Bomb Grade

by Brian Freemantle

  Natalia knew she’d done well, although she kept any awareness from showing. Her satisfaction did not last long.

  Popov said: ‘There are clearly members of the Yatisyna Family still free. Or maybe the retribution was exacted by the Agayans mob. Our initial information about the intended robbery at Plant 69 came from the Militia regional commander at Kirov, Nikolai Vladimiro-vich Oskin. Without his contribution, the intrusion at Kirs would have undoubtedly succeeded. And we would now be dealing with an unthinkable nuclear loss twice as large as that we face now. Nikolai Oskin knew the risks he was taking. He asked for protection. He and his family were transferred to Moscow …’

  Asked me for protection, thought Natalia, in growing apprehension.

  ‘… Their bodies were found this morning, in the apartment that had been provided for them. Each had been tortured. Oskin was bound in a chair. From the position in which it was placed and the way in which the bodies of his wife and children were left it would appear he was made to watch while they were mutilated and finally killed – each by being decapitated – before being physically tortured to death himself.’

  Perhaps, thought Charlie, his most recent idea wasn’t such a good one after all.

  With an ingrained determination to be part of everything, even if he was not invited, Charlie hung around while Kestler approached Popov to arrange the American scientific examination of the recovered lorries and, when it emerged the Russian team were already at the Arbat, went unchallenged in the Militia car to collect the telephone-alerted woman from the American embassy compound.

  Hillary Jamieson was waiting for them at the compound entrance, wearing one-piece overalls Charlie accepted to be scene-of-crime official issue from the colour and the foot-high FBI lettering on the back, but which owed more to designer-inspired alteration than to government seamstresses. The trousers were tapered to shows legs which Charlie would have thought, in other clothes, reached her shoulders but visibly and delightfully stopped at a tightly displayed ass so perfect that Michelangelo would have gone into artistic if not lustful rapture and in this case might just have converted from the sexual proclivities of a lifetime. He would certainly have modelled the breasts, even more provocatively displayed as bra-less both by the tightness of the material and the insufficiently closed zip, for a statue that would have reduced the Venus de Medici to an effigy of someone’s washerwoman grandmother.

  Kestler was briefly and literally speechless, actually stumbling as he hurried from the car to hold open the rear door for her. Prick teaser meets prick teased, thought Charlie, watching the performance. She shook her head against Kestler taking a large plastic workbox and a thick plastic suit-carrier type sheath from her, following both into the rear and directing to Charlie a sculpted-toothed, favoured-mortal-to-local-aborigine smile as she did so. She gave an apologetic hand flutter to Kestler that her equipment took up too much room to allow him in the back as well. As the disgruntled Kestler got into the front she said, ‘I’m still not sure what the fuck I’m doing here but I hardly expected to hit the ground running! What have we got?’

  Kestler noticeably blinked at the ‘fuck’. He said, ‘You haven’t met Charlie. Assigned like I am. From England.’

  Hillary twisted back in the rear seat. ‘Hi! I thought you were local!’

  ‘They’re different from us: they wear animal skins and grunt a lot,’ said Charlie.

  She laughed, unrebuked. ‘I thought they did that in England, too! And painted themselves with woad.’

  ‘Not in London. Only out in the country.’

  The car began to slow, impeded by the congestion from part of the inner ring road as well as the Arbat being simultaneously closed off. The driver asked Kestler which scene they wanted and when Kestler identified the Arbat, turned on his emergency siren and lights and overtook the stalled traffic on the wrong side of the road, flashing for street patrol Militia to clear intersections ahead of them, and Charlie was glad they had accepted Popov’s suggestion to take an official vehicle. Knowing the closeness of the Arbat Charlie became serious, answering Hillary’s initial question while Kestler was engaged with the driver.

  She listened, just as seriously. ‘What’s this Arbat place?’

  ‘Tourist quarter. Largely pedestrianized.’

  ‘How wide an area has been cleared?’

  ‘Extensive, from what we were told this morning.’

  ‘It had better be, if these lorries are contaminated.’

