“Sonny Baca,” Sonny told the armed guard who peered into the van.
“They’re waiting for you inside,” the guard motioned. “Park right there, next to the Jeep.” A few cars were parked right in front of the building. The bigwig’s Jeep, Sonny figured as Lorenza parked the van. An armed security guard stood nearby.
They were met at the administration building door by Matt Paiz. Sonny knew Matt, and although he didn’t like some of the tactics his agents used, he had found Paiz to be a decent guy.
“Sonny, how are you? I’m damn glad you could come. Sorry to bring you out when you’re still recuperating, but—”
“I’m okay,” Sonny said. “Lorenza Villa, Matt Paiz.”
Paiz took her hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said. “Look, we’ve got clearance for you, but we didn’t plan on anyone else being in on the meeting.”
“Why not?”
“Lab security,” Paiz explained. “It’s always tight, but today it’s—” He didn’t finish.
“I need her,” Sonny said. “She’s with me or I turn around and go home.”
Paiz looked from Lorenza back to Sonny, nodded. “Okay. Let’s get you a badge—” He led them to a receptionist’s desk where he called the labs’ director and explained the situation. Both had to fill out visitors’ forms and were scanned by the computer. Until they were purged when their visiting time expired, their faces would exist in the memory of the computer. The secretary handed them temporary badges. “Wear at all times,” she cautioned.
“Is the Ford Explorer yours?” Sonny asked.
“Ford Explorer?”
“Nothing. So what’s the deal?”
“I’d rather have Eric explain it,” Paiz replied, and led them down the hallway to his office. The hallway was bristling with the labs’ internal security guards and FBI agents. Stern-faced men who stared but said nothing.
“By the way, Casey Doyle’s here,” Paiz whispered.
Casey Doyle, the director of the FBI? This is big, Sonny thought, but what the hell does it have to do with me?
Eric was pacing back and forth when Matt let them into his office, and Doyle sat grimly in an armchair. Something very important had brought Doyle from D.C. and Paiz from Alburquerque, Sonny thought. What?
Paiz introduced Sonny and Lorenza. “Leif Eric,” the director replied, shaking their hands. “Damn glad you could come, Sonny. If I may call you Sonny. This is Mr. Doyle, FBI director.”
Eric appeared nervous, but congenial. Doyle hardly smiled. His wrinkled face was sour to the core.
“We owe you an explanation,” Eric began. “And it involves some very secure data. I think it would be best if Ms. Villa waited outside—”
Sonny shook his head. “She stays.”
“But—” Eric glanced at Doyle, who shrugged, then nodded.
“As long as both of you understand that what you’re about to learn cannot be discussed outside of this office. Not to the papers, not to the local police, not to a wife or husband, not to anybody.”
“Okay,” Sonny said, and sat back to listen.
“Fine. I’ll get to the point,” Eric continued. “We’ve just intercepted an illegal shipment of plutonium.” He paused, as if waiting for Doyle to add something. “Actually, it’s a plutonium pit.”
“Do you mean the core of a nuclear bomb?” Sonny asked for clarification.
“Affirmative,” Eric replied.
Holy tortillas, Sonny thought. Intercepted the core of a nuclear bomb? He knew a black market in plutonium existed. Now that the world was dismantling its nuclear arsenals, the stuff was being bought and sold. He remembered a small amount of plutonium being intercepted at Kennedy Airport a few years ago.
“We believe it came from Ukraine,” Eric continued. “Ten kilograms. Enough to make a crude nuclear bomb, if someone were so inclined.”
“Taken right from a nuclear bomb?” Sonny asked, just to make sure he was visualizing the right thing.
“A nuclear missile.”
“Ah,” Sonny whispered. In its machined, metallic form, a plutonium pit could be smuggled across borders in a briefcase. That’s what the CIA and other intelligence agencies had been afraid of all along—terrorist groups getting hold of a pit from a dismantled nuke.
“Is it ready to be used?”
Eric cleared his throat. “Yes. It was obviously taken when a nuclear missile was being dismantled. It came into New York City, went through Denver, and was on its way here when it was intercepted.”
