115

MIAMI, FLORIDA—3 JUNE

Marcus and his team landed in Miami in a private jet just before 3 a.m.

A DSS advance agent met them at the Signature Flight Support center and drove them to the Oak Grove apartments, though it was a nightmare to get to the actual evidence scene. The entire area was blocked for a half mile in every direction, and residents were still being evacuated.

Even when they cleared through the checkpoints, they found the streets near the building clogged with emergency vehicles. Specialists in hazmat suits were everywhere. Police and FBI choppers buzzed overhead, though there were no TV news helicopters; the governor, in coordination with DSS and the Secret Service, had just declared a no-fly zone over the stadium.

Marcus eventually found the special agent in charge and received a full briefing. No other hot spots had been found in the city, though NEST teams were going neighborhood by neighborhood in search of more. A massive manhunt was underway but so far had turned up no one associated with Kairos. The only sliver of good news was that the city was not panicking, since most of its residents were sound asleep. The deadline for the morning edition of the Miami Herald had already passed, and so people would not be waking up to headlines screaming anything like “Feds Hunt for Nuclear Terrorists ahead of Papal Visit.” For now, officials were telling the media there had been fears of a gas leak in an apartment and that out of an abundance of caution, residents were being evacuated until the situation could be resolved.

That story worked for a while, but by sunrise, TV and radio news broadcasts were leading with unsourced rumors that federal authorities were searching for a “foreign terrorist cell” allegedly operating in the Miami area.

At 9 a.m., the governor and mayor held a joint news conference to say simply that there had been a bomb threat at the apartment complex—not a gas leak—but that the situation was under control. Asked by reporters if rumors of terrorists coming to Miami were true, the governor adroitly deflected the issue by saying, “As with any major event in our city, we are dealing with many rumors and allegations.” He added that he and the mayor had great confidence in the work law enforcement was doing, that the city was not in danger, and that the people of Miami remained “very proud to welcome His Holiness” to their city.

Shortly before 10 a.m., Marcus arrived at the DSS command post, located on the top floor of a high-rise hotel not far from the stadium. He placed a call to Dell to basically report that they hadn’t found anything Kairos related yet.

“I think you need to get on a plane to New York next, then,” Dell said, speaking from a SCIF in the American embassy in Moscow. “If there’s nothing more you can do in Miami, and Houston is already on high alert, we need boots on the ground near Yankee Stadium.”

Marcus couldn’t think of a reason to disagree. The pope was on his way to Miami even now. NEST and the other agencies had things under control, as much as he could predict.

At 10 a.m., Marcus joined a secure videoconference with the president and the NSC.

Defense Secretary Foster opened the briefing by telling the group that the Pentagon and DOE were able to confirm overnight that the unique radioactive signatures found at the Miami apartment complex could, in fact, be traced back to Russian uranium. However, the evidence was conclusive that this was a different batch of Russian uranium from the traces found in Houston. That was significant, he said, because it meant the Miami hot spot had not been created from the same set of bombs as the Houston one. That, in turn, meant these bombs were being transported by a different Kairos cell.

Hernandez called on Dell, who was participating in the call from the SCIF. “What time are you meeting with Petrovsky?” he asked.

“In about ninety minutes.”

“Add this to your brief, Martha.”

“I will, Mr. President.”

Hernandez ordered the SecDef to take U.S. nuclear and conventional forces to DEFCON 2. Then he turned back to Dell. “I don’t want to give the Russians any room to misunderstand the gravity or the urgency of the situation, Martha. And I want you to use the language Annie suggested yesterday. Make it clear that if any nuclear device containing uranium mined, processed, or enriched in Russia is detonated on American soil, the U.S. government will consider this an act of war by the Russian Federation. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Dell said. “But what if Petrovsky argues the material was given to the Iranians or stolen or was out of the Kremlin’s control for some other reason?”

“Tell him I don’t care, and neither will the American people. If nuclear weapons with Russian fingerprints kill American citizens, we are going to war.”

Every muscle in Marcus’s body tensed. The situation was deteriorating rapidly. A Kairos attack inside the American homeland would be bad enough. But this thing could get far worse. Aleksandr Luganov—Petrovsky’s predecessor—was dead, but the evil that Luganov had set into motion was taking the great powers to the brink of global thermonuclear war. And unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, the only parallel he could think of, no one outside this call had any idea of the danger.