Swindler & Son Page 14

  “Apparently, he built it. Stacia dropped some petty cash in Karachi and found out that Djermajian used to work at Dr. Khan’s skunk works, making nuclear weapons for the Pakistanis and selling them out the back door to anyone with money and bad intentions. He was Khan’s quality-control man and a bit of a hoarder. Whenever ten of something came in, he’d reject one as sub-standard and keep it for himself. Over several years, he put together the pieces he needed.”

  “How did he get the plutonium?” Sara asks.

  “Who knows? Former Soviet states, Saadam’s nuclear program—”

  “Sadaam’s WMD’s were a fabrication.”

  “He had no active programs in 2003—his nuclear program was shut down by Israeli bombs in the early 80’s. But the sites were still intact when the US went in—they were just too busy securing oil fields to bother about plutonium. Stacia assured me that, wherever they got it, this was a working device. It was leaking radiation like an old Fiat leaks oil.”

  -Just a moment. How would Stacia—your office romance, schooled in fashion and cars—recognize a nuclear device in the raw?

  Before moving to Paris, she graduated the Moscow Mechanical Institute 1987 as a nuclear physicist. Worked on Soviet military reactors and then with NATO, decommissioning warheads.

  -You’d take her word it was a functioning device?

  If she said it was, it was. Let’s face it—if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be here questioning me.

  -Without a bomb, you would still be guilty of several serious offenses.

  There’s my point—if this was a simple case, I’d be in a Wadiiran jail wondering what limbs I was going to lose instead of here, talking to you. There’s something delicate here that needs covering up, which means it’s a real bomb.

  -And, where is this Stacia now?

  Somewhere secure in the Ural Mountains. But if we’re in trouble, she’ll come out of the woodwork.

  -Is that a threat?

  I’m not threatening. I’m separating the meaningful details from the loose ends, in case you’re thinking about trying to bury this thing. It won’t bury, take my word for it.

  -We’ll see. However, if it is buried in your favor—can we count on Stacia remaining secure?

  Stacia will say whatever Harry asks her to say.

  -Harry…

  Yes, Harry’s part of the price. Harry, Diamante, Sara and I all walk away together, that’s the package.

  -What if that isn’t possible? What if, as the gangster movies say, there has to be a fall guy?

  Let’s get to the end and check the cards then.

  So Harry stalks the wall of windows, all worked up, gesticulating wildly and flexing his baritone. “Who knows what happened? Maybe Djermajian couldn’t find a buyer or died before he could complete the sale. I’d taken possession by claiming the shed so I couldn’t just leave it there—but where could I move it? The whole thing weighed on me for months—”

  “Months? You didn’t tell anyone?” I burst. “You didn’t tell me?”

  “You were out of town a lot—and I couldn’t involve you, you see. You’ve spent a decade protecting me—figuring out the rules, the guidelines, how to do the dance without getting caught. This time, I wanted to protect you.

  “And then, there was the carbomb in London and the club shooting in the Fifth Arrondissement and the carbomb in Belgium and then the Rue Breguet and I started thinking, maybe there was a point to it. I just had to move the bomb. You remember Mr. Lazlo—”

  “Lazlo! Jesus!” Explain to Sara: “Serbian, regional arms dealer. Scumbag.”

  “Well, he was available,” Harry apologizes. “I wrote a certificate for the Mercury Venture, contacted Mr. Lazlo to pick up the device and deliver it, delicate handling, to the ship.”

  “You didn’t tell that snake what he was moving—”

  “I’m forgetful, not stupid. Stacia left it securely crated before she went home.”

  “So you shipped it and came out here to receive it. And you hired Rene and Proto to keep me busy until you were done—?”

  Harry nods, taking credit eagerly.

  “But then why set the police after Nicky?” Sara asks.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The false charge—that I smuggled the Rue Breguet bomb into Paris.”

  Harry’s eyes open wide. “I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t—no, never.”

  “You’re sure?” I demand. “You haven’t forgotten, you didn’t by mistake?”

  “No, no, I swear. It’s all worked out brilliantly—other than you two showing up here.”

