Prince George’s County, Maryland
USA
How are you doing?”
Maggie Templeton stood from behind her impressive bank of computer monitors, concern deepening the lines etched into her face by time.
“Good. Why wouldn’t I be?” Randi said, continuing toward an open door at the back of the spacious outer office.
Fred Klein also stood when she entered—a reflex bred into him at a time when formality and manners still mattered.
“How are you?”
“Fine. I’m fine, okay?”
Randi fell into a chair and examined the man. He looked like he always did—like he had in Cairo. Nondescript at first glance but upon closer inspection hiding something behind those wire-rimmed glasses. Cunning. Enough that it made Randi feel like she wasn’t in control of her own life—an unfamiliar sensation that she despised. Of course, Smith would have reminded her that Klein had never used his considerable power or intellect to do anything but stand behind her. Then again, the last time he’d been heard from, he’d been swimming out to sea with an arrow in his back.
“So why am I here, Mr. Klein?”
He settled back behind his government-surplus desk. “What do you know about Fukushima?”
“The nuclear disaster? Just what I saw on TV like everyone else. Earthquake, waves, explosions, radiation. Not really my area of expertise.”
He pulled out a pipe and went through his normal OCD ritual lighting it while the elaborate ventilation system that Maggie had installed started up.
“The plant had six reactors. One through Three were active, Five and Six were in cold shutdown for maintenance, and Four had been defueled. After the earthquake, One, Two, and Three went into automatic shutdown mode. Emergency generators came on to run the cooling system.”
“Then the wave hit.”
He nodded. “Forty feet high. It came over the seawall and knocked out the diesel generators. When the battery backups ran down, things got hot and the explosions started…”
“Causing the radiation leaks,” she said, completing his thought. “That was years ago, Mr. Klein. What’s it to Covert-One?”
“Some things have come to light about the disaster that don’t completely make sense.”
Randi shrugged. “That’s not terribly surprising. Whenever a screwup that big happens the only people working harder than the disaster relief teams are the corporate hacks and politicians covering their asses. They’d probably have had enough power to cool the thing down if it weren’t for all the paper shredders firing up in Tokyo.”
“A fair assessment, but it goes beyond that,” Klein said. “The highest levels of radiation were measured in Reactor Four.”
Randi pondered that for a moment. “Didn’t you say that had been defueled?”
“I did.”
“I’m no nuclear engineer but defueled sounds safe.”
“It should have been. And setting aside the radiation levels for a moment, why, four days after the tsunami, was there an explosion in that reactor?”
She shrugged again. “Jon’s the scientist. But someone must have an explanation.”
“Oh, there are a number of them. Not one is even remotely plausible, though.”
“And that’s what Jon was working on?”
Klein took a long pull on his pipe. “I managed to make contact with a man who had smuggled out some suspicious samples right after the tsunami. He was passing them on to Jon when…when things went wrong.”
“I assume you misplaced the samples, too?”
He didn’t answer immediately, but her phrasing was clearly not lost on him. “The samples are gone.”
“I guess I don’t understand what we’re trying to get at here. Are you saying that the Japanese nuclear contractors might have cut corners and built an unsafe reactor? Or are you—”
“The man I was in contact with suspected some kind of sabotage,” Klein interjected. “And he was scared. He wouldn’t talk about it on the phone or even via encrypted e-mail. He suddenly decided he wanted to be rid of that sample and told me if I didn’t get someone over there in twenty-four hours, he was going to destroy it and disappear.”
“So that’s what got Jon sent to a remote fishing village in Japan.”
“There was no time to bring someone up to speed. Jon was my top operative so I sent him.”
Touché, Randi thought, keeping her face impassive. While she was closer to Smith than she was to anyone else in the world, she was also competitive. That was Klein’s subtle way of telling her that he thought Smith was better.
“Okay, sabotage,” she said. “Nuclear reactors are pretty well secured and pretty sturdy. Attacking them isn’t easy to do. Who? An antinuke group?”
“Maybe, but I’m more concerned about the possibility of foreign actors.”
“China.”
Klein took another pull on his pipe. “You know better than I do how the Chinese feel about Japan, and the situation in the East China Sea is headed nowhere good. The president is putting pressure on the Japanese prime minister to calm things down but, frankly, it’s easier said than done.”
“That’s an understatement,” Randi said. “Sanetomi is the Zen master of politicians, but the position he’s in is impossible. If he goes far enough to appease the Chinese, his own people are going to see him as selling them down the river. And if he stands his ground firmly enough to keep his job, the Chinese are going to start polishing up their ICBMs. The Buddha himself would fall off the tightrope he’s stuck on.”
“And then there’s General Takahashi,” Klein said. “While he’s being typically clever about it, he seems to be going out of his way to provoke China.”
“Okay, but why a nuclear plant? And why years ago before things got really hot between them? Are they concerned that the Japanese might be using Fukushima to create a nuclear arsenal?”
“We have assurances from Sanetomi that they’re not, and the intelligence community seems satisfied by that.”
“So maybe the Chinese were just trying to create an incident? Make the Japanese lose face and give them something internal to focus on. Or do you think they actually could have been trying to soften them up for an attack?”
“An outright attack on Japan would be a serious enterprise. It would drag in the US and the rest of the world from the first salvo.”
Randi tapped her fingers absently on the arm of her chair. “Leads?”
“Like I told you, the man I was in contact with in Japan is dead, the samples are gone, and there’s nothing but silence coming out of China. But I know you’re well connected there.”
Before turning her focus to the Middle East, she’d operated a great deal in China and spoke fluent Mandarin. “Okay. Let me nose around a little bit.”
“You have an idea?”
She stood and started for the door. “I just might.”