Pinnacle Event (25 page)

Undercover trucks and unmarked helicopters from NEST had been crisscrossing the New York City and National Capital Region metropolitan areas, searching for signs of nuclear radiation. NEST had placed sensors on bridges and tunnels leading into Manhattan and on the Potomac bridges from Virginia to Washington. The alarms went off with regularity on all of the sensors, cases of false positives, of medical-related radioactive material, or natural materials, that emit signals similar to uranium.

No media sources reported the secret activation of the Government Continuity program that had sent senior bureaucrats into caves and other clandestine facilities. Some noted that the Vice President had appeared healthy just before his office announced that a flu had caused him to cancel his planned rallies in support of Democratic candidates throughout the country.

FEMA, the disaster recovery agency, had alerted and moved many of its units, including the mass mortuary team, under the guise of hurricane preparations. Since what was likely to be the last of the season's hurricanes was aiming at Florida and could move up the East Coast, no one saw through to the real reason why the FEMA units were activated and relocated.

The President insisted on staying in Washington and having his family remain there with him. He could not sleep as midnight came and Election Day began on the East Coast. He had become convinced by his National Security Advisor, as well as the intelligence agency heads, that the possibility of nuclear explosions in the United States on Election Day was nontrivial. Two hours into the day, actually at 2:12 a.m., he appeared in the White House Situation Room to visit the Crisis Task Force that had quietly been stood up. He peppered them with questions, looking for any intelligence that would confirm the nuclear risk.

Winston Burrell was more than just his National Security Advisor, he had been with the President since his unlikely announcement of candidacy nine years earlier. When Burrell said he could not recommend evacuating New York and Washington because the intelligence was too vague, too unspecific, the President had actually been relieved. He readily accepted the recommendation.

The first polls closed at 7:00 p.m. in a few states in the Eastern Time Zone. Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, and Indiana were all too close to call, according to the television networks' exit polls. Heavy voter turnout was reported across the country, including in Florida where the hurricane's effects were beginning to be felt in the south. Long lines were still waiting to vote in three of those states. That meant it was going to be a long night.

On the West Coast, in their temporary headquarters at the High Speed Computing Center at Livermore National Lab outside of San Francisco, Ray Bowman, Mbali Hlanganani, and Dugout tried to focus on their mission, to find what they had become convinced were five loose nukes. Using Dugout's Minerva big data analytics software, now running on the massively parallel computer, they tried to find connections, patterns among all the events that had happened. Who was behind the string of murders, thefts, clandestine movements, and other activities that stretched from South Africa to Europe, to Israel, and Hong Kong, and now to Canada? The only two men they knew for sure had been involved in the central conspiracy were both in a morgue in British Columbia.

Using another part of the big computer at the lab, Dug was systematically trying to crack the encryption codes that the Potgeiters' had used to lock the files on the Mac Air laptops. At Fort Meade in Maryland, NSA was also going at those codes. Dugout admitted that it was theoretically possible that the number crunching could go on unsuccessfully for decades.

After literally running around the world chasing leads, Ray Bowman was beginning to feel not just physically exhausted, but emotionally strung out. He had been convinced that the nukes would have gone off by now. The fact that they had not left him with no theory of the case, no idea what to do next. Although he had not opened up to either Dugout or Mbali yet, he knew he would have to admit to them soon that all he could think to do was wait for a lead, wait for the computer, wait for the enemy to make a mistake and reveal themselves. Maybe the bad guys, whoever they were, already had slipped up, he thought, and they had missed it.

His mind raced through possibilities, coming up with nothing.

“Do you think the President will tell the winner what has really been going on?” Dugout asked Bowman when he caught Ray's attention focusing on the muted TV news coverage. “Congratulations on your election, and by the way we really have been looking for some loose nukes and we can't find them?”

“Whichever one of them wins tonight, the incumbent is still the President for the next ten weeks and he gets to call the shots till then,” Ray replied. “You'd better believe he's going to want us to solve this puzzle well before he steps down.”

