“How do you know all of this?” Venice asked.
Maryanne continued as if she hadn’t heard. “Gregory left, and he left angry. He called Bernard a traitor and he disappeared. Two weeks later, as Bernard was between the front door of his house and his car, on his way to work, an unknown man jumped from behind a bush and beat him with a baseball bat. Broke his right shin, his left forearm, and three ribs. Didn’t say a word until after the beating was finished, but then told him that he would do as Gregory asked, or he’d find his wife blinded by acid and his son crippled with a baseball bat.”
“Now that sounds like Chechen payback,” Jonathan said. Chechen rebels had recently killed over three hundred schoolchildren in a terrorist raid in Russia. Nasty, nasty folks to get crosswise.
“This is where I come in,” Maryanne explained. With a nod toward Venice, “And how I know all these details. Of course Bernard agreed to comply — it’s always smart to agree with the guy who’s trying to kill you — but he had no intention of doing so. He called the FBI, and I became his case agent.”
“Case agent for what?”
“You doubled him, didn’t you?” Jonathan guessed.
Maryanne nodded. “Historically, we’ve found that newly minted citizens are often the most patriotic. In Bernard Mitchell’s case—”
“What’s his real name?” Boxers interrupted.
“None of your business,” she said. “And if that’s a deal breaker, then we are done.”
Jonathan didn’t press the point. He’d seen this before. For whatever reason, aliases and birth names, once declared to be classified, tended to remain that way — to the point where confessed terrorists who had been put into witness protection in return for their testimony against their former jihad-buddies were able to disappear and recycle themselves in their old stomping grounds because nobody updated the no-fly lists with their new names. Jonathan saw no urgency in knowing Mitchell’s real name.
“In Bernard Mitchell’s case, he was furious at the threat to his family and ashamed of the actions of his friend. His was one of the best motivations in the world — revenge. I told him that the easiest way to protect him would be to put him to work for us. We would feed him with false information that was laced with just enough truth to make it seem reasonable. If we did our jobs right, as the Chechens followed the bread crumbs, we’d be able to see where they were going and what they were doing.
“Financially, it was a pretty sweet gig for the Mitchells. Bernard was on three payrolls simultaneously — the rebels were paying him for his espionage, we were paying him for playing along, and ARC was paying him for his real expertise.”
“I don’t quite follow what kind of useful, sustainable intel he could provide,” Jonathan said. “I mean, you can dance for a while, but sooner or later, wouldn’t he have to cough up a nuke?”
Maryanne smiled.
“You’re shitting me,” Boxers said. “You gave up nuclear warheads? Tell me they were dummies.”
“They were doctored,” she said. “To set off a warhead requires a complex series of electronic impulses. To initiate the process requires a complex code. We changed the code.”
“But there’s still a nuclear warhead?” Venice asked.
“There had to be,” Maryanne said. “There’s a predictable amount of radiation leakage outside of the warhead casing. We needed to keep the radioactive material in place, or else the leakage wouldn’t be there, and without the leakage, they’d know that they had a fake.”
“I can’t imagine a single thing that might go wrong with that plan,” Boxers said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
“Trust me,” Maryanne said. “Without the codes, these things are just radioactive paperweights.”
“You just used the plural,” Jonathan said. “How many are we talking about?”
“A few.”
“Can you put a little more meat on that number?”
“Five to eight.”
Boxers’ jaw dropped as he leaned in closer. “You don’t even know the precise number?”
“It’s complicated,” Maryanne said, “but yes, we don’t know the precise number.”
“How big are they?” Venice asked.
Maryanne shook her head. “Not very. Full-up, with the casing, they’re about six inches in diameter, a little over thirty inches long, and weigh under a hundred fifty pounds.”
“So, they’re not all that powerful,” Venice concluded. She seemed relieved.
“Zero-point-seven-kiloton yield, give or take.”
“Before you take solace in that number,” Jonathan warned, “she’s saying that the warheads are the equivalent of seven thousand tons of TNT.”
“So, we’re talking artillery rounds,” Boxers said. “The equivalent of our W-forty-eights.”
From the early sixties through the early nineties, the US, its allies, and the Soviets all developed nuclear warheads that could be fired from standard artillery pieces. They were rendered obsolete by more reliable delivery systems, but the Soviets apparently felt compelled to keep some of them around.
“Did the Russians know you were playing this game with their mortal enemies?” Jonathan asked.
“Of course not. In fact, Russian records showed that the very warheads we were tracking had in fact been destroyed.”
“You’re saying they lied?” Venice said.
“It’s what they do,” Maryanne said. “That in itself became an important data point. It was useful to know that our new allies would rather lie than be embarrassed.”
“So what went wrong?” Jonathan asked.
“We’re not sure. About a year ago, Bernard’s Chechen friends started getting anxious, started making unreasonable demands. We got the sense that they were testing him to make sure he was really on their team.”
Venice said, “That means someone tipped them off? That must have scared the Mitchells to death.”
“It gets better,” Maryanne said. “Not only do we suspect that someone tipped off the Chechens, we think someone tipped off the Russians, too. They found out that we were playing nuclear games with terrorists and they were not happy.”
“This does not seem unreasonable to me,” Boxers said.
“We were learning a lot about Chechen terrorist networks,” Maryanne said. “So, now, all of a sudden, there’s a back-channel diplomatic firestorm. CIA is pissed, and State is furious. The White House was blindsided, and your friend Wolverine has had some serious explaining to do. Overall, the last few weeks have been interesting.”
“So,” Jonathan said. “About the hit on the Mitchells.”
Maryanne uncrossed her legs and recrossed them the other way. “Yeah, about that. We don’t know exactly. As things got progressively hotter with the Chechens, Bernard fell out of touch with the Bureau. He started skipping our regular meetings, wouldn’t return phone calls.”
“Probably because he was frightened,” Venice said.
“Undoubtedly. But that’s not how it works. When you’re on my payroll, you play by my rules.”
“You started applying pressure,” Jonathan guessed.
“I had to. I was worried that he might be considering going rogue and working for the other side. I needed to keep tabs, and he wasn’t playing along.”
Jonathan’s eyes narrowed as a piece fell into place in his head. “I think I see where you’re going,” he said. “You applied a little too much pressure. You drove him to the other side.”
“I don’t know that for a fact, but I suspect it, yes. And here’s the really embarrassing part — we think he got the arming codes for the warheads.”