Atom Bomb Angel

by Peter James

Sleder drummed his fingers on top of his cigarette box. ‘And what good will this do you?’

  ‘I’m coming to that now. We have in mind to offer you a deal: you do a small favour for us, and in return we won’t destroy you.’

  Sleder took out another cigarette, and rolled it around between his fingers.

  ‘We just want you to start supplying fuel rods and bundles to a number of nuclear power stations in the United States, Canada, Spain, France and Britain; that is all.’ He sat back.

  Sleder put the cigarette down on the desk. ‘I don’t know if I have missed something that you said, but that is precisely what I am trying to do at the moment. There are several other countries I would like to sell to as well.’

  Carpov nodded. ‘You didn’t miss anything. We are not concerned about countries other than these – what you do there is your own affair – but with these five, we are prepared to give you plenty of assistance.’

  ‘And what do you want out of this? Do you want to supply the uranium?’

  ‘You’ll find out what we want, when we are ready to tell you.’

  Sleder’s brain was churning over. The only possible reason he could think of was that the Russians needed an outlet for surplus uranium; but two years ago his company had approached the Russians to see whether they would be prepared to supply uranium and at what price, just as they had approached all the other uranium-producing countries with the same questions. The Soviet reply had been that they had no surplus uranium to sell. So why, Sleder wondered, had they changed their minds – or had they?

  He didn’t like Carpov, didn’t like him one bit, but there was something in what the man said that made Sleder think. His own approach to the nuclear energy industry had been lethargic so far; it was time he pulled his finger out, and this was just the prompting he needed.

  ‘I cannot see any advantage in not co-operating,’ said Sleder.

  ‘I think that sums it up very well,’ said the Russian.

  17

  The box of crème de menthe Turkish Delight slid across the spotless grey desk top, sprinkling bits of icing sugar as it went. Arthur must have had a birthday recently, I decided; he normally carried his Turkish Delight in a paper bag. I took one and pushed the box back.

  ‘They’re good,’ he said, taking one out of the box and lifting it up towards the cave-like orifice that had suddenly appeared between his thick moustache and even thicker beard. The beard was very uneven, as though every now and then, when the mood took him, he would have a go at trimming it with a pair of scissors, but got bored half-way through. With the jagged, uneven tufts, and the patches of white from the sugar that had fallen off the lump of Turkish Delight, his beard had taken on the appearance of a gorse bush struck by lightning.

  Arthur Jephcott was in complete contrast to his office. He wore a thick, dark-green Harris Tweed suit, that, whilst looking as though it had been handed down to him by his father, had actually been made, at very great expense, by an elderly tailor who continued to labour under the 1930s view that suits that looked new were vulgar. Also, as he’d told the cheerful Arthur at the final fitting, he’d made plenty of allowance for Arthur to ‘expand’. The man had not lied; in square footage, the outfit was more like a marquee than a suit. Arthur could have doubled in size and still had room for a few friends in there. Under the jacket, he wore a yellow-and-brown checked Viyella shirt, the collar of which had almost entirely frayed away, and appeared to be held together by his bright orange tie.

  I thought it odd that his wife could have let him go out like this, but then, I hadn’t met her, and maybe she was even stranger. He looked every inch an academic, with alert brown eyes, a tangle of curly hair on his head, and small, soft-looking hands of the type that appear to have spent their days caressing expensive leather-bound pages of print in quiet oak-panelled rooms. In fact his hands spent their days caressing the keys of a computer terminal, and the room was not oak-panelled, but lined with lead and concrete.

  Arthur Jephcott was Director of Combined Central Information, an outfit shared by all the organizations that comprised the British Intelligence network. CCI was housed in a massive atom-bomb-proof office complex several hundred feet underneath the Hyde Park underground car park. Jephcott was responsible for an army of 5,000 people in this windowless subterranean town, and for one of the largest computers ever built; it was in fact four massive computers connected together, and the machine was known by the name of Wotan.

