First Team [First Team 01] Read online

  “Even that has problems,” said Stich. “Or so I’m told.”

  “There would be a great deal of value in upholding the rule of law,” said McCarthy dryly. “But there is a bit of a time limit.”

  “A statute of limitations?” asked Corrine, not understanding.

  “In a way. We have a message predicting that Satan will be struck by May 10. We would be Satan,” added the president.

  “It’s credible?”

  “That’s what we need to find out,” said the CIA director.

  “Well, you’re best off deciding whether you want to prosecute or not before going ahead,” Corrine told him.

  They sat silently for a moment. Corrine decided that was a cue for her to leave. “I think I’ll go for lunch,” she said, rising.

  “Set a spell,” said the president.

  “I don’t know if it would be useful for me to be present,” said Corrine.

  “You’re always useful, Miss Alston. I believe the gentlemen are finished for now, and you and I have some other matters to discuss. I’ll get back to you on this, Thomas.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Corrine nodded to the others warily, aware that McCarthy actually wanted to discuss it further. One of his aides—Jess Northrup, an assistant to the chief of staff who was primarily responsible for keeping him close to schedule—came in and ran down the afternoon’s appointments. He had a meeting with the head of the SEC, then a round of phone calls, all designed to push far-reaching business reforms. “Leveling the field for common folk to invest in their future” had been one of the president’s important campaign slogans, but doing that in a town tangled with business and political interests was harder than ‘rassling daddy gators—another of the president’s pet sayings.

  “Well?” asked McCarthy, as Northrup retreated.

  “That’s a deep subject,” said Corrine.

  “I hate it when my words are used against me,” said McCarthy. He leaned back in his chair. “I need a set of ears and eyes I can trust.”

  “Your problem, Jon, is that you want to have your cake and eat it, too. Either question the prisoner or put him on trial.”

  “He’s been questioned. They’re not sure if they can believe what he says,” said McCarthy.

  They stared at each other, each silently pondering the dilemma. While the president clearly had a duty to prevent the loss of life, he also had to uphold the Constitution and preserve the rule of law. It was the sort of decision that Lincoln had had to make during the Civil War; McCarthy had written a book about Lincoln before leaving academia to go into politics, and the example of the country’s greatest president was never far from his mind.

  “What has he told you so far?” Corrine asked.

  “Let’s go back a bit,” said McCarthy. “Way back. I want you to understand the perspective better than Thomas explained it. How’s your Russian geography?”

  “I know where Moscow is.”

  “Buzuluk mean anything?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  “Town on the Samara River. Other side of the Urals, a bit middle central. Think of St. Louis, if you could put it in lower Siberia.” The president smirked. “The area’s supposed to be lovely in the spring, if you can ignore the mosquitoes. During the Cold War, the Russians had an experimental lab there. They worked on reactors, alternate designs for submarines, and a series of nuclear rockets. Not much worked for them, but then that’s the nature of experimental labs.”

  The president leaned back in his seat. “Well now, years go by, the wastes from the operation pile up. Variety of wastes, mind you—spent uranium, they call it U235 or 235U, has the number in front of the letter like an exponential equation.”

  McCarthy drew out exponential equation in a way that made Corrine smile. He was playing country bumpkin, even though he obviously knew a great deal about the subject. It was a pose he liked to adopt.

  “Control rods, contaminated boron-europium, oh a variety of things,” continued the president. “A whole briefing paper full of them. Some last a few hours, some centuries. Some of it very nasty, some no more harmful than the glow on a Timex watch. Well now, comes the time and the lab work is done and all of this waste is set-tin’ around—”

  “Is this a Defense Threat Reduction Agency project?” Corrine asked. The DTRA was a joint U.S.-Russian effort to contain waste and warheads. It had met with some success containing radioactive material from antiquated bombs and missiles that had been scrapped under disarmament treaties.

  “No, for various reasons this isn’t under their purview. For a while, the Russian Navy took it over—I guess they weren’t satisfied with making a mess up on the Kola Peninsula and thought they’d have a go here.”

  Despite the president’s sarcasm, the situation on Kola was a serious one. Literally tons of waste material—including played-out reactor cores—were stored in deteriorating conditions at Russian naval bases on the Berents Sea. Various efforts were under way to clean them up, but there was a great deal of consternation about security at the sites, as well as safety measures.

  “Well, this here project is a bit better contained. French company is working with the Russians, packaging up the worst waste into these containers that are easy to handle. Bit like putting a muzzle and wheels on a daddy alligator and carting him through town. The waste is transported from Buzuluk to Kazakhstan, then down to Kyrgyzstan for burial. Some of it, that is. We have monitoring devices in Kazakhstan, and two months ago, someone noticed a discrepancy. Not a large one, mind you, but one that couldn’t be explained easily. So we sent the CIA in to investigate. Which is where Thomas and his people came in.”

