by Lior Samson
They crossed back over Mass Avenue and headed down Boylston toward the Boston Public Library. At the library, Shira surrendered Karl’s jacket.
“So, now you give it back,” he teased, “now that we are about to go into someplace warm.”
They spent the next several hours searching the Internet but found nothing definitive. Every trail they followed just led to another trail. Or a dead end. They finally gave up and went in search of an early dinner instead. Karl suggested his favorite Indian spot on Mass Ave, but Shira told him that the only decent curry outside of Mumbai was in London. They settled on Thai at an overcrowded walk-down place on Boylston, but both of them kept looking out the window and neither of them ate much.
39
The sky had clouded over and was turning from dull silver to deep charcoal when they finally reached the apartment building again.
“How do we get in?” Shira asked.
“Simple,” he said looking up at the lights in the windows. “There’s somebody home on the third floor.” He went over to the bank of names and buttons. “Let’s try M. Hogue on the top floor.” He pushed a button. Nothing. “Okay, maybe it’s B. Sandelman.” He pushed another. This time the release on the front door buzzed in response.
“Thanks! Forgot my key,” Karl called up the stairwell when he heard a door open above. He waited until he heard the door close again before walking down the hall toward the storage area. “So, let’s see this special key of yours again.”
She slipped the necklace and key over her head and handed it to him. The key was the right shape and slid past the warding into the horizontal slot. Karl half expected it to bind when he tried to turn it, but the cylinder rotated easily and the door swung open. “So far, so good.” Karl fumbled for and found a light switch. The steep stairs led down to what looked like a long narrow room. At the bottom of the stairs, Karl found a pull-chain fixture and turned on the overhead light. The room turned out to be a narrow corridor running beside a row of wire mesh storage cages. They could see a few objects in some—a chair in need of re-caning, a rusted wheelbarrow, a broken lamp—but most were empty, and, judging by the thick layer of dust, long neglected.
Thirty feet away, the corridor ended in a blank wall.
“Nothing here. A wild goose chase,” he said as they strolled down the length of the room.
“Hang on a minute, that doesn’t fit.” She pointed. “There, through the cages, you can see the foundation. It’s blocks of stone. The wall at the end is smooth concrete, obviously more recent. Let’s check it out.”
Up close, they could see that the wall only looked like concrete but actually seemed to be painted plywood that might have once been white. A door was set in it, secured by a hasp with a large combination lock. Karl jiggled hopefully, then shrugged.
“Now all we need is one of,” he looked at the dial, “uh, 64,000 combinations. Then again, this door doesn’t look too tough. I could probably kick it in.”
She looked skeptical, but stepped aside to give Karl room.
Deciding to use his shoulder rather than kicking, Karl drew back and threw himself against the door. “Oh, shit, I may have broken my shoulder,” he said. “It may look like flimsy plywood, but there’s something underneath. It’s reinforced with steel or something.”
“Let me take a look at that lock,” she said. “I think I’ve seen one like it before.” She turned it over in her hand. “I think I may even know the combination.”
“You what? How?”
She pointed to the back of the lock. It was inscribed in Hebrew. “Hafner Locks, Haifa,” she read. “There’s one exactly like it on the hasp for our storage area at our apartment building. Migdal bought it. I don’t think it’s any coincidence. What’s this particular kind of Israeli-made lock doing in Boston? I’ll tell you.” She spun the dial a couple of turns, then carefully picked out three numbers in sequence. The lock slid open with a heavy click. “A woman never forgets her wedding anniversary. A smart woman has ways to make sure her husband never forgets.” She lifted the lock from the hasp and set it on the floor.
Karl looked at the lock on the floor, then smiled at Shira. “You certainly were right about coming along. I did need you after all. Are you ready to find out the rest of Migdal’s message?”
Shira nodded, then tugged at the handle. “It’s heavy.” She pulled again, this time with both hands. The door moved a little but didn’t open.
