“That’s—” Mike swallowed. “Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly. Just prudent.” She reached out and took the bag, removed the phone, and started to fiddle with the case. “We’ll be in touch. Probably not with this telephone, however.”
“There are certain requirements,” Mike added.
“What?” She froze, holding the battery cover in one hand.
“The sample that Matthias provided.” He watched her minutely. “I’m told they’re willing to negotiate with you. But there’s an absolute precondition. Matt told us he’d planted a bomb, on a timer. We want it disarmed, and we want the pit. If it goes off, there’s no deal—not now, not ever.”
Olga’s expression shifted slightly. She’s not a poker player, Mike realized. “A time bomb? I understand that is not good, but what do your lords think we can do about such a thing? Surely it’s no more than a minor…” She trailed off. “What kind of bomb?”
Mike said nothing, but raised an eyebrow.
“Why would he plant a bomb?” she persisted. “I don’t see what he could possibly hope to achieve.”
Too much subtlety, maybe. “He brought a sample of plutonium with him when he wanted to get our attention. It worked.”
“A sample of ploo-what?” Her expression of polite incomprehension would have been hilarious in any other context.
“Oh, come on! What world did you—” Mike stopped dead. Whoops. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” she said coolly.
He boggled for a moment, as understanding sank in. She’s not from around these parts, is she? “Do you know what an atom bomb is?”
“An atom bomb?” She looked interested. “I’ve seen them in films. An ingenious fiction, I thought.” Pause. “Are you telling me they’re real?”
“Uh.” You’re really not from around here, are you? On the other hand, if you stopped a random person in a random third-world country and asked them about atom bombs and how they worked, what kind of answer would you get? He licked his lips. “They’re real, all right. Matthias had a sample of plutonium.” No sign of recognition. “That’s the, the explosive they run on. It’s very tightly controlled. Even though the amount he had is nothing like enough to make a bomb, it caused a major panic. Then he claimed to actually have a bomb. We want it. Or we want the rest of your plutonium, and we want to know exactly how and where you got it so that we can verify there’s no more missing. That’s a nonnegotiable precondition for any further talks.”
“Huh.” She frowned. “You are serious about this. How bad could such a bomb really be? I saw The Sum of All Fears but that bomb was so magically powerful—”
“The real thing is worse than that.” Mike swallowed. He’d spent the past couple of weeks deliberately not thinking about Matt’s threat, trying to convince himself it was a bluff: but Judith had told him about the broken nightmare they’d found in the abandoned warehouse, and it wasn’t helping him get to sleep.
“Assuming Matthias wasn’t bluffing, and planted a real atom bomb near Faneuil Hall. Make it a small one. Imagine it goes off right now.” He gestured at the window. “It’s miles away, but it’d still blow the glass in, and if you were looking at it directly, it would burn your eyes out. You’d feel the heat on your skin, like sticking your head into an open oven door. And that’s all the way out here.” If it was the size of the one Judith found, Boston and Cambridge would be a smoking hole in the coastline—but multimegaton H-bombs weren’t likely to go world-walking and were in any case unlikely to explode if they weren’t maintained properly. “We don’t want to lose Boston. More importantly, you don’t want us to lose Boston. Because if we do—” he noticed that she was looking pale “—you saw the reaction to 9/11, didn’t you? I guarantee you that if someone nukes one of our cities, the response will be a thousand times worse.”
“I—I don’t know.” The Russian princess was clearly rattled: “I was not aware of this. This bomb that Matthias claimed to—I don’t know about it.” She shook her head. “I will have to tell Patricia. We’ll have to investigate.”
“You will? No shit.” Mike didn’t even try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “This other faction in your clan—if it’s theirs, they’re playing with fire. Maybe they don’t understand that.”
She finished extracting the battery from the mobile phone. “You said that this, it goes to the vice president?”
“To one of his staff,” Mike corrected her.
“We’ll be in touch.” She slid it into a pocket gingerly, as if it might explode. “I will see you later.” She stood up briskly and walked into the front hall, and between one footstep and the next she vanished.
Mike stared at the empty passage for a moment, then shook his head. The shakes would cut in soon, but for now all he could feel was a monstrous sense of irony. “What a mess,” he muttered. Then he reached for the phone and dialed Colonel Smith’s number.
The dome was huge, arching overhead like the wall of a sports stadium or the hull of a grounded Zeppelin. Small, stunted trees grew in the gap in its wall, their trunks narrow and tilted towards the thin light. Mud and rubble had drifted into the opening over the years, and the dripping trickle of water suggested more damage deep inside. Huw shuffled forward with arthritic caution, poking his Geiger counter at the ground, the rocks, the etiolated trees—treating everything as if it might be explosive, or poisonous, or both. The results were reassuring, a menacing crackle that rarely reached the level of a sixty-cycle hum, much less the whining squeal of real danger.
As he neared the dribble of water, Huw knelt and held the counter just above its surface. The snap and pop of stray radiation events stayed low. “The pool outside the dome is hot, and the edges of the dome are nasty, but the stream inside isn’t too bad,” be explained to his microphone. “If the dome’s leaky, the stream probably washed most of the hot stuff out of it ages ago.” He looked up. “This place feels old.”
Old, but still radioactive? He felt like scratching his head. Really dangerous fallout was mostly dangerous precisely because it decayed very rapidly. If what had happened here was as old as it felt, then most of the stuff should have decayed long ago. The activity in the dome’s edge was perplexing.
“You want a light, bro?”
Huw glanced over his shoulder. Yul was holding out the end of a huge, club-like Maglite. “Thanks,” he said, shuffling the Geiger counter around so that he could heft the flashlight in his right hand. He pressed the button just as a cold flake of snow drifted onto his left cheek. “We don’t have long.”
“It’s creepy in here,” Elena commented as he swung the light around. For once, Huw found nothing to disagree with in her opinion. The structures the dome had protected were in ruins. A flat apron of magic concrete peeped through the dirt in places, but the buildings—rectangular or cylindrical structures, rarely more than two or three stories high—were mostly shattered, roofs torn off, walls punched down. Their builders hadn’t been big on windows (although several of them sported gaping doorways). The skeletal wreckage of metal gantries and complex machinery lay around the buildings. Some of them had been connected by overhead pipes, and long runs of rust-colored ductwork wrapped around some of the buildings like giant snakes. “It looks like a chemical works that’s been bombed.”
Huw blinked. “You know, you might be right,” he admitted. He walked towards the nearest semi-intact building, a three-story high cylindrical structure that was sheltered from the crack in the dome by a mass of twisted rubble and a collapsed walkway. “Let’s see, shall we?”