The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (4 page)

“And Mortie, too, of course,” Kate said. “He knows Mahmood a lot better than I do.”

“Yes, of course,” Wheatley said, “and Mortie, too. But you’re going to track Mahmood and Al-Greeb in a way that Mortie cannot, and you’re going to find out for me what Mahmood is really up to, and you’re going to follow the trail right to Al-Greeb’s safe house.”

***

Kate spent the afternoon shuttling from one administrative office to another in OHB, completing her end-of-tour debriefings, filling out forms to ship back her meager household belongings from Islamabad, surrendering her State Department credentials and other expired ID while getting the new home office credentials necessary for getting access to headquarters, performing all those menial chores required of anyone who chooses to live and work in a Federal bureaucracy, even one as small as CIA. Kate found it nearly impossible to concentrate on these routine matters. Her mind raced over her conversation with Wheatley. She could not carve out any free time for herself to think and plan until the following day.

Once assigned a cubicle in the CTC and an internal computer account, she tried to develop background materials on Yasser al-Greeb. Though CIA publicly made a big deal about its cutting-edge technology, the IT systems within the Agency were basic and dataflow was still mired in the Age of Gutenberg. Paper was everywhere. She was able to glean a little from an internal electronic archive that contained biographical profiles of enemy foreign nationals, but the main value of these databases was to steer her to more in-depth material kept at higher levels of security and in paper files stored in a central registry. The fact that CIA was mainly a paper-based organization was not something the PR folks advertised on college campuses garnering new recruits.

Accessing web-based materials in the public domain had to be done on a separate computer system in an isolated area, since the internal computers had ‘airwalls’ (instead of firewalls, meaning that the internal computers were not connected to the outside world
at all
, even by UB ports or CD drives, and therefore could not be hacked by any technology short of mind-reading).

Kate found that the basics of Al-Greeb’s 34 years on the planet were straightforward: Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb was born in 1977 in Kuwait City, Kuwait, in a middleclass family of five brothers and two sisters. The parents were both originally refugees from Palestine. Yasser was the youngest child. His father, an oilfield engineer, moved the family to Jordan in 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait. Yasser graduated with honors from Amman High School in 1996. He then studied medicine for six years at Istanbul University, graduating with a combined bachelors of science and medical degree in 2002. He did an internship in internal medicine at the University of Jordan Hospital and at the Islamic Hospital, run by Jordan’s Islamic Brotherhood, in Amman. He married in 2004 to a woman from the Al-Rusefiah Palestinian refugee camp outside Amman. Little was known about her beyond her name, Samiha, and her Palestinian antecedents. The couple was thought to have had one child, a son. They lived in one of the poorer suburbs of Amman, Jabal Nuzhah.

Kate took this to be exactly what it was—the unremarkable biography of a middleclass Jordanian doctor. There were scores of men with identical résumés, but they had remained physicians caring for the sick in Amman clinics. What had taken Yasser al-Greeb to the battlefields of Afghanistan and the terrorist safe houses of Peshawar and Quetta? What had induced him to leave a new wife and a child for a mission from which he might never return? And why had a Moroccan suicide bomber expropriated his name?

If there were answers to those questions, Kate would have to find them by delving into files that were not kept on computers.

Jacques LeClerc was confident that his trip to Russia would yield enormous profit. He checked into the 98-year-old Savoy Hotel on Rozhdestvenka Street, the most expensive in the city, where he took a two-room apartment for $550 a night. He charged it to a black American Express card issued to Security Exports, S.A., his personal firm, based in Paris, the Cayman Islands, and South Florida, where he also maintained a luxurious condo.

LeClerc rationalized the pricey hotel by telling himself that the cost was a bargain by Paris standards. The magnificent old hotel was also a stone’s throw from Red Square, where he would make his first contact the next morning in front of Lenin’s mausoleum.

Without bothering to unpack, he ordered from room service a bottle of
Veuve Cliquot
champagne and a
croque-monsieur
sandwich dripping with melted Gruyère cheese, butter, and béchamel sauce topping two slices of toasted Italian bread and a half-pound of thinly sliced ham, the mid-day snack of a man who has opted for a short, luxurious life rather than a healthy one.

Rich meals, to be honest, were only one of many self-indulgences of this arms trafficker, for that was Jacques LeClerc’s profession. Nearing fifty, he had already reached a ripe old age for a man in his business.

Trips to Moscow were routine for LeClerc. Russia was the go-to nation for brokering weapons deals. The volume of small arms lying around from the Soviet days was staggering. Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, weapons were everywhere.

After the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya, the separatist regime discovered 28,000 rifles, 200,000 hand grenades, and over 13.5 million rounds of ammunition left behind. For a time, Chechnya was the main source of illegal small arms in Russia. But it was not the only source. There were large caches of arms in all of the former Soviet client states.

