Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  Then he saw it ahead, the outline of a big building just visible in the last light. The hospital. Inside, maybe a key that would save a million lives and, with them, the way of life now called freedom. The dying children and, God willing, some clues.

  He drove into the parking lot, pulled the car in between a weathered Toyota and a Ford truck. How deeply American was this place, how kind and how very ordinary.

  He got out of the car and hurried toward the great, dark building to challenge its secrets.

  2

  DELIVERANCE BY DEATH

  As he approached the hospital’s wide main doors, instinct made him check the locations of fire escapes and exits, count the stories, and note whether or not you could get off the roof. He had no reason to be concerned; it was just habit.

  The lobby was large, the floors white and polished. There were people sitting here and there in the chairs, some reading, others simply waiting. He passed the gift shop and a row of plantings, and approached the information desk. There was faint music, no hospital smell, a sense of order.

  He remembered hospitals like great broken skeletons, echoing with the voices of the unattended.

  “I’m Dr. Henry Franklin,” he lied to the receptionist. “I have an appointment to visit the Morales children.”

  She punched at a keyboard. “Uh, uh-oh, they’re critical. I’m afraid they’re in intensive care, no visitors.”

  “I’m from the Centers for Disease Control,” he said, the falsehood emerging with practiced smoothness.

  She made a call, spoke Spanish. “There’s a guy out here. I think it’s a reporter. He’s claiming to be from CDC.”

  He was a fair linguist, which was one of the reasons he had been an efficient case officer. He rarely let people he dealt with know when he spoke their language, and he didn’t do that now.

  “May I see some identification?”

  He drew out his wallet and showed her the CDC card he’d armed it with. As a nominal CIA operative, he had access to a variety of false IDs, some of which he could use legally, all of which could survive an in-depth background check . . . he hoped.

  “Please, Doctor, come with me,” a nurse in green scrubs said. She’d appeared silently, a young woman whose dark looks reminded him of his former wife, the gorgeous Nabila, still present in his heart. She was furiously complex and needed urgently to be cherished—too Arab, in the end, to endure an unruly American husband such as himself.

  The implacable demands of his work kept him away from her too much, and this made her feel unloved, and, in the end, she had walked out of the marriage. He was still heartsick at the loss and grieved as if she were dead.

  People raised in the restless Western tradition understood nothing of what it was like behind the doors of Muslim households, of how right it could feel to be enclosed in deep tradition and intimate privacy. She had made coming home an entry into another, better world, gorgeously peaceful. Sentiment aside, though, he was an old rogue puma. Home is the hunter, home from the hill—except not him. This hunter only came home on leave, assuming he was close enough to manage it.

  He missed her now, as he followed the nurse up the corridor. He watched the dark hair, the fluorescent overhead lights glowing on the olive skin, the smooth surge of her private body, and imagined her private ways.

  Then they were at the entrance to an intensive-care unit. The doors opened onto a forest of equipment, patients enveloped in technology, nurses in their greens, a group of doctors conferring quietly at the foot of a bed. Again, he was reminded of other hospitals, where he was sometimes the only person present with even rudimentary medical knowledge, sitting with men of courage who were dying in squalor, able to offer them nothing more than a hand. The edges of the world may seem tattered and ugly and corrupt, but there are heroes there.

  “She’s in and out,” Nurse Martinez said. “Rodrigo is conscious now.”

  “Has the FBI been here?”

  “Just the border patrol, to take them back if they survive.”

  “The parents?”

  “No parents.”

  “But they know they’re illegals?”

  “Sure.” The sudden clipped tone reflected the quiet fury of the Mexicans, their disdain for the whole process that was unfolding at the border, the way it reminded them of ancient defeats, and made them cling even more fiercely to the bitter certainty that being Mexican did not make you less.

  She stopped before three shut green curtains, then drew one back.

  And there he was, a shocking picture of childhood gone wrong, a little boy festooned with IVs, his vitals monitor indicating a temperature of 105, a blood pressure of 171 over 107, and an oxygen exchange number that Jim knew was ominously low.

  A drain, black with blood, led from the boy’s mouth. Mouth bleeding: 300 REMs exposure. Probably fatal in a healthy adult. This scrawny boy was already dead.

  “Can he speak?”

  “If he will.”

  “Hello, my son,” Jim said in Spanish, causing Nurse Martinez to glance at him. “Will you tell me where you sat in the truck?”

  They had been brought across Bridge 1 right here in Eagle Pass, Jim felt sure of it. He would not ask the boy direct questions, though. Jim had done too many interrogations to try that. Only the stupid were direct. Only the stupid were violent. He prided himself on being able to extract information without the subject realizing that he was being interrogated.

  The boy’s eyes met Jim’s. Mahogany, sad as a dying animal’s, waiting blankly. His throat worked, his mouth opened, and the interior was red, as if filled with tomato soup. “It was in the front.”

  “Do you mean with the driver?”

  He shook his head.

