Pinnacle Event

by Richard A. Clarke

  Kinder shifted in his seat. “You said no one will ever know who did it. Or if they do, it will be a false trail, what did you call it, ah, a legend.”

  “That American, Bowman, and the black woman from South Africa are getting closer to us. Somehow they found the Potgeiters. Then the woman sent someone to the Comoros,” Rogozin said softly.

  “The Comoros? We have to stop her,” Kinder insisted.

  “Don’t worry. We got the guy she sent to Comoros before he learned anything. We got there in time.”

  “I told you to kill Bowman a long time ago,” Victoria Kinder interjected. “Why is he still alive?”

  “We’ve tried to kill him twice. We’ll get him. In any event, it’s almost impossible to connect you two to the bombs,” Rogozin replied.

  “I don’t like the word ‘almost,’ Sergey,” Kinder said slowly. “I do not like it at all.”

  A bell rang. The voice from the speakers said, “We are cleared for landing. Coming in to New York.”

  MONDAY, 13 NOVEMBER

  YAKUTSK, SAKHA REPUBLIC

  RUSSIAN FEDERATION

  “The Luna isn’t frozen yet,” Konstantin Kuznetzov said to his sons, looking down on the river from his estate on the hill ridge outside of Yakutsk. “It’s later every year.” Behind him one of the world’s largest forests spread out to the west. He owned most of it and enormous deposits of natural gas under it, as well as the Sakha Arctic Shipping Company, which kept Yakutsk and other remote cities in the northeast supplied, even when it meant having to break the ice. Just within the Sakha Republic and neighboring Krasnoyarsk Krai, Kuznetzov’s land holdings were bigger than dozens of countries, including good-sized ones like Argentina.

  He was one of seven Russian oligarchs the Financial Times had profiled, contending that each of them was worth more than two hundred billion dollars. Together their corporations controlled three-quarters of Russia’s gross domestic product.

  Of course, they did not own 100 percent of their corporations. Some of them were traded on the Moscow stock market, but few shares ever moved. There were also the silent partners, those in the government, including the Czar who made this all possible.

  Sitting in front of him were his two children, young men now, boys aged eighteen and twenty. He had flown them back from universities in Paris and Oxford, had them tell their friends that their mother was ill. He had told them not to worry, she was fine, but he needed to see them both quickly. “It is an emergency,” were his words. He had preceded them to the Sakha Luna Dashas by forty-eight hours. They had landed, each in his own plane, at the family’s airstrip and had each been helicoptered to the compound.

  After they had briefly recovered from their flights, their father asked them to join him in his library, a room with a wall of glass looking east, across a cleared field, to the river below. Konstantin Kuznetzov withdrew a squat, clear-glass bottle from a mound of ice. In the center of the bottle was a metal rod. The bottle cap was a strange perforated metal plug. “It’s Heavy Water,” he announced proudly.

  “Like what they use in nukes?” his older son asked. “That rod in there, that bottle looks like part of a miniature reactor.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s just the name the Norwegians gave it. It’s a historical pun, yes? Not radioactive. Is vodka, better even than the Kauffman. Made with water they found under the ice in Sweden, from the last ice age. Very pure.”

  The young men looked at the strange bottle and then joined in with their father, all three simultaneously taking down a full shot in one gulp. “Za tvoyo zdorovie!” they all said and clinked their shot glasses.

  “Now, my sons, let me tell you about real nuclear bombs and what is going to happen soon, why we are here in Yakutsk.” They were stunned, silent. They could not look at one another. They stared instead at their father.

  Finally Yuri, the younger boy, spoke. “This sounds like a line out of Tolstoy, Father, but does the Czar know?”

  Kuznetzov walked away, toward the window. With his back to the boys he said, “This is not an act being carried out by any government. The Czar will condemn it. He will call for an investigation. Russian security services will help uncover perpetrators. It will be a difficult two or three years before things begin to settle down, before, what did the old man Bush call it, the New World Order takes hold.”

  “But, Father, millions will die,” Yuri replied.

