From prior experience, Cono doubted that the hapless CIA staff at the embassy could have picked up what Katerina knew. He guessed that she was still working her sadistic admirer, Kurgat, and that he was a pillow chatterbox.
“It’s worse,” Katerina said. “One of my stringers says the local police arrested two foreigners last week. They had diagrams for making a simple device, where one chunk of high-U slams into another. The foreigners were released. Pressure from high up.”
“So, you think I can help you in some way,” Cono said. “And preserve the interests of your good friend Mr. K at the same time? After all, even the minister of the interior needs a little help from his friends sometimes.”
Katerina drew her head back and glared at him. A little too angrily, he thought.
“Cono, don’t you see what they will do with the uranium?” Katerina whacked her hand on the water. “Once the jihadis have it, it’s child’s play to make a bomb, or bombs.”
“And you think if you can stop the transfer to them, this will be the big score that makes the Americans give you your freedom. At last.”
“My handler, Simmons, before he got called back … he said they couldn’t deny it to me if this one thing went right.” There it was again—the slight change of timbre in her voice that had earlier made Cono sense ambivalence.
“Katerina, buy your own freedom. I’ll give you the money to do it.”
She put her hand on Cono’s knee. “But I know too much now. If I run … if it’s not with their backing … they know everything about my mother, my father, my brother, my little sister.”
Cono saw his own mother in his mind, teaching him to dance on the beach, her bare brown abdomen beading with sweat before his eyes. She was dead. His father too. His grandmother. There was no one else to worry about.
There was a splash and another splash as two kids dove into the pool, followed by a shout of praise from the instructor.
“And what of Mr. Kurgat?” Cono asked. “You seem to have reconciled with him. I’d make him your backup plan in case the Americans ditch you. He’s a friend in the know, after all.” Katerina’s little finger contracted against Cono’s knee for an instant, and then, as if to conceal the involuntary movement, she made her hand retreat in a titillating glide across his thigh.
“He’s older now.” Katerina’s voice lowered. “The pills don’t even work for him. He just wants me to lie naked with him. And there’s no choice. It’s part of my assignment, the reason the Americans hired me in the first place.”
“No more biting?”
“No more biting.”
“Ah, men losing the power in their dicks. When they can no longer fuck their women, they fuck the world.” Cono slid down the steps to douse himself in the water, and pressed with his arms to lift himself back up. The movement caused his triceps to ripple.
“I took a chance, telling you all this.” Katerina was stern. She had changed in the intervening years, but there was still truth in her voice. Either that or she was a witch of deception. “Now tell me what you were doing with Zheng Lu Peng.”
Cono’s eyes returned from their scan of the perimeter of the pool deck and the fence around it. “So that’s his name. He didn’t have the good manners to introduce himself, despite being dressed like a gentleman. I’d guess he’s a fan of yours too.”
Katerina waited in silence.
“It was my little assignment, to meet with him,” Cono said, “in exchange for the liberty of my trapped woman friend. I was just an errand boy who happens to speak Mandarin. You’re a busy woman, in so many places at the same time, listening in on so many telephones. I can see why the Americans want to keep you under their thumb. Makes me wish I was on that long flight out of here.”
“I didn’t tell the Americans, Cono. I didn’t tell anyone you’re here.”
Cono searched for the telltale signals of dissimulation on Katerina’s face, but her wet hair was draping her features. He leaned back and let his head sink until the water reached his earlobes. “What else?”
“Zheng Lu Peng is Beijing’s new man here. I don’t know what he’s up to. Simmons thinks it’s more than oil.”
“Katerina, Katerina, you have so many worries on your shoulders. It’s a good thing they are so strong.”
“They aren’t strong enough for this. Not alone. The big problem is the uranium. How will you ever enjoy a meal or make love again after you see the news? How would you live with yourself? Half a million people killed, no matter what city it blows up in. Thousands of little kids like those over there.” Katerina pointed at three children poised to dive. “And after half a million dead, the dying continues for the ones who weren’t incinerated; they die later from the radiation, like at home, in Ukraine.”
