Legacy - 33. Olympic Plutonium - Debbie McLaughlin

“I haven’t seen you this excited in a long time,” my wife, Cathy, commented as we worked our way through the residential blocks of the Underground White House.

“That’s because it’s not everyday I get a leg up on Trevor Austin,” I replied. Yes, I’d really pulled a fast one this time. Putting extra manpower on the subject, I’d managed to get a major lead on the true identity of President Schroeder’s pick to succeed Trevor as the National Security Advisor. It turned out that Richard Samuelsson was none other than Blake Sinclair, a convicted terrorist turned state witness who’d been involved in a plot to detonate a nuclear device at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. Trevor was going to crap his pants. There was no way he could have seen this one coming.

“Are you sure we’re in the right housing block?” Cathy asked as we wound our way through the maze.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I reassured her. “For all intents and purposes, we’re being escorted,” I pointed out. Although I had full access to nearly all areas of the Underground White House, as one would expect to be the case for the Attorney General, an extensive security system made it virtually impossible to lose track of people in the maze of passageways, nor for people to get lost. At each security checkpoint we had to confirm where we were going and whom we were visiting. What’s more, directional indicators lit up along the way to keep us from getting lost.

A pulsing light over the door indicated we had arrived at Sam Austin’s quarters. We were meeting there rather than at Trevor and Kurt’s place because we didn’t want to deal with any intrusions from their children, although their children were old enough to take care of themselves. Besides which, Sammy Austin had the best-equipped kitchen in the entire facility.

Before I even had a chance to knock, the door was opened by Kurt DeWitt, Trevor Austin’s husband and the President’s Chief of Staff. “Kurt!” I exclaimed. “I didn’t think you’d be able to make it tonight. I’d have thought Schroeder would have you working to the bone.”

As we went inside, we were greeted by the most wonderful, mouthwatering aromas. Sam was in the kitchen area, busily working on dinner. Stan Meyer, the head of the NSA, and Trevor were seated side-by-side on a sofa. They looked up from the laptop they’d been staring at when we entered and stood to greet us.

Laughing, Kurt answered, “Oh believe me, he’s tried. The only way I was able to get the evening off was to tell him the truth . . . that I’m having dinner with you to discuss some concerns you have about the nomination.”

“Fuck, Kurt,” I replied, and then apologized, “Sorry, I haven’t cursed like that in at least a day but, seriously, what were you thinking? Talk about tipping your hand! What if I hadn’t found any concerns? What if Samuelsson’s record had come up clean?”

“Well, did it?” Kurt asked.

“Um . . . no, but that’s beside the point!” I replied.

“Don’t worry, Debbie. If you don’t already know it for sure, you’ll have Samuelsson’s true identity by the time you and I meet with the President. I’ve taken the liberty of penciling us in for a breakfast meeting at seven, by the way.”

“You’d better damn well hope you’re right about me finding the identity of Samuelsson by then,” I replied, but then added, “although it’s a good bet I will. In fact, I already have a preliminary ID.”

“Good,” Kurt answered. “It’ll help to be on the same page when we go in tomorrow and tell the President his choice for National Security Advisor is none other than convicted terrorist Blake Sinclair.”

I know my mouth dropped open, but I was speechless. My wife, on the other hand, was anything but speechless as she exclaimed, “OH MY GOD! How did you know?”

Laughing, Trevor said, “Although I’d like to take credit for my wisdom, or for applying my skills in the field of espionage, this one was a lot of just plain dumb luck. Once we associated Nehru with Samuelsson in the present, then detected a pattern in the past . . . a pattern that revolved around attending the Olympic games . . . I suddenly remembered the case of Blake Sinclair.”

“How could any of us forget?” Sammy chimed in from the kitchen. “After all, it’s not every day my brother passes out cold.”

“He did?” I asked in surprise.

“At the time of his arrest,” Trevor went on to explain, “Blake Sinclair was my lab partner in a course on solid state physics we shared at MIT. I was in Computer Science and he was in the Electrical Engineering Program. He was and remains one of the weirdest people I’ve ever met.”

“When I turned on the television the morning of Sinclair’s arrest,” Sammy added, “Trevor simply slumped over and passed out.”

