The Faithful Spy

Exley shook her head as she pictured al Qaeda’s careful movements. For the thousandth time she marveled at the patience of these jihadis. They were slow and steady and they never gave up. She’d been thinking lately about selling her apartment, heading back to Virginia to be closer to her kids. Now, reading over the report, she wondered again about listing her place, and soon. Logan Circle was barely a mile from the White House, and radioactive fallout couldn’t be good for real estate prices.

it was two p.m. in Diego Garcia when Farouk Khan told Saul where the plutonium and uranium were hidden. Two p.m. in Diego Garcia meant three a.m. on the East Coast. On a Sunday. No matter. Secure phones began ringing at homes all over suburban Virginia less than ninety seconds after the Critic-coded transmission reached Langley and the White House. The president heard the news when he woke four hours later, per a standing order that his sleep not be interrupted for anything less than a full-scale attack on American soil.

By the time the sun was rising the Joint Terrorism Task Force had begun an investigation, which it named Operation Earnest Badger. Intelligence agencies seemed to have an unwritten rule that the most serious jobs got the most ludicrous names, Exley thought. The name wasn’t the only absurd aspect of that first Sunday morning meeting. The FBI and the agency had argued for an hour over which side should run Earnest Badger. Finally they’d agreed to name coheads: Exley’s old friend Vinny Duto and Sanford Kijiuri, the deputy director of the Feebs. With their fight for bureaucratic glory out of the way, Duto and Kijiuri got down to business, deploying fifty members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team — a.k.a. NEST — to Albany. The Department of Energy had created NEST in 1975 after a hoax nuclear warning in Boston showed the need for a specialized task force that could quickly investigate atomic threats. The emergency team now had about a thousand members, though only a few dozen were full-time paid employees. The rest were volunteers, mostly scientists from the government nuclear laboratories in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. NEST even had a few retirees old enough to have seen the power of nukes firsthand during the open-air tests of the 1950s.

Exley admired the courage of the scientists, whatever their ages. They had taken upon themselves the unenviable mission of searching for nuclear and dirty bombs, and the even unhappier job of defusing any weapons they found. They worked alongside FBI counterterrorism agents, as well as Special Forces commandos authorized by a secret presidential directive to kill on sight anyone believed to possess a nuclear device. During the Cold War, only top-level intelligence and military officials had known of NEST. Now the veil had lifted slightly. Still, the government took extraordinary precautions to prevent the public from learning about nuclear threats, hoping to discourage hoaxes and blackmail. NEST and the FBI never disclosed threats, even — or especially — those considered credible.

The NEST scientists wore civilian clothes on their missions and carried their laptop-sized radiation detectors in briefcases and oversized purses. The detectors could pick up unusual levels of alpha and gamma rays at distances up to forty feet. They sent wireless signals to miniature receivers that the scientists wore like hearing aids. NEST also owned a fleet of trucks that looked like ordinary delivery vans but actually held larger detectors able to pick up radiation from hundreds of feet away. To defuse a bomb, NEST had warehouses full of exotic tools at its headquarters at Nellis Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas: robots that could be controlled from miles away, the most powerful portable X-ray machines ever created, saws that cut with a high-pressure stream of water instead of metal. In fact, all of NEST’s equipment was fabricated from plastic and nonmagnetic metals like aluminum, since strong magnetic fields could scramble the computer chips inside nuclear weapons. until now, the most serious threat ever investigated by NEST

had come in October 2001. SISMI, the Italian military intelligence service, had warned the agency that al Qaeda had smuggled a tenkiloton nuclear weapon — a so-called suitcase bomb — into New York.