Bomb Grade

chapter 35

H illary Jamieson’s presence initially created the sort of can-this-be-true reaction to which Charlie was by now accustomed, but that instantly changed at the sheer professionalism and obvious ability with which she recounted her Moscow examination of the stolen plutonium containers. There wasn’t the most arcane question from the three German physicists present she was not able immediately to answer and there weren’t many anyway, so comprehensive was her account. The cylinders were of a type she had only read about and seen in illustrations, an old design even by Russian standards, with an inbuilt refrigeration system. All the coolant meters had registered a stable temperature. The Curie reading on the gauges showed the plutonium to be highly enriched but each cylinder was well sealed and the meters and gauge had a secondary cut-off system to prevent leakage if any valve failed. The cylinders had no sign of corrosion or damage and she’d told the intended smugglers how to wedge and pack them: providing they did what she’d said there was no risk of leakage. Despite which it obviously made good sense to have the protectively equipped and suit-stocked removal vehicles available in Berlin.

In addition to their preparations at the Kempinski, the Bundeskri-minalamt antiterrorist division had installed photographic surveillance as well as listening devices on the GertrudeStrasse telephone kiosk and in advance of the Wiesbaden meeting Charlie worked his way through the mountain of prints, insisting he couldn’t recognize the olive-skinned Trabant driver featured upon them as a frequent user. Charlie insisted so again at Wiesbaden and repeated the danger of losing an Iraqi connection by unnecessary observation, which was the objection he made even more strenuously arguing against including the Polish authorities in a tracking operation between Russia and Germany. He’d already established contact points along the route and advised them through Balg before leaving Moscow that Sergei Sobelov intended to use the Kempinski. And because he was the only possible link between the two he would know where the containers and the money were to be exchanged between a Russian Mafia boss and the Iraqi emissary. That, Charlie maintained, was where the surveillance should be massively concentrated, not anywhere else, where a chance discovery or simple mistake could destroy everything.

Charlie’s argument – and the sometimes shouted opposition to it – occupied a lot of the morning and continued into the afternoon and appeared to end with his winning it, although it was decided to maintain the GertrudeStrasse monitor. Charlie was sure one of the German agencies at the conference – countei-intelligence if not antiterrorism but most likely both – would try a lot more, because any service in the world would have done. But his main concern was to avoid Polish interference, which was why he stirred up the resentment he did, deflecting them from the en route hotels. They still hadn’t been demanded by the end of the day – proving the point of which he didn’t remind them that too many people involved in too much organization overlook basic essentials – which Charlie accepted to be only a temporary oversight. To be sure, as he needed to be, he’d have to make his move at Kalisz. Poznan had only ever been a failsafe insurance.

On the flight back to Berlin, conveniently separated from Schumann, Hillary said, There wasn’t anyone back there who didn’t think you were the most arrogant son-of-a-bitch they’d ever met: I even thought so and I know different. When are you going to tell me what you’re up to?’

‘Soon,’ lied Charlie. Knowing Hillary as well as he now did, he knew it would be impossible to get her active participation: unfair – wrong even to consider it. This was his personal fight – his revenge for the threat against Sasha – no one else’s.

She grinned, beside him. ‘You think they’ll have our room at the Kempinski wired for sound and pictures?’

‘More than likely,’ accepted Charlie.

‘I’ll ask for the film when everything’s all over.’

This time there was only one day’s delay between Charlie’s successful connection to GertrudeStrasse and his interception at the U-bahn station. It was the same olive-skinned driver who detoured for even longer around the eastern part of the city, with Charlie braced more against an outburst of rear-view realization than the springless jarring of the Trabant. The exchange was on the Karl-LiebknechtStrasse, directly outside the cathedral, the body-search as efficient as before. It was a different Mercedes. Turkel said immediately Charlie entered the vehicle, ‘So we have a deal?’

‘They’ve accepted your offer.’

‘The same thing.’

‘Not until they’re satisfied how the payment is to be made and the handover achieved.’ Charlie saw the car had gone completely around the square to drive p ast the cathedral a second time. The huge guard sat as before, arm at the ready along the seat back.

‘I presume they want cash? The Russians usually do.’

‘Yes.’

‘And in dollars? They usually want dollars, as well.’

‘Yes.’

‘Peasants!’

‘Peasants only trust gold.’

‘It’s still a lot of paper.’