  ‘Not predominantly because of the health risk,’ qualified Kestler, from the front. ‘The chief concern is that the general public – abroad as well as here in Moscow – will find out what’s happened.’

  ‘Tell me you’re kidding me that no official warning has been given!’ demanded the girl.

  ‘We’re not kidding you,’ assured Charlie, flatly.

  ‘This isn’t a joke, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘Welcome to the real world,’ invited Charlie.

  ‘This isn’t the real world! It’s the unreal world!’ She looked searchingly around the car, then back to Kestler and Charlie. ‘Where’s your protective stuff?’

  Kestler and Charlie exchanged looks. Kestler said, ‘We don’t have any.’

  Hillary said, ‘This isn’t happening! I just know this isn’t happening!’

  ‘It is,’ argued Charlie. ‘Look!’

  The scene ahead was like one from a surrealist movie. For fifty yards in the direction they were approaching the road and the surrounding pavements were crowded with milling, other-way focused people and protesting, horn-blasting vehicles cut off from a view of absolutely unmoving and unpeopled emptiness, as cleanly as a sharp knife separates one side of a cake from the other, by metal-fences barriers hedged by shoulder-to-shoulder Militia. As far as they could see beyond the barrier there were no cars. There were no trolleys. The windows of every building and shop were blank. There was a fountain which didn’t spout water. It looked exactly like the desolation Charlie imagined would follow a nuclear explosion.

  ‘Just an ordinary, downtown Moscow street investigation, folks!’ mocked Hillary, making an up-and-down hand cupped masturbating gesture. ‘Nothing to see! Just move along now; all go home!’ The mockery stopped. ‘How’s this going to be kept quiet, for Christ’s sake?’

  Charlie had had the same thought listening to Natalia itemizing the arrest warrants at that morning’s meeting. Instead of answering he physically pulled Hillary against the seat as they reached the barrier. ‘Sit back! Don’t go forward!’

  Unprotesting Hillary remained where Charlie had hauled her. As the barriers were briefly moved aside there was the pop of flash bulbs and the sharp whitening of television lights. Obediently pressed against the seat, Hillary said, ‘I just know there’s got to be a reason for what you’ve just done!’

  ‘Three letters a foot high all over your back,’ said Charlie. ‘God knows who the media were back there but it’s supposedly free here now. How’d you think they’d interpret an FBI scene-of-crime scientific officer, especially one looking like you do, in an ordinary, downtown Moscow street?’

  ‘Buried deep down somewhere I’m sure there was a compliment,’ grinned Hillary.

  ‘Buried deep down under a lot of practical common sense, maybe,’ half confirmed Charlie. He was surprised to see the bearded Aleksai Popov already at the scene, which was around a sharp curve in the approach road and completely out of sight of the road block. Popov was surrounded by uniformed and plainclothed officials, grouped about ten metres from the neatly parked, side-of-the-road cluster of vehicles. None wore any sort of protective clothing. Charlie counted four men around the lorries. All appeared to be wearing cotton overalls, like Hillary, but with their faces obscured with hamster-pouched air-filtering masks.

  ‘Doesn’t look as if I’ll need this,’ said the girl, patting the suit-carrier. ‘Maybe an idea for your guys to stay with the others; though.’

  ‘You speak Russian?’ challenged Kestler, simply.

  Hillary
grimaced. ‘Can’t think of everything. Wait until I check for levels.’

  Kestler identified Popov as they approached on foot and Charlie was uncritically aware how long it took Natalia’s lover to get his eyes up to the American girl’s face. Popov greeted her in English and said the Russian technicians were expecting her.

  From the way she bent her body away from it, her equipment box was heavy. When she was about five metres from the lorries she put it down and took out what looked like a hand-held mobile phone and a mask quite different from those the Russians were wearing. There were no side filters but it was looped to a back-pack canister she slipped expertly on as she continued towards the vehicles. The Russian scientists stood together as a group, watching her, and there was a flurry of hand language when she reached them. Hillary vaulted lightly into the rear of each truck, disappearing for what seemed a long time in every one. After the interior check she went crab-wise beneath them, her hand-held device raised aloft and afterwards checked each cab and finally the BMW before gesturing back to them. Once more, uninvited, Charlie tagged along. There was no objection from anyone. Popov went with them. By the time they got to the lorries, Hillary had the mask unclipped, hanging loosely at her throat.

