Page 118 of Nobody's Hero
Ego stroked.
‘So, how about we talk about how you’ve managed to do what I’m assured isn’t possible?’ Koenig continued. ‘Bess says you can’t permanently contaminate Lake Mead. I say you’ve found a way. Something to do with the F-35s.’
Tas checked his watch. ‘Sure, why not,’ he said. ‘We still have a few minutes to kill. The optimum time for an attack on the dam would be at dusk, during the park rangers’ shift change. That’s what would seem most believable to the eye in the sky.’ He checked his watch again. Nodded once, little more than a head bow. ‘Why don’t you try to work out exactly what it is you’re sitting on?’
‘Can I phone a friend?’
Tas grinned.
Koenig added theDie Hardinformation to what he already knew. The boat was low in the water. It had landed in Maine and been driven across the country. That meant Tas hadn’t been able to use any old boat. He’d had to usethisboat. Koenig had never studied marine engineering, but he understood the physics. Boats floated when the amount of water they displaced was heavier than the boat itself. The primary way to displace water was to create space. Space that could be filled with drugs, guns, wine, cigarettes, even people.
‘It’s not explosives,’ he said. ‘You could have picked that up anywhere. There was no need to smuggle it into the country.’
‘It’s not explosives.’
‘A virus?’
‘Why would I need a boat for a virus? Surely a test tube would do?’
‘A poison or a chemical the think tank hadn’t considered? One with longevity.’
‘No. Miss Carlyle is quite correct. Poison would be inconvenient. It wouldn’t indefinitely render the water undrinkable.’
‘Bess thought the most likely way to intentionally cause a mass migration event was to poison the air with weaponised fungi,’ Koenig said. ‘One of the mycotoxins. Causes severe illness, enough to displace the population. But we’re on water. That would make a mycotoxin releaselesseffective, not more effective.’
‘It’s not fungi,’ Tas said.
Koenig was fresh out of ideas. He was almost fresh out of blood. ‘I have no idea, Jakob. We know there aren’t any nuclear bombs in play.’
‘I’ll give you a clue,’ Tas said. ‘You’re getting warmer.’
‘Thereareno missing nukes, Jakob. When there’s a threat like this, everyone checks their stockpile. No country wants suitcase bombs in play.’
‘You’re not listening, Mr Koenig,’ he said. ‘I said you’re gettingwarmer.’
He emphasised warmer. Like he was being literal, not figurative. And when Koenig thought about it, hewaswarm. And he should have been cold. The body compensated for blood loss by restricting the blood vessels in the limbs and extremities. It concentrated on vital organs like the heart and the lungs and the liver. The skin and the arms and the legs got a much-reduced amount. The less blood you had, the colder you became.
But Koenig was warm, as if he were leaning against a radiator. Which meant the heat was coming from an external source. In the last ten minutes the deck had gone from feeling like wood warmed by the sun to wood that hadn’t long been out of the fire.
He could think of only one thing that generated heat like this.
Despite the heat, Koenig shivered. Like he’d stepped out of a sauna and into the snow. He understood everything. He understood why the boat had been smuggled into the country. And he understood why Tas needed Smerconish to close the deal.
Koenig had failed.
He had failed and Tas had won.
Margaret had won.
Because as sure as bacon for breakfast, Lake Mead was about to become toxic. And there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop it.
‘The boat isn’t packed with explosives, is it, Jakob?’ he said. ‘It’s packed with something much worse.’
‘You’ve worked it out, Mr Koenig!’ Tas said, grinning from ear to ear. Proud. ‘Well done! The boatisn’tpacked with explosives; it’s packed with spent nuclear fuel rods.’
Chapter 127
Koenig had once been involved in the hunt for an embittered, mid-level nuclear scientist called Oscar Sands. Sands had somehow been included on an interdepartmental email chain, one of those rambling ones where the most recent email had little to do with the originating email. Sands had joined the chain near the end. He’d been asked for his input on something Koenig hadn’t understood. Unfortunately for the person who’d cc’d him, the originating email was way above Sands’s security level. And Sands wasn’t the kind of guy to ignore that. Sands was the kind of guy who would print out the entire email chain, then go shopping for a buyer.