Her voice sounded stiff. What he had told her had affected her somehow.
She knew more than she was saying.
“That this has something to do not just with the Germans during World War II, ma’am, but with the Russians as well. There’s something else you should also know.”
“Go on?”
“My family was involved.”
“It seems that way. What else?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“You don’t know, or you couldn’t say?”
“There’s a question I wouldn’t mind asking you.”
She snorted, but said nothing.
Sam added, “Let’s just say that neither one of us is confident enough about our conclusions to talk about them openly. That way it doesn’t sound like we’re deliberately hiding things from each other.”
The Secretary of Defense was an old friend of his family, but that didn’t mean that Sam trusted her further than he could throw her.
The woman used to cheat at ‘Old Maid’ back in the day, after all, and later taught him how to double-deal and count cards so they could fleece his father at poker.
She was definitely not to be trusted.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The next call was to his father.
“Sam, is that you?”
“It’s me.”
His father paused, took a deep breath. “What’s going on and how much is this going to cost me?” he asked.
Sam’s father wasn’t heartless, but he had a hell of a way of expressing himself. It was like living as a fish, while having a great white shark for a parent.
“You’ve seen the news,” Sam said. “How much do you know?”
“I know enough to know that you shouldn’t be on the damned phone with me.”
“I’ve sent Tom out to dive the Clarion Call,” Sam told him.
Which was strange in and of itself. If he wasn’t supposed to have any help and he wasn’t supposed to go beyond the Beltway – how in the world was he supposed to follow a clue? The terrorist must have known that he’d find a way to cheat at that point.
He must have been counting on it.
Sam grimaced.
“The Clarion Call,” Sam’s father said. “That’s one of our oldest vessels. Sunk off the coast of Sandy Point State Park. Before my time. It was one of old man Reilly’s ships.”
Sam waited.
“I’d always wondered why he scuttled it,” James acknowledged. “It was supposed to have been in poor repair, but I’d been on it a few months before that, and it didn’t seem in disrepair. Nothing that couldn’t have been repaired, anyway.”
“It was the first of the ‘special’ ships, wasn’t it?”
James chuckled. “You might say that.”
“So there might have been something hidden inside?” Sam asked.
“It sounds like exactly the sort of thing my father would have done. He would’ve taken on the job to hide something, accepted payment for the job, then taken the cost of the sunken ship he’d just been paid for off his taxes. He was a hard man, old man Reilly.”
In that case, pot, meet kettle. Like father like son.
“What might be in there?” Sam persisted.
“Anything. It went down in 1996. By then he had contacts all over the world.”
“Something illegal?”
“Probably.”
“How illegal?”
His father paused. Finally, he said, “He never smuggled women, as far as I know.”
“Dad...”
“It’s a long story. And you don’t have time.”
“What about Global One?”
“What about it?”
Sam explained about the picture and his theory that it all had something to do with the Russians.
His father made a thoughtful humming sound in the back of his throat. “I don’t know what to say, Sam. I do know that the Clarion Call was used to ship something from Canada to Russia, back when it was still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
“How is that connected?”
“I remember the cigars they used to smoke. The three of them would stand on the deck and smoke them after supper, with the full moon overhead...”
“The three of them?”
“I don’t remember much. I was young. Mama was always sick on the water, even on the big ships. ‘The boy has to know where he came from,’ Dad would say, and drag me across the ocean without her, but then he’d abandon me. Stan and I used to bet on horseraces, listening to the results over the radio all night long.”
James Reilly wasn’t one to share stories out of the past, and he wasn’t one to let his mind wander. If he did, he had a good reason.
Sam waited, hoping that his father’s memory would bring up whatever was swimming around in the depths of his highly intelligent mind.
James said, “Nothing good. That’s all I remember.”
“Another question. Did Grandpa ever meet Werner Heisenberg?”
“The scientist? No.”
Sam set his jaw hard. Oh, well. He hadn’t exactly expected to hit gold with the first strike of the hammer. “Look, dad. Will you see what else you can find?”
“Call you back at this number?”
“Yes.”
His father grunted, said, “Don’t do anything that hurts our stock prices!”
On the way back around the block, Sam picked up the phone and checked it.
So far, so good. No angry messages, no sounds of explosions, and no voice mails from the terrorist stating that he had pushed his luck too far.
That was good.
He was planning to push it even further.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Residences at Farragut, Washington, D.C.
Retired Senator Charles Finney sat in his wheelchair on his balcony at The Residences at Farragut. He was still sore from his morning’s efforts. It was a nursing home, plain and simple, although the staff didn’t let any of their patients call it that. The place was so expensive it felt more like being on a permanent pleasure cruise than anything else, but so restricted, it reminded him of a top-security military base, too.
He could have ordered lobster for breakfast if he wanted – but he couldn’t have walked out of the building of his own free will, even if he could still walk.
