Atom Bomb Angel

16

After Harry Slan left Deke Sleder’s office, the German Industrialist sat in silence for a long time thinking. He was not a happy man at that moment, and he did not like doing what he had just done. However, he liked being rich and he liked being powerful, and he was intelligent enough to understand that a family’s empire does not always survive and prosper through three generations by putting ethics at the top of its list of priorities.

The man who had come to see him at his headquarters in Hamburg only a few months before hadn’t exactly had ethics at the top of his list of priorities either. He had introduced himself to Sleder’s personal assistant as one Walther Hauptmertz, stating that he had a business proposition that he wished to put to Herr Sleder in person; no one else in the organization would do. Intrigued, Sleder had granted him an appointment.

Hauptmertz was a stocky man, with a twinkle in his eye, and a face that was full of fun. He strode into Sleder’s office in a fashionable herring-bone suit, that flattered his figure, but did not have the preciseness of fit, nor of detail, that a personally tailored suit would have done. The back of the jacket rose up a little too high behind his neck; one of Hauptmertz’s shoulders was a fraction higher than the other, but the jacket did not compensate for this; there were buttons on the cuffs, but no buttonholes, not even fake ones; the jacket had a striped pattern, but the stripes did not match up at the shoulder seams, nor at the pockets. It was clearly an off-the-peg suit, and, judging from the good cloth from which it was made, had been bought from an expensive boutique. His narrow Cardin tie, and even narrower Etienne Aigner executive briefcase were further confirmation that he probably wasn’t on the poverty line. He struck Sleder as looking like a cross between an international arms dealer and a marketing manager for a French cosmetics house.

They shook hands and sat down. The size of this office made Sleder’s New York office look like a cupboard in comparison, but Hauptmertz did not show any sign of being impressed. He placed his briefcase on Sleder’s desk, popped it open, but didn’t remove anything, and leaned forward.

‘Herr Sleder,’ he said with a big smile, taking what appeared to be a gold Dunhill lighter from his pocket. ‘Have you ever before seen one of these?’ He held it up for inspection.

‘I think so — it’s a cigarette lighter, is it not?’ Sleder wondered if the man was weak in the head.

‘No. It looks like a cigarette lighter, Herr Sleder.’ The man pulled hard and it snapped into two halves, and for a full second there was a high-pitched shrieking sound, which then subsided slightly. He laid the two halves on the desk top, and moved them around. As they moved, the shrieking got alternatively louder and then quieter. Hauptmertz finally moved them into a position that stopped the shrieking altogether. ‘This is actually the very latest in anti-bugging equipment. No microphone, of any type, however close or powerful, can pick up one intelligible word with this device in operation. Both halves are transmitters and receivers; they are transmitting now on a new frequency — a frequency that you and I cannot hear. This frequency disintegrates electric sound waves, but does not affect ordinary human speech and hearing.’ He smiled.

‘Very clever,’ said Sleder, ‘provided, of course, it works. It could be most interesting… most interesting. And you are looking to sell this invention, are you?’

‘Oh no, Herr Sleder, I just wanted to tell you about it in case you had decided to record our conversation — to let you know that it would be a waste of time.’

Sleder eyed him strangely.

‘You see, Herr Sleder, what I am about to tell you is confidential. It would be in the interests of neither of us for this conversation to get beyond the walls of this room. That is my reason for putting this device on your desk.’ The twinkle, for a moment, went from his eyes, like the sun on a rich blue sea suddenly going behind a cloud, leaving dark grey water and sinister white horses; then it bounced back again, and he smiled once more.

‘I see,’ said Sleder, not seeing very much at all. ‘So what is your secret, my friend, that is so great I am the only person on earth who may share it with you?’

Hauptmertz stared him straight in the eye. ‘I am going to destroy your business and personally bankrupt you,’ he said.

Sleder put his hand out, flipped open the lid of his cigarette box, without offering the box to Hauptmertz, lit the cigarette with a table lighter on his desk, inhaled deeply, then blew the smoke out and leaned forward. ‘And for your next trick after that?’

‘I am not a magician, Herr Sleder, and I am not playing tricks.’

Sleder held the cigarette out in front of him, but did not draw any more smoke from it. ‘That’s a pity; I have a god-daughter, and I am sure she would have liked a white rabbit for her birthday.’

Hauptmertz didn’t smile. Sleder wondered whether to push the button that would bring the two guards charging in with their guns, or whether to hear this man out a bit further. The man made his decision for him.

‘Gebruder Sleder,’ said Hauptmertz, ‘owns, among its major assets, 842,000 acres of wheat ranch-land in Manitoba, Canada, Oregon in the United States, and Queensland, Australia. The revenues from this make up nine per cent of your company’s total revenues.

‘You own SledTex of Lecco, Italy, which is now among the world’s five largest producers of sportswear textiles, making fabrics for everything from ski anoraks to footballers’ shorts to scuba-divers’ wet-suits to asbestos suits for motor racing drivers; SledTinta of Como, Italy, one of the world’s largest textile printing plants; Sleder-Ykeng-Lee of Hong Kong, which is one of Hong Kong’s largest manufacturers of jeans, and which now has a twenty-year contract to build factories and manufacture jeans inside the People’s Republic of China. Your textile interests account for twelve per cent of your company’s total revenues.

‘Your interests in oil are spread fairly widely. You own a small field in the North Sea, but the drilling so far has been inconclusive, although you have hyped up the reports, and three major companies are interested in purchasing it at the present time. You have minor oil interests in Saskatchewan, Kenya and the North Sea, but your major oil holdings are in El Salvador, where you have made seven important strikes, and invested, if I may be permitted to say so, more than is wise, perhaps, for such an unstable country.’

