Pinnacle Event (27 page)

“You are lucky we maintain all the phone records for a year,” said the Brigadier General from Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of America's NSA, the signals intelligence unit. “It takes a lot of storage to keep all of those records.”

“Thank you for coming, General, as the deputy of one intelligence agency to the deputy of another, I thank you,” Danny Avidar said as the two men sat in Avidar's dimly lit office.

“Not a problem. Next time you will visit our house, maybe come to see our base in the Negev.”

“Perhaps. So, the question was last August fifteenth, at 0726 in the morning at the Haganah train station a man, Dawid Steyn, was murdered. We gave you his mobile number. Were you able to see if there were any mobiles of any interesting people at the time near Dawid Steyn in the station?”

“We got the list of all the people Shin Beth thinks work for this Olympus Security you mentioned. We pulled up all of their mobiles. None of them were in the Haganah Station at 0726 on fifteen August. Or if they were, they had their mobiles turned off,” the General said.

“Shit.”

“But wait, it's not over,” the General added. “We did what you asked us to do and what do we get, we got nothing. But we are the experts on these things, yes? So, we do what we would do. We expand. We expand the time period we are looking at and we expand the radius of where we are looking. This is what we do. You see, Danny, you asked the question wrong. But not to worry, we corrected the question for you, even though you did not know enough to ask us to do that. We did it anyway.”

Avidar endured it. “Well, of course, you know much better than we how to do these things. Thank you for correcting the question. If we had asked the question right, what would you have found?”

“If you had asked the question right, what we would have found is what we found when we asked the question our way. At 0734, a mobile called a number in Cyprus. The mobile was moving at the time and at the speed of and in the direction traveled by a local bus, probably the Dan line fifteen, which leaves the Haganah Station at 0730. I know your next question. Was the mobile one that belonged to someone from this Olympus? Yes, it happens that it was. Mobile number 52 612 is registered to Efrim Brodsky who is on the list of Olympus employees given to us by the Shin Beth.”

Danny Avidar leaped up and struck out his hand to shake with the general from the 8200. The General remained seated and held up his hand to indicate
stop
. “It's not over, yet. Do you think we at 8200 stop when there is more to collect? Never.”

Avidar sat back down. “Of course not.”

“‘Of course not' is right. We are very professional. We may not get all the credit and all the fame that you guys do in the Mossad, but often it is us that provide you the leads that you need to do what you do. Without us, many times, Danny, you know you would not be able to track these bad guys.”

“We appreciate all that you do,” Avidar said, quietly, politely. “As an intelligence officer and a professional, you know that often what we do, what you do, must never be known, and no one can get the credit.”

“Exactly,” the General agreed.

“So tell me what the fuck more you know, all of it, now.”

“All right, all right. No need to be nasty,” the General replied. “That mobile was last heard from when it pinged a mobile tower on October twenty-sixth. It didn't call anyone. It just was turned on and it pinged the tower.”

“Where?”

“Odd. The tower was in the Comoros Islands.”

 

37

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11

HIGH SPEED COMPUTING CENTER

LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA

“When will you be done?” the man in the lab coat asked, grabbing him by the arm as he entered the building.

“Who the fuck are you?” Dugout asked, pulling away.

“The guy who was scheduled to use High Speed. The guy you stole it from.”

Dugout remembered him now. It was the climate change guy who had some huge model he was running simulations on, simulations that could only run on something as massively parallel as the Livermore High Speed computing array. Dug wanted to explain that he appreciated the importance of the man's work, but that there was at present, an immediate need that trumped it. If nuclear bombs went off in our cities, the economy would so badly crash that any and all scientific research would be retarded for a century. No one would be able to do anything about climate change until it was too late, which would just compound the new Dark Ages started by the bombs. All of those thoughts dashed through his head in an instant, as well as the realization that he couldn't explain that to a scientist who was not cleared to know about the mystery of the missing bombs.