  “Yuri, there are almost seven billion people on this planet. Too many for the systems to sustain. Too many who are just a drag on the systems. Even when we are done there will be over six billion people, Yuri, think of the size of those masses,” Kuznetzov said, walking back toward his sons.

  “Will you be safe, Father?” Vladimir, the older boy, asked.

  “We will all be safe, Vlady,” he said, putting his hand of the boy’s shoulder. “Here, in our forest kingdom, we will all be safe. Well supplied and comfortable. That is why I sent for you, so you will be safe, here with me.”

  For the first time, the boys looked at each other, the horror showing in their expressions. “But, Father, I have to go back to Oxford in two days. I have a very important meeting with my tutor.”

  “I am afraid that won’t be possible, Vladimir,” Kuznetzov said.

  “How long do we have to stay out here?” Yuri asked, with panic in his voice.

  “As I said, it should all settle down in two or three years, maybe sooner, maybe,” Kuznetzov said, pulling the bottle out of the ice surrounding it, pouring another round of shots.

  The boys looked at each other again, as their father had his back to them. “He’s crazy,” Yuri mouthed.

  Kuznetzov turned and walked toward his sons, carrying three shots of the Heavy Water Vodka. He handed one to each boy. “To the New World Order. It will all be yours.”

  42

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14

  JFK AIRPORT

  NEW YORK CITY

  “I’m with the FBI. Please come with me,” the Special Agent said to Ray Bowman as he stepped from the Virgin America aircraft on to the jetway. Bowman’s Sunday call to Winston Burrell and the National Security Advisor’s subsequent call to the FBI Director had set the wheels in motion. The Bureau had put two hundred agents onto the task of tailing and listening to Sergey Rogozin and the Kinders from the time their jet had landed at Teterboro four hours ago. Rogozin’s New York office of Olympus Security was being penetrated electronically on its telephone lines and acoustically through the walls and windows.

  Ray guided Mbali down the stairs on to the runway, where Bill McKenna, Special Agent in Charge of National Security for the New York office of the FBI sat waiting for them in a Chevrolet Suburban. McKenna looked young for the job and his accent sounded more Texas than Brooklyn. “I’ve been told from the top to give you any and all assistance on this case, so you got it,” he said. Ray introduced Mbali Hlanganani as his “colead on the case.” She didn’t blink, but she made a mental note to ask exactly when she had become that.

  “Where did they go from Teterboro?” Ray asked.

  “Rogozin went straight for his office. It’s two brownstones on East seventy-fourth. Very pricey real estate. Looks like he has an apartment in one of them,” McKenna explained. “Rogozin came in on an airplane with just two other passengers, Jonathan Kinder, the CEO of Kinder Industries, and his daughter, Victoria, a professor at NYU. The Kinders went to their penthouse on Central Park South, but now the daughter is at the UN. She’s speaking at some meeting there.”

  “Can you get me into the UN meeting? I might want to just confront her and ask her what she knows about Rogozin. See what reactions that brings.”

  “Already thought of that, Mr. Bowman, set up a top-secret level workspace for you in the U.S. Mission across the street from the UN and got you two passes to the UN meeting through an ex-Bureau guy who now runs security in New York for the UN.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll skip that,” Mbali said. “I need to get to the South African Mission and grab a secure phone to
call into my office. Among other things, I want to see what we’ve learned about Marcus’s death.”

  “The South Africans are on Thirty-eighth Street, between First and Second. We can drop you there on our way,” McKenna said as the Suburban pulled through the airport gate.

  “Did you sweep their plane at Teterboro? Any signs of radiation?” Ray pressed.

  “We did, along with Customs, searched every plane that came in or went out of Teterboro so it didn’t look like we were after Rogozin. Came up cold, except for some medical equipment on a flight going out to Minnesota. We’ve been running the rad/nuc detection guys ragged the last two weeks, but even so they are really scrupulous. If there was a trace, they woulda found it.”

  Bowman was not surprised. It made no sense for Rogozin to personally escort a weapon into New York. The fact that he was in the city suggested that it might not be the target, or at least that nothing would detonate while he was still there.

