“I’m not kidding. Fleming wasn’t kidding either—at least, he believed what he’d been told. I played dumb with him, pretending not to know what he was talking about, but afterwards I went and told Manfred and he ran an audit. The little shit was telling the truth. One of our nukes is missing.”
“God on a stick! If the Council finds out—”
“It gets worse. Turns out it’s one of our FADMs. Long-term storable, in other words, and there’s a long-life detonation controller that’s also turned up missing. The implosion charges were remanufactured eighteen months ago, so it’s probably nearing a service interval, but those charges were modified to survive storage under adverse conditions for up to a decade. If we don’t find it, we’re in a world of hurt—what do you think they’ll do if Boston or Cambridge goes up?—and if we do find it and hand it over as a sign of our commitment to negotiate, it’ll take them all of about ten seconds to figure out where it came from.”
Brilliana closed her eyes and swore, silently for a few seconds. She’d known about the Clan’s nuclear capability; she and Olga were among the handful of agents whose job would be to emplace the weapons, if and when the shit ever truly hit the fan. But the nukes weren’t supposed to go walkies. They were supposed to sit on their shelves in the anonymous warehouse, maintained regularly by the engineers from Pantex while U.S. Marine Corps guards patrolled the site overhead.
Based on a modified W54 warhead pattern, the FADMs were a highly classified derivative of the MADM atomic demolition device. They’d been built during the mid-1970s as backup for the CIA’s Operation Gladio, to equip NATO’s “stay behind” forces in Europe—after a Soviet invasion—with a storable, compact, tactical nuclear weapon. Most nukes required regular servicing to replace their neutron-emitting initiators and the plastic explosive implosion charges. The FADM had been tweaked to have a reasonable chance of detonation even after several years of unmaintained storage; the designers had replaced the usual polonium initiator with an electrically powered neutron source, and adding shields to protect the explosive lenses from radiation-induced degradation. The wisdom of supplying underground cells with what was basically a U.S. inventory–derived terrorist nuke had been revisited during the Reagan administration, and the weapons returned to the continental USA for storage—but they’d been retained long after the other man-portable demolition nukes had been destroyed, because the advantages they offered had been too good for certain spook agencies to ignore. More recently, the current administration—pathologically secretive and dealing with the aftermath of 9/11—had wanted every available arrow in their quiver, even if they were broken by design.
And they were. Because the Clan, with their ability to get into places that were flat-out impossible for home-grown intruders, had been treating them as their own personal nuclear stockpile for the past two decades.
“Listen, why are you telling me this? Why haven’t you briefed Uncle A? It’s his headache—”
“Uncle A is fielding another problem right now: the pretender’s just rolled over the Hjalmar Palace and there’s a three-ring, full-dress panic going down in Concord. He’s pulling me in—I’m supposed to be looking for a thrice-damned mole, who everybody tells me is probably a disgruntled outer family climber, and in case you’d missed it, we’ve got a civil war on. The bomb’s been missing for months, it’ll wait a couple of hours more. But I think when you get back from the west coast you’re going to find that finding it is suddenly everyone’s highest priority. And I’ve got a feeling that the spy who’s feeding Egon and the nuclear blackmail thing are connected. Matt wasn’t working alone, and I smell a world-walker in the picture. So I figure you and I, we should do some snooping together.” She paused. “Just what are you doing out in California, anyway? Is it something to do with the Wu clan?”
Brill sighed. “No, it’s Helge. We’ve located her. While I was flailing around in Boston doing the breaking and entering bit, she mailed me a letter via the New Britain office at Dunedin. The duty clerk caught it in time, opened it, and faxed the contents on: meanwhile we identified her aboard a westbound train that’s en route for Northern California. I need to find her before the New Britain secret police arrest her. So I’m taking a shortcut.”
“Huh. Much as I like her, isn’t finding Matt’s plaything a slightly higher priority?”
“Not when she’s carrying the heir to the throne, Olga.” She waited for the explosion of spluttering to die down. “Yes, I agree completely. You and I can have a little talk about professional ethics with Dr. ven Hjalmar later, perhaps? Assuming he survives the current unpleasantness, I’d like to make sure that he needs a new pair of kneecaps. But you’ve got to admit that we’ll need a king—or queen—after we nail Egon, won’t we? And if he really did artificially impregnate her with Creon’s seed, and if we have witnesses to the handfasting, then it seems to me that…well, which would you rather deal with? Egon trying to have us all hanged as witches, or Miriam as queen regent with Uncle A pulling the strings?”
“I’m not sure,” Olga said grimly. “She’ll be furious.” She paused. “Gods, that’s why he sent you, isn’t it? She trusts you. If anyone can get her calmed down and convince her to play along, it’d be you. But if not…”
“Uncle A wants her back in play,” Brill said, mustering up what calm she could. “But if she’s left loose, she’s as dangerous as that time bomb you’re hunting. Isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Olga said, sounding doubtful.
“She was getting too close to James Lee, the hostage,” Brill added.
Olga’s voice went flat. “She was?”
“We don’t need another faction on the board,” Brill said.
“No. I can see that.” Olga paused. “You’ll just have to charm her, won’t you?”
“Yes,” Brill agreed. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going back to sleep. Give my regards to Uncle.”
“I’ll tell him. Bye…”
Quietly closing the boardroom door behind her, Brill padded back to her first-class chair. She paused at the storage locker next to it, and opened it briefly: the specialized equipment was undisturbed, and she nodded, satisfied. It was the biggest single advantage of flying on the Clan Committee executive jet, in her opinion—in the course of her business she often required access to certain specialized items, and commercial airlines tended to take a dim view of her carrying her sniper kit as hand luggage. She sat down and strapped herself in, then tilted her chair back and dimmed the overhead lights. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, starting with arranging a reception for a train at a station she didn’t even know the precise location of, and trying to make contact with Miriam one jump ahead of the Homeland Security Directorate goon squad who’d surely be waiting for her when the train arrived.
Bombardiers
It was a good morning for flying, thought Rudi, as he checked the weather station on the north tower wall. No, make that a great morning. After all, he’d never flown over his homeland before. It would be a personal first, not to mention one in the eye for the stick-in-the-muds. Visibility was clear, with a breeze from the southwest and low pressure, rising slowly. He bent over the anemometer, jotting down readings in the logbook by the dawn light. “Hans? I’ll be needing the contents of both crates. Get them moved into the outer courtyard. I’ll need two pairs of hands to help with the trike—make sure they’re not clumsy. I’ll be down in ten minutes.”