Fires of War (26 page)

23

NORTH P’YŎNPAN PROVINCE, NORTH KOREA

Thera rose before dawn, once more unable to sleep. Her roommate’s snores rattled the room, but it was the adrenaline of the mission that was keeping her awake. She wondered about the scientist, and at the same time wanted to be gone, back to Japan and then home.

She’d be back in three months to pick up the tags, and have to go through all of this again. But it’d be much easier then.

Unless Ch’o deserted.

Had they gotten the message? There was no way of knowing.

There’d always be tension, anticipation, adrenaline. She could handle that. It was fear she had trouble with, unfocused fear. But who didn’t?

Dressed and wrapped in her heavy coat, Thera slipped out into the hallway and walked down to the door. The night air was frigid and sky dark. Without even thinking, she took one of the cigarettes from her pocket and began to smoke.

God, I’m addicted, she thought, tossing it to the ground and stamping it out. She took one last look at the overcast sky, then went inside to get a head start on work.

~ * ~

24

CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

Slott thumbed through the preliminary technical report on the soil that Ferguson and Guns had gathered at the South Korean waste site. The report contained several pages of graphs and esoteric formulas as well as a dozen written in almost impenetrable scientific prose, but the data could be summed up in one word:
inconclusive.

No plutonium had been found, though the scientists weren’t sure that was because there was none there or because the field equipment they’d taken to Hawaii simply wasn’t strong enough to detect it. A further analysis of the soil would take place in two days at a special CIA lab in California. There, the dirt would be compressed in a chamber and pounded with a variety of radioactive waves in a process one scientist had compared to hightech gold panning. If there were any stray plutonium-239 atoms—actually, there would have to be a few more than
one
, but Slott wasn’t up on the specifics—the machine would find them.

There was one technical caveat. The analysis relied on the fact that anyone trying to hide plutonium would go only so far as necessary to prevent its detection by standard equipment. The nano technology the Agency was using was exponentially more powerful; still, in theory a scientist who was aware of the lower detection threshold might be able to counter it. But if that were the case, Slott reasoned, they wouldn’t have found anything in the first place.

Directly below the report was a response from Ken Bo regarding the plutonium and its possible origin. Stripped of its many qualifications—and complaints about the “unusual” operation that had found it—was a theory that the material had come from the closed TRIGA Mark-III research reactor in Seoul. The reactor had been used in the 1980s and probably the 1990s to conduct experiments testing extraction techniques from depleted uranium. Other experiments, continuing until 2004, had produced other isotopes.

While not generally known, those experiments had been detected by the IAEA roughly five years
after
they’d been reported to the president and the Intelligence Committee by the CIA.

Bo’s contention—he phrased it as a hypothesis—was that the plutonium that had just been discovered was merely waste material left from those activities.

The theory would make a certain sense to a layman; the readings had been found at a waste dump, after all. But Slott knew that wasn’t what was really going on. First of all, the experiments had never been aimed at or succeeded in producing plutonium. TRIGA Mark-Ill had been shut down, and all the material, even potential waste products, accounted for. Slott knew this because it had all happened on his watch in South Korea.

But few other people, even within the CIA, did. Much of the data on the experiments was highly classified and had not been found or reported by the IAEA. Information about the program had not been included in any of the briefing papers on the new treaty, and it was obvious to him that neither Corrine nor Parnelles for that matter was aware of it.

Bo’s theory could get Seoul—and, by extension, Slott—off the hook if they were criticized. By carefully controlling the release of information about the TRIGA experiments, Slott could easily make it seem as if the CIA knew about this material all along and had in fact told Congress and the president.

Bo would never put this in writing, of course. He was counting on Slott to understand and play along.

Slott got up from his desk and began pacing around his office. Five people had known the entire TRIGA story from the Agency’s perspective. Slott was one; Bo was another. A third was now dead. That left the former head of the CIA, now dying of Alzheimer’s disease, and an officer now working in a staff position in what amounted to semiretirement.

He didn’t even have to manipulate the records. If anyone asked, he could say that plutonium had been mentioned but not put in the reports for some reason he no longer knew.

Had it been found?

No. Definitely it hadn’t. Definitely not. They had access to the South Korean documents, and it wasn’t there.

And they were
all
the documents.

He knew that, because he’d verified it with the Korean document tracking system. But who in Congress or the administrative branch would know that? Even Parnelles wouldn’t know that.

They could find it out, if they knew the right person to ask, but it would be difficult.

Slott rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t lie. And he wasn’t going to play the CYA games. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. That wasn’t who he was.

