Critical Mass

by Steve Martini

  “Maybe he just went out to get a breath of fresh air,” she said. “I’ll check.”

  Joselyn was getting that sick sense, the kind you get when you realize your client has lied to you. She wondered if there was a Max Sperling or if Belden had made him up. Still, why would he come all the way to Seattle with a lawyer and then run? It didn’t make sense.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to get Mr. McCally?” The guard pulled her from her reverie.

  “No. That’s all right.” Joselyn quickly headed down the hall toward the elevators, leaving the guy standing outside the men’s room door. All the way there she wondered what she should do. She could withdraw. After all, she hadn’t made a formal appearance. It wasn’t like a trial. She’d have to give Belden his money back, at least the part she hadn’t already earned. If he wasn’t going to tell her the truth, she couldn’t represent him.

  She could always buy time, tell McCally that her client had had a change of heart. That he’d decided to assert his Fifth Amendment rights. Maybe McCally wouldn’t ask to see him. If he did, she could tell him he’d already left the building. Still, that might infuriate the prosecutor. McCally gave all the appearances of possessing a short fuse. He might apply to the court for a bench warrant and have Belden arrested for failure to appear. In the meantime, Joselyn would have spun a yarn to a federal prosecutor. She wondered if that would constitute obstruction of justice? A million thoughts raced through her mind as the elevator seemed to stop at each floor to pick up and deposit passengers. Finally she got to one, stepped out, and checked the lobby. There was no sign of Belden.

  They had entered from the Fifth Street side of the building, so instinctively she went to that door.

  Maybe he was outside having a smoke. Did he smoke? She couldn’t remember. He chewed gum. He’d offered her a stick, outside the courtroom. It began to settle on her that she knew amazingly little about this man. He had paid her fifteen thousand dollars in retainers, and all she had was a post office box for an address and a phone number someplace in Kent. It was funny the things that money made you do—like stop thinking. Joselyn had accepted him as legitimate. Why? Because he came up with the cash? So could most drug dealers.

  Her mind began to reel with the possibilities. What if he disappeared? Then she’d have his money. She could write to the court and tell them she couldn’t find her client. Yeah, given McCally’s mind-set he’d believe that!

  She looked at her watch. She had told McCally ten minutes. It had taken her almost five just to get to the Fifth Street entrance.

  She stepped outside the door. It was like a meeting of the fallen angels at Smokers Anonymous, the acrid odor of burning cigarettes. A dozen people stood around, hands in their pockets, shuffling and looking down at stamped-out cigarette butts on the ground, as they added to the carnage in their lungs. None of them was Dean Belden.

  Joselyn raced down the stairs toward Fifth Street, looking both ways. There was no sign of him. It took her five more minutes to wave down a cab. She looked at her watch as she climbed into the backseat and gave the driver directions.

  “There’s an extra fifty bucks in it if you can get me there in under ten minutes,” she told the driver. By now McCally would be looking for her, asking the guard where she went.

  The acceleration of the taxi almost gave her whiplash. It drove her back into the seat, her hands scrambling for the seat belt. Fifty bucks was extravagant, but right now she was angry that Belden had misled her. She would pay some of his money for a fast taxi ride to rip into him. Why he had bothered to fly down she wasn’t sure, but there was only one place he could be. If he got cold feet, he would go back to the lake and the plane. Joselyn hoped she could get there before he left.

  The driver weaved in and out of traffic and took a course that looked nothing like the one she and Belden had taken earlier that morning. The taxi went under I-5 and climbed the hill on the east side. It took a left on a narrow residential street and then picked up speed. The taxi must have been doing seventy, the driver slowing to fifty for peripheral glances at the cross streets.

  Joselyn was afraid to look. If anybody opened a door on a parked car, it was likely to end up in the next country, along with the driver, or at least his hand. She was about to relent, to tell the taxi driver to slow down, when he took another left on two wheels, throwing Joselyn against the corner and the door.