  So they’d been in the body of the truck, pushed up against the front wall. “And what was there with you? A box, perhaps?”

  Rodrigo shook his head. His skin, mottled from burst capillaries, looked like colored tissue paper, as fragile as if it could be ripped by the friction of a thumb. There was internal hemorrhaging as well, Jim thought, and soon that blood pressure would start crashing, and that would be the end of this poor damn kid. The eyes settled on Jim’s face, and he knew the look, defiant: I haven’t told you everything.

  “No box, then, Rodrigo. But there was something there.” Sick fear swayed Jim. There was a question now, to which the answer, at all costs, must not be “yes.” “Rodrigo, was the thing round, and it had lots of wires?”

  Rodrigo’s mouth opened. There was a deep sound, gagging, bubbling, as if his guts were boiling. Consciousness ebbed.

  “Can we bring him back?”

  “You’re not a doctor.”

  “Can we bring him back?”

  “What’s this about? Who are you?”

  “Nurse, I have to get him to answer my question. Reduce his morphine drip.”

  “I can’t touch that drip!”

  Jim reached up and turned it off.

  “How dare you!”

  Jim stood to his full height, causing him to loom over her. “This is a national security matter. You will cooperate.”

  “I—”

  Rodrigo groaned. Jim went back down to him, laid his hand on the poor little guy’s sweating brow. “What did it look like?”

  “Black,” the boy said. “We sat on it.”

  “Round? Black and round?”

  Rodrigo frowned a little.

  “Was it a box, Rodrigo?”

  He nodded—and Jim knew, suddenly, what had been done. These children—in fact, everybody in that truck—had been used as a human shield. The bodies were there to confuse the mass detector and, hopefully, absorb enough radiation to get past the particle monitor.

  But that wouldn’t work. It might help, but the instruments were too sensitive. And, in any case, why in the world hadn’t Customs and Border stopped a truck obviously loaded with illegals?

  Jim wanted to scoop this little guy up into his arms and take him away, but he had no key to heaven. He had no kids, but he
hoped that he would, one day, and if so, they would be cherished with this man’s whole soul, to make up for the horrors he had seen across the shuddering mass of the third world.

  “Where were these children found?”

  “On Main, a couple of blocks from the bridge. The police brought them in.”

  In an adult, radiation exposure at this level would cause immediate fatigue and nausea, followed by a few days of recovery, the so-called walking-dead phase. Rapid and irreversible decline would then commence.

  “Has there been a dosage evaluation?”

  “We’re estimating three to four hundred REMs for the older children, a bit less for the little one.”

  He’d get a satellite lookdown of the area from the National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency. From Nabila’s brother, Rashid, who worked in their reconnaissance unit. If he was lucky, Rashid might actually find a picture of the truck. With the computers they had available, whether or not a truck had stopped in the street near where the children had been found could be determined in an hour or less. If they were lucky, they’d get the make, the year, conceivably the license plate and a visual of whoever had taken the kids out and laid them on the sidewalk.

  Interesting to see if Nabila and Rashid were on speaking terms again. Rashid had been against the marriage, called it an abomination. He’d been right, but for the wrong reasons. He and Nabby were among a tiny handful of Muslims in the intelligence community, and they were there only because of political pull. At a time when you could not understand the enemy without at least understanding Arabic, American’s clandestine services had locked arms to keep Arabic speakers out. In Jim’s opinion, that made Nabby and Rashid crucial personnel—but they were nevertheless treated with suspicion, and their activities were carefully watched.

  Silently, Nurse Martinez closed the curtain around Rodrigo’s bed. “I won’t be able to rouse him. It’s not a coma, but the sleep is profound.”

  It would, Jim knew, turn into death, and he thought that could happen at any time. But the boy had done all that was needed of him. He had informed Jim that he had crossed the Rio Grande in a truck with a plutonium bomb for a companion. So the burning question now became, how could that happen? Who in the world could miss a thing like that? Even if the detectors failed, they searched all vehicles, especially trucks.

  Then the nurse opened the curtain around the little girl’s bed, and Jim did not understand what he was seeing, not at first. Then he realized that she was under a tent of lead.

  “She’s emitting,” the nurse said.

  He contained his shock. There was only one way the girl could be that radioactive, and the knowledge of what that was drew a coldness into his belly. She had been made to carry unshielded plutonium or plutonium dioxide on her person, in her rectum, her vagina, her stomach. Poor damn little thing! The stuff was so heavy, she couldn’t have carried much.

  “These kids were the only victims found?”

  “Yes.”

  “No other cases of radiation sickness in the area? At all?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll need to know the exact spot on Main where they were found.”

  “Of course.” She drew him a little map.

  He left the hospital, trying not to run. The moment he got to his car, he threw open the trunk and unlocked the silver case that held his detection equipment. His standing orders required him to contact the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate in the event he became aware of the presence of a nuclear weapon inside the United States. He wasn’t actually sure of this, though. The situation was highly suspicious, to say the least, but he needed harder evidence if he was going to get a massive interdiction response.

