An Eye For An Eye (19 page)

Closing the gate, Guerrero put the tools in the small cart. With one last look at the cross, he turned and began pushing the cart back toward the stable. He had spoken to the gardeners. They had understood. Or maybe not; it didn’t matter. Regardless, they had provided him with the tools. And so, once a day, sometimes twice, he checked the grass. He cut it when it was long, then pulled the weeds, tended the flowers, and polished the stone, making sure everything was as neat and orderly as he could make it. It had to be, for Carolina.

He left the gardener’s cart in the stables and made his way up to the house. He walked slowly, another laborer taking his time below the hot midday sun.

Minutes later, he stepped below the trellis-covered walkway and made his way around the house to the patio by the pool. There, he spotted Alberto waiting for him. Alberto nodded once but said nothing and Guerrero followed him into the house.

In his office, Guerrero placed the hat on the corner of his desk. Taking the USB drive from Alberto, he slid it into the port of his computer. After he read the message, he stood and looked out the window. Although he could only see leaves, he knew that beyond the trees was the stable, and, beyond that, the grave.

Soon, Carolina. Soon
.

“So, Matthew tells me you worked for Barbara Tanner,” the president said.

“I did,” Patty answered, “For a couple of years.” She smiled. “But I think I was a few years too early. I would have liked to have worked for the senator after she became the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.”

Richter and Patty were dining with the president and the first lady in the residence section of the White House.
A
Saturday
,
he had only worked for a few hours early in the morning, then he had taken Patty on a tour of Washington. Prearranged by the Secret Service, they had bypassed the tourist lines and were given private tours of the Capitol building, the Supreme Court and the Lincoln Memorial. Then they were treated to a rarely seen view of the Washington Monument, bypassing the elevator and taking the stairs—something that had been closed to the public for decades.

“What did you think of Barbara?” Maria Kendall asked.

“I think she’s fantastic!” Patty answered. “I admire her for standing up, for making her voice heard, especially in a male-dominated organization like the senate.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Maria said with a twinkle in her eye as she raised her wine glass.

The two ladies engaged in small talk as white gloved members of the butler’s staff cleared the dishes. The ladies continued talking when the servants left and Richter and the president exchanged a glance. The first lady was keeping the conversation on lighter subjects, not wanting to spoil the evening with a discussion of the threat just south of the border. The conversation shifted to Princeton and Patty’s classes. 

“Do you enjoy teaching?” Maria asked.

“I do,” Patty said then laughed. “It wasn’t what I intended to do but I somehow fell into it.” Patty took a sip of wine. “So what is Angela studying?”

“She’s in premed. She has a long way to go, but if she could pick her dream job, she would travel the world with Doctors Without Borders, providing emergency medical care to people impacted by conflict, disasters...,” the first lady gestured to the president. “Dave doesn’t like the idea, but she’s determined.”

Richter and the president exchanged another glance. He understood all too well the president’s concern.

“That’s impressive and admirable,” Patty said then turned to the president. “But I can understand your worry, especially given what you must see.”

The president nodded. “You can only bring them so far and then you have to let them go. I am proud—what dad wouldn’t be?—but still it makes me nervous.”

“Did Matthew give you the tour?” Maria asked, changing subjects again.

“Of the White House?” Patty asked. “Not yet.”

“Well then, let’s go.” Maria said as she pushed her chair back. “I’ll give you an insider’s view, show you some things that Matthew doesn’t even know about.”

The two women stood and the first lady leaned over to Richter. He noticed the twinkle in her eye.

“I like her,” Maria whispered.

Richter smiled and it struck him just how alike Patty and the first lady were. They both were comfortable in social settings, able to make small talk with anyone and, when animated, they both had a sparkle in their eye. As the two women left—their excited chatter and laughter ringing off the walls—he and the president exchanged another glance. The president, he could see, had noticed it too.

The analyst clicked the icon on his screen and listened to the call again. Despite the fact that both phones were cell phones, it was surprisingly clear. That, he knew, had less to do with the quality of the phone or of the platform of the local cellular service providers and more to do with the sophisticated enhancement of the computers. He had never seen the legendary NSA supercomputers and likely never would. He wasn’t sure if they were even located in his building in the vast, sprawling complex in Fort Meade, Maryland. Everything was need-to-know and what he needed to know, and knew very well, was radical jihad.

Translation wasn’t a problem. He was fluent in Arabic, having spent the first fifteen years of his life in Lebanon. Members of a small and dwindling Christian community, his father finally decided it was time to leave when their church was burned to the ground. It was one of the rare occasions when he, his parents, and two younger brothers hadn’t attended. His older sister, married and living several blocks away at the time, hadn’t been so lucky.