  “Right, okay—a brilliant plan to ship a nuclear weapon here to blow up a pumping station.”

  And here Harry’s face deepens, an expression I’ve seen only a very few times.

  “I’m not blowing up the pumping station, my boy. I’m blowing up the Arabian Peninsula. I’m blowing up the modern world.”

  He rushes to retrieve a whiteboard from behind the drapes, tilting it to give us a good look at a map tacked in place, surrounded by scribbles and notes around the edges.

  “Here’s Ras Tanura and here—” he traces a spidery line across the entire Arabian peninsula, highlighting oil fields along the way “— is the pipeline. The ship sails to the mouth of the pipeline and the bomb explodes. Yes, it takes out the pumping station—but what matters is, nuclear fire flies the length of the pipeline, lighting the oil in underground oilfields throughout the peninsula. Whoosh! In a day, thirty or forty per cent of the world’s oil is destroyed or rendered so radioactive, no one can touch it for a century. What’s left becomes so expensive, it’s useless.”

  He pauses, taking us in, jubilant. We all stare at each other, stone silent.

  “Would that work?” I ask weakly.

  “Maybe,” Yusuf says. Sara nods.

  “Tomorrow morning, there’s a convention of sun worshippers right below us!” Harry gestures out the window, at a coastline amphitheater facing north—facing Ras Tanura. “12,000 people, having traveled from all over the world to celebrate the annular solar eclipse, just as the bomb goes off. Twelve thousand cellphone cameras! I didn’t plan it but there it is! Greatest show on Earth!”

  He faces us again, eyes wide, mouth agape with desire.

  “Do you know what happens? The bomb is so hot, it turns the sand—all that sand—to glass. We’ll literally be blinded by the light, during an eclipse. It’s biblical.”

  “You’ll kill millions of people!” Sara says.

  “Oh no, I won’t,” Harry grabs back his laptop to answer. “Look! There’s a website for it!” The legend atop the page reads NUKEMAP; the screen shows a bullseye over Ras Tanura. “You see? Here’s a 36-kiloton device like mine! They estimate the direct injuries from the blast at 8,600, tops! Most of the fallout drifts over the Gulf and dissipates! Even with fallout deaths over time, we’re talking only 578,000 dead and 964,000 injured—even with the injured, it’s under a million!”

  The room has gone silent, the audience exhausted and defeated by the evening’s speaker. The sound of his words echoing off the walls is lunacy. Yet Harry’s thrilled. It’s charming, brilliant, as far as he’s concerned, because, at this juncture, any train of thought he can bring to conclusion seems brilliant to him.

  “They’re people.” It’s Amina speaking now, quiet but coiled. “That’s our entire population.”

  “They hate you,” Harry says, brutal. Amina recoils. The family is not used to being spoken to like this. It’s a dangerous moment.

  “But Harry…why?”

  “Why?” Harry’s voice rises an octave. “Because it has to be done! Look at the Rue Breguet! And three more times in Paris in as many years! And Mumbai and Madrid—and the World Trade Center! Look at the damage there—and all the damage in retaliation. They kill three thousand in New York, maybe a thousand in Europe and we kill—who knows? Half a million? A million civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen? Which makes them want to kill us even more! It has to stop. All I’m
doing is saving us from ourselves!”

  We’re wheezing. We’re wiping our noses, our upper lips, our foreheads. I can’t remember a room so electric with so little going on.

  “This area’s no different, really, from Ireland, Kosovo, Central Africa, India and Pakistan, Nepal and China, you name it. They’re all squabbling with each other, hating each other, sniping and killing each other. Except we don’t have millions of troops tied up in any of those other places. Why? We all know why. Because of the OIL!

  “We’re addicted. We always need more. We know we should quit, the signs of self-destruction surround us and the means to quit are available. But, like any junkie, our need for more distorts and corrupts everything else. Fatah and Hamas, Shiite and Sunni, Arabs and Persians, these are worldwide issues now instead of local petty arguments—simply because this place has what we crave.”

  “The West own the oil companies,” Sara says.

  “True—we’re so efficient, the addict and the pusher—these poor slobs just happen to live where the garden grows. But what shall we do—wait for the addicts to seek treatment? No—we have to go cold turkey. And we will, tomorrow morning.”

