Bomb Grade

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘We were taken to several installations in and around Gorkiy,’ recounted Scott, stiffly. ‘In my opinion the security was excellent. The Russian officials who accompanied us admitted they suspected isolated thefts of small amounts of nuclear material in the past but stressed the majority had been from the republics that once made up the Soviet Union, not from Russia itself.‘

  So the Cabinet and whoever else was on the mailing list were going to get a load of crap, judged Charlie. Which didn’t make this encounter at all a waste of time. He had his first report – a warning not to believe a word of Scott’s official account – for the Director-General and he’d only been in Moscow a few hours. Turning hopefully to the second man, Charlie said, ‘Let’s talk about amounts and the danger they represent.’

  The smile this time was gratitude, at being included. ‘What do you know about nuclear physics?’ asked Burton, innocently.

  ‘Actually, not a lot,’ admitted Charlie.

  ‘The explosive of a nuclear weapon is either uranium 235 or plutonium 239. Plutonium is actually created from uranium,’ said the man, settling back in his chair. ‘There’s two ways it can be exploded. It’s either surrounded by a tamper like beryllium oxide, which reflects neutrons and causes them to multiply when they’re compressed into what’s called a critical mass. Or two subcritical sections are driven together by what’s called a gun-barrel arrangement. Either splits the atom, creating a chain reaction of more and more split atoms, which releases an incredible amount of nuclear energy.’

  Scott, who’d obviously heard the lecture before, looked bored. Saxon sighed, equally unimpressed. Assholes, thought Charlie. ‘What’s the effect?’ he coaxed. ‘How many people can die?’

  ‘There’s only been two practical examples, Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ reminded Burton. ‘Hiroshima used uranium, exploded by the gun-barrel method. 80,000 people died and 70,000 were injured. Nagasaki used plutonium, with a beryllium tamper. That killed 40,000 people and wounded 25,000.’ The man hesitated. ‘They were tests, you understand? To see which method was the more effective.’

  No one was looking bored any more.

  ‘How much uranium or plutonium is needed for bombs like that?’

  ‘Technologies have greatly improved since 1945,’ said the physicist. ‘But below a certain amount there’s neutron leakage which reduces the effectiveness. The generally accepted critical mass is around five kilos.’

  ‘Five kilos of uranium can kill 80,000 and five kilos of plutonium can kill 40,000 people!’ pressed Charlie, pedantically, determined totally to understand.

  ‘At least,’ confirmed the expert.

  Charlie looked between the soldier and the scientist, momentarily – rarely – without words. One was a silly bugger who’d let himself be conned everything was safely under lock and key and the other existed in such a rarified atmosphere of pure physics that 80,000 and 40,000 were statistics, not death tolls, and who didn’t realize the obscenity of describing the difference as tests of effectiveness.

  ‘But the smuggling attempts – even what’s actually been seized in transit in the West – aren’t in kilos,’ offered Burton, helpfully. ‘The amounts have been far smaller.’

  ‘What’s to stop small amounts being stockpiled to make up an amount sufficient for a bomb if they’re all bought by the same person or country?’ demanded Charlie.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ admitted the man.

  Scott cleared his throat, the prelude to a pronouncement, and said to Charlie; ‘In view of what I understand your posting to be, you’re probably already aware of discussions between countries within the European Union to create a Star Wars protection against some countries in the Middle East?’

  Discerning the tone in the other man’s voice, Charlie said, ‘Which you don’t think necessary, after your investigation here?’

  ‘For God’s sake man, it would cost £20 billion!’

  As they walked to the entrance of the embassy, Bowyer said, ‘I thought that was interesting, didn’t you?’

  Charlie looked quizzically at the station head. ‘It frightened the shit out of me.’

