Arlington, Virginia

Mercer sprawled on the leather sofa in the rec room wearing the loosest pair of sweatpants he owned, a bag of frozen peas pressed to his groin and a vodka gimlet within easy reach. From the floor, Drag regarded him through droopy, bloodshot eyes, indignant that he’d been evicted from his favorite spot.

Cali and Ira Lasko sat on the other couch facing Mercer, while Harry and Booker Sykes were at the bar. Burgers and fries from a fast-food restaurant littered the coffee table and bar top.

When the Maid of the Mist returned to its dock and it was determined that Mercer didn’t need a hospital, he was given a ride to the Niagara Police Department and booked on numerous charges. Like after the shoot-out in New Jersey, Ira had to step in with local authorities to get him released. Sykes had picked up Cali and her team from Grand Island and abandoned his boat so no one knew of their involvement. Ruth Bishop from the Coast Guard was to lead the investigation into the gun battle, coordinating with her Canadian counterparts to find the helicopter that had dropped the paratroopers and was most likely going to haul away the crates. So far word of their contents had not spread thanks in large part to the money Brian Crenna was being paid to keep his mouth shut. He’d have a new tugboat and floating crane by the end of the week. His missing crewman had been found on the Canadian side of the border, so with no civilian fatalities this was being heralded as a thwarted terrorist attack on Niagara Falls power plants. Mercer, NEST, and Sykes’s team weren’t part of the cover story and were sworn to secrecy.

Because none of the terrorists’ bodies had been recovered, Mercer, Cali, and Sykes’s Delta team had spent the day with the FBI’s counterterrorism unit going over hundreds of pictures of known terrorists in hopes of identifying the men who’d attacked the barge. One of the bass boats had survived the ordeal and was found packed with enough explosives to sink a cruise ship. As Mercer had noted during the battle, the terrorists were Middle Eastern. He recognized four of the men from the photo lineup. Two were Iraqi and two were from Saudi Arabia. The Arab paratrooper, a former captain in the Iraqi Republican Guard, was well known to the Pentagon, but none of the others were particularly high up in the Al Qaida chain of command. There was nothing in any database on the Caucasian parachutist.

Ira made sure that Homeland Security would keep him in the loop as they tracked how the men entered North America and where they had gotten their weapons. They would also provide twenty-four-hour guards for Mercer’s house. That was his price for cooperation. He didn’t want to take up Ira’s suggestion of moving to a safe house.

With his genitals sufficiently numb, Mercer set the peas on a dishrag next to him and wiped a smear of ketchup from his lips. He’d just finished telling Harry the story of the fight and his dive off the falls.

“I think that makes you the twelfth person who’s gone over the falls and lived,” Harry remarked. “However, technically you didn’t go over them. You parachuted, so it really doesn’t count.”

“Technically, my ass,” Mercer spat back and hobbled to the bar for another drink. “I may not be able to talk about it but in my mind I went over the falls and I’ve got the swollen stones to prove it.” He turned to Ira. “I’ve forgotten to ask. How’s it going with the recovery of the crates?”

“Coast Guard’s on it now with Cali’s teammates, ah, Slaughbaugh and Williams. They managed to recover two of them pretty easily from the Maid of the Mist Pool below the rapids, but the other two are directly under the falls, where the water is deeper than the falls are tall. The good news is there’s no trace of radiation in the water, so we know they didn’t break open.”

“And security?”

“Airtight this time,” Ira said solemnly. “What made you invite Booker along?”

“Poli’s been a step ahead since Africa. He has the original manuscript from Chester Bowie’s safe, which gave him the name of the freighter Bowie used to ship the crates to America. And as Cali proved finding what happened to the Wetherby wasn’t too tough. What I hadn’t anticipated was the number of men he’d employ and the sophistication of the assault given the short amount of time he had to plan it.”

Booker Sykes spoke up. “An operation like he coordinated would have taken weeks, maybe months for training and he pulled it off in just a couple of days.”

