Fires of War

by Larry Bond

  But that’s what they were going to do.

  Rankin went over toward the cliffside, checking on the men there. He squatted next to each one of the men, not saying anything—what was there to say?—just showing them he was there.

  “Oh-twenty,” said Barren finally, coming over and pointing to his watch. “What do you say?”

  “Ten more minutes,” said Rankin.

  “You briefed fifteen, not thirty.”

  “I want to make sure.”

  “Right.”

  The ten minutes passed more slowly than the first twenty. The wind stiffened. It wasn’t bitter cold—the temperature had climbed to the high thirties, a veritable heat spell—but it added to the discomfort nonetheless.

  Finally, Rankin hopped over the wall and trotted to the middle of the road, taking one last look himself.

  Nothing.

  “Saddle up,” he told the others. “Let’s hit the road.”

  22

  SOUTH CHUNGCHONG PROVINCE, SOUTH KOREA

  The lights grew stronger. Ferguson tried to sink into the ground, hiding from them in the musky, oil-scented dampness.

  This is what the grave will smell like, he thought.

  The lights moved to his right, then came back. The car stopped and moved, stopped and moved; it was making a U-turn.

  Finally the lights moved away for good. Ferguson planted a tag, then made his way back to his pack, retreating around the building to find a way inside.

  The door in the rear of the building had a wired alarm, with the wires running along the top and the sensor near the upper-left-hand corner. Ferguson worked a long, flexible metal strip into the gap between the door and molding, pushing it until it struck the alarm connection plate on the jamb. He used the current meter to make sure he had a connection, then taped the metal in place.

  The lock was a high-quality German-made model that used mushroom pins in its works, a difficult challenge to pick. Ferguson had to alter his usual technique, gently and loosely prodding the inner workings of the lock before getting it to give way.

  The door opened into a vast empty space. The concrete floor was swept clean, the ribs of the building bare. Ferguson made sure there was no motion detector, then slipped inside. He checked for radiation contamination—none—and put tags near the overhead doors at the front of the building.

  Ferguson circled back across the compound, aiming at one of the two smaller buildings. Just as he approached the front door, he caught a glimmer of something on his right and jerked back.

  It was a video camera.

  He froze, silently cursing. Slowly he backed away, wondering how he had missed it.

  It took him a few minutes to spot the light that was supposed to be illuminating the camera’s area. It was out.

  So had he been seen? Or was there simply not enough light?

  Ferguson ran his fingers around his mouth, considering the situation. Given how the guards had responded the other night, if he had been seen, the entire security force would be racing here.

  No sense wasting time then, he thought, stepping to the door.

  Ferguson swiped the card in the reader and tugged on the latch. The door didn’t open. He swiped the card again, but it remained locked. Leaving the card in the reader didn’t work either.

  Maybe the security people had a way of locking down the campus buildings and were on their way.

  Ferguson jumped back into the shadows, fingering a tear gas grenade. But after ten minutes passed, he realized no one was coming. The problem had to be with the card. It must be programmed to allow its user access only to certain areas or at certain times.

  “OK, Miss Secretary,” he whispered to the card. “Let’s try you at door number two.”

  Ferguson slinked through the shadows to the next building, the largest on the site. It had three stories and—most important for Ferguson—a card lock on the door at the rear that wasn’t covered by a video camera, not even one with a broken light. He checked for alarms, then took out his pilfered identity card.

  The door buzzed as soon as he put the card into the reader. Ferguson held his breath on the threshold, listening to make sure the place was empty.

  Red exit lights and pairs of dull yellow bulbs posted along the ceiling lit the hallway. Each door was made of wood; placards with Korean characters hung next to each. Ferguson photographed the hall and the placards, then chose an office door about midway down the hall. It was locked, and not just with a run-of-the-mill, any-screwdriver-will-do lock, but a Desmo, an eight-pin isolated key tumbler that was almost impossible to pick.

  Almost.

  Ferguson had to dig deep into his lock-picking tools to take it on, fiddling with a custom-made tension wrench and wirelike spring. The lock gave almost no feedback before suddenly giving way. Ferguson was so surprised that he dropped the screwdriverlike tension wrench on the ground.

  “Real quiet, dude,” he whispered, scooping it up. He left the door slightly ajar and slipped inside.

  He found himself in an office shared by three people; each had a small desk and his or her own computer. Stealing a hard drive would have been easy, but it would also be pretty obvious.

  Pulling one of the computers out, he saw that they were networked, and that the LEDs were flashing. Unhooking it or even just leaving it and booting up might alert a remote system administrator, or at least leave a record of the intrusion.

  Ferguson was debating whether the risk was worth it when he heard a sound from the hallway. By the time he got back to the door, footsteps were coming in his direction.

  Easing the door back against the jamb, he kept his hand on the knob rather than risking the sound of a click as it snapped into place. Then he took a long, slow breath, pushing the air from his lungs as silently as possible.

