Bomb Grade

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Does that mean Ley’s my daddy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why hasn’t he been before?’

  ‘The man in the church had to say he could be.’

  ‘I’ll be like the others at school then?’

  ‘Do you want Ley to be your daddy?’

  ‘Will he still buy me presents?’

  ‘I expect so. There’ll be a party, after the church.’

  ‘Do you want Ley to be my daddy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Even though she’d been given the instructions, the damned woman shouldn’t have taken off to Berlin without advising Washington, so there was another disciplinary reason for getting rid of Hillary Jamieson, although Fenby didn’t feel he needed any more. But he didn’t like the idea of her being where he couldn’t know what she was doing. Which was easily resolved. Kestler had to be moved to Berlin at once, to keep a handle on everything.

  He smiled up at Milton Fitzjohn’s approach across the restaurant. ‘Thought you’d like to know in advance that you’re going to have a very famous nephew in the next few weeks,’ Fenby greeted the House Speaker. ‘So it’s a good time to talk about the future.’

  chapter 36

  Quite sure he could judge her moral reaction from twice having heard Hillary’s denunciation of nuclear cynicism and hypocrisy, it was unthinkable for Charlie to tell her in advance what he was going to do, even though he could have omitted the secondary intention and just argued his need to survive. Wrong, even, to have brought Hillary with him. But he still needed her. He’d hoped to have seen enough in the Moscow warehouse and thought he had, but Hillary’s Wiesbaden account of the cylinder examination had convinced Charlie he needed to know much more, more probably than it was possible to assimilate.

  Once safely across the border, Charlie drove more leisurely, satisfied they were undetected, and with time to spare stopped at a roadside shrine for Hillary to take photographs and again at an ornate church, where she crossed herself and genuflected and lit two candles and he realized she was a Catholic. Unasked, she said the candles were a prayer to keep everyone safe, them most of all.

  He let Hillary lead them into it, when they started driving once more, waiting for her to ask again about Kalisz, feeling her eyes upon him when he repeated the danger of too many people.

  ‘You sure that’s all it is?’ she challenged, openly.

  ‘What more could there be?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘It makes sense to see they’re on schedule. The last time everything was thrown out by the Volkswagen breakdown.’ Intent on keeping the conversation where he wanted it, he said, ‘You seemed very confident there was no danger of the cylinders leaking?’

  ‘No reason why they should, providing they aren’t thrown around.’

  ‘And then there’s the secondary protection system,’ he prompted. Which worked, as he’d expected it would, because with him at first and certainly at dinner with Popov and Natalia, he’d discerned the expert’s pleasure Hillary got explaining her esoteric science.

  Although enriched plutonium could act as an atomic trigger, by itself it was latent as an explosive but lethal in content. It could expand if there was an abrupt or sustained temperature change, which was why there was an inbuilt cooling system: America and Britain had once used the same sort of storage but didn’t any longer. There was actually an additional protection in the Russian canisters, an expansion provision that was always allowed. Abrupt expansion could spring both the meters and the gauges, the primary function of which was measuring. The moment the pressure went beyond their tolerance, stronger seals were released completely to close off the cylinder neck.

  It was more complicated than Charlie had imagined. ‘The secondary system only operates under heat pressure?’

  ‘That’s all it needs to.’

  ‘What would have happened at Pizhma? We know the canisters leaked there.’

  ‘The tops were simply smashed off. It would have been easier just to unscrew them but I guess they didn’t know that.’

  ‘Using those half-handles on the same level as the gauges and meters?’

  ‘And a lot of strength: they’re filled at below zero temperature and the metal expands afterwards: it’s a further way of ensuring a protective seal.’

  Charlie thought there seemed far too many. ‘You need a special tool?’

  ‘Not necessarily, on those we saw. They’re pretty basic, like most of the Russian technology. But a wrench might help.’

  ‘What if the meter or gauge controls came unscrewed?’

  He knew Hillary was still looking directly at him. ‘Charlie, you considering a Masters in nuclear packaging?’

