by Tom Clancy
“Hemingway was a jerk.”
Silly and innocuous certainly, and nothing to do with anything.
Except that it meant his man, Elata, the painter, the forger par excellence whom he had turned into a detector of forgeries par excellence, had gotten the document he needed and was en route to Zurich.
Danke, Herr Elata. Ausgezeichnet.
He had expected the message. He had also expected the e-mail three arrows later, though this one he had hoped not to receive.
“The eyes are the gateway to the soul. But sometimes even the soul gets lost.”
This had been sent by one of his deputies in Paris. It meant that Interpol — the eyes — had spotted Elata and trailed him, but had lost the scent along the way.
He had feared this contingency, since he wasn’t entirely sure of the woman at the museum. That had been the major reason he’d consolidated his exposure and used the painter to pick up the letter. He had planned to burn the painter at the end of the operation anyway — he had long planned, as his American acquaintance in New York delicately put it, to clip him.
Still, it pained him to consider the many works that would now by necessity be lost, the imitation Giotos, Bosches, Donatellos, and countless lesser-knowns, all of whose work could be conjured as if by magic from the talented hands of moody Herr Elata.
His people would transport the painter safely to Switzerland and keep him hidden for now; there would be no chance of his being followed or discovered. They were used to dealing with Interpol and had several well-tested methods of throwing the agents off the trail.
Morgan flipped down through the rest of his messages, disposing of them quickly. He had deleted four or five when his eyes stuck on an unexpected note:
“A twist. He had a girlfriend.”
The message did not indicate where it had come from and was not signed, but Morgan knew immediately who had sent it and what it meant. It was disappointing, for it meant that a complication in Scotland — a complication that was actually owned by Miss Constance Burns, not himself — remained unresolved.
A girlfriend privy to secrets she shouldn’t be privy to; she would have to be eliminated.
Perhaps, and perhaps not. Morgan leaned both shoulders against the door. There was no indication in the message that the girlfriend knew anything. Indeed, the very fact that the author of the e-mail had decided to raise the point meant that the matter was far from certain. The author had a large portfolio of abilities, and it was their understanding that the obvious decisions would be made in the field and not questioned. That the e-mail had arrived meant the sender was unsure, and wanted to ascertain Morgan’s wishes — and willingness to pay — before proceeding.
A girlfriend. Morgan thought of the twins, who might be said to be among his most intimate acquaintances, at least so far as Zurich was concerned. But neither of them knew the least speck of his business. Killing either would be a foolish waste of resources.
On the other hand, an irate girlfriend seeking to avenge a lover’s death — grand operas had been built from less substantial stuff.
The operative could eliminate her in the usual, efficient manner. But what if there were an investigator on the trail? Eliminate him as well? All Scotland would meet with unfortunate accidents before every possible connection to the difficulty was erased.
Nonsense. Not worth the effort.
It occurred to Morgan, as he stared at the white tile floor, that this was the inchworm’s problem. Constance Burns was gradually but steadily becoming a liability. She remained useful to the Antarctica enterprise — but for how long? He did not think he could trust her if pressure were applied. If, by some far-fetched chance, things went wrong in a manner he had not foreseen, could she be relied on? Would she crumble before a hard-pressing investigator from Her Majesty’s Ministry? If she were confronted, would she give Morgan up to save her skin?
It occurred to Morgan that she might. It also occurred to him that he would not allow her the chance to do so. And perhaps this Scottish business allowed him to construct one of his elaborate escape hatches. Certain gestures might be made that allowed, if things were to reach a difficult juncture, the blame to be placed on her for a range of activities. And in that case, the more murders that could be laid at her door the better.
Morgan also had an idea that his favorite international corporation might add its credibility to the operation. Not that, strictly speaking, this was necessary, but there was a certain symmetry that made it all the more attractive — the Bordeaux that tweaked a neighbor’s nose.
“Await further instructions,” he thumbed in response to the message.
The rest of the notes were, thankfully, mere gibberish. He clicked the T, Z, and K together, then shut the device. As the programs in the servers ten thousand miles away went to work erasing the electronic path he had taken into the e-mail system, he went to the sink and washed his hands.
FIVE
ROSS ICE SHELF, ANTARCTICA (70°00’ S, 30°42’ W) MARCH 4, 2002
The documents were scrupulously fabricated, which was how they were able to execute the whole unscrupulous and illegal operation without interference.
On paper the four shielded casks, essentially welded steel-and-lead sarcophagi, each contained ten fifty-five-gallon drums of spent fuel assemblages generated by the Turm nuclear power facility in Austria, a landlocked country dependent on foreign ports for its international marine transport.
The fact of the matter was that the radioactive waste had originated at Fels-Hauden, a state-run power plant in central Switzerland.
On paper the casks were brought by freight train to Trieste in northeastern Italy via the Österreichische Bundesbahn, or Austrian Federal Railway, which interlocked with the European Transfer Express Freight Train System, to be forwarded to the Port of Naples on the Mediterranean coast.
