Guardian of Lies (17 page)

It’s a courtesy call. Why Templeton has asked for this meeting we’re not sure. It happens all the time. A clerk puts something in the wrong box in the evidence lockup, and it takes them a few days to find it. It seems the evidence clerks have misplaced the six photos taken by Katia’s mother in Colombia, the photographic prints made by Emerson Pike, reclaimed by Katia the night he was murdered and seized from her by the police the day she was arrested.

We have to assume that as long as the man in question is alive, the item is viable,” said Llewellyn.

Herb Llewellyn was in his early forties. He had a shock of tousled salt-and-pepper hair over horn-rimmed glasses. His dress shirts, the sleeves of which were always rolled above his thin, bony elbows, seemed to bear a perennial spot of ink, either fresh or faded, from a pen that leaked in his breast pocket. This morning he was meeting with Thorpe in Thorpe’s corner office at FBI headquarters.

“Explain to me how that works,” said Thorpe. “I’m still not convinced on the issue of shelf life. Everything I’ve ever read says ten, maybe twelve years tops, after that it may be dirty but that’s it, and even that’s minimal.”

Thorpe wanted to be sure he knew what he was dealing with before he went up the chain and got his head handed to him by someone who didn’t like the message he was delivering, especially if there was any chance he was wrong. The acting director had now fallen on his own sword. Thorpe wasn’t even sure if he knew what higher authority looked like anymore.

“In this case, you can forget everything you’ve read,” said Llewellyn. “And I don’t say that lightly. It’s a special case.”

“In what way?”

“The Soviet Seventy-ninth Brigade, according to the accounts in the Russian documents, possessed a highly skilled field-level maintenance unit. The FKRs were designed to be completely field maintained.

“More to the point, each transport van contained multiple replacements for every critical part. We’re talking about a gun type here, simplicity itself, exceedingly reliable and easy to maintain. The entire device could fit into a fair-size steamer trunk. The gun barrel would be no more than perhaps three feet long and between three and four inches in diameter, with a smooth bore. According to the information in the documents, the man we’re looking for was one of the brigade’s top armorers. He was trained and experienced in maintenance on the system in question. He would know how to store it, how to keep it alive, and if necessary, how to bring it back to life.”

“That’s possible? He could do that?”

“With an ample supply of replacement parts, yes.”

“What about the Russians? Can they help us at all?” said Thorpe.

“State Department has been in contact with them. Relations, as you know, are not good. On the international front, to deflect heat, in the event that something happens, they’re taking the position that it’s an old-empire problem, a holdover from the Soviets for which they are not responsible. Unofficially, they’re trying to obtain design details, drawings if they can find them. But it’s an old system. It’s been obsolete for decades, not even remotely close to anything in their current arsenal. Their thermonuclear stockpile, fifty megatons or more, enough to take out twenty square miles, would be implosion-type bombs, a core of plutonium surrounded by conventional explosives and triggered by highly complex detonation systems. What we’re hearing is that a lot of the documentation on the older-type weapons, the stuff we’re dealing with here, was trashed after the collapse of the Soviets. So finding information may be next to impossible.”

“So correct me if I’m wrong. You’re telling me our cause for concern turns on two contingencies: that the man is still alive and that he has the necessary spare parts to keep the weapon alive.”

“Correct.”

“We may know more about the man in a day or so. For now, let’s talk about the parts,” said Thorpe.

Thorpe and Llewellyn were about as different as two people could be. Llewellyn was an intellectual from MIT, a scientist who headed up an office of nerds all packing scientific calculators that could perform three hundred functions and carry out equations to a dozen decimal points. For this reason it seemed strange that the two men always gravitated toward each other whenever there was a crisis, as if each compensated for some deficiency in the other.

“Let’s assume for the moment that he doesn’t have the parts. Could he fabricate them?”

“It’s possible, but it becomes much more problematic. The tolerances required for fabricated parts would be critical. He would require access to tools and dies that would be difficult to obtain. Even with the proper equipment, it’s questionable. Without skilled help I would say his chances of success drop dramatically. The man’s an armorer, not a machinist.”

