Atom Bomb Angel

21

Hagget might have been sour, but he didn’t let me down; at five thirty the small Bell helicopter was waiting at La Guardia airport, and I clambered in, clutching a soft hold-all. It was pitch dark, sleeting again, and a fierce wind was blowing across the concrete. The engine was already running, and the pilot nodded as I pulled the door shut and strapped myself in. The noise in the small cockpit was deafening.

‘Y’okay?’ he shouted.

I stuck my thumb up. He pointed to a set of headphones, and I put them on. It was like going into a different world as most of the roar and clatter was suddenly shut out. There was a burst of sharp, dipped speech from the pilot, a crackling hiss, then a reply from the tower. ‘Any time you want, Charlie Zero Tango. Watch the wind.’

‘I’ll watch it. Y’awl have a good Christmas,’ he said. He spoke with a heavy deep-South accent.

‘We’ll try.’

He reached forward with his right hand and pushed the throttle forward. The chopper shook violently, the body-work flapping so hard it sounded as though the whole machine was going to fall apart, then suddenly we lifted off the ground and hovered a few feet above it for some moments while the pilot fought against the buffeting wind to keep us stable. He opened the throttle full, dipped the nose slightly into the wind, and we started to climb upwards.

As the lights became smaller beneath us, we bounced uncomfortably about in the sky, and the pilot was fully occupied keeping the yawing, pitching machine in some semblance of level flight.

After about a minute and a half, he turned to me and pointed to my headphones. I lifted them off.

‘Going to have a bumpy ride!’

I nodded in agreement.

‘This is one hell of a night to go fooling around in helicopters.’

‘I can think of things I’d prefer to be doing,’ I shouted.

We were still climbing, and the wind was screaming outside. It was dark and eerie up here, and we were about level now with the tops of the tallest of the skyscrapers, heading in towards Manhattan at a faster rate than I, at this moment, relished. This was one hell of a way to spend Christmas Eve.

‘You sure about what you want to do?’ shouted the pilot.

‘Yes,’ I said, feeling very unsure.

‘I don’t know that I’m going to be able to set you down — this wind’s worsening, and I don’t know that roof at all.’

‘Didn’t you fly over it today?’

‘Sure I did, half a dozen times; each time it looked worse than the time before. It’s not fit to make a perch for a jackal. There’s stuff all over the place — the roof of the elevators, ventilators, the air-conditioning motors are all up there. There’s just one gap that’s good enough, and if we get blown wide of it, you can bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.’

He was right. Landing on the roof of a building isn’t easy. It’s tough enough in broad daylight with a calm breeze. In the pitch dark, in a gale, on a roof that’s not designed for helicopters landing, it wasn’t going to be too clever. But then, Sleder hadn’t exactly sent me an embossed invite to drop by on him; if he had, with his style for doing things, he would have had the roof levelled and landing lights installed.

‘What the hell do you want to go fooling around up here for? Why don’t you go in the front door?’

‘I lost my key.’

‘Oh, I just got it. Don’t tell me. You’re Santa Claus, right?’

‘Right. That’s what’s in my sack—’ I stopped talking suddenly, quite suddenly; anyone would have done. I gulped deeply. Only feet down below and to my right were the top windows of 101 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, looking more sinister and uninviting than I could ever have imagined.

‘I ain’t gonna be able to hang around for too long. I’m gonna set you down and then get my ass out of it. If I get caught by a gust, I’ll be over the edge.’

‘Okay.’

‘Going in now.’

The chopper thumped down onto the black roof. I opened the door. ‘Happy Christmas!’

‘You too, Santa!’

I jumped down and the wind nearly blew me over backwards as I landed. The chopper lifted off without a moment’s hesitation. In the pitch dark, and without its lights on, it had vanished into the sky within moments. The clattering of its engine and rotors faded, and suddenly Father Christmas was alone, very, very alone. The wind howled, tore at my clothes, trying to push me over to the edge.

I put down my hold-all, removed a powerful torch from it, and switched it on.

