It was that afternoon that everything changed. Katia had gone to take a shower. She often did this earlier in the day to avoid the other women. With the water running and facing the spray, she didn’t see or hear them. The big Mexican and two of her friends came into the large communal shower bay behind her. They were wearing sweats and running shoes. Even though the Mexican was large and outweighed Katia by at least fifty pounds, she always traveled with at least two others.
One of them groped Katia from behind. When she turned around, startled, and tried to cover herself with her hands, they all laughed.
“Relax, we’re not going to hurt you. We’re just going to have a little fun,” said the big one. When she reached out and tried to touch her, Katia pulled away. Then they started with the insults. They told her how worthless Ticas were, how the Costa Rican women preened like peacocks, showing their bodies in order to kowtow to the gringos. Katia turned and tried to finish her shower.
“Don’t you turn your back on me, bitch.” The big Mexican grabbed Katia, spun her around, pulled her out of the spray, and pushed her against the tiled wall where the Mexicans could get at her without getting wet. The big Mexican’s two friends grabbed Katia’s arms and held them to the wall. The big Mexican pumped some soap into her hand from the dispenser on the wall and rubbed it on Katia’s face and into her eyes.
“Leave her alone!”
Katia’s eyes burned. She couldn’t see a thing, but she heard the voice. It came from somewhere outside the shower bay.
Suddenly the two women released Katia’s arms. She slid along the wall, away from them, toward the running shower. While they had their backs turned, Katia was able to quickly rinse some of the stinging soap from her eyes. In the yellow haze she saw Daniela standing in the entrance to the shower bay. She was wearing shorts, a jail top, and running shoes. There was a sheen of sweat on her body, as if she might have been out in the yard running.
“Why don’t you just leave her alone?” said Daniela.
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” said the big Mexican. “Unless maybe you would like some of this too.”
“I don’t think there’s enough of you to go around,” said Daniela.
“Oh, you think so?”
“I know so.”
It happened so quickly that Katia wasn’t even sure what she saw. Through the lingering sting and blur of soap she remembered a flash of slick, muscled body as Daniela closed the distance. She came at them so fast and with so much aggression that the first instinct of the Mexican’s was to back up. This forced one of them, the one closest to Katia, into the spray of the shower.
They braced themselves with their hands out, ready to take her. But Daniela was no longer there. She had dipped down onto her hands on the tile floor and spun her body. With a single powerful sweep of her muscled leg, she reached out and swept the feet from under all three of them.
Katia remembered the sound. It reminded her of coconuts on concrete as their heads hit the hard tile floor. The next thing Katia knew, the three women were on their backs, sliding across the soap-covered tile as if in slow motion. They lay there for several seconds with their mouths open, dazed.
Only one of them tried to get up. It was the big Mexican, and it was a mistake. She held on to the wall to steady herself, got to her feet, and with a look of fury in her eyes, she got a bead on Daniela, lowered her shoulder, and charged.
The sleek Colombiana stepped to one side, like a toreador in a bullring. She grabbed the Mexican by the hair as she passed and redirected her head, faceup, right into the tile wall.
Katia remembered the dull thud, the vibration against the wall, and the red river of the Mexican’s blood that was flushed by the running water down the drain.
The woman lay there on the floor for more than a minute before her wide-eyed friends even stirred to help her, and when they did, they gave Daniela a wide berth in order to get there.
Katia thought the Mexican might be dead. But it didn’t even seem to faze Daniela. To her it was simply the natural order of things, the law of the jungle in jail.
Katia and Daniela had spent most of the time since the shower altercation hanging together and talking.
Daniela told Katia that she had been arrested three days earlier in San Diego on charges related to drugs. But, of course, like everyone else in the jail, she was not guilty.
Paul had told Katia not to talk about her case with anyone, and so she did not. Even when Daniela asked Katia what she was in for, Katia told her flatly that her lawyers had told her it was best not to discuss the matter. It was difficult. Katia knew that she owed her safety and her newfound sense of independence to her friend.
After lockdown in the evenings they played cards, as they did tonight on top of the small table in the cell. Daniela had taught her several new games. Tonight they were into the third hand of gin rummy and Katia was having difficulty trying to decide whether to discard a three or a five when the cart rolled up in the hallway, outside their door. Katia turned her head to look. It was clean towels for the next day.
“I’ll get it, you play,” said Daniela. She got up, walked over, and watched through the thick glass in the door as the laundry inmate outside stacked two towels. The inmate was about to put the towels on the pass-through, the metal device like a large mail slot next to the door. Then one of the male guards came down the hall. Starched uniform, sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, hair in a crew cut, he stopped at the cart and talked to the inmate. Daniela couldn’t hear what they said, but her heart nearly stopped when the guard looked at the towels, then reached into them for a quick frisk while he looked into the laundrywoman’s eyes. Guards often found drugs and other contraband this way.
He went on and the laundrywoman gave him a contemptuous sneer. Then she placed the two stacked towels into the pass-through. Daniela took them on the other side.
“Okay, I laid down the five,” said Katia.
“Just a sec.” Daniela put one towel on Katia’s bottom bunk. The other she put on her own mattress. As she did so, she slipped her hand into the inner fold of the towel to feel for the tiny raised points of the checkered plastic handle. It was not much bigger than the box the playing cards came in, but the Walther PPK.308 carried a deadly punch. It was all she would need.
Yakov Nitikin could stall no longer. Alim was growing restless. Increasingly he conferred with the technician his own government had sent. The man was not familiar with the Russian device, but he knew enough about weapons design to realize that the time for assembly had arrived.
The barrel was clean. There was no corrosion, and the few tiny traces of oxidation that appeared on the metal parts had been meticulously cleaned and removed by careful handwork using strips of emery cloth. This was followed by a bath in light machine oil to remove any residue of abrasives left by the cloth.
Nitikin supervised all of it. First he instructed Alim’s men and then he watched them as they worked. He paid particular attention to the inside bore of the gun’s smooth barrel. Yakov was looking for any signs of pitting in the metal surface, anything that might cause drag or slow the speed of the projectile as it was fired down the barrel. The muzzle velocity required was a thousand feet per second, roughly the speed of an American.45-caliber bullet.
Even though the projectile was not designed or intended to clear the muzzle, and the barrel was less than three feet long, any significant reduction in velocity would result in a premature detonation. As the two subcritical elements of uranium came in close proximity, but before they could properly be assembled under pressure to initiate a chain reaction, a small nuclear explosion would tear the device apart, what physicists had long called a fizzle. Radiation would spill out, but it would be largely confined and easily cleaned up. The device and the entire mission would be a failure.