The Faithful Spy (25 page)

By the time the sun was rising the Joint Terrorism Task Force had begun an investigation, which it named Operation Earnest Badger. Intelligence agencies seemed to have an unwritten rule that the most serious jobs got the most ludicrous names, Exley thought. The name wasn’t the only absurd aspect of that first Sunday morning meeting. The FBI and the agency had argued for an hour over which side should run Earnest Badger. Finally they’d agreed to name coheads: Exley’s old friend Vinny Duto and Sanford Kijiuri, the deputy director of the Feebs. With their fight for bureaucratic glory out of the way, Duto and Kijiuri got down to business, deploying fifty members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team—a.k.a. NEST—to Albany.

The Department of Energy had created NEST in 1975 after a hoax nuclear warning in Boston showed the need for a specialized task force that could quickly investigate atomic threats. The emergency team now had about a thousand members, though only a few dozen were full-time paid employees. The rest were volunteers, mostly scientists from the government nuclear laboratories in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. NEST even had a few retirees old enough to have seen the power of nukes firsthand during the open-air tests of the 1950s.

Exley admired the courage of the scientists, whatever their ages. They had taken upon themselves the unenviable mission of searching for nuclear and dirty bombs, and the even unhappier job of defusing any weapons they found. They worked alongside FBI counterterrorism agents, as well as Special Forces commandos authorized by a secret presidential directive to kill on sight anyone believed to possess a nuclear device.

During the Cold War, only top-level intelligence and military officials had known of NEST. Now the veil had lifted slightly. Still, the government took extraordinary precautions to prevent the public from learning about nuclear threats, hoping to discourage hoaxes and blackmail. NEST and the FBI never disclosed threats, even—or especially—those considered credible.

The NEST scientists wore civilian clothes on their missions and carried their laptop-sized radiation detectors in briefcases and oversized purses. The detectors could pick up unusual levels of alpha and gamma rays at distances up to forty feet. They sent wireless signals to miniature receivers that the scientists wore like hearing aids. NEST also owned a fleet of trucks that looked like ordinary delivery vans but actually held larger detectors able to pick up radiation from hundreds of feet away. To defuse a bomb, NEST had warehouses full of exotic tools at its headquarters at Nellis Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas: robots that could be controlled from miles away, the most powerful portable X-ray machines ever created, saws that cut with a high-pressure stream of water instead of metal. In fact, all of NEST’s equipment was fabricated from plastic and nonmagnetic metals like aluminum, since strong magnetic fields could scramble the computer chips inside nuclear weapons.

UNTIL NOW, THE
most serious threat ever investigated by NEST had come in October 2001. SISMI, the Italian military intelligence service, had warned the agency that al Qaeda had smuggled a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon—a so-called suitcase bomb—into New York.

A ten-kiloton bomb is about as small as a nuclear weapon gets, barely half as powerful as the Fat Man bomb the United States dropped on Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Still, the bomb had enough power to obliterate midtown Manhattan and kill 200,000 people. Most civilians simply couldn’t comprehend what nuclear weapons could do, Exley thought. She envied them. Thinking too much about al Qaeda’s desire for a nuke was like envisioning the end of the world, or your own death—an exercise in humility that could become a morbid obsession.

Exley vividly remembered the search that had followed the SISMI warning. NEST had frantically deployed hundreds of scientists to check every street in Manhattan, every airport terminal, every floor of the Empire State Building. But NEST never found a bomb. And neither the CIA nor any other intelligence agency could ever confirm the initial Italian report. By Christmas 2001 the investigation had wound down. Four months later NEST and the Joint Terrorism Task Force officially declared the report a hoax. Duto, at the time the No. 2 in the agency’s Operations Directorate, flew to Rome to tell SISMI it needed some new sources. Exley wished she could have seen that conversation.

