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for the rest of your career. I’m sorry.”
    Petkov felt the life drain out of him. His boots against the floor sounded like they belonged to someone else as he saluted and did a smart about-face and marched out of the room as if nothing had happened. But something had happened. The one thing he loved had just been taken away from him forever.
     
4
     
    Bill Morrissey didn’t like the report at all. As the head of the South Asia section of the CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, he generally hated the volatility that permeated the whole region. The report he held in his hands was another in the disturbing trend that was making it an even more dangerous place.
    Morrissey carried the report into the office of Cindy Frohm, one of his senior analysts, and tossed it onto her desk. He trusted her judgment. “Read this,” he said, sitting in the chair across from her.
    She glanced at the title of the report. “The Pakistan crossing incident?”
    “Twelve hundred mils an hour. When they took the scrap metal off the truck, they found ten boxes just
shitting
radioactivity. Two of them weren’t sealed well, and two more had been breached by gunfire and the explosion. Ten boxes!”
    “Weapons-grade,” she said.
    “Plutonium,” he said ominously.
    “I’d heard,” she said. “Who was bringing it in?”
    “Well, if it was Pakistan, you’d think they wouldn’t do it on a scrap-metal truck, and you’d think they’d tell their own border guards to let it through.”
    “Who else could it be?” she asked, confused.
    “Maybe Pakistan, but not the
government
of Pakistan.”
    “
That’s
pretty scary.” She considered some of the possibilities that flooded into her mind. “We should send someone from the NRC or the DOE over there to help.”
    “We offered. They were offended.”
    “They would be.”
    “I want you to figure out where it was going.”
    She saved the computer file she was working on and faced Morrissey. “What do you think?”
    “Iranian driver, documents showed Pakistan as the destination, but passing through a lot of other countries, too, including Iran.”
    “Could be anybody. Iranians sure would love to have nuclear capability.”
    “But he was coming into Pakistan. He had passed through Iran. If this was their game, they would have kept it.”
    She pondered some of the twisted possibilities. “Maybe Pakistan just wanted to be able to deny it if something went wrong. Plus, we don’t really know what happened at the border. Sounds to me like someone knew it was coming and tried to hijack it. What happened to the driver?”
    “Big gunfight, but the radioactivity got him.”
    “And the guards?”
    “Same. And if this truck was trying to make a run through the mountains with ten boxes, how many other boxes have gotten through?” he asked.
    “Any theories on how they got hold of it?”
    “Lots.” He sighed heavily from the weight of trying to track the flow of boxes of radioactive material throughout his area. “Most likely, though, is the Mafia.”
    “The
Mafia
? Russian Mafia? We’ve never confirmed they have access to any nuclear material. Plus, it was from Kazakhstan.”
    “Nothing to do with nationality.” He shifted in his chair. “The entire Russian nuclear system, like most of their systems, is a wreck. They have guys with Ph.D.s in nuclear physics driving cabs. These Mafia assholes have sniffed out how hungry for nukes some of these desperate regimes are. They’re renting them nuclear engineers.”
    “It’s all about money . . .”
    “Exactly. Read that,” he said pointing. “Then come see me.”
     
     
    Luke Henry brought his beloved silver Corvette convertible to a quick stop in his garage that looked like a barn. It was the older model Corvette. He couldn’t afford a recent model Corvette on a Navy pilot’s salary. He climbed out and slammed the door of the car so hard he was momentarily afraid he would break the window that was rolled down inside the door. He walked