Code Word: Paternity, A Presidential Thriller Read Online Free Page B

He
logged off and headed for the bathroom, popping another antacid tablet.
    Rick
Martin , he thought, smart, likeable, articulate, but I doubt he
knows who he is, really. Like another president who faced an existential crisis
right away, Jack Kennedy, he’s never been tested big time. Kennedy at least had
the PT-109 experience. Rick Martin’s never done anything tougher than a
presidential campaign, not that those are easy, but they’re about the
candidate, how much risk he’ll take, what he can endure and put his family
through, and what he’s willing to do to win. Being president of the United States
is about three hundred million people and the nation whose actions or inactions
set the boundaries of what’s possible in a lot of the world.
    And
Paternity! What’s he gonna do with the evidence, compelling but not undeniable,
not a smoking gun? He
thought about their first discussion, on Martin’s third day in office.

 
    At his request, he and the president had
had their first meeting not in the Oval Office, but in the White House SCIF,
the Special Compartmented Intelligence Facility. Called “the skif,” it was
literally a room within a room, as secure as unlimited funds and technology
could make it. The Oval Office was equally secure, but the DNI didn’t control
it, or the records of access to it, or the microphones that recorded
conversations within it. The skif, however, was under his control. Also, he
knew the value of theater when briefing a new president.
    “Mr. President, I asked for this meeting
with you alone, and here, to tell you about the most closely held intelligence
asset this country possesses. The code word for it, which is itself top secret,
is Paternity.”
    The president made a “go on” gesture with
one hand and sat expressionless, signaling, Hendricks supposed, that this president’s trust was not a given.
Of course, that was always so with
intelligence. Hendricks sighed inside and continued.
    “Mr. President, Paternity refers to the
scientific capability we have to determine the origin, the paternity one might
say, of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, called HEU. By origin, I mean at
least the country of its manufacture and in many cases the specific facility
where the material was produced. We’re able to do this by analysis of the HEU
or the plutonium itself and by analysis of fallout particles in the atmosphere
and the ground if it has exploded. This scientific capability has a number of
potentially important applications, as I’m sure you will appreciate.”
    After pretending a bit too obviously to
reflect, Martin said, “And one of those applications would be, if a nuclear
weapon was detonated anonymously in this country, we could figure out who had
made it.”
    Ignoring Martin’s sarcasm but noting his
vanity, Hendricks replied, “Indeed we could, Mr. President! And also if, as is
to be hoped, we intercepted a bomb before it was detonated, for example by detecting it in a radiation portal scanner.”
    “Tell me something about it. How did we
get this capability, how certain are you of the accuracy . . . and why keep it
secret? It looks like a deterrent to me.”
    “It’s a long story, Mr. President, which
I will condense severely at this telling. But, as to the last of your
questions, why is it that we don’t we announce Paternity as a deterrent
measure? Because it would reveal extremely sensitive intelligence sources and
methods and because, if attention is directed to it, certain states will
attempt, possibly successfully, to develop countermeasures. Better to keep this
rabbit in our hat until we need it. That, sir, has been the conclusion of every
president since Jimmy Carter began the program, which is called the Paternity
Project.”
    “Mmmph! Well, this president may change that”
    When Hendricks didn’t react, Martin said,
“Go on.”
      “When the Pakistanis tested six nukes in 1998,
samples of the gasses that escaped from underground showed that most