No, translation wasn’t a problem, he thought. Still he glanced at the English-language transcript that the computer had spit out. He shook his head. It always amazed him how the system was able to detect subtle nuances in tone and accent and handle the differences between the seemingly endless dialects. He could, but he wondered again how long it would be before the agency told him his services were no longer needed.

He shook his head again then focused on the task before him. The call was troubling. Although he listened to many calls and read many postings and emails where angry parties discussed the
Great Satan
and how, one day, God willing, they were going to bring the wrath of Allah to America’s shores, this one was different. It was more than the rant or the blowing off of steam of a disaffected and disenfranchised people, a people who had neither the means nor the conviction to act. This one hinted at a plan that was underway.

He listened another time to see if he had missed anything.

“We have acquired the necessary materials.”

“Allah be praised. Where are they now?”

“In Ohio.”

“What is the next step?”

“We have to remove the critical components. This takes time. We have to be careful.”

“Allah will protect you. When?”

“Soon, my brother. Soon.”

There was a pause and, in the background, he could hear street noises: a car horn, a shout, the rumble of a truck.

“Allah willing, this machine they use to stop their cancers will now give them cancers instead.”

He glanced at the transcript again. No, he hadn’t missed anything, he thought, as he began to type. He needed to get this one out immediately.

As Richter climbed into the back of the SUV, he yawned. He was tired. The previous afternoon, he had decided to return to New Jersey with Patty. She had made the trip to Washington, then decided to stay for two days, something which had surprised him. Some sort of holiday at the university she had said. Whatever the reason, he was glad she had come. And so while he had worked, Patty had played tourist, seeing the sites they hadn’t been able to visit together. The evenings had been nice, he thought with a smile. After two days, he realized that he didn’t want her to leave and, although she had insisted on taking the train to Washington, he had decided to drive her home. Or rather, the Secret Service drove her home while he and Patty sat in the back. After another late dinner, this one in New Jersey, they returned to her apartment close to midnight.

It was a long time before they finally fell asleep.

The next morning, after he climbed into the SUV, Agent Wendy Tillman handed him his morning briefings and a cup of coffee.

“Thanks,” he said with a smile as he took the cup. “I was going to ask you to stop along the way.” He took a sip and sighed. The briefings could wait.

Tillman smiled back. “I figured you would, so we stopped on the way over.” Her eyes shifted back to the road as the driver signaled for a turn. She glanced back again. “Got a second cup up here for you too.”

Richter raised his cup in salute. “You go above and beyond the call of duty, Agent Tillman.”

Ten minutes later, they had just pulled onto the New Jersey Turnpike when the phone rang. He glanced at the number then frowned. When he hung up moments later, he felt a chill running up his spine. He leaned forward and gave the agents a new address. It was always better to get information directly from the source, he reasoned, and he was so close. As the driver made a U-turn—illegal, but it hardly mattered since they were cops—he sat back and considered the news.

Fifty minutes later, he was sitting in Mark Crawford’s office in the federal building in lower Manhattan. Crawford’s face was grim as he filled Richter in on the theft.

“Are you familiar with cesium-one-thirty-seven?” he asked.

“The basics,” Richter responded as he remembered the training he had received while with the FBI. “Give me the summary.”

“It’s a man-made element, a radioactive isotope created in nuclear fission. It’s used in industrial gauges and certain types of measurement devices and,” he paused, “in radiation therapy for treating certain cancers.”

Richter frowned as he briefly thought of Brett Watson. He shook his head and gestured to Crawford to continue.

“In these devices,” Crawford said, “it’s referred to as sealed-source radiation. In brachytherapy devices—the machines used for cancer treatment—it’s in a stainless steel tube, about three quarters of an inch long.”

Richter’s eyes narrowed. And it was dangerous and lethal even in such small quantities, he knew, as he recalled an incident in Brazil where one such device had been stolen. After the scrap metal, the thieves had nonetheless been intrigued by the radiation capsule. They punctured it, no easy task, and in the ensuing chain of events, a handful of people had been killed and several hundred sickened. All from just a few small grains, he remembered.

“This stuff, obviously, is regulated,” Crawford continued. “The canisters are stored and transported in a sealed lead container. Records must be maintained each time the lead container is opened, serial numbers of each canister recorded…” He waved his hand. “Long story short, a medical equipment and supply company in New Jersey had one of their trucks broken into in Newark. And although they had ten of these canisters in a sealed lead container in the back at the time, only one was taken.”

Richter was silent for a moment as he considered the implications.

Crawford nodded as if he could read his mind. “I think that we have to assume that the threat we’ve been worried about for the last decade is real.”

Five hours later, Richter, Pat Monahan, and the Secretary of Homeland Security sat down in the Oval Office across from the president. They all wore the grim faces of those who bore bad news. Burt Phillips joined them a moment later.