The bread-and-butter of LeClerc’s business, which generated between $1 million and $2 million a year for him personally, was the purchase of crates of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s iconic automatic assault rifle, the world’s most abundant military firearm, for export and resale in Africa and Asia.

Though he would deal with anyone who had the money to pay him, from rump revolutionaries in godforsaken African hellholes to urban criminal gangs in European and American cities, LeClerc was a purist of sorts. He insisted on buying, whenever possible, real AK-47s produced before the collapse of the USSR and warehoused by military officers, not cheaper knockoffs like the Hungarian AMD-65, a shorter-barreled cousin with a forward handgrip and a futuristic muzzle that, for reasons he could not fathom, had become popular in Afghanistan.

LeClerc also snapped up other light weapons, including the experimental AN-94 Nikonov assault rifle, a revolutionary weapon with shifted pulse recoil, a system designed by Kalashnikov engineers to minimize the gun’s kick after the first shot. This was said to increase accuracy. He was also always in the market for Dragunov sniper rifles, Bizon-2 submachine guns, and portable surface-to-air missiles. SAMs were hard to find but commanded a 100 per cent markup. By special order, LeClerc could also supply anything from a 100-bed field hospital to various military aircraft, including helicopters. Payment was in advance, of course.

Though he had kept his eyes open for one since the late 1980s, there was a particular weapon, a legendary kind of weapon, that had eluded LeClerc for his entire 22-year career as an international arms trafficker. It was a weapon so rare and so profitable that, should he ever succeed in acquiring one, it would end his need to work for the rest of his life.

There were said to be about 150 of these weapons, manufactured by the USSR before it dissolved, that could not be accounted for. They were said to be floating around within the borders of the former USSR alliance. They were likely in the hands of retired or cashiered Soviet officers who had expropriated them as a kind of substitute 401(k) retirement program.

This particular weapon would weigh between 90 and 250 pounds, the size of a small refrigerator, like one of those cube-shaped boxes found in every American college dorm to store beer. It would be portable enough to use a specially designed backpack or tent duffel bag as the means of delivery.

Yet notwithstanding its small size, this weapon could deliver huge destructive power. It was, of course, a nuclear device, one yielding between one-quarter and five kilotons of explosive force, enough to level lower Manhattan and kill, just in the initial fireball, between 300,000 and 1.5 million people in a crowded urban area.

LeClerc was seeking what was known in the popular imagination as a ‘suitcase nuke,’ or ‘mini-nuke,’ or even a ‘vest-pocket-nuke,’ though LeClerc himself doubted whether any such devices had ever been made smaller than a very large backpack.

The following morning, LeClerc had scheduled a meeting with a retired Soviet-era deputy defense minister, a man he had dealt with for years, who claimed he could provide him with a contact with access to a backpack nuke. It was warehoused not far from Moscow.

First hearing this news, LeClerc had shown appropriate skepticism so as not to telegraph his eagerness to pursue such a deal, especially since he would be fronting his own money to buy it. Resale, LeClerc was confident, would not pose a problem for him.

***

A week later, a low ceiling of leaden clouds obscured the noonday sun at Podalsk, the grimy industrial city 25 miles south of Moscow that blights the banks of the Pakhra River. Retired KGB Colonel Viktor Marchenko, a rugged 65-year-old veteran of MinAtom and the Soviet nuclear defense industry, arrived at the Central Train Station a quarter-hour early so as not to miss his guest.

A pack of feral dogs, a growing menace in poverty-stricken greater Moscow, was circling inside the wooden turnstile. The dogs took one look at Marchenko and slunk away, heads low. Though long retired, Marchenko still had a lean, fit body, crew-cut iron-gray hair, a military bearing, mustache, and an understated air of menace. Animals and humans alike were instinctively wary of him.

A Moscow commuter train pulled in the station and passengers disembarked. The well-dressed and pudgy Frenchman was easy to spot, even if Marchenko had not already met him a few days earlier at a Moscow restaurant. Ordinary Moscow commuters wore threadbare suits that fit like sacks. Jacques LeClerc sported a blue serge jacket with a bright yellow tie and matching pocket kerchief. It was a silly costume to wear in Moscow, where mobs of street toughs preyed on foreign visitors.

“Mon vieux...”
Marchenko said with false bonhomie. He had served a memorable tour as an assistant military attaché in Brussels and savored the memory of that era of his life, so rich in material comforts and buxom Belgian females.

LeClerc smiled and offered his hand. Marchenko took it, gave it a muscular squeeze, and dropped it quickly, like a dead fish. The two men walked out of the station in the direction of a dilapidated concrete monument to the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, blackened by three decades of soot.