  Arthur’s office was a sterile white, with nothing at all in it except a grey metal desk. Behind his desk, was the keyboard of a terminal into Wotan, and on one side of the desk was a large visual display unit looking much like a television screen. Arthur had no pens, pencils or paper in his office; he never used them. Everything that he wanted to write down, he tapped straight into Wotan.

  He finished chewing his piece of Turkish Delight. Crème de menthe Turkish Delight was Arthur’s one vice in life; he was completely addicted to it. He never smoked, and never drank, but throughout his waking hours he would steadily munch his way through ten to twelve pounds of the stuff a week. Apart from a very sticky handshake, it didn’t appear to do him any great harm.

  Arthur Jephcott was a librarian, an archivist, a sorter and storer and retriever of facts; he would take facts, pull them apart, then put them back together, five different ways, ten different ways, one hundred different ways, without his face being lined with worries, because he never had to decide which was the right way. He merely presented the options for others to decide; presented the pros and the cons, loading first one end of the scale with weights, and then the other, but leaving someone else, always, to decide whether the end that finally sank down was, in this murky world of espionage that was forever grey, to be marked either Black or White.

  Every piece of information that was gleaned by the Security Service, the Secret Intelligence Service, the Special Branch, GCHQ – Britain’s round-the-world radio monitoring network – the Armed Forces and the police was passed, through Arthur, into Wotan.

  ‘How’s your very lovely lady?’ he asked.

  ‘Giving me a complex – she’s too damned tall; she’s also not terribly impressed with me at the moment. We came rather close to splitting up a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got tripped up – the night Whalley went off to his meeting with Mr X. She was preparing me some special birthday surprise; I’d promised to be home early that night, and I had to stay with Whalley. I sent her a message saying I was stuck in Ireland with a broken-down aeroplane, and she’d seen me driving down Park Lane half an hour before. She’s still convinced I spent the night with another bird.’

  ‘Is there not a golden rule, Max? If you tell a lie, make sure it is not only plausible, but that you can substantiate it within the context of your movements and actions? It’s one thing to make a mistake like that with a girlfriend, but you could make a similar mistake in an operation which could jeopardize your life.’

  ‘You haven’t met Gelignite,’ I said, ‘it damned nearly did!’

  He grinned.

  I remembered coming straight to see Arthur the morning after Gelignite had broken into my house, and he ran her through Wotan backwards, forwards and inside out, cross-referencing three generations back, and every living relative we could find. She was clean Roedean, finishing school in Montreux, Lucy Clayton secretarial, and a personal bank account that would have made Croesius sit on the ground and beat the floor with his fists in a jealous rage. Great-great-grandpa had been transported to Botany Bay for rape – a trait that had evidently not entirely left the family’s genes. Out there, he had founded the family empire in sheep farming. Great grandpa had expanded it into property and mining, and on his death it was divided between his two sons. One son lost his half on the baccarat tables of Monte Carlo; the other son trebled the size of his, and handed it down to his son. His son produced Gelignite.

  ‘Don’t mess this one about,’ said Arthur, then, ‘Marry h
er.’

  ‘I’m not the marrying kind.’

  ‘With a face like that, and a father rich enough to give her five million quid for her twenty-first birthday and not feel it missing out of the petty cash tin, what more do you want? With a pedigree like hers, if she were a dog, she’d clean up at Crufts.’

  That summed up Arthur’s romantic vision of life: he looks at a super bird, and immediately conjures up visions of dogs winning prizes. I grinned at him. In spite of being surrounded by the most up-to-date technology in the world, and spending all his working hours in this weird, stark complex, without daylight and without natural fresh air, in the cold white light of neon strip bulbs, amid the constant distant hum of the air-conditioning units and the sound of tapping on keyboards of word processors and computers and push-button telephone dials, he retained a simple, almost rural outlook on life. His stout leather brogues and his car seats thick with the hair of his wife’s hounds gave away his private life best: he was a man who relaxed away from work by walking across moors, not by wining and dining dusky mistresses.