“You have to remember that 2012 was also the year that Trevor witnessed that kid killing himself,” Kurt chimed in. “That event was just a few weeks before and it left Trevor traumatized.”

“It would have left anyone traumatized,” Cathy sympathetically agreed.

“So it’s just by coincidence that you figured it out,” I concluded. “Had it not been for your having shared a class with him at MIT and having him as your lab partner no less, you might never have made the connection.”

“I wouldn’t say that at all,” Stan Meyer, the head of the NSA, interjected. “Trevor was well on the way to figuring it out based on space-time correlation alone. He’s a master of this sort of thing . . .”

“Don’t I know it,” I interrupted. “He puts most of our agents to shame.”

“Anyway, Trevor’s personal experience with Sinclair merely sped up the process,” Meyer went on, “and it allowed us some unique insights into his current situation.”

Sam brought a tray out with some amazing-smelling pastries and set it down on the coffee table in front of the sofa. “Since there are no vegetarians here tonight,” he explained, undoubtedly referring to the Kimball-Reynolds clan, “this is a carnivore’s night. We have dumplings stuffed with pork, beef, scallops and shrimp. I hope you like them,” he added with a grin.

“I couldn’t get much in the way of drink selections,” he went on. “If anyone wants wine, I have an overly sweet Riesling and a particularly dull Cabernet. For the beer drinkers, I have a few cans of Bud . . . and I managed to procure a pint of Gibson’s and a bottle of tonic, but I don’t have any limes . . . sorry. I also have a few cans of Sprite, Diet Pepsi and Canada Dry, and of course we have tap water over ice.”

“Long as you went to the trouble to get it, Sammy, I might as well have a gin and tonic, sans the lime,” Kurt replied.

“A can of Bud will do it for me,” Trevor chimed in.

“I’ll try the overly sweet Riesling,” I responded and Cathy added, “I’ll have the same.”

“I’m twenty-six years sober,” Stan Meyer replied, “so I’ll stick to the ginger ale.”

In the meantime, I grabbed a napkin and a couple of the pastry balls, and sat in one of the armchairs that flanked the sofa. Cathy sat in the other armchair and Kurt grabbed one of the kitchen chairs and sat down next to me. Biting into one of the pastry balls, which was filled with the most tender beef fillet I’d ever tasted, I literally moaned, “God, this is good,” earning a few chuckles from everyone else, particularly my wife. The meat had obviously been marinated with an incredible mix of herbs but, given the short notice, I couldn’t see how Sammy had had the time, and so I asked him.

“That’s a trade secret, Debbie,” Sammy answered, and then he broke out in a laugh. “Actually, it’s pretty simple. Ordinarily I’d marinate the meat overnight at the least. Since I only had a few hours to work with, much of it spent tracking down what ingredients I could find on short notice, I used a syringe to inject the meat with my special herbal solution. I then wrapped each piece of meat tightly in plastic wrap and steamed them before removing the plastic and stuffing them into the pastry. It only took me about twenty minutes to prepare these, not counting the baking time.”

“I’m impressed,” Cathy responded.

Before anyone else could comment, Trevor interrupted by saying, “I think we’d better get started. Let me tell you a little more about what we know about Richard Samuelsson, a.k.a. Blake Sinclair.

“Blake Sinclair grew up in a small town near Baton Rouge, Louisiana; hence, he has a rather distinctive southern accent. He was the oldest of three children, but then his little sister died when she was only seven from acute lymphocytic leukemia. The sad thing is that even then, ALL was nearly one hundred percent curable, but his family didn’t have health insurance and, although charity care for indigent children was available, they waited to seek medical care until it was too late.

“The Sinclairs were deeply religious, belonging to a church affiliated with the Southern Baptists that was particularly strict. Having put their faith in Jesus that their critically ill daughter would be cured, they were devastated when the power of prayer alone failed to prevent her ultimate demise. Blake’s father took to heavy drinking on top of what was already a serious drinking habit, and his mother abandoned them and was never heard from again. We still aren’t sure of her whereabouts.

“Just eleven years old at the time, young Blake was forced to fend for himself and take care of his nine-year-old brother, Bret. A year later, when Hurricane Katrina hit, Blake and Bret fled to their neighbors, who took them with them to Houston. The neighbors, Donald and Tanisha McGrath, spent the better part of the next year trying to locate the boys’ father or their mother, only to find that the father had drowned during the hurricane. With no trace of the mother, the McGraths ended up raising the Sinclair children as their own.