If this was the sort of thing Father Christmas had to do for a living, I decided he could keep it. The wind ripped through my clothing and through my flesh and through my bones, howling and whining against every object that protruded on the roof. I could dimly see the lights of the Empire State Building through the thickening sleet, and I could see lights of other buildings over to my right. I was utterly alone; I had never felt so alone. I was on top of the world, in the heart of a city where most people had switched out the lights and gone off to have a good time. During the next few hours, millions of excited children would be climbing into bed and waiting for a bearded man in a red robe to come clambering down their chimneys — at any rate, those that knew what a chimney was. I didn’t have a beard or a red robe, and I didn’t have any presents to bring down Deke Sleder’s chimney.

The beam of the torch found a small steel door, and I prayed that no one had tumbled Martha and prevented her from unlocking it. If I couldn’t get in through that door, I would be a dead man by morning; no one could survive the chill factor created by the wind up here for a whole night — and since I’d dismissed my sleigh, there wasn’t a wide selection of alternative routes back to the ground short of a mountaineering feat which would have qualified me to climb the north face of the Eiger with my hands tied behind my back.

I switched off my torch, pulled out my Beretta, and turned the handle. The door opened with no effort, and I relaxed, just a fraction, for the first time since I had kissed Martha goodbye that morning. I waited some moments before peering cautiously in and snapping the torch back on. I didn’t expect a welcoming party, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I shone the torch around. It was a concrete staircase, the fire escape to the roof, exactly as shown on the architect’s plans. I pulled the door shut behind me, then, holding my torch in one hand and my gun in the other, I started descending. It was bloody creepy.

I came down onto a floor, went through a door and found myself in a sumptuous apartment. It had evidently been furnished by an interior decorator to be all that the hospitality apartment of a successful corporation should be, with acres of thick broadloom, Italian porcelain lamps, bronze sculptures in the style of Giacometti, and a master bedroom that any exiled king would have been proud to have died in. It lacked a lived-in feeling, but fortunately it also lacked an occupant.

The larder had been stocked by someone who knew about good food. It was piled with tins of expensive delicacies, as was the freezer, and the booze cabinet had been stocked by someone who knew about good booze. At least I now had the consolation that my Christmas dinner might consist of something a little more exotic than the packets of sandwiches, chocolate bars and apples that lay at the bottom of my hold-all.

There was a large television set, the chairs looked inviting, and I decided it would be sensible to wait until daylight tomorrow to begin my search; the treasures of Sleder’s office, on the floor below, would be my Christmas present to myself in the morning.

I helped myself to a large gin, a cold quinine, as tonic is called in the States, a generous portion of ice cubes from the electric dispenser attached to the fridge, and settled myself into an armchair that reclined as I sat in it. I lit a Marlboro, sat back, and decided that I didn’t feel too bad… didn’t feel too bad at all.

As I sat, I reflected on everything that I had learned in the last few weeks. Operation Angel was backed by the Soviet Union and fronted by Namibia. In France, Baader-Meinhoff, doubtlessly in conjunction with the French left wing, was involved. In Spain, ETA was involved. In the US it was Joel Ballard, a professional terrorist. He was in charge of Canada too, although doubtless there was an FLQ connection there. The Front Libération de Québec had been quiet for many years, and although many of their aims had been achieved, many had not. This was no doubt their chance of a return to the big time. In England, as usual, it was the Irish and, for a change, a Namibian with a grudge.

The deadline was eleven days away, and we had no idea which power stations were threatened. We couldn’t take any of the people in because we had no evidence, and in any event it would have served little purpose, probably setting us back rather than advancing us. They were almost certainly all operating in individual units, or cells, as the IRA call them, which would be able to survive and continue their work, even without the leaders.

I wondered how much Fifeshire knew that he hadn’t told me. Had he placed Martha in that job? She wasn’t telling that. But she had told me pretty well all of what she had found out: about Harry Slan and American Fossilized, proving that Quoit was right in his theory — or at least, looked as though he was about to be proved right. The most important thing I had to find out in the next three days was whether Sleder was blackmailing Harry Slan and Horace Whalley, and perhaps others, merely because AtomSled needed orders, or whether Sir Isaac Quoit’s hunch was correct.

What I wanted was very well hidden, and it took me until Sunday afternoon to find it; it was hidden in an ingeniously concealed spring-loaded drawer at the back of a filing cabinet in Sleder’s own office. I had first to pull the front drawer right out, and then a second drawer popped up behind it. The front drawer had been the first place I had looked, and it was only when I returned to it and in a fit of frustration yanked too hard that I realized it would come out and that there was another drawer behind it.