She also wished that the suitcase-bomb episode had given her confidence in NEST’s ability to find a nuke if all else failed. But she knew better. During the search the NEST scientists hadn’t tried to hide their limitations. Despite their equipment, they had little chance of locating a bomb in a blind search. They faced an almost impossible problem: plutonium and uranium are only moderately radioactive until they detonate. And cities are filled with radioactive hot spots: X-ray machines in dentists’ offices; CAT scanners in hospitals; pacemakers, which are powered by minuscule amounts of plutonium. Even freshly cut granite emits enough radiation to cause false alarms.

Three days into the suitcase-bomb search, Stan Kapur, a chubby physicist from Los Alamos who threatened to take Exley to dinner whenever he came to Washington, had said something that Exley still remembered. During a meeting, someone, she couldn’t remember who, had asked about the odds that NEST would find the bomb if it existed.

“Looking for one of these in New York, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. A haystack made of needles,” Kapur had said. No one had wanted to hear that. But Kapur, who was now leading the NEST team in Albany, had told the truth, Exley thought. Without accurate intelligence, all the physicists on earth couldn’t find a bomb. Getting inside the enemy’s head was the only way to win.

EXLEY FELT A
strange frisson as she looked at photographs of the duffel bag on the floor of D-2471, which was called a locker though it was really about the size of a one-car garage. On the Sunday after Farouk’s confession came in, the president had considered ordering Albany evacuated. That step had turned out to be unnecessary after the NEST scientists reported that the trunk inside the bag was too small to hold a nuclear weapon.

After inspecting D-2471 with a pulsed fast neutron scanner and a modified CT scanner, NEST’s best guess was that the trunk held about eight pounds of C-4 explosive, packed around two small lead-lined steel cases that contained plutonium or uranium. In other words, the trunk was a miniature dirty bomb, capable of killing hundreds of people around Albany if the wind blew the wrong way. But NEST could not estimate exactly how much radioactive material the bomb held, because its lead linings blocked almost all the alpha and gamma rays the material emitted. Meanwhile, the army’s explosive-disposal teams reported that the trunk appeared booby-trapped, wired to detonate if it was moved or opened without the proper key.

After two days of debate, the president decided to leave the bomb where it lay and signed an executive order nationalizing the storage center on the vague grounds of a “national security emergency.” Not even the White House Counsel’s Office believed the order was legal, and Joey O’Donnell, the owner of Capitol Area Self Storage, had balked at giving up his property. But Kijiuri, the FBI deputy director, had not-so-politely explained to Joey that he had an easy choice. He could be a good American and accept the $1 million the government was offering, twice what the place was worth. Tax-free, too. Or he could protect his constitutional rights by filing a lawsuit and pissing off everyone from the FBI to the president himself. “You just won the lottery, Joey,” Kijiuri said. “Take the check and take a vacation. You want us looking at your taxes?”

Joey took the check and a vacation. Even before he signed over the building, a combat engineering team had arrived to reinforce the walls and ceiling around D-2471 with six-inch-thick lead-and-steel plates. By the end of September the entire building would have a new roof and walls thick enough to trap the fallout from an explosion.

ALONG WITH A
new ceiling, Capitol Area Self Storage got a new workforce. None of the previous staff complained about being fired; they had all received severance checks bigger than they’d expected. The Delta Force commandos who replaced them were unfailingly polite to customers, though their mid-South accents didn’t quite fit in upstate New York. Meanwhile, FBI and CIA technicians engaged in a not-very-subtle competition to see who could install fancier surveillance equipment in the center. Because of the rules preventing the CIA from operating on American soil, the agency should have left the job to the Feebs. But that restriction had been lifted by the presidential order that created Earnest Badger, or so Duto insisted.

The dueling teams of techies had locked up Capitol Area Self Storage tigher than—tighter than any cliché imaginable, Exley thought. Four hundred cameras, heat sensors, and motion detectors had been installed in and around the building. A roach couldn’t get within twenty feet of the bomb without setting off silent alarms. And God help the person who opened, asked about, or even looked too long at locker D-2471.

Too bad the Joint Terrorism Task Force had no idea who that person might be. The room had been rented two months earlier by a man who had called himself Laurent Kabila, the name of the late and unlamented former president of the Congo. “Laurent” had paid in advance and in cash for a three-year rental. He hadn’t come back since his initial visit. Not surprisingly, neither the locker nor the bag had revealed any fingerprints or traces of DNA. Anyone capable of smuggling nuclear material into the United States was presumably also capable of wearing gloves.

