Threat Level Black af-2

by Jim DeFelice

  Threat Level Black

  ( Andy Fisher - 2 )

  Jim Defelice

  New York Times bestselling author Jim DeFelice's unconventional hero, FBI Special Agent Andy Fisher, returns in a chilling novel of international terror within our national borders.

  North Korean scientists have developed a new weapon — the "E Bomb." It can render useless any electronic system within a ten-mile radius. Andy Fisher isn't sure such a device actually exists, but when a terrorist group claims to have acquired it — along with a cache of deadly sarin gas — he isn't going to take any chances.

  The threat is more immediate than Fisher suspects: the terrorists are already proceeding toward their objective. With the lives of millions hanging in the balance, as well as the leadership of the free world, Fisher races against the clock to stop a nightmarish plague from being unleashed…

  Jim DeFelice

  Threat Level Black

  For the men and women in the FBI who bust it every day and end up dodging as much political BS as bullets.

  Part One. Shut out the Lights

  Chapter 1

  The last light went off in Manhattan three seconds after the bomb blast.

  Brooklyn, farther from the epicenter, flickered for another half-second…

  The D train had just entered the tunnel under the East River and slammed to a halt, sending its nearly one hundred passengers hurtling toward the front of the cars. The magnetic pulse that had exploded over the Con Ed power yard at the top of the island had wiped out more than just the power; all electrical devices within twenty-five miles stopped functioning — watches, radios, backup generators, old-fashioned fuses, computers, Walkmen, TV sets, electric toothbrushes, hair dryers, toasters, microwave ovens, fire alarms, security devices, video cameras, and children’s toys died, their microchips fried. Transformers, regulators, transistors, capacitors — they were all cooked by the blast.

  With the lights out in Manhattan, two cars ran through Times Square, crashing into the lobby of the Loup Theater, where a crowd had just gathered for the revival of Cats. Flight 704 from London managed to land on the darkened runway at Kennedy but then slid off the apron, just in time to witness the midair collision of two flights trying to land at nearby LaGuardia. The nearly sixty thousand people crowding into Yankee Stadium for the start of the World Series against the Braves began to riot as they rushed for the exits. A fire truck speeding to a car fire on the access ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge skidded out of control at the jammed intersection. Striking an obstruction, it went airborne, flying up and over the bridge into the dark water below. On the George Washington Bridge, a distracted driver swerved his SUV into a liquid propane truck, sending the truck crashing into a rail. The tank hit the metal obstruction at just the right angle to compress the tank sufficiently to make it explode, turning the exit for the West Side into a yawning gate of flames.

  Over on the east side of the island, the tram to Roosevelt Island stopped over the river, perched exactly 250 feet above the water. A woman aboard the car pressed her face to the glass, awed by the sight of New York completely dark. A dark shadow looped toward her; she stared at it for a moment, wondering if it was a cloud or some avenging angel sent by God. In the next moment the shadow materialized into the underside of a traffic helicopter whose gauges and controls had been devastated by the blast. The skid of the helicopter pierced the glass of the gondola, spearing the woman and her nearby companion before tearing the tram and its assembly down into the water in a huge fireball. The flames landed squarely on the deck of the Elflon Oil, a barge en route to a new floating power station about a quarter-mile upriver. The barge began to sink at the rear, leaking its fuel out into the water. Miraculously, the helicopter did not set the oil on fire; that happened a few minutes later when gasoline leaking from a tanker ignited, heating the thin layer of fuel sufficiently to turn the river into a layer of red and yellow fingers grasping desperately at anything in reach.

  Then things got really ugly…

  * * *

  “Serves the bastards right for outlawing smoking,” said Andy Fisher, turning away from the computer where the simulation was running.

  “That help you?” asked the programmer.

  “Only psychologically. I can’t stand New York.”

  “Of course, that’s only the first five minutes. It’ll take at least three months to get replacement parts for that electric yard that was fried in the blast, and God knows what else. It won’t be confined to New York, either. Remember the blackout in the summer of 2003? Spread from a few power lines in Ohio, right? Well, this thing will spread twenty times as far and at least as fast. And when the power goes out this time, it’ll stay out, at least in New York. Because the E-bomb fries everything. You don’t have a chance to pull the circuit breakers: They’re all fried. Everything’s fried. You know how long it’ll take to get replacement parts?”

  “Months.”

  “In some cases years. So you think: city without power for months? No lights, no elevators, no subways— ”

  “Yeah, but I’m sure there’s plenty of downsides.” Fisher took a last swig of the coffee — Chase & Sanborn, 2003, north side of the mountain — then went outside to have a cigarette. He was joined there half a smoke later by Michael Macklin, who headed the CERN — Homeland Security joint task force that had called Fisher in.

  “What do you think?” Macklin asked.

  Fisher shrugged. “You couldn’t have worked Godzilla into the picture somehow?”

  “He does Tokyo.”

