Pinnacle Event (24 page)

“Then let's go to the Dugout,” she said. “Now, which one of these is our chopper?”

 

32

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6

U.S. ROUTE 50

PARIS, VIRGINIA

In the hills of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, as the sun came up and cast a yellow light on the remaining leaves west of Washington, there was more traffic than normal for a late autumn, early Sunday morning. It was not enough for anyone to notice, unless they were perhaps an intelligence officer from an embassy in Washington, sitting by the roadside, drinking coffee, reading the paper.

Such a person would have noted the unusual number of cars with Washington, DC, plates, with only a passenger in each car. Unlike the local traffic of pickup trucks and older Chevys, this trickle of vehicles was made up of Priuses, Hondas, and the occasional BMW. Tracing the plate numbers, the agent would have been able to confirm that there was something going on. They were senior government officials driving west at a time most of them would normally be at brunch in Georgetown.

Quietly, while the nation focused on the last few days of the frenetic presidential election campaign, while the locals in the little Shenandoah and Blue Ridge towns went to church, senior federal bureaucrats had been activated. The day they hoped would never come seemed to be in the offing. They were told to pack for a week away and to tell their families only that they were going on a surprise and secret trip. With that, they drove west trying to find the cave, or the bunker, or the old Forestry Service facility where they would wait to see if a nuclear bomb went off in Washington. If it did, their impossible task would be to try to govern the country from the bunkers. None of them really thought that would work.

LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

NEAR SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

“The bombs will go off today,” Bowman said. “It's Sunday now, right?”

“It has been Sunday for an hour here. In California. We are in California, in case you were wondering. Why today?” Dugout asked, distracted, while he watched data whizzing by on a screen in front of him. “Why not tomorrow?”

“They'll want Washington to call off the election. If they explode today, there will be time to react, to cancel the presidential election,” he replied, laying on the couch with his eyes closed.

“Why don't you just let it happen, just go to sleep?” Dugout asked.

“I'm taking a power nap, just twenty minutes, then I'll be all rejuvenated.”

“You know Mbali is smarter than you?”

“Probably, but why do you think so?” Ray asked.

“Lots of reasons. One of which is she had enough sense to go to sleep. You can't possibly think straight when your body does not know what time zone it's in. You realize you have flown all the way around the world?”

“Not completely,” Ray replied, sitting up. “I have only done twenty-one time zones, I still have three time zones left. How long till you crack the encryption?”

“I told you it doesn't work that way. It's not a microwave, you don't just put something in for five minutes on high. It's a massively parallel processor array, the largest and fastest in the world, which is why we're here, which is why I bumped the climate change guy off this system, which is why he hates me,” Dugout babbled as he moved from screen to screen in the computer control room.

“How long 'til you crack the encryption, then?” Ray repeated.

“Any time between now and never, since I don't know what kind of algorithm they used, I can't answer that, so we are making multiple different assumptions and trying them all simultaneously, hence the massively parallel part.”

Bowman yawned and poured a mug of black coffee for himself. “Well, if you don't do it today, it may not matter.”

“NSA is working on it, too, back at the Fort,” Dugout observed, taking the mug out of Bowman's hand, “but I think this hunk of junk has a better chance of getting there first, or ever.”

Bowman poured himself another mug of black coffee. “I talked to your boss.”

“Which one? Winston, Grace, or did you just talk to yourself again?”

“Grace,” Ray replied. “She thinks we're missing something, thinks we're too close to the forest or something. Taiwan did not pan out. When the State Department confronted them, they denied they had bought nuclear weapons and then they had a high-level meeting to try to figure out why we would ask them such a crazy thing like that. They didn't seem to be acting.”

“So why were the three Trustees there in Taipei six weeks before the test blast?” Dug asked.

“They actually seem to have been buying a hotel and shopping mall,” Bowman reported. “But, according to Taiwan's National Security Bureau, their spooks, Karl Potgeiter did meet with some retired generals while he was there. Even after the meeting, the generals weren't sure why they met. Potgeiter said something about looking for ways of investing together, using their expertise.”

“That doesn't add up,” Dug replied.

“It does if the late old man Potgeiter was telling the other Trustees that he was arranging the sale of the nukes to Taiwan. Maybe the meeting was just a show, an act, to convince the other Trustees that the buyer was acceptable, that it was Taiwan,” Ray thought aloud. “The others see him meet with Taiwan generals, but they don't sit in on the meeting. Potgeiter says the Taiwan guys are the buyers.”

“When actually it was someone else?” Dugout asked.

“Someone who Potgeiter was dealing with, someone who the other Trustees would probably not have agreed to sell nukes to, maybe,” Bowman continued.

“Like al Qaeda?”

“No, I'm pretty sure al Qaeda is not involved. CIA and NSA are all over the AQ groups. They would have picked it up. Besides, I have my own special source, who came back to me this morning. Said they weren't doing it, said maybe it was Hezbollah.”

“Special sauce, what are you, Ronald McDonald?” Dugout laughed. “By the way, Winston called earlier. He wants us to do a video link with him at eight his time. You might want to, uh, comb your hair or something.”

“I can't believe I heard that coming from you,” Ray said, as he wandered off to the men's room.

Two hours later, Winston Burrell appeared on the large monitor in the computer control room, looking as strung out as Ray and Dugout were. It appeared he was in his West Wing office, alone.

“It's decision time, boys. The President wants to know first thing this morning if he should order evacuations in New York, Washington. If we think that nuclear bombs are going to go off before the election Tuesday, now is the last time to order the evacuations. It's all prepared, FEMA has activated all of its response teams for an exercise, the Vice President has already come off the campaign trail allegedly because he lost his voice. He's actually gone into a bunker in Virginia. The President has been holding off deciding on evacuation orders until he saw if you found anything on the computers.”

