Free Wednesday's Child by Alan Zendell Page A

byproducts of nuclear reactor fission, extremely deadly, and long-lived.
    Samir noticed my reaction.  “Dylan has seen the light.”
    “You think Al Khalifa’s carrying these?”  Port security had been a political football for decades.  There was always a lot of talk about it during election campaigns but no evidence that anything was done about it when the elections were over.
    “We’re not certain.”  Samir glanced at William, who nodded at him.  “Things have changed, Dylan.  We don’t publicize it, but we’ve been doing random sweeps of freighters entering the harbor for years.  We cast a broad net on a regular basis so they’ll think we’re just fishing, but it’s also a cover for taking an apparently innocent look at targets like Al Khalifa when Intelligence identifies them.”
    “What do you have, exactly?”
    “I went on board with the Border Patrol carrying a radiation detector.  It helped to know the language.”
    “You’re kidding.  You mean they actually mark containers, ‘Illegal Radioactive Contraband’ in Arabic?”
    “You’d be surprised what I can learn from a shipping label.  These guys are thorough and patient, but not always terribly creative.  They tend to follow predictable patterns like always using the same front companies to cover their activities. 
    “I found traces of radioactivity on a container marked ‘Medical Supplies.’ There was even a radiation hazard sticker on it.  That’s not unreasonable because some of these isotopes are used to treat cancer.  It’s also not uncommon for slight leakage to occur, not dangerous, but enough to register on a good counter.”
    “What made you suspicious?”
    “The container was addressed to a hospital in Riyadh.”  He unrolled a map of the Arabian peninsula and the Mediterranean.  “Why would a ship carry potentially dangerous and sensitive cargo bound from Aden to Saudi Arabia, travel up the Red Sea through the Suez Canal, to Benghazi and Marseilles, and then across the Atlantic to New York? Why would you even put it on a ship?” 
    He was right; it made no sense from any point of view.  Riyadh is landlocked, two hundred miles from the nearest port in Bahrain, and if the cargo was going there and then by truck to Riyadh, the ship would have gone in the other direction.  And even that dodged the question of what the cargo was doing in Aden in the first place.
    “You’re sure the container was loaded in Aden?”
    “According to the manifest it was.  We have a priority request in to Homeland Security to have the Coast Guard impound the ship.  We’ll have to move quickly to get the crew off before they can react, then get in and out as fast as possible.”
    Identifying the substances Samir detected would be pretty routine, the same kind of thing I’d done working for NRC.  The trick was to keep our options open.  If we found something significant, we’d confiscate most of it, but try to make it look like we didn’t know it was there.  The best scenario would be to neutralize the threat and still be able to follow the containers to their destination.
    William said, “Any questions?  Okay, then, stay loose and be ready to jump when I call you.”

WEEK 2
     
    11.
     
    Sunday morning, the second day in a row that Ilene and I awoke with no temporal disconnect, was a lovely morning, perfect for a drive in the country, except that we left the interstate well within the suburban sprawl of northern New Jersey.  Just ahead was a startlingly modern building that looked like it was built entirely of glass and pure white marble and would have been at home perched on a cliff at Malibu. 
    “Jerry’s office is in there,” Ilene said.
    Emotionally, I was still engaged with William and my squad. I hadn’t been thinking about hallucinations or living days out of order when I got home, and it must have showed in my body language, because Ilene’s face lit up with surprised delight when she saw me.  She’d asked