  Another long silence.

  “But again, why us, Harry?” Diamante asks. “We’re not the people who change history.”

  “Right,” I add. “We’re the ones who watch from a distance and pick up what falls on the floor, or what we can get to fall on the floor. Since when do we stoop to changing the world?”

  The look in his eyes is naked, infinitely sad—and defeated. I’ve never seen this face before, not ever.

  “I’m sliding off into the blue, Nicky. Nothing to lose anymore.”

  “You’re just tired,” Diamante coos. “A few days—”

  “I am tired, my darling, but a few days? If only! When I had the vision, when I saw it all in front of me, it felt like destiny, don’t you see? It didn’t take me ten minutes with a map to recognize the rightness of the thing.”

  “They’ll put you in jail for the rest of your life,” Sara says, anguished.

  “I won’t spend a day in a proper jail,” Harry settles back in his chair, imperious. “A competent solicitor and a well-spoken physician and the worst I’ll end up is a locked ward with rubber walls.”

  “It won’t work,” Yusuf addresses us now, with a shocking competence—here’s the Cambridge-educated prince behind the gangsta pose. “You think we haven’t planned for this? As soon as oil goes to five dollars a gallon, solar and wind become economical. We’ve already laid out the world’s largest solar farm—we’ve got the sun and we’ve bought the acreage. The transmission lines to Europe will take less than three years in an emergency. You destroy the oil, we’ll keep our power, thank you.”

  And finally, that is that. No one has anything to say. It’s the aftermath of a fifteen-round fight, the survivors in their corners, semi-conscious on their stools.

  Harry pulls a bottle of champagne off the upright cart and pulls the foil off the top. “Let’s drink to Oblivion,” he says. “Going blind for the cause.”

  Yusuf’s deference is gone. “Give me my phone—I’m calling Rahim.”

  “You’re not calling anyone!” Harry says firmly.

  “Phone or not, I’m leaving,” Yusuf glares at Diamante. “You’re not shooting me.”

  “I STILL HAVE THE REMOTE!!” Harry thunders, pulling a plastic lozenge from his pocket and wagging it over his head.

  A moment later, Diamante and I have jumped him and I hold the gizmo in my hand.

  “You have a remote control?” I scream. “They gave you a remote control for a nuclear bomb?” And I do something reckless, because I know, deep down, it isn’t. I push the top left button at the same time as the ‘On’ switch. The television across the room immediately lights up. I switch it off.

  “What were you told this would do?”

  “I can arm the bomb from here,” Harry says but the confidence is oozing out of him.

  “This thing wouldn’t arm a set of Lego’s.”

  His face collapses. Not just wrong, but humiliated, a fool. Here is the fear Harry has always run from—disguising himself, shuffling personae like suits, conjuring legends and schemes and finally commandeering a nuclear device to upend civilization—the lifelong fear of being exposed as a fraud, of proving his snooty clients right when they snickered their way out of our office. God, do I hate this moment.

  Diamante’s pistol is still pointed at Yusuf’s forehead. I should tell him to back off—he certainly isn’t going to shoot—but I can’t.

  “You can’t leave, Yusuf, not yet,” I say. “Not till we get sorted out.”

  “What if there really is a bomb?” Yusuf demands. “What if they didn’t just take his money and run away, laughing?”

  “There is a bomb!” Harry insists.

  “If Stacia says it’s a bomb, it’s a bomb,” I say.

  “How long do you suggest we wait?” Yusuf asks and it’s a fair question.

  “We’re not going to wait. We can’t.” I turn to Harry. “When does the ship dock?”

  “In the morning, as the sun rises, like 6 am,” he says.

  “So we have several hours to play with.”

  “Play with? What if it gets jostled and goes off?” Yusuf asks.

  “A nuclear weapon won’t go off from jostling,” I say.

  “A properly designed one won’t,” Sara warns. “This was home-made in a shed.”

  “What’s if it’s behind schedule? Or ahead?” Yusuf continues. They’re all legitimate questions.

