He didn’t answer immediately, but her phrasing was clearly not lost on him. “The samples are gone.”

“I guess I don’t understand what we’re trying to get at here. Are you saying that the Japanese nuclear contractors might have cut corners and built an unsafe reactor? Or are you—”

“The man I was in contact with suspected some kind of sabotage,” Klein interjected. “And he was scared. He wouldn’t talk about it on the phone or even via encrypted e-mail. He suddenly decided he wanted to be rid of that sample and told me if I didn’t get someone over there in twenty-four hours, he was going to destroy it and disappear.”

“So that’s what got Jon sent to a remote fishing village in Japan.”

“There was no time to bring someone up to speed. Jon was my top operative so I sent him.”

Touché, Randi thought, keeping her face impassive. While she was closer to Smith than she was to anyone else in the world, she was also competitive. That was Klein’s subtle way of telling her that he thought Smith was better.

“Okay, sabotage,” she said. “Nuclear reactors are pretty well secured and pretty sturdy. Attacking them isn’t easy to do. Who? An antinuke group?”

“Maybe, but I’m more concerned about the possibility of foreign actors.”

“China.”

Klein took another pull on his pipe. “You know better than I do how the Chinese feel about Japan, and the situation in the East China Sea is headed nowhere good. The president is putting pressure on the Japanese prime minister to calm things down but, frankly, it’s easier said than done.”

“That’s an understatement,” Randi said. “Sanetomi is the Zen master of politicians, but the position he’s in is impossible. If he goes far enough to appease the Chinese, his own people are going to see him as selling them down the river. And if he stands his ground firmly enough to keep his job, the Chinese are going to start polishing up their ICBMs. The Buddha himself would fall off the tightrope he’s stuck on.”

“And then there’s General Takahashi,” Klein said. “While he’s being typically clever about it, he seems to be going out of his way to provoke China.”

“Okay, but why a nuclear plant? And why years ago before things got really hot between them? Are they concerned that the Japanese might be using Fukushima to create a nuclear arsenal?”

“We have assurances from Sanetomi that they’re not, and the intelligence community seems satisfied by that.”

“So maybe the Chinese were just trying to create an incident? Make the Japanese lose face and give them something internal to focus on. Or do you think they actually could have been trying to soften them up for an attack?”