  Then she saw it—Lake Union. It was less than ten blocks away on the other side of the freeway.

  They headed down the hill. Joselyn fished in her purse for the money and came up with three twenties, then looked at the meter and grabbed a fourth. She was going to make the driver’s day. Joselyn had no time to haggle over change. She wondered how long it took to prepare a floatplane for flight. Maybe he’d have to refuel? That would give her plenty of time to catch up with him. She hadn’t spent that much time talking to McCally. Even if Belden had left the courthouse immediately after she’d gone into the room with the prosecutor, he couldn’t be more than ten minutes ahead of her. Unless his taxi driver had his own private turnpike, he couldn’t have gotten to the lake any faster than she did.

  They ran a red light and sped along the east shore of the lake.

  “It’s about a mile up. On the left.” Joselyn unbuckled the seat belt and was leaning over, hanging on to the front seat as best she could. She saw the restaurant, Chinese, or Japanese, the words KAMON ON THE LAKE in neon scrawled on a large sign. The seaplane dock was just beyond the restaurant. She remembered it.

  “There.” She saw Belden’s plane. It was at the dock, but somebody had turned it around, and the engine was running. She could see mild ripples on the water being churned from the prop wash. There was no sign of Belden, but he couldn’t be far.

  “Stop here. Let me out.” She almost threw the money at the driver. The car was still moving when she opened the door. It skidded to a stop on the graveled pavement of the parking lot, and Joselyn jumped out. Struggling for a better grip on her briefcase and purse, she nearly tripped.

  “You want a receipt lady?”

  She ignored the driver. Her thoughts were on the plane, its engine idling a hundred yards away at the end of the dock. She had to negotiate around a wooden planter box, through a white picket gate covered by an arbor.

  Joselyn had just cleared the gate when she saw him. Belden was putting his wallet in his hip pocket. She was right. He had to refuel. He was walking toward the plane as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He’d stood her up, left her talking to an angry prosecutor at the courthouse, and now he was going to head home as if nothing had happened.

  Anger flared like molten lava. “Hey.” She yelled at the top of her voice, but it was swallowed by the rumble of the engine.

  He stepped across onto one of the pontoons.

  She yelled again, but he showed no sign of recognition, his back still to her.

  She dropped her briefcase and purse on the dock and started to run, hands cupped to her mouth yelling for him to stop. The heel of one of her shoes caught in the gap between two planks on the dock and snapped.

  “Damn it.” Her best pair of dress shoes. She took off the broken one, started to hobble, and nearly tripped. She ditched the good shoe, throwing it ahead of her on the dock, and ran in stocking feet, yelling Belden’s name along with unmentionable epithets through cupped hands.

  The constant rumble of the engine grew louder as she drew near. She was sure he couldn’t hear her. He loosened one of the lines securing the plane to the dock, and then for some unfathomable reason, Belden turned, his gaze rising to meet her on the dock.

  Joselyn stopped in mid-stride, out of breath, the nylons on her feet shredded. Standing on one pontoon, directly below the plane’s open door, Belden looked directly at her, a studied expression as if at first he wasn’t sure it was her. Then the sign of recognition, he waved. The fucker actually waved at her and smiled. She couldn’t believe it. There was no remorse, not the slightest expression of atonement for th
e fact that he’d left her holding the bag with an angry prosecutor at the courthouse.

  She bent over, hands on her knees, still catching her breath. She was furious. She wanted to kill him. She looked down at the shredded nylon on her feet. Then heard the roar of the engine as it revved up.

  Joselyn looked up, startled. He’d released the aft line, pulled himself up into the plane, and was pulling away from the dock. After all of this, Belden was going to leave her standing there. Over her dead body. She grabbed the first thing she saw—her single good shoe on the dock—and ran headlong toward the plane. She reached the edge of the dock and threw the shoe as hard as she could. It struck the metal aileron on the plane’s tail and dropped into the water.

