But I couldn’t.
Not without spitting on everything that millions of brave and honorable men and women had fought for. Not without imperiling the lives of untold thousands of innocent people.
I couldn’t.
“You still there, Logan?”
“Still here.”
“Thirty seconds.”
“I know what’s in the suitcase.”
Dundee was seething, barely able to get the words out. “I told you not to look.”
“I didn’t have to. You know you’ll never get away with it. So, let’s just call it a day. You let Savannah go, unharmed, and I give you my word that I won’t come looking for you right away. What d’you say?”
“I say shit goes downhill and payday’s Friday. Fuck you, mate.”
And that was it.
I called 911 in a haze, too numb, really, to accept the likely implications of the decision I’d just made.
After the Radisson and several nearby structures had been evacuated, a member of the Santa Maria Police Department’s bomb squad, garbed in his “Lost in Space” protective suit, approached the suitcase where I’d left it at the back door of the hotel and gingerly sliced it open. Inside were a dozen, two-foot-long metal canisters, each containing uranium pellets. The car under which I was to have deposited the suitcase had been reported stolen the night before in San Luis Obispo, a half hour away. It had been wiped clean of prints.
“You should’ve told me,” Streeter said over the phone as I sat in the hotel lobby, my legs still shaking an hour later. “We could’ve at least tried to help.”
“There was nothing you could do, not under the circumstances.”
I wanted to know how, at the height of the Cold War, nuclear material could have gone missing from a secure government facility.
Streeter said he’d filed a query online with the National Crime Information Center, requesting any records about thefts that may have occurred at the Santa Susana lab in 1956. The NCIC files showed that there’d been what was described as a burglary in October 1956. It was never solved. His query, he said, triggered a call that morning from a US Department of Energy investigator in Washington, who told him their conversation was strictly off the record.
“The DOE guy told me it wasn’t a break-in,” Streeter said. “It was a staged robbery.”
“Staged?”
“Yeah. By the CIA.”
The DOE investigator told Streeter that workers at Santa Susana a year earlier had begun secretly constructing America’s first operating nuclear power plant, which they euphemistically referred to as a “sodium reactor” to deflect any attention from the press. Five years later, some kind of catastrophic meltdown occurred, Streeter said, and all of Los Angeles came close to being vaporized. Washington was largely successful in covering it all up, and the lab was eventually shut down.
The year the staged robbery occurred, Streeter said, coincided with Pakistan leasing a base to the United States so that American military forces could keep closer tabs on Soviet ballistic missile testing. What Islamabad wanted in return was a small amount of fissile material to build a working atomic bomb that Pakistan could then wave in the face of India, its sworn enemy, who was building its own nuclear weapons at the time.
“Washington couldn’t just hand over the stuff without the Indian government going nuts,” Streeter said, “so they got the bright idea of planning a heist and making it look like the Russians were responsible. They found some Russian ex-pat, a former military pilot, to do the job. Everybody at the Santa Susana lab was briefed ahead of time. Then, one of the guards got sick. They brought in a temp, some moron, and nobody bothered to tell him what was up. There was a gunfight. He got shot. They think the guy who was working for the CIA got shot, too. Afterward, everybody at the lab had to sign sworn statements saying they’d go to prison if they ever talked publicly about what happened.”
The bloodshed didn’t end at the lab, according to the DOE investigator.
“That newspaper story you came across, the one about the security guard getting shot at the airport in Santa Paula? They think the guy drove to the nearest airport to Santa Susana, which was Santa Paula, shot that guard to cover his tracks and protect the agency, then flew the uranium out,” Streeter said. “The guard, before he died, said it was a Twin Beech. The DOE confirmed that.”
Whoever killed Chad Lovejoy and made off with uranium, Streeter speculated, had probably been exposed to a lethal dose of radioactivity. He was worried I might’ve suffered a similar fate.
“Uranium isotopes are unstable,” I said, “which makes the uranium itself barely radioactive. You don’t even really need special packaging to protect yourself.”
Streeter didn’t ask me how I knew such things, and I didn’t elaborate. He said his supervisors had formed a task force, assigning three more detectives to investigate the murder of Chad Lovejoy and Savannah’s disappearance, which they now considered linked. He said he wanted to make arrangements to have my phone examined forensically in hopes of backtracking Dundee’s calls. I suggested he’d probably be wasting his time. If Savannah’s kidnapper had any smarts, he would’ve paid cash for a disposable cell phone and bought calling minutes from one of hundreds of offshore service providers, rendering his communications with me or anyone all but untraceable.
“Never thought of that,” Streeter said.
I asked him if his newly formed task force had developed any viable leads that might, in the near term, lead them to Savannah.
He paused. Then, reluctantly, he said, “Unfortunately, not at this time.”
I had to hang up. I had to sit down.
Blue-uniformed Santa Maria police were flitting in and out of the lobby, talking urgently on their hand-held radios, questioning hotel employees and guests who’d been allowed back inside after the suitcase had been driven away for closer inspection and the scene declared safe. I watched them go about their work from the comfort of an armchair, like some bit player in a cop movie. Large scale models of World War II aircraft hung from the ceiling over the dining area adjacent to the lobby. I focused on them and tried hard not to think of the choice I’d made.
I honestly didn’t know what else to do, Savannah. Please forgive me.
“Mr. Logan?”
Standing over me was a burly Latino police officer in his fifties. He wore silver captain’s bars on his collar and a salt-and-pepper crumb catcher on his upper lip. With him was a compact, clean-shaven man of about thirty-five with dark, movie-star features and perfect hair. But for the pistol bulge under the right armpit of his well-tailored gray business suit, he could’ve passed for a bank executive.
“This is FBI Special Agent Pellegrini from the Santa Maria field office,” the captain said. “We’ve asked the justice department to come aboard for obvious reasons.”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” Pellegrini said.
“Whatever you need.”
“I’ll leave you two to it,” the captain said, shaking the fed’s hand and walking off.
Pellegrini sat down in the chair beside mine, removing a small digital voice recorder from his breast pocket and clicking it on.
“You realize,” he said, resting the recorder on the arm of my chair, “that you violated any number of federal statutes, flying the contents of that suitcase in here, without proper notice or authorization.”
“So nice to meet you, too, Agent. So glad we could establish a warm and trusting rapport before you tried to bend me over.”
“I just want to let you know where I’m coming from, that’s all.”
I wasn’t in the mood to be bullied. Especially for no apparent reason.