Cono’s forehead creased in puzzlement. “You mean the reactor that blew up.”
Katerina’s face flushed instantly. “Yes. Chernobyl. Two of my cousins and their families lost everything.” Her rising voice was thick with anger. “One cousin’s baby was born with no arms or legs. And there was a little girl who died of leukemia, daughter of my cousin Nadya, a mother of three who now has tumors growing out of her skin. In a full nuclear explosion, they’d be counted as the lucky ones, not like my sister, who ...”
Katerina stopped. “I don’t think it’s possible for you to understand,” she said quietly, “unless you have seen it yourself.”
The children at the end of the pool dove in and rose up and slapped the water, trying to find the edge. Cono saw their little fingers clawing for the lip of the deck.
“What do you want me to do?”
“You’re buddies with Timur Betov; he’s your friend. How that can be, I don’t know. Help us get close to him, get a device or a tracker on him, so we’ll be there to squelch the transfer of the uranium. Please, Cono. I need your help.” Katerina held his gaze as he searched her eyes.
A long moment passed. Friends, Cono thought. What is my friend Katerina not telling me?
Despite the wringing he’d given them, Cono’s boxer shorts were still uncomfortably wet as he sat in the car he’d flagged several blocks away from the bustle of Avenue Abay.
Katerina was certain the transfer was due to take place the next day, she had told him. Cono had said he’d try to help and had taken her private phone number, but he hadn’t disclosed to her the location he suspected. If she were to call in the bumblers at the embassy … he’d seen that before. It smelled like a mess in the making, a mess with the highest stakes. Cono could simply walk away from the stench. And yet, maybe he had become addicted after all—addicted to being the pivot point, to being as central as that crucial joint between copulating man and woman, but with a danger that did not know the bounds of orgasm. What was more, Katerina was right about one thing—if he didn’t do his utmost, and the high-U was later detonated, how would he ever live with himself?
What Katerina had said, if it was true, combined with what Cono knew, meant that Timur was arranging two wings to lift him to the top. Beijing, in its quest for control of the country, would lift one wing, and the jihadis, with their desire for the high-U, would lift the other. Cono’s inadvertent presence in Almaty had provided Timur with an arm’s-length way to play Zheng Lu Peng, who had said that the timetable for the oil bid had been moved up by Cono’s “boss,” who was obviously now dealing outside the chain-of-command. Timur’s instructions to Cono, in his darkened apartment, to make the rounds as an oil-contract auction boy, were a decoy, a ruse. Only support from the Beijing sow mattered, and it had to come fast. Being seen with the Chinese during Xiao Li’s rescue at the Hotel Svezda had endangered Timur’s plans, Cono saw more clearly now. It had confirmed Kurgat’s suspicion of Timur’s intentions to cut a deal with Beijing, provoking both men to act now.
With one wing ready to soar, Timur must have revved up the jihadis. He’d probably sequestered the high-U years back, when he’d shot to the top of the Bureau. “Maybe a little thanks to you,” he’d said on the phone when Cono
had tracked him down from Istanbul. No doubt Timur had been waiting for his chance to use the high-U as a lever for a long time.
With both wings rising, Timur could regard the premier as irrelevant. Minister Kurgat, on the other hand, was taking potshots at Timur twice a day on average, so far.
And what winds were set to blow under Katerina’s wings? The Americans were using her and her talents like fodder. They would continue to string her along; she must know this, unless she was blinded by some illusion of allegiance. On the other side, dear toothy Mr. K could offer her a sealed marble mansion among the embassies and new high-security expat enclaves strung along the boulevards up toward the mountains. She could stroke his fat belly as he promised a Western passport that would never come, and she would stare out the windows until the day arrived when Kurgat’s protection of her crumbled, and he couldn’t even protect himself.
And yet with that bleak horizon before her eyes, Katerina had said the first problem was the uranium. All the children dying. It came to that: women and their children. Even women and the children who did not belong to them. It was the only force in the world resisting the centrifugal destructive rage of men.