“Here, let me try.” He got both hands on the handle as firmly as he could manage, put one foot as high as he could on the frame beside the door, then pulled with all his strength. His face turned red, but ever so slowly the door creaked open.
Karl pulled out his keychain with the LED flashlight on it and shone the ghostly blue light around the room. There were stacks of magazines and, toward the back, three huge cardboard canisters. Karl picked up a magazine off the top of one of the stacks and blew the dust from it. “Hey, look at this,” he said. “Popular Electronics, June 1959. And here,” he wiped dust from another stack, “a 1953 CQ Magazine. That’s ham radio. Your husband really was a geek. He must have been a serious collector. These are all sealed in plastic. Let’s check out the barrels.” He used his knife to work loose the lid on the nearest one, gradually increasing the gap until he could slip his fingers under it and pry it off. The barrel was filled with sawdust from which a few scattered pieces of dark plastic poked up.
Karl laughed. “Now that is really funny.”
“What is it?” She leaned over and peered into the barrel. “What’s so funny?”
“Mitch. Migdal. Your late husband. These are the contraband Polaroid filters I told you about, the sunglasses in the dark. He just never made the last shipment. They’ve been here all this time.”
“Thanks for doing my work for me.” The voice came from the far end of the basement. Through the doorway they could see a man ducking down to peer at them as he came down the stairs.
“Lev, it’s me, Shira. What are you doing here?”
“Hello, cousin. I’m just keeping tabs on you. And don’t you two make a clever pair.” He strode toward them, gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
“The joke’s on you, Novikov,” Karl said. “Migdal outsmarted you all. There’s nothing here but old magazines and bits of plastic.” He grimaced and looked at Shira. “Man, I think I hurt my back, too, when I tried to open the door.” He arched his back and stretched as he reached around with his hand and pressed into the small of his back underneath his sweater. He seemed to tug at something as he said, loudly, “Ah, much better.” Shira gave him an odd look, but he didn’t react.
Lev ducked down to get through the low doorway and swept his light around the room. “Really? Just magazines and plastic?”
Karl reached into the open barrel and scooped up a handful of oily sawdust and brittle plastic. He sprinkled it back in. “See? Sawdust and plastic, plastic and sawdust.” He dipped his hand in again, but this time struck something hard and much bigger.
“Migdal outsmarted us, all right,” Lev said, nodding toward the barrels. “We tracked him all his life, we used every intelligence connection we could and followed every lead, and in the end he fooled us with nothing more than the old purloined letter trick. He never moved the stuff. He didn’t put it in a vault or ship it off shore or work a deal with anybody. That’s why we could never find a trace of it. He didn’t do anything with it, just secretly bought the building and left it here practically in plain sight.”
“Are you talking about plastic? No, I guess not.”
“No, I’m talking about MUF, Material Unaccounted For. You see, Migdal shorted us. That night at Ga’ash, when he delivered the uranium to my father, he was three short of the promised delivery. He said that what he had was all he could get. But years later, when the theft was finally discovered by MIT, we found a little accounting discrepancy. MIT, of course, never acknowledge the missing fuel. Exactly as Migdal and his felonious friends had figured, MIT covered it up.
It would have been a public relations nightmare and financial disaster for them to admit they had lost nearly a ton of fissionable material. A little creative accounting here, a fabricated experiment there, a change of dates on old refueling schedules and, voila, no MUF. But, as I am sure you can guess, we have our sources. We found out that they were, in truth, missing more of the original fuel rods than we received. Migdal had held back the others as a sort of insurance policy. As long as they were unaccounted for, we needed him alive and on our side. Of course, we couldn’t prove anything or openly accuse anyone without tipping our hand and bringing a house of cards tumbling down around us. And, like MIT, Migdal never acknowledged the missing material. It was a threat, believe me. It would be damnably hard to make an atomic bomb with this stuff, but with half a teaspoon of intelligence you could make some really dirty explosives that could leave a small city uninhabitable for a very long time.”
“What are you going to do to us?” Karl said. ”Are you going to kill us now that you got what you were after?”
