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

by Charles Z David

  When the three of them met at noon in Doron's apartment they decided to use the same ploy to extract information from one of the scientists. They thought that it would easier to do that with the older of the two, the divorced engineer called Stavros. The two intelligence officers had already located the address given by Guido on Google Earth maps and Street View photos but the team still had to find a way to seize Stavros in broad daylight without setting off alarms. So they pulled out the oldest trick in the book – seducing Stavros with a woman that presented him with an offer he couldn't refuse.

  Finding a willing and able woman proved to be quite simple and just a matter of offering the right amount of money to the right type of woman. They invited one of the high-class call girls, Alexis, who came to Doron's apartment and after hearing their proposal a little haggling took place and an agreement was reached on the price for her services. Her part was very simple - she was to knock on Stavros's door pretending to be lost while looking for a person who had called for her special services and asking for permission to use his toilet as she suddenly felt unwell. Then she would ask him if she could lie down for a moment. The way she looked no red blooded Greek man could refuse her request. A minute later Yakir would ring the bell and when the door opened he would see Alexis and fly into a rage saying that he had called for her services. He would then overpower Stavros and inject him with the tranquillizer, pay Alexis and send her on her way. Doron and David would then come to the apartment and replay the ISIS executioner scene and get Stavros to speak. Once again the plan was fraught with holes but they knew that Guido might warn Stavros to disappear and time was of the essence.

  Surprisingly the plan worked and they quickly had Stavros trussed in a chair and gagged in his own apartment. The John the Beheader act worked wonders and Stavros was more than willing to cooperate. David was mainly interested in two things: if Stavros knew the intended target of the device, and more importantly if he could describe it. Stavros said that to the best of his knowledge, as he had been told by the professor, the device was to be used only for blackmail purposes and never to be detonated. He understood, without being expressly told, that it would serve to purify Europe of unwanted foreign elements, and would be shared by several likeminded organizations. The description of the device matched the implosion bomb model and the dimensions he gave confirmed that it was more or less like a stripped down version of the "fat man" unsophisticated atomic weapon. His information about the container did not add anything new as he only saw it for a brief moment when the device was placed in it and he did not notice the exact name painted on it. He could not provide any new details about Ollie beyond the fact that he visited the lab in Padova quite frequently and often with a large Viking type called Andreas. When questioned about the workforce he told them that there were about a dozen employees from different countries and the only people he knew were his Greek colleague and Professor Modena. When he was shown a photo of Dr. Smalley he recognized him immediately as Dr. Jay, and David figured that the nickname was derived from the initial of his first name, Jason. Stavros said that all the employees kept pretty much to themselves and were warned not to relate any personal details. After warning him that if he called anyone about the interrogation they would get to him and cut his head off with a dull knife, the Israeli team left the apartment after giving Stavros another dose of the tranquillizer that would keep him quiet in wonderland until the next morning.

  28th May, Tirana, Albania

  At the central mosque, Immad looked at Ollie and smiled when he saw the French beard that he had grown during the past week. He then took a Swedish passport out of his pocket and looked at the photograph of the previous owner from which it was stolen in Dubrovnik. Apparently there were no suitable Swedish tourists that even remotely resembled Ollie or were approximately the same age and with the same build in Tirana, or for that matter in Albania. Immad told Ollie that the price would be higher than expected due to the extra costs involved in getting this passport. He also explained that Ollie would have to make some further changes with his hair style but would not have to dye it, as he had previously thought. When he handed over the passport, after a substantial sum of money was transferred, Ollie opened it and looked at the photograph of Andreas Nester Burkhart, age 33, height of 1.82 m, blue eyes, balding blond hair, with a little French goatee beard and a small scar on his left cheek partly covered by the beard. The irony of being called Andreas was not lost on Ollie. Immad said that he would take Ollie to a local barbershop where his appearance would be slightly altered to match the photograph. When the changes had been made Immad told Ollie that he should use the passport quickly and sparingly as it might soon be reported as stolen.