They’d picked up FriedrichStrasse, although going east, and Charlie wondered how close the surveillance was. ‘The Americans print $1,000 notes. Twenty-two thousand $1,000 notes takes up far less room in the boot of a car than eight plutonium cylinders. Three large-size suitcases should hold it quite adequately.’

Turkel shrugged, seemingly disinterested. ‘You will guide the delivery vehicles to Wannsee, to the lay-by near the lake buildings: that’s why we went there, for you to be familiar with it. The man who picks you up at the U-bahn will be there, to identify you to the people who are going to examine the containers and guarantee everything is genuine. Before you do that, you will have introduced me to the Dolgoprudnaya people. While the canisters are being checked, I will show them the sights of Berlin, from the comfort of a car…’ Turkel held up a mobile telephone of which Charlie had until that moment been unaware. ‘… The line will be kept open, throughout the cylinder check. The moment I hear everything is satisfactory, I will hand over the money and at Wannsee my people will take delivery of your cargo. Does that sound satisfactory to you?’

Charlie could think of so many objections – chief among them his own personal intention – that he had difficulty deciding where to begin. So he said, ‘No! It is completely unsatisfactory.’

The rejection brought the stir Charlie expected from the heavy man in front.

Turkel said, ‘Why not?’

‘You’d have no guarantee the Dolgoprudnaya wouldn’t try to steal the money before handing over the plutonium. They’d have no guarantee you wouldn’t try to steal the plutonium before handing over the money.’

‘ Would they try?’

‘Of course they would! Just as you’d try to get the plutonium without paying for it.’

‘Enough!’ barked the man in front. The interjection – and the way the man leaned over the seat towards him – so startled Charlie that he physically jumped.

‘No!’ stopped Turkel, extending a stopping hand towards the man. ‘It’s all right.’ He turned, smiling, to Charlie. ‘What’s your alternative?’

The bastard had intended trying to hijack it! He was paying too much attention to his own plots and not enough to anticipating those of everyone else, Charlie told himself. ‘Sobelov is coming personally,’ Charlie disclosed for the first time. ‘He hopes this will be the first of several transactions…’

‘… That would be interesting…’ interrupted Turkel.

‘… Then this must go perfectly,’ resumed Charlie. ‘After proving to Sobelov the money is in the cases it will be taken by you both to a safe deposit vault or a left-luggage facility. Sobelov gets the key…’

‘But…’ tried Turkel, but now Charlie held up the halting hand. ‘But Sobelov doesn’t get the money until you’re satisfied: your money is safe. So you can personally ensure the plutonium cargo is genuine

…’ He looked quizzically at the small man. ‘But not in the open, at Wannsee. That really wasn’t practical, was it?’

Turkel shrugged, unembarrassed.

‘Rent a warehouse. Or use a facility you already own or trust. We won’t go there until after the money is deposited. Be there, with your experts – take us there yourself even – and personally see it approved.’ They were so far at the eastern edge of the city that signposts were actually indicating Frankfurt am der Oder. There were still four days before Sobelov’s delivery drivers were due at Kalisz.

‘That seems to ensure safety on both sides,’ agreed the man.

‘We must foreshorten the meeting procedure,’ insisted Charlie. ‘Sobelov won’t wait around for days, like you’ve made me do.’

‘When’s Sobelov arriving?’

‘The fifteenth.’

‘Do you enjoy the Ganymed?’

‘I’ve become very familiar with the menu.’

‘The Ermeler Haus then. My guests. One o’clock.’

‘Sobelov will have people with him,’ warned Charlie.

Turkel smiled. ‘I’ll have people with me. Some to make sure I’m not being tricked and others to show how unhappy I’ll be if it’s attempted.’

They dropped Charlie at the FriedrichStrasse U-bahn and on his way westwards Charlie tried to isolate the suspected German observation but couldn’t. Hillary was sorting through shopping packages when he got to their room. At once she announced that Schumann expected them upstairs. The German said ‘thieving bastard’ when Charlie related Turkel’s virtually admitted hijack intention and nodded to the warehouse alternative.

‘You still think he’ll try to cheat?’

‘Probably.’

‘I guess you’ll get the handover location at the lunch. It won’t give us any time to get into position.’

‘Which will make both of them feel safe,’ Charlie pointed out.

