The Dreadful Alchemist: A Thrilling Espionage Novel (Techno thriller, Mystery & Suspense Book 1)

by Charles Z David

  Piero followed the money trail and tried to find out who had rented the warehouse and within minutes got the name of a local firm that belonged to a prominent businessman with known ties to the separatist party that was also recognized as a racist stronghold. The businessman said that he had been asked to rent the warehouse as a personal favor by a local politician and claimed that he had no idea what the warehouse was used for. An interrogation of the politician quickly led to the Italian delegate who participated in the Corfu meeting, but he was forewarned and by the time Piero's agents got to his home they were informed that he had gone on vacation to an undisclosed location. Umberto and David were extremely aggravated since this was their strongest and most direct lead to the organization that was behind the project.

  It was obvious to all of them that the device had been moved from the warehouse recently and that the top priority was to locate and neutralize it. This could be done if they could determine the target by finding the key people and the organization that had built the device. Umberto wanted to immediately post the photos of Modena, Smalley and the blond man on all the media channels and appeal to the public to help in locating these dangerous "drug dealers". David asked him to wait a little longer until he consulted his colleagues in the international task force. He was particularly concerned that panic would spread if word got out that an improvised nuclear device had been produced by a group of fanatics and was now at large somewhere in Europe. They already knew that Dr. Jason Smalley was a racist who believed in expelling all foreigners of inferior races from England and that Professor Modena was a Catalan separatist. They did not know who the blond man was and what connection he had to the others but after he had been seen in London with Smalley and in Padova with Modena and Smalley they suspected that he may be one of the major players in the project. Umberto suggested that they focus on identifying the mysterious blond man and proposed that they circulate his photo image through all the airports around Padova in the hope that someone would remember him.

  May 19th, Vienna and Padova

  In the morning David flew back to Vienna and was met by Orna Cohen at the airport. The ITF members were already gathered in one of the conference rooms of the IAEA headquarters and received David's report about the events and findings in Padova with ashen faces.

  The American delegate, Eugene, was the first to recover from the shocking news, and said that they should discuss the ways and means needed to transport the device from the warehouse to the target area. Assuming that the device indeed consisted of a U-233 fissile material core and was not manufactured by a fully equipped advanced workshop it would probably be quite cumbersome as it would have to be a primitive implosion type device. He speculated that it may be as large and as heavy as the "fat man" plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki at the end of Second World War and would therefore require a crane to lift it and a truck to carry it. He suggested that they first look for trucks and cranes in the Padova area that may have been used to transport the device.

  Vassilly interjected that if an expert such as Dr. Smalley was involved then perhaps they could do with a much smaller and lighter design. He also emphasized that the Nagasaki atomic bomb had to be transported and dropped by an airplane, requiring an additional protective shell of heavy metal while the improvised nuclear device would be transported on land, and perhaps by sea, and would not need this heavy shell.

  The British member of the task force, Thomas, said that he had closely examined Smalley's qualifications and found that he had no access to anything but quite primitive designs so that Eugene's assumption that the device would be large and heavy was probably correct though Vassilly's point was also valid.

  David added that if a truck was used to transport the device it could be hundreds of kilometers from Padova as at least 12 hours, and possibly 24 hours, have passed since the device left the warehouse. He then excused himself, left the conference room and called Umberto with the new information and speculations asking him to find all companies in the Padova area that had cranes, trucks and especially flat bed trucks equipped with cranes. He asked him to look into sales and rentals of such equipment and then returned to the conference room.

  The discussion now focused on the wisdom of contacting Interpol about these developments and the consensus was that it would only cause panic all over Europe if news of an unsupervised nuclear device got out. They then talked about involving the Secretary General and the IAEA and decided to wait before alerting the agency because of the same reasons. They agreed that regardless of the exact location of the target they had to alert the friendly intelligence agencies of the European countries, especially those in which strong racist and separatist movements were active and strengthen the radiation monitoring network on the major highways and in ports in case its target was a large harbor town.

  Just after noon time David received a phone call from Umberto telling him that his people had located a local car rental agency in Padova that had rented a truck with a crane to an exceptionally big person who looked like a Viking. There was no written record of the rental but after a short questioning one of the employees admitted that he had carried out the transaction but had not had time to complete the forms as the truck was returned the same afternoon and the large Viking exchanged it for a regular passenger car. The employee said that this deal was also done without a rental agreement for the same reason. When asked if he had made a photocopy of the Viking's driver's license the employee said that the copying machine had a malfunction so a copy was not available. Piero's agent was a very sharp person and wanted to see the truck and record the mileage that it had done. The employee now became very cooperative and remembered that he was surprised to see that the truck had done less than 100 km and he asked the Viking if he was not satisfied with the truck. The Viking rudely told him to mind his own business and pulled out a 100 Euro note which silenced the employee. The agent asked about the passenger car and was told that it was a Jeep Renegade four wheel drive and got its license plate number. The car rental employee was summoned to the police station and asked to work with a police artist to create an image of the Viking which he was doing at that very moment.

