HETTA STEERS THE SUBURBAN OFF THE RAMP ONTO ROAD 1. THE signs all point to Jerusalem.
‘The Engineer has built a bomb,’ I say.
She keeps her eyes on the road. ‘There’s no way anyone could smuggle one in.’
I envy her conviction.
‘All they have to do is smuggle in the deuterium and tritium. Neither carry a signature on their own. Ilitch can do the rest with a 3D printer.’ I pause. ‘Why are you here?’
‘PIAD liaison with Presidential Protection.’
‘On whose orders?’
‘Cabot’s.’
‘Cabot’s here?’
She nods. ‘A message came in two hours ago. Secret Service eyes only. From Christy. My orders are to pick you up and bring you in. To avoid a diplomatic incident. Stop you doing anything stupid. Everyone’s seriously on edge. If the Israelis get even a whisper of this, they’ll scrub the conference.
‘But the consensus is, nothing can get through. You’ll see the security arrangements when we hit the Needle Eye cordon.’
‘Consensus?’
‘The considered opinion of our multi-agency intelligence cell.’
‘The CIA director. The head of the NSA. The DCI. Are any of them here?’
‘No. Cabot is the only person of any seniority with intelligence connections.’
‘That’s something, at least.’
‘Meaning?’
‘We can trust him. Cabot isn’t going to sacrifice himself for the intelligence cabal that put this together.’
‘Cabal?’
‘Us and the Russians.’
Her eyes narrow.
‘The Russians?’
‘I was in Stockholm, Hetta. I saw Koori.’
‘Gapes’s trainer?’
‘Koori went back to the US. He briefed Christy. I went to Russia.’
She breathes in sharply when I remove my glasses and show her the dents on my face.
‘I met Ilitch.’
There’s a line of vehicles ahead.
A policeman with a baton is directing ordinary traffic to the two right-hand lanes, diplomatic to the left.
A barrier that looks like a toll booth stretches across the highway – a thing with walls and a roof.
The diplomatic lane is empty. The volume in the others is already building.
A set of lights instructs us to slow and then stop.
A scanner sweeps from front to back, checking out the exterior and interior of the SUV for anything with a signature that looks weapon-like, while a mass-spectrometer takes micro samples of the air.
The merest trace of explosive, biohazard, or a nuclear or chemical material would be flagged to the heavily armed cordon beyond the barrier.
A green light invites us to drive.
I wait till we’re accelerating again.
‘This device is different. It doesn’t need explosive. It’s a high-precision, compact nuclear weapon, tiny, potentially, with a yield somewhere in the five-to-ten-kiloton range – enough to destroy half the city. The printer builds the casing to the tolerances required. The Engineer makes it go bang by collapsing the ballotechnic.’
‘How?’
‘With his mind. He has trained for this since he was a kid.’
She turns and stares at me. ‘Fuck you, Josh.’
I point to my face again. ‘Believe it or not, this is evidence-based.’
We pass through a cutting. The road narrows from three lanes to two and drops into a valley. I can see tall buildings on the distant hillside.
‘Christy’s team has compiled a dossier of all the intel on the Engineer. She doesn’t believe he’s for real.’ She pauses. ‘Nobody does, Josh. They think he’s blowback, like Johansson said – a myth we created, returning to haunt us.’
We slow again. Another checkpoint. A soldier spots our plates and waves us into the left lane. Hetta powers down her window and hands our documents to a guy with a submachine gun. CCTV cameras scan our movements and facial expressions for anything that suggests we might have something to hide.
The spectrometers provide their usual back-up.
We’re waved through, toward a cluster of vehicles. Soldiers milling about. Motorcycle outriders. Guys in suits and shades watching the road and the skies.
‘What about the President?’ I ask.
She pulls in. ‘He remains to be convinced, too.’
I spot the Beast, five vehicles ahead.
‘You’ve got five minutes,’ she says.
Hetta and I clamber into the back of the Beast. Cabot and Graham flank the President. Christy’s brief sits on his lap. I know Sergeyev’s dossier on the Engineer will have been passed to him too.
I give them the missing piece to their puzzle: the Russian determination since the seventies to find someone with the talent to trigger an explosion by psychokinesis, the power of thought.
‘Insane,’ Graham says. ‘We have covert WMD inspection teams at key points who’ve scoured the city, including the Mount of Olives, for a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield device. They’re still out there, patrolling, backed by some serious SEAL support, five minutes, max, from any point they need to reach within the city. Trust me, Cain, there’s no trace of one.’