The file in the drawer was marked, innocently but appropriately enough, New Business. It contained a buff folder, a sheath of papers, and a copy of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Inside the folder were several packs of Kodachrome X colour-negatives, and printed contact sheets. In some of the snaps I recognized my chum Horace Whalley; in the others were a total of eleven different men, none of whom could reasonably be described as good-looking, engaged in virtuoso performances with a bevvy of truly stunning young ladies. All had been captured, either for immortality or for some other purpose, in excellent colour, by a photographer who knew exactly what he was doing. I pressed a button on my ubiquitous Trout and Trumbull adapted Seiko digital quartz watch, and the face disappeared, exposing a tiny camera lens. The quality of my snaps would not be as these, but the fidelity of reproduction would be passable; Henri Cartier-Bresson might have turned in his grave, but it wasn’t a one-man show at the National Gallery that I was after. I recorded the faces of each individual, then replaced the snaps in the buff folder. Next, I took the sheath of papers and went and sat down at Sleder’s desk.

The papers were divided into five sections; one was headed United States, the second Canada, the third Great Britain, the fourth France and the fifth Spain.

Being not only patriotic, but also aware of who paid my rent, I turned my attentions first to the sheath marked Great Britain. The first page listed the names, locations and types of all the operating nuclear power stations in the British Isles. The second page listed the fuel types required for the advanced gas-cooled reactors, the magnox reactors, the pressurized-water reactors and for the one fast breeder reactor, and the third and fourth pages gave the exact technical specifications of the fuel required for each of the types. The fifth and sixth pages gave the amount of fuel consumed daily, weekly and annually by each of the reactors, and whether they were required to shut down for refuelling or whether they were on a continual-feed system.

The pages that followed listed all the organizations that comprised Britain’s nuclear energy industry, their addresses, telephone numbers and all key personnel of all sections.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the back of the last page was some tiny printing. It was so small as to be hardly legible to the naked eye and it took me some minutes of straining before I could decipher it. It said: Printed in the USSR. I thought about that for some moments. Sleder was without doubt a man who went to great lengths to get whatever he wanted. The information that was contained in here was readily available, surely, from a damned sight easier and more accessible source than the Soviet Union?

The other four bundles contained similar information about the nuclear energy industries of the other four countries, and all had the same tiny printing on the back of the last page.

The next sheath of papers interested me even more. The first page was a memorandum, undated, unsigned and not addressed to anyone specific. It stated simply: All substitute fuel rods or bundles will be identifiable by the initial B in capital letter form following the third digit of their serial numbers. Under no circumstances whatsoever are any rods or bundles of B-marked fuel to be shipped anywhere without my personal authorization.

There was a second memorandum. It stated: Instruct Hamburg to allocate 72 bundles for British Nuclear Fuels Limited, 75 bundles for Electricité de France, 71 bundles for confirmation for Spain. Under each word was a short string of numbers, and attached to the memorandum was a telex from AtomSled Hamburg which read: 101–5–5 /226–18–1 /40–28–2. I picked up the copy of Fear of Flying, turned to page 101 and counted five lines down and then five words across. The word was We. The next two words were are holding. It was an old but very effective form of code — a book code. They would have a copy of the same novel in Hamburg. Unless anyone intercepting the message knew what the book was, it was virtually impossible to crack the code on such a short message as this. Sleder had evidently been reading his detective novels.

What I needed to know, and badly, was what was special about the B-marked fuel that they had to be marked at all, and what was so special about them that Sleder felt the need to communicate in code. I needed someone who knew about fuel bundles to take a very close look at one, and to do that, I needed to obtain one. I didn’t have enough time to go hunting around Sleder’s factories, and in any event I wasn’t crazy about the idea of poking around a plant stuffed with radioactive nasties in case I ignored one No Entry sign too many and found myself in a No Return room. So I sat quietly at the grand master’s desk and tried to figure out an easier way.

My train of thought was suddenly interrupted when my eyes told my brain that a shadow had all of a sudden fallen across the desk, and my brain figured out that since the chief source of light, the window, was behind the desk and my eyes could see nothing unusual in front of them, then the cause of the shadow must be behind me.

