Atom Bomb Angel

by Peter James

  4

  The canopied stern of Chanson II moved little in the calm St Tropez dusk. Two stout hemp ropes held her secure to the bollards on the quay, and a battery of smart navy and white fenders protected her port and starboard sides. Her teak decks shone with polish, her white paintwork glistened, and the gold lettering of her name and the word Panama underneath were immaculate.

  She was a rich man’s boat, in a parade of rich men’s boats. One of a dozen and a half genuine gin palaces that sat swanking in silence down the most public part of the quay, opposite the cafés and the restaurants where thousands of holiday-makers from campsites and pensions mingled with the few wealthy villa owners to sip their cafés au lait and pernods and pick at giant ice-creams in glass bowls, and ogle in awe at the passing crumpet, and the stunning white bums of the boats of the super-rich.

  Chanson II was one hundred and forty foot, and had fourteen private berths, all with en suite bath or shower, plus generous quarters for a crew of sixteen. One of the berths was a sizeable state room with a bedroom off it, that had a circular bed, with mirrored walls and ceiling. The private bathroom had a double bath and a Jacuzzi. In one corner of the state room was a twenty-six-inch Bang and Olufsen colour television set, and next to it was a matching B & O stereo. Down one wall, under a large expanse of glass that was more a picture window than a porthole, was an exquisite, genuine George the Third writing desk, with two telephones on it.

  The telephones, the desk, the hi-fi, the television, the bathroom, the bedroom and the boat belonged to a handsome 46-year-old German named Deke Sleder. Sleder was a familiar name to the readers of gossip columns and glossy magazines as one of the world’s international playboys. A doyen of the jet set, five times married – once to an heiress, twice to film starlets, once to a rock singer and the last time to a black fashion-model – he was one of the world’s most publicized ageing trendies.

  But living glamorously was not the only thing he was good at. He was also well known to the readers of Fortune magazine, Business Week, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other financial publications, as a businessman to be reckoned with. Having inherited from his father a fortune in excess of four hundred million Deutschmark in interests ranging from textiles to oil, from high explosives to wheat farming and to the manufacture of ball bearings for railway carriage wheels, and having turned these not entirely humble origins into a combine turning over more than five hundred million pounds annually, Deke Sleder could not be reasonably described as either lacking in grey matter or being short of a bob or two.

  A taxi drew up at the barrier at the end of the quay, and a short, plump American in a loud, checked jacket, tangerine Polyester trousers, white shoes with tassels, and a thin silver chain inside his open-neck shirt, clambered out. He was struggling simultaneously with the French language, a large Gladstone bag and the French currency. Judging from the expression of thunder on the taxi driver’s face, he had won his struggle with the French currency.

  The American picked up his bag and strutted jauntily up the quay, reading off the names of the boats as he went along, until he reached the Chanson II. As he started to walk up the gangway, he didn’t notice a man at a café on the quay lower his copy of France-Soir and study him carefully through the 200mm lens of his Nikon before pressing the shutter button.

  The American was excited. Invitations to spend long weekends on yachts in the South of France did not come often to Adamsville, Ohio, and he sure as hell was going to make the most of this one, even though he fully expected to spend most of the time discussing important business. That was what he had assured his wife, and he had assured her that in good faith, because it was what his host-to-be had told him. He was, all the same, a trifle curious as to what deal was so important it was worthwhile his host-to-be’s flying him all the way out here – and first class at that.

  The American’s appalling dress sense and poorly kept body masked an intelligent, if limited, brain. He was at the peak of his career and would go no higher than where he was, although there were more rungs available for the climbing. He worked for the American Fossilized Corporation, a massive combine which specialized in the manufacture of aviation and rocket fuels, as plant manager of their Adamsville, Ohio, operation. It was public knowledge that American Fossilized was under scrutiny for a take-over bid from Gebruder Sleder GMBH (US) Inc., and it was public knowledge that the boss of Gebruder Sleder was one Deke Sleder. It was not, however, public knowledge that the principle business these days of American Fossilized, and in particular of its Adamsville plant, was the manufacture of uranium-filled fuel rods for nuclear power stations.

