Pa'an

It was hard being one of the very few in Congress that did not accept patronage. Saxton Hornsby travelled business class on overseas flights and first class only when he earned the frequent flier miles. Packing his lanky frame into an airline seat that seemed to shrink every year usually left him cramped and cranky. On this flight to London he was traveling business class, a bit less comfortable, but preoccupied with his forthcoming top secret briefing. It wasn’t clear to him who could be trusted in this high-stakes area of nuclear weapons. After an interminable wait for his two-suiter at the luggage carousel, he found his way to the public transport mall. A man in livery carried a sign with only a musical instrument on it. It was a saxophone. That was for him, Sax, without advertising his full name. The man took his bag and rolled it quickly toward a waiting limo. Inside was a man Sax had never met before. The man was Indian and wore a blazer over a checked shirt, no tie. Of course, no real intelligence officer was going to look as obvious as James Bond.

“Senator Saxton Hornsby, I apologize for this rather rude introduction. What would you like to see today?”

“Blue tulips in Mayfair would be nice.” That was the recognition phrase, Sax hoped.

“I hear there’s a whale swims up the Thames.” The man broke a big grin. “Always makes me feel like some idiot in a comedy spy movie when I have to do that. A pleasure to meet you. I’m Grant Gupta from MI6. We’ll be briefing at number 10 Downing Street. Hope you had a decent flight?”

“I hardly noticed it after the message I got to get over here. I certainly hope this is worth the trip and all the secrecy. You guys have to know I don’t have much clout in Congress.”

“Please, Senator, no modesty here. You will do what you can do and we will see to it that you are well informed. No more than that is possible.”

They both rested on the route to the Prime Minister’s residence.

Gupta presented his credentials and CoDel Hornsby’s diplomatic letters and they were quickly cleared to the inner sanctum. “The PM will not be attending. He keeps a public calendar. I’m sure you understand.”

“Sure. I’m ready if you are.”

An RAF officer laid a portfolio on the table in front of each of them. The portfolios had red “classified” ribbons on them that had to be cut to see the contents. Gupta obviously was familiar with them. “Then without wasting any time, if you will allow: the first page is a list of all companies world-wide that are cleared and contracted to dispose of weapons grade materials under the Nuclear Disarmament accords. You may not know most of them. They are not the usual defense contractors.”

Sax read names like “Dexter Mining Pty; JSC Rossnisny Vladivostok; Halsston, Burton Logistics, Inc.; and others both recognizable and obscure in almost every nuclear nation. These were the companies that were supposed to collect, encapsulate, bury and monitor the raw material of dismantled atomic bombs.

“You’re right. It’s just a list of names to me.”

“Next page is a list of the significant shareholders or directors of these contractors.”

Sax turned the page. Three companies owned or had significant, but not controlling, shares in each of the disposal contractors. There were two of the names in each contractor, in no obvious pattern. No one of the three had any controlling interest.

“You see the pattern?” Gupta pointed out. “It turns out that two of these three names control every one of these contractors. It didn’t stand out at first because no one entity had control. It takes two of them, and the pattern was not visible in the ordinary bidding process.”

“Clever bastards” said Sax.

“Very clever bastards. It took a lot of digging to find out just who these people were, and we still don’t have a rock-solid indictment. But look here, those are the dates when these three entities gained control.”

The dates were all within a three month period BEFORE the Nuclear Disarmament Treaties were made public.

The following pages showed what had been discovered about just how control of the contractors was established.

“We were blocked at every level when we tried to get this information, even from the usual registration agencies of public corporations in the USA and United Kingdom. Documents were missing, withheld, redacted to uselessness, or simply denied. If it were not for the failure of a Greek Cypriot bank we would never have been able to gather this data. The bank in Cyprus turned out to have the keys to the kingdom. Since then we have been tracking transactions all over the world from these people. Not one of them is a name in the news. They keep pretty well off the headlines.”

The following pages documented, case by case, tales of opportunistic takeovers apparently aided by inside information, convenient cases of loans being called at the worst possible time and rescued by new Board members, and unfortunate and untimely deaths of principals and key people. Each one was innocent enough on its face, but laid out side by side it spelled only one possible conclusion.

“Conspiracy,” breathed Sax.

“Yes. Massive conspiracy on the highest financial and political levels. But to what purpose? And who are they? This is as far as we got.”

“Can’t bring them in for questioning? Tap their communications? Subpoena their records?”

“What is it that you say in the US, “politics is the art of the possible?” We have been blocked at every official level. All we know is that some powerful group has manipulated events to get control over much of the world’s raw material for nukes.” Gupta frowned. “We don’t know what they plan to do with it. We don’t know IF they have plans. We don’t know if they are capable of using it. All we know is that the scenarios are all nasty.”

The RAF officer collected the portfolios and fed them to a heavy box-like machine. The meeting was over.