So Duto and Kijiuri had decided that whoever came for the bag would be arrested only if he removed it from the center. Otherwise he would be allowed to leave and would be tracked. Of course, by allowing the courier into D-2471 instead of arresting him immediately, the task force ran the risk that he would blow up the bomb inside the storage center. But if they arrested the courier right away, the trail to the rest of the cell would end. And they desperately needed more information about al Qaeda’s operations in the United States. On the other hand, they couldn’t risk allowing the bomb outside the center.

Exley understood the decision. As an analyst, she wanted as much information as possible. But if her family lived in Albany, she’d have wanted to try the president for treason if he allowed al Qaeda even an outside shot at taking control of a dirty bomb.

EXLEY HAD RESOLVED
to leave the office before dark at least once this week, give herself a chance to get some exercise outside, maybe walk down the Mall. Not today, though. She wanted to read Farouk’s transcripts again, cover to cover.

At that moment she realized that something really bad was happening to her. No point in lying to herself. Since coming back from Diego Garcia she had turned a mental corner. She had always been obsessed with her job, but as the stakes rose she was
enjoying
it more, enjoying the chance to see what no one else saw and hear what no one else heard. Even the interrogation—the torture; she’d say the word—of Farouk. Her revulsion had faded all too quickly as she watched Saul at work. He was just so good at breaking Farouk, and part of her enjoyed seeing genius in all its forms.

You’re just a cog, the little voice in her head told her. You gave up your life to be a cog. Now you’re giving up your morals too. But for once she ignored the voice. Fine, I’m a cog, she thought. But I’m a cog in the most powerful machine in history, a machine that reaches everywhere in the world, that can snap you off a roof in Iraq and make you disappear before anyone knows you’re gone, that can see through clouds and hear through walls.

Ugh. What nonsense. What shit. And yet her pride was real. At least now I know how it happens, she thought. I know how power corrupts.

A KNOCK ON
her door startled her. She looked up to see Shafer twisting his little body inside her office.

“Ellis. I was just thinking about you.”

“Only happy thoughts, I hope.”

“Always.”

“Qué pasa?”

Exley stifled a sigh. Shafer’s oldest son had been studying Spanish all summer. Now Shafer had gotten into the act, dropping Spanish phrases at random into his conversations. Every mangled word grated on Exley, reminding her of her distance from her own kids. Plus, as someone who had worked hard to learn three languages, she found Taco Bell–style linguistic ineptitude deeply annoying.

She held up the report. “Wondering if I should sell my apartment. Whether a dirty bomb will hurt property values.”

“Probably not,” Shafer said. “September eleventh was the best thing that ever happened to Washington real estate.”

“You’re not supposed to say things like that.”

“True though.”

And it was. The agency and the Defense Department had added tens of thousands of jobs after the attacks, propelling house prices in the D.C. area into the stratosphere. Another unintended consequence of September 11. Bin Laden surely hadn’t expected that he would make government bureaucrats rich when he hit the Pentagon.

“Catch anything on the hundredth reading you didn’t see on the first ninety-nine?” Shafer asked. “Anything brilliant?”

“I leave the brilliance to you, Ellis. However…” She fell silent, unsure if she wanted to talk about Wells right now.

Patience was not one of Shafer’s virtues. “What? What?”

“Tell me something. We fix up customs and immigration. We’ve got gamma-ray detectors at the ports. We spent, what, ten billion dollars on this stuff last year? So why can you still walk in from Mexico?”

“Is this a rhetorical question? Because you know the answer as well as I do,” he said. “We want an open border so Mexicans can come in and do the jobs we’re too lazy to do ourselves.” He cocked his head. “Now, what were you really going to say? That wasn’t it.”

“You never let me get away with anything, do you?” Shafer knew her well. She had to give him that.

“Out with it.”

“You’ll think I’m obsessed.”

“You are obsessed. That’s why I like you.”