“None?”
“Absolutely none, Mr. DiContino. Your business may not allow you to make one hundred percent assured statements, but mine does. Plutonium is not found — it’s made. Processed. And damn tightly controlled. The Libyans do not have the capacity to ‘cultivate’ or refine P239.”
“What about uranium?”
Two sets of eyes bored into Joe. “As I said, they have none. Just highly enriched uranium for…” The picture!
“What?” Bud saw doubt.
Anderson looked again at the third photo. It is.
Bud slid his chair closer. It was the enhanced blowup of one of the officers around the plane. Nice of him to look up. “What is it?”
“His name is Ibrahim Sadr. Captain’s rank. He runs the Libyan research reactor at Tajoura. It’s a small ten-megawatt job. The Soviets built it in the late seventies, early eighties. It started up in eighty-one.”
Everyone was wondering the obvious. Bud did so aloud. “Could the reactor fuel be used for the weapon?”
“It’s not likely.”
It wasn’t convincing. “That’s not good enough. We have to know. Where’s the hundred percent assurance?”
Joe had to admit that had been a bad way to characterize the usual certainty with which he could do his job. “No one has ever tested Vishkov’s design. It’s only theoretical, but it should work. He figured that, and so do I. But it still needs highly enriched uranium.”
“You said—”
“—it needs ninety percent or higher concentrations to work.” Joe paused. Could it?
“Your expression worries me,” Bud admitted.
“Me too,” the DCI agreed. “Could the weapon work with a lower percentage?”
“I don’t know.” The face stared up at Joe from the photo. “It shouldn’t. The only way to know without a doubt is to test it, and we can’t do that. I could make a million sets of calculations and there would always be a plus or minus four percent error, up or down, on either end of the performance scale. That four percent could be the range of error Vishkov made allowances for if he calculated for a lower percentage concentration of U235. The fuel for Tajoura is seventy to seventy-five percent enriched uranium. You’d need to implode that concentration to get it to the point of supercriticality, unless Vishkov’s bomb increases the artificial density enough. I wish I knew, but I don’t.”
“Then it is possible, yes?” Bud asked.
Joe hesitated only a second. “Yes.”
For Bud the contemplation was over. He had his answer, and with that answer he reaffirmed decisions he had already made. Dear God. “Captain Anderson, could you defuse such a weapon?”
“If it’s on that plane and you can get me to it, yes. I’ve done it before.”
“We have to assume it is.”
“Joe, if you could ask Sadr any questions, what would they be?” Landau inquired, pointing to the tablet of paper. “Be simple and brief.”
Anderson allowed a hidden smile inside. “You guys have someone everywhere.”
“That’s not your concern,” Bud reminded him.
Joe grunted. There wasn’t much to think about. The questions were simple. He scribbled them on the lined paper, then tore off the sheet and handed it to the DCI.
“You’re leaving from Andrews in an hour,” Bud informed Joe.
“Only the secretary of Energy can activate my team.”
Bud no longer felt like being polite. “We are on the same side, Captain. Now, if you want, I’ll get the secretary on the phone and he can tell you personally. Or, I can go upstairs and get the president to sign the order. In either case you will be going — alone.”
“What?”
Bud was struggling with the security aspect of the situation. “Do you have to have your team? If not absolutely, then it’s solo.”
Joe would rather have a five-person team with him, but why protest? The NSA had obviously seen his file — the classified one — which told him that he had worked alone on his biggest job. “Whatever you say.”
“Good. Gather up whatever you need. The driver who brought you will see you to the field.” Bud thought Anderson looked less than pleased. He left immediately, with no goodbye or parting words.
Herb Landau tucked the sheet of paper in his inside pocket. He stood up with a shove of his arms on the chair. The suit felt baggy. It had to be more noticeable.
Bud stood, too, pinching his lips with two fingers. “He’s a little arrogant, Herb. I’m not sure I like him.”
“You don’t have to like him, son. Get used to it. You’ll work with more assholes than a proctologist if you stay in D.C. for a while.”
Bud opened the door for the DCI.
“Besides, he’s damn good at what he does.”
“He must be,” Bud replied, thinking a second later, to himself: He better be.
“Don’t worry,” the ordnance expert assured the Scotland Yard officer. “Putty.”
The inspector assigned to the Domestic Terrorism Desk squeezed the material between his fingers. It felt much like his little girl’s modeling clay after it had sat out for a day or two, but not as flaky. There was a detonator — a mock one — protruding from the block of putty, obviously used to simulate explosives. The ordnance boys had dissected the explosive device, which turned out to be a harmless replica of the one that had all but destroyed a building less than a kilometer from where the fake was found. This was according to a note found with it. Trusting terrorists, the inspector had learned, could be deadly. But this seemed to be different: It was a warning.
“So our friends have a rather clever gadget here, do they?” the inspector commented. He was looking for a more descriptive outline of the explosive-laden vest that lay sliced open on the table. Several of the large pockets were open to view, and certain wires were neatly snipped at the points where they exited the pockets on the front and sides of the canvas garment.
“It seems so, sir. Eight pockets, each containing three pounds of high-explosive plastique. I don’t think we need to doubt that they have the real thing.” He poked the block of putty which approximated the size and weight of each pocket’s contents.
“Any more?”
“Well, the triggering mechanism is quite sophisticated. A deadman’s switch — this thumb switch, here.” He pressed it down, and released it, demonstrating its use. “If the chap holding this lets go—boom. Interrupter switches on each separate block of plastique. If a wire or wires are cut—boom. If the power is lost—boom. The only way to deactivate the thing is this.” The ordnance man pulled a small metallic box from the top left pocket. It had three red rocker switches on top and a rubber coated conduit running from the bottom to the other wire bundles. “We cut this conduit and the ones running from pocket to pocket. It’s green wire to one terminal, then red to another — no consistency. And in addition there are secondary links to the charges. There are these individual wires from the switch box to each charge, and a loop conduit from the box to number one, from there to number two, and so on. No dice cutting or defusing. Only the proper positioning of these switches will safe it.”
“Is it a onetime safe?”
“No. It can be engaged as often as desired. That way the chap doesn’t need to worry about getting his thumb tired.”
The inspector raised his eyebrows. Behind his back his thumbs were grating against each other. “Damn hideous.”