intelligence service believed. The car bombings alone showed a great deal of coordination across a wide geographic distance.
Far more interesting, Jackson thought, was the fact that the warhead was a fake. Had it started that way? Had its weapons kernel been removed?
Taking a weapons core from a nuclear bomb was not technically difficult — if you were a nuclear weapons expert. Did the guerrillas have access to those kinds of people? A number were college-educated, but their majors were in subjects like literature. Someone could have been hired, perhaps. Jackson spent about an hour learning how to use a watch list as a cross-reference before giving up. There were plenty of potential experts, most of them Russian, but no direct link to Peru or Ecuador that he could find.
But working with the lists gave Jackson another idea: how to determine who Sholk was. Jackson found the list immediately after Iron Heart and began comparing it with other watch lists, including several intercepted ones from foreign governments (allies as well as enemies). By fishing through the lists and several passenger manifests from the Middle East, he found four candidates. Only one was unaccounted for at present (two were in jail; another had committed suicide), and he happened to be Russian: Stephan Babin.
Babin was mentioned in a Department of Defense Intelligence Agency report from the early 1990s as a Russian military officer who might be worth cultivating. He was apparently serving as a liaison in Bosnia at the time. The NSA had Russian military files, but Jackson couldn’t figure out how to access the special database. He called the librarian for help, but the man had gone out for a late lunch.
Was it lunchtime already?
Discovering Sholk’s identity felt like a personal triumph, but Jackson didn’t stop there. If there was a weapons expert with the rebels, it might very well be Babin.
Jackson paged through information on the encounter during which the bomb had been found by the Peruvian army. There was no list of the guerrillas taken. Nor did Babin’s name show up in any of the lists of known or suspected guerrillas compiled by SIN, Peru’s intelligence service.
If names were out, what about photos?
He’d need to find a picture of Babin in the Russian data; he wasn’t sure whether one would exist or not. In the meantime, he brought up photos of the guerrillas, thinking he might be able to narrow down possibilities on the basis of age.
But there were almost no photos of the people connected with New Path. The best he could find were photos of a few of the dead bodies. Jackson tried a wider search and got names and photos from the post office takeover by the guerrillas a few days before in Lima, along with some additional incidents.
Still waiting for the librarian to return, Jackson opened the system’s facial features tool — it used several hundred specific points to match faces — and began playing with it, capturing faces and applying searches to familiarize himself with the program. The tool was extremely easy to use. He moused a box around a face, “capturing” it, then simply clicked one of the search buttons on the toolbar and waited while the computer checked the face against a database. Of course, behind the scenes, the program went through a billion gyrations, computing and checking, but to Jackson the process seemed no more difficult than using the primitive drawing program one of his neighbor’s little girls had shown him at Christmas.
The first search came back with what the computer called “no definites.” However, it did give him about ten possible matches, none of which actually looked close when he opened the window under the dialogue box on the screen. He tried again, selecting the same face. This time the computer beeped immediately and gave him an error message: he was repeating the search against the same database. He opened the list of searches and saw that the computer had helpfully highlighted several databases that he might be interested in, based on the terms of the first search. Jackson carefully looked through the list, but it didn’t include Russian military files. It did have Peru’s, however, and he checked those off along with the computer’s other suggestions. The computer returned with no match.
He moved the cursor to another person and repeated the search. This time he got a hit — the suspected guerrilla was an army lieutenant who, according to the small bio that popped on the screen, was still on active duty.
And in the same division that had discovered the nuclear warhead.
69
Lia felt the body on top of her, pushing and grunting, the devil incarnate. She struggled with all her might, resisting and fighting, cursing the others holding her down. She knew she would lose the battle, but it was the struggle that was important. To resist meant salvation, survival — she would be wounded, but in a greater sense still whole, the most important part of her preserved.
And then suddenly she was free, the rapist gone, light streaming in around her.
Voices murmured in her head. The Art Room?
“Hello?” said Lia. “Hello?”
She wasn’t in Korea. She was in the helicopter, the ruins of the helicopter — they had crashed in the Andes.
She was pitched at an angle, her head and right arm resting on something soft.
Fernandez.
The aircraft had augured in on its starboard side, crushing the cabin downward. She couldn’t see Fernandez’s face, but his left arm next to her chest was drenched in blood. Lia looked toward the front of the helicopter. Bits of metal and wire hung like vines in front of her. Beyond them, instead of the pilot and the rest of the cockpit, she saw rocks and dirt, some scrubby brush. The sky.
Lia slipped down a little farther when she undid her seat belt. The door of the helicopter was above her left arm. It was intact. She pulled back the latch and pushed against the panel, but the door snapped back down, pushed back by gravity.
Squirreling around in the seat, she stood on Fernandez and pushed her way up and out of the aircraft. They had crashed against a mountainside. Rocks loomed above her. Moving as gingerly as possible, she got out, crawling head-first down and around the crushed fuselage onto the slope, then through the dirt to a level spot a few feet from the bits and pieces of the helicopter that lay scattered along the ground.
It was always the easy assignments, she thought, that ended up being trouble.
Lia took a breath, then pushed along the ground a few yards more, going across the slope. Finally she clambered to her feet, pulling herself up on the side of a big rock.
“Just peachy,” Lia said out loud.
She reached to the communications switch. “Are you there?”
“Lia, are you OK?” said Rockman instantly.
“I’m in one piece.”
“I called you on the sat phone twice. Why didn’t you answer?”
Lia realized she had left her bag in the helo and started back to get it.
“Lia, what’s your situation?” asked Marie Telach.
“Tangled and confused. The helicopter crashed. Everyone else is dead.”
“Was it shot down? Or something mechanical?”
“I’m not sure. I was dozing, then I heard a bang.”
“An explosion?”
“I’m not sure.”
She looked into the fuselage. The bag with her clothes and the sat phone peeked out from under a large piece of metal that was anchored by part of the helicopter engine; there was no way she was getting it. But the briefcase with her laptop — and the envelope with the replacement voter cards — had wedged itself near Fernandez’s body. She might be able to snake in and grab it.
“Lia, please,” insisted Telach.
“I’m OK, Marie. The helicopter crashed.”
“Was it shot down? Or was it a mechanical problem?”