“That tells us,” Mercer continued, “that he’s got a lot of assets in the States.”

“And you’re sure he wasn’t with the assault team?” Ira asked.

“Positive,” Mercer said bitterly. More than anything he wished the mercenary had been there when the barge went over the falls. “I did recognize the white paratrooper from New Jersey. He was taking the potshots at us while Poli was driving. I suspect the Qaida fighters on the bass boats were just cannon fodder in case the barge was protected.”

“That’s why all the explosives,” Booker added. “Suicide run if you had a Coast Guard escort. I figure the Iraqi who ’chuted in was the terror cell’s leader but they were working for Poli.”

“Who ultimately works for someone else,” Cali said.

“Someone we don’t have a bead on yet.” Mercer returned to the couch and settled the frozen peas over his groin again. “But it’s got to be Al Qaida. How else could he get their men? For Poli it’s all about the money. Guys willing to die in a suicide attack do it for politics or faith.”

Ira finished his burger and crushed his napkin. “You think this is Al Qaida’s attempt to get the radioactive material they need for a dirty bomb?”

“What else could it be?” Cali answered. “We all know they’ve wanted to get their hands on nuclear material for years. And despite what the media thinks, NEST and other groups are doing a damn fine job closing conduits from the old Soviet republics and any other source imaginable.” She glanced at Mercer almost as if what she was about to say was his fault. “What no one anticipated was finding a cache of natural plutonium that seems to have been lost for a couple thousand years. Using what Chester Bowie rediscovered is Al Qaida’s only chance if they want a dirty bomb.”

“I don’t get something,” Harry said. “If you guys could recover the crates without any problems, what’s the big deal with a dirty bomb anyway?”

Cali met his frank gaze. “It’s a terror weapon. More people would be killed in the initial explosion than would suffer radiological effects, but that doesn’t matter. The mere mention of radioactive contamination would be enough to cause nationwide panic. Remember the anthrax attacks and how many people were hoarding Cipro?”

“Unfortunately,” Ira interrupted, “competition in the media has forced them into using scare tactics in order to sell ad space. A story like a dirty bomb attack would turn the media into a feeding frenzy of doom and gloom that would actually help the terrorists in spreading fear. You have to know that our press is no longer free. And it’s not some vast right wing, or even left wing, conspiracy that’s destroyed its objectivity. It’s our own consumerism that has allowed the media to be co-opted by Madison Avenue in order to sell lingerie and cheaper computers. You just know there are editors and news directors out there who are anxiously awaiting a terrorist attack or a plane crash or a celebrity murder so they can pump their circulation and raise their ad rates. So long as advertisers subsidize the media, the press will always find the negative. It’s human nature.”

“What’s the alternative?” Harry asked. “In countries where the state supplies the news, you get nothing but propaganda.”

“I don’t know,” Ira admitted. “But it pisses me off that when there’s no real news to report they go out and find some horror to exploit. Thousands of teenagers die every year but it’s only during a lull in the news cycle that one death gets turned into a national tragedy. And this happens not because we value that teen over any other but because the constant exposure to the details creates a feedback loop of interest.”

“Pretty cynical,” Harry remarked. “And I can’t deny it.”

“Sad, huh?” Ira said tiredly.

Mercer leaned forward. “We’re getting off topic.”

“Sorry.” Ira scratched at his bald head. “I spent the morning with our media consultants building the cover story around the attack. Leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”

“We’ve secured the bulk of the plutonium Chester Bowie mined,” Mercer stated. “I’m not even going to worry about the little bit that was in the safe. That still leaves the Alembic of Skenderbeg, which we’re still trying to hunt down, and what the Russians mined after Bowie left Africa. Have you gotten anywhere with them?”

“Actually I have.” Ira opened the briefcase at his feet and withdrew a folder. “That’s how I spent my afternoon. I got this from Grigori Popov, a guy whose career mirrors mine. He was a sub driver in the Pacific Fleet who moved to naval intelligence. He’s now a deputy in the Ministry of Defense. I’ve known him for years, and while I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him, we’ve been dealing with each other long enough to know when it’s time to put all our cards on the table.”