Damn, Sonny thought, a plutonium pit. A real live core bouncing around the country.
“How’d you find it?” Sonny asked.
“By accident,” Paiz explained. “A state cop stopped a car near Raton. Two men. They shot the cop, but not before he got off a shot. Killed one of the smugglers, the other fled.”
Yes, the story had been on the radio yesterday. A state cop shot near Raton, but the story said nothing about the plutonium, and being more concerned with his own health, Sonny really hadn’t paid attention to it. He figured it was one more dope smuggler stopped by a state cop.
“Besides the people in this room,” Eric continued, “only two of my people know we recovered the core. The two I sent to the crime scene to recover it. We haven’t even told the state police what we’re faced with.”
“So why tell us?” Sonny asked.
Doyle stood and spoke for the first time. “The description of the suspect that got away fits the description of a friend of yours.”
For being director of the FBI, Doyle was no superhero, only a seventy-year-old man with a stoop and the weight of the world on his back. He was a political appointee hired to try to clean up the agency. The president didn’t want the mole scandal that wrecked the CIA a few years back to be duplicated in the FBI.
He stood in front of Sonny, his eyes boring into him. He was a bent old man, but his look was intimidating.
“A friend of mine,” Sonny said. “Who?” he asked, but he already knew.
“The guy who tried to blow the WIPP truck,” Doyle said, placing his hands behind his back and walking to the big plate-glass window that faced east. From there he could see as far as the Río Grande valley and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rising above Santa Fé. Threatening storm clouds hung over the Santa Fé peaks.
“The man who uses the Raven alias,” Eric said.
Sonny looked at Paiz, Paiz nodded.
Raven smuggling plutonium? To make a bomb? Dr. Stammer’s warning rang in Sonny’s memory: Raven’s going to Russia to buy a nuke. And I believe him.
“We’ve been after him since he tried to blow the WIPP truck,” Paiz said. “You almost caught him during the Balloon Fiesta when he tried to smuggle in the cocaine shipment. He was selling coke to pay for this. Then he disappeared. Now we know he was shopping in Ukraine.”
“How much does it cost to buy a plutonium pit?” Sonny asked.
“Millions,” Eric said.
“There are plenty of our enemies out there willing to fund this lunatic,” Doyle interjected. “North Korea, Iran, Iraq, you name it. We’ve followed a trail of money funneled through a Swiss bank account. Over twenty million dollars. Now the account is empty. Raven bought the plutonium all right. We were just lucky to intercept it.”
So Arturo Romero won’t get a ransom note after all, Sonny thought. Raven has other money sources.
“Does he actually think he can build a bomb?” Sonny asked. “Don’t you need a lot of equipment?”
Eric nodded. “If he’s got the right people, a bomb can be put together almost anywhere. Out-of-work, disgruntled nuclear scientists from the former Soviet Union or Ukraine are selling their services. Ex-nuclear physicists are a dime a dozen. An expert in focused explosives could be bought. Someone with that kind of expertise could build the detonators. Actually, manuals on how to put together a bomb have circulated on the Internet for years now. What’s been lacking is the heart of the bomb, the pit.”
“But you have the pit,” So
nny said, “so what’s the problem?”
“This man is dedicated to a world revolution,” Doyle said. “We have a dossier on him a foot thick. He failed this time, but we’re sure he’ll try again.” He placed his hands on the desk, and his gaze bore into Sonny. “We need to find him and stop him.”
And I need to find him and stop him, Sonny thought.
“National security is afraid he’ll try again,” Eric said.
Paiz spoke. “When we first met Raven, we thought we were dealing with a crazy activist who opposed the storage of nuclear waste at the WIPP site. But once we pulled a background check on him, as Mr. Doyle has just said, we found aliases a mile long. Turns out Raven is not Raven.”
Sonny checked a smile. How many times had he heard that?
“He’s not just an ecoterrorist, and his knowledge of explosives is far greater than that picked up by blowing dynamite in the Grant’s mines. He’s been around the world, from Libya to North Korea. He’s left his footprints all over the place.”
“Footprints?”