“We don’t work that way,” he said, returning his gun to the holster under his arm. “You know a lot, you two—more than you should—but I think we can trust you, at least as long as we can keep an eye on you. Which is why I would suggest, Mr. Lustig, that you consider moving to Israel. Despite appearances and the current political climate, it would really be ever so much safer.” He paused. “For you, anyway, if you get my meaning. We do have a certain amount of leverage to ensure you’ll both go quietly about your lives.” He looked at Shira.
Karl took a slow breath. “But you killed Migdal, or had him killed, because he was dealing with the Palestinians, with the Arabs.”
“Look, I won’t pretend to condone everything that Migdal was trying to do with Trade Now, but he was one of ours. He was more than that, he was a brother to me. We wouldn’t kill him because he quit, and we wouldn’t kill him because we didn’t like his politics. We just wanted to neutralize him, not take him out. We wanted to be certain this stuff wouldn’t end up in the hands of terrorists. After he was killed, we worried that we would never recover it, but then you entered the story. Yes, we dogged him and kept the pressure on, but we didn’t kill him.”
“Then who did?”
“I did.” The voice came from the stairwell at the end of the room.
“Tariq. I should have known you would be here.”
“Yes, you should have, Lev. You should have figured it all out quicker and saved everyone a lot of pain and trouble. You know, just for a moment, there, in Germany, Mitchell thought I was you. It was his last moment, because I had given up on him. He was never going to deliver. So, Mitchell died thinking it might be Mossad who was after him.” He laughed, a short, explosive laugh. “And you will die thinking that it is Tariq Mustafa who wants to kill you. But you both will have been wrong.”
“Then who are you?”
“You could call me a dealer in antiquities. I trade in nuclear relics. I am also a promoter of free trade. And my wealth. Unfortunately, you have something there that I already bought and paid for, paid dearly.” He stepped into the light where they could see his face. He was wearing an MIT sweatshirt, and Karl realized that it was probably he rather than some student that they had seen hanging around the apartment earlier in the day.
“You see, there was a survivor from the Delft. Your father must have told you about the Delft, Lev. One of his finest moments, blowing up a couple of college kids. But he missed one. Ah, and now you understand. Yes, here I am, Mitchell’s shipmate, Jef Vries, and I’ve struggled all these years to get revenge and to get what I deserved. I finally got my revenge in Germany, and now I am about to get what I deserve. I already have a buyer for the last of the fuel. Mitchell refused to deal and kept playing games with us, so I lost patience and got him out of the way. It’s been a hell of a chase ever since. Now you are in the way, Novikov.” He raised his gun.
Karl twisted slightly to one side, his back toward Shira, and took a half step back farther into the darkness of the storage room. He was hoping that she would notice, hoping she would be able to see enough in the gloom to guess what he was about to do and to stay back. Lev was now almost directly in front of him, half in the light, half out, while Jef, at the other end, was right under the light fixture. It was now or never.
The important thing is not to be afraid, he thought. In one swift but unhurried seamless motion, he dropped to one knee, drew the Glock from where it was tucked in the back of his pants, brought his hands together in front of him, took aim, and fired. At the other end of the room, Jef’s arms flew out and he fell backwards. His gun discharged twice, wildly, before he slumped against the wall and slid down to the floor.
Lev pulled out his gun and held it outstretched in front of him as he ran down to the other end. He kicked the body, which fell to one side, then reached down and felt for a pulse. “He’s dead,” he said. “That was some performance Karl Lustig,” he continued, as he holstered his gun and started back toward them. “Do you always carry a handgun? And how did you learn to shoot like that?”
“Yes, I always carry a handgun,” he said with a quick laugh. “At least in recent days. And, believe it or not, like much of everything else that I’ve found useful in my life, I learned to shoot at MIT, on the pistol team.”
“You know, you can get up now,” Lev said, reaching down to give Karl a hand.
