re buying it?”

“That,” Xander said, “and the recipe. Nikolay
had a scientist working to reverse engineer the makeup of the bomb,
hoping to produce more. I didn’t need that, but he was already
halfway through, so….” He shrugged. “A bit of money trouble arose
and he asked for funding that would come out of the purchase price
with the stipulation that I’d be the sole owner of the technology.
Being that we’ve worked together a number of times before, I bought
in.”

“In what capacity did you work together
before?”

“In a capacity other than Harvey,” he said
pointedly. “He kept me abreast of his progress, checking in every
month like clockwork, but there’d always been a problem with
getting the exact mix right. This bomb is some four to six decades
old, and there isn’t exactly an instruction manual to go with it.
You can understand it’s a delicate operation. A few months back, he
notified me that he had it. They were streamlining the design to
make it smaller, easier to detonate while meeting modern safety
standards—”

“Safety standards for a nuclear weapon,” she
mocked, returning her attention to Nikolay’s file. “Talk about tits
on a bull.”
And,
Jesus
, smaller?

“I was to meet with him three weeks ago to
settle up. Obviously his death made that appointment impossible to
keep.”

Kizzie’s head snapped up. “Death? When you
started this conversation the man was missing.”

“Nikolay Sokoviev is dead,” Xander said with
absolute certainty.

“Uhhh…Did’ya kill him?”

“Yes, Kizzie. I killed the man I invested a
small fortune into and, silly me, I forgot to get the
technology.”

One shoulder lifted. “Hey, I don’t know how
you guys roll in the ICBG.”

“I didn’t kill him.” Her brows went north
and, understanding the unspoken question, Xander followed with one
of his own. “Tell me, Kizzie. You’ve just kidnapped a known
explosives dealer. What’s your next move? Call his people and ask
for ransom?”

He has a point.
“Then how do you know
Niko didn’t take your money and the technology, and run?”

He tilted his head and frowned. “Do I strike
you as the kind of man you want to cross? You don’t get to be me
without burying a few bodies.”

Kizzie caught every thread of menace in his
tone, as much an answer to her question as it was a warning.
“Right. Niko-the-holy is dead.” She flipped to the next page in the
dossier. It mentioned his two boys, Sacha Sokoviev, 29, and Misha
Berlitz, 14.
Niko, you old dog…
“Anything else about Harvey?
What type of materials—”