“A faint trail,” Paiz continued. “He’s here, he’s there—”
“But now he’s here,” Sonny said.
“Yes. He’s here, and he has a base of operations.”
“Why here?” Sonny tested their knowledge of Raven.
“Because of the labs,” Eric replied. “Between us, Sandia Labs, and Kirtland in Albuquerque, we’ve got the expertise and the nuclear capability—” He paused, pursed his lips, and said no more.
“So how do I fit in?” Sonny asked.
“He left a message. We believe it’s for you,” Eric said.
“A message?” Sonny was surprised. So this is why they called him in.
“It’s a bowl, and actually Matt’s the one who figured the message relates to you.”
Sonny’s hair along the back of his neck stood on end.
“What kind of bowl?”
“It’s one of the most beautiful pieces of pre-Columbian art I’ve ever seen,” Eric said. “It resembles the work from Tula. Pre-Toltec obsidian. There are glyphs carved on the outside of the bowl. I’ve been collecting Indian pottery since I came to New Mexico, and I’ve never seen anything this beautiful. We think he was carrying the plutonium pit in the bowl. And here’s the strange part, the bowl isn’t lead lined, but an initial test tells us the plutonium doesn’t emit radiation through it.”
Sonny felt sweat along his back. The pot Eric was describing was Owl Woman’s Calendar of Dreams! He looked at Lorenza and the look on her face told him she, too, was stunned.
Is it possible? His look asked, and she nodded.
“Where did you find it?”
“At the Raton incident. The cop shot Raven’s accomplice, a second state police car came up, and Raven fled.”
“Unbelievable!” Sonny said. Raven had taken the bowl when he kidnapped Owl Woman.
“It’s believable all right!” Doyle snapped.
Eric continued, “I recognized a few of the glyphs on the bowl. The ankh sign. A tree. The sign for infinity. And something that reads like an explosion. A sunburst, much like our Zia sun. And near the radiating sun the glyph of a bull. Sonny Baca, Matt figured. He knew you had chased Raven. And perhaps Raven is chasing you.”
“What do you think?” Matt Paiz asked Sonny.
“Yes, that’s Raven’s method. He leaves clues. Where’s the bowl now?”
“It’s sitting down at TA-Two with the pit.”
“Can I see it?”
Eric looked from Paiz to Doyle. “Do you think you can read the glyphs on it?”
“I don’t know,” Sonny replied.
He did know that the inscribed bowl was the Calendar of Dreams that belonged to Owl Woman. Maybe Raven interpreted the sun symbol as a sign for the apocalypse of time. Time would come to an end unless the Calendar of Dreams was returned to the people, the heirs of the dream of peace. It was just a stroke of luck that a state cop had stopped Raven near Raton and stumbled onto the bowl and the plutonium.
And, Sonny thought, looking out the window at the gathering clouds of the afternoon, the time of the winter solstice is upon us. Raven has it all figured out.
“It’s important,” Doyle said. “If you can read any part of it, it might give us a clue about Raven and what he’s up to. We need to know who funds him.”
“That’s why we called you,” Paiz added.
“I’ll try.” Sonny nodded. “One stipulation.”
“What?”
“The bowl belonged to my grandmother—”
“What?” Eric arched an eyebrow.
He looked at Doyle, who shrugged.
“Then you did know something about this?” Doyle asked.
“It’s a long story,” Sonny explained, “but I need to return the bowl.”
“Do you expect us to believe—” Eric’s voice rose in irritation, but Paiz held up a hand.
“Come on, Sonny, level with us. If the bowl really belonged to your grandmother, does that mean you can read the glyphs on it?”
“No.”
Eric shook his head. “The bowl doesn’t mean anything to us, as long as we have the plutonium. If it belonged to your grandmother, as you claim, you can have it. What’s your grandmother’s name?”
“Owl Woman.”
“Where does she live?”
Here, Sonny thought, in my heart. In me. In my dreams, in Raven’s nightmare.
“Here,” he said, looking out the window at the plateau that sloped into the valley. Here in La Nueva México, everywhere.