  Fisher took a long drag on the cigarette, working it down toward his fingertips. Something about the air in suburban Virginia made cigarettes burn quicker. Fisher had a theory that the burn rate increased in inverse proportion to the distance from Washington, D.C., with the Capitol building the epicenter of inflammability. Undoubtedly there was a flatulence factor involved.

  “So is this something we worry about, or what?” asked Macklin.

  “Oh, you can always worry,” said Fisher.

  “Should we, though?”

  Fisher took a last drag of his cigarette, then tossed it to the ground and took up another. Macklin had a kind of earnestness-grating, even under the best of circumstances, whatever those might be.

  “Turning lights off in New York — not exactly the sort of thing that’s going to piss off Middle America,” said Fisher. “I know a bunch of ministers who might even get behind it.”

  “The DIA thinks it’s a real threat,” Macklin said.

  “Well, there you go, then,” said Fisher. “Obviously it’s nothing to worry about.”

  “You’re joking, right?” Macklin eyed his cigarette, but Fisher wasn’t sharing, at least not with him: The head of Homeland Security had just suggested a five-cent tax on smokes to help pay for his department. “They say it’s good intelligence. There are intercepts between this Muslim cell in Syria talking about power going out. Problem is, they’re to a cell phone that no one’s been able to find. But the DIA thinks it’s good intelligence.”

  “They ever tell you they had bad intelligence?” asked Fisher.

  Macklin shifted around nervously. “Should we go to an orange alert?”

  “What color are we at now?”

  “Yellow.”

  “You get a raise if the color changes?”

  “No way.”

  “Sucky job. You should never have left the FBI, Mack. You wouldn’t have had to worry about colors or the DIA. New York gets fried, it’s somebody else’s problem.”

  “Hey, come on, Andy, give me a break here. I didn’t want to work for Homeland Security. Leah made me do it.”

  Leah was Macklin’s wife. The pair had met while working together at the FBI several yea
rs before and, despite extensive counseling, had gotten married. From the moment he uttered the words “I do,” Macklin’s life had nose-dived: The poor slob had given up smoking, cut back on coffee, and according to the latest rumors even enlisted in a health club.

  “I’m sorry for you, Mack. I really am,” said Fisher.

  “So, can you help me out?” asked Macklin. “I need to make a recommendation to the big cheese in the morning.”

  Fisher shook his head. It was pitiful, really. In the old days, Macklin never would have called the boss — anyone, really — the “big cheese.” Marriage really did screw people up.

  “I asked Hunter to send you over because I figured you could help,” added Macklin. “Come on, Andy. Help us out here. Help me out. For old times’ sake.”

  “I am helping you,” Fisher told Macklin.

  “All you’re doing is busting my chops.”

  “That’s not help?” asked the FBI agent. He looked at his cigarette thoughtfully. Jack Hunter was executive assistant director for National Security/Special Projects, a kingdom within a kingdom within a broom closet at the FBI. He was also allegedly Fisher’s boss. Hunter had in fact sent him over to talk to Macklin, but the executive assistant director — ex-ass-dic to people in the know — had specifically instructed Fisher to be not particularly useful.

  Or, as Hunter put it, “If I wanted to help them, I’d send somebody else.”

  “Turning off the lights seems too simple,” said Fisher. “All that’s going to do is make people mad at Con Ed, the power company. That’s not exactly a major accomplishment.”

  “It’s not just turning off the lights,” said Macklin. “An E-bomb — whether they explode it over New York or Tokyo or Des Moines or wherever — every electrical device within twenty-something miles goes out. It takes months to get everything back online.”

  “Yeah, I saw the show. Something else is up.”

  “Mayhem’s not enough for you?”

  “I like mayhem, personally. It’s just not enough as a motivating factor.”

  “So, what’s going on, then?”

  Fisher sighed. “Jeez, Mack, do your own detective work. You used to work for the FBI, right?”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t like you,” said Macklin. “Come on, Andy. You’re the hot-shot hound-dog snooping machine. You look at an airplane crash and you can figure out what the pilot had for lunch.”

  “Well, sure, if it’s splattered on the windshield,” said Fisher.

  “I heard what you did with that Cyclops case.”

  Fisher shrugged. He’d just about single-handedly broken one of the most far-reaching, diabolical conspiracies ever to rack the American military and political establishments. The President had personally thanked him. Even better, Hunter had avoided him for forty-eight hours after the busts were made public.

  That and five bucks would get him a pack of cigarettes. Two packs if he got it through his Indian friends online.

  “You got to help us,” said Macklin. “We could be facing a major terrorist operation here.”

  “No offense, but all you have to go on is a three-sentence report from the DIA and one intercepted e-mail that the NSA says could be either about an E-bomb plot or the opening of a new pizza restaurant. Not a hell of a lot to go on,” said Fisher. “I will say one thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The kid who wrote that simulation program’s got a real future. I like what he did with Yankee Stadium.”

  “Jeez, Andy, if you don’t help me, I have to rely on the DIA.”

  “That’s kind of an ugly threat, Mack.”