  Ollie had heard that getting into Israel as a lone traveler could be problematic since the border control officers were automatically suspicious of young single men arriving in Israel, regardless of their nationality and appearance. He reckoned that the best way to enter the country without drawing unwanted attention to himself would be to join a church group on a pilgrimage to the holy places. He decided to take a flight from Tirana to Oslo, in Norway, and then cross into Sweden by train and book a sightseeing trip to the Holy Land with one of the many church groups. He was sure that his Swedish passport would not be scrutinized scrupulously in Oslo as it may have been in Stockholm or other airports in Sweden where perhaps an alert for a missing passport may have been issued.

  According to the schedule of the Rijeka shipping agent the container would be due to arrive in Haifa between June 10th and June 17th, so Ollie reckoned that he should join a group that would set off for Israel around the middle of June. The Rijeka agent had arranged all the documentation and paperwork for the "agricultural machinery" to be delivered to the Khodori Institute in Tulkarm, near Nablus, one of the two agricultural schools in the Palestinian Authority territory. He had given Ollie the name of the addressee as Dr. Anwar El-Alami who was the dean of research at the institute. Ollie knew little about the relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) beyond the articles he had read in the popular press but was aware that slipping into the PA from Israel would not be difficult with the right contacts as thousands of Palestinians did this every day.

  May 29th, Vienna

  The teams of nuclear forensics analysts from the US, Russia and the ITU in Germany had finally managed to agree upon the factual evidence found in the Padova warehouse, but had some major differences of opinion on their interpretation. They all agreed that the findings indicated that kilogram quantities of U-233 were produced by bombarding a mixture of thorium and beryllium oxides by gamma radiation from the stolen medical and industrial sources found in the warehouse. They also conceded that the quality of the product was high and that the level of the bothersome U-232 was below the threshold that would prevent the device from working properly but high enough to impose a safety hazard due to the intense radiation from its thallium-208 decay product. They considered the implications on the health of the employees that may have been exposed to unsafe doses of radiation and concluded that those that had been in close contact with the radiation sources for extended periods might develop symptoms of radiation sickness sooner or later. Their estimates of the expected yield of the device spanned a large range because they did not know the details of the implosion mechanism, but based on the weight of the mock-up model of the core and its diameter, they finally agreed that at the maximum it would probably be similar to the Nagasaki plutonium atomic bomb that was also based on implosion. Namely, something like a device with an explosive power equivalent to 15-20 kiloton of TNT. Imperfect implosion or design artifacts would reduce this yield but it was anyone's guess what the actual explosion would be like. However the most significant finding arose from the particles of organic matter they found in the metal cabinet that was positioned in the corner of the laboratory. Meticulous analysis showed that these originated from a block of a conventional explosive with a unique composition that was found only in nuclear devices made i
n North Korea. The link between the lab in Padova and North Korea was very disturbing in the minds of the scientists as that could also mean that a tested bomb design was at their disposal.

  After getting confirmation that the objective of the Astraea project was to construct an improvised nuclear device, based on U-233 as the fissile core and an implosion type mechanism, David called for a meeting of the international task force. He updated the team on the information he had gathered in Athens, without going into any details about the methods used to obtain it. He repeated his suspicion that the plot of using the device only for blackmail purposes was a clever cover story concocted by the blond man they now knew as Oscar Gunnar Axelsson, or by his more recent alias Olaf Gunther Andersson or Ollie, and about his ties to Islam from the incident in the hospital and from the testimony of some of his friends from the university days in Uppsala. David expressed his fear that the ultimate target may not even be in continental Europe and could be practically in any city or other location to which containers were shipped. The information they got from the Greek engineer, Stavros, and the Golden Dawn operative, Guido, did not get them any closer to finding the device, the intended target or the chief perpetrators. The French member of the ITF, Nicolas, told the team that Interpol had received many calls about seeing a blond man that matched the description and image and all had turned out to be false alarms so that they stopped responding to these calls. He added that with the photo from Agda's cellphone they might have a better chance of finding the blond man known as Ollie. Thomas, the former MI6 operative, said that the search for Dr. Smalley in the UK had not provided any leads, and suspected that he had gone under cover somewhere in Europe. There was no trace of Professor Modena or any of the other people who had worked with him. Eugene and Vassilly had no news and suggested that the task force draw up a contingency plan in case the device left Europe and arrived in their own country.