Instead, Dug just said, “I don't know yet. Soon, maybe soon. I can't promise you.”

The short man in the lab coat did not look like the type to pick a fight, especially with someone who was about six inches taller and about twenty years younger. Yet, he placed a finger on Dugout's chest and pushed it hard, tapping it as he spoke. “What I do is important. I need my machine.”

Dugout grabbed the man's hand and placed it down by his side and held it there. “First, it isn't yours. It's the government's. Second, what I am doing is important, too. If you have a problem, take it up with the Lab Director.”

With that, Dugout took the elevator up to the fourth floor.

He normally took the stairs, but he didn't want that guy following him, yelling at him. He waved his badge over the access control, punched in a PIN, and placed his palm on a glass plate. The three-factor authentication complete, the door to the computer control room opened. Ray and Mbali were already there.

“Comoros, I knew it,” Ray said.

“Good morning. Knew what?” Dugout asked.

“The Comoros Islands. They're involved. Something happened there. What was going on around October twenty-sixth?” Ray asked.

Dugout sat down at the computer control console. “Did you look at the timeline? We have been keeping a timeline. Standard procedure.” He hit a few keys and a chart appeared on the large screen. “The tritium had just been heisted from outside Pretoria.”

“They flew it to Comoros,” Ray asserted.

“How do we know that?” Mbali asked. “We checked all the flights that left around then. None went to the Comoros.”

“Efrim Brodsky. He was in Moroni, in the Comoros on October twenty-sixth, according to Danny,” Ray answered.

“Like the angel Moroni?” Dugout asked.

“You a Mormon now?” Ray said, looking at Dug.

“I saw the show.
Book of Mormon
?”

“So he was in Comoros, so what?” Mbali interjected.

“So, his phone shows up as having been on in Pretoria for the week before that, according to Danny.”

“Danny knows what phones are on in South Africa?” Mbali asked.

“He does when they are Israeli mobiles.”

Mbali frowned. “Okay. So lay it out.”

“This Efrim Brodksy works for Olympus Security in their Tel Aviv office. Danny thinks he probably killed Dawid Steyn in August. Then he shows up in South Africa in mid-October. He is near Pretoria on twenty-five October. The tritium heist occurs. Then Brodsky shows up in the Comoros the next day. Then he disappears and is still gone. I say he was part of the tritium heist and then he flies out with it to the Comoros, which just happens to be real close to where the nuclear bombs were stored on Madagascar.”

Mbali went to the whiteboard and sketched in blue a map of South Africa and the Indian Ocean to the east. Then she drew lines in red. “What do we know for sure? So, they moved the bombs from South Africa to Madagascar years ago. We know that is true. Solid line. Then a probable nuclear explosion takes place August ninth in the ocean near here. We know that.” She drew a mushroom cloud at sea. “Then they move the bombs from Madagascar August tenth. We know that, too, but we don't know where. Let's take your theory and say they move them to Comoros. Theory, therefore, dotted line. Then they steal the tritium October twenty-fifth from outside Pretoria. Known fact. You say they fly it to Comoros, where this Efrim shows up from Pretoria on October twenty-six. Another dotted line.”

“Keep going. This is getting good,” Dugout told her.

“It gets good, huh?” she said to him. “Now it is over to you and your big data mumbo jumbo. Check again, what flights left from Pretoria that could have gone to Comoros. Rule out commercial passenger flights that we know went elsewhere. Can you do that with your machine?”

“Sure.”

“Good, then look at all the charter flights that left Comoros in the last two weeks and all the ships. Look for something odd about them. Where they went. Who owned them or chartered them. Can you do that, too?”

“Yes, ma'am. On it.”

“You are awfully quiet there, Mr. Bow Man,” she said.

Ray guided Mbali into the lounge, the break room, next door. “Let's let Dugout do his thing. You gave him enough that he will find something.”

“Meanwhile, the big computer is still chugging away on trying to open the Potgeiters' laptops?” she asked.