  David asked Umberto what he thought about the new information and what he proposed to do with it. Umberto said that he had discussed the matter with Piero and they concluded that obviously the device must be within less than 50 km from Padova and probably stored temporarily somewhere close. Piero had already sent his agents to the warehouse and by now they were questioning everybody in the area about a truck equipped with a crane. In addition, they sent an all-point-bulletin alerting police about the Renegade jeep and the Viking driving it, but were not very hopeful considering the time frame and the fact that it was quite a common vehicle in northern Italy and that the artist's image of the Viking was not be as accurate as a photograph but this was all they could do.

  Chapter 9

  May 19th, Trieste and Rijeka

  Ollie had arrived in Trieste the previous evening after making the short drive from the farmhouse near San Giorgio delle Pertiche. He stopped at one of the rest-areas on the A4 highway between Venice and Trieste and under the cover of darkness removed the license plates from a car that was parked farthest from the restaurant and replaced the Renegade's plates. He knew that crossing through Slovenia into Croatia with the rented car would not be possible, especially if the car registration and license plates did not match so he left the car in a large parking lot and checked into a small family run hotel.

  In the morning he boarded a bus that would take him to Rijeka where he intended to find a ship that would take his container with the device inside it to the Haifa port in Israel. The bus ride went smoothly and no one gave his passport a second look when he crossed into Croatia after a 27 km short stretch through Slovenia. However when he reached Rijeka and talked to a number of shipping agents he found that there was no direct ship from Rijeka to Haifa but that a container could be transshipped through Bari in Italy and Limassol in Cyprus and
reach Israel three or four weeks later. Although not happy with the delay he thought that this would give him time to arrange for the release of the container from the Haifa port and its shipment to the target area in Jerusalem. So he made the necessary preparations, and the accompanying necessary cash transactions, to ensure that his container with its marking as agricultural machinery would be loaded on a ship that was to leave Rijeka heading for Bari four days later. He still had to figure out how to transport the container to Rijeka and decided that the best way would be to hire a Croatian company to collect the container from the farm near San Giorgio. This way, even if the truck was stopped Ollie himself would remain untraceable. The manager of the Croatian company said that for a suitable fee he could make sure that the container arrived in Rijeka safely and without delay, meaning without being opened. The "suitable fee" quadrupled the original price but Ollie willingly agreed to pay half in advance and half upon delivery. So he gave the manager instructions for getting to the farm and they arranged for the pick up to take place the next day in the evening. After that Ollie took the bus back to Trieste, retrieved the Renegade from the parking lot and drove back to the farm.

  May 20th, Padova and San Giorgio

  Ollie spent the night sleeping soundly in the bedroom of the farmhouse. He had arrived late the previous night and after checking that the container had not been tampered with parked the Renegade jeep in the barn next to the container. He saw Andreas's body in the living room but was too tired to do anything about it at night. In the morning he managed to move the heavy body to the barnyard and dug a superficial grave in which he placed Andreas's body. He cleaned the living room to the best of his ability since he feared that the Croatian truck driver might want to enter the house on some pretext. He then settled down to wait for the truck.

  Meanwhile, back in Padova, Piero summoned all his agents and told them that one of the neighbors who worked not far from the Astraea warehouse had seen a truck equipped with a crane enter the warehouse garage and leave a few minutes later with a standard shipping container. He did not notice the writing on the container but was sure that there was some kind of a sign or emblem on it. He wasn't sure about its color either but said the truck itself bore the name of a local rental company. This information was not very helpful as Piero already knew about the truck and also knew that the truck had been returned to the rental agency. The same neighbor also said that a short while after the truck departed about a dozen men also left the warehouse. When he was shown the photo of Modena he said that he had seen him several times, but did not recognize Dr. Smalley's photo. However, when he saw the artist's image of the blond man and the Viking he said that they were the two people that had been in the truck.

  Once again Piero's elite troops set out on a search of storage facilities and farmhouses in the area surrounding Padova. Umberto managed to arrange for a couple of police helicopters to carry out an aerial survey while the rest of the agents scanned the roads. The agricultural area contained many places in which a container could be easily hidden out of sight. Piero supposed that the container may have been transported to the holding area near the port of Venice and sent half his men to search for it among the thousands of containers awaiting shipment. They were all equipped with radiation detectors but were told to focus on the containers listed as having arrived for shipment during the previous 24 hours. In addition he placed several roadblocks on the roads leading out of Padova but did not have enough radiation detectors for all of them.

