Critical Mass (2 page)

To counteract his lack of eyes and ears, he’d requested the right to recruit in the field, but had been turned down. These past few months, he could have used some good agents along the border, really used them.

Maybe then he would have been on top of this case before children lay dying. Maybe he would have made an interception. But this was going to
be a chase, because whatever had been on its way across the border was now in country and being positioned.

U-235 didn’t matter. This would not turn out to be about uranium. In fact, he thought the U-235 that had been brought over before was a test carried out to see how U.S. safeguards worked.

Nuclear materials are hard to detect if they’re properly shielded. The most reliable detection systems react not only to radiation but also to the presence of the kind of bulk necessary to conceal it.

Whatever he was chasing now had been highly radioactive, and it had been brought across with illegals, probably in a truck. Could it be plutonium dioxide, perhaps, ready to be transformed into a metal, or intended to be used in some sort of low-yield bomb? It was shipped as a powder, which could have leaked. But if that was the case, why hadn’t the radiation detectors on whatever bridge it had crossed screamed bloody murder?

Maybe, while the truck was on the bridge, there had been nothing to detect. No leaks. But the new systems were designed to see shielding as well as emissions, and there were new brand-new detectors in Eagle Pass; he’d seen the installation reports. They would have seen a bomb, surely.

But for whatever reason, they hadn’t.

At this morning’s meeting, the regional Weapons of Mass Destruction coordinator, Cynthia Spears, had read a report from the Laredo Field Office about the radioactive kids. “They are illegals aged ten, eight, and four, believed to have been off-loaded by coyotes when they got sick.”

The moment he’d heard those words, he’d booked a flight to San Antonio, then been compelled to drive from there because of the lack of air service to Eagle Pass. He knew little about the community. In 2007, the mayor had refused to allow Homeland Security surveyors to enter the town to survey for the wall. Later, it had been built, but it was of no concern to Jim. Walls had no relevance to him. The things that concerned him came across bridges in disguise, not through the river under cover of night.

The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he was dealing with plutonium and that these children had somehow been exposed during handling, after it had crossed the border.

Plutonium was potentially much more of a threat than highly enriched uranium. It took far less plutonium to make a bomb, and therefore it was more portable. But it was also harder to make plutonium go critical and explode. If the builders had the right parts, though—well, it was possible. You
could even get a low-yield plutonium bomb out of a simple gun-type detonation system of the kind used with uranium bombs.

Every country that had ever produced nuclear weapons materials had experienced some loss. Most highly enriched uranium and plutonium that had been lost by Western governments was accounted for in one way or another. But that was not true of Russia. During the collapse of the Soviet Union, highly enriched uranium and plutonium had gone missing and so had numerous critical parts.

He drove harder than ever, pushing the car relentlessly. In the movies, he would have had access to a government-issue Gulfstream or something. In the real world, no chance.

He fought the illusion that the road was actually getting longer, stretching away in front of him like an expanding rubber band.

This came from the desert lights phenomenon, the sense that distant lights weren’t getting closer. For a fair amount of time, he’d seen lights ahead—but at least it was a city, and not the dim cluster of lanterns that marked most settlements along the ragged edges of the world.

“Come on,” he muttered.
Were
the lights receding?

Nah, the Global Positioning System now had him twelve miles out. Experimentally, he opened his cell phone. Nope. Okay, noted. At least he was not going into some squat Kazakh burg full of bored sadists in threadbare uniforms who would thoroughly enjoy a night of waterboarding an American.

Gradually, the lights resolved into individual buildings, an Exxon station, a trailer back from the road, and he was soon moving through the outskirts of Eagle Pass.

But no, this was the middle of town. Eagle Pass appeared to be all outskirts, but it was low-slung, that was all, and quiet at this hour. A peaceful place.

