Chapter 30
March—seven months earlier
Institut Alpinuum für Sport, Physiotherapie, und Zellleistung
St. Moritz, Switzerland
The Alpine Institute for Sports, Physical Therapy, and Cellular Performance occupied a modern three-story building set high on the steep hillside that was home to the village of St. Moritz, in the eastern Swiss canton of Grisons.
From its windows, clients had a breathtaking view over the village and the entire Engadin Valley.
They saw the famous wainscoted tower of Badrutt’s Palace Hotel and next door, Confiserie Hanselmann; the sweeping lake on the valley floor; and the polo fields bordering it.
But most of all they saw the mountains. The Piz Nair and the Piz Corvatsch and the Corviglia, towering sentinels gathered all around, slopes blanketed by newly fallen snow.
It was a bluebird day, in the parlance of the ski bums and tourists who flocked to St. Moritz during the winter.
Not a cloud in the sky, the sun impossibly bright, the sky vividly blue.
But Ava Attal, her T-shirt drenched with sweat, lungs fighting for breath, couldn’t give a fig for the view.
She was in pain. And she wanted it to stop.
“One more rep,” commanded her trainer. “You’re almost there.”
“You’ve been saying that for an hour,” said Ava, as she raised the fifteen-pound dumbbells to shoulder height.
“Hold it,” said the trainer. “Three-two-one. There!”
Ava lowered the weights to her side. “Another?”
The trainer shook her head. “You’re done,” she said, taking the weights. “You killed it.”
“I think you killed me.” Ava sat on a bench and toweled the sweat from her eyes.
Week twelve completed. Not bad, young lady.
She raised her right arm. For the first time since her surgery, there was no strain, no discomfort.
She shouted with joy. Everyone in the gym looked her way.
She waved to them unabashedly. “I’m getting better! ”
A few clapped. Others rolled their eyes. Ava didn’t mind. Five months earlier she’d been given up for dead. Anything was an improvement.
The trainer returned and told her Dr. Lutz wanted to see her in his office. “Right away, Frau Attal.”
Ava threw the towel around her neck and took the elevator to the first floor. The door to Dr. Gerhard Lutz’s office stood open. A tall, rangy man with shaggy gray hair and furious black eyebrows ushered her inside.
“We need to talk,” said Lutz.
“Is something wrong?” asked Ava. “Has there been a setback?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” said Lutz. “You’re doing just fine. Your shoulder is healing faster than expected. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Ava regarded her doctor. He was a serious man, seventy years old, fit as an athlete in his prime.
He wore a white lab coat over a plaid button-down shirt, as well as jeans and climbing boots.
Gerhard Lutz was a renowned orthopedic surgeon and pioneer in the use of stem cells to aid recovery.
Five months earlier he had operated on Ava’s shoulder and upper arm, reattaching the pectoralis muscle to the humerus.
She had not injured herself playing a sport or taking a nasty fall on the ski slopes.
Her injuries were inflicted by a bullet, a 5.
56 mm full-metal-jacket round fired from a Heckler quite the opposite.
He was speaking quietly but having great difficulty doing so. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Ava, not wanting to break his momentum.
“He was imploring someone to visit him,” Lutz went on. “He said he must come to examine some kind of device. I didn’t quite hear what, but he said he needed this man, I believe his name was Abbasi, Dr. Abbasi, to help construct something he called a viable transmitter.”
“A transmitter?” Ava repeated. She was officially interested.
Lutz nodded, drawing his bushy eyebrows together.
“Tariq asked him repeatedly if he needed to be worried about being in proximity to this device. He said the word ‘radiation’ three times, or maybe it was ‘radioactive.’ I’m not sure now.
Oh, yes, and he said, ‘It doesn’t matter where I got it. I have it.’”
“And whatever ‘it’ is,” said Ava, “requires a viable transmitter and may or may not be radioactive.”
Again Lutz nodded. “You see, I convinced myself he was talking about a bomb,” he added, almost shyly. “He never said the word, but he sounded deadly serious. He even had a name for it.”