  “What’s the connection with Chechnya?” Corrine asked.

  McCarthy smiled. “Now you know, dear, these terrorist groups can get more tangled than a pair of rattlers sucked into granny’s loom.”

  That was a new one to her.

  “Can they make a nuclear device from the waste?” she asked.

  “Scientists say no. The CIA people think they’re stealing it to build a dirty bomb,” added the president. “But they haven’t quite put the pieces together yet. And that’s where our guest comes in.”

  “What did the Russians say?” asked Corrine.

  “They were not consulted. That would have complicated things, frankly. They see him as a criminal as well. By the time they’re done with him he won’t be worth talking to. Their prisoners have an unfortunate habit of passing away in prison.”

  “You’re not going to tell them what’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure anything is. That’s the difficulty. The evidence is less than overwhelming,” admitted the president. “The French company has manifests that show nothing is wrong. We have satellite photos that show all of the railcars used to move the waste arrived intact. But the sensors passed their calibration tests. I need to decide if our prisoner has valuable information or not.” McCarthy shook his head. “My preference would be to prosecute the son of a bitch in court.”

  “It’s possible you’ve already lost that opportunity,” Corrine told him.

  McCarthy did what he always did when someone told him something he didn’t want to hear: He smiled.

  “How reliable is Mr. Parnelles’s interrogation method?” she asked.

  “Extremely.”

  “And the May 10 information?”

  “They’re not sure whether it’s related. It was contained in a message to be delivered at a mosque. The CIA is evaluating it. The interesting thing is that the language referred to a group that hasn’t been heard from in years. Whether it’s true or not, at this point it’s difficult to tell.”

  There was a knock on the door, but McCarthy ignored it. He leaned forward. “I want you to assess the CIA operation. It’s unusual.”

  “How unusual?”

  “Have you heard of Special Demands?”

  Corrine shook her head.

  “It’s a small unit of the CIA that was authorized by executive order on the NS
C’s recommendation just before we came into office. You were out of the Washington loop by then, helping yours truly win the election. It’s not all CIA. As a matter of fact, it seems to rely a great deal on Special Forces, though it uses a CIA officer as a team leader and is under their operation control.”

  Corrine shrugged. “Special Forces and the CIA have worked together for years.”

  “On and off, yes. But not precisely like this.” McCarthy paused, the practiced politician cuing his audience to pay attention to what he said next. “I’m worried these people are cowboys. I need someone who can sniff around and report back to me without raising a ruckus. Would you do that, dear?”

  “Mr. President. Jon—my job description—”

  McCarthy’s laugh would have shaken the walls of a lesser building. “Give me my pen. Let me fix your job description.”

  “I’m serious, Mr. President.”

  “I’m serious, too,” he told her.

  Corrine sighed. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “Very good, dear.” McCarthy was instantly serious once more. “We’ll arrange for transportation to Guantanamo first thing tomorrow morning. Best watch what you wear. Some of those poor Marines haven’t seen a good-looking girl like you in a coon’s age.”

  ~ * ~

  2

  GUANTANAMO DETENTION CENTER—THE NEXT DAY

  He was smaller than she expected, stooped over in his orange jumpsuit. His arms and legs were shackled together, and his eyes blinked constantly at the light. With his unkempt hair and beard he looked like a cross between a gnome and a homeless man. He moved meekly, though Corrine had noticed from the tapes she’d reviewed that this was an act; he could inflate his upper body and hold his head erect when he wished. The effect wasn’t quite regal, but the difference was noticeable.

  Corrine sat at the wooden table, waiting for him to settle into his seat. When he did, she nodded to the interpreter that she was ready to begin. Two soldiers stood near the door, large batons in their hands; two more stood directly behind the prisoner.

  “Are you being treated well?” Corrine asked him.

  Kiro—known here as Muhammad al Aberrchmof, the name he had been given at birth—smiled as the translator repeated the question in Arabic, but said nothing.

  “Is there anything that you need?” said Corrine.

  “Freedom,” said Muhammad al Aberrchmof, in English.

  Corrine tried not to look surprised, though the interrogators had told her that he didn’t understand English. They had also predicted that he wouldn’t speak in her presence— as a woman, she was considered about on a par with an earthworm.

  “Are there people who should be notified that you are all right?” she said.

  al Aberrchmof said nothing.

  “Your wife, your children,” she prompted, turning to the translator and repeating the question. “You want them to know that you’re well.”