  As the American stepped onto the deck, two burly men in double-breasted navy blazers, white trousers, peaked caps and white plimsolls, materialized from the stern cabin.

  ‘Can we help you?’ said one, guessing the man’s mother tongue first go. He spoke with a heavy German accent.

  ‘My name is Slan – er – Harry Slan. Mr Sleder is – er – expecting me.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Slan,’ the henchman smiled. ‘Herr Sleder is expecting you.’ He stretched out his hand and took Slan’s bag. ‘Please, you follow me. Herr Sleder is sure you would like to take a rest after your journey, and he will welcome you aboard himself at drinks before dinner in two hours’ time at eight o’clock.’ The man led the way off down into the boat. Harry Slan could not see the wink that was exchanged between the man who remained behind and the man on the quay who was so short-sighted, he needed a 200mm lens in order to read his France-Soir.

  They went down two flights of polished wooden stairs and then along a carpeted corridor. They went past a door marked Tirpitz, another marked Graf Spee, and stopped outside one marked Bismark. The man turned to Slan. ‘This is your cabin. On behalf of Herr Sleder, I wish you a very comfortable stay.’ With that he put down the bag and walked off.

  Harry Slan picked the bag up and entered the cabin. Halfway in, he stopped in his tracks. Standing in the room, facing him, was a tall dark-haired girl, with a strong, beautifully proportioned body that almost rippled with energy. She put her hands on her hips and smiled at him. Her breasts were large and firm, and lifted up and down slightly as she breathed. The only stitch of clothing on her entire body was a minute bikini bottom, either side of the front of which sprouted thick black tufts of hair.

  Harry Slan gulped and started to back out of the room. ‘Sorry – I’m sorry – er – wrong room.’

  ‘You must be Harry?’ she said, with a soft German accent.

  ‘Er – yes – er – sorry.’

  ‘Welcome to your cabin, Harry. I am your cabin hostess. Let me fix you a drink and unpack your bag for you. What would you like – a nice cold beer, or an American cocktail?’ She marched over to the door, took Slan’s bag in one hand and Slan in the other, and pushed the door shut behind them with her foot.

  5

  Horace Whalley was a pragmatic-looking man, in his early fifties. He had a thick-set face at the front of a conical head, with a large nose that dipped slightly downwards, and grey hair that was cropped short, and he looked as though he carried the burdens of the world on his shoulders. He was about five foot seven, wore unassuming worsted suits, drab wool ties, and had a generally meek air. He stooped slightly, and never took large footsteps. Unknown to him, there was a tiny electronic microphone concealed in every room of his house, inside his car, inside his office, and inside his Rotary Club tie-pin, which normally he always wore but had recently mislaid.

  He munched his bran and prunes breakfast, unaware that the sounds of his eating were being heard, with perfect fidelity, by six men in three motor cars, parked in the vicinity of his house, in the tree-lined Surbiton avenue, in such a manner that they could follow him unobtrusively, regardless of which direction he decided to take on leaving his house.

  It was the seventeenth morning of their vigil, and they had heard him, as usual, take his wife a cup of tea in bed, murmur. ‘Goodbye, dear, I’ll see you later,�
� go downstairs, pick up his briefcase and umbrella from beside the door, go out and into the garage. A few moments later, the tail of a powder blue Vauxhall Cavalier would start pouring out choked exhaust smoke, the reversing lights would shine on, and the car would start to move backwards down the short concrete driveway. None of the six men needed to look at their wristwatches: they knew it was 6.15 a.m. precisely.

