“His organization, FSTEK, had been given the task of quietly finding that material and returning it to Russian control. He said they had already recovered some ten kilograms. He said he needed people like me, people who understood nuclear materials, to find the rest.
“I did not know it during that lunch, but already I had become a state secret. I did not go home to my dormitory after that. I have never been back since. The marshal spirited me away immediately and cut me off from the world I knew. I was not allowed to speak with my friends or even my family. My things were taken to a new apartment in Moscow, a place that I did not leave for another six months without an escort.
“Perhaps I should have been terrified. Instead, I was exhilarated. I had work to do, vital work — work that could save countless lives. Work to be proud of. Before he had used police techniques to find the nuclear material. The process was slow — it required too much human intelligence. With Geiger counters and satellites, I made the work much more efficient. In my first six months, I managed to locate another fifty kilograms of the missing plutonium — often, only a few grams at a time. In Kiev, we found some in an abandoned factory. More in a garbage pit near Krasnoyarsk. The worst was when we found sixty canisters, nearly three full kilograms, in a railroad siding outside of Moscow, hidden in among general stores and supplies for the maintenance of trains. The men who worked there, the railroad men, they had seen the canisters every day, had walked past them and never even wondered what was inside. One of the canisters was not properly shielded, and it… leaked. Most of the men I spoke to are… dead now.”
She shook her head. “This was our worst discovery. It was not, however, the most dangerous. We found two kilograms were sitting in a warehouse in Bucharest. We tracked the men who had moved the plutonium to that warehouse. We found they were gangsters, the worst kind of criminal. And that they had a buyer — a man known to have affiliations with North Korea. The material had to be recovered, at any cost.
“We could not simply go there and take it away from them. We had no authority outside the borders of Russia. We needed someone who could infiltrate the gang and steal the material. This is when I became a true operative. I begged Marshal Bulgachenko to allow me to go, personally, to recover the material. He did not wish to agree. He thought of me as a child still, a little girl, incapable of such a thing. I did my best to persuade him I was the right one for the job. In the end I believe he relented only because I already knew all the details. Choosing another agent would mean briefing them, telling them secrets that were vital to state security.
“I received intensive training before the mission began. I took a crash course in the Romanian language. I learned how to fire a gun, though I was never very good at that — no marksman, certainly. I was given combat training, hand-to-hand fighting techniques and the like, by a man who had been a trainer for the Spetsnaz, our special forces. That was the hardest part: day after day of exercises, of sparring and then fighting with blunted knives. Every night I would come home to my bed bruised and sore in new places, desperately tired, but I would have to stay up to read more intelligence reports, more daily updates on the Romanian gang.
“Jim, you have heard some of the actual mission. I went to Romania, where the transfer was to take place. There I found Bogdan. He was in desperate trouble, about to be arrested for sedition. The sentence would be death. In exchange for his life — I do not know how it was arranged, someone made a deal — in exchange for immunity, he agreed to hack into the files of the gang, and of the buyers.
“When Bogdan told me where the exchange was to be made, in a parking structure in Bucharest, I went there with twenty men, all of them highly trained soldiers. Things… went wrong. The gangsters were ready for us somehow; they were armed with machine guns. The buyers came with their own security. There was a firefight that lasted for nearly ten minutes, and at the end only I and two of my soldiers remained standing. All of us were wounded.
“There was no time… the local police were closing in. The gangsters had reinforcements coming. I did not have time to think things through. I made… I made a very bad mistake. The plutonium was in a bag, a kind of duffel bag with lead shielding. I picked it up and carried it from that place. I had to make my way most carefully out of Romania, often by hitchhiking or stowing away on trains. I could not allow myself to be caught by police, you see — not with what I was carrying. For six weeks I never let that bag out of my sight, not until I was back in Russia. I took it to an FSTEK facility and there, finally, I turned it over to technicians who could dispose of it properly.
“They opened the bag and took out the plutonium and I thought I was done, that my mission was over and a success. It was only then one of the technicians — he was dressed in a full hazard suit, and he would only touch the bag with lead-lined gloves. He looked at me with eyes that were… very sad. He opened the bag and showed me the lead lining, the shielding that had protected me from the radioactivity over those six weeks.
“He showed me there was a hole in it. During the firefight, a bullet had pierced the bag. Cut almost clear through the lining.
“For six weeks I had been carrying a bag full of the most toxic substance the world has ever seen. For six weeks, it had been poisoning me. And I never knew.”
“You were — irradiated?” Chapel asked, barely able to believe her story.
“The lining was not pierced entirely. If it had been, I would have died within hours of picking up that bag. As it was I only received a moderate dose of radiation.”
“How much?” Chapel asked.
She shrugged. “Perhaps twenty, maybe thirty millisieverts per day.”
Chapel was unsure what that meant.
Nadia looked him straight in the eye. “It was the equivalent, say, of having my whole body x-rayed once per day. For more than forty days in a row. It is a… significant exposure.”
She stood up and went over to the tablet hanging in the tree. She spoke directly to Hollingshead as she went on. “I was examined by many doctors. They told me there was one immediate effect: I was now sterile. The radiation had destroyed all my eggs. I will never have children, now. But this seemed less important to them than the other effect, that I had increased my possibility of dying from cancer at an early age. I asked them for specifics, but they said with cancer there was no such thing, that one could never predict what would happen. I asked for an estimate, a guess. I said, what is the percentage chance that I will die of a cancer before I am forty?
“They said, ninety-nine percent.”
“Nadia,” Chapel said, though he had no idea what he would say next. How do you comfort someone who’s gotten news like that?
She ignored his sympathy. “I went to Marshal Bulgachenko and told him all this and he wept. He had a bottle of vodka in his desk, still sealed. He said it had been given to him by Andropov. He opened it that night and we talked for a very long time, talked and drank. I could not seem to get drunk, or perhaps not drunk enough. The marshal said I should retire from FSTEK, retire and move somewhere pretty and end my days looking at water. The sea, the ocean… I said no. I said instead I wished to use what time remained to me to do something vital. Something useful.
“The marshal told me he had something in mind. It was very, very secret but we had finished off his special bottle by then and I think he would have told me anything. He spoke of Perimeter that night, and it was the first time I ever heard of it. He told me what it had been designed to do. He told me of the great shame around it, that so much of it was forgotten, untouchable. He said it had long been his dream to dismantle Perimeter.