Eric didn’t understand, but he reached for his parka. “I don’t care if we believe you or not, Sonny. The important thing is for you to look at the bowl and see if it has clues about Raven. Come, let’s go.” He walked briskly toward the door.
“I’ll drive with Sonny and Lorenza,” Paiz said, and took the back handles of Sonny’s chair.
Eric glanced at Doyle, nodded, and they headed out the building. They were immediately flanked by security guards armed with automatic weapons, dressed in protective vests and headgear. Outside, Eric and Doyle boarded Eric’s Jeep.
“I’ll be at TA-Two with these three persons,” Eric said to the captain in charge. “Stand by.”
The captain saluted and pulled back, as did the guards around him.
“Follow us. Stay close,” Eric shouted at Paiz.
TA-Two, the nuclear research reactor building, lay at the end of Omega Canyon. Crossing Omega Bridge, making the loop, and driving along the floor of the canyon meant they could be there in five minutes.
On either side the canyon’s walls rose as natural protection for the labs, which produced PU-239. For research purposes only, the labs’ administration kept telling the public for years, but those who followed the labs’ role in the nuclear industry knew better.
“How well do you know the place?” Sonny asked.
“I’ve been here a few times,” Paiz answered.
“Is TA-Two guarded?” Sonny asked.
“Eric has three or four lab security men there, but they don’t know they’re guarding a plutonium pit. They think they’re guarding an Indian bowl just uncovered at one of the construction sites nearby. Eric knows how to lie. Frankly, I’m surprised he let Lorenza in on the meeting. But you have us over a barrel. You know Raven better than anyone.”
“So Doyle is hoping I read the bowl and lead him to the nest of the world terrorists who are behind all this,” Sonny said.
“Something like that,” Paiz agreed. “I understand the chemists from the metallurgy lab won’t have a look at the plutonium until tomorrow.”
“How dangerous is it?”
“You wouldn’t want to hold it on your lap for too long, but it’s fairly safe for now. It’s either nickel or silver coated. If you held it in your hands, it might feel warm. Right now it’s subcritical, as the physicists put it. You can transport the pit easily enough; couriers transport that stuff all the time. You might be sitting in an airplane, taking your family
on a vacation to San Francisco, and the middle-aged executive sitting next to you might be carrying a nuclear substance in his briefcase. Destination, Livermore.”
“But a machined pit is quite a bit more dangerous,” Sonny said.
“Yup. You don’t want to be around if the thing goes critical.”
“How does it go critical?” Sonny asked.
“If you wrap it in plastic or drop it in water. In other words, if enough neutrons are aimed at the core or if in some way you excite that baby, then you’ve got trouble.”
“You seem well versed.”
“The agency has been aware of the problem. We get training.”
“The problem?”
“The number one post—Cold War fear is that a terrorist group might smuggle in nuclear material and build a bomb. The movies you see about terrorists stealing missiles or planes armed with nuclear weapons are just that, movies. What we’re afraid of is what Raven seems to be up to. You get hold of a pit and ‘buy’ the services of the right experts, and you can build a bomb in downtown Santa Fé.”
“Why not in New York, or San Francisco? A dense population center.”
“No one knows why he picked this place. I guess in large metropolitan areas he could hold the public for ransom, and if he actually blew a bomb, he could cause a lot of casualties. Maybe here he can threaten Sandia Labs in ’Burque. Suppose the army has dismantled bomb pits stored in the Manzano Mountains, or right on Kirtland base. And further suppose that a nuclear bomb in our midst would set off those pits, create a superbomb.”
“The end of the world,” Sonny whispered.
“Something like that. Anyway, I don’t believe your grandmother story, either, so why do you want the bowl?”
“Historical continuity,” Sonny replied.
Paiz scowled. “What were you doing in Santa Fé?”
“Missing girl. Consuelo Romero, sixteen-year-old daughter of Arturo and Eloisa Romero, disappeared last night.”
“The mayor’s daughter?”
“Yup.”
“You think Raven was involved?”
“Yes.”
“So, he’s in the vicinity,” Paiz murmured, and made a note in the notebook he flipped from his pocket. “I’ll follow up on it.”