His balcony overlooked Farragut Park – he could just see the back of the White House from his floor. He’d picked the apartment based on the view alone.
Charles Finney wanted to remind himself of who he was, a man who’d lived his life in the shadow of that great building, a man who’d made sacrifices for his country.
If anyone found out what he’d done, it wouldn’t just be his own image that was tarnished. It would destroy the entire fabric of democracy, and what this great nation was founded upon.
He shook his head and cursed.
The terrorist seemed to be intent on destroying everything he’d built. He’d unearthed Die Koloratursoubrette, the bomb that Heisenberg had jokingly named “The Fat Lady” of opera, after he had heard that the American bombs were to be named “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.”
Then he’d dragged Mike Reilly’s grandson into the situation, leading him around by the nose from clue to clue. At least, that’s what he was hearing from his sources at the Capital.
It was a bad sign.
He’d had to take steps. The death of Congresswoman Bledes was unfortunate, but Finney considered her loss collateral damage. He was mostly indifferent to her death. What stirred his anger was the fact that the shot had failed to reach its intended target.
What else would be lost to protect the king in this game?
He chuckled to himself. He’d given up so much, in a thousand small ways; he wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice himself now – except for the fact that he had to play both the role of a piece and of the player.
It was worth it, though.
The King was the United States.
And he’d be damned if he was going
to yield the game to the son of some upstart German immigrant trash…
Finney wheeled himself back inside, and away from the balcony. He was humming an old Doris Day song in the back of his throat.
A knock at the door.
“Come in.”
A pretty, pale-faced young woman stepped in. “Someone here to see you, Mr. Finney.”
“That’s all right. I’m expecting him.”
She backed out of the doorway; a few moments later, George Smith entered. He had an aluminum attaché case with him, attached to his wrist by a discreet cuff and a black band that looked like a bicycle lock.
“Sir,” he said.
“Do you have it?”
“Yes, sir. We used the paintball attack on the senators as a distraction. As you guessed, the terrorist had to respond to the attempted escape you asked us to put into effect. I believe we timed things rather well.”
“Yes,” Finney nodded in satisfaction. He knew the document had been held in the Library of Congress. Several of his people were planted there.
“Would you like to see it, sir?”
He rubbed his tongue thoughtfully over a tender tooth. He had lost a few over the years, and he hesitated every time he had to have one pulled.
“Might as well,” he said. “Before it goes into the secret vaults, eh? We’re turning into the Vatican, with underground crypts full of history. Crucial information it’s better that no one knows, yet we can’t bear to part with. A bunch of sentimental old fools, that’s what we are, too ashamed to admit that we’re a bunch of filthy sausage-makers. Each and every one of us push it down the road, make it someone else’s problem…”
Smith stood and listened with his hands behind his back. Respectful treatment toward a key political figure who had once been important, but was now just an old man who was clearly losing his marbles.
He shook his head. “Listen to me ramble. Go on, open it.”
Smith unlocked the case from his wrist, then placed the case on the bedside table and unlocked the two clasps with a key. He snapped open the locks, then lifted the lid and pulled out a manila envelope. Inside the envelope was a rigid plastic folder.
Inside the folder was the document, still inside a thin layer of crisp cellophane.
The old man’s eyes filled with tears.
His sadness wasn’t for the author of the letter—Werner Heisenberg—or the addressee—President Gerald Ford—but for all the times gone past. The burdens he carried, the lies he was forced to tell, even the deaths he had to order.
All to protect D.C. from one bomb. A device that had been ripped out of the past where it had been decently hidden, then placed in public view.
A million people, threatened.
It made his blood boil.
And for what? So that some kid could reveal the “truth.” The one truth out of a hundred different other truths that nobody needed to know – nobody needed to know that the Germans had been ahead of both the U.S. and the Soviets. Nobody needed to know that World War II had almost been lost. If Washington D.C. had been taken out by a nuclear bomb, would all the fight have gone out of Americans? If anyone found out how close the U.S. seat of government had come to becoming another Nagasaki or Hiroshima, who knows what would have happened.
Most importantly, few people would accept what he had withheld for more than seven decades: In the history of the human race, no one event had steered the course of humanity toward everlasting peace, more than the development and subsequent proliferation of the atomic bomb.
In his opinion, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and subsequent architect of the first proven successful atomic weapon, should have been awarded the greatest Nobel Peace Prize for his development.
It was this action and the deterrent threat of life-on-earth ending consequences, that left the world in its longest period of peace and stability since the end of World War II. At no time on earth had mankind cooperated so well together, since the start of the Agricultural Revolution nearly ten thousand years ago.
Retired Senator Finney closed his eyes.
A group of scientists brought this atrocity to mankind. And in jarring contrast its development had left prolonged peace.