Towns like Ozersk and Trekhgorny and Seversk, where he’d worked from time to time, might be isolated, but they were more lively than this at night. Drunk Russians—which after a certain hour in Siberia is, essentially, everybody—do not go gently. But here in this little border town, you sensed a peace, the same peace you felt throughout the developed world. He called it profound peace, soul peace. Eagle Pass enjoyed the same soul peace that blessed the rest of America. People felt safe here, which was another reason that things like 9/11 were so destructive. They slammed the American spirit right in the face.

Of course, human and drug smuggling were big business on the Mexican side of the border, and the violence involved was certainly known to cross over. Still, this was very certainly not the third world.

In cities like Islamabad or Kabul or Tashkent, you can smell the old, sour stench of hate, and see the fear that lives in people’s eyes, the blood-soaked remembrance of crimes long past, and waiting retribution. You come back to this country after a few years of that and you want to kiss the ground.

Then he saw it ahead, the outline of a big building just visible in the last light. The hospital. Inside, maybe a key that would save a million lives and, with them, the way of life now called freedom. The dying children and, God willing, some clues.

He drove into the parking lot, pulled the car in between a weathered Toyota and a Ford truck. How deeply American was this place, how kind and how very ordinary.

He got out of the car and hurried toward the great, dark building to challenge its secrets.

DELIVERANCE BY DEATH

As he approached the hospital’s wide main doors, instinct made him check the
locations of fire escapes and exits, count the stories, and note whether or not you could get off the roof. He had no reason to be concerned; it was just habit.

The lobby was large, the floors white and polished. There were people sitting here and there in the chairs, some reading, others simply waiting. He passed the gift shop and a row of plantings, and approached the information desk. There was faint music, no hospital smell, a sense of order.

He remembered hospitals like great broken skeletons, echoing with the voices of the unattended.

“I’m Dr. Henry Franklin,” he lied to the receptionist. “I have an appointment to visit the Morales children.”

She punched at a keyboard. “Uh, uh-oh, they’re critical. I’m afraid they’re in intensive care, no visitors.”

“I’m from the Centers for Disease Control,” he said, the falsehood emerging with practiced smoothness.

She made a call, spoke Spanish. “There’s a guy out here. I think it’s a reporter. He’s claiming to be from CDC.”

He was a fair linguist, which was one of the reasons he had been an efficient case officer. He rarely let people he dealt with know when he spoke their language, and he didn’t do that now.

“May I see some identification?”

He drew out his wallet and showed her the CDC card he’d armed it with. As a nominal CIA operative, he had access to a variety of false IDs, some of which he could use legally, all of which could survive an in-depth background check . . . he hoped.

“Please, Doctor, come with me,” a nurse in green scrubs said. She’d appeared silently, a young woman whose dark looks reminded him of his former wife, the gorgeous Nabila, still present in his heart. She was furiously complex and needed urgently to be cherished—too Arab, in the end, to endure an unruly American husband such as himself.

The implacable demands of his work kept him away from her too much, and this made her feel unloved, and, in the end, she had walked out of the marriage. He was still heartsick at the loss and grieved as if she were dead.

People raised in the restless Western tradition understood nothing of what it was like behind the doors of Muslim households, of how right it could feel to be enclosed in deep tradition and intimate privacy. She had made coming home an entry into another, better world, gorgeously peaceful. Sentiment aside, though, he was an old rogue puma. Home is the hunter, home from the hill—except not him. This hunter only came home on leave, assuming he was close enough to manage it.

He missed her now, as he followed the nurse up the corridor. He watched the dark hair, the fluorescent overhead lights glowing on the olive skin, the smooth surge of her private body, and imagined her private ways.

Then they were at the entrance to an intensive-care unit. The doors opened onto a forest of equipment, patients enveloped in technology, nurses in their greens, a group of doctors conferring quietly at the foot of a bed. Again, he was reminded of other hospitals, where he was sometimes the only person present with even rudimentary medical knowledge, sitting with men of courage who were dying in squalor, able to offer them nothing more than a hand. The edges of the world may seem tattered and ugly and corrupt, but there are heroes there.

“She’s in and out,” Nurse Martinez said. “Rodrigo is conscious now.”

