LITMIR.BIZ

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went dead quiet.

      “Hi, Kurt,” Luke said. “I like your new command center.”

      Kurt nodded. “Agent Stone.”

      Susan turned to Luke and they shook hands. Luke’s big hand swallowed her tiny one. “Madam President,” he said. “Good to see you again.”

      “Welcome, Luke,” she said. “What do you have for us?”

      He looked at Kurt. “Are you ready for my report?”

      Kurt shrugged. “That’s why we’re here. If it weren’t for you, we’d all be upstairs enjoying the festivities.”

      Luke nodded. It had been a long day, and it was still early. He wanted to finish this up and go out to the country house he had once shared with Becca. Everything was too much right now, and what he most wanted to do was take a nap. Just nap on the couch, and maybe later, in the late afternoon, sit outside with a coffee and watch the sun set over the water. He had a lot to think about, and a lot of planning to do. An image of Gunner appeared in his mind.

      All eyes were on him. He took a deep breath. He repeated what Don had told him. Islamic terrorists were going to steal nuclear weapons from an air base in Belgium.

      A tall heavyset man with blond hair raised a hand. “Agent Stone?”

      “Yes.”

      “Haley Lawrence. Secretary of Defense.”

      Luke had known that. But until this moment, he had forgotten it.

      “Mr. Secretary,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

      The man gave a slight smile, almost a smirk. “Please share with us how you think Don Morris obtained this intelligence. He’s in a federal high-security facility, the highest security we currently have, held in isolation in his cell twenty-three hours a day, and has no direct contact with anyone except the guards.”

      Luke smiled. “I think that’s a question for the guards to answer.”

      A ripple of laughter went around the room.

      “I’ve known Don Morris a long time,” Luke said. “He’s probably one of the most resourceful people alive in the United States at this moment. I have no doubt that he receives intelligence, even in his current location. Is it accurate intelligence? I have no idea, nor does he. He doesn’t have any way to confirm it or discredit it. I guess that’s our job.”

      He gave Kurt a sidelong glance. “Those are all the details I have. Any thoughts?”

      Kurt paused for a moment, then nodded. “Sure. This will be a little bit on the fly, but mostly accurate. Belgium has been much on my mind in recent years, for obvious reasons.” He turned to an aide standing behind him. “Amy, can you bring us up a map of Belgium? Key in on Molenbeek and Kleine Brogel, if you don’t mind.”

      The young woman fiddled with her tablet, while another aide turned on the main display monitor behind Kurt. A few seconds passed. The monitor ran through a few internal tests, then showed a blue desktop. A quiet buzz of conversation started again.

      Kurt watched his aide. She nodded to him, and then he looked at the President.

      “Susan, are you ready?”

      “Ready when you are.”

      A map of Europe appeared on the screen behind him. It quickly zoomed in to focus on Western Europe, and then Belgium.

      “Okay. Behind me, you see a map of Belgium. There are two locations in that country I want to call your attention to. The first is the capital city, Brussels.”

      Behind him, the map zoomed again. Now it showed the dense grid of a city, with a ring highway circling it. The map moved to the upper left-hand corner, and several photographs of cobblestone streets, a government building from the nineteenth century, and a stately and ornate bridge over a canal.

      He turned to his aide. “Bring up Molenbeek, please.”

      The map zoomed again, and more photos of streets appeared. In one, a group of bearded men marched carrying a white banner, fists pumping the air. The top of the banner had Arabic characters written in black. Below that was the apparent English translation:

      No to Democracy!

      “Molenbeek is a suburb of about ninety-five thousand people. It is the most densely populated section of Brussels, and parts of it run as high as eighty percent Muslim, mostly of Turkish and Moroccan descent. It’s a hotbed of extremism. The weapons used in the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack were cached beforehand in Molenbeek. The 2015 Paris terror attacks were planned there, and the perpetrators of that crime are all men who grew up and lived in Molenbeek.”

      Kurt looked around the room. “In short, if there are terror attacks being planned in Europe, and we can safely assume there are, there’s a pretty good chance that the planning is taking place in Molenbeek. Are we clear on this?”

      A ripple of agreement went through the room.

      “Okay, let’s see Kleine Brogel.”

      On the screen, the map zoomed out, scrolled to the right a short distance, then zoomed in again. Luke could make out runways and buildings at a rural airfield not far from a small town.

      “Kleine Brogel Air Base,” Kurt said. “It’s a Belgian military airfield located about sixty miles east of Brussels. The village you see there is the municipality of Kleine Brogel, hence the name of the base. The base is home to the Belgian Tenth Tactical Wing. They fly F-16 Falcons, supersonic jet fighters, which among other capabilities, can deliver B61 nuclear bombs.”

      On the screen, the map disappeared and an image materialized. It was of a missile-shaped bomb, mounted on a wheeled trundle and parked beneath the fuselage of a fighter jet. The bomb was long and sleek, gray with a black tip.

      “Here you see the B61,” Kurt said. “Not quite twelve feet long, about thirty inches in diameter, and weighing in at about seven hundred pounds. It’s a variable yield weapon that can put as many as three hundred forty kilotons on a target – roughly twenty times the magnitude of the Hiroshima explosion. Compare that yield to the megatons of the large ballistic missiles, and you can see that the B61 is a small tactical nuke. It’s designed to be carried by fast airplanes, like the F-16. You’ll note its streamlined shape – that’s so it can withstand the speeds its delivery craft are likely to reach. These are American-made bombs, and we share them with Belgium as part of our NATO agreements.”

      “So the bombs are onsite there?” Susan said.

      Kurt nodded. “Yes. I’d say about thirty of them. I can get you the exact figure, if we need it.”

      Another ripple went through the gathered crowd.

      Kurt raised his hand. “It gets better. Kleine Brogel is a political football in Belgium. Many Belgians hate the fact that the bombs are there, and want them out of the country. In 2009, a group of Belgian peace activists decided to show everyone how unsafe the bombs were. They breached the security of the base.”

      The map reappeared on the screen. Kurt indicated an area along the bottom edge of the base. “To the south of the airfield there are some dairy farms. The activists walked across the farmland, then climbed the fence. They wandered around the base for at least forty-five minutes before anyone noticed they were there. When they were finally intercepted – by a Belgian airman with an unloaded rifle, by the way – they were standing right outside a bunker where some of the bombs were stored. They had already spray-painted slogans on the bunker and put up some of their stickers.”

      Chatter erupted in the room again, louder and more pronounced this time.

      “Okay, okay. It was a serious lapse in security. But before we get carried away, let’s recognize a few things. For one, the bunkers were locked – there was no danger the activists were going to get inside. Also, the bombs are stacked in chambers underground – even if the activists did somehow make it inside, they wouldn’t have been able to operate the hydraulic lifts to bring the bombs to the surface. The activists were on foot, so even if they managed to operate the lifts, they wouldn’t have gotten very

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