by Karla Forbes
“You don’t really want to hear the science,” Wilson told him.
“Try me.”
Wilson put the knife to one side. “As I said, plutonium is primarily a radiation hazard, even though it emits alpha particles which don’t have the energy to penetrate human skin. The danger is through inhalation in concentrated amounts, such as you would find after a nuclear explosion, or through smaller doses over an extended period which is the situation that people who work with plutonium are keen to avoid.”
“You’re right,” Fox said, “drop the science. Are we in danger or not?”
“OK,” Wilson said, with uncharacteristic patience. “What if I tell you exactly what’s going to happen here and then you can make up your own mind?”
Fox’s sullen silence gave him tacit permission to continue. “Right, inside this suitcase is a nickel-plated sphere of plutonium, about the size of an orange and weighing five kilos. It’s packed with explosives, but after all this time, they’re no longer dangerous. OK so far?”
Fox said nothing.
“Good,” Wilson continued. “Your job was to recover the bomb from the seabed. Mine is to extract the plutonium, because although the bomb itself is trashed, the plutonium is still active and dangerous.”
Fox began to interrupt, but Wilson held up his hand for silence.
“No,” he said, “hear me out. I’m going to extract the plutonium by dissolving the core in H3NSO3, otherwise known as sulfamic acid, at a constant temperature of 60 degrees centigrade. I’ll be adding nitric acid to aid the process, then drying out the resulting sludge until I’m left with a powder. This is the plutonium that will scare the shit out of the British government and enable us to retire in luxury on a warm tropical island somewhere in the southern hemisphere.”
Fox leaned forward and stared Wilson in the eyes. “I’ll only ask you one more time. Is that fucking plutonium dangerous or not?”
Wilson indicated a small glass cabinet on the table. It was a strange yellow colour, measured 90 x 60 centimetres, and had two holes cut into the side where heavy gloves stuck inwards like cow udders in the latter stages of rigor mortis.
“I’ll work within the confines of the cabinet,” he explained. “The lead glass will protect everyone in this room, but as an extra precaution I’ll be wearing an industrial respirator.”
Fox looked from the suitcase to the glass cabinet. “I’m not convinced; it’s just glass.”
“No, it’s lead glass. Plutonium is safe as long as it’s handled correctly.”
Fox shook his head as though trying to dispel his evident misgivings. “If you know that, then presumably the British government will know that. So why the hell should they pay us sixty million not to distribute something that isn’t dangerous?”
Wilson turned to Hubner with exasperation. “Can you get him out of here? I really don’t need this.”
Hubner stubbed out his cigarette, having obviously decided that it was time to intervene.
“What Dave is trying to tell you,” he said, taking Fox aside, “is that the plutonium is safe unless it’s ingested, inhaled or gets into the bloodstream through an open wound. As we’re not planning on doing any of those things, then for us there won’t be a problem. The government, on the other hand, will do almost anything to avoid it being spread around the atmosphere, because the cost of clearing up the mess and dealing with the panic and confusion could run into billions.”
“He only had to say that,” Fox muttered sullenly. He wandered off into the kitchen without a backward glance.
Wilson watched him go, his mouth hanging open. “Is he really that ignorant? Or is he just trying to wind me up?”
Hubner sighed. “He might not have your knowledge of chemistry, but he’s a good diver. Without him we wouldn’t have any plutonium to work with. You two should make more effort to get on with each other.”
“He’s a liability,” Wilson growled. “Look at that fiasco with the boat. All he had to do was smile nicely, keep his mouth shut and accept the offer of the tow. Instead he acted like a surly gorilla and immediately raised suspicion.”
“OK, so he’s lacking in the social graces, but what does that matter? We dealt with the situation, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, but we lost our boat in the process. We haven’t got enough money to buy another one, and having a boat is still an important part of our plan.”
“You fret too much,” Hubner told him. “By the time we need a boat again, being cautious will no longer be necessary. We’ll steal one.”
Wilson was unwilling to be placated. “We shouldn’t have been put in the position where we had to kill that bloke.”
“Do you have a problem with that?” Hubner demanded. “We’ll be killing a lot more than that if the government doesn’t pay up. You’re not going soft on me, are you?”
Wilson shook his head. “No, but I don’t like killing unnecessarily. It’s clumsy and unprofessional. If we leave a trail of dead bodies in our wake, we’ll have the police after us. We don’t need that.”
“It won’t happen,” Hubner assured him. “Even if the second man survived, which is unlikely, the police aren’t going to believe him. We’ve covered our tracks too well. Don’t worry about it.”
Wilson wasn’t yet ready to be mollified. “So you say,” he muttered, turning back to the suitcase. “But you saw yourself, he sussed out straight away that there was something wrong.”
“What if he did? He can’t do anything about it now.”
Wilson resumed sawing away at the rotting leather. “Are you sure about that? He got away from us easily enough. I get the feeling that if he’s not dead, he could be trouble.”
Hubner slipped another cigarette from the packet and lit it, screwing up his eyes against the tendril of smoke. “Dealing with trouble is my department. All you have to do is concentrate on recovering that plutonium. Can you do it or not?”