  “I have only myself,” said al Aberrchmof, again in English.

  The interrogation team was watching all of this through a closed-circuit television. Though the camera was hidden in the wall, the prisoner probably realized they were watching and intended his performance as a message to them.

  But what did it mean?

  “It’s a shame that you’re alone,” said Corrine. “Are you willing to cooperate with us?”

  “I have cooperated,” said al Aberrchmof.

  “You speak English very well,” she said.

  al Aberrchmof didn’t respond.

  Corrine resisted the impulse to start asking more meaningful questions, fearful that doing so would tip off their importance and complicate the interrogation team’s job.

  “Is there anything you would like to tell me?” she asked instead.

  al Aberrchmof began speaking in Chechen. The translator, who had been chosen because he could handle Chechen as well as Arabic, pushed his glasses back on his nose as he struggled to catch all of the words.

  As he spoke, al Aberrchmof’s voice gradually faded to a whisper. It was impossible to tell if he was really fatigued or if it was part of his performance.

  “The Iranians are working with Allah’s Fist to construct a weapon,” he translated. “They will be launching it soon.”

  Corrine waited, as if she were considering this information.

  “You are not part of Allah’s Fist?”

  al Aberrchmof’s head had slid down toward his chest. Now it rose slowly, a contemptuous sneer on its face. “They do not understand the struggle of the Chechen people.”

  “It seems you’re only a late convert to that cause,” said Corrine.

  The prisoner held her gaze for a moment, his eyes large as if he were trying to plumb her consciousness. Then he blinked, and once more his head tilted downward.

  “What sort of weapon?”

  al Aberrchmof didn’t answer.

  “A bomb?” she prompted.

  Again he said nothing.

  “How will they launch it?” she asked.

  No answer.

  “When will they launch it?”

  No answer. She waited for a few seconds, then rose and started to leave.

  “A ship,” he said in English as she reached the door. “I believe they will use a ship. It is an Iranian plan. We Chechens care nothing for them. Our concerns are with Chechnya.”

  ~ * ~

  P

  eter Wilson, the head of the interrogation team, met her in the hall.

  “What’d you think?” he asked, leading the way to the base commander’s hut, where they were due for lunch.

  “He told me about the Iranian ship,” she said. “Pretty much what he said in interview 12.”

  “You remember the tape?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “The English is new.”

  “He was giving you the finger. Were you surprised he talked to a woman?”

  Wilson shrugged. “Maybe we’ve broken him down far enough. Or maybe one devil is the same as another.”

  “How real is the Chechen rebel stuff?”

  “Hard to tell,” said Wilson. “It’s consistent, but maybe he’s just setting up some sort of political line or defense. The Russians didn’t consider him important enough to go after, and a lot of these guys setup shop in Chechnya only because they won’t be targeted by us. His history of attacks are all against the West.”

  “Is he telling the truth about the ship?” Corrine asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “I think he’s lying,” she said. She hadn’t made up her mind until then, but she realized she was right. “He’s too controlled—he’s giving us this information for some reason. Or for a lot of them.”

  “Obviously he has a reason,” said Wilson. He held the door open for her, and they stepped out of the building. A pair of Marines nearby snapped to attention so stiffly they could have served as models for a poster. “But I think he’s telling us more or less the truth. Bits of it anyway.”

  “He’s telling us what he wants us to believe, certainly,” she said. She stopped short of the waiting Hummer. “I think I’ll skip lunch, Mr. Wilson.”

  “But—”

  “I want to go back over the interrogation videos, then I have to get back to Washington.”

  “You have to eat, too, don’t you?”

  She smiled at him. “If you send over a sandwich, I’d appreciate it.”

  ~ * ~

  3

  SUBURBAN VIRGINIA—THE NEXT MORNING

  Ferguson rested his head back on the vinyl cushion of the sofa in the doctor’s waiting room, narrowing his eyes to slits and trying to avoid looking at any of the three overweight women sitting across from him. The room had all the charm of a bus depot, though the doctors who ran the practice had taken a stab at adding a personal touch—the beige walls were divided about chest high by a strip of corkboard with patients’ photos attached. Most were trying to smile.

  A television was mounted in a Formica-clad cabinet at his left, playi
ng an endless loop that alternated segments devoted to cardiovascular distress and the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Ferg had sat here long enough to be convinced he had both.

  The window at the receptionist station slid open.

  “Mr. Ferguson?”

  “Ah, the condemned man is called for his supper,” said Ferguson, unfolding himself from the sofa. He ignored the receptionist’s puzzled frown and ambled to the hallway, pushing open the heavily sprung door where a nurse waited to lead him to the examining room.