  ‘I’m trying to understand what could go wrong.’

  ‘The ones I examined were split-pinned.’

  Charlie hadn’t noticed that. ‘Split-pins can shake loose.’

  ‘The ones we saw were spring-ended, splayed after being inserted to prevent that happening.’

  ‘What’s highly enriched mean?’

  ‘That’s it’s highly irradiated.’

  ‘I don’t understand the danger of a leak.’

  Hillary turned to look outside the car and Charlie was relieved. ‘OK, you know what a laser is, an amplification of a monochromatic light beam? Seen all the movies of it cutting through metal on its way up to James Bond’s crotch, stuff like that?’

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘Same thing here. Except that it’s an X-ray and it’s invisible. You don’t feel it or hear it but it penetrates most things except substances like lead, and as I told you before, it melts bones like butter and you can take your pick of the cancers.’

  ‘Why hasn’t it affected Mitrov and Raina? We’ve pictures of them breaking canisters open.’

  ‘We don’t know it hasn’t. But I’d guess they’re OK. Our time frames give us just that: the times. They weren’t exposed for longer than a few minutes, at any one time. Say half an hour, in total: maybe even less.’

  ‘How long does it take to be fatal?’

  ‘After two hours, closely exposed to something as hot as we’re talking about, you’re wasting your money buying a new suit for Christmas.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning to.’

  ‘Don’t plan anything else,’ said Hillary, with a prescience Charlie found unnerving.

  They got into Kalisz late in the afternoon, with the town already shrouded in winter half-light. It was almost completely dark by the time Charlie located the Atilia. There were no BMWs in the small parking area visible to the side of the hotel. Charlie drove by without stopping.

  Having established his marker Charlie separated them from it by four streets before he actively began looking for where they could stay. He explored a further two roads before he found a pre-Solidarity relic boxed between a uniform row of shops and apartment buildings. It was an ugly, falling-apart example of the central planning hotel design once imposed from Moscow, a concrete and formica and factory-wood mausoleum. Off a cavernous vestibule there was an even more cavernous bar, already filled with noise and smoke. The carpet of their room was scarred by cigarette burns and ran the spectrum of stains. The wardrobe door was so thin it rippled as it opened and the bedstead achieved the same shimmer at the slightest touch. The sheets were grey and transparent and matched some of the carpet stains, and through the net of their curtains, which was all that covered the window, they could see through the net of the facing room a man scratching his groin beneath his underpants, which was all he wore. He saw them looking and went on scratching. There was no connected bathroom, which Charlie was glad about for the later excuse, if he needed one. The mirror over the handbasin was verdigrised in every corner and the basin grimy from the dirt of previous occupants. There was no plug. There was no heating, although the pipes groaned with the constipated ettort to provide it.

  Hillary said, ‘You sure know how to give a girl a good time.’

  ‘It’ll do,’ said Charlie. He would have sought out suc
h a place if he hadn’t found it the first time because its overwhelming benefit was that such hotels never closed and no interest was ever given to comings and goings. There was no restaurant and bills were settled at the moment of booking in. Charlie thought it was perfect.

  ‘What happens if they got picked up crossing the Russian border into Poland?’ demanded Hillary.

  ‘We’d already know of an interception at the Russian border.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s the point,’ argued Hillary. ‘You really being straight with me, Charlie?’

  ‘I said I’d keep you safe.’

  ‘That wasn’t the question.’

  ‘I’m being straight with you.’ Charlie mentally chanted the mantra that the end justified the means, whatever those means were. ‘I’m going to check out the Atilia. Alone.’

  ‘I’m not sitting here watching that guy across the yard jerk off.’

  From experience, Charlie went to the town square. The war legacy restoration had been done well enough for the wine restaurant to look original. They chose a table against the balcony rail, overlooking the ground-floor dining room and the spits upon which the meat slowly revolved, over two separate open fires. Hillary agreed the view was much better.