  ‘So what’s new in British Intelligence?’ I asked him. Arthur loved to gossip, not that he ever gave away state secrets, but he did pass on little snippets of personal information about my superiors.

  ‘One little goodie for you,’ said Arthur. ‘The Home Secretary – you probably read that he’s in hospital for a few days for medical tests?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, he’s actually there because he is suffering from – er – damage to the rear quarters; he and some boyfriend got a bit carried away together.’ Arthur grinned. It was an unusually fruity tale for him. ‘I think he’s a bloody liability that man; so does everyone. But that’s the only one I have for you today. Since you moved on to grander places, I have been suffering from a serious lack of information!’

  Arthur was referring to my previous assignment, a massive study of the staff of MI5. With a few breaks for ‘quickie’ jobs every few months, the assignment had taken me the best part of five years. During this time, Arthur and I traded a great many tales. It was a curious relationship we had developed, based on scandal that we could not pass on beyond the walls of the room, told through mouthfuls of Turkish Delight.

  ‘That assignment was a damned sight simpler,’ I said. ‘I don’t like this one at all. There’s something about it – I don’t know quite how to describe it – I just don’t feel that, whatever I’m doing, I’m really making any progress. Just when I think I’m getting somewhere, whatever I’m onto dries up. It’s almost like chipping away at a glacier with a hammer: take a bit off here, a bit off there, but it’s not making any difference, not stopping the damn thing from advancing. Operation Angel, whatever it is, is big, damned big; it is scheduled to take place on 4 January, and it is now 14 December. Three weeks, and right now, where are we? Bloody nowhere.

  ‘I reckoned I had it all figured out after I stopped McEliney in his car. Put the Ring of Bells pub under a microscope and wait for ginger-haired Mick to turn up; follow him, bug him, and between him and Whalley, we’d get to the pot of gold. I’ve drunk in that damn pub every night for the last three weeks, chatting up the thick-arsed locals until I’m blue in the face, waiting for Mick to come – then arriving home with Guinness all over my breath and trying to persuade Gelignite I’ve been working hard – Then I get a phone call last night: the police have found him on an abandoned building site with a bullet in his head; the bullet is from the same gun that shot McEliney dead two days before. Someone’s doing a damned good job of tidying up their back yard.’

  Arthur nodded. ‘It’s a familiar pattern – seen it many times before – eliminating unwanted witnesses before the stunt is pulled.’

  ‘I think we’re going to need one hell of a lot of luck in the next three weeks,’ I said.

  ‘Do you?’ said Arthur, somewhat surprised. ‘I didn’t know you were a person who believed in leaving things to luck. It’s certainly not the reputation you have. You’re known by most people in Intelligence as the Digger, because that’s exactly what you’ve always done; you’ve kept on digging until you’ve found something. That’s the only way in our game; Fifeshire’s Law of Intelligence: facts, facts, facts! We’d all be useless without them – Wotan would be fifteen million quid’s worth of scrap ironmongery without facts. And facts aren’t acquired by luck – at least, in my view, not often. People can say they got a lucky break, but I always disagree. People say a golfer is lucky if he gets a hole in one. I don’t agree with that at all. Heck, that’s what the chap’s trying to do. When he drives off he aims at that pin – even if he can’t see it, he’s still aiming for it – and every time he stands on a tee throughout his life, he aims for that pin. If he goes to his grave without ever getting that hole in one, in my view he has been unlucky. If he has succeeded in getting a hole in one, I wouldn’t say he had been lucky; I’d say he had been successful – he had done what he tried to do.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to need an awful lot of golf balls, Arthur,’ I said.

  He grinned.

  ‘Anyway, what have you come up with?’

  ‘We’ll go through it,’ he said. He looked at his watch. ‘We’ll have to be quick – I have to leave here in exactly half an hour. Now that the Home Secretary has discovered, after eighteen months in office, that he has an Intelligence organization under him, he wants to know all about it – ruptured anus or no ruptured anus.’

  ‘And what will you tell him?’

