Pinnacle Event (6 page)

Linda stood in the doorway. “You'd better be back soon, asshole, because I am not building the nursery addition all by myself. I need a carpenter's assistant and that would be you.”

Soon after sunrise, Ray found Emily's mobile phone, called Gallows Point and was put through to Dugout's room. “I want you to meet me in half an hour. There's a little beach.”

Bowman drove down the hill and got back on “The Road,” as the locals called the loop around the island. He passed Cinnamon beach and Trunk Bay, Peace Hill and Hawksnest Beach. They were all still empty. It was early and the tourist season did not really start until Thanksgiving. He abruptly pulled off the road into a parking area big enough for two, maybe three, Jeeps. Dugout was already parked there.

Bowman jumped out of his open-top Jeep and walked through a small iron gate into what seemed like a tunnel through a rain forest. The descending path was covered by a canopy of trees and vines. Dugout followed, stumbling over tree roots and rocks, balancing his backpack. In a few minutes the verdant tunnel opened onto a small, white sand beach and a turquoise cove. No one else was there.

“My private beach,” Ray said, “most of the time.” There was a boarded-up cinder block house, but none of the picnic tables and showers with which the National Park Service had dotted the other beaches on the island.

Bowman stood and faced him. “You know what they call this beach?”

“Ray's Hideout?”

“It's named after a guy who bought it in the fifties, built that little shack over there. He was trying to get away from his past, from the killing he had been involved in. Kinda like me. But he was also haunted by images of a future in which cities went up in flames from nuclear bombs.” Bowman walked away from the beach, toward the shack.

“In the end, it didn't work for him. Being here. He went back to the mainland, back to work,” Bowman said, looking at Dug. “He was the man who built the H bomb.”

“Who the hell lived here?” Dugout asked.

“Oppenheimer. This is called Oppy's Beach.”

Dugout wasn't sure what Ray Bowman was telling him.

“So you're in?”

“You've ruined it for me. You and Burrell. I can't sit down here in paradise thinking about cities being nuked, not any more than Oppy could. But if I'm doing this thing, so are you.”

“Sure, but remember we only got two weeks. Then it's Rock Wall,” Dugout replied. “They close the ports, the borders, they start looking everywhere with Geiger counters.”

“And if Winston's right, when he starts Operation Rock Wall, the bad guys will respond by nuking the first city. And even if they don't, the country will tear itself apart in panic.” Ray Bowman began walking toward the path to the road. “How were you planning on leaving the island?”

“If I am leaving with you in tow, I can call in a Coast Guard helo from Puerto Rico. It can be here in two hours. In the meantime, I can teach you how to use the iPad.”

“However much of a Luddite I may be compared to you, I do know how to use an iPad,” Ray said taking the device. “My three-year-old niece knows how.”

“You've never seen one like this. I designed it myself.”

“Oh, good. I kinda liked the one Steve Jobs designed,” Ray shot back.

“This one is secure, encrypted, has a telephone and video phone function and connects to an Air Force communications satellite.”

“That's nice, Duggie, but I'm going to need identities, passports, credit cards, cash. And I'll need Winston's office to phone ahead and open the doors I can't open by myself. Occasionally, I may need help from the Fort, the Bureau, or the Agency.”

“All of whom, as I recall, were great friends of yours.”

“Don't be a wise ass. It's unbecoming,” Ray replied. “Look. I'll always let you know where I am and what I am up to.”

Dugout had a wide grin. “Don't worry. I'll know.”

 

4

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19

CAFÉ GRIENSTEIDL

VIENNA, AUSTRIA

“Ein grosse schwartze, bitte,”
Bowman said to the elderly waiter.

“Mit strudel?”
the old man asked.

Charmed that some things never changed, he replied, “Okay,
warum nicht
?” He had taken a seat by the window, with a view across the narrow street and the Michaelerplatz to the Palace and the Spanish Riding School. Like most of the people in the cavernous, old caf
é
, he paged through a newspaper. Unlike most of them, he also scanned the room to see if his guest had arrived, or if anyone else of interest was present.

