The Threat

“New news,” Bloom said. “I made a couple more calls on that last issue we talked about? And guess what? The bad stuff got away.”

“I’m sorry?” His mind was elsewhere. “Uh — what bad stuff?”

“You know what bad stuff. The shit they make there.”

He was back in the picture, despite the agent’s elliptical references. “You said they said they never got to it.”

“That’s what their honchos put out. Right. But it isn’t what happened.”

He tensed. Cupped the phone to his ear. “Okay, I know this isn’t a secure line. But can you—”

“They flew off with the pixie powder,” Bloom said. “Enough to turn a whole bunch of folks into pixies.”

“Shit!”

“Where are you now?”

“In Fairfax.”

“Pay phone? Picked at random? Okay, what I’m hearing is, they got away with thirteen hundred pounds of encapsulated isotope.”

“Thirteen hundred pounds?” A woman lighting a cigarette a few steps away looked up, startled, and he lowered his voice. “Is that what you said?”

“Yeah, but that’s not isotope weight. Far from it — most of that’s going to be the lead shielding. But it’s two months’ output. And hot, hot

stuff. Cesium, mostly. Fresh out of the reactor. They hit the plant the day before shipment. Obviously had inside intelligence.”

His head was going at about sixteen miles a second. So the fanciful scenario he’d developed on the road might be more than that.

And in that chilling moment he understood that no one else, no other site or agency in the whole edifice of government, military, the intelligence community, had the information to put together that he, Bloom, and Ed Lynch had. Each agency would know a bit. This fragment or that. But nobody else had enough pieces to show a picture that had been jigsawed apart by someone more cunning and patient and inventive than any other adversary he’d ever faced.

The downside was, he had no proof. Only supposition.

It was exactly the kind of event he’d thought the Threat Cell might pick up. The trouble was, there was no Threat Cell yet. So there were no procedures to put out an alert, get other agencies involved, the way there were for an imminent military attack or an impending natural disaster. He felt sweat break along his hairline, and dragged his sleeve across it.

At the same time, he might be wrong. He was already walking a narrow line. If he cried wolf on this one, and no wolf was stalking the flock …

“I don’t like the sound of this,” he said. “With what Ed dug up about the UPS flights, and what that other guy, the one we caught, said the cartel was planning to do—”

“Thinking the same thing, boss. So where do we go with it?”

He looked at his watch, knowing there was no way he could go back in now and eat a quiet dinner with his daughter. “There’s only one place we can do anything from. I’m on my way.”

“Sit Room?”

“Call me there in an hour. Get hold of Marty and Ed and tell them to come in. And find out as much more in the meantime as you can.”

“How about Alvarado?”

Dan remembered his suspicions about the Coast Guard lieutenant commander, that if anyone inside his own office was the leak to the cartel, it might be Luis. Or was that prejudice, just because the guy was Hispanic? And worked his tail off, and stayed late? He said reluctantly, “Yeah, Luis too — but don’t tell him what it’s about, okay? Just tell him to get his tail in to the Eighteen.”

“You’re really gonna bust the glass on the red box, huh?”

“You don’t think I should?”

“Hey,” Bloom laughed, “I don’t know. But it’s about as good a way to go down in flames as any.”

15

He gave his daughter money for a taxi and told her he was sorry but that he really had to go. He didn’t like the disappointment in her eyes, but didn’t see anything he could do about it but promise to get together again soon.

The roads were slick and there were accidents working, strobes searing the mist, so it wasn’t until midnight that he actually got to the Ellipse. He stalked head down through the blowing rain to the West Wing. The marines weren’t out, even in rain gear. That meant the president wasn’t in residence. Dan wondered where he was, but dismissed it as something he didn’t care enough to wonder about.

As far as he was concerned, the asshole could be grilling in hell.

Lynch and Alvarado got up as he came into the admin staff area. “Marty’s on her way,” Ed said. “But it may take her a while, there’s flooding in her neighborhood.”

Dan said fine, looking past them to where the duty officers and comm techs sat in the brightly lit, always flickering-live intensity of the watch center. The night crew here got just as much action as the day people, since night in Washington was day in Asia and the Middle East. He was glad to see Roald’s helmet of dark hair in the director’s cubicle. First he’d see if he could convince her. He’d already resolved on the drive in that if he couldn’t, he’d let it go. He was supposed to interdict drugs, not terror attacks.