The Faithful Spy

A ten-kiloton bomb is about as small as a nuclear weapon gets, barely half as powerful as the Fat Man bomb the United States dropped on Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Still, the bomb had enough power to obliterate midtown Manhattan and kill 200,000 people. Most civilians simply couldn’t comprehend what nuclear weapons could do, Exley thought. She envied them. Thinking too much about al Qaeda’s desire for a nuke was like envisioning the end of the world, or your own death — an exercise in humility that could become a morbid obsession. Exley vividly remembered the search that had followed the SISMI warning. NEST had frantically deployed hundreds of scientists to check every street in Manhattan, every airport terminal, every floor of the Empire State Building. But NEST never found a bomb. And neither the CIA nor any other intelligence agency could ever confirm the initial Italian report. By Christmas 2001 the investigation had wound down. Four months later NEST and the Joint Terrorism Task Force officially declared the report a hoax. Duto, at the time the No. 2 in the agency’s Operations Directorate, flew to Rome to tell SISMI it needed some new sources. Exley wished she could have seen that conversation.

She also wished that the suitcase-bomb episode had given her confidence in NEST’s ability to find a nuke if all else failed. But she knew better. During the search the NEST scientists hadn’t tried to hide their limitations. Despite their equipment, they had little chance of locating a bomb in a blind search. They faced an almost impossible problem: plutonium and uranium are only moderately radioactive until they detonate. And cities are filled with radioactive hot spots: X-ray machines in dentists’ offices; CAT scanners in hospitals; pacemakers, which are powered by minuscule amounts of plutonium. Even freshly cut granite emits enough radiation to cause false alarms.

Three days into the suitcase-bomb search, Stan Kapur, a chubby physicist from Los Alamos who threatened to take Exley to dinner whenever he came to Washington, had said something that Exley still remembered. During a meeting, someone, she couldn’t remember who, had asked about the odds that NEST would find the bomb if it existed.

“Looking for one of these in New York, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. A haystack made of needles,” Kapur had said. No one had wanted to hear that. But Kapur, who was now leading the NEST team in Albany, had told the truth, Exley thought. Without accurate intelligence, all the physicists on earth couldn’t find a bomb. Getting inside the enemy’s head was the only way to win. exley felt a strange frisson as she looked at photographs of the duffel bag on the floor of D-2471, which was called a locker though it was really about the size of a one-car garage. On the Sunday after Farouk’s confession came in, the president had considered ordering Albany evacuated. That step had turned out to be unnecessary after the NEST scientists reported that the trunk inside the bag was too small to hold a nuclear weapon.

After inspecting D-2471 with a pulsed fast neutron scanner and a modified CT scanner, NEST’s best guess was that the trunk held about eight pounds of C-4 explosive, packed around two small leadlined steel cases that contained plutonium or uranium. In other words, the trunk was a miniature dirty bomb, capable of killing hundreds of people around Albany if the wind blew the wrong way. But NEST could not estimate exactly how much radioactive material the bomb held, because its lead linings blocked almost all the alpha and gamma rays the material emitted. Meanwhile, the army’s explosive-disposal teams reported that the trunk appeared boobytrapped, wired to detonate if it was moved or opened without the proper key.

After two days of debate, the president decided to leave the bomb where it lay and signed an executive order nationalizing the storage center on the vague grounds of a “national security emergency.”

Not even the White House Counsel’s Office believed the order was legal, and Joey O’Donnell, the owner of Capitol Area Self Storage, had balked at giving up his property. But Kijiuri, the FBI deputy director, had not-so-politely explained to Joey that he had an easy choice. He could be a good American and accept the $1 million the government was offering, twice what the place was worth. Tax-free, too. Or he could protect his constitutional rights by filing a lawsuit and pissing off everyone from the FBI to the president himself. “You just won the lottery, Joey,” Kijiuri said. “Take the check and take a vacation. You want us looking at your taxes?”