Bomb Grade

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘I had a lot to sort out.’

  ‘And now you have.’

  Charlie gestured further along the multi-lane highway. ‘The Peking’s the best Chinese restaurant in the city.’

  ‘Seven-thirty?’

  ‘Fine.’ Which it was. Hillary might have a very necessary place in his scheme of things, as well as being gorgeous.

  Charlie thought the rice wine was tasteless but drank it anyway and they had duck in pancakes because that was the thing to do. Hillary insisted on doing most of the ordering and there was a sweet and sour course and chicken in cashews and steamed dumplings.

  She dismissed FBI sting operations against the American Mafia as totally different – always controllable – from what he wanted to do and asked if he’d seen the torture photographs and what about that business in the club, that had frightened her shitless! She was unimpressed by his spetznaz argument.

  ‘I’d need your help,’ Charlie announced.

  ‘My help!’

  ‘Technically, if it ever comes to anything. To check out what I was offered to make sure it wasn’t a con.’

  Hillary regarded him warily. ‘Charlie, I like the way I look! These guys don’t fuck about: I don’t want any facial remodelling.’

  ‘Just a check to ensure I don’t get caught out along the way with a load of crap.’

  She smiled, nervously. ‘I’m with Lyneham. It isn’t going to work so it’s a waste of time talking about it.’

  ‘If it works,’ he pressed.

  ‘If it works we’ll talk about it again.’

  When he asked if she wanted to go on to a club Hillary said he had to be joking, after last time. There was no question of her not going back to Lesnaya. Charlie was worried that this time he didn’t have the aphrodisiac of fear but he needn’t have been. Afterwards she lay wetly over him, her head on his shoulder.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ she said, her voice muffled.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You take house guests?’

  He pulled away, better to look down at her. ‘You serious?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Are we talking serious relationships or escape from embassy compounds?’

  ‘Escape from embassy compounds. I don’t go for serious relationships.’

  ‘My turn for a question. What’s the score between you and Kestler? You two didn’t seem the best of friends at lunch.’ And he was still curious at her earlier dismissal.

  Now it was Hillary who moved away. ‘There isn’t a score. I don’t go for guys who wave their dicks around their heads like a lariat. I like to make my own choice. Which I did. Which is why I’m here. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You did it brilliantly, Charlie.’

  ‘What?’ he said, not understanding.

  ‘Changed the house guest subject.’

  ‘What would the embassy say?’

  ‘Who gives a damn? It’s personal, not professional.’

  And professionally he would need her if the sting operation came even halfway near to being set up. ‘You want your own bedroom?’

  ‘Let’s keep it for friends.’

  They made love once more during the night, slowly, starting when they were still half asleep and stayed entwined afterwards so the telephone rang several times before Charlie could disentangle himself. As he picked up the receiver he saw it was just before seven, although it was still dark outside.

  ‘We picked up five Russians at a place called Cottbus, just over the Polish border,’ announced Balg. ‘They had six canisters with them. And Bonn’s agreed to your sitting in on the interrogation.’

  It was the last of several meetings, a review of everything they had discussed while Peter Johnson had been in Washington, and they ate in Fenby’s private dining room at Pennsylvania Avenue. There was no public benefit parading an unknown Briton at the Four Seasons.

  ‘You’ve no doubt he’d make public what a stupid son-of-a-bitch Kestler was: and me with it?’ It had been Fenby’s recurring question, at every session.

  ‘None,’ insisted Johnson, who blamed Fenby for a lot of his own entrapment.

  ‘So the bastard’s got us by the balls?’ He’d never lost control like this before, never had to be the one obeying the shots instead of calling them, and Fenby didn’t like it.

  ‘And can use what he’s got like you tried to do,’ agreed the deputy British Director. ‘If anything goes wrong we’re package-wrapped for sacrifice.’

  ‘I guess we should cool things for a while.’

  ‘I don’t have any alternative,’ said Johnson, anxious to separate himself from the American.