Katerina didn’t add up. He could feel that she wasn’t being straightforward with him, but her sense of urgency about the high-U danger was real, and Cono was relieved that beneath her slightly hardened skin, her motives seemed to extend beyond her selfish survival impulses. And what a survivor she had proven herself to be.
Cono’s impromptu taxi passed an Internet café. Four blocks later he told the driver to pull into an alley and stop next to a row of garbage containers. He got out of the cab and stepped into a gap between the containers, waiting to see if anyone was following him. After several minutes he walked briskly through a maze of back alleys, eventually doubling back to the café. He wanted to see if he could find any information on the Web to confirm Katerina’s story, and to reacquaint himself with HEU. He had no choice now. Do nothing when his fingers were on the fulcrum of a disaster? Impossible.
The young man minding the café was Chinese; he looked like an eager college student, with black plastic glasses riding low on his nose.
“How’s business?” Cono asked in Mandarin, surprising the youth and making him smile.
“Well, there is business.”
“Almaty a new home for you? Like it?”
“Home is always China, but we’re here to stay.”
“Why?”
“We can do what we want. My parents and I can stuff the piggy bank for the future. No government guy taking our operation or shutting us down. Bribes, sure, but the protection’s worth it. Money’s coming into the country. Game’s open, like the Wild West.”
“Wild West?” The expression was new to Cono.
“Wild West, you know, America in the good old days. You living in a seashell? Like in High Noon. You seen it?” He drew his fingers out of imagined holsters. “Bang, bang, be your own marshal. You can get it on DVD.”
“Thanks, I’ll look for it.” Cono said, pointing back with his own finger-pistol, then raising it to his mouth and blowing over the tip.
He took a seat and began to click through links on HEU hazards. The only previous brush he’d had with high-U was a tontería for an “unnameable Western nation” hoping to detect an illicit shipment of the material on a container vessel due to pass through the Bosporus. The plug was pulled at the last minute, for undisclosed reasons, but in his apartment near Galata Tower in Istanbul, Cono still had two rather cumbersome multiple-wire proportional radiation counters, sampling gear, and a plastic suit with a rebreather, all stashed behind a panel in an empty closet.
He’d prepared himself for that assignment with the details of emission stats for various degrees of enrichment, the handling and safety procedures, the types of containment—whether the HEU was in simple ingot form, metal-oxide shavings, or beryllium pellets. But it had all faded from memory now, like the words to a song he hadn’t sung since childhood, when he had stolen oranges and crackers and the occasional slippery fish only because he was hungry. Over time the stealing had extended to uncomfortable secret facts and even inconvenient people—not kidnapping exactly, but a sort of temporary relocation. Now he was hunting for uranium. He was moving up the food chain. And he was still hungry. Hungry for what? Money? No. Power? Over people? That was like having power over clams. Hungry for what? He didn’t know.
The search results flashed by in a rapid series.
Sixty to seventy pounds of HEU would be more than enough to enable a primitive gun-type explosive device that could be engineered in any machine shop.
When contained in canisters, highly enriched uranium is of no immediate danger to persons nearby.
The refined ore and semi-purified metal can exist in several chemical variants and oxidative states …
Blah, blah, blah. Click, read. Click, read. Click … Cono was momentarily dazed by the flicker of the computer screen—it was an old type of CRT, probably with a vertical scan frequency that was in the sweet spot for rasping his brain. He stood up and composed himself as the painful throb deep in his head subsided.
He sat down again and searched for Project Sapphire, keeping his eyes off the screen except for short glances.
… On 21 November 1994 1278 pounds of HEU were transferred from the Ulba Metallurgy plant near Ust-Kamenogorsk to the Y-12 plant at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in a highly secret project code-named “Sapphire” …
1300 steel canisters for shipment by two C-5 transport planes from Kazakhstan to the U.S.…
The United States agreed to compensate Kazakhstan for the material, though the transaction was “not handled as a straight business deal” …
The value of this quantity of HEU is difficult to ascertain, but it certainly is far less than the billions of dollars the Kazaks could have garnered by selling it on the black market …
The U.S. Defense Secretary said they had accomplished their mission of keeping the bomb-grade material “forever out of the reach of black marketers, terrorists, or a new nuclear regime.”