“It was during the early years following the hurricane that Blake and Bret began to engage in what was likely nothing more than mutual sexual exploration. Although there was never any evidence that it wasn’t consensual, when the McGraths discovered the boys engaged in mutual fellatio, they punished Blake for it, sending him away to a Baptist boarding school. Remarkably, Blake flourished there, earning top grades and, ultimately, a full ride scholarship to MIT. He also reconnected with his religion, undergoing baptism when he was fifteen and becoming active in Bible study.

“It’s not clear just when Blake became interested in the 2012 Movement . . .”

“The 2012 Movement?” Cathy asked.

“As you may recall,” Kurt explained, “there was a cult-like movement in the early part of the century, centered on the belief that the world would come to an end in 2012. There was even a movie made about what supposedly might happen. The whole thing was based on a pseudo-scientific interpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, in which the winter solstice of 2012 was thought to represent the end of a 5125-year cycle.”

“I thought that whole thing was debunked,” Cathy added. “The Mayans never actually predicted the end of the world. Of course it may have seemed that way when the Spanish invaded, a half-a-millennium before 2012,” she added with a laugh.

“There were a number of splinter groups,” Trevor went on to explain, “that believed the Mayans had foreseen the Apocalypse predicted in the Bible. It was all based on coincidence and conjecture, taking parts of passages out of context and finding supposed parallels in the Mayan calendar and in modern society. It turned out the so-called Mayan calendar was bogus, but that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists from taking it as Gospel.”

“The 2012 believers were definitely on the fringe of society,” I added, “but the 2012 Movement went much further than that. The Movement was an underground group of would-be terrorists who not only believed the world would end on December 21, 2012, but who believed it was their duty to make sure it happened. They thought that they were enacting God’s will, ensuring a place for themselves in the coming Kingdom of God.”

“It sounds scary,” Cathy responded.

“Believe me, it was,” Trevor went on. “Anyway, Blake Sinclair became involved in the 2012 Movement at some point, either at his boarding school or once he got to Boston. The Movement was shadowy and had members from all walks of life, some of them with positions in very high places. Their plan was to sow mass hysteria through targeted, high profile terrorist attacks.

“There were a few minor incidents that are now known to have involved the 2012 Movement, but the key event was to have involved the detonation of a nuclear device in the Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremony at the 2012 Summer Games. They believed the explosion of a nuclear device at that particular time, with virtually all nationalities present, would lead to finger-pointing and an escalation of violence that would ultimately lead to global nuclear warfare.

“The 2012 Movement put everything into trying to procure a thermonuclear weapon but, as many terrorist groups before and since have discovered, not only is attempting to procure a nuclear device exceptionally difficult, but it is the surest way to attract unwanted attention. Had they stuck to using conventional plastic explosives strapped to suicide bombers, they might well have succeeded in sowing mass hysteria, but probably not in bringing about the end of the world they so desired.

“When efforts to obtain a ‘loose nuke‘ from the collapse of the old Soviet Union failed, however, what had initially been a backup plan took on urgency as 2011 drew to a close. Although the explosion of a low-yield fission weapon wouldn’t have had near the impact of a high-yield thermonuclear device, which would have destroyed much of London along with the Olympic compound, it would have still yielded more casualties than the original bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined.

“The leaders of the 2012 Movement actively recruited several individuals from within their ranks claiming to have the expertise to build a fission bomb,” Trevor continued. “We may never really know if Blake Sinclair actually had the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon, but his claims that he could thrust him into the center of the plot to bomb the Olympic Stadium. It was certainly a rather wild claim under the circumstances. He was only twenty-one years old and his major in Engineering at MIT was in Communication Theory, which hardly seems related to nuclear physics at all.

"However, he somehow managed to convince some of the key players in the movement that he could build such a device and had access to the raw materials to do so. There was already plenty of information out on the Internet and perhaps he was able to repackage it in a way that was convincing . . .”

“Or maybe he really did possess the knowledge,” Meyer suggested.

