Pinnacle Event (12 page)

As he opened the mini fridge in search of a Red Bull, the first lines of “Rhapsody in Blue” came over the speakers tied in to his server cluster. Good news, the Gershwin masterpiece was what Minerva played when it had found what it had been programmed to look for. Dugout dashed to the screen.

A consignment of five shipping containers had left Maputo on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa four days after the double flash. Each was bound for a different port in West Africa, on a cargo ship flagged in Liberia and owned by a company registered in Vanuatu. The master was a Philippine captain. It fit the pattern he was searching for, perfectly, five bombs, five targets. “Found them,” he said aloud.

Dug tapped in a query for the onward itinerary of each of the containers. They had all bounced around from port to port, ship to ship for weeks. One container had finally cleared customs at Rotterdam, another two had been trucked away from Felixstowe near London. One had entered Mexico at Veracruz. The last one was still at sea, having been transshipped eight times. It was now on a Panamanian flagged ship from Trinidad, bound for the Port of Miami, where it was due to dock tomorrow morning. “Shit!” Dugout yelled to the empty room.

Dugout swiveled on his chair and picked up the secure phone, punching the button on the console that read
DHS/NAC
. The Nebraska Avenue Complex was the headquarters of Homeland Security and held its twenty-four-hour operations center, connected to Customs, Coast Guard, and a dozen other DHS agencies.

“NAC, Yeoman Burke,” the Coast Guard woman answered. “How can I help you?”

“This is the PEG. I have a Pinnacle event, repeat Pinnacle event. Code Empty Quiver. Give me the Senior Watch Officer.” Dugout had spoken the interagency clear code for a nuclear event, Pinnacle, and Empty Quiver, the specific category of event for a missing weapon.

“Pinnacle, yes, sir. Let me look that up here a minute,” she replied. “Pinnacle, oh, God, stand by, switching you to Captain Mendoza, stand by.”

 

13

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22

ABOARD EL AL FLIGHT #52

JOHANNESBURG–TEL AVIV

“There is a privacy screen in First Class, madame, if you want to raise it after takeoff,” the flight attendant explained. “It separates you from the passenger in the next seat.”

Mbali looked at Raymond, who already had his headphones on, and smiled. “Maybe I will later, but he seems like a nice guy.”

The flight attendant looked askance at the big American.

“Well, the switch is right here when you decide you need it.”

Mbali had looked around at the crowd boarding the plane and remarked to herself how few blacks were among the passengers. Relations between the South African and Israeli governments were still chilled and those who traveled back and forth between the two countries tended to be Jews, who tended to be whites, with the strange exception of the Lemba people, who called themselves the Mwenye, and had been shown through DNA to be directly related to the original Israeli tribes of Moses. She laughed wondering what would happen if 747s filled with the Lemba started showing up in Tel Aviv claiming their Right of Return after three thousand years.

“What's so funny?” Bowman asked.

“It's a long story?”

“Does it have to do with termites eating bars?” he asked.

“Ah, so you finally figured it out, Mr. Bartender?”

“Yes, but it took a while, and then I tried it out on my, ah, friend and she got it right away. Well, she's more than a friend. I live with her and her partner.”

“You Americans are so strange to us, really, you know,” Mbali chuckled.

“Well, it, too, is a long story, which I am sure we will have time for at some point,” he stammered, his ears reddening in embarrassment. “I'm still getting used to it myself, but it works. Anyway, I called Emma and Linda today and I told them about meeting you and, well, anyway, Emma knew the joke.”

“Well, at least she's smart.” Mbali said, reaching across and touching Ray's arm. “I am so glad to hear you're not single. When I didn't see a wedding ring, I wasn't sure. I've always had problems working closely with single men. Truth to tell, with a lot of married men, too.”

“Well, I'm taken, so don't worry about any ulterior motives.”

“Good.”

“But what about you, since we're having this talk? Is there someone in your life?” Ray asked.