“Good,” said Thorpe. “Now how do we know he has the spare parts?”

“The KGB reports,” said Llewellyn. “We know that the Russian, Nitikin, arrived on Castro’s doorstep at Punto Uno the afternoon of October twenty-eighth.”

“Excuse me. What’s Punto Uno?” said Thorpe.

“It was central command, military headquarters for the Cuban government during the missile crisis. Castro always hung out there whenever there was a national calamity.”

“So Castro was involved personally?”

“We don’t know, but we have to assume so. According to the KGB reports that were compiled from Soviet military accounts, Castro was present at Punto Uno when the Russian arrived. Apparently the Russian was invited inside the compound. He was there for a little over an hour. What happened inside, who he met, who he may have talked to, the Soviets couldn’t be certain.”

“Castro would have wanted to cover his ass,” said Thorpe. “He wouldn’t want to get crosswise with the Soviets.”

“Nor they with him,” said Llewellyn.

“So we have no idea whether the Cubans might be involved now?”

“No,” said Llewellyn.

“Go on, let’s get back to the parts.”

“The Russian was seen again later that night, October twenty-eighth, this time at the port at Mariel. Both times, at Punto Uno in the afternoon and at Mariel that night, he was driving a large Soviet transport van. According to the Soviet military and the later KGB reports when he arrived at Mariel, he was under the protection of a good-size contingent of Cuban troops. They estimated more than two hundred armed soldiers and at least two armored vehicles. It’s clear he wouldn’t have gotten off the island without the Cubans.”

“So what you’re saying is that to get it back, the Russians would have had to engage in a shooting war with their allies,” said Thorpe.

“Correct. And according to all the reports,” said Llewellyn, “Moscow wasn’t willing to do it. At that moment they had a full plate trying to stare us down.”

“The van the Russian was driving,” said Thorpe, “I assume this is the key piece of evidence?”

“Correct. It was a fully equipped Soviet mobile-weapons van. According to the KGB it had the weapon and a full complement of replacement parts.”

Llewellyn handed Thorpe a photograph. It was an enhanced enlargement showing a line of military vehicles, what looked like heavy-duty trucks parked side by side near a sizable Quonset building with a corrugated arched roof.

“That was taken by a U.S. Navy Crusader on an aerial recon flight on October twenty-fifth, three days before the Russian disappeared. The building is located at Bejucal. It was the central storage site. We didn’t realize it at the time because of the single security fence and the absence of any real military presence around it. Apparently the Soviets believed the best defense was deception,” said Llewellyn. “It may also have compromised their internal security.

“The vans, here and here.” Llewellyn directed Thorpe’s attention to the photograph with the point of his pen. “Those are mobile-weapon movers. That’s what our Russian friend was driving when he showed up at Punto Uno and again at Mariel. The limited security around the facility probably explains how he was able to drive it away. We know that the weapon type in question had already been deployed, because three of them were aimed at Guantanamo. Of course, we didn’t know that until the 1990s. The delivery system would have been on a truck and trailer. It would have flown off a ramp—”

“He doesn’t have one of those?” said Thorpe.

“No. The original delivery system would have been more cumbersome than it was worth. It would have been too large and too visible. He certainly wouldn’t want to use it today. It would be much easier to deliver it on a ship, or better yet, the bed of a truck.”

“So what you’re saying is that if he had the van, he had the weapon and the parts, and with that he doesn’t need anything else to maintain it.”

“Essentially, yes. With a gun type there are no tricky detonators. My people are working on it but from what we can see, the only thing he might need other than the parts he already has is a little fresh cordite to fire the projectile down the barrel, and that he could probably get almost anywhere.”

Thorpe issued a deep sigh, then leaned back in his chair.

“Okay, so the Soviets tracked him to Mariel. What happened then?”

“Soviet intelligence reports that the Cubans helped him load the van into the hold of a registered Liberian vessel. The ship sailed that night, the twenty-eighth. The Russians thought about sinking it with a sub but they had nothing in position because of the U.S. blockade around the island. They had recalled all their subs out to the mid-Atlantic in an effort to reduce tensions and avoid an accident with the U.S. Bottom line is, the ship, the van, and the man all disappeared.”