  Charlie felt instant empathy with Barry Lyneham, guessing at once he wouldn’t have to go through any getting-to-know-you bullshit because he was sure he knew the man already. He put Lyneham around 55, although maybe a little older, because Lyneham had clearly stopped worrying about inflicting personal damage upon himself. His belly bulged over the lost waistband of his trousers, presumably supported by an equally lost belt and the shirt collar was loosened for comfort or even by necessity. Lyneham’s face, particularly around his nose, was reddened from finishing too many bottles before too many evenings had ended and Charlie wasn’t sure if the wheezing was caused by excess weight or asthma: probably a combination of both. The words, when they came, hinted the deep south birth and were never hurried anyway and Charlie was quite sure the pouched eyes saw everything, just like he was sure the man heard everything, even the words that weren’t spoken, an operational trick instinctive to their craft. Barry Lyneham was an old timer who’d been there and done it and didn’t need telling how to do it again. After the morning with Thomas Bowyer and the technical session that had followed it was refreshing to be with someone with whom he could relax but at the same time take seriously, confident he was on the same wavelength.

  They went comfortably through the low foothill pleasantries of agreeing Russia was a bigger mess now than it had been under communism and would probably take years if not decades to get right and in the meantime it was causing a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot of worry.

  ‘Nuclear shit top of the list,’ said Lyneham, starting the ascent to what mattered.

  ‘I’d welcome whatever steer you can give to me.’ He was in Lyneham’s territory, where it was polite to appear at least to defer, but after what he’d already listened to he wanted some balancing, rational judgment. He was curious at the absence of James Kestler, but that, too, was Lyneham’s decision.

  ‘Total fucking disaster. Crime’s king here, right? This is Capone country, reincarnated. You want anything, you get it from organized crime. The only way. It was always the way in the old days. Now nobody bothers to pretend any more. Yeltsin and all the others made all the right sounds and let the Bureau come here officially and now they’ve let you come and it doesn’t add up to a row of beans. This country was so fucked up, lying about production norms and meeting quotas, that they don’t even know what nuclear stuff they had in the first place so they sure as hell don’t know what’s gone or going missing.’ Lyneham had to pause, to recover his breath after such a concerted diatribe. To cover his difficulty, he took a bottle of Jim Beam from a lower drawer and Charlie nodded acceptance although hardly expecting the tumbler to be half filled. ‘Forgetting my manners by taking so long,’ apologized the American.

  More with which to doubt Scott’s report, in his first account to London, Charlie recognized. ‘How are we supposed to operate?’ demanded Charlie.

  ‘You find out, you let me know,’ suggested Lyneham. ‘You were warned in London about jurisdiction and protocol?’

  ‘Endlessly,’ confirmed Charlie. The whisky was very different from Islay or Macallan but was an interesting change.

  ‘We can’t operate, not properly. We’ve no effective investigatory facilities and no right to employ them even if we had. I’ve actually advised Washington how we’re being suckered but it makes political sense for us to be officially recognized and based here so no one wants to hear it’s all a heap of shit.’ Lyneham’s protest had been one of his first attempts at a defence against failure.

  ‘Suckered?’ queried Charlie.

  ‘Liaison, right? Which in my book means a two-way trade. Not, apparently, in their dictionary. We get virtually nothing from the Russians. But they expect us to keep feeding them with everything we pick up in Europe and the Middle East. Which is the ass-about way of trying to do anything; by the time we pick up anything outside, that’s where it is, outside a
nd lost.’

  ‘What about working backwards to prevent it happening again?’

  Lyneham exploded into jeering laughter, adding to both their glasses. ‘You’re not listening, Charlie! The nuclear business is mafia business. And by mafia I mean Mafia: as organized and powerful as anything in Italy or what we’ve got in America. Bigger, maybe. We know – from Italy and from America, again not from here – they’ve even established working links, one between the other. And organized crime buys police and militia and anything else it wants to buy. Always has done. Always will.’

  ‘The corruption can’t be that complete!’ Perhaps that was why there wasn’t any trace of Natalia. She wouldn’t have been bought.

  ‘Not at the top, maybe,’ conceded Lyneham, although doubtfully. ‘But the top people don’t go out kicking in doors and putting up road blocks around nuclear installations. It’s the middle-ranking and operational people who do that, people like us, and in Russia those guys are as dirty as hell, believe me.’