Sleder continued to stare at Hauptmertz. He hadn’t moved an inch, and the ash was half an inch long on the end of his cigarette.

‘Revenues from your oil fields in El Salvador account for twenty-three per cent of your company’s total revenues.’

Sleder knocked the ash off the end of his cigarette, but did not lift the cigarette up to his mouth. So far everything Hauptmertz had said was completely accurate; and the only people in the world who knew the precise figures of the Gebruder Sleder empire were Sleder and his accountants. Someone had been giving Hauptmertz a lot of help with his homework.

Hauptmertz continued. ‘You are producing high explosives under a licence from the Federal German Government which specifies that these explosives are for industrial purposes, such as mining, only. In fact, only ten per cent of the explosives you manufacture are sold for industrial purposes. Under the banner of your company, and behind the façade of your industrial explosives business, you have a sizeable munitions empire manufacturing, and going to great lengths to sell, hand grenades, shells, mortars, landmines — and you don’t discriminate over your clientele, do you? Terrorists are among your best customers. It is all done under a perfectly innocent-looking front, and the authorities are kept very happy by the substantial annual payments, both in cash and in beautiful girls, that you make to them. This munitions empire accounts for twenty-six per cent of your revenues.’

Sleder stubbed out his cigarette. He was starting to feel uncomfortable, and he wasn’t used to feeling uncomfortable.

‘Gebruder Sleder,’ said Hauptmertz, ‘manufactures wheels, ball bearings, brake parts and axles for railway locomotives and carriages; you supply Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Britain, Spain, Canada and the United States with these parts. This side of your business accounts for twenty-eight per cent of your company’s total revenues.

‘The remaining two per cent comes from a new development. Your company AtomSled has been set up with a massive capital investment — all provided by yourself — to cash in on the world boom in nuclear energy. AtomSled has been set up to manufacture the fuel rods and bundles for nuclear power stations. The amount of plant you have constructed, if worked at capacity, would contribute twenty-five per cent of your company’s total revenues; all it contributes at the present time is two per cent. You have so far been unable to obtain sufficient contracts. Your factory workers are on short time, yet even so you are building up a massive stock-pile of fuel, which you cannot be sure you are going to be able to sell. The financial drain caused by this is serious, but at the moment not desperate.’ Hauptmertz and Sleder stared for some moments at each other.

‘Thank you,’ said Sleder, ‘for giving me such an elaborate account of my business; I would be curious to know your sources.’

‘Yes,’ said Hauptmertz, ‘I have no doubt you would.’

‘I would also like to know who you are, for whom you are working and why you are telling me all this?’

‘My name is Carpov, Dimitri Carpov. I work for a small company in the Soviet Union which you may have heard of: it is called the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnasti — you probably know it better by its initials: the KGB.’

‘And my name is James Bond,’ said Sleder. ‘I work for MI6.’

Carpov shook his head. The twinkle had gone again from his eyes. ‘You are joking; I am not.’

‘Please continue,’ said Sleder.

‘Your wheat and textile interests: they account in total for twenty-one per cent of your revenues, which is not a lot, so we shall not for the moment concern ourselves with them. But your oil — which alone accounts for twenty-three per cent — that is interesting. The backbone of your oil interests is in El Salvador, and we have some very good connections there. We can arrange very quickly for your plant to be destroyed, and we can make it impossible for you to put up new plant in its place.

‘Your munitions interests, which account for twenty-six per cent of your revenues: I don’t think I need to convince you any further that I know a great deal about your business; I know exactly who you are paying off, and how much you are paying; we could expose you in any of a dozen different ways, and wipe out your munitions business within a matter of months.

‘Your railway components which contribute twenty-eight per cent of your total revenues: we have massive plant in the Soviet Union making the same types of components; we could go to all your customers and offer to supply them the same articles at a price you could never match. We could wipe out your components business within a year.’

Sleder drummed his fingers on top of his cigarette box. ‘And what good will this do you?’

‘I’m coming to that now. We have in mind to offer you a deal: you do a small favour for us, and in return we won’t destroy you.’

Sleder took out another cigarette, and rolled it around between his fingers.

‘We just want you to start supplying fuel rods and bundles to a number of nuclear power stations in the United States, Canada, Spain, France and Britain; that is all.’ He sat back.

Sleder put the cigarette down on the desk. ‘I don’t know if I have missed something that you said, but that is precisely what I am trying to do at the moment. There are several other countries I would like to sell to as well.’

Carpov nodded. ‘You didn’t miss anything. We are not concerned about countries other than these — what you do there is your own affair — but with these five, we are prepared to give you plenty of assistance.’

‘And what do you want out of this? Do you want to supply the uranium?’

‘You’ll find out what we want, when we are ready to tell you.’

Sleder’s brain was churning over. The only possible reason he could think of was that the Russians needed an outlet for surplus uranium; but two years ago his company had approached the Russians to see whether they would be prepared to supply uranium and at what price, just as they had approached all the other uranium-producing countries with the same questions. The Soviet reply had been that they had no surplus uranium to sell. So why, Sleder wondered, had they changed their minds — or had they?

He didn’t like Carpov, didn’t like him one bit, but there was something in what the man said that made Sleder think. His own approach to the nuclear energy industry had been lethargic so far; it was time he pulled his finger out, and this was just the prompting he needed.

‘I cannot see any advantage in not co-operating,’ said Sleder.

‘I think that sums it up very well,’ said the Russian.