  There were twelve men in the team altogether, six were always on while the other six rested. All twelve of them had come to the conclusion several days ago that following Horace Whalley was a waste of time. His routine each day was exactly the same: from the time he left the office at four forty-five in the afternoon to the time he returned to it at seven in the morning, any one of them could have told me, with his eyes shut and his ears blocked, exactly where Whalley was and what he was doing. But they were professional enough to understand that this was the point. Whalley’s normal routine was completely taped; any deviation from it would stand out like a sore thumb – and it was a deviation that we all waited for.

  The three cars that followed him in the morning, changing places every few miles, were different makes and colours from the ones that followed him in the evening, and none of the cars was ever used more than once in the same week. At six twenty as usual the three cars that followed him in towards central London heard him turn on Radio 4, keeping the volume control low as he listened to the end of the Farming Report, and then turning the volume up to listen to the news headlines. The men thought perhaps he’d turned it up louder than usual on this particular morning, but they couldn’t be sure.

  The first item on the Monday morning headlines was the shooting of four soldiers in Belfast. The second item was a sharp fall in the cost of living. The third item was the disappearance of the chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, Sir Isaac Quoit. He had last been seen, the announcer informed listeners, on Saturday afternoon, walking his pointer across Ashdown Forest, near his Sussex home. The dog had returned home alone, but nothing had been seen or heard of Sir Isaac. The breakfast programme newscaster gave the information to the nation, or at least to that portion of the nation that were up at this hour, tuned into Radio 4 and actually listening to their sets, with a degree of gravity in his voice that was ideally suited to the occasion, and had been selected from a file of fifty different tones of gravity for fifty different types of serious announcements stored in the memory banks of his brain after a quarter of a century doing this job. The police, he stated, were treating the matter as ‘foul play’, and left his audience to decide for themselves whether this implied that the police were intending, shortly, to arrest the dog.

  By the time the blue Cavalier’s radio reception had faded into nothing but a crackle as the car descended the ramp to the car park underneath the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s Charles II Street headquarters, Horace Whalley and the six men who were following him had listened to the newscaster report the same story, in the same tone, five more times. They had also listened twice to Sir Isaac Quoit’s wife relating precisely what Sir Isaac was wearing when he set off, what he had said to her, which was pretty much what anybody who was setting off to walk the dog for forty-five minutes might say to his wife, and debating whether the fact that he had had a second helping of pudding might indicate he had been stoking up for a long journey. They had also listened to her relate how the dog had come home with someone else’s frozen leg of mutton in its mouth, which didn’t indicate anything at all, except that either the dog was underfed or it was a kleptomaniac.

  ‘Daphne’s coming in.’

  I switched off the tiny radio receiver built into my propelling pencil. Daphne was the code name for Horace Whalley. I looked at my watch and knew I needn’t have bothered. It was exactly 7.00 a.m. I yawned, and cursed Whalley. Having to be at work at 7.00 a.m. was not my idea of fun, and after seventeen days I still had not got used to it. I decided I probably wouldn’t ever get used to it. My circadian cycle, as the twenty-four-hour clock in one’s body is called, is not geared to be in harmony with the gentle glow of dawn; it prefers to commence its daily cycle several hours after the sun has first appeared over the far horizon, and it likes to be jolted into action by a succession of cups of thick, black coffee delivered by a warm, naked girl. Much to the chagrin of myself and my much abused innards, my current coffee-mate wasn’t into 6.15 a.m. deliveries.

  I took out my first Marlboro of the day and then stuck it back in the pack. I wasn’t giving up – I like smoking – but I had promised myself I was going to cut down drastically, and that definitely meant not lighting up at 7.00 a.m., for openers. If my metabolism was in ruins and my lungs in tatters, it was Whalley who was to blame. My hatred of his working hours, and the knowledge that the sooner I either gave him up as a bad job or nailed him doing something, the sooner I might have some chance of returning to a normal existence – or at any rate, to as near to a normal existence as my job would ever allow – spurred me to a degree of application to this task that appeared dangerously like enthusiasm.

