He opened the decorative wrought-iron gate and climbed up to the stoop. He pushed the doorbell. Over and over and over again. He heard Venice say, “Oh, my God, Digger,” and then he heard movement from inside. He kept pressing the button.
“It had better be an emergency,” Boxers roared from somewhere beyond the door, “or there’s by God going to be a corpse on the sidewalk!” Not everyone who said stuff like that meant it literally. Boxers was an exception.
Jonathan saw Big Guy’s shadow approaching from beyond the mottled glass and noted that he was moving… with purpose. Even as the door tore open to reveal Boxers’ towering form, Jonathan continued to press the button.
“Goddammit!” Big Guy roared. “This had better—” Recognition came immediately. “Dig? What the hell?” He looked past Jonathan’s shoulder to see Venice and Maryanne. “Am I throwing a party I didn’t know about?”
“Can we come in?”
Boxers hesitated. Uncharacteristically self-conscious, he looked down at himself. Clearly roused from bed, he wore a pair of — wait for it — boxers and a T-shirt.
“Don’t worry,” Jonathan said. “You’re fine. We’re the ones who are overdressed.”
Big Guy pivoted out of the way to allow them to pass. Jonathan beckoned for the others, and thirty seconds later, they were inside and standing in the foyer.
“I didn’t know you liked antiques,” Venice said.
Because of his size and his penchant for violence, many people underestimated Boxers’ intellect and sensitivity. The artifacts in the room were more than mere antiques. Many of them were collectibles worthy of museums. To Jonathan, all of it was either a vase or a statue.
“I think I’ll go put some pants on,” Big Guy said. The ancient stairs creaked as he climbed to the second floor.
“I heard that he was a large man,” Maryanne said. “But I don’t think I understood the scale of it.”
“Definitely better to have him on your side than the other,” Jonathan said. “Let’s have a seat.” He led the way to the right of the foyer into the living room, which was dominated by a shallow fireplace. Typical of the nineteenth century, when fireplaces were a main source of heat, the lack of depth often made twenty-first-century citizens nervous about having a fire so close to their living space. Jonathan happened to know that Boxers had spent a small fortune getting that fireplace certified to modern fire codes, and that he routinely kept it stocked and burning during the winter months. The antique theme carried into the living room, but with a modern flair that allowed for comfortable, oversized cushions.
“Look at all the books,” Venice said, taking in the floor-to-ceiling shelves that flanked the fireplace. “I had no idea.”
“Box is an interesting guy,” Jonathan said. He winked. “Don’t let on to others that he knows how to read. It’ll ruin everything.”
Jonathan helped himself to the end of a love seat closest to the foyer, while Venice took the opposite end.
Maryanne shifted her gaze back and forth from the two leather chairs that flanked the fireplace. “Which one?” she asked.
Jonathan pointed to the one on the left. “That one has the bigger butt print,” he said. “I’d take the one on the right.”
She sat.
Boxers was back down in three minutes. “Okay, Dig. What gives, and who’s this?” He pointed to Maryanne.
Jonathan brought him up to speed with what they knew so far. “Now, given Agent Rhoades’s persistence, I’m guessing that we’re about to hear the details that she previously didn’t want to share.” He looked at Maryanne. “Am I correct?”
Maryanne sat forward in her chair. “You can never repeat what I’m about to tell you.”
Jonathan rolled his eyes. Oh, please.
Maryanne caught it. “Bear with me,” she said. “Back in the late eighties, when people on our side of the Iron Curtain were drunk with our defeat of the Soviet Union, the apparatchiks on the other side were running for their lives, both literally and figuratively. Glasnost and Perestroika brought with them a world of insecurity for a lot of once-important and now irrelevant people.
“Power grabs became the way of their world, and there were a hell of a lot more groups to worry about. The Czech Republic, Georgia, the ’Stans, and God knows how many other former Soviet republics were all claiming their independence politically. That posed a huge problem in terms of strategic weapons.”
“The nukes were spread all over the place,” Jonathan said, jumping ahead in her story.
“Exactly. The Politburo, God love them, were the scaredest of the lot, presumably because they knew what disaster could be wrought by the loss of central command authority. They also knew that they couldn’t account for every warhead. While that detail didn’t become clear until later, the US had long suspected such.”
Jonathan exchanged a look with Boxers but said nothing. Back in their Unit days, the two of them had crawled through the weeds in that part of the world to help determine that very fact.
Maryanne continued, “NATO forces initiated Operation Gardenia, funded mostly by our federal government, to locate and reconsolidate all the scattered nukes under central Russian control.”
Venice reared back in her seat and raised her hand. “Wait a minute. You’re telling me that we actually helped our scariest enemy reacquire nuclear warheads?”
Boxers laughed. “You look surprised. Do you have any idea how many times your boss and I have been shot at by weapons purchased by the same Uncle who sent us into battle against them?”
“Remember,” Maryanne said, “after the fall, Russia was our new good friend. The powers that be were confident that they would never use the weapons against us.”
“Unbelievable,” Venice said.
“Moving on,” Maryanne said. “We thought we got them all, but when you’re dealing with those kinds of numbers, there was no way to be sure.”
“Let me guess,” Jonathan says. “We were wrong.”
“Exactly. And by quite a lot. More than twenty, although that’s really just a rounding error considering the thousands of warheads that were involved.”
Boxers tossed his hands in the air and guffawed. “Well, then, if we’re only talking twenty twenty-five-megaton warheads, what’s the point of talking at all?”
“What does this have to do with the Mitchells?” Jonathan asked. “I know you told me he had nuclear engineering experience, but how does that come into play?”
“Here’s where it gets a little complicated.”
“Just use small words and I’ll try to keep up,” Jonathan said. He hoped his irony was transparent.
“Bernard and Sarah Mitchell are from Chechnya,” Maryanne explained. “As you might know, that’s not the most stable corner of the world.”
“Never has been,” Jonathan said. “Their terrorists make Hadji look like an amateur.”
“So you already know,” Maryanne said. “That’s good. That’s helpful. When he expatriated to the United States, he went to work for a company in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, called Applied Radiation Corporation, which managed the reclamation of radiologically contaminated military facilities.”
“Uh-oh,” Boxers said.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Maryanne said. “Yes, he was involved in Operation Gardenia, but he was a good guy. A couple of years into it, he was approached by an old friend named Gregory, from Chechnya, who shared with him an ambitious plan to seek retribution for the years of Soviet brutality. He wanted Bernard to share information on the location of old nukes.”
“Actually,” Boxers said, “this is running pretty close to what I was thinking.”
“Here’s where it goes different,” Maryanne assured. “This Gregory guy was a good friend, and there are few people in the world who hated the Soviet Union more than Bernard. But Bernard was also a family man, and he was proud of his then-recent American citizenship. He pushed Gregory away and told him to never contact him again.”