November 22, 1994. Reuters. “Nuclear Bomb Cache Found In Kazakhstan.”
November 24, 1994. Washington Post. “Kazakhstan Site Had Lax Security.”
October 24, 1996. Washington Times. “Kazakh Uranium Shipment Was Shy Enough For Two Bombs.”
November 11, 1996. Nucleonics Week. “Sapphire HEU Is Less Than DOE First Claimed, Government Admits.”
The pain in Cono’s head returned, now with greater force and centered just above his palate. He stood up, walked shakily to the bright-eyed young man behind the cash box, and paid with a trembling hand.
“You all right, man?” The youth’s brow creased in concern.
“Just fine, just fine,” Cono responded automatically in Mandarin. “Just fine.”
The pain was excruciating. A sharp metallic taste spread across the back of his tongue, as if he were chewing on aluminum foil. He turned and focused on the glass door, which was filled with flashing zigzags of blurred light. His toes turned inward as he tried to walk, stumbling with stiff legs that didn’t want to move. His feet suddenly pointed like a ballerina’s, lifting him in his last lurch toward the exit. His hand was just able to swing the door partway open before his rigid body fell onto the sidewalk.
“Hey! You all right?” The Mandarin voice sounded strangely like Cono’s father’s, but the fuzzy face didn’t match. The young man was poking a finger against Cono’s carotid. Cono’s jaw was so tightly clenched that he couldn’t have spoken even if his mind had formed words. “Open your eyes! Ta ma de! Shit, are you alive?” Cono’s eyes fluttered open. “Oh, man, you’re scaring me. You’ve been out for a while. I called the embassy. You don’t look so Chinese, but that’s the way you talk. They’ll be here any minute. Better than calling an ambulance in this town. I’ll get you some water, okay? You okay? Your head okay?”
Cono’s body slackened slightly. He uncurled his fingers. He could f
eel his arms, but barely. He tried to turn over and get his knees under him. Gradually he pushed himself up onto all fours, wobbling as he watched strings of saliva elongate from his mouth down to the concrete. Two vaguely familiar polished black shoes planted themselves on either side of his splayed hands.
“Your description of him was quite accurate, young man. Thank you for alerting the embassy. He doesn’t look it, but he is one of ours. Your guess is probably right, just a seizure, or maybe food poisoning. He will be grateful to you when he regains full consciousness.”
Still unable to speak, Cono felt his body being lifted and carried. The sun blanched his retinas. As he was folded into fetal position in the back seat of a car, he heard the faint whisper of Xiao Li’s voice in his head, saying, “Is Almaty such a big town?” The fleeting thought of her led to a jumble of pleasurable sensations that vanished when he felt the blunt pressure of the Makarov’s muzzle on his pubic bone. The wetness down there was warm. The vague thought assembled in Cono’s mind that he had peed on Timur’s cherished pistol. The humor of it partially assembled itself too, then faded, as did the whole of Cono’s consciousness.
Zheng turned to the troubled café attendant. “And now please show me which computer our compatriot was using.”
“Aren’t you going to take him to a doctor? He looks pretty bad off.”
“Which computer?” Zheng said tightly, forcing a smile. “Maybe we can discover some information that will allow us to inform his family.”
The young man pointed to the terminal Cono had used. Zheng sat down and scrolled back through the recent queue of sites. HEU, radiation containment, enrichment stages, canister configurations, Sapphire, Kazak uranium shipments … Zheng became more puzzled and disturbed as he scanned page after page. The insulting foreigner with the dirty face in the park was much more than Zheng had surmised, not just a go-between. Now he appeared to be a threat, but from which angle? At last the clicks of the mouse arrived at a site for Romanian marriage brokers.
Performance Anomalies Page 12
