Free War Plan Red by Peter Sasgen Page B

But Frank wouldn’t necessarily sit down and knock back a few cold ones with his boys. And not this boy. Yet, there he was in Frank’s hotel room.”
    “Maybe he had information Frank wanted.”
    “What information?”
    Her mouth tightened. “I don’t know.”
    “Okay, say he did, but why meet him in a shit hole of a hotel? And why the need for secrecy?” Scott considered for a long moment, gazing down at the gray carpeting as if he might find the answer written there. He looked up. “Did Frank say anything at all about a meeting?”
    “Not a word. Just that he was going to wrap things up and head back to Moscow.”
    “By the way, any idea what happened to his cell phone? I didn’t see it listed on the FSB’s inventory of his personal effects.”
    She shook her head. “It’s missing. Someone must have stolen it.”

    “It’s useless without his activation code,” Scott said.
    At length Alex’s shoulders sagged. “Maybe…”
    “Maybe what?” Scott said.
    “Maybe Abakov was right. Maybe Frank and the sailor…”
    “Come on, Alex. I know you don’t believe that.”
    “I don’t want to, but I can’t think of any reason that Frank would have met with a half-illiterate navy conscript in a hotel near the base. Everything would have been covered in the private interviews.”
    “Then there’s got to be another explanation.” Scott turned back to the desk. “What about his computer?
    Maybe there’s something useful on it.”
    “I doubt it,” Alex said. “Most of the stuff he copied to the hard drive was encrypted technical material, and I don’t have the access codes.”
    “I thought you said he kept the high-security stuff in the chancery.”
    “He did. Even so, this stuff is sensitive, and that’s why he used a twenty-eight-bit encryption code.”
    “Isn’t that overkill?”
    “Probably, but he was careful.”
    “Right, and a man who’s that careful wouldn’t meet a sailor from Olenya Bay in a hotel room in Murmansk unless it was damned important.”
    Alex said nothing. She knelt beside Scott and booted the laptop sitting on the table. He inhaled her scent, a light fragrance in her hair from the shampoo she had used. The desktop came up on the screen.
    Alex stroked keys and waited. A dialog box asked for an ID. She tried various combinations of words and letters but kept getting Access denied. Scott suggested a few more, but she got the same result.
    “See what I mean?” Alex said. She shut down the laptop.
    Scott stood. He blew through his teeth in frustration. “What are you doing for dinner tonight?”

    They had a table in one of Moscow’s elegant new restaurants on Ulitsa Petrovka, complete with tinkling crystal, waiters wearing tuxedos, and a chef imported from Paris. Over drinks Alex said, “Why are you so interested in my background?”
    “For one thing, we’re going to be working together. For another, I don’t meet a woman every day who knows how to build a twenty-megaton nuclear weapon.”
    Alex laughed behind a hand. “That’s not true at all.” She lowered her voice. “I don’t know how to build a bomb. I know how they work and what goes into one, that’s all.”
    “That’s plenty. So tell me about you.”
    “There’s not much to tell. I grew up in California. My father was a journalist and I wanted to grow up and be one too. I thought a life interviewing presidents and foreign leaders was the most exciting thing in the world a person could do. Instead I discovered I had a knack for science and studied physics at USC. After I completed graduate work, I got a job at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
    I arrived when they discovered that radioactive tritium had been seeping into ground water. I was on the team that worked to solve that problem, and later I was offered a position with the U.S. Department of Energy as an embassy liaison with the Norwegians in Russia. That’s how I ended up in Moscow.”

    “I’m impressed,” he said.
    “You