“And the bad?” There was always bad when a person prefaced his words that way.
“That what they’ve got on board is still dangerous, but it still requires the nuclear material, which we don’t know if they have. There’s no evidence they’ve removed any from Tajoura.” Landau’s tone conveyed the frustration in that statement.
Drummond knew he had to bring some unwanted certainty to the situation. “Herb, it looks like they do have it. One of our S&T teams doing a financial trace on this whole thing came up with some damning info. It seems the colonel was in the habit of buying scrap metal through a Tunisian front company. The kind of stuff that comes from dismantled industrial plants.”
“A lot of those left around after the forties,” Landau commented.
“One of those scrap shipments was particularly suspicious. Bad documentation, a money trail through PLO and other accounts.” Drummond drew a breath, wishing the discovery had been a mistake. But it wasn’t. “That scrap came from Osirak four days before the Iraqis rolled into Kuwait.”
The DCI snickered. “So Qaddafi was playing the good Arab brother for Hussein, keeping the uranium safely tucked away.” Landau leaned back, his fingers tapping in sequence on the desk edge. “And there wasn’t supposed to be any nuclear material at Osirak anyway.”
“We always suspected there was. Even the Israelis did when they bombed the reactor back in the eighties.” Drummond finally sat. “We’ll have to figure that one out later — a Soviet slipup, more than likely. Back in the pre-Gorby days. What’s interesting is that this all appears to have been in the works before our predecessors did their dirty work on the colonel.”
“Like we knew, he’s wanted nuclear weapons openly for a long time,” Landau said. “And now he has highly enriched uranium. Higher than Tajoura.”
“It can’t all be on the plane,” Drummond commented.
The DCI shook his head. “No way. We’ll have to check on how much could be left behind, but that could present a further problem.” Or an opportunity.
It was quiet for a short period that seemed much longer. The misaligned wheels of the night janitor’s cart were audible in the hallway. Drummond turned to check the door visually. “You know, old Harry’s probably the most well informed man in this country,” he said, giving the crusty old custodian of the executive level more credit than was deserved. “The things he must’ve heard, even in just meaningless conversations. He’s been here thirty-two years.”
Landau heard none of it. His mind was occupied with a thought. “Qaddafi was smart on this one, Greg.”
The DDI returned to the relevant discussion. “How so?”
“He gets all this set up, the hijackers, the thing on board, all of it. The assassination, too; that’s what I think. And once it’s all over, if he’s still alive, he has surplus uranium for whatever reasons he chooses.”
“Smart and dangerous.”
Landau acknowledged the correctness of the DDI’s statement. “And the clever misinformation, placed just where we’d find it. The bomb design scam. They obviously didn’t have the capability to build something of even its crude design.”
“Just to scare us. To make us wring our hands.”
“Right. And he had us, too. What’s really on there may not be as frightening, but it could be just as deadly.”
Drummond flashed a knowing smile. “Not-so-scary things aren’t as hard to deal with.”
“Neither are other things, now that we know.” The DCI knew that Bud would agree with that thought.
“Sir, there’s a phone call for you. It’s urgent.”
Bud looked at the DCI. Urgent held little meaning when a meeting with the president was about to begin. He hovered over the speakerphone for a moment. “Who is it?”
“Director Jones.”
He debated the decision. “Herb, go on in without me. Tell them I’ll be in in a minute.”
“Where the hell is he?” the president asked. His body involuntarily paced.
“He’ll be here,” Ellis responded. “It must be important or Jones wouldn’t have called in the first place: He knows what’s going on.”
The president wasn’t angry at his NSA, he was angry at the shifting situation. The revelation from the DCI that something, though not a bomb, was on the hijacked plane had clouded an earlier decision he made. “How, tell me, how can I order that plane shot down with this new information? How can I do that?”
Neither Meyerson nor Gonzales had an answer. Herb Landau, however, saw little need to alter the previous course.
“Sir,” the DCI began, “you still have no other option, in my mind.”
“Herb, when we thought that plane was carrying an atomic bomb, then we had no choice. But now, with whatever it is, I don’t know. Mass destruction is one thing, but this…”
“This thing can’t be as destructive as a bomb,” Gonzales said.
“Do you know that… for sure?” the DCI asked. The chief of staff signaled not. “Then until we know that, we have to assume it is.”
The president checked the time. “Bud shou—”
The NSA’s entry interrupted the sentence. “We have a whole new problem,” Bud spat out. He was almost breathless, and walked right to the president, who stood in rolled- up shirtsleeves by the fireplace.
“What now?” the president asked for the others.
Bud looked to Landau. “You filled them in?” The DCI nodded. “Sir, the intelligence that came out concerning what is on the plane, coupled with what the Agency discovered concerning the source of the uranium, is disturbing; it validates to a high degree what we’ve suspected, with only a difference in the aircraft’s cargo. What we’ve been missing is the why. Why are they doing this?”
“Correct,” Meyerson agreed. “What do they hope to gain?”
Bud nodded. His movements were quick and sharp, signaling the seriousness of the unknown to the others. “We have that now.”
“Let’s have it,” the president said. He walked over to his desk and sat down. Meyerson and Gonzales came over, too, standing at the desk’s edge. Landau followed, moving slowly and leaning forward on a chair back.
“I just got off the phone with Gordy Jones. He relayed some new information from L.A. They found the man they believe was the connection for the assassins. His name was Marcus Jackson.”
“Was?” The president knew what it meant.
“They attempted to arrest him. An FBI agent was seriously wounded and Jackson was killed.”
The president rubbed his upper lip with the edge of his fist. “Ellis, find out the injured agent’s name.” To Bud: “Go on.”
Bud’s breathing eased. “This is all hot, so bear with me. Some paper?” The president leaned forward and handed over a pad and pen. “We have two assassins, the Khaled brothers, with a deeply personal reason for doing what they did. You already know about their little sister. Now, they did it — there’s no doubt. The FBI has positive identification on them from several sources and witnesses. The question was who helped them, and how? Well, this Jackson fellow was in the perfect position to put them in place without drawing undue attention, and since he disappeared right after the killings they went looking for him. No luck right away, but they did find the pickup point for the weapons. Jackson had stashed them there for an easy pickup by the Khaleds — that way there was no face-to-face meeting, no direct link. And for his trouble he got a million bucks, free and clean.”
“More moola spread around,” Landau said.
“A lot,” Bud agreed. “They found the majority of it at the hotel he was hiding out in. So Jackson has his money, and he thinks the Khaleds are going to cover his tracks — wrong. They left the original weapons’ crates at the pickup site after removing the stuff, after Jackson went to the trouble to sanitize the weapons. He just expected them to get rid of the packages.”