  She stood there at the edge of the dock, perspiration running down her face, frustration boiling over. The bottom of one foot throbbed and bled where she’d picked up a splinter. She watched as the plane made a wide, sweeping turn beyond the boathouse at the end of the dock and passed out of sight. The roar of the engine was muted by the wooden facade of the building. Still she could hear him throttling up for the channel and his takeoff, and she could do nothing.

  She walked slowly toward the end of the dock, furious. As she reached the corner of the boathouse, Joselyn heard the engine gain an octave in pitch and a hundred points on the decibel meter. Suddenly the plane emerged from behind the far corner of the building. Tail down, engine at full throttle, it roared across the water.

  Joselyn stood transfixed as if witnessing the emerging geometric shapes of a kaleidoscope, as the propeller shot forward and skipped across the water like a stone. The wings seemed to lift in a single unified piece, separated from the plane’s fuselage by an emerging orange flash, a brilliant burst that seared the optic nerve, delivering intense pain to her eyes. An instant later, the pressure wave hit Joselyn, throwing her onto her back on the dock. Her last memory was one of intense heat as the shock wave passed over her body. The spreading flare of exploding aviation fuel shot a hundred feet into the sky. Small bits of the plane floated in the air like leaves in an autumn gale.

  TWELVE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  The White House Working Group had tentacles into the National Security Council, eyes and ears at the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, and a dozen other federal agencies. They were the clearinghouse for information on domestic terrorism. The group had been formed after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and since that time it had convened once a week in the Old Executive Office Building unless there was some urgent business, in which case they could be called together on a half hour’s notice. This was not a regularly scheduled meeting.

  “What is this about?” Stuart Bowlyn was the chairman of what was known as the Working Group. Its more formal name was the Coordinating Subgroup on Counterterrorism. The panel was designed to try to ease the turf wars that erupted every time Congress threw more money at the war on terrorism.

  The attorney general wanted to make sure the State Department wasn’t sticking its nose under the lawyers’ tent on matters of criminal prosecution. The State was perennially pissed off at the National Security Council for making foreign policy. The FBI and the CIA had their own forms of tribal warfare, and the Department of Defense had only one concern: that nobody, including the president or Congress, screwed with its budget. Dropping money into this pit was like chumming with bloody bait in a tank full of sharks.

  Bowlyn had his work cut out. He was an assistant to the national security adviser and closer to the seat of power than anyone else on the panel. Seated with him at the table were an assistant director of the CIA, a high-ranking official of the FBI, and an assistant attorney general. The other members came from Military Intelligence; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and the Protective Intelligence Division of the Secret Service. They all had high-security clearance.

  The deputy director of the CIA handed Bowlyn a report in a folder marked TOP SECRET. Bowlyn opened it and read, then closed the file and looked up.

  “Who’s up and running on this?”

  The CIA nodded toward a man in a naval uniform wearing the rank of captain on the shoulder boards of his white dress uniform shirt.

  Bowlyn nodded. The officer got out of his chair and moved around the table toward a large map of the world that was pulled down in front of a chalkboard. He picked up the pointer.

  “About a week ago, Naval Intelligence started picking up a lot of frantic transmissions from a Russian military installation in Siberia. A place called Sverdlovsk, here.” He pointed to a location on the map in central Russia. “And their Pacific Fleet Command, here.” He pointed again. “At the port of Vladivostok. We didn’t think anything of it, but we continued to monitor. Most of it was encrypted. But some of it wasn’t. Some of it was over phone lines that weren’t secure.”

  “They were talking in the open?” Bowlyn seemed surprised.

  “Yes. That got our attention, too. It was as if they wanted us to listen in.”

  Bowlyn nodded to him, a signal to go on.

  “One word kept cropping up in the conversations and transmissions—Isvania. We weren’t sure what to make of it. We pumped it into one of the military intelligence databases, and two days ago we made a hit. The Isvania was a Russian factory trawler. According to our information, it went down in the eastern Pacific sometime earlier this month.”

  The naval officer moved the pointer on the map again, this time to the U.S. side of the Pacific.