  They were at the end of the morning traffic, approaching noon, but the highway was still jammed and moving slowly. After Ray looked at his watch the third time, McKenna asked the agent driving the truck to turn on the blue lights and use the breakdown lane to get them into town a little faster. Mbali looked more nervous than Ray had ever seen her be. He wondered if it was the scary driving or her sense that they were getting close to knowing what they were after.

  SPECIAL SECURITY SERVICES

  CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

  “I’m sorry you have been waiting so long Mr. Dupré,” the tall, young man said to Etienne. “I am Nelson Hutamro, in charge of investigating what happened to Mr. Robinson. They just told me you were here and had been waiting for hours. I apologize. We’ve been a little crazy here today. Please, come upstairs to my office.”

  Etienne wondered how old the Zulu was, was he really old enough to be the lead investigator on Stroh’s murder? And, if he was, why was he still in Cape Town? Hutamro’s office, however, was large and in a suite that said DIRECTOR MBALI HLANGANANI over the outer door. Hutamro’s office was only three doors down, inside the suite.

  “You said you were there when Mr. Robinson was shot and you knew his Service name when you called. And you knew his special call-in number, you phoned in on it. Can I ask how you learned these things, Mr. Dupré?” Hutamro asked when they were seated on an old leather couch and chair.

  “Might I have some tea?” Etienne began. “It was very dry and dusty in the lobby all these hours.” Etienne wondered if he could trust this young man with what he assumed from Stroh’s comments was a very important case, important enough to have gotten him killed. “Mr. Stroh, his real name, Marcus Stroh, said that he worked for the top person in your Service, a Ms. Mbali.”

  Hutamro called out for teas, then checked to make sure the recording light was on next to the telephone. “He did. So do I. This is her office suite.”

  “And you work directly for her?”

  “I do. I am one of three Special Assistants to the Director.”

  “And what I tell you will get to her and no one else?”

  Hutamro crossed his long legs and thought a moment. “If you want that, I can report it only to her. What the Director decides after that, who she will share it with, I cannot say. It is up to her.”

  Etienne was exhausted from the overnight flights and he felt he needed a shower, but he was kept awake by the adrenaline, the realization that by coming to South Africa without the permission of DGSE, he would undoubtedly be fired from his contract job and likely worse. He was throwing his life into a blender, but he felt a compulsion. He kept seeing Pierre and Marcus, bleeding onto the linen tablecloth.

  “I am a contract officer of the DGSE, acting without permission. My true name is Etienne Kafotamaki. Mr. Stroh made a request of my boss Pierre Marcoux. To answer his questions, I was sent across from Mayotte to Comoros.

  “Mr. Stroh wanted information about aircraft and ships that had moved on certain days that acted unusually. I found that information.”

  Hutamro sat up in his chair and reached for a notepad and pen. Etienne took a sip of the tea that had now shown up, his hand unsteady with the cup. “Pierre, my boss, was giving that information to Marcus Stroh when he was shot. When they were both shot, I was a few feet away. I should have seen the danger and warned them, but I did not see it until it was too late. I killed the shooter. But it was too late.” Etienne stopped and looked down. He rubbed his eyes.

  “It is very difficult to act in time in these situations,” Hutamro said softly. “I am sure you did all that you could.”

  “I did not, but now I am finishing my mission. I was to find the information that Mr. Stroh wanted so that it could get to Ms. Mbali. When they know in Mayotte, in Comoros, that I have come here, they will fire me, arrest me. They wanted to take their time and let Paris decide when and if to give this information to Ms. Mbali. I give it to her now.” He handed Hutmaro the card that Pierre had been handing over when he was killed, the card with the aircraft tail number. On it, Etienne had added the names of two ships.

  “I can tell you when the plane took off and landed, several times, and when the ships departed and from where. I have memorized it all.”

  Nelson Hutamro took the card. He noted a small stain on the upper-left corner. He was sure that it was dried blood. “May I call you Etienne?”

  “But of course, yes.”

