Randi fell into a chair and examined the man. He looked like he always did—like he had in Cairo. Nondescript at first glance but upon closer inspection hiding something behind those wire-rimmed glasses. Cunning. Enough that it made Randi feel like she wasn’t in control of her own life—an unfamiliar sensation that she despised. Of course, Smith would have reminded her that Klein had never used his considerable power or intellect to do anything but stand behind her. Then again, the last time he’d been heard from, he’d been swimming out to sea with an arrow in his back.

“So why am I here, Mr. Klein?”

He settled back behind his government-surplus desk. “What do you know about Fukushima?”

“The nuclear disaster? Just what I saw on TV like everyone else. Earthquake, waves, explosions, radiation. Not really my area of expertise.”

He pulled out a pipe and went through his normal OCD ritual lighting it while the elaborate ventilation system that Maggie had installed started up.

“The plant had six reactors. One through Three were active, Five and Six were in cold shutdown for maintenance, and Four had been defueled. After the earthquake, One, Two, and Three went into automatic shutdown mode. Emergency generators came on to run the cooling system.”

“Then the wave hit.”

He nodded. “Forty feet high. It came over the seawall and knocked out the diesel generators. When the battery backups ran down, things got hot and the explosions started…”

“Causing the radiation leaks,” she said, completing his thought. “That was years ago, Mr. Klein. What’s it to Covert-One?”

“Some things have come to light about the disaster that don’t completely make sense.”

Randi shrugged. “That’s not terribly surprising. Whenever a screwup that big happens the only people working harder than the disaster relief teams are the corporate hacks and politicians covering their asses. They’d probably have had enough power to cool the thing down if it weren’t for all the paper shredders firing up in Tokyo.”

“A fair assessment, but it goes beyond that,” Klein said. “The highest levels of radiation were measured in Reactor Four.”

Randi pondered that for a moment. “Didn’t you say that had been defueled?”

“I did.”

“I’m no nuclear engineer but defueled sounds safe.”

“It should have been. And setting aside the radiation levels for a moment, why, four days after the tsunami, was there an explosion in that reactor?”

She shrugged again. “Jon’s the scientist. But someone must have an explanation.”

“Oh, there are a number of them. Not one is even remotely plausible, though.”

“And that’s what Jon was working on?”

Klein took a long pull on his pipe. “I managed to make contact with a man who had smuggled out some suspicious samples right after the tsunami. He was passing them on to Jon when…when things went wrong.”

“I assume you misplaced the samples, too?”