Seven Grams of Lead

“Mr. President,
Flight 89 wasn’t struck down by lightning.”

“Don’t tell me it was intentional.”

“No, sir. It was an accident.”

“The airline’s fault?”

“Actually, scientists based in Wisconsin, Leonid and Bella Sokolov. Have you been briefed on them?”

“Maybe I ought to be.”

“They won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1985. We lured them from Russia two years ago, set them up in a hardened underground complex as part of the HPMD project.”

“High Power Mass Destruction?”

“For all intents and purposes. Technically it’s High Power
Microwave Device.
”

“The E-bomb?”

“Yes, sir. The Sokolovs’ part in the initiative has been to effectively weaponize a flux compression generator.”

“Flux compression generator?”

“It generates an electromagnetic pulse on the order of terawatts—or about ten thousand times as powerful as a lightning bolt—and fries semiconductive material, meaning all electrical and electronic systems within its range cease to function. The problem with E-bombs has always been limited range, half a city block max. In theory, the Sokolov model is capable of reducing an entire city to the Stone Age. All computers, telecommunications, radar, power plants, power lines, lights, refrigerators, pacemakers—you name it—would be relegated to scrap. Machines would come to a stop. Planes would fall out of the sky …”

“In theory?”

“The Sokolovs generated a pulse lasting just a ten-thousandth of a nanosecond. Their objective was to blow out a lightbulb across their lab, and they did. Flight 89 was four miles away.”

“So the two hundred and thirty people aboard were victims of friendly fire?”

“We’re hoping to keep that to ourselves, for obvious reasons. The weapon itself is a watershed in national security.”

“As long as no one else gets it.”

“Yes, sir. Of course we’ll make sure that that doesn’t happen.”

Midazolam, a short-acting
sedative, is usually administered orally or by hypodermic needle. Canning liked to use a remote-controlled robotic housefly. On this mild August night, as Canning hid behind the hedges between Lake Michigan and the Sokolovs’ heavily guarded house, his iPhone served as a remote control, sending the robofly darting through a partially open window and into a second floor bedroom. Canning had learned that when Leonid Sokolov was home alone, he favored the breeze off the lake to air-conditioning. All this week, Sokolov’s wife, Bella, and their daughters were vacationing at the Blue Harbor Resort, fifty miles up the coast.

An infrared camera within one of the fly’s bulbous eyes relayed real-time video to Canning’s iPhone.
Sokolov lay beneath a quilt, eyes shut, mouth agape, his crown of white hair unmoving against a pillow. The fly would deliver enough midazolam to ensure that he remained asleep for ten minutes. In half that time Canning would climb to the second story and implant a subminiature device beneath the scientist’s scalp.

Canning guided the robofly to a hover over Sokolov’s upper lip. With a tap on the phone, the fly’s abdominal cavity opened and released a midazolam mist, the bulk of which Sokolov inhaled without disruption of his sleep. Canning preferred midazolam to more conventional sedatives because its subjects awoke without any memory of their procedures. He knew the drug occasionally caused abnormally slow respiration, but the risk was remote.

Yet that’s exactly what appeared to be happening now.

The iPhone showed Sokolov’s rate plummeting from a normal twelve breaths per minute to just four. Then he ceased breathing altogether.

Forget implanting the eavesdropping device, Canning thought. Death was certain unless he resuscitated the Russian immediately and then turned him over to paramedics. But the American had gone to extreme lengths to avoid detection, from coming here in a stealth one-man submarine to dressing hood to boots in black neoprene whose surface was electronically cooled to prevent thermal sensors from registering
his presence. Saving Sokolov was out of the question. The operational objective was now getting away with killing him.

Canning had learned long ago not just that anything that can go wrong on an op will, but that anything that cannot go wrong will too. It was now second nature for him to plan for contingency upon contingency. From the pouch hanging from his belt, he produced a coil of lightweight climbing rope tipped by a miniature titanium grapnel with retractable flukes. He tossed the grapnel onto the roof as a wave crashed into the shore, obscuring the patter of the four flukes against slate tiles. A tug at the rope and three of the flukes grabbed hold of the far side of a brick chimney. After making sure that the rope would bear his weight, Canning began climbing, his split-toed boots gripping the knots tied every sixteen inches.

Seconds later, he pushed the window open and hoisted himself into the bedroom. He unholstered a Makarov
pistolet besshumnyy
—silent pistol—and its companion suppressor, then snapped the two together. The pistol was loaded with nine-millimeter bullets he’d cast by hand from soft lead. From the foot of the bed, he fired once into Sokolov’s forehead, the muted report no louder than the wind. Canning watched the Russian’s central nervous system fail. No drama, just a quick fade. Dead within seconds.

Canning hoped the lead bullet would turn the
homicide investigation into a wild-goose chase. Toward the same end, on his way out, he drew a small envelope from his pouch and littered the floor with its contents, hairs and bits of skin belonging to other men, including two convicted felons. Over his neoprene gloves, he pulled on a latex pair whose fingertips would replicate a third felon’s prints. He touched the footboard and nightstand, then climbed out the window, slid down the rope, and dislodged the grapnel.

Before returning to his sub, he planted a biodegradable battery-powered directional pin microphone in the grass.

Thus, the following morning, in a motel room 200 miles north, he overheard one of Sokolov’s people knock on the bedroom door. No response, of course.

An FBI crime scene team arrived soon after, quickly concluding that an assassin had sprayed a sedative to subdue the burly scientist prior to shooting him.

Couldn’t have been scripted any better, Canning thought.

Later in the day,
RealStory
broke the news of the Wisconsin murder story as well as the news that “the Wisconsin murder story isn’t just any murder story.” Russ Thornton, the site’s authoritative blogger on current events, also wrote:

Not an entirely secret location, thought Canning, sitting back from his monitor. The second part of his contingency plan—hurrying to the Blue Harbor Resort in Sheboygan and implanting Bella Sokolova with the eavesdropping device originally intended for her husband—had gone without a hitch. Canning was able to hear the marshals whisk her and her two daughters to a safe house in Cleveland.

He returned to Thornton’s post. According to one
of the blogger’s sources, the FBI was likening the Sokolov murder to the 2006 “neutralization” of Alexander Litvinenko, another Russian émigré.

Perfect, Canning thought.

From a computer in his New York apartment, Thornton managed to provide an inside view of the law enforcement and intelligence communities sharper than most insiders’. Canning’s own sources concurred with Thornton’s account of the Bureau’s misdirection. And the director of DARPA, whose post–Flight 89 accident conversation in the Oval Office Canning had listened to, was none the wiser.

Unfortunately, there was more to Thornton’s post. As Canning read on, his satisfaction turned to concern.