health-conscious nutritionist. But as a means of providing an exhausted body with a shot of raw fuel, it was pretty hard to beat.
They split the bar. Larsson didn’t eat the cake so much as let it melt in his mouth and trickle down his throat. Carver took a good look at him, checking out the lower half of his face, the area that had been exposed to the wind, for any sign of white, waxy patches that would indicate frostbite.
“Looks clear,” he said. “But you could still have frostbite on the way. Is your face prickly, itchy?”
“Nuh.” Larsson shook his head. It wasn’t exactly sparkling repartee, but at least he was responding.
“I’ll get you some food,” Carver said, and went away to boil up some rice and mix hot water with the freeze- dried curry.
By the time they had eaten, darkness had fallen. Carver climbed into his own sleeping bag. Over the next few hours, he made more drinks. Larsson seemed to stabilize. The shivering subsided, and when he finally fell asleep, his breathing was shallow but reasonably even. Carver knew, though, that even though the immediate crisis had passed, the fundamental threat had not. Unless Larsson could be rescued from the mountain and given expert medical care, he had only hours to live.
49
Kady Jones was reading e-mails, an affectionate smile on her face. A few days ago, two of her favorite people at Los Alamos, Henry Wong and Mae Lee, had got married. They’d gone on a honeymoon to Rome and, being techies, they hadn’t sent postcards home by snail mail. They’d found an Internet cafe instead. Mae’s message to Kady was chatty, detailed, and intimate: one close girlfriend to another. Henry’s had consisted of a couple of lines, assuring her that Rome was pretty cool, plus a bunch of digital holiday photos, with captions attached.
His favorite was a shot of Mae posing in a park on the Aventine Hill, with a view across the Tiber to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. She looked great, her face suffused with a happiness that seemed to light up the whole shot.
“Man, am I one lucky bomb-geek!” he’d written on the caption.
Kady was looking at the shot on her lab computer, whose screen was far larger, with much better resolution than the one in the Roman cafe. So she noticed what Henry hadn’t, that there were two guys talking in the background of his shot, and the perspective made them look like weird midgets growing out of Mae’s armpit. Out of idle curiosity she zoomed in on them to take a closer look.
And then she gasped. “Holy shit!”
The man on the right was only vaguely recognizable, but his companion was all too familiar. If the two of them were having anything other than a casual, social conversation, this innocent holiday photograph had suddenly acquired a whole new level of significance.
She dialed a number in Washington. FBI Special Agent Tom Mulvagh, the man who’d supervised the operation at Gull Lake, had been transferred to D.C. to work on the secret team searching for the Russian bombs. They’d built up a good working relationship. She told him to expect an e-mail and waited a few seconds.
“Do you have the picture on your screen?”
“Yeah, thanks for sending me that, though e-mailing shots of hot broads is most often a guy kind of thing.”
Kady could picture Mulvagh’s grin. He liked to kid around a little when the situation allowed. She didn’t have any problem with that.
“Very funny, Tom. That ‘broad,’ as you call her, is Mae Wong, the beautiful, sensitive, and highly intelligent wife of my associate Henry Wong. And she’s not what I want you to look at. Go in on the two guys…”
“What, the ones in her armpit?”
“Exactly… Recognize them?”
There was silence on the line while Mulvagh thought, then: “The one on the right looks familiar.”
“That’s what I thought,” agreed Kady. “I’m pretty sure I saw his picture in a magazine. He’s that general. His assistant got killed in the park in D.C.”
“Vermulen,” said Mulvagh. “Right, I remember. But what’s the significance to you or me?”
“Well, it’s not him that caught my attention. It’s the other one, with the darker hair. He’s Dr. Francesco Riva. He’s Italian, came over here in the late seventies, got a masters at MIT, and worked at Lawrence Livermore National Lab for more than a decade. That’s where I got to know him, and you can take it from me, Mulvagh, Frankie Riva is really a fantastic nuclear physicist.”
“And I should care about this because…?”
“Because, for one, Frankie’s specialty was the miniaturization of nuclear weapons; and for two, he quit the lab five years ago and disappeared right off the map. You’ve got to understand, pretty much everyone in our business knows everyone else, by reputation or in person. We know who’s doing what, and where. But for the last few years, Frankie Riva hasn’t been doing anything. Not in public, anyway.”
“And now you’re going to tell me what he’s been doing in private.” said Mulvagh.
“Well, I don’t know. Not for sure. But the thing about him was he didn’t live like a nerd. He wasn’t at home with his PC and his pizza boxes. He liked European sports cars, pretty girls, and dinners for two at the kind of place where the maitre d’ had to translate the menu.”
“So he needed money.”
“Exactly,” Kady continued. “That’s why he quit Livermore. He said he wanted a private-sector salary. That’s not unusual. Plenty of guys go to commercial research labs. But Frankie’s not at any lab I know. The word on Nuke Street is he’s been selling his skills to people who want bombs, and who’ll pay whatever it takes to get them.”