  “It sank here, about sixty nautical miles due west of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, off the coast of Washington State. A Coast Guard C-130 spotted the oil slick about ten days ago. A Dolphin helicopter launched from the Coast Guard cutter Regal recovered small pieces of wreckage. A marker buoy, a flotation bag, and a partially inflated life raft.”

  “No survivors?”

  “No.” The officer picked through a file he’d put on the table until he found the photographs he was looking for, then passed them around the table toward Bowlyn.

  “Stenciled on the side of the raft was the name Isvania. According to the Russians, the ship was slated for scrap. It was supposed to be headed for Bangkok.”

  “What was it doing off the West Coast?” said Bowlyn.

  “We don’t know,” said the officer. “Neither do the Russians.”

  “At least that’s what they’re telling us.” The man from the CIA apparently had his doubts about Russian candor.

  The Navy man ignored him. “There were heavy seas in the area but no distress calls. The Russians acknowledge that it is possible the ship was involved in smuggling.”

  “Smuggling what?” said Bowlyn.

  “That’s the part they’re not telling us.”

  “And we know why,” said the CIA. “Because they know more than they’re willing to admit.”

  “The wreckage we recovered wasn’t much,” said the Navy man, “but it was enough to give us a hint that whatever it was, the crew of the Isvania didn’t want us to find it. The marker buoy contained a marine transponder. It emitted a signal that could be picked up on a Russian military frequency. It’s an older system. Had a range of no more than about a hundred miles. The flotation bag was the kicker. It was filled with a hundred gallons of diesel fuel.”

  “What for?” said Bowlyn.

  “A submersible lift, to assist the buoys. The buoys would float on the surface, one of them emitting the signal. Whatever the cargo was hung from a line below the bag of diesel fuel. You wouldn’t be able to see the bag or the cargo from the surface. The whole thing was pretty ingenious. It was designed to go to the bottom if whoever was supposed to pick it up didn’t get it within a few days. There was a small valve on the flotation bag. And a timer set to open the valve. Once the diesel oil spilled out into the sea, the cargo would have pulled the buoys to the bottom. The only reason we got it was that the cargo had been removed. The buoys kept the empty bag near the surface.”

  “Any idea what the cargo was?” said Bowlyn.


  “It weighed roughly two hundred pounds.” Now it was the FBI’s turn. “Our lab analyzed the bag and the marker buoy. Assuming there were two other buoys. We found three severed lines. If they were the same size, and given the capacity of the flotation bag, we worked backward and determined the weight of the load. And there’s something else you should see.”

  He passed a copy of the lab report to Bowlyn, who looked at it quickly, flipped to the second page, and stopped halfway down.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “Tested it twice.”

  “What else do we know?” Bowlyn looked around the table.

  “We’ve continued to monitor the Russian communiqués out of Sverdlovsk.” This from the CIA deputy director.

  “We haven’t been able to decipher all of them, but what we have indicates a considerable degree of anxiety at fairly high levels of the government.”

  “This could come from the place Sverd—”

  “Sverdlovsk,” said the CIA. “Yes. Underground bunkers. We’ve got satellite photos if you want to see them.”

  Bowlyn shook his head. “You think something got away from them?”

  “It would appear that way,” said the Navy man.

  “Tell me about this place Sverdlovsk.”

  “Nearest city is Yekaterinburg. It has a highly developed criminal subculture. There has been considerable violence there in recent years, most of it by organized gangs. Several local officials have been assassinated. One of the key prizes between the warring underworld factions is viewed as the armaments facility at Sverdlovsk. The various criminal groups vying for dominance see the facility as vital turf.”

  “That coupled with the fact that the place has piss-poor security,” said the CIA. “From what we hear, the gangs in the area see themselves as major players in the world arms market. As far as they’re concerned, the Russian government is merely storing the stuff for them, until they can find buyers.”

  “We know that the Iranians and Iraqis have been over there trying to shop,” said the Navy officer.