“Raymond, you chose this caf
é
for the Lipinzaners? You like horses now?” Jonas Moe must have come through a back door. He was at the table before Bowman knew he was in the room, an unpleasant reminder to the American that certain of his skills had atrophied while he tended bar in paradise.

“No, Jonas, I chose it because it's a short walk from my hotel and a long way from UN City. No need for your fellow international civil servants to see us together.”

“Ein Americano, bitte, und ein Sakertort mit slag,”
the Norwegian told the passing waiter, who looked at him as if requesting service was rude or impertinent. Jonas Moe had been in Vienna long enough to know that unless he grabbed a passing waiter, it might otherwise be a very long time before he was served. He had been in the old city for twenty-six years, as a senior staff member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN nuclear inspector. Moe had also been one of Bowman's personal sources on the Iranian nuclear program, passing on the full results of the Agency's inspections and sometimes carrying some extra equipment with him to Iran.

“Any chance to get off that UN island in the Danube. I hate that late twentieth-century architecture, so cold, impersonal. Give me an old Viennese caf
é
any day. And any chance to see my good friend Raymond, who the drum signals had said was gone from government, out of the spook world. But here I see it is not so? The drums have told false tales again?”

“Let's just say that I am doing some research. Perhaps I am writing a book?” Ray responded.

“With respect, Raymond, you could no more have the patience to write a book than you could train the dancing white horses across the Platz. But I will play along. What would this book be about, Iran and its nuclear weapons program?”

The elderly waiter brought the coffee and cake. “I will have you know that I was an accomplished horseman one summer in Montana, admittedly many years ago,” Moe asserted. The waiter departed.

“No, not Iran again. Ancient history. South Africa.”

Moe's eyes darted quickly up from his chocolate cake and his expression became more serious. “The double flash in August that I am not supposed to know about, that your government failed to mention to the IAEA. Finally you are taking it seriously?”

“I don't know anything about a double flash.”

“Of course you do.”

“I am concerned with more ancient history,” Bowman replied. “Nineteen ninety-one. The destruction of the six South African nuclear bombs. IAEA went in after they were disassembled and had a look. The records say you were on that mission.”

Jonas Moe withdrew a pack of Marlboros and lit a cigarette. They were not in the larger smoking room of the caf
é
, but this room was almost empty and the waiter would not object unless some tourist complained. “You have been snooping in the records of a UN Agency again? You Americans are worse than the Chinese, hacking into everything.” He flicked an ash into his saucer. “My first field mission with the Agency. Two months in South Africa. Very pretty country and great wine, so tragic their race hatred.”

“The IAEA report said the bombs probably were destroyed. The enriched uranium from the bombs was placed under safeguard, under seal, and monitored with cameras,” Ray recalled.

“Highly enriched uranium was declared by their government. We placed it under seal. We audited their production records. It seemed that we had all the HEU they had made. This is all in public documents, reports.”

Although Ray loved cigars, the cigarette smoke was already affecting his sinuses. “But you thought the records were doctored, that they had produced much more HEU?”

“You have hacked into my brain, too? Accessed my old cerebral files?” Jonas Moe asked.

“You thought that some warheads were never destroyed, that there was extra HEU they used to make more warheads, which they kept, somewhere,” Ray asserted, bluffing.

“When you are Russia with forty thousand nuclear weapons, half of them unsafe, you can disassemble the old ones and harvest the uranium for other uses. You Americans have also cut your own inventory in half over the last twenty years. But when you have only a few, they are very special to you. And in 1991 when the world was in flux, the Cold War ending, the Communist bloc disintegrating, Apartheid finally being abolished, and Nelson Mandela about to be freed and to take over … in this sort of world do you give up all your crown jewels? No, you doctor your books.”