“There is a man,” she said, smiling at the thought. “Some people assume I must be butch to be in this job, but no, there is a man. His name is Nelson. He's almost seven years old. I thought when I was thirty it was now or never.”

“That's wonderful, but do you ever get to see him?”

“Oh, yes. Every morning and every night, except when I travel, which is rarely.” She paused a moment and her expression clouded. “So, I know you want to ask who or where is his father. He died when Nelson was two, shot leading a drug raid in Joburg. Now, Nelson is the only man I have room for in my life and he, let me tell you, is plenty. Let me show you.” She withdrew her Galaxy smartphone and pulled up a photo album with hundreds of pictures of her boy, many with both her and her son.

“Maybe I can meet him when this is all over?” Ray asked, handing back the phone.

“I keep him well away from my business,” she said. “No offense.”

“Understood,” he said. He leaned back in the chair and put his headphones back on, hoping for another airborne moment of clarity. Instead, he fell asleep.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23

ABOVE DAVID BEN GURION AIRPORT

LOD, ISRAEL

He woke several hours later. Mbali had put up the privacy screen between their two seats. The long overnight flight from Johannesburg in the old El Al 747 had been wearing. Even in First Class the seats were uncomfortable. The only thoughts that came to him before he had dozed off were of the men in the cars, the men in Vienna, and the noise, the blood, the shooting in Camps Bay.

CIA men had been surveilling him at the caf
é
in Vienna. That meant the Agency knew what he was doing, or thought they did. Had Winston told them, had he told them to protect him? Or had they learned about it through one of their people inside the NSC staff? Were they trying to get a lead from him and then swoop in and claim credit, in the process blowing the opportunity, if there were an opportunity?

And there had been the others in the cars in Grinzing.

Two sets of others, Rosch had said. Others who were watching him or watching Johann Potgeiter, or now watching us both? Maybe Mossad was watching him, too. They always had a way of showing up in interesting places when there was a whiff of nuclear something in the air. Maybe Potgeiter had protection, now that he was a Trustee, replacing his father? Protection from those who had killed the first batch of Trustees, whomever their killers were.

That was still the central question, why kill the Trustees, especially after they had delivered the bombs. If they had, in fact, delivered bombs. Perhaps because what they had delivered was defective? The buyers felt scammed and retaliated? Killing the sellers would not get you your money back. Killing the sellers might, however, wipe clean your trail, your identity. That would work, that would be a motivation, but only if the Trustees alone knew the identity of the buyer and there were no records for the successor Trustees to figure out what had happened.

Bowman could not suppress the thought that if he failed and the parallel work by the intelligence agencies did too, something so dire might happen that the world would go off in a different direction, as it had after 9/11. It was a direction to a far worse place, where large sections of cities lay in radioactive ruin, where the dead were counted not in the hundreds, but in the tens of thousands, where paranoia and state surveillance would run amok, where the economies would tank and progress of all kinds would slow or retreat.

Or not. Maybe all the fears were wrong, all the theories flawed. Maybe the double flash was not a nuclear bomb going off. Or even if it had been, maybe it was a North Korean or Pakistani experiment. Maybe the Saudis had been developing a weapon as a hedge against the Iranian nuclear program. The Trustees were real and they had all been killed after being paid huge sums of money, but maybe there was another explanation that was eluding him.

What was real was the fact that the American President, and apparently his South African counterpart, both believed that there were loose nukes and that those nukes were going to go off in their cities sometime soon. Both men were doing, or about to do, searches that would be so obvious that the media would get the story of loose nukes in a matter of days, if not hours. Then no amount of presidential rhetoric or assurances would stop people pouring out of the great cities and engaging in all sorts of disruptive and self-destructive behavior. If there were actually bombs hidden in cities, the terrorists might well decide to ignite them then, rather than risk being uncovered in the searches. As he began to drift off again, there were two pings.

“Please make sure your seat belts are buckled and your seat is in the fully upright position as we begin our final approach to Ben Gurion.”