Slott stopped in front of his desk, looking at the picture of his wife and kids. It was a year old, taken when they’d moved into their new house. His only boy—they had three older girls—had just lost his first tooth.

If he didn’t play the games, he might very well lose his job. They’d lose their house, have to move. He’d end up selling cars or insurance somewhere out West where no one knew who he was.

Or he could just keep his mouth shut and see what happened. Protect Bo, even though this raised some serious questions about Bo’s competency.

Everyone was entitled to one screwup, wasn’t he? And it wasn’t even clear this was a screwup.

Slott went back behind his desk. He still had his son’s baby tooth in the top desk drawer, an accidental souvenir he’d retained after exchanging it for a gold dollar.

The tooth fairy—a little white lie.

Not even that. His son had brought up the tooth fairy and the promise of money. Slott hadn’t said anything, one way or another.

Daddy didn’t lie, David. He was just protecting the family.

Would that be better to tell his boy or his girls than:
Daddy’s not the incompetent screwup the congressmen are claiming.?

Slott pushed the desk drawer closed. He told himself he needed more information before he could decide what to do.

It wasn’t true, but it was the sort of lie he could live with.

~ * ~

25

DAEJEON, SOUTH KOREA

Ferguson stuck his head under the shower’s stream, shaking as the ice-cold water sent shivers through his body. It was a poor substitute for sleep, as was the weak coffee he got in the lobby.

“Corrine wants you to talk to her,” said Corrigan when he checked in.

“What, does she think I’m working for her now?”

“You are.”

“You find anything else out about Science Industries?”

“Thomas Ciello got a list of some of the people who work there,” said Corrigan. “One of them is pretty interesting.”

“Who dat?”

“Guy named Kang Hwan. Wrote a paper on extracting nuclear material using some sort of laser technique. Real technical stuff.”

“Jack, you think a shopping list is technical.”

“Har-har. This is. I can upload a copy of it for you.”

“In Korean?”

“You’re a laugh a minute, Ferg. What if I busted your chops like this every time you called in?”

“You mean you don’t do it on purpose?”

Ferguson laughed, picturing Corrigan fuming at the communications desk in The Cube.

“Post me a file of the open-source information on him that I can access from a cafe,” Ferguson said.

“Anonymously?”

“No, Jack, I’m going to walk in and tell the people there I’m a spook. We lost the laptop, remember?”

“You can get the open-source stuff with a Google search. There’s nothing there. I can’t send the report that way.”

“I don’t want you to,” said Ferguson.

“You can get it at the embassy.”

“Don’t send it to them.”

“Jesus, Ferg. You sound more paranoid by the minute.”

“Yeah, I’m channeling my Irish grandmother. Just do what I say.”

“All right, but...”

After he’d finished with Corrigan, Ferguson called Corrine.

“It’s the Black Prince,” he told her cheerfully when she answered. “What’s going on?”

“Your friend is arriving in Seoul at six p.m.”

“Very nice. He may be returning home a little sooner than I expected with some things I want you to check out.”

“What’s going on, Ferg? Why are you bypassing the usual channels?”

“Insurance.”

“Against what?”

“Against things disappearing. Memories going bad. Interpretations of facts that can’t be trusted.”

“Who don’t you trust?”

Ferguson lay back on the bed in his room. He hadn’t planned on getting into this discussion right now—and, hopefully, ever.

“Maybe I’m just being paranoid,” he told her.

“You don’t trust Slott?”

He didn’t answer.

“You trust me?” said Corrine finally.

“I pretty much can’t stand you, Corrine. But I think you have a different agenda than those people do.”

“You saved my life,” she said.

Ferguson had to think for a moment before remembering. It had been in a nightclub in Syria. Or was that Lebanon?

“Yeah, well, that was a job thing,” he told her. “Anyway, don’t get your underwear all twisted up. I don’t know that anything’s going on. I just want to make sure I’m not screwed by it if it is.”

“Well—”

“A deep subject. Now how about that flight number?”

~ * ~

erguson spent a few hours looking for more of the National Truck Company vehicles. None of the ones he checked out seemed like very good candidates for the truck he’d seen at the waste site. Four of the seven had open beds in the back. One was painted a garish pink that he thought would have glowed in the dark. The other two were in various states of disrepair and looked as if they hadn’t been moved in months or maybe even years.

Checking on the trucks was the sort of necessary but tedious detail work that Ferguson had little patience for. The more he did it, the more he was convinced that Science Industries was the best lead he was going to get for the time being, and that he ought to concentrate there until something told him he was wrong.