“It is, but that could take forever. But we may not need it. We have lots of threads now. I tracked down Sergey Rogozin through NSA. He's in London. Turns out he goes there often from Olympus's headquarters in Cyprus. We told the Brits overnight. MI5, the BSS, is putting a very good team on him and NSA and GCHQ will team up to keep a close eye on his mobiles and all the comms associated with anybody from Olympus Security.”

“What more do we know about Rogozin? What would he do with nuclear bombs?” Mbali asked.

“He's likely working for somebody. He's got a lot of A-list, heavy-hitter clients, according to CIA. Started out with Russian oligarchs, but then went global and has corporations and billionaires from all over. We've just got to figure out which one of them ordered up some nukes.”

“And why,” she added.

“There has to be a why,” Ray agreed. “What have you heard back from Cape Town?”

“Well, unlike you and the Israelis, we don't track all of our citizens all the time by following all of their mobiles.”

“Only because you don't have the technology,” Ray laughed.

“Not yet. We have higher priorities, like building houses for our people who still live in shacks and shipping crates. We have many years of Apartheid to make up for. It will take a while.”

“Okay, you're right. But what did you find out?”

“Sorry, I'm still sensitive to some issues. What did my people find back home? Well, they confirmed Olympus has an office and a team in Pretoria. Someone broke into their offices last night, these things happen, but we didn't find anything interesting yet. We imaged their computers and are still going through the files. I have guys tailing all of them. And Marcus Stroh is on his way to the Comoros with a small team, and radiation detectors, but there are lots of little islands there. It's not just one.”

Bowman shook his head and looked at his shoes. “What's the problem?” she asked.

“We don't know how long we've got. When we thought they were trying to disrupt the election, we had a deadline, we knew how fast we had to run. Until we know why they are doing this, we don't know when it's going to happen. You still think they're going to blow up the black townships, create a white South African breakaway state?”

“No,” she said. “I never did. It wouldn't work. Their white Bantustan would be radioactive, too. And besides, those of us who were left wouldn't stop 'til we killed them all.”

Ray looked into her brown eyes and knew she meant every word of it, knew she could be a killer. “Did you ever kill anyone? I mean, personally, not just ordering it?”

She nodded and bit her lip. “You?”

“Only the ordering part. Never the trigger, not with my own hands.”

“Could you?” she asked.

“I guess you never know until you have to, but, yes, to stop the kind of thing that I think they are trying to do, yes.”

“I just hope we get the chance, in time,” she said.

 

38

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12

DZAOUDZI, PETITE-TERRE

MAYOTTE, INDIAN OCEAN

Tall, broad, and with a thick head of white hair that seemed to stand straight up, Marcus Stroh did not blend in well for an agent of a secret service. That was true in his native South Africa and seemed even more the case in the airport baggage claim in Dzaoudzi. Pierre Marcoux of France's overseas intelligence service, the DGSE had no difficulty spotting him. The Frenchman, short and wearing a wicker hat and baggy shirt, could have been a pensioner looking for his daughter on the 777 from Paris that had just arrived. He was, instead, the only representative of the French intelligence service in this prefecture of over two hundred thousand people.

“Bienvenue, Monsieur Stroh,
à
l'Union Europ
é
enne,”
Marcoux said after standing next to Stroh for half a minute scanning the crowd as Stroh was.

“Pierre?” Stroh asked, slightly surprised. “I meant to ask you when we talked yesterday how I would recognize you. So good of you to come out to the airport to get me.”

“Marcus, this is a tiny island. It was not far to come to get you. How was Nairobi?”

“I just switched flights there, never went in to the town. We really have to start direct flights here from South Africa.”

The two men began walking toward the line of taxis. “No, don't do that. Then I would have to monitor all of the people who would come from there. Too much work,” Marcoux joked. “I don't like work. That is why I chose to be stationed here, the farthest part of the European Union from Paris.” Marcoux directed Stroh toward a waiting Renault taxi.