  ‘I’m going to find one.’

  ‘I don’t want to know about it.’ The southern fried chicken had been cold and Fenby hadn’t served any wine, either.

  chapter 30

  Gunther Schumann, the intended Russian-speaking interrogator who met Charlie at Tegel airport, was a superintendent in the special nuclear smuggling division of the Bundeskriminalamt. An appropriate piratical black patch covered a missing left eye, although not the scar from it that ran down his cheek, and he’d developed the habit of winking the good right one conspiratorially when he talked, which he did a lot in excellent English during their preparatory lunch at the Kempinski, where Charlie had made a nostalgic reservation.

  The arrests had been a coordinated German and Polish operation made entirely possible from the identification of the Warsaw hotel. The five Russians had arrived at the Zajazd Karczma, which Polish intelligence was staking out, eight days earlier. The initial reason for checking them had only been that they were Russian. On the first night the boot of one of their two cars was picked and three canisters discovered. It had obviously been a contact point because they’d stayed there two days; because he’d occupied the Napoleon room they’d decided a Russian carrying a passport in the name of Fedor Alekseevich Mitrov was the leader. There had been no calls made from the hotel. Mitrov used outside street kiosks five times, never the same one twice. He was the only one to telephone, a further indication of his being in charge. He’d been seen to make notes every time but they hadn’t been found after his arrest. The surveillance had been constant, night and day, but there had been no meeting with anyone else in Warsaw or during the interrupted drive to the border. The accelerator cable of one car, a Volkswagen, had snapped near Lodz and they’d lost half a day getting it replaced. They’d been allowed to cross the border because the German nuclear smuggling legislation was stronger and more wide ranging than in Poland. The Bundeskriminalamt had tapped the Cottbus hotel switchboard but again there had been no calls, either in or out. Mitrov had used a kiosk once, within an hour of their Cottbus arrival, but made no notes.

  On their third day at Cottbus the group because very agitated. Two watching Bundeskriminalamt officers, a man and a woman, had been too far away at a pavement café to hear an obvious argument between two of the men, with Mitrov visibly gesturing around him to warn of their being overheard. The group had split, leaving separately: one man had gone direct to the railway station and noted train departures for Berlin. Frightened of losing some of the group – but more importantly what they were carrying – the decision had been made to arrest them. It had been done at four in the morning. They had all been asleep and there had been no resistance, although each had been, armed either with Walther or Markarov handguns. Three Uzi machine guns had been found in the two cars, a Mercedes saloon in addition to the repaired Volkswagen. So had a total of six nuclear canisters, equally split between both vehicles. The cars had been legitimately bought, both for cash, from separate Berlin salesrooms, and each was registered at separate Berlin addresses, although the identities of the named owners on both the purchase and registration documents were false. The Bundeskriminalamt were totally satisfied the people living at the addresses – an accountant and his girlfriend and the widow of a railway inspector – were uninvolved and that their homes had been chosen at random, possibly from a telephone book. No
ne of the arrested Russians had made any statement or admission. The canisters alone, marked with the fingerprints of each of the five, guaranteed a case that could be traced backwards to Russia but not forwards, to the plutonium’s destination.

  ‘And working from your count of twenty-two, there’s still ten containers missing, seven if we use the Russian figure,’ concluded Schumann. ‘Like always, nothing’s ever complete: it’s a bastard.’

  ‘Maybe not quite as incomplete as usual,’ said Charlie, tapping the bulging briefcase firmly wedged between his feet.

  It took Charlie longer than it had the German to set out what he’d brought from Moscow and which had taken him a full day after Balg’s early morning call to collect and collate, from the frantic-for-participation US embassy Bureau and from Rupert Dean in London. Long before Charlie finished Schumann was smiling and nodding, his good eye stuttering up and down.

  ‘I couldn’t assimilate all that properly to break them and they’d realize it: Mitrov quicker than the others. Is your Russian good enough?’

  ‘Yes,’ assured Charlie, quickly.