“But what if we don't?” Mbali asked. “What if we just keep hitting dry holes? You know there is a scenario where these bombs are like the lost Rembrandts. Nobody knows where they went. Somebody just paid a lot of money to get them, just to have them. Or maybe just to have them to take out and scare people if and when they ever feel threatened?”

Bowman opened a Diet Coke and sat down next to her on the couch. “I thought of that, like Saudi Arabia or Taiwan, or even South Korea. Thing is that the U.S. Intelligence Community, as often as it screws up, would really probably know if one of those three countries had done this. Even if some wealthy, weird little place like Qatar had done it. We would know by now.”

“Which, again, leaves us with a bloody rich terrorist group that we have never heard of,” she said.

“Or a bunch of Luddites who wanted to throw the world into reverse, or maybe just slow it down?” Dugout added. “You know, people who are afraid of robots and genetic engineering, and drones.”

“And have billions of dollars and have hired some seriously good hit squads and other operators?” Ray asked.

“Hmm, seems unlikely,” Dugout admitted and went back to his search models. It was just before midnight and into Wednesday on the West Coast. “We have a winner,” the announcer intoned as marching music played on the television screen in the lounge and the image on screen shifted to a presidential seal spinning over a map of the United States. “We are declaring a winner in Ohio and with those electoral votes assigned, we can now declare the forty-fifth President of the United States.” The screen shifted to scenes of wildly celebrating supporters in a giant ballroom and then to an outside shot of a crowd of people cheering in front of Jumbotron screens in New York's Times Square.

Ray, Mbali, and Dugout sat quietly in the scruffy lounge of the computing center, surrounded by stained couches and empty vending machines, looking at each other, like mourners at a wake, or the last wedding guests after the bride and groom have been long gone. The candidate that all three supported had won, but they were not feeling like celebrating. Dugout hit the
MUTE
button.

“I know what those guys at the losing candidates headquarters feel like, just empty. I should be glad we all survived and nothing happened, no bombs blew up, but this just feels like the biggest letdown ever. We didn't find the bombs, but they didn't go off. We failed, but it didn't matter. I'm spent, just like tapped out,” Dugout said, looking at the television coverage. He shifted his gaze across the room to Ray, who was sprawled out on a battered-looking couch. “Are you going back now, to the bartending, to the island?”

Mbali looked quickly at Bowman. It was a question she had wanted to ask, but had not.

“I feel like I just woke up from a binge, without the fun part of having been drunk,” Ray announced to himself, as much as to the others in the room. “Yeah, I thought that the bombs would go off before yesterday, before the election, but when I think about why I believed that it was because that's what you and Winston told me when you recruited me. I just bought into it, uncritically.”

“So, if your mission was to stop the bombs going off and preventing, disrupting the presidential election, you failed. But there was no plot to blow up bombs before the election,” Mbali spoke in a tentative way that sounded like she was asking a question.

The television coverage was showing the new President-elect, beaming, about to make a victory statement. “She's right,” Dugout said. “The United States succeeded in running an election, but not because of us. We failed.”

Ray looked at Dugout and then at Mbali. He put his hands on the couch and forced himself up and then stood, looking at the other two in the room. “That was never the task. It wasn't just about the elections. The task was to find the bombs. We haven't failed. We still have to go find the nukes before someone uses them for whatever it was that they're meant for.”

“Good,” Mbali said, “but what do we do now? Maybe it was never about the U.S. Maybe it was about South Africa, or Israel. We still don't know anything.”

“No. Look, we know a lot more than we did twenty-one days ago when I left the bartending job. We know for certain that there were South African nuclear bombs, that they were stored in Madagascar and they left there, that the Potgieters were part of a plot to transfer them to somebody who paid a lot of money for them,” Ray said, sounding like he was trying to motivate himself. “Most importantly, we know that there are loose nuclear bombs out there somewhere and not in the hands of good owners. It may not have happened in the last forty-eight hours, but something awful will happen as a result of that. That is a wealth of information, we have developed.”

