“She can take care of herself.”
“Wait a second—”
“She’s fine, Charlie,” said Telach, breaking in. “Please just make your way to the airfield as soon as possible.”
53
Stephan Babin laughed when he heard the news report. Tucume had added a delicious twist to his plan: not only had the army discovered that the terrorists possessed a nuclear weapon, but documents indicated that they had been in contact with the campaign director for Victor Imberbe — Victor Imbecile, as the general called him.
All across the country, people would be scampering through their garbage to find the government’s printed guides to the election. Vice President Ramon Ortez was unacceptable because he couldn’t protect Lima and had told the police to fire into a crowd of protestors. Imberbe was a terrorist.
Who could they turn to? Tucume’s chosen puppet, Hernando Aznar, of the Party of the Future.
Tucume had told Babin that Aznar would do much better than the polls showed, because he had strong support among the natives, who were rarely polled. Yesterday he had been within eight points of Imberbe officially; by the general’s rough estimate, this meant he was actually within four of the leader. By tomorrow morning, even the polls would show Aznar ahead.
Babin’s own plan was proceeding as well. The real warhead—
His satellite phone rang. Worried that the man who was to pick him up in the morning had been delayed, Babin answered quickly — and found himself talking to the general, not the soldier he had bribed to take him to the coast.
“Stephan, have you been listening to the news?” asked Tucume.
“Of course. Congratulations.”
“I owe you a great deal, my friend. After the election, you will have a villa, and a driver, and perhaps a girl or two to keep you company.”
“I’m touched.” said Babin.
“A driver is on his way. He’ll take you to the helicopter — we have a suite for you in Lima. No more exile. And I’ve arranged for new doctors. We are grateful people, Stephan.”
Babin didn’t know what to say.
“There were rebels in the area, and they struck just at the right time,” continued Tucume. “My ancestors protected me — I have never felt so optimistic. And you are the cause.”
“Perhaps I should stay here until after the election,” said Babin. “I don’t want the Americans putting two and two together.”
“Don’t worry about them,” said the general. “You’ll be safe with me in Lima.”
Babin had not foreseen this. Refusing the ride, that wasn’t an option; he couldn’t afford to do anything that would make the general suspicious. Shooting the driver or hiding — once Tucume realized something was wrong, Babin would have a difficult time escaping.
If he went to Lima, could he escape from there? Could he get to Ecuador and then Mexico, where the cargo container would land?
There was some leeway, but…
“Stephan, are you there?”
Babin heard a vehicle approaching. “I’m here, General.”
“My aide will take care of you. He should be there any minute.”
“I hear him.”
“Excellent. I’ll see you when I get to Lima.”
“Godspeed,” said Babin. “Godspeed.”
54
Rubens swiveled in his desk chair, listening as Jackson detailed what he had discovered over the course of the last two days. When he had asked to speak to Rubens, the weapon had not been discovered. Now the images from Peru seemed a graphic verification of Jackson’s work, though he apparently had not been told about them yet. Rubens listened to the ambassador, trying not to interrupt or prejudice him; he wanted as much raw information as possible before saying anything that might influence the researcher’s opinion or presentation of the facts.
“The arms dealer worked in Russia and the Middle East, traveling back and forth,” Jackson told him. “He must have been planted or cultivated around the time of Bosnia, because there are no references to him earlier than that. There are two different possibilities for the program that he was part of, but wherever he started, he quickly became more important. There’s a reference to someone working with the CIA in Moscow in 1999. They used the code word Sholk or ‘silk’ in Russian, which is from ‘IIIeJIK.’” Jackson spelled the Cyrillic letters out. “I’m not very good with Cyrillic letters.”
“That’s quite all right.”
“You see, the Cyrillic is important, because they use that for an operative in Syria the next year,” explained Jackson. “And it’s in several intercepts a few months before Iron Heart begins — the Russians may have been on to him by then.”
“You don’t think that’s a coincidence?”
“Unlikely, given the way they were assigning identities at the time. But possible. Notice the parallels — again in Afghanistan after the American action there, and then in Moscow.”
Jackson had unearthed a number of communications and vouchers for money, tracing through four different projects. While only the CIA officer who had “run” Sholk would know for sure, Sholk was most likely the asset who had gotten involved when Brazil tried to buy nuclear warheads from the renegade Russian in Iron Heart.
NSA intercepts of e-mails showed that a Russian arms dealer had supplied weapons to Middle Eastern terrorists after several meetings in Beirut. Sholk was in Beirut the same time as at least two of the sales.
He was clearly the same person. Which meant that the CIA had had a man who gave weapons to terrorists on its payroll.
And then they’d brought him into Iron Heart. He helped make the deal — and mysteriously died in a plane crash when it was done.
A very convenient plane crash. Though Jackson didn’t say it, Rubens thought it very possible that by then Sholk had become a liability. Destroying his plane with a shoulder-launched missile or a bomb would have been child’s play.
But Sholk’s background wasn’t the most interesting thing Jackson had discovered.
“There were three warheads discussed in one of the original communications from Brazil. ‘Three bags of bread’ were the words they used.” The ambassador passed a yellow sheet of paper across the conference table to Rubens — the original decrypted translation of a communication sent to Russia that the NSA had intercepted, the message that had probably gotten Iron Heart started in the first place.
“And then there’s this photo.” said Jackson, laying the paper onto Rubens’ desk. “This was of the shipping point, the evening right before the raid.”
The paper was a print of a satellite photo taken by a KH- 11A spy satellite. The warheads were small rectangular boxes in the lower right-hand comer of the photo, identified by a photo interpreter at the time as the payload of SA-10 “Grumble” missiles. Roughly five feet long and about three feet across, they looked like ordinary crates; the interpreter relied on information about packaging and other data to classify them.
“This is why the search in Peru was so extensive after the plane went down,” said Jackson. “They had the
