Sniper's Honor

Interlude in Jerusalem V

Certain things worked, certain things didn’t. It turned out that platinum as a catalyst was so widely used in the world that its name alone implied thousands of possibilities, some of them potentially lethal or at least weaponizable, some of them not so much. To plow through them and test them against a potential act-of-terror template would be a colossal waste of time. You needed two points to draw a line, establish a direction, a destination. One point indicated nothing except the universe around it.

Routine low-level exchanges with other friendly intelligence agencies — and even some not so friendly ones, surprisingly cooperative with the institute — yielded nothing, either. That meant Nordyne GmbH was either harmless or so far below the radar that it had been expertly buried by the best pros in the business, but there was no other indication of professional involvement. The mere presence of armed guards, even if some were Islamic extremists who’d been to war against Russia, meant nothing. Whoever owned Nordyne GmbH may have been manufacturing lawn-mower engines with catalytic converters for the American market and wanted to protect his investment.

All right, smart guy, Gershon argued with himself, why would he go to such lengths to camouflage his operation? Why would he locate it in a spot conspicuously close to Israel’s greatest enemy, an enemy that hungered for destruction and death, and yet at the same time, why would he seem to have — no independent penetration had yielded it — no connection with Iranian intelligence or Hezbollah, Hamas, or any of the world’s too many professional Jew-haters?

On top of that, the report from Lausanne was that the “address” for Nordyne GmbH was a fraud, just a post office box of a franchise operation in a mall. There was no headquarters per se, yet somehow, from a certain Swiss bank, payments were regularly sent by wire to receiving entities.

And — new element in the puzzle of the plant itself — why was there no outflow? If something were being manufactured, why was it not being shipped? Why was it linked to no distribution system, why was it unrepresented by a marketing department, why was it not publicizing its product at trade shows, whatever its trade might be? Why was it completely disconnected, as far as Gershon could tell, and that was pretty damn far, from any government sponsorship or even linkage? Its civic connections consisted of local property taxes paid promptly, water and electricity bills paid promptly, safety inspections passed, probably in the sense that someone “passed” someone else a couple of thousand rubles and the inspector went away happy, never having gotten past the cyclone fence and the gun muzzles of the Chechen thugs.

It just sat there, doing whatever it did, going nowhere, seemingly producing no salable product. It seemed operational only at night, because an American satellite, otherwise picking up zero activity, managed to confirm an operating temperature at a certain sector of the plant of about 1400 degrees centigrade. Why did they need all that heat, or, since he knew nothing much about chemistry, maybe the question should be “Why did they need so little heat?”

“Sorry,” said a professor at the university, “fourteen hundred centigrade is nowhere near the limit of industrial possibility in chemical manufacture. It’s not so hot, it’s not so cool. It’s just sort of in the middle.”

“Which means it tells me—”

“Nothing, except that somebody’s cooking something to make something else.”

“I think that’s what we already knew.”

“Now you know it even more so.”

And that was the most satisfactory conversation he had.

It didn’t help that Israel had no assets on the ground in South Russia. Moscow, St. Petersburg, yes, Volgograd, even beyond the Urals and in towns of special strategic value, yes. But way down south in the ass-end of Russia, near the Caspian, no way. And since the assets they did have at closest proximity — Odessa, Kiev, Lviv — were so well watched, it made no sense to send someone over from, say, the Odessa consul to check out the plant as a casual tourist. That would be sending SVR a telegram that the institute had something going on, was watching somebody, and who knew how SVR would react and how that reaction would mess things up.

“We know they’re making something; we don’t know what. We know they haven’t shipped it anywhere. We know they’re close to Iran, a night’s voyage by freighter. We know they have deep pockets and are highly paranoid about security. We don’t know who’s paying.”

“Gershon, what I don’t get is: they rushed, they rushed, they rushed. And now… nothing?”

“Odd, isn’t it? Represents a kind of mind that wants everything under control, overthinks, overprepares.”

“Gershon, you’ve just described the director of the institute, the prime minister, the entire cabinet and, God rest her soul, Golda Meir.”

“I know. Psychology gets you nowhere in this game, because everybody in this game is already crazy, including me and Cohen. But especially Cohen.”

So it was odd that Cohen came up with an idea. “Gershon,” he said, “considering your platinum mystery.”

“Yes.”

“If we’re monitoring the plant by satellite and secondary intelligence sources and our friends at Precious Metals Industry Reporter, and there have been no large-scale, industrial-appropriate raw materials shipments to the plant, then would it not seem possible that whatever else they’re using in their manufacturing process would be available locally? Perhaps that’s why they located there, because whatever else they needed was abundant, and anyone ordering large supplies of it would not attract suspicion.”

“What a horrible idea,” said Gershon. “So stupid, so useless. I wish I’d thought it up.”

What was abundant in Astrakhan besides fish eggs? It turned out only gas and oil; the Caspian Sea was a vast body of water sitting on a concentration of unpleasant-smelling substances that were of extraordinary value in the world’s energy market. Pipelines already ran from Azerbaijan to Turkey; drilling stations already dotted the coastline. The spindles and turrets of refineries already rose against the sky, and noxious fumes already clung miasmatically to all nine ports that ringed the world’s largest lake. How the fish survived to lay strings of the little black eggs that people gobbled on wafers with champagne seemed a minor miracle, one that perhaps did not bear investigating too closely. The caviar still tasted great, and the oil and gas still powered many of the civilizations that flourished in the fertile crescent.

Gershon ended up with a list of raw materials, chemicals, enzymes, compounds, end products, by-products, and waste products that such aggressive siphoning of the planet was known to produce. Natural gas alone was not an industry but a mother of industries: its product list included engine oils, industrial coolants, compressor oils, bearing greases, endless varieties of fuel and energy, fertilizers, fabrics, glass, steel, plastics (endless), and paint. It went on and on. My head, why does it hurt so? My indigestion, why does it burn so? It was too much stuff. It was as if the stuff had won. He, mighty Gershon, defeated by the abundance of stuff!

Since it was late and Cohen wasn’t around to provoke him, he tried a last exercise, the dullest form of investigation known to man, requiring no IQ, no education, no sensibility for the game, no experience: the good old random stab.

He went to his good friend Dr. Google.

He entered: “platinum.”

Then he entered the name of a substance that the Caspian was known to produce in copious quantities. The result, for minute after minute, clicking drearily into the night, was gibberish, nonsense, pointless.

I must be cracked, he thought.

If I am, it’s all right with me.

He tried one more. What the hell?

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, more gibberish until…

What on earth was ANDRUSSOW OXIDATION?

Another question for Dr. Google.

Ultimately, in Gershon’s mind, Dr. Google, the world’s greatest spy, loafed and dithered, took time for a shit and a nice bicarbonate of soda, and then answered. It must have been quite obscure, because it took Dr. Google.0742 seconds to answer, instead of the average.0181. Reading quickly, Gershon learned that the Andrussow Oxidation seemed to be a process invented by a Leonid Andrussow at IG Farben in the ’20s that enabled methane (Caspian-abundant) and ammonia (Caspian-abundant) in the presence of oxygen (world-abundant) at a temperature of about 1400 centigrade over (imported at great cost and under serious security) platinum to oxidize, if he understood it, into something called hydrogen cyanide, sometimes called Prussic acid, which, when combined with a stabilizer and an odorant, became…

He gulped, he swallowed, he reached for the phone to call his department head because the situation had just become an emergency and he wondered how soon it would become a catastrophe.

The end result was Zyklon B, the killing gas of Auschwitz.

Someone was making a lot of it.