“The Liberian vessel,” said Thorpe, “do we have a name? With a name we get shipping records. Even after forty-five years we might see where the vessel landed.”

“I thought about that,” said Llewellyn. “Our intelligence people checked our copies of the old Soviet documents. It looks as if the vessel’s name was in the KGB reports, but for some reason it was inked out, redacted by the Soviets, we don’t know why.”

“And of course without the original document we can’t look behind the ink.”

“Correct,” said Llewellyn.

“So we don’t have a clue as to where this guy went or whether he might still be there today?”

“Until we had access to the KGB reports, he was just an urban legend, one that Emerson Pike was apparently obsessed with. We talked with people Pike worked with before he retired and they all said that he believed the legend to be true. Even after he retired, whenever he traveled, friends said he was always on the lookout. It looks as if perhaps he found him. The Soviet apparatus searched for Nitikin for almost thirty years, until the empire collapsed, and they never found him. So you have to assume the Russian is fairly resourceful,” said Llewellyn.

“And old,” said Thorpe.

“Yes, but that may not be an advantage,” said Llewellyn.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean if he sat on it all these years, why would he use it now? Unless, of course…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless he’s dying and he knows it, in which case it’s either use it or lose it.”

“So he has to restore it before he dies,” said Thorpe.

“My guess is that he’s found help. He would need it. It’s possible but not likely that he’d be able to move it himself.”

“You’re thinking subnational terrorists,” said Thorpe.

“If the plan is to use it, that would be my guess,” said Llewellyn. “No nation I can think of is going to want to have their fingerprints on an event like that. And while a nation-state could take it and put it in their arsenal, without the capacity to maintain it, what good is it? In ten years they’ve got a corroded hunk of junk. No. Unfortunately, there’s only one purpose to be served by a dinosaur like this, and that’s to turn it loose and let it roar—to make a statement that the world will understand.”

Both men knew that when it came to potential helpers, there was no shortage of candidates.

“So you’re pretty sure there’s no chance he goes to use this thing and gets a fizzle?” said Thorpe.

“There’s always the exception in the physical universe,” said Llewellyn, “but I wouldn’t place too much reliance on it in this case. You have to remember, the first one of these we made, gun type, we didn’t even bother to test it. We just shipped it across the Pacific and dropped it. That’s how certain we were that it would work.”

“You’ve convinced me,” said Thorpe. “What are we talking about in terms of size?”

“Are you asking mass, the size of the weapon, or yield?” said Llewellyn.

“All three.”

“The warhead would be bigger than a bread basket. Unfortunately, we don’t have a picture. The only one we know of is a photograph of one of the missiles itself on a ramp aimed at Guantanamo. We know the warhead was situated in the midpart of the fuselage. How large or heavy we can’t be sure,” said Llewellyn. “You’d want to use a truck to move it. I’m guessing a small box truck would be more than adequate.”

“In other words, the kind you can rent anywhere,” said Thorpe.

“Right.”

“And yield?”

“That we do know. Think in terms of Little Boy,” said Llewellyn.

“You’re kidding. I thought you said this thing was field tactical for battlefield use.”

“It is. Back then I guess they thought bigger was better,” said Llewellyn. “No. It’s almost precisely the same. A smaller package no doubt, but it’s the same type, and the same yield as Little Boy, fourteen kilotons, and it would be very reliable. That’s what I was saying. We tested Fat Man, the implosion device, in the New Mexico desert to make sure it would work. But Little Boy, that was a gun type, a sure thing. The first test was the live performance over Hiroshima.”

Larry Templeton’s facial features have always reminded me of those statues of Lenin pulled down by the mobs at the close of the Soviet Union. His bald head and goatee, the forceful jaw and the deep-set eyes, make for a powerful image.

Seated behind his desk, as he is this morning when Harry and I are ushered into his office, we get only a slight sense of Templeton’s diminutive physical stature. This comes from his abbreviated upper body hidden partially behind stacks of case books and files on his desk. He lays down his pen on top of the papers he is working on and beckons us to enter.