  Charlie did and was unsettled by it. Rupert Dean and the others who’d briefed him in London expected more than that, like he did himself. And if London weren’t satisfied, they’d made it brutally clear he didn’t have a job any more. With such an easily presented opportunity Charlie said, ‘So why was Kestler specifically appointed: just part of the same empty politicking?’

  Lyneham’s within-seconds reaction was confusing and, having already decided upon the American’s experience, Charlie wasn’t completely sure whether it was genuine or feigned. ‘Washington advised it was a specific appointment?’ It wouldn’t be right to talk about Kestler’s favoured relationship back home in Washington: he didn’t know the Englishman well enough yet.

  ‘Yes.’ Hardly the tell-me-more remark of the century, Charlie conceded to himself. But it would have to do.

  ‘That was political.’

  Charlie missed the point but didn’t want to say or do anything to hint his disadvantage: hiding disadvantages was one of the most inviolable of all personal Charlie Muffin survival rules. ‘So we’re just going through the empty motions, like mentally screwing every girl with big tits we pass in the street?’

  Lyneham smiled, lasciviously. ‘I like that! Some day I’ll use that as my own!’

  Charlie was almost offended at the weak, avoidance-attempting flattery: he’d thought the other man better than that. ‘So what’s the answer?’

  ‘Jamie’s very keen. Superman role model, know what I mean?’

  Charlie believed he did but he felt there was a message or a reason beyond the obvious. He tried to put himself into Lyneham’s position, unsure if the tentative deduction was a flickering spark or a shining light at the end of the tunnel: close-to-weary old career man bothered by unpredictability of anything-but-weary young career man. Too early and too unsubstantiated to be considered seriously but something to be borne in mind. At this early stage there were other more important things that had priority. Charlie knew nothing was going to be easy – there was every eventual chance of this being the most difficult operation in a long and mostly difficult operational life – but he remained disoriented by the ease of things so far. Charlie decided that if he didn’t more forcefully set the pace he risked Lyneham believing, figuratively at least, that he was as lightweight as Bowyer. ‘Embarrassed by him?’

  The remark brought the American forward over his whiskey glass, as Charlie hoped it would. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘Thought I would have met him at the same time as you,’ said Charlie, accepting there were a hundred escapes for Lyneham to take. None of which the man did, which further intrigued Charlie.

  ‘Wanted us to meet first,’ said the Bureau chief, too simply.

  For what, precisely, wondered Charlie. Aloud he said, ‘I’ve appreciated that, too.’

  ‘Keep in mind what I’ve said.’

  ‘I will.’

  James Kestler responded to his superior’s summons as if he had been waiting on the other side of the door, entering the room as if there were some sort of spring device in his heels to enable him to move faster. Had he ever been as eager as this crop-haired, shiny-faced, bejeaned young man, wondered Charlie. He would have liked to think so but he doubted it. Charlie endured the pump-armed handshake and the repeated although slightly varied assurance they were going to be a good combination (a partnership Kestler appeared to believe already more definitely established than Charlie did, although there was still too much to be gained to dispute it) and the concluding demand to admit he saw himself at the very forefront against the most dangerous criminal activity currently being conducted by organized crime, not just in Russia but throughout the world. Kestler called it being at the cutting edge. Charlie said he supposed that’s how he did see it, yes, not wanting to bruise the younger man’s enthusiasm. Kestler stressed they had a lot to talk about and a lot to plan and a lot to accomplish and Charlie agreed with all of that, as well, because all of it was true. Throughout, Barry Lyneham sat overflowing his inadequate office chair, saying nothing and doing nothing but add occasionally to his and Charlie’s bourbon glass. There’d been no offer to Kestler, from which Charlie guessed that Kestler didn’t drink. The repeated gratitude at the German information, which had been officially delivered under Kestler’s name, brought a renewed flurry of eager guidance from Kestler that there were as many con men in the nuclear business as there were traders with insider access. ‘That’s what Braun was, a punk.’