  “What if I asked Hunter to permanently assign you to Homeland Security? You’d love it over here. Get your own expense account, nice car. We have our pick of impounds. I can probably hook you up with a drug dealer’s condo or something. You should see our office up in New York. Out in the suburbs, on the water. Tell you what: Come by around noon tomorrow and I’ll set up lunch with the big cheese himself.”

  “I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “When you join Homeland Security, do they make you go through a behavior modification program to learn to call the boss ‘big cheese’? Or do they do it with drugs?”

  “Shit, Andy.” Macklin sighed. “Can I have a cigarette?”

  Fisher reached into his jacket for the pack and shook one out. “You owe me a nickel.”

  Chapter 2

  Dr. Park Syoun Ra-ha took a deep breath and rose from his workstation, trying to appear no more nervous than any other scientist might be when called to the director’s office. The two men who had come to fetch him waited stiffly a short distance away — not out of respect but because the work done at Nyen Factory was top secret, and anyone who looked at the wrong computer screen might be accused of a crime. Inadvertent or not, merely gaining top secret information was punishable by death in North Korea. Disseminating it was a crime beyond all imagining, and giving it to the Americans must surely be ten times worse.

  Park felt his fingers trembling as he followed the men into the hallway. The complex’s name meant “kite,” but that was a convenient cover, for the items constructed here were not a child’s toys. The factory buildings nestled against a hillside north of Kujang hosted a weapons development facility that had few rivals in Asia. There were at least three different research areas, and most likely a full dozen; even Dr. Park wasn’t sure how many there were. He was personally responsible for the creation of a weapon that could send a modern city back to the Stone Age in a heartbeat.

  Dr. Park did not want to see that weapon used. He also had decided he must leave North Korea. He had combined these two goals and, after considerable debate, taken steps to fulfill them. But now as he walked to the director’s office he worried that he had acted too rashly. He worried that he would forfeit his life in a most painful manner.

  Worse, his attempt had been completely ignored by the Americans. He’d sent the e-mail nearly a week before. There had been no response.

  Dr. Park could reconcile himself to that. But he had thought that if he were going to be caught, he would have been caught nearly right away. When no one sent for him by the end of the second day after he’d sent the message, he had concluded he was safe.

  One of the guards stopped Dr. Park when they reached the director’s outer office. He knocked on the door and went inside. When he did not immediately reappear, Dr. Park wondered whether this was a good or bad sign. If they thought he was a traitor, wouldn’t they deal with him swiftly? But, on the other hand, where was the need to be swift? Letting him sweat out his guilt would be part of his punishment.

  While death would naturally be the outcome, the end would not come swiftly. On the contrary, the process of punishment would be long and slow and painful. This went without saying. He had heard stories about cattle prods and special beatings, terrible things done to a man’s privates.

  The muscles in Dr. Park’s thighs began to vibrate as he walked into the office. A pain began to grow at the back of his head on the right side, spreading quickly toward his eyes, pressing his skull the way a vise might.

  “Dr. Park,” said the director. “Welcome. You know General Kuong Ou?”

  Dr. Park felt a shock in his chest that forced the air from his lungs. Kuong was the head of the Military Research Institute, the bureaucracy that ran this plant. He commanded an army division and was related to the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, North Korea ’s father and commander in chief. He was one of the most important people in North Korea.

  Kuong’s visit here had not been announced, and to find him in the corner of the director’s office — what else could this mean but great, great distress for Dr. Park?

  Horrible distress.

  As the director began speaking, Dr. Park could think only of torture. The one happy thought that occurred to him was the fact that he had no family: His parents both had died some years before, and he had never found a wife. At least his humiliation and pain wou
ld belong only to him.

  The director’s words seemed more like stones than sounds, pelting the sides of his face, pummeling him without meaning.

  Vacation.

  Rest.

  Moscow conference.

  Reward.

  What was he saying?

  Kuong was smiling.

  Smiling?

  “Your unit has done brave work,” said Kuong. “In the current situation, it is most admirable — beyond admirable.”

  Was this part of the torture: to tell him that he was being rewarded and then send him to prison?

  But why so elaborate a ruse?

  No, they were smiling. He was… free.

  Free!

  “Our Russian comrades are hosting a conference on power generation similar to the ones you’ve attended in China,” added the director. “There’s unlikely to be anything new there, but you will have to make a full report.”

  Dr. Park looked at the director and then at the general. He struggled to return their smiles.

  “Enjoy yourself,” said the director. He began telling him of the arrangement details: An aide would accompany him as a guide and translator. Though the director did not say so, the aide would actually be a minder from the security service, prepared to report him for any infraction and willing to kill him if necessary. But typically such men were corruptible; it was a question of finding their price.

  Dr. Park had never been to Moscow.

  There were trains, connections to other cities.

  Or perhaps if he simply went to an embassy…

  Yes.

  Would the Americans take him? There had been no answer to his e-mail.

  “You do want to go?” asked the director.

  He made it sound as if Dr. Park had an option, which the scientist knew wasn’t the case. In North Korea, even recreation was mandatory.

  “You do want to go, don’t you?” added the general when he did not respond immediately.