Ira glanced at his notes. “We were pretty much right when we spoke in my office a few days ago. The Russians had stolen the designs for our atomic bomb but knew they wouldn’t have the resources to enrich uranium for at least a decade, and plutonium production would take even longer. As World War Two came to a close the KGB created something called Scientific Operations headed by a shrewd cookie named Boris Ulinev.”

Mercer sat bolt upright, color draining from his face. “Jesus. Department 7.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Don’t you remember me telling you about my involvement when Hawaii almost seceded and the whole plot to blow up the Alaska Pipeline?” Lasko nodded. “Both of those were old Department 7 operations.”

“That’s right!” Ira exclaimed. “I knew it sounded familiar when Greg was telling me about it.”

“You know their last director is still on the loose out there,” Mercer said with ill-disguised anger. “Ivan Kerikov’s his name. I wonder if he’s mixed up in all of this.”

“I doubt it,” Ira told him.

“Ah, guys?” Cali interjected. “Little help for those of us who don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mercer explained. “Department 7 was created during World War Two as the Russians were advancing into German-occupied Eastern Europe and then into Germany herself. Their sole mission was to assimilate captured technology. The Nazis had some pretty advanced stuff on their drawing boards at war’s end and the Soviets stole as much as they could get their hands on. Plans for jet aircraft, powerful radar systems, next-generation missiles, even the world’s first infrared scopes. It was Department 7’s job to take this technology back to the Soviet Union and integrate it into their military. That’s how they were able to produce jet fighters so quickly after the war. The MiG-15 was basically a copy of a German aircraft.” He looked back to Ira. “It makes sense they’d be involved with this if Bowie was right and it was German agents after him.”

“He was and they were,” Ira said. “When Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, learned about the Alembic of Skenderbeg, he personally dispatched a team to search for its power source. Two of them were killed, we know now by Janissaries, while a third returned to Germany with a sketchy report about Chester Bowie and his crates. The Germans didn’t send another team back to Africa, believing they could enrich uranium themselves, and the whole affair was shoved into an archive.”

“And in waltzes Department 7,” Booker said from the bar, a plug of tobacco shoved against his right cheek.

“Exactly. While the Nazis shipped a lot of their nuclear program to Japan at the close of the war, there was enough left in Germany for Department 7 to figure out there might be a natural source of nuclear fuel. Unlike the Germans the Soviets scoured parts of Africa until they found the cache in the Central African Republic in 1947, which was a French Colony at the time. Oh, and Greg Popov denies any massacre took place.”

“Naturally,” Mercer smirked.

Ira gave him a wry smile. “He did say that they mined several tons of ore, the entire lode in fact.”

“So what happened to it?” Cali asked. She pursed her lips around her straw to sip some of her Coke. It was a sensual gesture that caught every man’s attention and delayed Ira’s answer for a beat.

“Ah, Greg told me they used up half of it before they began to enrich their own uranium in 1950.”

“So their early bombs were fueled by the plutonium,” Harry said.

“Appears that way.”

Mercer asked, “What about the half they didn’t use?”

“Thought you’d bring that up.” Ira reached into his briefcase again and tossed two airline tickets onto the coffee table. “You and Cali are going to go see it for yourselves. The Russians have it stored in an old mine in the Ural Mountains with a bunch of other artifacts left over from Department 7. I’ve already cleared it with your boss, Cali.”

Cali couldn’t believe it. “The Russians just left it sitting there?”

“You know better than most how poorly they secured their nuclear material during the Cold War. And when you think about it, until the last decade or so it didn’t matter. There wasn’t anyone interested in getting their hands on the stuff. Of course today is a different story, which has forced them to play catch-up. Our government has funneled billions to Russia and Ukraine to consolidate and better guard their stockpiles, but it takes time.”