“That’s certainly a possibility,” Trevor acknowledged. “In any case,” he continued, “what really cinched the deal was his connection to the son of a wealthy Indian businessman.”

"Narendra Nehru!” Kurt exclaimed.

“Exactly,” Trevor responded.

“So they knew each other before Sinclair entered Witness Protection,” Kurt added.

“They knew each other very well,” Trevor replied. “It turns out that both young men were in the closet. Sinclair was a deeply religious Southern Baptist who believed homosexuality was fundamentally wrong and Nehru was the son of a prominent Indian businessman who would have considered a gay son an unacceptable embarrassment to the family.

“Of course we don’t know all the details of how they met . . . perhaps they hooked up in one of Boston’s many gay bars . . . but they developed a relationship that lasted at least two years.”

“And that perhaps continues to this day,” I added.

“I too thought that might be the case,” Trevor replied, “but I think if there is still a sexual component to their relationship, it’s one-sided. You see, young Blake Sinclair wasn’t as careful as he might have been and he contracted HIV. Perhaps this was one of the factors that pushed him into the 2012 Movement in the first place but, in any case, we know he passed his HIV onto Nehru and it was Nehru’s HIV status that led his father to discover the nature of his son’s sexual orientation. The whole story of Nehru picking it up from a prostitute was concocted after Sinclair’s arrest and was likely intended to avoid a scandal that could have, literally, brought the Nehru business empire down.

“I believe it’s likely that Nehru deeply resents Sinclair for what he thinks he put him through and that everything that has happened since has been intended to extract revenge,” Trevor concluded. Although I had a PhD in Psychology, not to mention one in Criminology, Trevor always had a much more intuitive sense about people than I did. I always tended to trust his judgment over my own.

“So how does Nehru figure into the terrorist connection?” Cathy asked. Leave it to my wife to get back to the story.

“Nehru’s father’s firm was the principle supplier of uranium to the Indian government,” I answered. “They owned a series of uranium mines in the American Southwest and provided processed ore, supposedly for peaceful purposes such as power generation and medical imaging. It was rumored that they had a secret plant in India itself where they processed the ore into weapons-grade material and Sinclair apparently believed his lover’s father was directly involved in India’s nuclear weapons program. Whether or not that was actually the case remains open to debate to this day.”

“So Sinclair blackmailed his own lover?” Sammy asked from the kitchen.

“How ironic that Nehru ended up turning the tables on Sinclair,” Kurt pointed out.

“Funny how life has a way of bitin’ ya back,” Sammy said in his trademark, mild southern drawl as he started to set several serving dishes along the kitchen counter. “Since room at the table is tight,” he went on, “ya-all will need to be servin’ yourselves.” Everything smelled fantastic!

Cathy and I got in line behind Trevor and Meyer, with Kurt and Sammy falling in behind us. Space was indeed tight around the table, with six place settings crammed around a table designed to seat four.

The main course was a beef stroganoff unlike any I'd ever tasted. How Sammy was able to make something taste so good with such a limited supply of fresh ingredients, I couldn’t imagine. In addition to the stroganoff, we enjoyed green beans sprinkled with sesame seeds and a tomato compote that was just amazing.

“So what happened when Sinclair tried to blackmail Nehru?” Kurt asked.

“One can only guess how Nehru must have reacted when his lover threatened to expose his sexuality,” Trevor answered. “He may have been willing to do anything to stay in the closet, but there were limits to what he could or would do. It’s doubtful that he could have actually gotten his hands on weapons-grade uranium or plutonium in any case and that, more than anything, probably dictated his actions. Desperate times bring about desperate measures.

“Nehru went to the FBI and offered to help them capture Sinclair, but the FBI was only interested if they could capture those higher up the food chain. They’d already been criticized for their role in conducting sting operations on would-be terrorists who had nothing more going for them than a desire to hit the big time. To the FBI, Sinclair was nothing more than a harmless bottom-feeder. It was his contacts in the 2012 Movement that were of interest.

“With the threat of being exposed still hanging over his head, Nehru went back to Sinclair and told him he could get the goods but that his suppliers weren’t about to hand over weapons-grade material to an unknown stranger. Nehru told Sinclair that his suppliers insisted on a face-to-face meeting with the top people in the 2012 Movement as a precondition for their cooperation.