Bowman noticed that the caf
é
was beginning to fill up as the morning wore on. He was relieved that his one-time source had snubbed out the cigarette. “So, Jonas, did they do a good job doctoring the books?”

“They tried to, but that's all they needed to do really. Botha was meeting with Mandela. It was all about to end, peacefully. The UN was not going to call them liars about the nukes.”

Bowman knew Jonas Moe's concern over nuclear weapons proliferation was a driving passion, his life's work. He found it hard to believe that a younger, even more idealistic Moe had turned a blind eye to nuclear weapons going missing. “But you wanted to make sure that the bombs did not get into the wrong hands,” Ray suggested. “How did you do that?”

“My Team Chief, an Argentine, would have whitewashed it, but I told my South African counterpart that I would not. I was young and brash. The South African, good fellow he was, was a physicist with their Atomic Energy Commission. He was pissed at ARMSCOR, the defense industry because they had taken over the program. He told me to take a good look at the HEU production numbers from the Y Plant. He hinted that they were faked.”

Moe looked up and right into Bowman's eyes. “I couldn't prove it, but unless they were terribly inefficient, they probably made almost half again as much HEU as what they reported. My official submission was that there were ‘apparent inconsistencies.'”

“But your bosses here in Vienna wanted the story to go away,” Ray guessed aloud, “and so upon further analysis the inconsistencies became plausible numbers, within the statistically acceptable band.”

Moe nodded. He looked off into the distance, remembering those days. “But, Raymond, they knew I knew. The South Africans were fully aware that I was not fooled. So months later when I was back there again, my South African counterpart had me over to his house for dinner. After the feast with the family, he took me down to his
lager,
his private workspace under the house.

“He showed me a video, like a secret documentary they made, of how they had made some missile warheads and then shipped them secretly to Israel in 1994, not that the Israelis needed them, but it was a way of saying thanks for the Israeli help with the Jericho missiles that would have carried the South African weapons. And in the end, the South African team that had made the warheads just could not stand to see them destroyed. So they gave them to Israel.”

This was the part of the interview that Bowman had the most trouble planning. He did not want it to seem to Jonas Moe that this entire discussion was about him, or his possible failure a quarter century earlier. “It was credible, this video?” Bowman asked.

“My South African counterpart was. He joined IAEA and became a colleague. He worked on the Pakistan and India problems for years. Later, when he retired, he still consulted with the Agency. He was a good friend of ours, my wife and me, for many years, poor man. We miss him. We used to go hiking together in the Wienerwald.”

“I take it he has passed on?” Ray asked.

“This summer. Awful, really. A tram hit him out by Grinzing, smashed into his car, split the fuel tank, horrific explosion and fire. I just hope he died quickly and did not feel the flames.”

“Well, if you believed him and the documentary that the bombs went back to Israel, what do you think caused the new Indian Ocean flash,” Ray asked, “assuming there was one, of course.”

Jonas Moe moved the last bit of Sakertorte around on his plate with his fork. He did not look at Bowman. “That's what I have been wondering. Mainly in the wee hours of the morning, when I should be asleep. It seemed so much like the 1979 test on a ship in the middle of nowhere. But it can't be the South Africans. Everyone who was involved in that program is either old or dead, and none of them are even living in South Africa anymore. And besides, their warheads all went to Israel or were dismantled.” Moe looked at the man who had paid him for information for years. “Maybe it was North Korea. They do odd things.”

Ray smiled at his old source. “Yes, they do.” He signaled for their check. It was always hard to get them to give you a bill in Vienna. “Jonas, tell me one more thing if you will. The Israelis. Did you or anyone in the IAEA ever ask them whether they were given the warheads or what they did with them?”

Jonas Moe stood to leave. As they shook hands, he spoke in a low voice, his mouth near Ray's ear. “The Israelis would not talk to us. They never did, until they started giving us information about Iran lately.” He picked up his pack of Marlboros and moved quickly to a side door in the back of the room, a door Ray had missed when he first entered the caf
é
.