Chapter 12

Obaninov and his wife were sleeping in their bedroom when our team showed up. As far as we knew, Obaninov's wife had nothing to do with the theft, so Genie transported her to his holding place while we questioned her husband. When we finished, she would be returned to the bed and would know nothing that might have happened.

When Obaninov woke up, he was already tied, spread eagle, to his bed and he was naked from the waist down. The ball squeezing had turned out to be such a convenient persuader that we did not bother with anything else. We would have to find something equally persuasive for women.

Obaninov woke up and was immediately frightened, but not for the reason we expected. "What are you doing to me? I did everything you wanted me to do and you now have the plutonium. I did not say anything to anyone, and I left town like you asked. What more can I do for you?"

I said, in perfect gutter Russian, "We are not the people you bargained with. They are our enemies, and we want to know everything you know about them. Answer our questions or you will face a very painful alternative."

"I can't tell you anything or they will kill my wife and me."

"If you tell us what we want to know, and tell us now, we will protect you. If you don't cooperate, you will feel monstrous pain. Now, tell us who hired you."

"Please don't hurt me. I'll cooperate. I don't know any names, but it was people from one of the Moscow gangs."

"How did you get involved in this plutonium theft?"

"I was offered a choice. I could either unlock the doors and stand back out of the way, for which I would receive €50,000, or my wife and I could be tortured and killed. You see, I had no choice?"

"Did you know what the plutonium would be used for?"

"I was told that it would be used for a bomb on Israel. They were going to kill some filthy Jews, so I was in favor of that."

I was so disgusted with the man and his answers that I was kind of sick to my stomach. Babs could see that I was about to lose it, so she took my arm and led me away before I did something that I would regret. Komodo took over the questioning, no torture involved, and got a little bit of useful information from the man. Genie brought the wife back and released the man. We all transported back to the Ranch for a meeting.

At the meeting, Genie summarized what we had learned. The theft was done by a Moscow gang, but they probably had no interest in making a bomb. It was more likely that they had just been hired to perform the theft. The guard did have a telephone number he was supposed to call if he was approached by the police, so that might provide some useful information. Genie was currently working on that. Nothing else of value was yet available.

Just as the meeting was breaking up, Genie reported that he had tracked down something useful by working on that telephone number. He had a name and an address for a member of the Russian gang who was supposed to monitor Obaninov. The name probably meant nothing since it was Ivan Ivanovich, but the address was real. In fact, it was an office in a respectable office building in Moscow. Genie was checking that out as we spoke.

Ten minutes later, Genie reported that the office was used by a mid-level boss in a Moscow mob, so he was currently looking for home addresses. Thirty minutes later, Genie reported that all of the addresses he had been able to dig up were for vacant lots or cemeteries, so we were going to have to take a more direct approach.

Since it was still night time in Moscow, Genie suggested that we jump to the office and search it as thoroughly as we could before anybody showed up for work. That sounded good to us, so we jumped to the Moscow office to see what we could find.

We began searching through the paper records while Genie went to work on the computers. A lot of the paper records were written in Cyrillic script, so it was slow going through them. Genie had given us all a full grasp of Russian, even the written script, and we could read it, but the lack of familiarity still made it a chore to plow through, especially considering that a lot of the writing was scrawled in atrocious handwriting.

We did not find anything useful for our case, but there was a hell of a lot of stuff there that the gang would have not wanted to show up in public. We filed that information for future reference.

Genie, on the other hand, had found a detailed record of telephone calls made over the last six months, and several that were made to the same number in Iran. Further checking told Genie that the number was for the local office of Hamas in Tehran. That must be the link we were looking for!

Here we go again! This time we had to learn Farsi. We already knew Arabic, but this was our first encounter with the language of Iran. Genie jumped our team to the office in Tehran, and we immediately ran into trouble. We had hardly shown up when three assault rifles opened up on us. The bullets couldn't hurt us, but they were annoying, and we certainly couldn't perform a quiet search while those guns were going off. There was a chance that they would attract unwanted attention.

Genie locked the guns and simply dumped the three guards somewhere out in the desert. None of us were very concerned with the fate of three Hamas thugs. We started going through the paper files that we found, but there was no computer for Genie to search. I don't know—maybe computers are sinful? We didn't find anything useful in the written records, so Genie jumped us home.

We simply could not abandon the trail this easily, so we tried a different tack. As a person showed up for work at the Hamas office, Genie grabbed him and put him in a small cell until he could be questioned. We decided on a hard program of psychological warfare. Komodo would be morphed into the guise of a terrible demon for his questioning cycle. If needed, I would take part dressed in a normal business suit and looking like a typical Iranian lawyer. We would try the good cop-bad cop routine on the prisoner to see what kind of result we could get. If that failed, Komodo could always start his ball squeezing gig.

We let the prisoners stew for a while in solitary confinement. The little cell was brightly lit, and loud rock music was blasted at the prisoners. The sound level was just low enough to keep from causing a permanent loss in hearing, but it would be damned uncomfortable for as long as it lasted.

As expected, the first three men we questioned did not have much useful to say. They were the three guards who showed up to replace the three that we had dumped in the desert. They were quickly questioned and returned to their cells, but the next guy we questioned turned out to have something useful to try to hide.

We found out that intimidation and thespianism were not going to work on this guy, he was too much of a fanatic to be swayed by either one. However, he did have tender balls, so that was a productive route. He knew the basics of the scheme. They had hired six unemployed Russian scientists and engineers with money from Saudi Arabia. These Russians had experience in building minimum size artillery warheads, so they could design the kind of explosive the terrorists wanted. The terrorists planned to position four bombs along the length of Israel and explode them simultaneously on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.

They did not need fancy timing devices to initiate the explosions: four terrorists were going to play the part of the timing device and blow themselves up when they set off the bombs. This way, all they needed was synchronized wrist watches. The bomb trucks would be disguised as fuel trucks from Jordan, so they would have no trouble going anywhere they wished in Israel, provided they had the proper papers. The papers were easy to forge, so no problems were expected at that end of the operation.

The bombs would be built in Iran and the cobalt sheaths applied before the trucks left for Jordan by a devious round-about route. What this man did not know was where the bombs were being assembled and how far along the construction had progressed.

The next man was not quite as well informed as his predecessor, so they got nothing new from him. The third man we talked to did have the location of the assembly point. The bombs were being built in a large machine shop in the city of Tabriz. Unfortunately, the man was able to commit suicide before the address of the machine shop could be obtained.

This man was the last one that they had picked up, so there were no new prospects for questioning. We decided that there was no further need to question our prisoners, so Genie dumped them into the desert along with the first three.