“Oh, God, blame me, go ahead,” Dugout muttered while they were still on mute. “Dugout couldn't crack the code in time and so they all died.”

Bowman pressed the
TALK
button. “Winston, we don't really know that there are bombs in the U.S. There was no trace evidence of bombs at the site in British Columbia. If there are weapons in New York and Washington and you start to evacuate, the terrorists will decide to ignite them before the cities empty out. If there are no bombs in those cities, you will have killed dozens of people who will get run over in the panic of an evacuation, to say nothing of what you will do to the economy and the election.”

“I know all that, we have been saying that to each other for weeks now,” Burrell replied. “I was hoping for a recommendation from you.”

Bowman bowed his head for a brief moment and then looked into the camera. “I have a report that maybe the group buying the bombs was Hezbollah, but I don't believe that. Doesn't make sense and besides the subsource really wouldn't know if Hezbollah was doing it. He's not in a position to know what they are up to.”

“Not al Qaeda, not Hezbollah, not Taiwan. Telling me who it isn't doesn't help,” Winston Burrell said, gesturing with his hands in the air. “Tell me who it is that has the bombs. Tell me what I recommend to the President, what does he do now?”

“Do nothing,” Ray responded. “You have insufficient grounds for knowing what a prudent course of action would be.”

“That is the same situation I was in a week ago. You were supposed to put some facts on the table to help with the decision,” Burrell snapped. “Sorry, I didn't mean it like that. I mean, you have actually added lots of facts, it's just that they haven't got us to the fundamental questions of who, where, when, and why.” Burrell stood up. “I have to go give my recommendation to the President.”

“What's it going to be?” Ray asked.

“I don't know yet.” His image faded.

SIXTY-FIFTH FLOOR PENTHOUSE CENTRAL PARK

SOUTH MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY

“I think this Park view was worth every penny,” he said looking down at the last leaves of autumn, falling off the trees in the middle of the city, leaving little color to counteract the grayness of the sky. “I'll miss this apartment, but I did make a huge profit on it in less than two years.”

“It was an extravagance and it drew unneeded attention to you,” she said, moving up next to him. “You always have to have the newest, the best, the most expensive, and that's what it was when you bought it. Now it's not the newest anymore.”

“You're wrong, I don't always need the newest, but always the best,” he said and kissed her briefly. “Which is why I leased the 787. We'll be flying that today to the meeting in London. What did Sergey tell you? Did he find out what happened?”

“Their source in the Mounties in Vancouver reported that the Canadians essentially found nothing. The Americans, Bowman, took some computers, but the disks were encrypted and they won't be able to get anything off them,” she told him.

The older man nodded at his daughter. “When I heard from Potgeiter that Bowman knew about the test blast, and the storage area at Antsakabary, and the tritium heist, I thought for sure the President would order the evacuation of the cities before the election, but they didn't,” he said. “They have no balls.”

“It's just as well the Potgeiters are gone,” she said. “They had no real role going forward. And for Bowman, the trail will end there.”

A breeze swept down 57th Street, knocking more leaves down, pushing the ones on the ground into piles around benches. For almost eight on a Sunday morning, there were few runners out. Perhaps it was the early chill, the hoar frost on the grass that deterred some from venturing out too early in the day.

“They have no balls,” he repeated, “and they have no idea. Our ships are out there, and they are not looking for them. Instead, they have people driving around the docks in Jersey with radiation detectors.”

“Think of it as a Rorschach test, Father,” she said. “They see the evidence that something is going on and they think it's al Qaeda, or they think it's about their election. In Israel, they think it's about Arabs wanting to destroy Tel Aviv. In South Africa, they thinks it's about whites wanting to blow up Joburg. We all see in things the issue we are already working on, or what we secretly fear most, not necessarily what we should fear. People in this city, if you tested them, would fear snakes, but there are no snakes in this city. Of course, there are people with guns, but that seems almost normal to them. They are blind to the real problems because they decided long ago there was nothing they could do about them. Too hard.”

“Yes, Professor, you are quite right,” he said, turning his back on the city. “And for that blindness, they are about to pay a price.”

“Who do you think will win the election Tuesday, Father?” she asked.

“Given what is about to happen, what difference does it make?”

 

33

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 8

UNITED STATES

Voting began shortly after midnight in the handful of little towns that vied to be first to report their election results. In twenty-one states, early voting had been going on for as long as two weeks, meaning that millions of Americans had already voted. They did so at a time of rumors in the media of some vague, terrorist threat. Less than two weeks before Election Day, the Homeland Security Department had, bizarrely, initiated a no-notice exercise to conduct 100 percent inspection of all cargo entering the country.

Homeland Security claimed it was part of a bilateral exercise with Israel, something the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem was slow to confirm. The media grew quickly skeptical of the official explanation, especially as major corporations began hollering. Just-in-time delivery of parts for cars, of Apple computers and iPhones, of almost anything you could name, failed to be on time. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce claimed that the cost to the U.S. economy was twenty billion dollars a day in lost sales and the expenses of keeping facilities idling.

Photos of miles-long lines of trucks in Mexico and Canada were on every newspaper's front page. Both presidential candidates demanded a clear explanation of what was going on. Shortly thereafter
The Washington Post
headlined a story, attributed to senior Administration officials, that Israeli intelligence had reported an al Qaeda plot to smuggle poisons into Israel and the United States with the intent of attacking water supplies. Shortly thereafter, police and National Guard troops were seen standing around city reservoirs and treatment facilities. Some blogs noted that among the federal units seen in New York were elements of the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Support Team, or NEST.