Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2), Jack Lively [ebook voice reader txt] 📗

for Gamma rays. This can detect those and others, like alpha rays. It’s a Scintillation Counter, if you want the technical term.”

I said, “Why the fancy dead drop with an eight-pointed star instead of a simple phone message?”

Hagen said, “We don’t communicate interesting information over the phone.”

I said, “I figure there must be a whole bunch of you out there, graduating in nuclear physics. What is that, a growth industry now?”

He stood up. Turned to me and shrugged again. “How do we end up doing what we do? I think a lot of it has to do with luck and coincidence, don’t you agree, Keeler?”

Ellie had kept back. She was listening and she was armed. I lowered the Smith & Wesson, easing off the trigger. “I’m curious about the Porterhouse Bar, where you and Chapman put on that grand performance. That was staged for my benefit alone. You wanted me involved, but how did you know who I was?”

“We wanted you involved because we needed you. It was Chapman who found you among the fishermen. You were her idea. I just followed her orders.”

I straddled a large boulder at the water’s edge. Facing Hagen, keeping him between me and Ellie.

“Okay Hagen, let me take a stab at straightening this out.”

Hagen looked at me with a little smile on his face, visible in the ambient moonlight coming off the mist.

I said, “You and Chapman are Russians. I’m guessing that you work for some unit of the Federal Security Service, investigating what my own government has refused or neglected to look into.” Hagen hadn’t moved or changed expressions. The same little smile was stuck inside of that beard. “Correct me if I get anything wrong.”

He nodded.

I said, “For you people, this is all about the nuclear submarine. K-349. You must be working for a branch of the FSB that does non-proliferation. I figure you got up here because your people had gotten wind of a black market salvage job.”

Hagen nodded. “K-349 went down twelve years ago. We picked up chatter about a successful salvage attempt two years ago. It wasn’t any kind of good information, nothing actionable. But it was believable. So, the office developed a team to make computer models.”

I said, “Like a map of possible places to store a stolen nuclear submarine.”

“Correct. Believe it or not, there aren’t very many. Not thousands anyway. Distance to the salvage site, depth at port, you get the picture. Port Morris was one of them.”

“Okay. So far so good. You get wind of the salvaged nuclear sub. It’s Russian, so you people feel a sense of responsibility about it. You lost it, and you failed to find it. Now you’ve got to do something about it.”

Hagen was picking up pebbles and lobbing them into the water. “Well, in the beginning it was only chatter. Rumors and stuff coming in from the various listening stations.”

I said, “But you people are devious and careful, and I mean that in a good way. Instead of committing resources yourselves, you decide to move through us. Chapman gets in early, gets her hooks into the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission via a romantic affair with this kid, George Abrams. You people had identified him as a consultant for the USNRC’s Office of Investigations. Being a consultant, he was easier to latch on to because you figured, rightly, that there would be less security around him. Chapman makes the initial approach to George Abrams at the conference in Estonia.”

I was watching Hagen. He gave an almost imperceptible nod. “Go on.”

I continued. “Chapman hooks into Abrams the consultant. She feeds him the K-349 story, in some subtle way that makes him think it was his own idea. He feeds it to his boss, Valerie Zarembina. So far, so good. It’s the next part that I have trouble with.”

Hagen scooped up a handful of pebbles and started grinding them in his hand. He said, “Yes to all of what you just said. But of course, none of that mattered because Zarembina’s own people at the USNRC didn’t believe her about K-349.” He chuckled, shook his head and looked at me with a smile. “The bosses didn’t think there was enough evidence and they refused to commit resources to it.”

“But George Abrams managed to make Zarembina into a believer.”

Hagen said, “Yes. Ultimately, yes.”

“Zarembina sends Abrams up on a freelance mission, because she’s sure it’s real.”

He nodded.

I said, “And that’s why we don’t have a thousand federal officers swarming over town right this moment.”

Hagen said, “That’s correct. I’m sure they’ll come eventually, when it’s too late.”

I said, “But we aren’t dealing in eventually, we are the ones right here, right now. Let’s go back to you, Hagen. The team is you and Chapman. She’s the senior officer. I figure she’s got a degree in physics, but you’re the real scientist. You look like a guy who kills bears with his hands but you’re more of a geek. She’s the real soldier. You come up here before Chapman, preparing the ground. You join up with Deckart via the security job at the cruise ship. You look the part, and no doubt you’ve got some faked credentials to prove it.”

Hagen said, “You don’t need much for that job, Keeler. Once we’d found a probable location for K-349, we did a lot of research. We found this Mister Lawrence group. Tried everything we could to get in with their organization, but they run a tight ship. The next thing was to look around at their contractors. Sort of the same thing we did with the USNRC. Found Deckart and took it from there.”

“Not bad work.”

He shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t quite enough actually. We didn’t expect the resistance we got from the Mister Lawrence people, or how deep they’d dug themselves in here.” He laughed once. “Felt like we were back home in Russia or something.”

I said, "And then what, figured you needed a little extra help?”

We were about ten feet from Ellie’s position. Hagen emptied the handful