“This of course was a complete fabrication, but Sinclair took the bait. He was delighted to be able to play the role of a broker, bringing the two sides together. Nehru, for his part, thought he now had the leverage he needed to enlist the FBI’s help in getting Sinclair out of his life, permanently.”

“And the leaders of the 2012 Movement went for it?” Cathy asked as I polished off my first plate of food and joined some of the others in going back for seconds.

“Of course not,” Trevor replied with a grin. “They may have been desperate to get their hands on a nuclear weapon but they weren’t stupid. They wanted proof that Nehru’s suppliers were the real deal. Of course that was easier said than done, as they really didn’t have the expertise to verify the quality of a sample, even if they could get their hands on one. Sinclair was the ‘nuclear expert’ and they would have had to rely on his word, which was something they were more than a little reluctant to do.”

“Wait a minute,” Cathy asked, “they were willing to let a kid build a nuclear bomb for them, but they didn’t think they could trust him?”

“Let’s just say they finally got some sanity and realized just how much faith they’d already placed in a novice,” Trevor answered. “It was one thing to encourage a young man with religious fervor in his heart . . . to take advantage of him and whatever he had to offer the organization . . . to accept his offer to build a completed weapon, but quite another to expose themselves on his behalf.

“They informed him that they intended to obtain a nuclear weapon elsewhere. Perhaps Sinclair read more into his relationship with the leadership than was actually there but, obviously, they must have been at least a little interested to have allowed him access to the top leadership in the first place.”

“How stupid of the FBI not to get involved with Nehru,” I said, well aware that it was me, the Attorney General, who was saying it. “They had a chance to get their hooks into a major terrorist organization and they blew it.”

“It’s easy to say that in retrospect, Debbie,” Trevor responded, “but you have to remember that the 2012 Movement had yet to make a move back then. The FBI was aware of its existence but, at first, it seemed like little more than a religious cult. They weren’t caught totally unawares . . . they had a few agents assigned to monitor the organization and even had an agent on the inside. They just didn’t realize the organization had terrorist leanings until they made their first attempts to procure nuclear weapons. By the time they connected all the dots, it was nearly too late.”

“But didn’t word of intent to purchase weapons-grade material at least raise some eyebrows?” Cathy asked.

“Sadly, no,” Trevor answered. “They considered Nehru a rogue element. He didn’t have any connection to the Movement itself and it was only his word that he knew a kid who was building a nuclear bomb for them.”

“The FBI gets information like this all the time,” I added, “and it almost never pans out.”

“But if it pans out even once . . .” Sammy pointed out.

“Don’t you think I know that?” I replied.

“We deal with the same dilemma at the NSA,” Meyer added.

“The likelihood of a terrorist organization obtaining nuclear weapons without having large sums of money is virtually nonexistent,” Trevor continued, “and it was the money trail that ultimately proved the 2012 Movement’s undoing.

“Money laundering isn’t nearly as easy as one would believe. Everyone thinks in terms of briefcases full of cash, but coming up with a briefcase full of cash in the era of electronic banking isn’t all that simple. Any kind of large cash withdrawal automatically triggers an investigation. Organizations like the Mafia that deal in large sums of cash have less trouble with it . . . indeed, their problem is getting rid of so much cash . . . but, for a legitimate business, it’s nearly impossible to come up with a lot of clean, untraceable cash.

“The 2012 Movement was funded by a small group of very wealthy business leaders. When large sums of money began being transferred to offshore accounts via dummy corporations, then the FBI took notice. The 2012 Movement’s accountants were amateurs and it didn’t take long to trace the money back to the source.

“The problem was that these were people who truly believed the world was ending,” Trevor went on. “They had nothing to lose and actually believed their incarceration would hasten their ascent to the Kingdom of God when the end came. It was like we hit a stone wall.”

Smiling as I recalled some of the details from my own research, I chimed in with, “Actually, it was the spouses who were the key.”

“It’s always sex that trips them up in the end,” Meyers commented.

“Definitely,” I agreed. “Although most of the ‘significant others’ were equally fanatic, it only took a few to break things wide open. With their help, we were able to make the connection to the 2012 Movement and things finally started to fall into place.”

