The Threat

So he’d set up an appointment with Dr. Dina White, who held the counterdrug portfolio at State.

Lanky as a heron, White met him in the enormous 1960s-modern lobby. Around them people of every color were speaking every language he recognized and dozens he couldn’t guess at.

Her upstairs office was less impressive, the cubbyhole of an untenured academic. Binders sloped off metal shelves. The brown leaves of a long-dead pothos rustled in the blast of an air conditioner. She shuffled papers off a chair so he could sit down.

Over Taylors Yorkshire from an electric kettle White told him how optimistic State was about the new administration in Colombia. Senator Edgar Valencia Tejeiro had campaigned on a platform of reducing cartel violence, restoring justice, returning the country to normalcy. It was important to encourage him. That included the usual way America expressed friendship, with helicopters and other weapons. Congress was considering a $1.2 billion supplemental appropriation. The actual transfer would be a Defense responsibility, under the Foreign Military Assistance Program. Dan said he knew people in that office. Perhaps he could help expedite it. White said she’d appreciate anything he could do.

“The point I want to get across, that our people in country are telling us, is that this is a dangerous time for President Tejeiro. The cartels have assassinated newspeople, police, even high officials in the Justice Ministry. He could be a target too if he presses them too hard.”

He told her, “Yeah, I’d heard that. How can we help over at NSC?”

White said she’d drafted an attempt to persuade France and Germany to put the same financial and legal controls in place that the U.S., Britain, and Japan had. The European Union should enforce heavy penalties for laundering money and supplying arms and technical assistance to the cartels.

“All right,” Dan said. “Our shop will support that, and I have a contact at Treasury who’s thinking along the same lines. Maybe a meeting? To look at your draft?”

“Set up a time and I’ll be there.”

“Now let me shift to a different issue. Threat reduction.”

“Um, I do work some of that, but Dr. Sola has the lead in that area. Dr. Umberto Sola. Director of the Office of Nuclear Affairs. Unfortunately he’s speaking at the Middle East Center in Michigan today.”

Dan tried to find out exactly what State’s plan was for expanding operations in Kazakhstan. White grew vague. She said the effort was underfunded and not well coordinated. He asked whom she dealt with at Defense. She said as far as she and Sola had observed, Defense displayed little interest in threat reduction. “The undersecretary’s tried to push it in several venues. With nothing in the way of concrete results, manning, or even transport. Destroying a weapon by negotiation’s not manly, I guess. Or maybe, the more warheads the other side has left, the more Defense gets to keep. Regardless of what the president’s promised.”

“That’s a pretty cynical attitude,” Dan told her.

White looked as if he’d just told a joke. “You think so? The Chiefs pooh-pooh anything from us. They might respond to White House direction, though.”

“I have some of the action on threat reduction,” Dan said, though so far he hadn’t actually seen his name on anything. “Maybe we could coordinate a paper. Or ask for a supplemental?”

White said it would be good if he could get it into one of the president’s speeches somehow. Just a line or two. “Funding’s what makes things happen, but it’s not the whole story. We can have teams out there, but if the leadership, on both sides, isn’t serious about securing the weapons, the situation on the ground’s not going to change. De Bari’s personal attention, that could move it to the top of everyone’s agenda.”

Dan reflected grimly on the damage one loose nuclear shell had caused. He’d lost ten people topside to the burst itself, forty blinded or injured, and who knew how many to cancer in years to come. Maybe it wasn’t where Sebold and Clayton wanted him to put in his time, but he was determined to get involved somehow. And hadn’t De Bari said, while they were jogging, that he wanted his ideas? “Well, I can’t promise anything, but there might be a chance of getting the president to go on the record. If you and this Dr. Sola think it’d help.”

“That would be great,” she said, and knocked a binder off the desk. It hit a pile of papers and publications, and the tower rocked alarmingly before she grabbed it. “The last administration blew us off whenever we tried to do anything.”

He tried one more question. “Has anyone over here given any consideration to how somebody could get nukes into this country?”