Shaman Winter by Rudolfo Anaya

discussed outside of this office. Not to the papers, not to the local police, not to a wife or husband, not to anybody.”
    â€œOkay,” Sonny said, and sat back to listen.
    â€œFine. I’ll get to the point,” Eric continued. “We’ve just intercepted an illegal shipment of plutonium.” He paused, as if waiting for Doyle to add something. “Actually, it’s a plutonium pit.”
    â€œDo you mean the core of a nuclear bomb?” Sonny asked for clarification.
    â€œAffirmative,” Eric replied.
    Holy tortillas, Sonny thought. Intercepted the core of a nuclear bomb? He knew a black market in plutonium existed. Now that the world was dismantling its nuclear arsenals, the stuff was being bought and sold. He remembered a small amount of plutonium being intercepted at Kennedy Airport a few years ago.
    â€œWe believe it came from Ukraine,” Eric continued. “Ten kilograms. Enough to make a crude nuclear bomb, if someone were so inclined.”
    â€œTaken right from a nuclear bomb?” Sonny asked, just to make sure he was visualizing the right thing.
    â€œA nuclear missile.”
    â€œAh,” Sonny whispered. In its machined, metallic form, a plutonium pit could be smuggled across borders in a briefcase. That’s what the CIA and other intelligence agencies had been afraid of all along—terrorist groups getting hold of a pit from a dismantled nuke.
    â€œIs it ready to be used?”
    Eric cleared his throat. “Yes. It was obviously taken when a nuclear missile was being dismantled. It came into New York City, went through Denver, and was on its way here when it was intercepted.”
    Damn, Sonny thought, a plutonium pit. A real live core bouncing around the country.
    â€œHow’d you find it?” Sonny asked.
    â€œBy accident,” Paiz explained. “A state cop stopped a car near Raton. Two men. They shot the cop, but not before he got off a shot. Killed one of the smugglers, the other fled.”
    Yes, the story had been on the radio yesterday. A state cop shot near Raton, but the story said nothing about the plutonium, and being more concerned with his own health, Sonny really hadn’t paid attention to it. He figured it was one more dope smuggler stopped by a state cop.
    â€œBesides the people in this room,” Eric continued, “only two of my people know we recovered the core. The two I sent to the crime scene to recover it. We haven’t even told the state police what we’re faced with.”
    â€œSo why tell us?” Sonny asked.
    Doyle stood and spoke for the first time. “The description of the suspect that got away fits the description of a friend of yours.”
    For being director of the FBI, Doyle was no superhero, only a seventy-year-old man with a stoop and the weight of the world on his back. He was a political appointee hired to try to clean up the agency. The president didn’t want the mole scandal that wrecked the CIA a few years back to be duplicated in the FBI.
    He stood in front of Sonny, his eyes boring into him. He was a bent old man, but his look was intimidating.
    â€œA friend of mine,” Sonny said. “Who?” he asked, but he already knew.
    â€œThe guy who tried to blow the WIPP truck,” Doyle said, placing his hands behind his back and walking to the big plate-glass window that faced east. From there he could see as far as the Río Grande valley and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rising above Santa Fé. Threatening storm clouds hung over the Santa Fé peaks.
    â€œThe man who uses the Raven alias,” Eric said.
    Sonny looked at Paiz, Paiz nodded.
    Raven smuggling plutonium? To make a bomb? Dr. Stammer’s warning rang in Sonny’s memory: Raven’s going to Russia to buy a nuke. And I believe him.
    â€œWe’ve been after him since he tried to blow the WIPP truck,” Paiz said. “You almost caught him during the Balloon Fiesta when he tried