  As he negotiated the sidestreets in the most direct line to the Atilia, Charlie tried to reassure himself with all the other reasons for the Russians being delayed, apart from that suggested by Hillary. The rendezvous with Sergei Sobelov and the man who called himself Turkel was still more than a week away. So there was more than sufficient failsafe time. And although it might spook them, which he wanted to avoid above all else, he could always postpone the transaction. Eighty kilos of nuclear material on the one hand balanced by $22,000,000 on the other was a powerful argument for a little patience.

  But the BMWs were there.

  Not at the side, which was now much fuller, but in a corner tight to the rear of the hotel and shadowed by some trees so that at first he didn’t see them and momentarily felt the first dip of real alarm. There were enough other cars, as well as the tree canopy, for Charlie to get right alongside. The bonnet of each car was cold and Charlie guessed they’d already been parked when he’d passed the first time. He checked the dashboards of each for the warning flicker of an alarm system. There was none.

  ‘They’re there,’ he announced as he sat down with Hillary thirty minutes later.

  ‘Crisis over then?’

  ‘There never was one.’

  ‘You know I’ve got to check them, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Do you need to go inside the trunks?’

  She shook her head. ‘If anything’s gone wrong I’ll pick it up from the outside.’

  Charlie hurried the meal, wanting the advantage of the crowded car park and insisted on getting Hillary’s equipment satchel from the boot of their Mercedes for the opportunity to check the tool kit. There were some pliers, although they didn’t look particularly substantial, and a tyre lever but no other tool he could utilize. The tiny pen torch worked perfectly.

  The going home exodus had begun by the time they got to the Atilia, which they intruded into as if making for their own car, needing only minutes for Hillary to check the readings virtually as she passed the BMWs. Back on the road, clear of the hotel, she said, ‘There was no reading at all. Everything’s fine.’

  It was almost one-thirty before Charlie was sure Hillary was asleep. The bed creaked and groaned with his every movement to get out and he kept stopping, the excuse ready, but she slept on. He’d laid out his clothes when he’d undressed, finding them easily. The floor creaked, although not as loudly as the bed, on his way to the door and he waited for several minutes on the inside, listening for a change in her breathing. It continued on, undisturbed. There was scarcely a second’s flash of light, as he went out into the corridor.

  The lobby was still as busy as Charlie had known it would be and the side bar smokier, although the noise had dropped. No one paid him the slightest attention. The pliers and the torch from the Mercedes fitted easily into his jacket pocket but the tyre lever was awkward. His feet hurt like they always did at moments like this, as well as from all the walking he’d done that day.

  He spent a lot of time watching the Atilia before approaching it. Most of the cars had gone, although there were still a lot of lights in the building and through the windows he could see people moving around inside. When he did move, he kept close to the building, to play the hopeful late-night drinker if there was a sudden challenge. It was coal-black beneath the trees and he didn’t have to move cautiously any more. The standard method of springing boot locks was with a sharp downward blow momentarily to free the catch hook simultaneously with driving in the outer lock so the hook failed to engaged when the lid lifted again. Unable to risk the noise of the thump, Charlie tested with several pressing movements to ensure there wasn’t a hidden vibration alarm, and then actually sat upon it, levering himself sharply up and down from the bumper at the same time as forcing the tyre lever between his legs against the lock, close to sniggering at how ridiculous it would look. But it worked. The boot lid came open with only a vague click, although he thought he heard the cylinders inside shift. Momentarily Charlie remained gazing into the dark interior, trying to make out the shapes, suppressing another snigger. Enough atomic material to destroy a city – certainly this city – kept in a car boot that could be opened by bouncing up and down on his ass. But where else could it be kept? The canisters could hardly have been carried up to the reservation desk or put in a bureau drawer, along with the spare shirts. And a guardian preferring to sleep in the back seat instead of a hotel bed would have made a lot of people far too curious.