  Whoever was walking toward him was wearing plastic-soled shoes that squeaked loudly as he walked. Ferguson eased his right hand into his jacket and took out his pepper spray.

  Keys jangled.

  The steps were next to him.

  Then they were past.

  Ferguson heard the door to the next office open. The person who’d gone in began to whistle.

  He glanced at his watch. It was already quarter to five. The operation had taken him considerably longer than he had thought it would. If he was going to get out to the fence before it got light, he had to leave now.

  Ferguson looked back at the room. There were boxes of backup disks next to the PCs. Reasoning that they were less likely to be missed, he helped himself to a couple from each desk, choosing at random since he had no idea what the Korean characters meant.

  Outside, light from the next office flooded the corridor. Ferguson got down on his hands and knees and crawled to the doorway, looking up from the bottom to see inside. A man sat with his back to him, facing a computer a short distance away.

  Ferguson tiptoed past, stopped to make sure he hadn’t been seen, then continued to the end of the hallway.

  He was just about to put his hands on the door’s crash bar when he heard the squeak of the man’s shoes once again.

  Ferguson threw himself into the open stairwell to his left. As soon as he did, he realized this was a mistake; a set of vending machines sat on the landing between the floors above. He scrambled down the nearby steps, ducking just out of sight before the man and his squeaking shoes trotted up the steps to the vending machines.

  The doors below the stairwell had narrow glass slits on them. Curious about what might be on the bottom level of the building, Ferguson eased down and tried one.

  It wasn’t locked. He pulled open the door and entered a vast room of computers. Large mainframes and server units lined the walls and formed clusters around the pillars. Metal cabinets formed low-rising walls at different points in the space, which extended the entire width of the building.

  The cabinets were locked, but it was a simple matter to pick them, and as soon as he was sure there weren’t any monitoring devices or alarms, he slid his tools
in and opened one up.

  Large tape discs, the type used to store and back up massive amounts of data, sat in the cabinet. Most if not all had been there awhile—there was a layer of dust on the bottom row. Ferguson selected one, then closed up the case. He took some photos with his small camera, and went back the way he’d come.

  23

  NORTH P’YŎNPAN PROVINCE, NORTH KOREA

  Thera rose before dawn, once more unable to sleep. Her roommate’s snores rattled the room, but it was the adrenaline of the mission that was keeping her awake. She wondered about the scientist, and at the same time wanted to be gone, back to Japan and then home.

  She’d be back in three months to pick up the tags, and have to go through all of this again. But it’d be much easier then.

  Unless Ch’o deserted.

  Had they gotten the message? There was no way of knowing.

  There’d always be tension, anticipation, adrenaline. She could handle that. It was fear she had trouble with, unfocused fear. But who didn’t?

  Dressed and wrapped in her heavy coat, Thera slipped out into the hallway and walked down to the door. The night air was frigid and sky dark. Without even thinking, she took one of the cigarettes from her pocket and began to smoke.

  God, I’m addicted, she thought, tossing it to the ground and stamping it out. She took one last look at the overcast sky, then went inside to get a head start on work.

  24

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Slott thumbed through the preliminary technical report on the soil that Ferguson and Guns had gathered at the South Korean waste site. The report contained several pages of graphs and esoteric formulas as well as a dozen written in almost impenetrable scientific prose, but the data could be summed up in one word: inconclusive.

  No plutonium had been found, though the scientists weren’t sure that was because there was none there or because the field equipment they’d taken to Hawaii simply wasn’t strong enough to detect it. A further analysis of the soil would take place in two days at a special CIA lab in California. There, the dirt would be compressed in a chamber and pounded with a variety of radioactive waves in a process one scientist had compared to high-tech gold panning. If there were any stray plutonium-239 atoms—actually, there would have to be a few more than one, but Slott wasn’t up on the specifics—the machine would find them.

  There was one technical caveat. The analysis relied on the fact that anyone trying to hide plutonium would go only so far as necessary to prevent its detection by standard equipment. The nano technology the Agency was using was exponentially more powerful; still, in theory a scientist who was aware of the lower detection threshold might be able to counter it. But if that were the case, Slott reasoned, they wouldn’t have found anything in the first place.

  Directly below the report was a response from Ken Bo regarding the plutonium and its possible origin. Stripped of its many qualifications—and complaints about the “unusual” operation that had found it—was a theory that the material had come from the closed TRIGA Mark-III research reactor in Seoul. The reactor had been used in the 1980s and probably the 1990s to conduct experiments testing extraction techniques from depleted uranium. Other experiments, continuing until 2004, had produced other isotopes.

  While not generally known, those experiments had been detected by the IAEA roughly five years after they’d been reported to the president and the Intelligence Committee by the CIA.

  Bo’s contention—he phrased it as a hypothesis—was that the plutonium that had just been discovered was merely waste material left from those activities.

  The theory would make a certain sense to a layman; the readings had been found at a waste dump, after all. But Slott knew that wasn’t what was really going on. First of all, the experiments had never been aimed at or succeeded in producing plutonium. TRIGA Mark-III had been shut down, and all the material, even potential waste products, accounted for. Slott knew this because it had all happened on his watch in South Korea.

