“If she’s with him, they’ll have her in just a few seconds.”
“What do you mean? Either you have him or you don’t,” said Thorpe.
“The agents are turning onto the street right now. They’re less than a hundred feet from the signal. They’re right on top of them, could reach out and touch them,” said Mendez.
“Can you hear what’s going on?” said Thorpe.
“What do you mean it’s a different tower?” Mendez was talking to someone else. Thorpe could hear more voices, a lot of excitement at the other end. “What?”
“What’s happening?” said Thorpe.
“Sir, there’s a little confusion here. We’re getting some signals we don’t understand. There’s got to be a tower malfunction. The signal’s been handed off to three separate towers. What? How fast?”
“What’s going on?” said Thorpe. “Talk to me.”
“According to our technicians the signal is moving again. Whoever has the phone is doing about a hundred and forty knots.”
“What?”
“That’s about a hundred and sixty miles an hour.”
“I know what a goddamn knot is,” said Thorpe.
“He appears to be on an airplane.”
“Do we have any military assets in the area? WACs, anything that can track it on radar?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, find out. And see if you can get the tower at the airport to call the plane back. Costa Rican police ought to be able to do something. And call me when you know.” Thorpe slammed the receiver down so hard it bounced off the cradle on the phone and onto the floor, where he got up and kicked it.
Nitikin had spent most of his life shielding the bomb and harboring it for a purpose. In his youth, the device was an instrument of the revolution. That Khrushchev would not use it for that purpose and share the power with their comrades in Cuba had angered Nitikin. The revolution was an ideal, pure and pristine. Yakov had never abandoned his country. On the contrary, its leaders had abandoned the revolution. Despite all the years he spent in hiding, Yakov Nitikin was still a soldier.
But now that he was old, he was confused. He longed only to spend time with his daughter, to see her again, to talk to her, to hold her. He wanted to see his granddaughter, Katia, whom he had seen only once as an infant, but whom he talked about endlessly with Maricela, asking questions and looking at photographs. All of these were now lost, left behind in his hut at the encampment. He had cried himself to sleep, bellowing like a baby the night Maricela left the camp. Something had snapped in him. He feared for her and could not wait to call her on the phone.
He now hovered anxiously on the edge, caught between duty and the desire to escape.
Nitikin knew that there was no way to bargain with Alim. To attempt it was to invite a quick death. How does one bargain with the devil? The moment Afundi knew that the bomb was armed, he would pull out his pistol and Yakov would be dead. There were times he thought he hated the man enough that he could kill him, but the thought of sabotaging the bomb never entered his mind.
To fail now was to betray everything he believed in, all that he had worked for all those years. He had traded a life with his family for the mission of the bomb. It was not his child, though there were times when he felt as if it throbbed with life, the embryo of revolution.
He searched for some way out, some method by which he could satisfy duty and still see his daughter. What he needed was time.
Yakov was working through an open side panel of the wooden crate, inside the container, presumably checking the device for any damage, as instructed by Alim.
Nitikin had lied to him. The bomb was entirely safe to transport. The safety device was redundant. After all, the warhead had been designed for delivery in the belly of an unmanned MiG jet, a cruise missile launched from a ramp, not unlike the V-1 rocket. The gravitational and kinetic forces applied to the warhead at launch were probably three or four times greater than those experienced in the most violent vehicle collision or other accident.
True, the safety device would prevent the bomb from achieving a chain reaction if the gun was fired accidentally, but there was no chance of that unless the cordite charge was loaded under the breech plug, which only a fool would do except immediately prior to deployment.
For Nitikin the safety device had but a single purpose: it made him indispensable and kept him alive. It had one other advantage-only he knew whether the safety device was engaged or not.
“He wants to know if there is any damage.”
Nitikin was startled by the voice coming from behind him. He looked out and saw the brooding face of the interpreter standing in the bright sunlight just outside the open door of the container.
“No, it looks fine. I’m just checking the last few items.”
“Then I can tell him the device is in working order? You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Yakov spoke from inside the box, without looking. When he didn’t hear any further comment, he stuck his head out and saw the larded backside of the interpreter twenty feet away, walking in the other direction along the deck, toward the bridge.
Nitikin turned back to the bomb. He used the flashlight he’d borrowed from the interpreter to check and make sure that the minute groove cut into the safety wire was properly aligned, a quarter turn, ninety degrees, in a clockwise direction. Once satisfied, he took hold of the wire and turned it counterclockwise until the groove in the wire was facing straight up.
Very gently, so as not to break the delicate bond holding the wire to the safety disk, Yakov eased the wire toward himself until he saw the fine red line painted on it at the outer edge of the bomb case. The safety disk was now clear of the gun barrel. It was housed in a separate supporting container welded to the inside of the bomb case. Reinserting the safety in the barrel would take knowledge of the settings as well as fine hand skills that even Nitikin doubted he possessed any longer.
Yakov crawled from the crate, closed the wooden side panel, and screwed it down tight.
Arming the bomb had fulfilled his duty as a soldier even though he had no intention of informing Alim until the last moment, and then hopefully through a note or a message delivered by another. Now Yakov was free to escape and join his family, if he could only find the means.
FIFTY-SIX
Unfortunately the Gulfstream had everything on board but an in-flight phone system. The copilot who saw me trying to talk to Harry on takeoff told me to shut it down. The cell phone might interfere with their avionics.
An hour into the flight and the passengers seemed to settle down. The other two couples paired off to seats and settled in for the ride. Herman and I spent the time in the rear of the plane trying to explain to Maricela what we’d found when we returned to Lorenzo’s apartment.
At first she couldn’t believe that he was dead, and when she finally came to accept it, she blamed herself for leading the killer to his front door.
“You don’t understand,” I say. “Lorenzo was selling them information.” I showed her the fax from his machine.
As she read it her eyes gravitated to the name at the bottom of the page. “That’s it. I remember. I heard only once, but his last name was Afundi. I knew that I’d heard it. I just couldn’t remember. But why? Why would Lorenzo be working with them?”
“The oldest reason in the world,” says Herman, “money.”
“You mean he sold Katia’s life for a few dollars?”
“He may not have known that they would try to kill her, but I doubt if there’s any question that he fingered Pike.”