“Of course I can.”
“I’m pleased to hear it,” Hubner said, shaking out the match. “Then I suggest you get on with it and leave everything else to me. If my father was good for nothing else, he taught me how to watch my back.”
There was something in his tone that caused Wilson to pause in his work and regard him with curiosity. Hubner’s eyes were devoid of expression, but his mouth, as he drew nicotine into his lungs, was determined. Wilson decided that Hubner was more than capable of watching his back, and if anyone tried getting in the way, it would be their misfortune. He realised with a start that he had seen that look elsewhere. He had seen it in the eyes of the man on the boat; the one who had escaped overboard and could still be alive.
Wilson suppressed a shiver of apprehension, and angrily told himself to get a grip. What threat could one man possibly represent? And yet? It would have been better all round if they had killed him outright, or at least sighted a body. Wilson had no love for loose ends, and this could be a complication that they had reckoned without. One that could yet come back to haunt them.
Chapter Four
Nick stretched and yawned and was leaning back in the chair considering his few remaining options when Annelies stuck her head around the door.
“Still no luck?” she asked, her voice sympathetic.
He swivelled away from the computer and threw himself onto the sofa. “Not so far,” he said, yawning again. “I’ve trawled through every site there is and come up with nothing – and believe me, there are a hell of a lot of boats for sale out there. It’s the time of the year. People often sell up rather than pay berthing fees all winter and then they upgrade to a better, newer model in the spring.”
“Couldn’t you have just searched under ‘Searay 270 Sundancer’ and saved yourself a whole lot of time?”
“I tried that,” Nick said glumly. “Google came up with over eight thousand hits. I refined the search to ‘Searay 270 Sundancer for sale in the UK’ but it still came up with too many.”
“So what did you do?”
He arched his neck,
massaging out the cricks. “First of all, I ignored any adverts that had been put on by agents.”
“Why?”
“I’ll come to that in a minute. I only looked at adverts that had been placed by private sellers and were comparatively recent. After a while, I got quite clever at picking them out and skipping over the rest.”
“But you still didn’t find any that fitted the bill?”
“No. Those that had photographs were all too smart. The boat I’m looking for is a pile of junk. If it didn’t have a photograph, I went by the price. There weren’t that many available under twenty thousand, so that reduced the options even more. After that, I went by the area. I’m guessing that if our murderers bought the boat to go diving in the South East, they wouldn’t have bought it in the North West. In the end I was left with only a handful of options, and when I checked them out, they were all still for sale.”
Annelies’s face brightened. “You said that one of them introduced himself as…what was it? …John Harris. Can we track him down somehow?”
Nick shook his head. “I’m sure it’s not his real name. He sounded as though he’d made it up on the spur of the moment. So there’s no point in even trying.”
“So what now?” she asked, subdued. “You’re not giving up are you?”
“Hell no!” Nick said emphatically, “It’s a bad plan that cannot be altered.”
Annelies looked at him curiously. “Was that a quote?”
“Maybe not the ‘hell no’,” Nick admitted, “but the rest was Publilius Syrus, who also said, ‘Necessity knows no law except to conquer’.”
Annelies spontaneously reached over and gave him a hug. “That’s more like the old Nick. Sometimes down, but never out.”
He disentangled himself with a laugh. “Enough of that. I’ve still got work to do.”
“We’ve got work to do,” she reminded him. “How can I help?”
He raised a questioning eyebrow. “Are you sure? What about your deadline?”
“Finished and already emailed to the client,” she informed him with a grin. “From now on everything else can wait. I’m all yours.”
“In that case,” he said, throwing her a look of gratitude, “we need a brainstorming session: a hundred and one ways to sell a boat.”
She considered. “Well, there’s Ebay, of course, and agents specialising in boat sales, yachting magazines, and the classified section in the free local paper. An advert on the sale boards in the local supermarket. A card in a newsagent’s window.” She looked at him with despair. “It’s hopeless, Nick. We’ll never find it like this. There are just too many possibilities.”
“That’s what I thought at first,” Nick admitted. “But if we examine the facts, we can then rule out the less likely scenarios and make it a lot easier for ourselves.”
“We can?” She sounded dubious.
“Think about it. Whoever sold this boat probably isn’t computer-savvy; otherwise, in one form or another it would have been advertised on the net. So that effectively rules out Ebay.”
Annelies nodded in agreement.
“But,” Nick continued, “I find it hard to believe that if our three murderers had set out to buy a boat for a specific dive, they would have stumbled upon one by chance in a newsagent’s window.”
“Which leaves agents, yachting magazines, and the classified section in the local papers,” Annelies said.
“Precisely,” Nick agreed. “But, as I said, we can probably rule out agents.”
Annelies pursed her lips into a pout. “You’re getting too clever for me, Mr Holmes. Why can we rule out agents?”
“Because, my dear Watson, whatever they were diving for was so important to them that they were willing to kill to protect it. In which case, they are going to be equally paranoid about covering their tracks. My guess is that they wouldn’t have gone through an agent, because they would have been required to leave their contact details which can be traced.”
Annelies nodded thoughtfully. “Yachting magazines and local papers it is, then.”