The fact was that the Swiss rail system, Schweizerische Bundesbahn, had picked up the casks at a departure station in Berne. In Naples, they cleared customs within hours for transshipment aboard the German-flagged tanker Valkyrie.
On paper the end point destination of the receptacles was specified as Rokkashi Village, Aomori Prefecture, Japan, where they would be stored for eventual reprocessing into plutonium-uranium mixed oxide — known as MOX — and utilized as fuel by the light-water reactors that provided the nation with a third of its energy demands. As plotted, the Valkyrie’s sea route was to take it through the Strait of Gibraltar, down along the Ivory Coast of Africa, then around South Africa into the Indian Ocean, through the Indonesian Archipelago to the Pacific Ocean, and finally to the Japanese shore for delivery.
The fact was that the cargo’s end point was nowhere near Aomori. The Swiss and Japanese had abruptly discontinued negotiations for the transfer after records of the clandestine talks were rumored to have been leaked to the American government, which, under exercise of the United States-Switzerland Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, had recently clamped down on the shipment of radioactive materials with a potential to yield the weapons-capable MOX extract. Executives at Fels-Hauden had later discreetly sought out another channel for the waste disposal. And found one.
Thus Valkyrie deviated from its charted course beyond the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and forged on into the Antarctic Ocean rather than heading east to the Pacific Rim.
In the open sea outside South Africa’s territorial waters, beneath a black and moonless night sky, the casks were moved by mechanized winch onto an ice-strengthened fishing trawler registered to an import/export firm based in Argentina.
Once aboard the trawler, they were placed in a special rad-insulated storage hold and ferried deeper into the southern latitudes, eventually crossing the Antarctic Convergence.
As it passed the subantarctic islands, the vessel encountered thin sea ice, which its riveted double-steel hull was able to nose through with relative ease. Further into its trip, the trawler used ice-distribution satellite maps composed weekly by the U.S. Navy an
d National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — and made available over the Internet for the safeguard of research vessels in subantarctic and antarctic waters — to locate and weave its way around heavy floes of pack ice as it circumnavigated the continent to the Ross Ice Shelf, an immense sheet of ice fastened like glue to the coastline and extending over fifty miles outward into the Ross Sea.
On March 4th, the trawler dropped anchor at the edge of this immense ice sheet and off-loaded its hot cargo onto rubber-belted Caterpillar trucks for conveyance to the mainland. It had reached the end of its outbound voyage.
Where in the continental interior the casks eventually wound up was a detail that neither its marine carriers, nor the administrators at Fels-Hauden, sought to learn.
In certain types of dealings, it is not unusual for all participants to agree that there are some questions better left unasked.
Scottish Highlands
More than five hundred stone forts once sat along the northern stretches of the Highland coast and the islands nearby in the north of Scotland, each in its own way the center of the universe. Their remains haunt the hills; besides the better-known attractions, a hundred walls, foundations, and bits of ceremonial markers lie scattered across many a square mile, some hidden by vegetation, others easily seen. Built during the Iron Age, the brochs remain outposts of distant memory, small and variable bits of the past whose worn rocks can be interpreted in endless ways. A row of stones together in a cow field might have seen incredible glory in the days after they were first chiseled and stacked; or perhaps they witnessed only cowardice and evil. A tourist touching them for the first time might feel his or her breath taken away, the mind recreating battles of kilt-clad warriors wrestling in the morning mist as pipers urged them together. A local growing up nearby might view the rocks as an apt patch for a tryst or a sip of something away from the folks.
All interpretations might be valid in their own way, all shapes, all ghosts. The past, ancient and near, is a country as varied and changeable as Scotland herself. To reconstruct it in a useful way is an act not of imagination but restraint — the possibilities must be winnowed, the ghosts held firmly in their places.
Frank Gorrie had found this true in every case he had ever investigated, from the traffic scrapes to the twelve murders he had seen since becoming a detective. It was not simply a matter of pushing the lies to one side and the truth to another; the lies were most often easy to spot. But the truth — there was a nub of a different matter.
The truth in the case of Ed and Claire Mackay was this: Edward Cailean Mackay had been an arse-chasin’ shit, from a good line of them. He’d been gone from Inverness with his wife for several years, working in Wales and England, the neighbors thought, but his reputation remained. He had picked up where he left off upon his return some two or three months ago, as the loquacious Christine Gibbon claimed. Many would testify to it, though they seemed curiously short on names of current girlfriends.
What they wouldn’t testify to, or maybe just could not admit, was the likelihood that Claire would put out his roving eye with a bullet. Especially with the wee babe in the next room. Most especially that.
Gorrie didn’t have children himself, and he guessed he ran toward overromanticizing the connection between mother and child, tending to view it wrapped in tender rose petals though he had ample evidence from his work to tell him different. It was on exactly this sort of matter that he missed his former detective sergeant and sometime partner most acutely. Nessa Lear had a fine compass for reality. Gorrie liked to say he’d raised her from a pup, picked her from the pool of detective constables and made her into a true solver of crimes. But he’d done too good a job — Nessa had been snatched away for a job with Interpol some months back. Never mind that she had asked for the job herself for several years — to Gorrie’s mind she had been wrestled from him, and the loss hurt all the more as no replacement had been forthcoming due to “budgetary considerations.”