“I’ve never …” Karl shivered. “I never did …”
“You did what you had to. And it seems he did get what he deserved, just as he insisted. But you, Mister Lustig, you were really taking a chance. I don’t understand why you didn’t just empty the clip into him just to be sure. It’s a Glock, a semiautomatic, you know. How could you be sure that your first shot would be good.”
“Just old habit, I guess. When I was doing target shooting we used single-shot Thompson Contenders. I wasn’t thinking about a second shot. I just wanted to place the one in the chamber right in the center of that MIT seal sitting like a bull’s-eye in the middle of his chest.”
“Well, it looks like you did.” He spread his hands. “Come on, you two, let’s get out of here. Our people will be along soon to clean up this mess. We are not supposed to be here, and you don’t want to be talking to the police, not with an unregistered handgun, not in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts you don’t. You’ll have to tell me sometime how you got it and how you got it here. Maybe over shishlik and a bottle of wine at a café I know in Haifa.” He winked.
“Maybe we will take you up on that. But you’re buying.” Shira flashed him a brief smile. “But what are you going to do with the uranium?”
“Give it back. We don’t need it, not anymore. MIT thinks they can find a way to put it to some use, although they long ago replaced the reactor with a better system. And they’re smart. They can be just as clever with addition as they were with subtraction. By next week, the books will balance and none of this ever happened.”
“Is it still any good,” Shira asked. “I mean, after all these years wouldn’t it be somewhat worn out?”
“Are you kidding?” He looked at Karl. “You, MIT graduate, tell the lady the half-life of U-235.”
“What, me? I was a computer geek. I don’t remember. Something like 700 million years. But lend me a laptop and I’ll Google it for you.”
40
2007 — Bini planted himself between Karl and the television and said something too fast for Karl to follow.
“English, Bini, use English. You need the practice.”
“No, you speak Hebrew. You need the practice.”
“Oh, now you’re in trouble, young man.” Binyamin ran from the room and Karl chased after him with mock anger. He tackled him onto the couch in the living room and started tickling and kissing him. Bini squealed. “Stop, stop. I’ll do it. I’ll speak English.”
Karl looked up to see Shira standing in the doorway, smiling. “What?” he asked.
“I’m just enjoying having both my guys here.
I know you have to go to Boston, but I wish you didn’t have to go so often.”
“Hey, don’t blame me. You know whose fault it is. So many secret trusts and holding companies and foundations. We found two more charities that ultimately traced back to him: the Wasserman Scholarship for Young Mathematicians and the Geffner Foundation that sponsors college students going to Israel. Anyway, I think most of the Benjamin and Hamm business is finally straightened out, so you and Bini are set. It mostly ran itself anyway. And you’ll never guess; we finally sold all the old magazines to a collector. Oh, yes, David and Ellen say hello. Turns out Ellen has a brother who now lives here, and they are thinking of coming over for Passover. It was David who put me onto the buyer for the magazines, some guy who made his fortune in publishing. Would you believe, he paid five figures for the lot?”
“No way,” she laughed. “I really had no idea what an entrepreneur Migdal was. All those years of wheeling and dealing. Another secret side to a complex man.
“Oh, that reminds me. I have something to show you. I’ll get it from the kitchen.” She returned, after a few minutes, holding an envelope. Now there were tears in her eyes.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“This came in the post yesterday. From Tel Aviv. They recovered it when they tracked down the rest of the Mustafa group.” She handed him the envelope. He opened it and fished out a chain. A silver mezuzah was threaded on it.
“It’s Migdal’s, isn’t it? Yes, I see it is. Wow. That must be a shock for this suddenly to appear after nearly four years.”
“Well, I think it is right that it took this long, because if it had come earlier, I might have put it in a drawer or even melted it down to make something new. But now I know what to do with it.”
She took it from him and slipped it over his head, tucking it into his tee shirt. “There. Migdal would have liked that. After all, he went to a great deal of trouble to bring us together. We’ll have to get a proper scroll, though, to replace Migdal’s doctored version.”