But it was his own actions which brought about the proliferation of the world-ending weapon. This was what made the entire venture so successful.
If America had maintained the Atomic weapon monopoly, the benefits would have been nowhere near as successful. In that case, he doubted the city of Nagasaki would have been the last place on earth to be destroyed by such a weapon.
The thought literally made him shiver.
What they did was abhorrent and treasonous at best, but he had done so for the good of his country. He was old. There was nothing the Administration could do to him that time wasn’t already well on its way to achieving.
What use to drag it all out into public now?
Except to blackmail the good men who were forced to make such terrible choices.
He shook his head and dashed the wetness in his eyes away with the back of his hand.
“Hand me my reading glasses,” he said.
They were gently placed into his hand.
Finney read the document letter, the words swimming in front of his eyes.
Although it seemed to take an eternity, he soon finished reading. His mouth was dry as he swallowed. Smith handed him a glass of water as he took away the document.
“Sir?”
“Lock it back up.”
Heisenberg had been a man of probity and honor. The problem with men of probity and honor was that they were unable to keep their damned mouths shut. The letter had made President Gerald Ford ask questions. Questions, like earthworms, did their best work when they were buried deep underground with the rest of the muck. Ford’s questions had exposed truths, forcing him to make difficult choices.
The Heisenberg Legacy was locked up again, the band and cuff discreetly out of sight around Smith’s wrist. The man had worked for the CIA for several decades, if he remembered correctly.
“Sir?”
“All that fuss over a single piece of paper?”
“Yes, sir,” Smith said, with some feeling.
“Well, be off with you. May you have a safe journey taking that to its new resting place.”
“Yes, sir.”
Suddenly, Smith held out his hand.
Bemused, the old man shook it. “What was that for?”
“I just want you to know that some of us know what you sacrificed, sir. You’re respected for that.”
The old man was touched. “I appreciate that, son.”
Then the hand was withdrawn, the CIA agent gone, and the old man staring off toward the White House as it peeked through the trees off the edge of his balcony.
If only old Mike had still been around. He would have taken care of all of this with a snap of his fingers. Nobody had been harder than Mike…
Old Mike wouldn’t have hesitated before ordering what he had dithered over for so long.
Finney picked up the telephone and dialed.
“Sir?” a man answered.
“There’s nothing for it, Painter,” he said, profoundly tired. “It’s time for Phase Two.”
“Yes, sir,” said Painter, his voice somber.
Well, and why shouldn’t he feel subdued?
Innocent people were going to die.
It was the price they had to pay to keep the world safe.
God knows, I paid the ultimate price to keep it secret.
Chapter Forty
Sam kept moving at a quick pace along the now empty street, heading toward the memorial.
The bright sun shone overhead, pounding down into Sam's skull. He shaded his eyes and turned around in a circle. Everyone here had gone inside. The streets were strangely deserted, especially after they'd been so packed earlier. Both sides of the street were packed with cars, in some places double-parked.
There was a hush in
the air. No music, no kids playing, no traffic.
Sam's throat tightened.
His grandfather had been a pilot in World War II. One of Sam's memories of the man was listening to him talk about the bombing of London. He said that first came the dual tone sound of the civil defense sirens. These were initiated by the Royal Observer Corps when they spotted Luftwaffe aircraft flying toward Britain.
This frightening sound caused civilians to stop whatever they were doing and rush into air raid shelters. Total blackout, everyone underground if possible – except for those brave souls waiting on top of buildings as spotters.
Suddenly, the sirens would cut off, and an eerie silence would come over the city. That utter soundless hush occurred – right before the bombs exploded.
The nightmarish contrast had stayed in Sam’s mind.
That hush was what it felt like to Sam right now. A million innocent people, waiting to find out whether it was their day to die.
If he wasn't standing in the middle of the street witnessing this, he would have expected chaos. Streets full of panicked rioters, people on their cell phones screaming that they needed to get out of here now and to hell with everyone else. Horns honking, gas shortages, power out...
Instead, this eerie silence.
He had to fix this.
He had to stop letting the terrorist call the shots.
Given what he knew so far, he had two choices: track down this game-playing lunatic or track down the explosive device.
He was no bomb expert, but a bomb built in the 1940s shouldn't be that sophisticated –unless the terrorist had modified it. He should be able to figure out enough to dismantle any transmitting equipment, though, at least long enough to bring in a real bomb squad.
Then again, the Secretary of Defense, the Metropolitan police, the National Guard and many others likely had searching for the bomb covered. He might end up duplicating their efforts – and letting the terrorist escape.
If he were the terrorist, though, he wouldn't be here, in D.C. Why stick around to get vaporized by a nuclear fireball? No point.
But that led him back around in a circle. If he wasn't supposed to track down the bomb and this madman was somewhere else, what was he supposed to do then? Keep following the clues?
The Heisenberg Legacy Page 14