Cabot nods, but I can see that he’s less convinced.
I lean forward. ‘This isn’t a conventional nuke. It’s a fourth generation weapon with a vengeance. The initiator – a thing called a ballotechnic – is chemically inert. And on their own, tritium and deuterium don’t emit detectable radiation. A Geiger counter in the Hall of the Assembly would get more excited by the exit signs. But when subjected to high pressure, that all changes.’
Thompson’s jaw clenches. ‘This initiative is the reason I became a politician. It’s the culmination of everything I’ve ever worked for. Everything I’ve dreamed about.’
I sense the ghost of Kit Harper at his shoulder – the kid who threw himself under a train to get away from Pastor Green and his other tormenters at the Southern Cross, the reform school Thompson was sent to by his parents as a fourteen-year-old.
‘If I leave and there is a bomb, I’m the worst kind of coward. If I leave and there isn’t, I’ll be a laughing stock.’ His gaze falls on each of us in turn.
‘So,’ Cabot says, ‘we don’t have a choice. We have to find him.’
I nod. ‘We know the Engineer’s name is Danilovsky, and that he’s from Dagestan. He’s thirty-five years old. There’s a photograph of him as a priest from around a decade ago. And the sketch from the cabin.’
‘If we circulate them, we risk alerting the Israelis,’ Cabot says. ‘It’ll trigger an evacuation of their key personnel. That happens, it gets flagged by the intelligence community. And picked up by Danilovsky. Then, boom.’
‘There are in excess of fifteen thousand delegates.’ Graham’s voice rises an octave as the implications of our task sink in. ‘Including two thousand clerics.’
‘The device itself,’ Cabot says. ‘What are we looking for?’
‘Something around the size of a baseball,’ I say. ‘Most of it is made up of the trigger mechanism, the outer shell – the ballotechnic. The core – which contains the nuclear material – is no bigger than a thimble.’
I look at the President. ‘When are you onstage?’
‘A little over seven hours.’
‘And the Pope?’
‘Directly before me.’
I share my view that it’s highly unlikely the Engineer will detonate the bomb until he has both star performers in his sights. And the Pope doesn’t land at Ben Gurion for another three hours.
Cabot rolls up his sleeves. ‘OK, so we put the delegate list back under the microscope.’
‘And then some.’ Graham turns to Hetta. As liaison between PIAD and the President’s protection detail, she must mastermind the hunt.
‘OK. So let’s get back to the Hall.’
Cabot glances significantly at us both. We can pull in around a dozen other Secret Service personnel, but they don’t get to know what we are doing.
Hetta and I return to her Suburban and hitch ourselves to the back of the motorcade. We’re joined by four Israeli motorcycle outriders, who fire up their lightbars and sirens.
At the city’s outer limits another huge sign directs regular traffic to the left, badged conference vehicles to the right.
I’m filled with the dread I felt after returning from Vermont, when I sat in the guest room with Hope’s ghost and Jack’s portrait.
The outriders ignore the stop lights at the next junction, wave other road users out of the way, and the motorcade peels off to the right, toward the Hall of the Assembly.
I tell Hetta not to follow.
She brakes as the lights turn red.
‘This isn’t right. Gapes directed us to the Church of St Mary Magdalene.’
‘You heard Graham. There’s nothing there.’
‘Then we need to look again.’
‘No. They need our eyes-on in the Hall of the Assembly.’ She indicates right, grips the wheel and stares resolutely at the lights, waiting for them to change.
‘Why did Lefortz assign you to me that night?’ I ask. ‘At the tower.’
‘I happened to be on duty.’
‘Happened to be?’
‘OK, he said you needed protection.’
‘But why you? You weren’t Presidential Protection. You were PIAD. A threat analyst, not a bullet catcher.’
She drums her fingers on the rim of the wheel. ‘I don’t know.’
‘He told me. You were the only person he could trust. Thompson had charged him with a clandestine probe into the misdemeanors of that part of our intelligence community which is beyond oversight, and using Russian mafia money to fund the Grid and other deeply classified programs. Thompson knew his world was about to turn dark; that the knives would be out for him.
‘There was no one he could trust except Lefortz. And no one Lefortz could trust except you.’
She glances at me.
‘I’m asking you to trust me, Hetta, the way he did.’
The lights change.
She cancels the indicator and makes a left.