During the three-millionths of a second it took my brain to reach this not illogical conclusion, the nerve ends in my right temple informed my brain that a cold metal object had just been pressed against my right temple. The hammer, anvil and echo chamber within my ear holes on both sides of my head received a series of vibrations, which they passed on to my brain, and my brain decoded these vibrations into words from a human being, male, Caucasian, of strongly Germanic origins. ‘Move and I’ll shoot,’ were the words.

A tidal wave of cold fear thundered through me and I felt that most of my innards had been flushed away. I froze for some moments, trying desperately to gather my wits, and to remember what to do in situations like this. I remembered. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you it’s rude to enter a room without knocking?’ I said. I wasn’t absolutely sure, but I thought I could hear him thinking.

‘I vill ask the questions.’

‘Okay. History’s my best subject.’

‘Shut up. Who are you and vot are you doing here?’

‘My name is Deke Sleder. I own the place.’

‘Very funny. I happen to know vot Herr Sleder looks like. I have worked for him for ten years.’ The gun pressed harder into my temple. ‘Who are you?’

‘The Ayatollah Khomeni — you probably don’t recognize me without my beard.’

I felt the gun push harder.

‘Vith a six-inch hole in your head, no one vill recognize you.’

‘Herr Sleder wouldn’t be pleased if you got blood all over his desk.’ I was cursing myself madly for having been too damn complacent; I had left my gun in the bedroom.

‘If it vas your blood, I am sure he vould not mind. Herr Sleder does not care for intruders.’

‘I think I just heard someone call your name,’ I said. ‘In a moment, I shall get very angry with you. There is no one else in the building.’

He had fallen for it. Now I knew he was alone. That made life a little easier — not much but a little, and every little helped in a situation like this. I wanted to see his face and his gun. The chair I was in could swivel freely. Whoever he was, he clearly wasn’t going to pull the trigger or he would have done so by now. He was more interested in finding out who I was and what I was doing here.

I swivelled the chair round with all my force, ducked my head down, and as I came round, I grabbed his gun arm with my right hand, pulling him towards me with a violent jerk, at the same time bringing my right foot up into his crutch. He went over my left shoulder, skidded headfirst along the top of the desk, carrying most of the papers with him, and plunged off the end. Unfortunately, he was still clasping his gun, a .44 Smith and Wesson automatic, in his hand.

I heaved the massive desk up and pushed it down on top of him, and heard a winded groan as it crashed down. Either he was a lot tougher, or fitter, or both, than I had thought, for he immediately rolled clear, brought the muzzle of the gun up towards me, and fired a shot which flattened itself onto the wall. I sprang across the room and out the door, went through the fire door and up the concrete steps to the next floor. Just as I reached the top of the steps, I heard the fire door open and footsteps on the concrete. A bullet cracked up the stairwell.

I raced into the bedroom, grabbed my gun from its holster, and snapped the safety catch off. Then I dived down behind the bed, switched the gun to automatic fire, aimed at the door and waited. I heard his footsteps reach this floor, but then he continued on up; he obviously thought I had run up to the roof.

I went out into the corridor, and through the fire door. I heard the unlocked door to the roof bang open. I crept carefully up to the bottom of the stairwell. The door at the top was open and daylight was streaming in. He was up there, busy discovering that I wasn’t. I hadn’t expected him to be quite so careless — it obviously hadn’t occurred to him that I might have a gun, and he displayed no caution at all when he decided that either I had jumped off the roof or I hadn’t gone up there at all, and started to come back down. He stepped into the doorway, silhouetting himself against the sky. As he stared down the stairwell, I was the last thing he saw on this planet. He evidently didn’t like what he saw. Whether it was me, or my Beretta 93R, I never did find out, because as he tried simultaneously to aim his gun at me and get back out onto the roof, I pulled the trigger, despatching three bullets up the stairs to greet him at a rate of twelve hundred feet per second. They didn’t travel particularly quickly in terms of the speed of light, but they travelled quite fast enough to reach him long before he had the chance to pull his own trigger.

The three bullets hit him in the chest, putting an instant and irrevocable halt to that organ, essential for the pumping of blood around the body, about which so much good, bad and indifferent romantic literature has been written. The force of the impact carried him four feet backwards across the roof, and draped him in not the most elegant of poses across the raised portion of an air-conditioning extractor vent.