  But few other people, even within the CIA, did. Much of the data on the experiments was highly classified and had not been found or reported by the IAEA. Information about the program had not been included in any of the briefing papers on the new treaty, and it was obvious to him that neither Corrine nor Parnelles for that matter was aware of it.

  Bo’s theory could get Seoul—and, by extension, Slott—off the hook if they were criticized. By carefully controlling the release of information about the TRIGA experiments, Slott could easily make it seem as if the CIA knew about this material all along and had in fact told Congress and the president.

  Bo would never put this in writing, of course. He was counting on Slott to understand and play along.

  Slott got up from his desk and began pacing around his office. Five people had known the entire TRIGA story from the Agency’s perspective. Slott was one; Bo was another. A third was now dead. That left the former head of the CIA, now dying of Alzheimer’s disease, and an officer now working in a staff position in what amounted to semiretirement.

  He didn’t even have to manipulate the records. If anyone asked, he could say that plutonium had been mentioned but not put in the reports for some reason he no longer knew.

  Had it been found?

  No. Definitely it hadn’t. Definitely not. They had access to the South Korean documents, and it wasn’t there.

  And they were all the documents.

  He knew that, because he’d verified it with the Korean document tracking system. But who in Congress or the administrative branch would know that? Even Parnelles wouldn’t know that.

  They could find it out, if they knew the right person to ask, but it would be difficult.

  Slott rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t lie. And he wasn’t going to play the CYA games. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. That wasn’t who he was.

  Slott stopped in front of his desk, looking at the picture of his wife and kids. It was a year old, taken when they’d moved into their new house. His only boy—they had three older girls—had just lost his first tooth.

  If he didn’t play the games, he might very well lose his job. They’d lose their house, have to move. He’d end up selling cars or insurance somewhere out West where no one knew who he was.

  Or he could just keep his mouth shut and see what happened. Protect Bo, even though this raised some serious questions about Bo’s competency.

  Everyone was entitled to one screwup, wasn’t he? And it wasn’t even clear this was a screwup.

  Slott went back behind his desk. He still had his son’s baby tooth in the top desk drawer, an accidental souvenir he’d retained after exchanging it for a gold dollar.

  The tooth fairy—a little white lie.

  Not even that. His son had brought up the tooth fairy and the promise of money. Slott hadn’t said anything, one way or another.

  Daddy didn’t lie, David. He was just protecting the family.

  Would that be better to tell his boy or his girls than: Daddy’s not the incompetent screwup the congressmen are claiming?

  Slott pushed the desk drawer closed. He told himself he needed more information before he could decide what to do.

  It wasn’t true, but it was the sort of lie he could live with.

  25

  DAEJEON, SOUTH KOREA

  Ferguson stuck his head under the shower’s stream, shaking as the ice-cold water sent shivers through his body. It was a poor substitute for sleep, as was the weak coffee he got in the lobby.

  “Corrine wants you to talk to her,” said Corrigan when he checked in.

  “What, does she think I’m working for her now?”

  “You are.”

  “You find anything else out about Science Industries?”

  “Thomas Ciello got a list of some of the people who work there,” said Corrigan. “One of them is pretty interesting.”

  “Who dat?”

  “Guy named Kang Hwan. Wrote a paper on extracting nuclear material using some sort of lase
r technique. Real technical stuff.”

  “Jack, you think a shopping list is technical.”

  “Har-har. This is. I can upload a copy of it for you.”

  “In Korean?”

  “You’re a laugh a minute, Ferg. What if I busted your chops like this every time you called in?”

  “You mean you don’t do it on purpose?”

  Ferguson laughed, picturing Corrigan fuming at the communications desk in The Cube.

  “Post me a file of the open-source information on him that I can access from a café,” Ferguson said.

  “Anonymously?”

  “No, Jack, I’m going to walk in and tell the people there I’m a spook. We lost the laptop, remember?”

  “You can get the open-source stuff with a Google search. There’s nothing there. I can’t send the report that way.”

  “I don’t want you to,” said Ferguson.

  “You can get it at the embassy.”

  “Don’t send it to them.”

  “Jesus, Ferg. You sound more paranoid by the minute.”

  “Yeah, I’m channeling my Irish grandmother. Just do what I say.”

  “All right, but . . .”

  After he’d finished with Corrigan, Ferguson called Corrine.

  “It’s the Black Prince,” he told her cheerfully when she answered. “What’s going on?”

  “Your friend is arriving in Seoul at six p.m.”

  “Very nice. He may be returning home a little sooner than I expected with some things I want you to check out.”

  “What’s going on, Ferg? Why are you bypassing the usual channels?”

  “Insurance.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against things disappearing. Memories going bad. Interpretations of facts that can’t be trusted.”

  “Who don’t you trust?”

  Ferguson lay back on the bed in his room. He hadn’t planned on getting into this discussion right now—and, hopefully, ever.