  The Croatian truck driver was stopped a couple of times for examination but his papers were in order and he had all the necessary documentation for a merchandise pick-up in Italy that was to be transported to Rijeka for shipment to Bari. The policemen that checked him asked him why the container could not be shipped directly from Venice to Bari without leaving Italy but in broken Italian the driver grumbled that he was only a truck driver and not the manager of the company. In the evening he arrived at the farm near San Giorgio where Ollie offered him a cup of coffee which the driver declined. They used the truck's crane to load the container on the platform and secure it with straps. The driver told Ollie that he had been stopped a couple of times by police but Ollie told him not to worry as all the paperwork was in order. The truck with Croatian plates heading back to Rijeka with agricultural machinery equipment was only stopped once before reaching Venice but was quickly allowed to continue on its way by the tired and bored policeman after its documentation was examined.

  As soon as the container was on its way, Ollie got into the Renegade jeep and drove south to Bologna where he abandoned the jeep at the railway parking lot and checked into a cheap hotel near the station. The following morning he boarded the train to Rome and from there he took a flight to Ljubljana. He rented a car at the airport and drove to Rijeka, contacted the shipping agent where he made sure that the container had arrived and was to be loaded on the ship for Bari and paid the second half of the transportation fee. He knew that he had to get a new identity as he was sure that the truck with the crane and the container would be traced to the farm, and he feared that Andreas's body would be discovered pointing a finger at him. He decided to drive the rented car from Rijeka to the highway connecting Zagreb with Dubrovnik and then cross into Montenegro, ditch the car in Podgorica and from there use public transportation to cross into Albania that was the only truly Muslim country in Europe, not counting Turkey, of course. From Shkoder near the border he took an Albanian bus to Tirana and found a place close to the Tirana International hotel that had a room-to-rent sign.

  The helicopters had been called off as soon as it got dark but the ground survey continued and Piero's people worked through the night going from one farmhouse to the next. It was after 10 pm when one of the teams arrived at the farmhouse near San Giorgio and although they found no one at home they opened the gate and wandered around the house and the barn. They noted that the tire marks of a heavy vehicle on the ground and in the barn and called in for assistance. Piero himself arrived with a sensitive radiation detector and they found slightly elevated radiation levels in the barn. A closer look in the barnyard showed signs of freshly dug soil and within minutes Andreas's body was discovered in the shallow grave in which Ollie had buried him. Piero immediately identified the body that fit the description of the large Viking and he called Umberto with the news that the bird has flown the coop. There were no documents on the body and all they could do was take mug shots of the face that had not been too distorted after being buried for two days. Upon hearing this Umberto almost lost his cool and murmured a juicy Italian expletive before calling David in Vienna.

  After hearing Umberto's report David said that they should try to identify the Viking and suggested that the photos they had taken be sent to all European police departments and to Interpol. The description of the exceptionally large body was also attached to the post-mortem photo. David thought that there was a high likelihood that the man was from one of the Scandinavian countries and Umberto concurred and said that he would personally contact the police chiefs in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland and ask them to give top priority to the investigation.

  20th May, Vienna

  David and Orna were just having a nightcap in her apartment when he received the phone call from Umberto. David realized that they kept getting close to finding the device and the mysterious blond man who appeared to be the moving force behind the project, yet he was always one step ahead of them. He told Umberto that now their top priority should be to find the man as he was definitely the leader of the project and that he would call for an urgent meeting of the task force for the following morning to update them that the device had been moved again and that they had to call for all the help they could get to find the blond man. He then called all the ITF members and summoned them for a nine o'clock meeting the next morning. David next called Haim Shimony, the Deputy Director of Mossad and gave him a brief update on the situation. Shimony asked David to return to Israel after his meeting in Vienna. By
the time he had done this neither he nor Orna were in the mood for anything but cuddling.

  21st May, morning in Tirana, Albania

  In the morning Ollie went to the central mosque and asked to see the Imam. Several eyebrows were raised when the blond man asked for the Imam but he was granted an audience after the morning prayers in which he participated. In stilted Arabic Ollie told the Imam that he was a Swedish convert to Islam and was in trouble with his country's authorities and needed a new passport. The Imam was reserved and suspicious at first but when Ollie told him a little about his adventures with the Islamic State forces in Syria the atmosphere changed dramatically and the Imam offered his help and told him to return in the evening. Ollie wandered around the city and was impressed by the difference between Stockholm and Tirana, both on the same continent while appearing to be worlds apart.