“Sir,” Richter began, “we have credible intelligence that an Islamist terrorist organization is planning to detonate a radiological dispersal device—a dirty bomb—somewhere in the U.S.” He paused, his eyes locked on his boss’s. “This is not just chatter, sir. We believe the group now has the necessary materials.”

He turned to Monahan and, as the director provided details on the theft and the FBI investigation, he thought again about what little they knew. The ride back to Washington had been spent on the phone, checking with his team, then with the intelligence agencies, and learning as much as he could about dirty bombs. It was then that he had learned about the intercepted call. But, outside of the thefts and phone call, they had nothing specific to tell them where or when.

“And the tie to Islamist terrorists?” the president asked.

Richter handed him a piece of paper.

“We’ve intercepted a phone call that appears to reference the thefts.” He nodded toward the paper. “That’s the transcript.”

A moment later the president looked up. His face was pale. “God help us.” He paused. “Why Ohio? Are they targeting Cincinnati? Chicago?”

Richter shook his head. “We don’t know, sir. Ohio might just be a location where they plan on disassembling the machines and building the bomb. It’s far enough away from New Jersey that anything peculiar noticed might not be linked back to the thefts. And if they’re in a rural area, on a farm for instance, they might not draw attention to themselves.”

Monahan leaned forward, frowning. “A farm would also have access to fertilizer.”

The president grimaced. “Ammonium nitrate? Like the Oklahoma City bombing?”

Monahan nodded. “Yes, except, for a dirty bomb, the blast wouldn’t have to be as big.” He took a breath. “While the blast itself will cause some immediate deaths, the intent of a dirty bomb is to sow fear and panic.”

Richter nodded. “Pat’s right. This is not the same as a nuclear device. There would be no nuclear chain reaction. But even with the radiation from just one of these canisters, such a bomb, if constructed right, would contaminate a fairly large area, as much as thirty or forty city blocks.” He paused. “And that’s from a small explosive device; something equivalent to ten or fifteen pounds of TNT.”

The president’s face hardened. “Tell me about the radioactive material,” he ordered.

Richter nodded. “Cesium-one-thirty-seven is a radioactive isotope with a half-life of thirty years. It’s in powder form and is stored in a small, stainless-steel rod, about this long.” Richter held his thumb and index finger an inch apart.

“The stuff in one of those could contaminate thirty or forty blocks?”

“Yes, sir.” Richter said. “Above the current acceptable limits, potentially well above.”

The Secretary of Homeland Security leaned forward. Her face was scrunched in a perpetual scowl, like she had just eaten something bitter. Despite the pundits’ commentary, the former governor of South Dakota and former lawyer had a firm hand over the vast and sprawling Homeland Security organization.

“Cesium emits both beta and gamma rays,” she said. “For people in the immediate vicinity of the blast—those who weren’t killed by the explosion—the risk would be radiation poisoning: either external burns if it comes into contact with the skin, or internal damage, if it’s inhaled. Then, depending on several factors like wind and the amount of explosive material used, most of the dust would likely settle over a five or ten block area, but some of the fallout would travel farther. Apparently, this stuff would adhere to surfaces like buildings and roads. It would hide in crevices and cracks. It might be carried farther away from the contamination zone by cars and trucks, increasing the risk. It would get into sewers, air ducts, the soil, the food supply, the water supply,” she paused, “and although there is some debate in the scientific community, it would likely render a large area of any city—Washington, DC for instance—uninhabitable.”

“So we would have a mass evacuation,” the president stated, his eyes narrowing.

The Homeland Security Secretary nodded somberly. “It’s likely, sir. But in the short term, we might have a mass quarantine.”

The president’s face clouded.

“Because this stuff would be virtually impossible to clean up,” she added, “it would continue to emit gamma rays for a long time, creating a long-term cancer risk in the area.” She put her pad down and took a breath. “Because of public fear, many suggest that the best way to deal with the contamination is to abandon the area, potentially demolish it.”

The president nodded. “And that would have a devastating effect on the local economy,” he added as the implications became clear. “Quite possibly the national economy as well.”

The president stood and began pacing back and forth across the room, seemingly lost in thought. Abruptly, the president stopped and turned.

“So let me see if I’ve got this straight.” His voice was sharp. “We know that someone stole a radiation source, and we believe two Islamist terrorists are planning an attack.” He stopped, stared hard at the people before him. “We don’t know where or when. The only things we do know is that this stuff is apparently in Ohio and that one of the men on the call is, or was, in New York and the other was in Chicago. Is that it?”

The Homeland Security Secretary frowned while Richter and Monahan both nodded slowly. Kendall held their eyes for a moment then turned to Burt Phillips. “I want the National Security Council in the Situation Room,” he growled. “Right now.”