“Has the FBI been here?”

“Just the border patrol, to take them back if they survive.”

“The parents?”

“No parents.”

“But they know they’re illegals?”

“Sure.” The sudden clipped tone reflected the quiet fury of the Mexicans, their disdain for the whole process that was unfolding at the border, the way it reminded them of ancient defeats, and made them cling even more fiercely to the bitter certainty that being Mexican did not make you less.

She stopped before three shut green curtains, then drew one back.

And there he was, a shocking picture of childhood gone wrong, a little boy festooned with IVs, his vitals monitor indicating a temperature of 105, a blood pressure of 171 over 107, and an oxygen exchange number that Jim knew was ominously low.

A drain, black with blood, led from the boy’s mouth. Mouth bleeding: 300 REMs exposure. Probably fatal in a healthy adult. This scrawny boy was already dead.

“Can he speak?”

“If he will.”

“Hello, my son,” Jim said in Spanish, causing Nurse Martinez to glance at him. “Will you tell me where you sat in the truck?”

They had been brought across Bridge 1 right here in Eagle Pass, Jim felt sure of it. He would not ask the boy direct questions, though. Jim had done too many interrogations to try that. Only the stupid were direct. Only the stupid were violent. He prided himself on being able to extract information without the subject realizing that he was being interrogated.

The boy’s eyes met Jim’s. Mahogany, sad as a dying animal’s, waiting blankly. His throat worked, his mouth opened, and the interior was red, as if filled with tomato soup. “It was in the front.”

“Do you mean with the driver?”

He shook his head.

So they’d been in the body of the truck, pushed up against the front wall. “And what was there with you? A box, perhaps?”

Rodrigo shook his head. His skin, mottled from burst capillaries, looked like colored tissue paper, as fragile as if it could be ripped by the friction of a thumb. There was internal hemorrhaging as well, Jim thought, and soon that blood pressure would start crashing, and that would be the end of this poor damn kid. The eyes settled on Jim’s face, and he knew the look, defiant:
I haven’t told you everything.

“No box, then, Rodrigo. But there was something there.” Sick fear swayed Jim. There was a question now, to which the answer, at all costs,
must not be “yes.” “Rodrigo, was the thing round, and it had lots of wires?”

Rodrigo’s mouth opened. There was a deep sound, gagging, bubbling, as if his guts were boiling. Consciousness ebbed.

“Can we bring him back?”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“Can we bring him back?”

“What’s this about? Who are you?”

“Nurse, I have to get him to answer my question. Reduce his morphine drip.”

“I can’t touch that drip!”

Jim reached up and turned it off.

“How dare you!”

Jim stood to his full height, causing him to loom over her. “This is a national security matter. You will cooperate.”

“I—”

Rodrigo groaned. Jim went back down to him, laid his hand on the poor little guy’s sweating brow. “What did it look like?”

“Black,” the boy said. “We sat on it.”

“Round? Black and round?”

Rodrigo frowned a little.

“Was it a box, Rodrigo?”

He nodded—and Jim knew, suddenly, what had been done. These children—in fact, everybody in that truck—had been used as a human shield. The bodies were there to confuse the mass detector and, hopefully, absorb enough radiation to get past the particle monitor.

But that wouldn’t work. It might help, but the instruments were too sensitive. And, in any case, why in the world hadn’t Customs and Border stopped a truck obviously loaded with illegals?

Jim wanted to scoop this little guy up into his arms and take him away, but he had no key to heaven. He had no kids, but he hoped that he would, one day, and if so, they would be cherished with this man’s whole soul, to make up for the horrors he had seen across the shuddering mass of the third world.

“Where were these children found?”

“On Main, a couple of blocks from the bridge. The police brought them in.”

In an adult, radiation exposure at this level would cause immediate fatigue and nausea, followed by a few days of recovery, the so-called walking-dead phase. Rapid and irreversible decline would then commence.

“Has there been a dosage evaluation?”

“We’re estimating three to four hundred REMs for the older children, a bit less for the little one.”