“Of course you know all about Perriman, including that it has offices worldwide. What you probably don’t know is that those offices serve as bases for our people, under cover as Perriman employees, to sell specially modified appliances.”
“Are we talking washers with a ‘detonation’ setting?” Charlie asked. He noticed Hattemer smile. Fielding did too, but it appeared forced.
“Sort of,” Fielding said. “The atomic demolition munition we work with looks like the innards of a washing machine, and the weights of the two are about the same. So washing machine housings make excellent concealments, and Perriman’s network allows for ease of trafficking. What we do is simple: We sell the bombs to terrorists, rogue nations, third world potentates, and any other lunatic with the means and inclination to detonate a nuclear weapon.”
“The bombs are duds, then?”
“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.” Fielding stopped pacing. “Nuclear weapons technology is readily attainable from open sources, but it’s the production of the fissionable material necessary to give a bomb its bang that’s beyond the capability of our customers, not to mention most major industrial countries. Duck’s team found a way to make worthless, run-of-the-mill depleted uranium pass muster at the point of sale as the good stuff-highly enriched U two thirty-five.”
“What happens when the customers take their new washer home?”
“That was the basis for the decision to replicate the Aftscharka ADM. The Russians had built it with the uranium pit deep in place. To fiddle with the uranium requires a complex dismantlement procedure well beyond our customers’ capabilities.”
“And if the customers try to detonate their new bomb?”
“If one of our Aftscharkas is triggered, it still yields some bang. More than some bang, actually. Each packs about a hundred pounds of plastic explosive, which is standard issue to generate critical mass in uranium implosion weapons and enough to take out a small building. So, assuming our customers survive the blast, they won’t immediately know anything was wrong with their weapon. Later, when they find out that they blew up just the small building as opposed to, say, a third of Calcutta, they have no way of determining why. But hopefully it doesn’t get that far. From the moment we make a sale-if not sooner-we have eyes or ears on our customers. We try to plausibly round them up or neutralize them before they blow up anything. In the worst-case scenario, characters who might otherwise have gotten their hands on a real nuke detonate the equivalent of a few sticks of dynamite. And the thanks are due to your father.”
From his windowsill, Hattemer added, “No one outside of our circle will ever know it, but Drummond Clark is one of America’s greatest heroes.”
Charlie felt a stirring of filial pride, along with a spring of optimism:
These men weren’t just Drummond’s allies, they were staunch admirers. A peaceful resolution seemed a possibility after all.
“We should add it is our hope that no one outside of our circle will ever know about his heroics,” Fielding said. He resumed pacing at a rate that pointed toward agitation. “The problem is that a crude sketch of a washing machine to you, Charlie, could be damning evidence to a Pakistani ISI agent who, in the guise of a tourist in Prospect Park, strikes up a conversation with Duck about the hundred-fifty species of trees there. There are other guys like me who peddle Aftscharkas — one of them plays the role of a rival arms dealer, another purports to be a disgruntled Russian general, another still poses as a Senegalese pirate. I’ve never met any of them. From his perch at Perriman Appliances, where each and every bomb was manufactured and prepped, your father was the only operative who knew everybody on the roster, not to mention every name on our entire client list. In hindsight, that information should have been compartmentalized. That’s hindsight though. Now, from the standpoint of national security, he is the very last person the United States can afford to have Alzheimer’s.”
“What did he tell the Pakistani agent?” Charlie asked.
“That was just a hypothetical. To our knowledge, he hasn’t told anybody anything yet. But it’s only a matter of time until he does, or until he picks up the phone to order dinner from that little Vietnamese place on Bedford and inadvertently dials an old customer in Pyongyang and rattles off the names of our players in East Asia, or breaks the news to the man in Pyongyang that his vaunted ten-kiloton Equalizer could barely blow up a straw hut.”
Charlie felt his blood rise. “Help me put this in perspective. If one of your guys gets shitfaced and becomes a risk to blab, what do you do?”
“If one of our operatives were to get that drunk, we’d dry him out before he could fall into the wrong hands.” Fielding’s measured cordiality seemed to belie impatience. “If one of our people is subjected to as little as the gas necessary to pull a wisdom tooth, we send a babysitter along to the dentist’s office. Over the last seven weeks we’ve had a team-a top-notch team-monitoring Duck from a house up the block on Prospect Place. But it proved inadequate. On Christmas Eve, he went wandering, which had happened before. But this time, the Meals on Wheels people and the kindly social worker who took him were really MI6.”
“Helen Mayfield?” Charlie said in utter astonishment.
“Fortunately Helen-or Alice or whatever her real name is-is relatively benign,” Fielding said. “She’d been investigating my alter ego, Trader Nick, who’s essentially a red herring, and she learned nothing of consequence from Duck. The issue is, whoever gets hold of him next time won’t be benign, and he’ll be broken like a piata.”
Charlie tried to set aside the Helen bombshell. “So, in cases like this, you’re just taking the candy out of the piata before the bad guys can?”
“I wouldn’t know. There aren’t cases like this. Usually, with older operatives, keeping secrets is practically ingrained. You also have to take into account the relative sensitivity of their secrets: Generally, when these men and women leave the field, they spend years consulting for us or for outside firms. During that time, classified technology advances at a head-spinning rate, and decades have passed by the time they begin to fail, at which point they could dictate their memoirs to an ISI agent and it would cause little damage, if any. This simply hasn’t been an issue. Until now.”
Charlie wondered whether, in his zeal to remedy the matter with bullets, Fielding had missed the obvious alternative. “Has anyone just taken my father to a doctor?”
“He saw specialist after specialist at CIA Medical Services.” Fielding leaned against the wainscoting’s chair rail, as if wearied by the recollection. “He was prescribed rivastigmine, galantamine, memantine, and everything else with even a snowman’s chance in hell of slowing cognitive decline. All, sadly, to no avail.”
“What about the new experimental treatments in the news? Wouldn’t the CIA have the resources to get him in on any of that action?”
“We could pull strings, sure. In Japan they’ve had nice results using histone deacetylase inhibitors, but only at the early laboratory animal testing stage. The Swiss have had some success boosting HSF1 levels. In worms. It will be three to five years before they can say the same for humans, if things proceed without a hitch.”
Charlie suspected Drummond had information pertaining to medical advances in Geneva, Switzerland, that Fielding did not. But by saying so, Charlie sensed, he would terminate Drummond’s prospects of getting there. Instead he asked, “So why not just put him in one of your secret agent nursing homes for three to five years, or however long?”
“As you and he have demonstrated, they’re not all that secure,” Fielding said.
“The Monroeville Hunt and Fish Club’s the gold standard?”
“Even Langley has trouble with leaks, and that’s with a thousand times the security. Duck would be a lightning rod in the best of those places. And we can’t take risks with Placebo. It’s not just any secret. It’s the kind you die to keep.” Fielding looked to Hattemer. “Were Duck in his right mind, he would take the L without hesitation.”
Hattemer’s eyes fell precipitously, as if the subject repelled him.
Charlie said, “I’m guessing you don’t mean the train.”
“L, as in lethal pill,” Fielding said.
“My father has one of those?”
“As do I, in a ceramic bridge over the farthest two upper molars, with a spring-loaded release activated by the tongue. The capsule itself dissolves in saliva, releasing saxitoxin, which acts in fifteen to twenty seconds.”
“Oh.” Charlie had learned all that he’d hoped to. He burned to stay and put forth an argument on behalf of Drummond’s preservation, but he suspected he stood a better chance arguing on behalf of Marxism here. It was time to get galloping.