“A name?” said Ava.
“For the device, whatever it was that required this transmitter. It will come to me.”
“When was this?” asked Ava.
“Two weeks ago,” said Lutz. “Just after your last visit.”
“Two weeks?” It required all Ava’s control to remain calm, outwardly unperturbed. And you waited this long to tell me?
“I know it’s all very vague,” said Lutz. “But again, it was how he was talking. He was worked up; as I said, agitated. It was so unlike him. He’s a smooth customer. Very charming. In control of himself.”
Ava laughed softly to lessen the tension. “I’m sure there’s a harmless explanation. Lots of products contain radioactive ingredients. Fluorescent lights, for example. Or watch dials . . . the tritium on the hour markers. Or medical imaging equipment.”
“Possibly,” said Lutz, half-heartedly. “He did make a joke about it.”
“What was that?” asked Ava.
“Something about keeping it away from his testicles—‘his nuts,’ he said—because he didn’t want to go sterile before he had children.”
Ava was looking at her phone. By now, she’d brought Tariq al-Sabah up on social media. “A bomb? I doubt it. He appears to be the opposite of a jihadi . . . unless they’ve begun tooling around Manhattan in exotic sports cars. Did bin Laden ever try the Cresta Run?”
“You’re discounting what I told you,” retorted Lutz. “Don’t lessen it.”
“I didn’t mean to,” said Ava.
“Please believe me, Frau Attal. There was nothing in the least whimsical about his tone. He was deadly serious.”
“I believe you,” said Ava.
“Now I remember,” said Lutz. “The device’s name. What he called it.”
“Go on,” said Ava.
“You see, I didn’t get it at first. I thought he was referencing the Bible, some type of scripture maybe. I mean, everyone knows it.”
“Tell me,” said Ava.
“Samson.”
For a moment, Ava felt nothing. She looked out the window, remarking on the scenic view. From Lutz’s office, she could see down the hillside to the St. Moritzersee, its surface dotted by whitecaps. Despite the cold, a few windsurfers were taking advantage of the strong winds.
Samson.
A coincidence, she argued. It couldn’t be her Samson.
Not a chance. How could Tariq al-Sabah know what they’d called it?
Besides, it had been so long. Everyone had given up the device for lost. After a time, it had been decided that its theft was hardly the disaster it had at first seemed.
The device was inoperable without a transmitter.
Even then, and most crucially, one needed a code to detonate the weapon.
All codes were held and controlled with religious zeal.
One man held the key. The Israeli minister of defense.
But Ava didn’t believe in coincidences. Not in her line of work.
If Tariq bin Nayan bin Tariq al-Sabah was speaking to an Iranian named Abbasi about building a transmitter for a radioactive device he called “Samson,” she had no business but to believe it was her Samson.
A one-kiloton tactical nuclear weapon that she’d lost on a freezing night on the Golan Heights over a decade ago.
After all, she mused, there was nothing like a little uranium-235 to fry a man’s nuts and guarantee he would never have children.
All this passed through Ava’s mind in a heartbeat. Well, maybe two. She returned her attention to Lutz. “Are you seeing him again soon?” she asked.
“Next week,” said Lutz. “Stem cell infusion. Thursday at eleven.”
“It might be smart for me to come back then,” said Ava. “A follow-up.”
“Oh no, Frau Attal,” said Lutz. “That’s not necessary. It can wait a month.”
“Next week,” said Ava, grimacing, touching her shoulder. “I have a feeling something isn’t knitting properly. Why don’t we schedule an infusion for me? Let’s say Thursday at eleven.”
Lutz needed a moment. “Oh, yes, an infusion. A little soon, but we can make an exception. Thursday. Eleven o’clock. That works.”
He escorted her to the door.
“What will you do?” he asked, his voice a whisper. “You and the people you work for?”
Ava placed her good hand on his shoulder. She stared at him a moment, then shook her head, ever so slightly. It meant: “Don’t ask. Never ask.”