Mbali laughed. “You sound like a coach giving yourself a gold star, an A grade? Good, you uncovered a lot of leads, but I repeat, what are we going to do now? I cannot go home to my President without knowing where the bombs went.”

“We clear our heads, we get some sleep. In the morning we take a day, walk around San Francisco, whatever, and we come back tomorrow and start again from scratch,” Bowman declared. “And meanwhile, Duggie, you keep that massive thing cranking away trying to decrypt something on those laptops and run down all those leads. One of them will give us what we need. It has to.”

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9

UNION SQUARE, SAN FRANCISCO

In the morning, Bowman took his own advice and drove into the city, parked, and began to walk in a city he loved. He wanted to think about nothing, the old technique that had always worked for him, the way he let his subconscious speak to him above the din, tell him what it had figured out while he was distracted. He parked in the garage under Union Square and planned to walk up Post Street, turn right on Van Ness, and march to the sea. It would take a while, but he was in no hurry. He needed the exercise. He had spent too much time in airplanes.

He emerged from the underground parking garage and entered the plaza. A cable car was moving down the hill.

Skateboarders were dodging pedestrians. Four elderly Chinese were doing stylized exercises on the grass. Businessmen who had been up late the night before watching the election results and were now late for work, moved purposefully across the Square. For early November, it was warm and the sky was empty of clouds, a bright, cerulean blue. His head was clear and he felt ready for the long walk across the city.

The phone in his pocket vibrated. He thought about turning it off, but he recognized the country code 972, Israel. “Mbali gave me your number. She said this number is new, it should be clean. Nobody knows it.” It was Danny Avidar calling.

“Well, that was true,” Bowman said as he sat down on a bench.

“Do you know a man named Sergey Rogozin?” Avidar asked.

“Never heard of him,” Ray said, stretching to recollect. “Should I have?”

“Well, he knows you,” Danny replied. “He hired the guy who hired the guy who was outside the restaurant. You remember the restaurant we went to?”

The scene of the car bombing in Jaffa flashed in front of him, the sound, the smell, the invisible hand smacking him to the ground. “And we know things about this Sergey guy?”

“I can't say more on this line,” Danny answered. “I just sent our file on him securely to Mbali.”

“Securely? How did you do that?”

“I gave her a device when she left here. We have a partnership now, sharing. We call it the four eyes, hers and mine. So maybe, you should get back to work now, yes?” The connection broke.

Bowman sat on the bench and repeated to himself what he had just heard and what he thought it meant. One thing it clearly meant was that he had to go back to the lab, where evidently Mbali and probably Dugout were still at work. The head-clearing walk had lasted three minutes. He headed back to his rental car, into the underground.

 

34

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9

THE CONNAUGHT HOTEL

LONDON, UK

“The Purpose Fund is pleased to announce the grant recipients for this year's research program,” Professor Victoria Kinder spoke from the podium. A bank of video cameras were in front of her to her right. She looked down and smiled to the board members seated in the first row of seats to her left. Behind them sat many of those who had applied for the funding.

“The Hospital for Tropical Diseases, London, will receive fifteen million pounds for a three-year study in emerging viruses,” she read out. “The Byrd Polar Research Group of Ohio State is awarded twelve million dollars for its continuing work exploring the polar regions.” Small groups gasped, hugged, or clapped with each reading. “Moscow State University's Institute of Agricultural Genetics is granted fifty-two million rubles for further work on adapting crops to grow in tundra regions.”

The attractive, young American academic went on, announcing funding for laboratories and research teams in India, Iceland, China, Norway, Canada, Austria, Australia, Switzerland, Korea, Chile, and Japan. Programs in alternative energy, biogenetic engineering, geological exploration, and multispectral satellite sensors were among the diverse recipients of the private largesse. In all, the fourteen awards totaled a quarter of a billion dollars. Each of the five board members had given fifty million dollars for this year's Purpose Fund research grants.