  Among his tools were brushes and a vacuum to gather dust, cameras, an ultrasensitive GPS device, a Geiger counter, and a device that could detect the kind of high-explosive materials likely to be used in nuclear detonators.

  He put the Geiger counter on the front seat beside him, and headed for the address the nurse had given him.

  A nuclear bomb could be loose in the United States. If it was, it would be on its way to its target right now and they would be wasting no time. Certainly anybody capable of injecting a plutonium nuke across the U.S. border understood U.S. detection systems well enough to know that it was going to be found, and soon.

  So they would be moving as fast as possible. If he was lucky, there were maybe a few days until the thing was detonated. But for all he knew, it could be in the air right now, approaching Los Angeles or Denver or some other vast concentration of innocent Americans.

  He left the parking lot, forcing himself to drive as carefully as possible, forcing himself to continue to think clearly and calmly.

  The thing was out there. Oh yes. He just needed to lock down a little more evidence to make sure the whole system took notice, and this was treated like the emergency that it was.

  3

  RESSMAN AIR SERVICE

  Todd Ressman was beginning to think his business might actually work. Last year, he’d cleared a little money, and so far this year, every month had seen positive cash flow. It had been a long haul, very long, since he’d been laid off during the death of Eastern Airlines in 1991. But what’s nearly twenty years in a guy’s life?

  He’d done charter work, off-the-books work, piloted for discounters, worked in Africa and Asia . . . and in the end gotten together enough cash for a down payment on his cargo-modified Piper Cheyenne. He’d put down sixty grand, all of his savings. He wasn’t going to move people, not after all his years in the damn airlines. Cargo didn’t complain, and had few other alternatives. If you were going to get something moved out of Colorado Springs fast, he was the go-to guy, and tonight he was taking a machine tool and a crate of frozen chickens to the Pahrump Valley Airport in Nevada. He was slotted for flight level 18, and at economical cruising speed he expected to land just after midnight.

  The flight would cost him $3,118.23 and would generate revenue of $5,004.19. If he got something in Pahrump, the run would be even better. What he might get there he couldn’t imagine, however. The town’s chief industry was sod, followed by prostitution and gambling. And speaking of chicken, the Chicken Ranch airport was one of the drop-ins, for God’s sake, but not for a cargo operator, obviously. Nevertheless, he’d learned in the years he’d been running his service that the worst thing you could do was anticipate. His business ran on the unexpected.

  The tool he had, for example, looked like some kind of disassembled drill press. It was heavy, but not heavy enough to take up all of his poundage. The chickens in their sealed crate had been a late addition.

  Who would spend all this money to move a drill press, or, more fantastically, chickens that couldn’t be worth but a few hundred dollars?

  He knew the answer, which was always the same: folks had their reasons.

  He’d take off in a few minutes, into what promised to be a gorgeous night. This was why he did it, why at fifty-eight years of age he was still going up every day of his life. He never got used to it, never tired of it. Back on Eastern, he’d flown sixes, then sevens, then twenty-sevens. He’d seen Eastern in its glory days and in its Lorenzo days. The death of that airline had not been pretty, nossir. Frank Lorenzo had destroyed it surgically, pulling off one valuable part after another, until there was nothing left but a lot of wretched old planes and men and women who would not quit until the thing was simply liquidated, which was what had happened.

  Well, that was groundside stuff. Todd wasn’t really interested. What he wanted in his life was his two PT6A-28s roaring on the wings of his lovely, quick airframe, his glowing instruments before him and the stars in the sky.

  He got aboard and checked his stow, making certain that all the tie-downs were secure. Thirty years in the air had taught him that the sky had a lot of ways to hurt you and the best method of dealing with that was to respect the fact that airplanes that usually wanted to fly sometimes decided not to do that anymore.

  He co
uld have been flying with another pilot, but why spend the money? Generally, he rented ground crew by the hour. He was based out of Colorado Springs but really would take anything anywhere in the United States, Canada, and, less willingly, Mexico. He spent two or three weeks flying, usually, then went back to C.S. and his house and Jennie, whom he had met on the old LaGuardia–Pittsburgh run pushing twenty-eight years ago.

  He looked over his manifest. The drill press was from Goward Machines, destined for some outfit called Mottram Repair. They must need it bad, to move it like this. As for the chickens, they were going from Blaylock Packers to an individual, Thomas Gorling. Todd could figure out most of his cargoes, but this one had him stumped. He had it back against the bulkhead, well secured. You always had to ask yourself, what happens if this airplane turns upside down? Given a small plane and a big, violent sky, that could happen. Had happened. In fact, in his years in the air just about every damn thing had happened. He’d experienced fires, crazy passengers, every known malfunction you could imagine. Usually, the Cheyenne was a pretty tolerable traveler, but she could get obstreperous when she was running heavy and there were crosswinds about.