When the 747 hit the runway with a thud, Bowman turned on his iPhone and clicked on Data Roaming. As the plane taxied to the gate, the stream of e-mails that had been waiting for him poured on to the iPhone. He was definitely going to bill the government for the charges. He pulled up his Wickr app for encrypted messages and checked to see if any had come in.

There was one from Gunter Rosch in Vienna. “Ray, tracked down the two teams that were surveilling you in Grinzing. One was the South African service, your new friend Mbali. The other were hired former Wien Polizei. They swear they don't know who hired them. We are working on that with them.” Wickr shredded the message on his iPhone when he closed it, making it disappear forever from any corner of cyberspace.

He looked across at Mbali, who was actually putting on lipstick and staring into a compact mirror, getting ready for their arrival. Of course she had had the younger Potgeiter under surveillance. That's how she knew he had interviewed him. She probably had all the new Trustees being followed. It was about time he saw those surveillance reports and learned everything she knew, or else he might not take her with him up into the Galilee Hills. He remembered that sharing, she had said, had to be a two-way street.

When the First Class door opened, they were the third and fourth passengers off the plane and into the jetway. An athletic-looking man stood just inside in a short-sleeved khaki shirt and jeans. “Mr. Radford, welcome to the Holy Land. Please come with me, and your lady friend.” The man opened a side door in the jetway and led them out onto a stairway to the tarmac, where a tan Mercedes waited.

“Danny Avidar is sorry he could not be here himself to welcome you, but he wanted to make sure you arrived okay and got settled into the hotel. So we will just skip over the Immigration business. If I can have your passports, I will get them stamped and return them to you. You are already checked in at the Clock. They call it a boutique hotel. It's in Jaffa. Not so many tourists as the Hilton or the Dan.” He paused and then looked squarely at Ray, as if to double-check. “Two rooms, as you requested.”

Danny Avidar had asked no questions when Ray had called him to arrange the visit. Either Mossad already knew what he was doing, which was likely, or Danny just assumed he would find out when Ray showed up. One thing Ray knew, Danny Avidar, the head of Ops for Mossad, would not be letting him wander around Israel unsupervised. Once he knew what Ray was up to, Avidar would probably have to tell the internal security service, the Shin Beth, to keep an eye on him.

“It's quite modern, Tel Aviv,” Mbali observed as the car sped through the city.

“Your first time in Israel? You expected maybe the Holy Land was still like it was in the Bible?” their driver retorted. “We fixed it up since then. Jerusalem we left old. You will see it while you are here, of course. Meanwhile, Danny is waiting for you.”

Knowing Avidar would be in his suite, Ray asked Mbali to come with him to meet their host. As they entered, he was pouring. “It's the Yarden Chardonnay you liked so much last time,” he offered the first glass to Bowman. “Robert Parker and Oz Clarke have both rated it now, so you may have been right about it.”

Ray introduced Mbali and the three of them toasted,
“L'chaim.”

“Did you know, Raymond that the Crusaders brought the Chardonnay grape to France from Israel. It's actually native here. In Hebrew it means ‘gate of God.'”

“Don't tell the French,” Ray laughed.

“I ask them where in France is a place called Chardonnay? There is no such place. There is Burgundy and Bordeaux, but no Chardonnay because it is not native to France. Anyway, we are all glad you came back to do this one, Ray. The Prime Minister and the Security Cabinet are going crazy. How do we keep these bombs out of Israel? It is existential for us. However many there are, doesn't matter how many. One and we are in deep trouble. Two and we are done as a nation. Everyone will leave. No one will live in a radioactive waste pile, waiting for the next bomb to go off. You need to tell us everything you know because Washington. Washington is acting like they know nothing. Nothing to share? They think the bombs are going to end up in the States? Crazy. We are the target. What do you know? Now, tell me.”

Ray had almost forgotten how fast Danny could talk, how quickly he got down to business and put his cards on the table. “You overchilled the Chard,” he said pulling the bottle of Yarden out of the ice bucket. “Washington does not know much and I am sure you have ways of knowing everything they have.” He sipped the wine and sat on the couch. “I suspect you may actually know more than we do.”