  ‘Clean enough to take the kids to school,’ she greeted. To Kestler she said, ‘Ask them what the reading was when they got here.’

  Kestler did and a balding technician with a grey, chin-fringed beard said five, offering a much larger instrument for Hillary to look. Charlie attached himself to them as she established, through Kestler, the exact time of their arrival, the scale of dissipation since then and the precise places in each vehicle, including the BMW, that had given off a radiation reading. Hillary ended the scientific exchange with a smiling handshake and Popov said, ‘I’ll let you have the written forensic report.’

  ‘I’d like to see it as soon as possible,’ accepted Charlie.

  ‘I can tell you already there’s not a single fingerprint, anywhere,’ said Popov. ‘The canvassed lorry was stolen three months ago, in St Petersburg. The other two from a Moscow haulage company, at the same time. The Moscow registration on the BMW is false: it belongs to a Lada owned by an air traffic controller at Sheremet’yevo. The plates on the Ford abandoned on the ring road were stripped off a genuinely imported Ford parked at Kazan railway terminal.’ Looking directly at Charlie, Popov said, ‘We are going to take all the vehicles on the check run to and from Pizhma tomorrow.’

  Charlie decided Popov enjoyed showing the efficiency in front of Hillary, who looked suitably impressed. The man with the beard fringe offered that they’d already checked the Ford, which had shown no radiation whatsoever, and that the vehicle remained isolated on the ring road solely for their examination. Hillary shook her head as Kestler translated and said: ‘Not unless you guys want to.’ Neither did.

  Kestler manoeuvred himself next to Hillary in the rear of the Militia car, putting Charlie in the front. He sat turned towards the American, his arm over the seat, so he was instantly able to squeeze the girl’s leg in warning when she started; ‘Well, the story so far …’

  She stopped, grinning at Charlie. ‘You trying to tell me a secret?’

  ‘No!’ he said, pointedly. ‘Maybe keep one.’

  She remained silent until they transferred at the ministry into the embassy car. Because Kestler had to drive it put Charlie in the back with Hillary again. At once she said; ‘Sorry. But everything with the driver was in Russian; I didn’t think he could speak English. And anyway, aren’t we on the same side now?’

  It was Kestler who explained their acceptance on sufferance, which Charlie finished by saying that if he’d arranged their transport, like Popov had for them, he would have ensured the driver was fluent in English. ‘So what would he have heard?’

  ‘The level of radiation when I got there was virtually nonexistent,’ reported Hillary. ‘If the Russians’ curie reading is accurate to within a degree, any contamination was entirely residual and from outside, from when they smashed the containers. That’s why I checked the outside and underside of the lorries and confirmed a reading. The inside of the trucks gave me a lot, though. It’s not shown in any of the satellite photographs, but each truck had some sort of hydraulic lifting device, to bring the canisters on board. Near the tailgate of each there’s extensive scratching and on the metal floor of one of the covered lorries there are clear circular markings of the sort you get from rubber pads at the end of support legs. The canvas lorry is flatbed and wooden decked: the wood here has been positively depressed for maybe a millimetre. From the satellite shots of the smashed open containers Washington’s already made weight calculations from height and thickness measurements. The floor markings on the lorries are consistent with the containers being pretty standard, hard outer casing, two-inch thick lead lining. In my opinion the floor markings prove that the containers were full when they were lifted inboard. On our estimate of twenty-two being stolen, that puts the total nuclear graded loss at just under two hundred and forty nine kilos …’

  ‘… According to this morning’s meeting, they only lost nineteen,’ interrupted Kestler.

  ‘We’ll have Washington recount,’ said the girl, at once. ‘I can’t see how our picture analysts were wrong, but on the lesser figure the loss will be two hundred and forty two kilos, forty minimum.’

  ‘Five kilos makes one bomb,’ remembered Charlie. ‘They’ve got enough to make forty-eight, at least.’