  May 30th, Gothenburg

  Andreas Nester Burkhart, the name Ollie now used, did not want to be seen in Stockholm so after his plane landed in Oslo he travelled by bus to Gothenburg in Sweden. Since he intended to join a tour group going on a pilgrimage to the holy places in Israel, he bought the local newspaper, Göteborgs-Posten (Gothenburg Post), looking through the classified ads for a suitable tour group. He found an advertisement of the Israel Christian Tours agency that organized 8-days tours devoted to seeing modern Israel and Holy sites that was scheduled to depart on June 9th. The itinerary included 2 nights in Tel-Aviv, 2 nights in the Galilee in a Kibbutz hotel and 3 nights in Jerusalem. This would give him an opportunity to survey the intended target area in Jerusalem and make preliminary arrangements with Sheik Khalil in Umm al-Fahm, the head of a faction of the radical Islamic movement in Israel, the contact person that Ibn Tutta had specified. Meanwhile he wanted to use the ten days before departure to arrange a new identity and a new passport as he feared that the Andreas Burkhart cover might be compromised soon.

  He had to avoid the two groups he was acquainted with. The Muslim community in Gothenburg was quite strong but the mosques were under police surveillance for two opposing reasons. On the one hand the police offered some protection against right-wing extremists that harassed foreigners in general and dark-skinned people, especially Muslim women wearing burkas. On the other hand, the police kept an eye on the leaders of the Muslim community, especially the sheiks in the mosques that served as recruiting agents for volunteers that wanted to join ISIS. Ollie's other connections were with racist nationalists like the group he had joined in Stockholm and these elements were also targeted by the police in order to prevent them from causing trouble.

  So Ollie looked for the regular criminals, those that had no political agenda and were willing to do business with whoever paid them. The experience he gained in the seedy quarters of Stockholm served him well and within a couple of days he came across a shady former Estonian, called Kermo, who dealt in bogus passports. After agreeing on the price and delivery date, Kermo did not ask any questions and only requested a recent photograph. Two day later, after 5000 Euros exchanged hands, Ollie received a well used Swedish passport with his photo and the name Hugo Elias Jacobsson, a 35 year old male from Gothenburg, whose profession was listed as an architect. Ollie went to a travel agency and found out that there was still a vacancy for the Israel Christian Tour group. The female travel agent was very pleased that a young man would join the group that usually consisted only of retirees. She told Ollie that there was a single girl in her late twenties who would be thrilled that a handsome young man was also booked on the tour. Ollie saw this as an opportunity to blend in with the group and get through the Israeli passport control without raising suspicion.

  Chapter 12

  June 9th, Tel Aviv

  The Swedish tour group arrived at Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv. Ollie, or as he was now called, Hugo, managed to be seated on the flight from Stockholm next to a plain looking girl by the name of Lena who was the only other young person in the group. He had turned on his charm and she was flattered by the attention of this good looking man. When they stood in line at the passport control they were already holding hands and together they approached the border security officer who was seated in her booth. She had been briefed to keep an eye open for a Scandinavian looking single young man and was aware of the fact that pilgrimage groups from Sweden seldom included young men. She looked at the couple and saw a handsome man with a rather plain woman. She saw that their passports were under different names and that the stamps in the passports indicated that they had not travelled together previously. So she went through the usual routine of asking them what the purpose of their visit was and where they intended to stay and for how long. She was satisfied with the answers but still a bit concerned about the couple, so she politely asked them to step aside. They were escorted to a small room and were invited to sit down and wait for the supervisor.

