Jack was having a hard time keeping up with everything he was learning about her. It was obvious that her “interrogation” technique wasn’t something she’d thought up on the spot. Not many people would have had the stomach to do that to another human being, regardless of what they were guilty of.
She seemed to relish it. Of course, after what they had done to her, he supposed he couldn’t blame her.
Once they had dumped both men down into the cistern, Angela went back for the eyeball she had cut out and tossed it in. Jack slid the lid back on.
They needed to hurry and find the place where the men were building an atom bomb.
Jack hoped they weren’t already on the road with it.
“We had better get going,” he said. “We may not have much time to stop them.”
FIFTY-THREE
“Wait back here,” Jack whispered.
He was thankful that Angela didn’t argue. He left her in the alleyway behind a partially crumbled brick wall and then moved on alone into the moon’s shadow cast by the large building with the arched roof.
As far as he could see, the only windows in the long building were up high, mainly for ventilation and to let daylight in. He moved quietly along the entire length of the building, looking for a way to see inside. The building was brick, and had stood the test of time. Around the back there were steel doors, but they were all locked. He might have been able to break into them, but not without making enough noise to send up an alarm. For all he knew, they could even be booby-trapped. There was a rolling door at the back of the building, but it, too, was locked.
When he reached the far side of the building, he found a shed of some sort. It had been built right up next to the main building. He climbed on a heap of discarded diesel engine blocks and gears stacked beside the shed and then used the gutter to help him climb up onto the roof. Standing on the roof of the shed, he found a place where the brick was broken up around a jagged vertical crack in the outer wall of the main building.
Jack pushed on the bricks around the broken area, looking for any that were loose. He found several. After jiggling them a little to see how easily he would be able to pull them out, he found one that was looser than the others. He carefully wiggled it out, inch by inch, being careful to make sure none of the other bricks would come tumbling down.
He was armed only with a couple of small knives. He knew how to use them, and they were often better in close quarters, but they were no match for guns at a distance. He had learned that lesson the last time he had brought a knife to a gunfight. It did not end well. He had spent months in a coma and then recovering in the hospital. If that experience taught him anything, it was that he didn’t want to get shot again.
It had also lost him Kate. She believed he was dead and so she had gone off the grid to keep any super-predators from finding her. Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t find her, either. It was discouraging to try so hard and not even be able to get any leads on her whereabouts. At the same time, he was in a way happy about it because she was keeping herself safe from any killers who might also be trying to find her.
After he had finally managed to wiggle the brick out of its place in the wall, he carefully set it down against a ledge so it wouldn’t fall off the roof and possibly alert the men inside.
He leaned down and squinted through the hole to see what he could of what was inside.
The first thing he saw almost made him fall off the roof.
There, in the middle of the room, was a spherical device about three feet in diameter. Several men were holding half of a metal outer shell up to it as another group of men were feeding a mass of wires through an opening in the shell.
A cargo van sat not far away, both of its back doors wide open. A bundle of electrical cables hung out the back.
The bomb didn’t look like some of the more sophisticated devices he’d seen, but with all the clues finally making sense, he didn’t doubt that at a minimum he was looking at a crude nuclear weapon. Except it wasn’t nearly as crude as he would have hoped. This was a relatively sophisticated device, and he would bet that its yield was enough to take out much of a big city like New York.
He could see machined brass sleeves for the exploding bridgewire already placed in the Semtex. The way the explosive was precisely shaped into geometric pieces that were being assembled into a sphere looked to have been done with care and precision.
The plutonium-239 the Mossad had found in the tread of José’s boot was bomb-grade plutonium, which told him that it surely had a plutonium pit. He could see the lead shielding of the tamper beneath where the Semtex was still being placed.
For the moment, where the plutonium for the bomb had come from was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that it was here, now.
Jack was sure, now, that this was undoubtedly the reason they had blown up the Oeste Mesa border crossing. They used the diversion of all the other terrorist attacks to dilute the importance of that one. Different terrorist organizations claiming credit for various attacks created confusion among the intel agencies as to what was going on. That confusion had helped them to get the plutonium pit and associated material needed for the bomb across the border and into the United States.
Everyone thought all those attacks were the big event. The other terrorists might not have realized they were pawns being used as a diversion, but they had served the desired purpose anyway, and while all that was going on this group had gotten the most crucial material for their bomb into the country. Everyone was searching the country for Muslim extremists, raiding mosques, making arrests, pulling in and questioning known radicalized people on watch lists, and poring over Islamic chatter.
No one was looking for Mexicans.
Jack estimated that the bomb was possibly only hours but no more than a day away from being fully assembled and ready. He was sure that by morning it would be loaded into the van and on its way. From what Miguel had confessed, the target was New York City. There was no reason to doubt that.
With no time to waste, Jack slid back down the roof and jumped to the ground. He moved quickly but as quietly as possible as he made his way back from the building with the bomb to where he had left Angela.
When he got to where she was supposed to be he didn’t see her. He looked around when he heard dripping water and finally spotted her, bathed in moonlight, just climbing up out of a large metal tank that had been cut in half and was lying on its side. It was partially filled with rainwater. Dripping wet, Angela climbed out over the side.
Jack was incredulous. “What the hell are you doing?”
She frowned at him like it was the stupidest question she’d ever heard. “Washing off all the blood.” She shook water off her hands. “I don’t want to get blood all over the interior of my truck.”
In an odd, crazy way, he had to admit that it made sense.
He ushered her a safe distance away from the building with the nuke. He had seen at least a couple of dozen men inside working to assemble the bomb. There could easily have been more that he couldn’t see through the small hole. He had seen a lot of AK-47s leaning against posts and tables.
He didn’t know if there were men other than the two Angela had killed who might also be walking around, taking a cigarette break, or even walking guard duty. If there were, he didn’t want to run into them.
He scanned the area one last time, then pulled his phone out and pressed one of the numbers he had programmed in.
When a woman answered, Jack gave her the code in. She checked briefly, then asked what she could do for him.
“Give me Dvora. It’s an emergency.”
It was the middle of the day in Israel, so he expected she would be available. As Jack waited he continued to watch for trouble. Angela was doing the same.
Dvora quickly picked up. “Jack—what’s the emergency?”
“I’m in Milford Falls—”
“Did you find Angela Constantine, then?”