Gilbert watched the monitors as Colonel Kathy Murray put her electronic tablet on the table, glanced at it, then regarded the men.
“Mr. Bell, Mr. Scroggins,” the woman said without preamble, “crates with nuclear materials, earmarked for delivery here by you, are missing. I want to know where they are. Mr. Bell?”
“Ma’am-”
“Colonel.”
He made a gesture of apology. “Colonel, I have no idea what you’re talking about. As I’ve been sayin’ to everyone who has had a hand in putting me here-”
“Thank you. Mr. Scroggins?”
The other man regarded her before answering. “I’d like to know who says there were nukes-”
“I’ll repeat the question if you like.”
“Colonel, we delivered electronic components,” Scroggins said.
“The address?”
“One was to the NYPD Counterterrorism office at 55 Broadway. The other was to an FBI lab at One West Street. Abbie handled the NYPD delivery, then went to get us lunch. I walked the other crates over to One West.”
She regarded Bell. “Earlier today you ignored an alert from your dispatcher.”
“It didn’t apply to us,” Bell said. “Because… we weren’t carrying nukes.”
“Did you make any stops?”
“A few rest areas for a few minutes and then at a lodge in Arkadelphia,” Bell said. “You can check the-”
“We know what to do. Name?”
“The Arklight Dome Lodge.”
“How did you disable the tracers?”
Bell shook his head. “We didn’t. There were no-”
“Mr. Scroggins?”
“What Abbie said,” he replied.
“What do you know about disabling a weapon-specific GPS device?”
Scroggins made a face. “I don’t know. You mean, like smashing it with a hammer?”
“What do you know about disabling a weapon-specific GPS device, Mr. Scroggins?”
“Shit, Colonel. I know shit about it.”
“We couldn’t even get to ’em if we wanted to,” Bell said.
Her dark eyes shifted to him. “Explain.”
“They told us in orientation that those gadgets get tied to the mechanism, inside. If the primary one isn’t working, the backup one goes on.”
“When the weapon is turned on,” she clarified.
“I don’t know about weapons, but for our gadgets, that’s my understanding,” Bell said.
Gilbert listened with detached interest. Col. Murray was going by the book: fast hits, no backtracking, keep them off balance and carried along by your agenda, not their own. But it wasn’t producing results. General Gilbert already knew that these systems had a backup. They gave you exactly one minute of warm-up before the weapon was fired. That was not a lot of time to prevent it from being used, because that was not the function of the timer. Someone on-site had to target and fire the weapon. The exact location was fluid because of external circumstances, like the repositioning of enemy security, patrols or, in the case of an airfield, the target itself. The idea was that a waiting chopper or vehicle could locate the signal, reposition itself, and get to the shooter in that minute, remove him from immediate-proximity danger. The air-to-ground nuclear rockets had an additional one-minute countdown detonator to give the team extra time before the shock wave or radioactive cloud hit. There was no need for a concussion explosion with a nuke: there was no way anyone at the target could shut it down or contain the blast.
His gut told him the guys weren’t hiding anything.
“Call me if something comes up,” Gilbert said.
“Yes, sir.” Jenkins replied.
Gilbert left the antechamber and walked to his office. Assuming the two men were telling the truth, he reverse engineered what might have occurred. Someone wanted nukes. Trask wanted to make sure they got them for reasons yet to be determined. The drivers were told they were delivering electronic devices. What if that information were false? What if someone at Trask-not the Shotgun-had disconnected the GPS devices on the Sea Burst prototypes? Fewer people would have to be involved with stealing two hot devices than with arming two “dummy” devices to make them hot.
But what about the missing inventory alert?
Was that an oversight, a screwup that some in-house nuke-stealing son of a bitch was supposed to have covered? Or hadn’t it been worth the bother? The loss of the nukes would have been discovered when the van got to White Sands in another day or so. The drivers would have been blamed, interrogated, and would have said exactly what they were saying now.
But what if “tomorrow” had been too late to take any action? What if someone was planning to transport-or worse, use-the nukes before then?
Had the nukes even been on the van, or was that a misdirection, as well? Were they going to be used in Atlanta? Were they in somebody’s van, headed for Washington D.C.?
The devil’s advocacy was starting fires of suspicion rather than dousing them. As soon as he reached his office, Gilbert called Trask on his private line. The call was sent to the industrialist’s voice mail.
Gilbert hung up without leaving a message.
It was then that he allowed himself to contemplate something that made his gut burn. It was something about which studies had been conducted and white papers written: what if someone on the civilian side of things decided to use their military wherewithal to start or assemble an underground army, like al-Qaeda or Hezbollah, only with a great deal of money and a solid command structure? Was that what this was? The first major weapons delivery to a nonnational source?
Unless Trask talked to him, there was no way Gilbert could find that out. The only military oversight of the industrial, civilian world was what the industrial, civilian world allowed. He couldn’t even authorize an examination of the crates that were delivered to the two New York addresses: he would have to pass that information along to local law enforcement.
For the first time in his life, Brigadier General Arthur Gilbert wished to hell he was dead wrong about something. But all of that wouldn’t change the fact that for whatever reason, there were two nuclear weapons that could not be accounted for.
CHAPTER 29
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Kealey did not have to study the scene to know that the situation was not contained and far from over.
He took it in at a glance, saw that the weapon the dead man carried was not the same that had been used for the Penn Station and Brooklyn Bridge shootings. He left the terminal and hurried along Forty-Second Street as he called Andrews.
“We just heard about-”
“It’s a sideshow,” Kealey told him. “Different gunman. I’m heading back to Grand Central.”
“Do you have any information about-”
“Zip,” Kealey said. “But I can’t think of anywhere else she’d go. Make sure someone tells the cops there not to stand down. There’s still a potential risk from the original shooter.”
Kealey waited while Andrews informed the president and the others, put the information out there. He was alarmed at how many people were being funneled along this one route-and he was still five avenues away. Vehicular traffic was down to a single lane as pedestrians clogged the streets.
It was a shooting gallery.
As he waited for Andrews to get back on, Kealey thought about the attacks this morning. Something was not making sense. Why would the enemy use a skilled killer for two attacks, drop in a ringer, then pick up again with the pro? Why sacrifice the Port Authority killer to take a sniper off the radar-and then put her back on again?
You wouldn’t, he thought. You’d take the opportunity to get her out with the crush of commuters. Send her somewhere else.
Or put her on another project. The one she had really been freed to undertake. The one that not just any adequate marksman could pull off.
Kealey slowed.
What the hell are they planning?
When Andrews came back on, Kealey shared the thought with him.