The deputy area commander, Nab Russell, had promised a successor in the hazy distant future. For the meantime, DI Gorrie and the rest of CID were expected to make do by using “pooled resources”—Russell’s personal euphemism for the detective constables. An eager bunch, mostly overworked, in several cases very rough about the edges, they were good at running down the odd leads, but not for bouncing ideas with, as he had often done with DS Lear.
Nessa would have been excellent probing the neighbors, much better than DC Andrews, whose monotone voice tended to make him sound more like a footballer than a policeman. He’d been too quick with the interviews; Gorrie had to take him by the hand.
Did Claire strike you as a killer?
No, sir.
Good enough then.
No, detective, we do it like this:
Had Mrs. Mackay seemed depressed? Drawn out? At the end of her wits, would you say? Was she an angry person? More frustrated than normal?
No matter the phrasing, no was always the answer. Oh, she could yell at Eddie, put him in his place. But murder him? Should have maybe, but until it happened not a one of her friends or family would have predicted it. She had not seemed to suffer postpartum depression; she’d gained her shape back after the birth with a mum-and-child program, where the instructor — a looker herself — said she had a special closeness with the child. Her sister said that she had worked at a bank as a teller but had no plans to go back; it wasn’t the sort of job you’d worry into a career.
So that was her story, rounded up with the help of Andrews in about a day and a half’s worth of work. A large question remained — where had she gotten the gun? It was not her husband’s, or at least there was no indication yet that it was her husband’s, and no one, not even Christine Gibbon, could remember any hint of it before.
Having reached a suitable impasse regarding the presumed killer, today Gorrie would turn his attention back to the victim, making his inquiries at the man’s employers and rounding up a few lost ends. But as he spotted Cromarty Firth’s domelike reactor building looming ahead in the early morning fog, an ungodly, un-Scottish creature wading in from the surf, he thought not of Edward Mackay but his son, christened Luthias Edward. It was one thing to grow up without a ma or a da, and quite another to grow up knowing your ma killed your da and then herself, with you in the other room.
What a legacy to leave a child. Gorrie could do nothing for the lad except his job, and while he regretted that his job might well mean pain for the boy in years to come, he endeavored to do his best to remove any question in the young man’s mind of what had happened. He would have done so no matter what the circumstance, but if his patience or stamina flagged at any point, he could gently prod it by recalling the infant in the crib, and imagining him fifteen years on.
A small valley ran between the plant and the road, making the access road seem as if it ran over a moat. Cement obstructions forced approaching vehicles to take a zigging path, and razor wire lined the double row of fences at the entrance; two guards manned the gate and demanded positive proof that DI Gorrie was indeed DI Gorrie.
“Aye, didna’ you know me well enough to borrow five pounds last Saturday, James?” Gorrie told one of the guards as he held out his badge.
“Procedure, Inspector,” responded the man, adding in a somewhat softer voice, “I’ll be payin’ you back next Friday, I’m sure.”
Gorrie was met at the door to the plant by a young woman tall and broad enough to play for the local football team; she showed him directly to the plant manager’s office, not pausing for pleasantries. Gorrie found his pace slowing with each step, resisting the rush. With white walls sandwiched between white acoustic tile and white linoleum, the hallway reminded the inspector of a hospital corridor, except that it smelled of wood polish rather than antiseptic.
There was no wood to polish in the halls, nor was there any in the manager’s office, where the paper-strewn desk, file cabinets, and two movable carts holding computers were all made of metal. John Horace sat behind the desk
, his owl eyes blinking once as they entered.
“Come,” he said sharply, though they were already inside.
“My name—”
“Inspector Gorrie, yes. Well?”
Gorrie sat down in the chair across from the manager’s desk. “I am investigating the death of one of your people here.”
“Ed Mackay. Efficient, good at his job.”
The manager’s manner might be common in London where, judging from his accent, he had been raised, but here it was grating enough to be suspicious as well as borderline insulting.
“What exactly was his job?” Gorrie asked.
“Supervised the removal of waste. We follow the Basel Convention in spirit and letter, Inspector. I’m sure that if you check with UKAE—”
“The atomic commission?”
“Quite. We are regulated — heavily regulated. Nothing moves from here without intricate planning. Even the odd hankie tossed in my basket there will be suitably accounted for. We don’t go polluting the environs, Inspector. We have precautions. Our record is exemplary.”
“I see,” said Gorrie. Under other circumstances, he might have been inclined to skip the lecture — he already knew a bit about Mackay’s job. But he generally found it useful to let a man speak, even when he didn’t feel an immediate need for the information. And so Gorrie folded his arms and leaned back as the plant manager began citing safety statistics. In three decades there had been over seven thousand shipments of spent fuel worldwide without an incident; the spent fuel had a better transport record than the average loaf of bread.
It struck Gorrie as Horace continued that the shape of his skull was not unlike the shape of the reactor dome.