Now that she had been persuaded, Nick felt less sure. “I might be completely wrong,” he ventured.
“I doubt it,” she said. “You have a habit of tackling a problem like a computer. Your idea of being completely wrong is other people’s idea of being ninety-five percent right. And, let’s face it, we haven’t come up with any better ideas.”
He glanced at his watch. “Are there any shops open around here at this time of night? I’d like to buy some newspapers and yachting magazines and press on.”
She looked at him in amazement. “Don’t you ever get tired, Nick? How about packing it in for the day and starting again in the morning?”
His expression hardened. “I can’t do that. The longer I wait, the colder their trail becomes.”
“Yes, I can see that,” she admitted. “You stay here and I’ll go. There’s no way you can drive around in that flashy Aston Martin of yours, and you’re not insured to drive my car. You might not worry about being caught without insurance when you’ve got a murder charge hanging over your head, but I haven’t got any points on my licence and I’d like to keep it that way.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but saw her point and closed it again.
She seemed to read his mind. “I know how hard this is for you,” she said soothingly, “but if you don’t like the idea of sitting around doing nothing, you could be fixing us something to eat while I’m gone. OK?”
He nodded reluctantly, unused to the sensation of no longer being in control of his life. He stood in silence as she picked up her car keys and jacket and then watched her through the window as she hurried down the path to where her car was parked.
It hit him then, like a punch in the guts. Until this was resolved, even a simple action like driving to the supermarket was fraught with difficulty. He mumbled an oath as he let the blind fall and he turned away, angry and frustrated.
Tim had called him arrogant. That had been a lifetime away.
***
“I can’t believe they lost him!” Mason bellowed, after several hours had passed and there was still no word. “All they had to do was take a couple of cars, pick him up and bring him back here. How difficult is that? I doubt that he’s got criminal connections or a stash of AK47s under the bed.”
“You know that’s not fair,” Gaskin pointed out, with his usual patience, “You can’t lose someone if you don’t know where they are to begin with. He was out when uniform arrived. They hung around for a while but he never showed up.”
“And they searched the house properly?” Mason asked, still keen to apportion blame.
“Yep,” Gaskin assured him, “the attic, the outhouses, everywhere. There was no trace of him.”
“But you say he hadn’t packed anything.”
“Can’t be sure,” Gaskin admitted. “There were plenty of clothes hanging in the cupboards, and his wash stuff was still in the bathroom, but he might have gone in a hurry and taken just the bare essentials.” Gaskin looked around for somewhere to sit, but every available surface was covered in clutter so he stayed where he was. “What about family?” he asked. “Most people have got someone who would take them in and to hell with the consequences.”
“Not in Sullivan’s case,” Mason said. “His parents were divorced when he was fourteen. His father is working for the World Bank in Washington, and his mother remarried and is living in the Lake District. I checked her out; he’s not there.”
“Brothers or sisters?” Gaskin asked.
“An older brother, but he’s living in Uganda working for a charity.” Mason hunched forward, a deflated look on his face. “It doesn’t make sense. He can’t just disappear like this. We know he hasn’t drawn money out of his account for several days, so where is he spending the night? He must realise that that Aston Martin of his is a liability. He can’t risk paying cash and staying anywhere downmarket, but he can’t use his credit card to pay for somewhere decent either.”
“Perhaps he kept money in the house,” Gaskin suggested.
Mason shook his head. “Can’t see it; not his type. Why soil your hands with dirty money when you’ve got platinum plastic in your wallet? No, someone’s sheltering him. I’m sure of it.”
“You could be right,” Gaskin conceded. “We know he hasn’t gone home and I can’t see him sleeping under a hedge, but are you sure he can’t skip the country on that boat of his?”
“Quite sure,” Mason said, emphatically, “It’s been under constant surveillance since the results of the post-mortem confirmed him as our only suspect.”
“But he’ll be part of the boating fraternity,” Gaskin pointed out. “He could be on his way to France in a friend’s boat as we speak.”
“If he is, we’ll get him,” Mason said, resolutely. “I’ve already alerted Interpol. If he uses his credit cards anywhere in Europe we’ll find him. In the meantime, this is what you do.” He slammed his hand down on the table. “Pay his wife another visit. I want a full list of his friends. Everyone he’s ever known, even if they’ve only passed the time of day with him. I want every one of them interviewed. If someone is sheltering him, I’m damn well going to find out who it is. Get warrants if you have to. Understand?”
Gaskin nodded. “Are you going public with his name and mugshot?”
Mason shook his head. “Not yet. He’ll dig himself in deeper if he finds his face plastered all over the nationals. For the moment we’ll keep a low profile. I don’t want him alerted to the fact that we’re closing in on him until it’s too late.”
Gaskin turned to leave. “Whatever you say, Guv. It could take a while checking on everyone, though; he probably knows a fair few people.”
“Then get on with it,” Mason said, springing to his feet. “We can’t afford to let the trail go cold. He might have evaded us once. Believe me, he won’t do it again.”
Gaskin did believe him. His boss took every failure personally. It would only be a matter of time before their suspect was behind bars. Gaskin gave him a couple more days of freedom at the most.