  He limited the torch, using it only to find the split-pins in the gauge nuts and get the pliers in place. Without being able to see what he was doing when he applied the pressure the pliers kept slipping off, sometimes with a sharp click when the plier teeth snapped together. The handles were slippery, too, where he was sweating, which was nerves, like the sniggering. Twice he had to stop, ducking behind the vehicle and pulling the boot lid down at the shouted departure of people with vehicles nearby. Once a man came out and urinated steamily against the wall and on another occasion he had to stop altogether for several minutes while a woman in a see-through nightdress stood at a window, appearing to look directly at him. She had very hairy armpits.

  It must have taken him almost an hour finally to loosen two of the split-pins. There was almost another snigger at the ease with which each notched valve unscrewed. Charlie abandoned the remaining two cylinders, shifting to the second car. It was much more difficult bum-bouncing the lid open. The woman came back to the window and another group departed, halting him. He’d virtually decided to abandon it when the catch finally sprung. Here he tried jamming the tyre iron across the releasing handles and wrenching sharply and again they gave almost immediately. It took Charlie fifteen minutes to release three. Satisfied, he softly pressed the lid shut. Momentarily he paused against the car, forcing the breath into his body to recover until he realized what he was actually leaning against and jerked hurriedly away. There was a shout from the hotel as he went through the side parking area but Charlie kept walking and it didn’t come again.

  No one noticed his arrival back. On his own floor Charlie did use the bathroom, needing it, and rinsed his face and hands clean.

  He listened carefully outside the bedroom door and then again directly inside. Hillary’s breathing was undisturbed. Charlie creaked across the room, let his clothes lie where they dropped, and edged into bed. The bed sounded his arrival but it wasn’t important any more. He knew he would be cold so he didn’t let himself touch her, lying on his back in the darkness.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  Hillary’s voice, unfogged by sleep, so surprised him that Charlie physically jumped. ‘Toilet.’

  ‘Bad bowel problem?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I heard you leave. Three hours ago.’ />
  ‘I couldn’t sleep. When downstairs for a drink. Thought I might as well go and check their cars again.’

  ‘Something I don’t think I mentioned about those gauges. From what I’ve read, the design was updated on the later cylinder models for the secondary protection system to operate if the valves are disturbed. It was only the prototype that was entirely controlled by temperature.’

  ‘What were the ones we saw in Moscow?’

  ‘The updated version.’

  ‘Good.’ He had to tell her: partially at least. She’d learn in the end but by then it would all have worked. ‘I’m trying to protect myself.’

  ‘Protect yourself!’

  ‘I’ve got to link Sobelov and Turkel. And then get them with the cylinders. I need a way to get out. Otherwise I’m trapped with them, when the shooting starts.’

  ‘You didn’t know the secondary protection came in automatically?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted.

  ‘So you were happy to kill people, to give you an escape?’

  ‘I’m not asking you to approve. Just understand.’

  ‘It’s difficult.’

  ‘They know what they’re carrying. And that it could kill hundreds.’

  ‘I’ve never gone for the God-like judgment argument.’

  ‘It’s done.’

  ‘I guess I knew you were a bastard. But not this much of one.’

  Charlie didn’t speak.

  ‘You just damaged the meters? You didn’t do anything else?’

  ‘No,’ lied Charlie.

  ‘You going to stop at Poznan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d like to get back to Berlin and forget about this.’

  They left early and reached Berlin by late afternoon. Hillary didn’t speak for a lot of the journey and said she wasn’t hungry and wanted an early night.

  Gunther Schumann was furious and insisted Roh and other agency chiefs were even angrier. ‘We bent rules for you, particularly over that damned Zurich bank account.’

  ‘The Zurich thing is quite separate: you want it as much as I do,’ reminded Charlie, rejecting anger with apparent anger. ‘This is different. We had an agreement. Roh broke it, not me. The other agencies too, probably. You wouldn’t have got this far without doing things my way and this might be as far as you do get. The Russians are on their way: I’ve checked them. And should be at Poznan on time. Anything that goes wrong there or from now on is down to you, OK?’ Arrogant son-of-a-bitch, he thought, remembering Hillary’s accusation.