  “Etienne, if all of this proves out, as I am sure it will, we would like to offer you employment with us, perhaps in Mayotte or Comoros, or perhaps Madagascar or Seychelles. Maybe the DGSE will not know that you came here, as Monsieur Dupré. I am sure Marcus Stroh would have wanted us to do that.”

  Etienne’s eyes moistened, but he did not shed a tear. He again sipped the tea. “Let me tell you the dates and places.”

  Nelson Hutamro copied down the information carefully, verified it again with Etienne, and then excused himself from his own office and walked down a row of desks to Mbali’s secretary. “I need to talk with the Director now, wherever she is.”

  43

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14

  HIGH SPEED COMPUTING CENTER

  LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

  LIVERMORE, CALIFORNIA

  He saw the man coming toward him. “Don’t start with me again,” Dugout said to the short, balding man in the lab coat. “You can have it back. I just need to terminate some searches and transfer some data to Fort Meade on the trunk line. Give me two hours and it’s all yours to do whatever terribly important thing it is you do.”

  “Professor Michael McFarland,” the man said offering his hand. “I model complex interactions with numerous permutations and high quantities of variables. I am overdue to get results to the White House Science Advisor on a climate change excursion. No other computing center can model this set of data in the time we have to finish. No other computing center can display the results with such high-definition graphics. They need visuals to understand things at the White House level, or so I’m told.”

  “I’ll have to remember that,” Dugout said, smiling. “Two hours.”

  Professor McFarland nodded, turned around quickly, and hurried out of the Control Room. There was no thank-you. Dugout sat down and began closing out his programs, transferring data to NSA, whose computers would pick up the attempt to decrypt the documents on the Potgeiters’ laptops. As he did, he noticed that one document had begun to open. It was an attachment on an e-mail and it was apparently sent using a different encryption algorithm than the Potgeiters had used on the documents on their hard drives.

  The decryption program had actually cracked the header on the four pages of the document and it had made clear the word in the first column in what looked like a chart. The header bore only the word USKORITEL. Dugout assumed it was a Pentagon acronym, U.S. Korean Intelligence? But why would the letter N be missing? U.S. Korean International Telephony?

  The first rows, were a series of numbers. The first was 9816. What followed were a few more entries w
ith 8 as the recurring third number. 10816. 11816. Then there were other numbers beginning with 9s and 1s, and 6s in common. Then numbers with 1s, 0s, 1s and 6s. Across from each number was text that the decryption program had yet to break.

  “Of course!” Dugout yelled out across the vacant room. “It’s a fucking schedule.” Each number ended with 16, the year. It was the date in European format, with the day and then the month. “Shit,” he whispered. So the first number was really meant to be 08.09.16, August 9. “Damn, that was the day the nuclear detonation was detected in the Indian Ocean.” This had to be the schedule for whatever they were doing with the bombs. Whatever, maybe the Koreans, maybe the crazy North Koreans, were doing with the bombs? USKORITEL?

  He quickly leafed through the four-page document to the end. The last number was 181116, or November 18. That was four days from now. There were no dates after that. He felt his stomach roll and his pulse race. Where the hell was Bowman?

  UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS

  NEW YORK CITY

  Bowman found a seat in the side gallery where he could look across at the witness table. At the table, Professor Victoria Kinder was reading from a prepared text while charts, graphs, and maps flashed on two large screens that Bowman could not see from where he sat. The screen facing his section was turned off.

  Professor Kinder was very pleasant to look at, but very dull to listen to. She was going on in a monotone, her presentation filled with acronyms. The UN panel she was presenting to was, nonetheless, riveted by whatever it was she was saying.

  “The Purpose Fund study on subglacial pooling cost fifty-five million dollars and received no outside or government funds. We used our own staff, ships, satellites, and aircraft. We submit the technical documentation here today, along with our Economic Effects Model documentation.

  “The EEM program was the result of a six million dollar grant from the Purpose Fund two years ago. It allows for the econometric modeling of changed patterns of agronomy, riverine transportation, access to critical minerals and energy sources, and urban habitat under a variety of assumptions about what the next fifty years will look like.