“Yeah, but that still didn’t give us the identities of the leadership of the Movement,” Trevor continued. “We knew that vast sums of money were being transferred into the Movement and we knew they were stockpiling weapons. Beyond that, we didn’t have a clue. We didn’t even know about the plot to bomb the Olympic Stadium.

“In the meantime, the 2012 Movement started to lose steam,” Trevor went on. “They were unsuccessful in procuring weapons-grade uranium or plutonium for a bomb, let alone an actual device. If it even occurred to them to use conventional weapons, volunteers to serve as suicide bombers were in short supply. 2012 turned out to be just another year and, as this became more and more apparent, fewer and fewer people were interested in contributing to murder in the name of a Biblical Apocalypse that didn’t appear to be happening.”

“So it kind of just fizzled out?” Cathy asked.

“We may never know how much of a factor the international effort to find them pressured the 2012 Movement’s leadership further underground and what effect, if any, that might have had on their plans,” Trevor explained. “Had they been better organized and opened 2012 with a bang, perhaps with suicide bombers in Times Square the way Al-Qaeda did a few years later, who knows what might have happened?”

“If that had been the case, we would have been too late," I added.

“Too little, too late,” Trevor said, echoing my words, “but perhaps what we did do was instrumental in slowing them down just enough for the Movement to dissipate on its own. That is something we may never know.”

“Then why go after Sinclair in the end?” Cathy asked.

“First, we already had a lot of the FBI’s time invested at that point,” I explained, “and heads would have rolled had we not gotten something for our efforts. Second, the leaders of the Movement engaged in a significant amount of illegal activity in the name of sowing mass hysteria. They had to be brought to justice, regardless of the actual outcome.”

“The only lead they had was Nehru and, through him, Sinclair,” Trevor went on. “Their case against Sinclair was weak . . . but it was just enough to pressure him into rolling on the rest of the organization. Witness Protection was the key. WP allowed Sinclair to start life anew, free of the stigma of 2012 . . . free of always having to look over his shoulder, always wondering if a crazed member of the 2012 Movement would take out their revenge on him . . .”

“. . . or a member of the Nehru family.” I added.

“Or a member of the Nehru family,” Trevor agreed.

“So how did Nehru actually track Sinclair down, and when?” I asked.

“I have no idea, Debbie,” Trevor answered, “but you can be sure we’re going to find out. We lost track of him, so how did they manage to find him? I don’t yet know the answer, but figuring it out will help us to avoid making similar mistakes in the future and to better protect our witnesses.”

“What I don’t understand,” Cathy asked, “is how Sinclair went from being an Electrical Engineering Student to being an expert on international relations? I mean, it’s not like there’s any kind of shared knowledge between the two.”

Smiling, Trevor answered, “That’s certainly one of the trickiest parts of the puzzle, Cathy. Samuelsson’s bio on the Hoover Institution website lists a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Georgetown University and a Masters from NYU in International Relations. He has a PhD from Yale in Economics . . . his dissertation was on the modeling of Global Finance . . . and he has a PhD from Cal Tech in Network Security. He did a post-doc at the Hoover Institution, worked his way up the academic ladder at Georgetown, the University of Chicago and Stanford before landing his current position at the Hoover Institution.”

"Shit, it sounds like he could give you a run for your money, Bro,” Sammy chimed in.

“How did he get into the PhD program at Cal Tech without drawing on the Engineering background from his prior life?” Cathy asked, echoing my own thoughts.

“That’s one of many mysteries we need to investigate, Cathy,” Trevor answered. “One of many mysteries . . .” he repeated.

Just then, as we were all digging into an amazing cranberry peach cobbler, the doorbell buzzed. Sammy went to answer it and we were all surprised to see Henry Garland, Jeremy Kimball’s personal assistant.

“I'm sorry to interrupt,” Henry began, but there’s been an incident. We all need to go to the Situation Room . . . all but you, Sammy,” he added apologetically as he turned to the Congressman, “and you, Cathy,” he added as he turned toward my wife. “Although you’re not supposed to be there anymore either, Trevor,” he added, “I’ve been asked to bring you too.”

“What’s happened?” Kurt asked. It only made sense that the President’s Chief of Staff would be the first to speak.

“It’s Altaf El Tahari,” Henry answered. “His motorcade was ambushed in Israel. He’s been kidnapped.”