  ‘We’ll need to build a stage set!’ announced Schumann.

  ‘And give an Oscar performance,’ agreed Charlie.

  Late that evening Charlie surveyed the efforts of nearly seven hours’ work and decided it was indeed very much like a stage set. There were pinboards stretching the entire length of one wall to display every one of the 150 satellite photographs enlarged to their highest definition. Each was accompanied by a separate enhancement of the individuals featured on the general prints, the physical analysis annotated alongside the images. The pictures showing the killing of the train guards were repeated in another display section. Along a second wall was installed a relay of specialized recording and replay equipment and halfway along the third were five full-length criminal line-up boards, calibrated to a giant-sized three metres. Alongside each were scales upon which a person had to sit for their weight to be accurately calculated by counters moved along a minutely marked pendulum bar. Each place was fronted by cameras, Polaroid as well as tripod-mounted. The centre of the room was empty except for five chairs side by side against a table. Official stenographers had their places directly behind and after them, on an elevated platform, were video cameras to record everything.

  Schumann said, ‘There should be music and someone yelling “Lights! Action!”’

  ‘I want to hear much more than that,’ said Charlie.

  He and the German spent another hour that night and two the following morning finalizing their confrontation, Schumann eventually but without offence conceding the orchestration to Charlie.

  The German still, however, initially played the lead. At Schumann’s order the Russians were quick-marched, militarily, to the weighing and measuring section of the room. To their total, half-resisting bewilderment their height and weight were established and after that the medical teams carefully recorded chest, waist, stomach, biceps and leg dimensions. Finally they were photographed against the scaled height charts, both by the sophisticated cameras and on the instant Polaroid equipment.

  Charlie and Schumann positioned themselves so that at all times they could gauge the reaction of the men when, one at a time but led by Mitrov, they were paraded with enforced slowness in front of the Pizhma photographic collage, finishing at the repeated section showing the guard murders at their moment of being committed. From each the reaction was total astonishment: in two cases it was brief, gap-mouthed astonishment. The procession concluded at the electronic equipment, where each warily uneasy man was questioned once more about his involvement in the Pizhma robbery – by Russian speakers other than Charlie and Schumann – to get voice recordings against legally established identities from the repeated although hesitant denials.

  Mitrov was a blond-haired, pale-faced man whose thinness was accentuated by his height. None of the others was as tall, although Charlie estimated two to be just short of two metres. The third was middle height, the fourth much shorter. All were thick set, the particularly small man positively fat. In the chaired line to which they were led Mitrov maintained the best control. The small man feasted off his fingernails and another man, blond like Mitrov, kept palming back hair that didn’t need putting into place.

  It was a full half an hour before the leader of the physiological analyzing team invited Schumann and Charlie to go through the identification with him, putting the height, weight and body dimensions calculated by the Washington photographic examiners against the just-recorded detailed measurements of the arrested five.

  ‘No doubt about any of them,’ declared the man, matching the Polaroid prints to the satellite images. ‘Three positive identifications with the shootings …’ His finger jabbed out at three different prints on the separated murder-proving pinboard. ‘… Here, here and here … Each showing someone at the moment of their being shot …’ He referred to the identity sheets to which the Polaroids were attached. ‘… Yuri Dedov, here …’ he said, picking out the small fat man actually standing over his victim as he fired. The analyst attached a photograph of the averagely tall blond-haired man to another satellite print. ‘This is Valeri Federov firing an Uzi at two guards emerging from the train. And this …’ He pinned a picture of the man of middle height to another satellite print ‘… is Vladimir Okulov shooting in the back a guard who appears to be running away.’ There were six positive identifications of Fedor Mitrov, in two of which the man was seen to be breaking open storage canisters, and four of the fifth man, Ivan Raina, helping him do it.

