Vermulen’s eyes narrowed in concentration. He had spent several years attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. military equivalent to the CIA. Back then he’d been Novak’s handler. A dozen years on, they were both retired, both operating in the private sector. Vermulen was a military lobbyist, a consultant to governments and corporations, an adviser in multinational arms deals. Novak worked out of Prague, a middleman between military, scientific, and intelligence interests in the former Soviet Bloc and the various clients around the world to whom they wanted to sell their respective skills or information.
“Many sides means many clients, Pavel. I’d say that was good for your business.”
“Most of the time, yes,” the Czech agreed. “But sometimes… You know all those stories that the Russians have lost one hundred nuclear weapons. Suppose I told you that those stories are accurate…”
“So Lebed was telling the truth?”
Novak was about to reply when an earsplitting blast of rock music suddenly pounded from the arena’s public-address system. He gave a grimace of discomfort and distaste, shook his head, as if in sorrow at the sullying of his sport, and leaned toward Vermulen.
“Yes, but he was wrong in one respect.” Novak was practically shouting now, but was still inaudible to anyone more than a few inches away. Even Vermulen had to strain to hear him over the music. “He said that no one knew where the bombs were. That is not completely accurate. The information will soon be available, on the open market. There is a printout. It has locations, codes, everything.”
That got Vermulen’s attention.
“Do you have it?”
Novak frowned and cupped a hand to his ear.
“Do… you… have… it?” Vermulen repeated.
The music faded away as suddenly as it had arrived.
“Not yet,” said Novak, with a sigh of relief. “But I have been approached by someone wishing to sell it, someone who knows of my reputation as, you might say, an honest broker.”
“But this printout, if it’s accurate, and it fell into the wrong hands…”
“The consequences would be unthinkable. Which is why I am asking myself, Do I want to be involved? Of course, the financial rewards would be very great. But if I were to help terrorists or drug cartels obtain such power, you know, I am not sure I could live with that. Yet how can I just turn my back and let someone else make this sale? The consequences would be just as bad.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“What you always did-take my information to those who need to hear it. You have many friends still at the Pentagon, even in the White House itself. Explain the situation. Maybe we can come to some arrangement, yes? After all, I must cover my costs.”
“Okay, maybe I can help. But I need more information. These items, on this list, are they all in America?”
“Not all, no… I cannot be certain, but my impression is some are in America, others in Europe, maybe even Asia, too.”
“Just NATO countries and allies?”
Novak raised his eyebrows, apparently amazed by Vermulen’s naïveté.
“Ach, please, my old friend, I do not need to see the list to know the answer to that question. The Russians despised and feared the rest of the Eastern Bloc even more than their enemies in the West. They knew how much we hated them. I can guarantee you, without any doubt, there will be weapons in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary… all the former Warsaw Pact nations. Yugoslavia, too.”
Before Vermulen could take the conversation any further, there was another blast of music and a roar from the crowd. The two teams were reappearing for the second period. Novak’s face lit up again. He leaned forward in his seat, all his attention on the ice, ready to follow every shift in the swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns etched by the skaters and the puck.
Kurt Vermulen, however, sat back, motionless and silent, ignoring the game. An idea had come to him, by no means fully formed, but rich in possibilities. It involved the list that Novak had mentioned and the bombs that it contained. But it had nothing whatever to do with anyone in Washington.
At the end of the game, the two men said their farewells and went their separate ways. Neither had noticed the man sitting a few seats away with a blue nylon knapsack on his lap. Once Vermulen and Novak had left the arena, the man checked the camera whose peephole lens was peering through the shiny blue fabric. The photographs still needed to be printed. But he had every confidence that they would come out just fine.
22
The one indulgence Alix still had left was the hot, scented bath she liked to sink into before she went to work. It was the cheapest way she knew of feeling good. But this evening she had to call Larsson first. She felt bad about depending on him. He’d already done so much for her.
“They’ve given me a final notice,” she said when he answered the phone. “One week to pay. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“There’s no progress, then, no chance of him remembering where he’s stuck his money?”
“In a single week, I don’t think so… But why do we need the clinic at all? I can care for him myself.”
“How?” asked Larsson. “The man’s still sick. He needs constant supervision, drugs, therapy. How can you afford that? Look, if there’s really no other way, I could get a loan on my apartment.”
“No, that’s not fair. You’ve been a good friend to us, Thor, but even a good friend must look after himself… Hell! I’ve got to go to work. We’ll finish this some other time.”
“I’m sorry, Alix. I wish I could have done more to help you.”
“You have. You listened. You cared. That was what I needed right now.”
She put down the phone. There would just be time to wash her hair before she left for the club. The bath would have to wait.
In an imposing Baroque office building on Lubyanka Square, in Moscow, the conversation between Alix and Larsson was recorded, transcribed, and passed on to a duty officer. He examined it, then leaned back in his chair and stared blankly at the ceiling, losing himself in thought as he considered his opinion and how best to present it. Finally he sat upright again and put a call through to his boss’s assistant.
“I need to meet the deputy director,” he said. “It is a matter of the utmost urgency.”
23
Waylon McCabe owned five thousand acres of Kerr County, Texas, a private kingdom between Austin and San Antonio, shaded by ancient live oaks and watered by twisting creeks and landscaped ponds. Up in the hills, a few miles from the main compound, stood a private retreat that McCabe reserved for his special guests. That was where he took Kurt Vermulen when he wanted a private conversation.
“You said you had something for me. What you got?”
Vermulen looked him in the eye. “A nuclear bomb.”
McCabe didn’t know if he was being taken for a fool.
“Is this some kind of joke, General?”
“Absolutely not. There are more than one hundred of them, cached around the world. They’ve been hidden for at least ten years. But I can obtain the document that tells me where they are.”
“You don’t have it yet, though?”
“No, but I expect to take possession of that information, along with the codes needed to arm the devices, within a matter of weeks. At that point, it’s just a matter of acquiring one functioning weapon.”
“Then what do you plan on doing with it?”
“Put it in the hands of Islamic terrorists.”
McCabe’s eyes widened. “Are you crazy?”
“Don’t worry… I’ll be giving it to terrorists we’ve invented. A video will be sent to news agencies around the world by a radical offshoot of the Islamic jihadist movement-an offshoot that does not exist, one that has been created for this operation. The video will threaten the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major city. The bomb will be filmed in such a way that defense analysts will immediately recognize that it is genuine.”