I cursed. I hadn’t wanted to leave any mementoes of my visit behind. Dirty dishes can be washed, beds can be made, ashtrays can be emptied. Corpses are altogether more a problem. Fortunately it was dusk, and it would have been impossible for anyone to see what had happened — not that it was likely anyone would have seen even if it had been broad daylight. All the same, I pulled the man’s body into the staircase. He was a large thug of a man in a cheap brown suit, with crew-cut hair. He looked like a low-grade bodyguard, no doubt part of Sleder’s private army of henchmen and thugs. There was a plastic ID card in his wallet. It stated that his name was Kurt Bruhnler, and he was an authorized security guard at 101 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. I searched through the rest of his wallet. There was no gun licence and his driving licence was German. Evidently Sleder imported his own thugs in preference to using the local brand. This particular one was going to require an import-reject sticker.

Hagget was yet again going to be an unhappy man, but I didn’t want him to be an unhappy man for a few days yet — not that I cared about Hagget, but I needed time, and needed it badly; I didn’t want anyone discovering this corpse just yet. A bunch of keys in Bruhnler’s pocket gave me an idea. I went up onto the roof and found the key that fitted the hatch to the elevator motor room. I stepped in and looked at the maintenance certificate. It was dated 28 November. That would be the annual date. Provided nothing went wrong with the elevator in the meantime, it would be eleven months before anyone would go looking inside that hatch.

I pulled Bruhnler’s body through and lowered him onto the roof of the elevator. Anyone riding up or down would be quite unaware of the joyless rider on the roof. Not that I intended to let him remain there for eleven months; I would ask the long-suffering Hagget to notify the authorities in a matter of weeks.

I didn’t enjoy killing, but I enjoyed the thought of being killed even less. I wondered how long Bruhnler had been watching me, and it made me shiver. I wondered how he had come to be in the building, and whether he had been sent especially — but I decided that was unlikely. He had probably been given the job of keeping an eye on the building over the Christmas weekend and hadn’t bothered on the first two days. On the Sunday afternoon, he had probably decided he had better check up, so that if anything was amiss, it wouldn’t look as though he hadn’t been doing his job when someone else discovered it on Monday morning. Although I shouldn’t have done, I grinned at the thought of Bruhnler’s strange tomb. Life has its ups and downs, and so, for Kurt Bruhnler, had death.

It was time to depart, and Bruhnler had at least kindly given me the opportunity to leave earlier than I had hoped. When Bruhnler had entered the building, the computer would have noted it. The fact that it was Max Flynn and not Bruhnler who departed was something that was unlikely to bother the computer greatly. All it was concerned with was balancing the numbers, and that my departure would do nicely.

It took me a couple of hours to tidy up and conceal, as best I could, the bullet hole in Sleder’s office wall, and I was well pleased with my efforts. It was eight o’clock by the time I got back to the Warwick. I ordered some food up to my room, then sat down in the armchair, and continued the thoughts that Bruhnler had so rudely interrupted.

B-marked fuel rods and bundles — what the hell was special about them? It was looking more and more as though Quoit was right. I needed to get hold of one and quickly. I still didn’t know which power stations they were for. Seventy-two bundles for England. I remembered that the daily average per reactor was about thirty-six bundles; that was two days’ supply for one reactor — or one day’s supply for two reactors. We could notify all the countries concerned, have them check all fuel bundles in every power station until they found the B-marked ones; but that wouldn’t necessarily work. If the stations were already infiltrated, there was no way of being sure that whoever did the checking wasn’t an accomplice and therefore wouldn’t report anything. Those telexes were dated 23 December. It was unlikely that anything would have been shipped before Christmas, so the bundles were at the moment almost certainly still at AtomSled in Hamburg. They were probably to be sent between Christmas and the New Year, when most industries are running short of manpower and security tends to be lax. Sleder was evidently monitoring everything like a hawk. We had to stop the fuel leaving Hamburg until we could get surveillance organized on all AtomSled’s factories and warehouses — the stuff could have been anywhere — and then we had to follow it to wherever it was shipped and stick with it. Sleder somehow, for a few days, had to be removed from the scene; just long enough to delay the start of the shipment until it could be identified. Getting a man like Sleder out of the way was not going to be easy.

I went to bed and dreamed dreams of mockery, and failure, and death, and woke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat — one of the great perks of my trade. Then I went back to sleep again, and this time the night was kinder to me.