She looked back at him. “What does this have to do with me? Why are you telling me this?”
“I found you because Cassiel killed people in Italy with the name Constantine. I read the report about your grandparents’ murder. No one was ever charged with their murder. I thought it had to be Cassiel who killed them.”
“It was.”
“Yes, well, I know that now because you just told me he did, but before none of us knew that for sure. The thing is, one of the other pieces of the puzzle, one of the seemingly disparate facts that has me troubled, is you.”
“Me? Why me?”
“I know that you were attacked by four Hispanic men. They intended to kill you and almost succeeded. I wondered why they would do that. Cassiel wants to kill you, but why did they? The only thing I could come up with was that after they raped you maybe they wanted to eliminate you as a witness. But I have this uneasy feeling that there’s more to it, some other connection to all these things I’m trying to fit together.”
“There is.”
“Like what?”
“They weren’t Hispanic,” she said.
He remembered that José, the Mexican suicide bomber, only spoke Spanish, and yet he didn’t know anything about Santiago de Querétaro, in Mexico, where he was supposedly born.
“What do you mean? Every report I saw said they were four Hispanic men.”
She shook her head. “They weren’t Hispanic. I told the police they were because that’s what I thought when they first came into the bar. That’s all the police needed to know.”
“You’re sure they weren’t Hispanic?”
“Positive.”
“Did they speak Spanish?”
“Yes. Spanish and English with a broken Spanish accent.”
“Then what makes you think they weren’t Hispanic?”
She smiled to herself just a little. “Do you think Mexicans hate America?”
“No, not really.”
“Neither do I. These guys did. They despise America with every fiber of their being. That hate for America defines them.”
Jack shrugged. “Okay, so then what do you think they are?”
“Middle Eastern. Muslim of some kind. My guess is Iranian.”
“Iranian.” Jack leaned in a little, frowning at this young woman who an hour ago he would not have believed would even know that Iran was mostly a Muslim nation. “Okay, now you have my attention. Why do you say Iranian?”
“They called America the Great Satan. That’s what I always hear Iran calling America—the Great Satan. They also called me things like ‘a dirty American whore,’ that kind of stuff. The kind of things the Iranians and terrorists say about us. They hold women in especially low esteem. I was no more than dirt to them so they thought they had every right, as men, to use my body.”
“But if they were trying to pass as Mexican, why would they say those things in front of you?”
“Because they intended to kill me. They thought I wouldn’t be alive to repeat any of it to the authorities and blow their cover, so they felt safe in being themselves in front of me.”
“Wow,” Jack said as he leaned back.
“But they didn’t decide to kill me because they didn’t want me to be able to identify them. They intended to kill me from the first because they received orders to do so.”
Jack came up off the seat back. “Orders? What orders? Orders from who?”
“Orders that came in the package I delivered to them. I have a courier service. I delivered a package to them, to Hartland Irrigation, and inside there was a letter ordering them to kill the courier.”
Jack stared off into the darkness as he thought about it.
“Do you know what was in the package?”
Angela shrugged. “Some kind of long tubes. They were clear. I could see wires inside the tubes.”
Jack stared at her a moment. “Can you describe the wires?”
“Well … wait.” She pulled out her phone. “Let me see if I can find a picture of what the wires looked like.”
She typed something into a search engine. She clicked a lot of screens looking for one that had the right kinds of pictures. When the images came up, she started flicking her finger to scroll down through dozens of pages of photos, all the time murmuring, “No … no … no.” After searching for a time, she abruptly halted. She enlarged a picture and then turned the phone toward him so he could see.
“These wires,” she said. “They looked just like these. They were in tubes with red caps just like this. The wires even had the little thingamajigs on the ends like the wires in this photo.”
Jack could feel the blood drain from his face.
“That’s exploding bridgewire.”
Angela wrinkled up her nose. “What’s an exploding bridgewire?”
“It’s used to detonate a series of explosives at precisely the same time.”
“Why would you need to do that?”
“To detonate an atomic bomb.”
FORTY-NINE
Several of those troubling little pieces, the little worry tiles, that Jack had been turning over and over in his mind, trying to understand, were suddenly coming together to form a terrifying picture.
“An atom bomb,” Angela said. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, I’m dead serious. Exploding bridgewire is difficult to purchase legally, so a terrorist organization wouldn’t want to try to buy it here for fear of raising a red flag with authorities. If they want to remain undetected, it would be far better for them to send it secretly.
“Terrorists operating in coordination with the Ministry of Intelligence for Iran will typically send critical items or messages through networks of agents—MOIS intelligence officers assigned to foreign missions and embassies in most countries. But that’s risky in the US because any of those people very likely would be under surveillance by any number of the US intelligence services.
“With something this critical, instead of using their own agents, they sometimes use a series of couriers—innocent, unwitting mules. Only the final courier in that web of couriers is provided the final destination. That’s why you were to be killed and your body disposed of where it wouldn’t be found. They didn’t want the final courier to be able to reveal where you took the package. At least, you were supposed to be dead.”
Angela leaned in toward him. “You mean to tell me you think these people posed as Mexicans so they could smuggle in the stuff they need to make an atom bomb? Do you seriously think that’s what’s going on?”
“That suicide bomber we captured—the one who said he was Mexican—had a small bit of plutonium-239 stuck in his shoe. Plutonium is used to make atomic bombs. Along with a lot of other parts, you need exploding bridgewire to detonate it.”
Angela held up a hand to stop him. “All right, but just because you have the plutonium, that doesn’t mean you could really make an atom bomb. If it was that easy terrorists everywhere would be doing it. It can’t be that easy. Lots of countries who would like a nuclear bomb aren’t able to build one. So, if they can’t, why do you think these terrorists can?”
“It’s not really the same thing. The bombs some countries are trying to build are different and for a different purpose. Their bombs need to be much more sophisticated. They need to have precise and predictable yields. They ultimately need to be small enough to fit in a delivery system like a missile. Most importantly, they need to have safety features and fail-safe devices. None of that matters to a terrorist. Because their needs are much simpler, it’s not out of the question that they might be able to build a crude device.
“It wouldn’t have the precision yield of a military device, but that wouldn’t be important to terrorists. What do they care if it ends up being a hundred kilotons, or two hundred kilotons? Any nuclear device in that range, pretty much regardless of size, would be devastating to America.