  ‘What Fifeshire thinks he needs to know.’

  ‘Which is?’ I asked.

  ‘Not a lot,’ he said abruptly, and then grinned.

  ‘Did you have any luck with the voice-prints?’

  Arthur shook his head. ‘It would be a damned sight easier if you could remember where you had heard that voice. What about hypnosis?’

  ‘Tried it. Negative.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s your imagination?’

  ‘No. I am certain I heard it before.’

  ‘Well, we’ve fed dark Capris into Wotan, and now we have fed in that voice. Your people are out interviewing everyone in the nuclear energy industry and they’re sending the tapes to us. We are converting them into prints, and feeding them into Wotan in the hope he can match one print up with the conversation you recorded between Whalley and his contact. There are over two hundred thousand people who work in the nuclear energy industry – I have their files – it will take you until well past 4 January to interview them all – you’ll be lucky if you get your man that way.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in luck?’

  He grinned. ‘Let’s just say I sometimes believe in miracles!’

  ‘What about McEliney’s fingerprints?’

  ‘Nothing more than what I told you last week: his record was clean, but his father has a long record of IRA involvements; he was arrested in connection with the Hilton bombing back in the mid seventies, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him.’

  ‘But it does make it pretty clear there’s an IRA involvement?’

  ‘Oh, certainly. The voice you cannot place – the speech boffins have analyzed that, and they say the man was almost certainly born and brought up in Ireland, and has spent at least twenty years in this country since then. His accent may have faded naturally – but he might have deliberately worked at losing it.’

  ‘Can’t you single out everyone with an Irish background?’

  ‘We have already done so, and we keep a special watch on them as their voice-prints come in. But if he’s hiding his Irish background, he’s almost certainly changed his name and his identity, and without knowing who the person is, it’s a near-on-impossible job to find one person out of two hundred thousand who has changed his identity. Of course, it could possibly be this person Patrick Cleary that McEliney spoke of. There is nothing to prove it, though, and even if we could prove it, I don’t think it would be of great help to us.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I think that
’s a false name too. We’ve checked on every P. Cleary in all the phone books in the British Isles, and all the ex-directory listings – every possible way the name could be spelt. We’ve singled out all the Patricks, and checked on them, and we haven’t been able to find any positive IRA links. All of them have been telephoned, and their voice-prints have been compared with your tape; negative. That leaves us with three possibilities: either he isn’t on the phone, or he’s using a pseudonym, or he doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Which do you think is the most likely?’

  Arthur beamed smugly. ‘You know I don’t normally like to give opinions?’

  ‘I had noticed.’

  ‘Well, this time it’s different. It’s Wotan’s doing, of course – you see, he has come up with something most interesting. As you probably know, as part of the Sharing of Intelligence Treaty between the SIS and the CIA, they, and a few other of the world’s intelligence networks, watch all the key international airports of the world, particularly those of countries endangered by terrorism and those of countries that support terrorism. All passenger lists, incoming and outgoing, are fed into Wotan, and to the CIA central computer system in washington, and the computers are able to build up patterns of movement and link names to dates and events.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, among the names you gave me were Ben Tsenong, Wajara and Lukas. Ben Tsenong is a student at Oxford, studying atomic energy; he is from Namibia, and on a United Nations scholarship. There are no records about him in Namibia – which is not unusual: records in South West Africa are appalling. However, Wajara could well be Felix Wajara. He’s a key figure in the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia and one of the most powerful blacks in the country – if they ever have free elections, he would stand a good chance of becoming prime minister. The name Lukas was harder, because that is a Christian name and not uncommon out there. However, on 10 August Felix Wajara arrived at Tripoli Airport in Libya with one Lukas Ogomo. Lukas Ogomo is a senior member of SWAPO – South West Africa People’s Organization. On a separate flight, on the same day, the chairman of SWAPO, Hadino Dusab, also arrived in Tripoli. And now, what is most interesting of all, on 9 August, guess who else flew to Tripoli?’