  “We can find out where they are!” Diamante starts clicking at Harry’s laptop. “We’ve got the tracker on the container.”

  He logs himself into our office system and clicks through several menus. “Oh!” he says sharply. I remember being on a small plane once and hearing the pilot say “Oh!” in just that tone. You really don’t want pilots or surgeons or people tracking your stray nuclear device saying, “Oh!” in quite that voice.

  Yusuf, Sara and I converge over Diamante’s shoulder, peering at the screen. “Where is it?”

  “It’s right out there,” he points over Amina’s head, out the windows to the Gulf. “But it’s not heading the right direction.”

  On the app, the ship looks so close—it’s probably visible out the window, if we only knew which ship it was. But it’s sailing at a steady clip in the other direction, toward the far coast of the Gulf.

  “Where’s it going?” Harry asks.

  Yusuf and Sara answer simultaneously. “Iran.”

  Diamante looks at me and I know what’s coming. When he says “We’ve got to stop that ship,” like it’s something we do every other weekend, I bury my head in my hands.

  Negotiation

  -At that point, going directly to Prince Rahim wouldn’t have been a better decision?

  Yusuf suggested that exact thing, of course.

  “I can’t let you,” I tell him.

  “Are you insane?”

  “This is the real world. Think politics,” I say. “If Rahim sends out commandos or fighter planes and takes the ship, it’s at very least a diplomatic incident. Based on what? Our word? If it goes to Iran, on the other hand, it’s gone, it’s not Rahim’s problem. Why take action when the problem’s sailing away all by itself at the moment? He’s not going to do anything—and in his position, that’s the right answer.”

  “That’s not your decision,” Yusuf says.

  “Oh yes, it is,” Sara says. “Prince Rahim’s life is politics. He’s better off letting this go—but we can’t, you see? We’re stuck in the real world. We created this problem, it’s our responsibility.” She stares at me and I nod. Yes, that’s the answer. I don’t know what to do about it but I know she’s right.

  Yusuf goes quiet for a long moment and then his face changes. “So what’s the plan, dog?”

  “We’ve got a big check from your brother. That’ll make a suitcase stuffed with cash, more than the captain of a Gulf
freighter’s ever seen, I’ll bet.” I turn to Diamante. “We’ve got to have a contact number for the ship, right?” He starts clicking to find it.

  “You can’t call them as you,” Sara says.

  “Huh? Why not?”

  “Think about it—they have to be the ones who set the police on you. They’re the only player left. Whoever’s on that ship, they saw your signature on the cert and wanted to make sure you wouldn’t interfere with them.”

  “That’s got to be right,” I realize. “Harry, you should talk to them. Harry?”

  Harry is silent, withdrawn into the deep cushions of his chair. He dismisses me with a wave—a passive, helpless surrender. He’s not lost anymore—lost would be better than this. He’s totally in the here and now, totally aware of what’s happening, aware for the first time of what he’s done.

  “Get us on the ship,” Yusuf changes gears. “We’ll clean the place up.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “No!” Amani howls. “Absolutely positively ‘no’, brother!”

  “My boys. We did six weeks of tactical training with Special Forces last summer. We packin’, dog! I got a Tec-9, Hassan’s got a Uzi!” He sees the look on my face. “Hey, fuck the Israelis; they make great fucking guns! You should see us at the range!”

  “Categorically ‘no’.”

  “A ship at sea isn’t—”

  “They’re fucking sailors, dog—we can take ‘em!”

  “Tell him ‘no’,” Amina begs. “Just tell him.”

  This trip keeps uncovering new horizons for bad ideas. I might pay to watch Yusuf and buddies doing ‘Firefight at Sea’ on pay-per-view, but I sure as hell am not putting our future in their hands.

  “No fighting,” I say. “We’ll outpay them instead.”

  “I thought I already did,” Harry says, stalking the windows and my first thought is to make sure he can’t get onto the balcony. If we don’t fix this, Harry’s a goner.

  “You did until they found out what was on board,” Sara says.

  “You think they know?”

  “They must. Otherwise, why set the police on Nicky? And now, they’re delivering the bomb to Iran.” She turns to me. “You really think we can outbid a government?”