  The office at the Authority, which the Energy Secretary had commandeered for his hot-shot analyst, was small, and tucked away in a quiet corner of the building, with a window that looked down onto Charles II Street, and it had two features uncommon to the other offices in the building: firstly, with the door shut, it was completely sound-proof; secondly, concealed in the back of the desk was a twenty-one-inch television monitor, linked, via closed-circuit to three television cameras and as many microphones elaborately concealed in the office of Horace Whalley two floors above.

  From seven in the morning to a quarter to five in the afternoon, I watched and listened to Horace Whalley at work. From ten until five past ten he slurped at a cup of hot coffee that was brought to him, and from one until a quarter past he munched his way through an egg and cress wholemeal bread sandwich, followed by a spam and chutney wholemeal bread sandwich, followed by two chocolate digestive biscuits and a small carton of milk, all supplied by his wife. From a quarter past three until twenty past three he slurped at a cup of hot tea. His daily adventures into the world of gastronomy were unlikely to land him a job as an inspector for the Michelin Guide.

  Apart from the brief interludes to nourish the inner man, Whalley was a prolific worker. His official title was controller of system safeguards, and his job was to ensure that the safety systems and procedures at the sixteen nuclear power stations in Great Britain were properly maintained and adhered to, within the confines of their budgets. Much of his work was to check up on the work done by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and the National Radiological Protection Board, and to analyze their recommendations.

  Whilst most of Whalley’s work was done from his office, he was entitled to, and did frequently, make random checks on the stations, and in order to be able to carry out these checks effectively he was allowed access, without having to seek any permission whatsoever, to every square inch of every power station in Britain.

  For the past seventeen days he hadn’t made any such checks; in fact he had done nothing of any interest at all. From the camera that was concealed above his desk, I could read any of his documents that I wanted to; I hadn’t yet noticed anything that was my taste in literature. It was the third week of October, over six weeks since my rudely curtailed meeting with Ahmed in the lavatory, and in that short time, I had added a new subject to that list of subjects upon which I could talk, if required, at great length, without actually knowing very much at all: this new subject was, not surprisingly, nuclear power. From my visits to each of the stations in Britain, and my seventeen days in the Atomic Energy Authority, I had acquired, whilst certainly not sufficient knowledge to build a nuclear power station, more than was adequate to blow one up. But if this was what was in the mind of my friend Whalley, in seventeen days he hadn’t yet showed his hand. Not at any rate until this particular day when, at 1.00 p.m., instead of taking out his sandwiches, he got up from his desk, put on his coat, picked up his briefcase and
left the office.

  I pulled out my propelling pencil, pushed the tip in and spoke into the clip. ‘She’s coming out.’ I pushed the button a second time, which switched it onto the receiving cycle and walked over to the window. A couple of minutes passed and there was no sign of Whalley. I figured he must have gone down into the car park, and if he had I wouldn’t see him come out from here, since the car park entrance was at the back of the building. I held the pointed end of the pencil up to my ear. It contained a tiny directional speaker, through which, if pointed at my ear, I could hear perfectly clearly, although someone standing right beside me would not hear a thing.

  Another minute passed, then a voice came out of the pencil.

  ‘This is Sheila. We’ve got her.’

  It was our practice to code name both the person being tailed, and the cars tailing, with girls’ names. The names of the three cars today were Sheila, Mavis and Ethel. My name for today was Carol.

  ‘Stay with her, Sheila,’ I said, ‘I’m coming out too.’

  I left the building by the front entrance, turned left and walked up to a grey Cortina that was parked on a jammed meter. It was one of five different cars that were parked on this meter on a daily rotation; I had keys to all five. I started the engine, then pushed into my ear a device that looked like a miniature hearing aid, but was a radio receiver tuned in to the frequency of the three surveillance cars. I could have tuned in to Whalley as well, had I wanted, but I didn’t think he would have a great deal to say to himself whilst driving along on his own. I clicked the top of my propelling pencil and spoke into it. ‘This is Carol. Where’s the party?’

  ‘At the fairground. Looks like we’re going on the helter skelter.’