  By now Ollie thought that hitting on Lena was a bad idea and was quite sure that his cover was blown. However, he knew that in the waiting room they were probably being monitored by a video camera so he started chatting with Lena as if he did not have a worry in the world. Lena was a bit uptight but he managed to allay her concerns talking about the places they would see and the things that they would do in Israel. They were speaking in Swedish, of course, but Ollie was sure that their conversation was translated and understood. After about 10 minutes a grim looking man entered the room with their passports in his hand. He said that Lena could leave the room and handed over her passport. She was hesitant about leaving Ollie but he told her everything was in order and asked her to tell the tour group leader that he had been detained for questioning by Israeli authorities. The supervisor asked him in English what he had said to Lena and Ollie translated what he had just said. The supervisor enquired about Ollie's travels, based on the entry and exit stamps in his passport, and as he had prepared for this in advance he supplied details of his former trips. This seemed to satisfy the supervisor so he told Ollie he was also free to go and gave him his passport. As Ollie was about to leave the room the man said in Arabic "Salaam Aleika" and Ollie caught himself at the last moment before automatically replying "Aleika as-salaam" and instead said that he did not understand. The man smiled and let him go to collect his luggage. By the time Ollie picked up his small suitcase the whole group was waiting to board the bus that was to take them to their hotel in Tel Aviv. After the group checked in to a large hotel on the beach front they were to meet in the lobby and go to old Jaffa for a taste of the lively city's nightlife. Ollie and Lena were in adjoining rooms but intended to spend the time together. This part of the tour was to give them a taste of modern Israel – there were no holy places in Tel Aviv – only a bustling city that never stopped.

  The supervisor, who was a senior officer in the Israeli Security Agency, smiled to himself and called his boss at the ISA telling him that he was sure that the man travelling with the passport of Hugo Elias Jacobsson was the person they were waiting for
, that they knew as Ollie. He said that while he had Ollie's passport in his hand he had managed to insert a microchip beacon that would enable the ISA to trace Ollie, or more accurately Ollie's passport, even from a distance of 500 meters. The information was passed on to the head of the ISA and to Mossad headquarters, and "Hugo" was placed under close surveillance. The instructions given by the head of Mossad were to find the improvised nuclear device and disarm it and "Hugo" was to be followed but not to be arrested until they were sure that he would lead them to the device. The ISA had the schedule of the tour group so two agents were posted in the lobby of the hotel in Tel Aviv with orders to follow "Hugo" if he departed from the group.

  David received the information with mixed feelings. He was glad that the mysterious blond man he had been trying to catch was within the grasp of Israeli security agents but was worried that this "Hugo", whom he preferred to call Ollie as this was the name of the person he had been chasing, would manage to evade his "baby sitters" and get hold of the device. He already knew that Ollie was exceptionally cunning and ruthless and feared that he may have contacts with local Arab extremists in Israel or the Palestinian Authority that would assist him if he tried to go underground. He was especially concerned that if the device was detonated in a populated center in Israel the collateral damage would be intolerable for such a small country. David presented his uneasiness to Shimony, the Deputy Director of Mossad, but was told that the best ISA agents were on the case and that a blond man like Ollie would stand out among the Israelis. He also said that without knowledge of Hebrew or Arabic Ollie would find it difficult to get around unnoticed. David said that he wasn't sure that Ollie did not speak Arabic as no one knew where he had spent the time between disappearing in Uppsala until he re-emerged in Stockholm several years later. David asked for permission to share the information about Ollie's presence in Israel with the members of the international task force and was instructed to wait until they determined what Ollie was up to. Shimony said that he worried that Ollie would somehow become aware of the fact that his cover was blown and take evasive action if he noted that he was being followed. Furthermore, he said, if all the extra security measures deployed in the major European cities because of the "dirty bomb" threat were suddenly removed that too might alert Ollie. David was not pleased with this decision but knew that he had to obey, so he asked when the international task force could be informed about Ollie's whereabouts and Shimony told him that would be only after the device and Ollie were seized.