They were interrupted by the arrival of Walter Roh, the head of the Bundeskriminalamt antiterrorist division and the most vocal opponent of Charlie’s solo operation. Instead of the normal fixed-faced hostility there was an immediate smile from the man at being able to show – particularly in front of Hillary – that he’d either ignored or had countermanded Charlie’s surveillance argument. In smirking triumph the thin-faced, flaxen-haired man announced that Turkel’s Mercedes had been a Hertz hire, on a genuine Turkish passport and credit card with a billing address in Istanbul. After dropping Charlie at the station it had gone direct to Schonefeld airport, from which Turkel and his two companions had flown on the last direct flight that day to Cologne. From the airport they’d been followed – undetected, as they’d been throughout, stressed Roh – to the Bonn offices of the Iraqi Information Service, already suspected to be the operating front for Baghdad intelligence. Charlie was ready for the accusation when it came, the presentation to him, without anything being said, of that day’s photograph of the olive-skinned man he’d earlier refused to identify. From Roh’s new pile Charlie picked out a print of the threatening front-seat passenger whom he insisted had always collected him until today. He didn’t think Roh – maybe not even Schumann – believed him but he was happy at the later excuse, weak though it was, that Roh’s boasting would give him. And which he realized he’d need when the counter-terrorist chief tried to correct the Wiesbaden oversight by demanding the hotels at which the couriers would stop. Charlie risked the briefest of warning looks to Hillary and named those in Poznan and Frankfurt am der Oder. She said nothing. He gestured her to silence back in their room when he thought she might be about to say something, because he would have bugged their room if he’d been in the German position, so it was not until that night at dinner at a chosen-by-chance restaurant that she was finally able to ask why he hadn’t said anything about the couriers’ first stop at Kalisz.

‘There’s an army of people stumbling about, endangering it all. I want to check them through Kalisz by myself.’

‘What about me?’

He still needed more technical guidance and he didn’t think he had time to get it without possibly arousing her suspicion. ‘I don’t intend making any contact: that wasn’t the arrangement. And I don’t want you anywhere near the hotel. I want to check them out myself.’

She shrugged. ‘I can’t see why, but OK.’

Charlie genuinely liked Schumann and regretted the embarrassment he might cause the man, so before he left the Kempinski early the next morning Charlie left a note that he didn’t want any help on a specific London enquiry, hoping Roh would be the one most upset by the exclusion. He would, promised Charlie, be back in Berlin at least two days before the arrival of Sergei Sobelov.

Having grown accustomed to Mercedes travel, Charlie hired one himself and drove hard to the Polish border, to avoid being traced by Walter Roh’s service while he was still in Germany. Now he wasn’t part of it any more, Charlie decided intelligence organizations were a bloody nuisance.

‘I brought the equipment I can conveniently carry, just in case,’ said Hillary, as they crossed, unimpeded, the easy Gubin checkpoint.

‘It might be a good idea,’ agreed Charlie. He wasn’t at all sure about what might happen in the next few days.

The interior of an Orthodox church was not new to her but Sasha still tightly clutched her mother’s hand, nervously awed by the ornate gold filigree of the overwhelmingly intricate decoration and the smell of the incense smouldering in its burners and even more uncertain than usual of the black-gowned priests with huge beards and rumbling voices, because today they were much closer than normal, in a small office, and talking about things she didn’t understand. She wondered if giants lived here. Before they left, her mother leaned forward with her head bowed for what seemed to be a long time from one of those wooden seats that Sasha always found so uncomfortable but she didn’t wriggle because she knew she shouldn’t whenever her mother knelt like that.

Outside, where the car and the lady in uniform who always took her to school these days were waiting, Sasha said, ‘What were you talking to the man about?’

‘Ley is coming to live with us: we might even get a new apartment together.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he loves you and he loves me and we all want to be together.’

‘Does the man in the church have to say he can?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does that mean Ley’s my daddy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why hasn’t he been before?’

‘The man in the church had to say he could be.’

‘I’ll be like the others at school then?’

‘Do you want Ley to be your daddy?’

‘Will he still buy me presents?’

‘I expect so. There’ll be a party, after the church.’

‘Do you want Ley to be my daddy.’

‘Yes.’

Even though she’d been given the instructions, the damned woman shouldn’t have taken off to Berlin without advising Washington, so there was another disciplinary reason for getting rid of Hillary Jamieson, although Fenby didn’t feel he needed any more. But he didn’t like the idea of her being where he couldn’t know what she was doing. Which was easily resolved. Kestler had to be moved to Berlin at once, to keep a handle on everything.

He smiled up at Milton Fitzjohn’s approach across the restaurant. ‘Thought you’d like to know in advance that you’re going to have a very famous nephew in the next few weeks,’ Fenby greeted the House Speaker. ‘So it’s a good time to talk about the future.’