“I know.” Cali shook her head. “It’s just frustrating. I’ve spent my career trying to prevent a nuclear attack and no matter how good I am, or the rest of NEST, it only takes one mistake by us and a city’s wiped off the face of the earth. Meanwhile you’ve got the Russians leaving nuclear material lying around in mines and warehouses or in the craters of old nuclear bomb tests they never bothered to clean up or even refill.

“And what happens if we do get hit? Sure we’ll condemn the terrorists and lob a few smart bombs, but then we’ll spend years investigating our own intelligence failures and never once address the real culprits, the assholes who made the material available in the first place. I agreed with taking out the Taliban after 9/11 but then we should have rolled right across Saudi Arabia. It’s their government that allowed bin Laden and his followers to fester; only the Saudis were smart enough in the beginning to ship them all to Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

“Course now they’re coming home to roost,” Ira added.

“And it’s only when bombs started going off in Riyadh that they took an interest in fighting terrorism, and even now their attitude is still pretty permissive. On the one hand they track down and execute a few extremists while on the other they continue to pump money into the Wahabi schools where future terrorists are trained, because if they stop, the whole movement will turn against them.”

“We know invading Saudi Arabia isn’t an option,” Mercer said. “So how do we get out of this mess?”

Again Cali shook her head. “The Saudis are actively exporting terror because they can afford to. It won’t stop until they’re broke. Take away their oil wealth and they’re just another backwater third world country that can’t feed its population. We stop them by finding other sources of oil and eventually finding an alternative to it altogether.”

“In other words,” Harry rasped, “we keep taking it on the chin for as long as it takes to pump the bastards dry.”

“And that’s just what’s going to continue to happen,” Cali agreed. “They’ll keep funding fanatics who will still try to fly airplanes into buildings or detonate a dirty bomb or simply strap on suicide vests and blow themselves up in malls and movie theaters.”

“This has turned grim,” Booker said, helping himself to a beer from Mercer’s retro fifties era lock-lever bar fridge.

“Unfortunately that’s the state of the world,” Ira replied. “I see more shit crossing my desk at the White House than you can imagine, but I do agree with Cali that fundamentalism is the single greatest danger today and there are no easy fixes either. We’re like the Russians playing catch-up with their nuclear materials. It will take us years to find a way to neutralize the Saudis’ influence by making oil obsolete.”

“In the meantime we have more pressing concerns,” Mercer said to get the conversation back on track. “What’s the plan once Cali and I get to Russia?”

“Grigori will meet you in Samara, an industrial city on the Volga River. From there you’ll take a military chopper to the mine. He’ll have a hazmat team on hand to make sure the plutonium ore is handled properly. They’re taking it to a weapons depot about a thousand miles from anywhere, in the middle of Siberia. Just so you know, that facility is the newest and best in the country, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers. Once you verify that the plutonium is safely in the depot, your mission is done.”

“Not even close,” Mercer said sourly. “We still have Poli and the Janissaries running around, as well as the Alembic of Skenderbeg to deal with.” He turned to Booker Sykes. “Are you up for a little trip?”

“Depends,” the Delta commando drawled.

“Ira, I take it you’re still not having any luck getting the Pentagon to send a team to check out the stele?” Lasko nodded. “Then, Book, how’d you like an all-expense-paid trip to the worst hellhole I’ve ever seen?”

“To do what exactly?”

“There’s an obelisk in the village where Cali and I found the mine. It was placed there by order of Alexander the Great. Cali and I both remember there was writing on it. I need to know what it says. I’m hoping that it will give us some clue as to where the alembic was stashed.”

“You just want pictures or the whole damned thing?”

“A couple of Polaroids and you’re out of there. Two days on the ground tops.”

“I recommend a digital camera,” Ira suggested.

“Figure of speech,” Mercer replied. “Don’t forget I’m a Luddite. I got my first cell phone last year.”

Sykes said, “The two guys with me on the boat, Paul Rivers and Bernie Cieplicki, both have to rotate back to Fort Bragg tomorrow.” He grinned. “I’ll see they come down with a case of the creeping cruds and spring them for the trip.”