  Hillary hesitated. ‘Only with proper laboratories staffed by properly qualified technicians and physicists. But you’re right – the bad guys have got enough to rule the world.’

  ‘Unless they’re stopped,’ said Kestler.

  ‘I think the most significant thing is that the housing isn’t in the lorries back there any more, either,’ said Hillary, answering the question as Charlie was about to ask it.

  Instead he said; ‘So it was transferred, to go on supporting the canisters in the trucks into which it was transferred.’

  ‘Obviously,’ agreed the physicist.

  ‘From the timed satellite sequence we know it took an hour to move the containers from the train into the trucks,’ said Charlie.

  Hillary took up the calculation. ‘Where the egg box was already prepared. This time the support frames had to be transferred, along with the containers. I’d say two hours, minimum. More likely three. Longer than that if they did it in the dark.’

  ‘So it wasn’t done at the Arbat,’ concluded Charlie, positively.

  ‘Who said it was?’ demanded the girl.

  ‘That was the suggestion at a briefing this morning.’

  ‘On the street back there!’ exclaimed Hillary. ‘Bullshit! No one taking the trouble these guys did would have risked that.’

  ‘You think there could have been an expert – a physicist even – involved in the robbery?’ queried Kestler.

  ‘Advising, maybe,’ she judged. ‘What I am damned sure about is that they didn’t intend losing what they got. Or being caught, getting it.’

  Natalia called Lesnaya within an hour of Charlie returning from the embassy, listening without interruption to everything he recounted. She said, ‘There must be a connection, between the two! Kirs had to be a decoy!’

  ‘Prove it, from the people you’ve got in custody,’ urged Charlie. ‘You did well, personally involving yourself in the questioning.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure Yatisyna will break quickly.’

  ‘Did he give you any indication of what he’s got?’

  ‘If he’s telling the truth about Kirs being set up by Agayans, he might know who the intended purchasers were.’

  ‘That could take us a long way forward,’ agreed Charlie.

  ‘I almost promised it at today’s meeting.’

  ‘Don’t promise what you haven’t got,’ warned Charlie. ‘And don’t tell anyone else. If you get it, keep it for a higher authority meeting. And get all the credit yourself.’

  ‘I didn’t know anything ab
out the lorries and the cars being found,’ Natalia admitted abruptly.

  ‘Popov didn’t tell you before the meeting?’ queried Charlie, recalling the look on her face. He could hear Sasha in the background, singing tunelessly.

  ‘I didn’t get up from the interrogation cell until fifteen minutes before it began. There wasn’t time. For me to be told about Oskin, either. I personally promised the protection!’

  In the solitude of his apartment Charlie frowned. ‘It’s work, Natalia! Don’t get personally involved. You couldn’t have anticipated what was going to happen.’

  ‘I should have done.’

  ‘Stop it!’ he insisted, sternly.

  After several moments’ silence, she said, They’re obviously very well organized, particularly here in Moscow.’

  Charlie hesitated. ‘I wasn’t personally challenging Popov. He was assuming too much.’

  ‘You don’t have to keep apologizing.’

  ‘I’m not apologizing. I just don’t want you to misunderstand.’

  Beyond the sound of Sasha’s tiny, unformed voice Charlie heard a man’s shout. Natalia said quickly, ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Yes.’ Popov must be in the hallway: it was obvious he would have his own key.

  Charlie replaced the phone feeling emptied. It was a feeling he was to experience a lot in the coming days, increasingly about events involving Natalia. Which was not Charlie allowing an intrusion because invariably those events were professional. He actually wished they hadn’t been.

  None of which, however, was his immediate concern. That was – finally – the public disclosure of the robbery.

  The metal hooks and shackles had probably been fitted into the basement walls when the dacha was first built, to hang meat or support gardening equipment. The bands around Silin’s wrists and ankles were very tight and wide apart, so that he was spreadeagled with his arms and legs widely outstretched. He was trying very hard not to show any fear to Sobelov, who stood directly in front of him.

  ‘I fixed the Pizhma robbery my way,’ said Sobelov. ‘I even started the war between the Chechen and the Ostankino just the way you planned, to send everyone around in circles. So there’s only one thing I want …’