“I am still recovering from our dinner in Moscow,” LeClerc said in the dingy square, far from buildings and out of earshot. “I trust you are well?”

“I am in good health, and today we will trade technology for money, my friend,” Marchenko said. “I have something to show you.”

Colonel Viktor Marchenko had been waiting two decades for this day. In 1991, when the Soviet Ministry of Defense was coming apart, Marchenko had decided that, like his superiors, it would be wise to salt away something for a future in Russia that was looking increasingly bleak. Pensions were being cancelled and the ruble was worth less and less.

In the wake of George H. W. Bush’s challenge to withdraw all of America’s tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, Mikhail Gorbachev had pledged to bring Soviet nukes back to Russian soil from surrounding client states. A tall order, as there were nearly 30,000 of them. Even if ninety-nine percent of those had been secured (and that was doubtful), that would still leave three hundred unaccounted for, and one of those, a footlocker-sized device from Ukraine weighing 400 pounds, had come into Marchenko’s control and permanent possession, along with several tons of more conventional weapons.

This nuclear device was now in storage in a quiet warehouse in the Tsilikatnaya section of the city, near a mothballed cement factory.

“Let us be clear that this is a larger device than perhaps you were initially led to understand,” Marchenko said as he unlocked the passenger side door of his battered maroon Lada. “You must not believe everything you read about miniaturization of atomic weapons, at least not on the Russian side.”

“I understand. There are so many false stories. I expect size will not pose a problem for me,” LeClerc said with a theatrical sigh, “or even for my client. Let us hope so. And in any case, it was worth the trip to see you, if only because you are a colleague and now a friend. I make no promises, but I am going to do my best for you, to find a buyer for you. There is a villa in Spain with your name on it, is it not so? We must find you the euros!” Marchenko chuckled appreciatively at these comments.

As for LeClerc, the actual size of the nuclear device, so long as it could be transported internationally in a standard intermodal shipping container, and to its final destination in a small panel truck or SUV, was a matter of indifference to him. He was delighted nonetheless to have a minuscule point over which he could drive down Marchenko’s asking price, a figure the starched KGB colonel had not yet seen fit to reveal.

***

The warehouse was one of many set amid factories in a warren of deserted streets. Marchenko parked in an alley strewn with weeds and entered a five story brick building via a locked side door secured by a key padlock. He ushered LeClerc into the dark, cavernous warehouse. Dust was everywhere; there was a musty smell. In the dim, patchy light admitted by rain-streaked windows, it was hard to see. They walked a distance to the rear of the building and climbed a ladder to a platform twenty feet above the concrete floor.

On the upper level, Marchenko made his way to a crude door fashioned from rough hewn planks and secured by another padlock, this one a combination lock. Inside the room was a naked bulb hanging from a wire with a pull-cord. LeClerc was momentarily blinded when Marchenko lit the bulb. When his vision cleared, he saw a large brown canvas steamer trunk reinforced with webbed straps and beveled metal corners.

“We made about nine hundred of various versions of these between the late sixties and 1988,” Marchenko said. “They were mainly intended for use as tactical devices in a conflict with NATO forces in Germany. We also stockpiled a few outside Europe, including one or two in West Virginia, in the United States. They are probably still there.”

“A tactical demolition bomb, in the RA series,” LeClerc whispered his eyes wide. This was the first time he had seen a nuclear weapon. He recognized the style and model immediately from photographs.

“This is an RA-211, which is a miniaturized version of the RDS-3, with an energy release somewhat lower than the original RDS-1,” said Marchenko, “though of course that was a bulky affair compared to this compact design. In terms of explosive force, this is at the upper end of portable, tactical weapons. The yield is tiny compared to its bigger strategic cousins. But I am confident this will generate over 17 kilotons of explosive force and winds of 800 kilometers per hour at a radius of 2.5 kilometers. There will be no survivors within this circle. Anyone within a radius of 7.5 kilometers will eventually die of secondary effects. Do you think this is enough power?”

LeClerc felt an oily, cold sweat developing on his forehead. “I understood that the electronic components of these devices had to be protected from the plutonium pit in storage,” LeClerc said, recovering his composure. “Surely if this device is twenty years old, the electronics have become hopelessly corroded?”

“Not at all,” said Marchenko. “This is an implosion type device. The physics package is removed. I also took out the battery and the beryllium reflector surrounding the core. They are in another location. The battery is actually in my home, attached to a wall outlet.”

“May I see the interior?”

“Certainly,” Marchenko said, undoing the webbed belts. “And of course I will show you the core and the sister components. They are stored in a lead-lined case to elude radiation detectors. And to protect myself—and you.”

“I am no nuclear expert, I will have to have one of my choosing certify that the device is still operable.”