  ‘I read the German file,’ promised Charlie.

  ‘It’s the excuse the Russians use all the time,’ intruded Lyneham. ‘They say most of what we give them from outside turns out to be a set-up to con the guys with the big bucks in the Middle East or wherever.’

  Charlie waited patiently until Kestler had virtually exhausted himself before asking for a contacts list at the Interior Ministry. The American file was far more extensive than that which Bowyer had produced, but Natalia’s name still did not feature anywhere.

  ‘I need to meet the right man,’ said Charlie, unsuccessfully scanning the names for a second time and feeling he had to give a reason for the request in the first place.

  ‘Aleksai Semenovich Popov,’ identified Kestler at once, jabbing at the list. ‘Operational head of the anti-nuclear smuggling division, with the official rank of colonel. Nice guy. Makes time any time.’

  Which Popov did, agreeing to a meeting when, at Lyneham’s suggestion, Charlie telephoned the Interior Ministry from the Bureau chiefs office. Charlie’s satisfaction was punctured at once when Lyneham said, ‘Don’t think everything’s going to be as simple, Charlie. He’s probably got nothing better to do.’

  Nothing was going to be simple, Charlie accepted objectively in the taxi carrying him back to Lesnaya. He hadn’t even started yet and if Lyneham was to be believed he was going to be bloody lucky if he was ever going to start properly. But it had been a good beginning, apart from the expectable embassy friction. And that was nothing he couldn’t handle. The only disappointment so far, in fact, had been his inability to find Natalia. And if he was going to be sensibly objective, it had been ridiculous for him to expect to locate her so soon. If ever.

  Back in the embassy, Lyneham said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Superfluous to requirements, put out to pasture,’ assessed Kestler, in youthful instant judgment.

  ‘Sure about that?’ asked Lyneham, who wasn’t sure himself but who hadn’t been as impressed as he’d hoped to be. ‘Don’t forget that past record.’

  ‘Trust me,’ said Kestler.

  I wouldn’t trust your judgment if you had a beard and your name was Moses, thought Lyneham.

  ‘When?’ demanded Natalia.

  ‘Tomorrow. He said he was calling from the American embassy. Obviously it’s going virtually to be a joint operation,’ judged Popov.

  ‘It makes sense.’

  ‘His Russian wasn’t very good, but at least he tried. Which is more than the American did at first. We ended up with English, though.�
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  Charlie’s Russian had been excellent, remembered Natalia, virtually fluent even in his use of colloquialisms. He’d obviously lost it through lack of use, like she’d probably lost a lot of her English, although she and Aleksai amused themselves sometimes, practising together. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Just that he wanted to introduce himself.’

  ‘Our not being told in advance of his arrival was a political criticism,’ declared Natalia, positively, less distracted by personal intrusion than she had been before and therefore thinking more clearly. ‘And there will be more, unless we manage something soon. Show him every consideration. And make sure he knows he’s getting it. I don’t want any more complaints than we can avoid between here and London.’

  ‘Every consideration?’ queried the reluctant Popov.

  ‘Give the impression of cooperating.’ Natalia no longer wanted to be alone to think, as she had when she’d first learned of Charlie’s arrival. The opposite, in fact. ‘You said you were busy tonight?’

  ‘Dinner with our regional commander, from the northeast. I don’t think I should consider rearranging it; I’m not sure how long he’s going to be here.’

  ‘Of course you shouldn’t rearrange it,’ accepted Natalia.

  ‘Maybe you should come?’

  ‘Too late to arrange anything for Sasha.’

  ‘What about the Englishman? Still sure you don’t want to meet him?’

  ‘No!’ said Natalia, too loudly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked the man.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘There’ll be a lot to talk about tomorrow.’

  How much would there be of what she wanted to hear, wondered Natalia.

  ‘A confirmed $100,000,000!’ queried a staggered Frolov.

  ‘Deposits already lodged, from every purchaser,’ confirmed the Dolgoprudnaya boss of bosses.

  ‘And there’s no problem at the plant?’