  Schumann carried the matched photographs across to the five, all of whom were fidgeting and foot-shuffling with the exception of Mitrov, although a nerve had begun to pull at the corner of the man’s mouth. The German dealt out his selection in front of each man and said; ‘Everything witnessed, in provable detail, from a satellite …’ He looked to the three killers, in turn, ‘And there you are, caught in the actual act of murder. That’s going to make your trial unique.’

  On cue Charlie crossed to the bank of tape machines, still held by the excitement that had swept through him minutes before. The audio tapes had been synched by both Washington and London to the millisecond to the times of the satellite images and the German analyst had just identified Fedor Mitrov as the man who had joked about akrashena as he’d smashed open the plutonium containers. Which was the first segment Charlie had chosen to replay, never believing it would have the significance it now did. The transmission had been cleaned of static and the voice echoed clearly into the room, the sound so good they could even hear Raina’s laugh, after the remark. Schumann and Charlie had decided against the actual interrogations being communal and Charlie snapped the machine off after a short while.

  ‘Voice prints can be proven as accurately as fingerprints,’ he said. ‘That’s why you were questioned earlier: to get your voices positively recorded against your names. In a few days we’ll have every word each of you spoke, all the time you were at Pizhma: a complete transcript.’

  The finger-gnawing Dedov said, ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Schumann.

  The fast-winking German was so euphoric by the second day that he commuted overnight to the Wiesbaden headquarters to brief the alerted Bundeskriminalamt hierarchy that they were getting sufficient for a sensational international trial as well as the chance to target a major Russian Mafia Family domiciled in Berlin.

  They carried out their questioning in the stage-set conference room, one man at a time after that first resistance-breaking group encounter, each Russian constantly reminded of the evidence of his guilt. An early conclusion was that apart from Mitrov, the other four were foot soldiers, fetch-and-carry gofers who pointed guns and pressed triggers at people at whom they were told to point guns and press triggers, without asking why.

  They questioned the anxious-to-confess Dedov first and the subsequent cross-examination of the other three provided little more than elaboration of what the diminutive fa
t man told them. They were the Dolgoprudnaya, the leading Moscow Family. Stanislav Georgevich Silin was the boss of bosses of six subsidiary clans which he ruled American Mafia style, through a controlling Commission with himself as chairman. The organization was a pyramid structure run military fashion, even to military designations and titles. They never saw or dealt with Silin direct, always through corps commanders or clan bosses. Mitrov had been their corps commander for the Pizhma robbery. They’d not been involved in any planning: they’d taken their instructions from Mitrov, who had told them where the nuclear train was to be stopped and that the guards and the escorting soldiers all had to be killed, to leave no witnesses. Mitrov hadn’t told them why some containers had to be broken open. After the robbery they’d driven further south, to Uren, where the majority of the twenty-two canisters had been transferred: only six were left in the original trucks. None of them knew where those trucks or the six canisters had been taken. They didn’t know, either, where the other ten canisters had gone. They’d been loaded into three Mercedes and one BMW and they’d all travelled in convoy for the remainder of that day. They’d split northeast of Moscow, at Kalinin. Of course they’d heard of the Agayans and Shelapin Families, even of the territory dispute at Bykovo, but knew nothing about either being involved in a nuclear robbery. They were small time: punks. They certainly hadn’t been at Pizhma: that had been entirely Dolgoprudnaya. None of them knew a Yatisyna organization. They’d stayed at the Zajazd Karczma longer than they’d intended because Mitrov had difficulty making contact from a public kiosk. And then been further delayed by the Volkswagen breakdown in getting to Cottbus, where they’d been told to go, and their buyers hadn’t been waiting, as arranged. Okulov had caused the witnessed pavement argument by accusing Mitrov of screwing up and stranding them with a load of nuclear stuff they couldn’t get rid of. It was Raina who had enquired about Berlin trains, intending to go the following day to make contact with the Dolgoprudnaya group permanently established there. Their middle-of-the-night arrest had come before Mitrov had given him the Dolgoprudnaya’s Berlin address but Raina thought it was somewhere in the Marzahn district, in the old communist-controlled east of the city.