The Fifth Horseman (25 page)

Eastman couldn’t resist laughing at the thought of Delbert Crandell, the Secretary of Energy, crammed onto the floor of his car. At least some good, he thought, would come out of all this.

“O.K.,” he said. “Do it your way. Just make damn sure it doesn’t leak.”

The headquarters of the SDECE, France’s intelligence service, are on the Boulevard Mortier behind Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris’s Twentieth Arrondissement, a neighborhood so drab that even on the brightest of spring days it somehow seems as depressingly gray as a Utrillo winter scene. From the street, the building that houses the SDECE looks like an old army caserne, which it in fact is, its paint peeling away like dead skin flaking off a sunburned limb.

The decrepitude ends at the front door. Inside the headquarters, gleaming banks of computer consoles place all the wizardry of the electronic age at the disposition of a service traditionally known more for the Gallic panache of its operatives than for their technical skills. Years of Congressional probes and public outcries might have sanitized the SDECE’s friendly rivals at the CIA; General Bertrand’s service could still recruit the mercenary forces required to overthrow the odd African dictator, engage the services of Corsican gunmen whose normal pursuits involved the sale of a little white powder, or set up its Kuala Lumpur operative in a whorehouse.

Such places were, after all, traditional venues for the exchange of information, and the French were far too appreciative of the foibles of the flesh to abandon them entirely in favor of devices as sterile as satellite photos.

The SDECE director, General Henri Bertrand, was seated at his desk deeply absorbed in a study of Vietnamese penetration into the Golden Triangle opium trade in Burma when his deputy came in with a thick computer printout. It contained everything the SDECE had on the sale to Libya of the reactor from which the Americans suspected Qaddafi had obtained plutonium.

Bertrand was familiar with much of the material. Security in nuclear matters had been a very delicate point in the French capital since the day in April 1979 when an Israeli hit team had blown apart the inner core of an experimental reactor destined for Iraq only weeks before it was due to be delivered to Baghdad. He glanced at it quickly and then told his deputy, “Ask Cornedeau to join me, would you?”

Cornedeau was the agency’s nuclear scientist, a bald, intense young man who had graduated from the Polytechnique, France’s great center of scientific learning, a decade before.

“Sit down, Patrick,” Bertrand ordered. Swiftly, he reviewed for him what had happened.

Patrick Cornedeau smiled and took an unlit pipe from his pocket. He was trying to give up cigarettes and it was the security blanket he employed whenever he felt the urge for nicotine rising in him.

“Well, if Qaddafi is really after plutonium, he couldn’t have picked a tougher way to get it.”

“Perhaps, cher ami, it was the only one available to him.”

Bertrand’s scientist shrugged his shoulders. He had gamed dozens of ways by which a dictator like Qaddafi could get the bomb: hijack a plutonium shipment, do what the Indians did — buy a Canadian heavy-water reactor that runs on natural uranium and duplicate it right down to the thumbtacks. But this was different. Cheating with a standard light-water reactor was the toughest challenge of all.

Cornedeau got up and walked over to the blackboard hanging on one wall of Bertrand’s office. For a minute he stood in front of it, idly tossing a piece of chalk in his hand, marshaling his thoughts like a schoolmaster about to begin a lecture.

“Mon general,” he said, “if you’re going to cheat on a nuclear reactor, any reactor, you cheat with the fuel. When the fuel burns, or fissions, it gives off heat, boils water to make steam to run turbines to make electricty. It also sends a stream of stray neutrons flying around. Some of them”-he punched the blackboard-“go banging into the unburned fuel, lowly enriched uranium in this case, and start a reaction in there which converts a part of that into plutonium.

“In this reactor,” he continued, making a sketch on the blackboard, “the fuel is in a pressurized core inside the shell that looks like this. You change it only once a year. It comes in enormous, heavy bundles of fuel rods. To get it out, you have to shut down your reactor. Then you need two weeks’ time, a lot of heavy equipment and plenty of people. Don’t forget we have twenty technicians assigned to it. There is absolutely no way the Libyans could have gotten the fuel out of there, spirited it away some dark night, without some of them noticing it.”

Bertrand drew on his Gauloise. “And what happens to that fuel when it comes out?”

“First of all, it’s so hot, radioactively speaking, it would turn you into a walking cancer cell if you got close to it. The assemblies are packed in lead shells and taken to a storage pond where they’re left to cool off.”

“And so the rods just sit there in the pond. What prevents Qaddafi from taking them out and getting the plutonium?”

“The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna has inspectors who are responsible for seeing that people don’t cheat on these things. They run at least two inspections a year down there. And in between they have sealed cameras run on sealed lines which constantly monitor the pond. There are usually at least two of them there, timed to take wide-angle shots of the pond every fifteen minutes or so.”

“And that, presumably, doesn’t leave him enough time to remove the rods?”

“Goodness, no. You’ve got to put them into huge, shielded lead containers if you don’t want to be irradiated yourself. They have to be handled by heavy cranes. You need at least an hour for the operation. Two is more likely.”

“Could the inspectors alter the film?”

“No. They don’t even develop them. That’s done in Vienna. Besides, they also lower gamma-ray analyzers into the pond each time they make an inspection, to be sure the rods are radioactive. That way they can be sure a switch hasn’t been made.”

Bertrand leaned back, his head pressed against the headrest of his chair, his half-closed eyes focused on one corner of the ceiling. “You make a very persuasive case against the Libyans being capable of obtaining plutonium from this thing.”

“I think it’s very, very unlikely, Chief.”

“Unless they had complicity at some stage in their operations.”

“But where, how?”

“Personally, I have always managed to contain my enthusiasm for the workings of the United Nations.”

Comedau crossed the room and slumped into his chair, his legs sprawled uncomfortably before him. His superior was an old-school Gaullist and everyone in the house knew he shared the former President’s distaste for a body de Gaulle had once referred to as “Le Machin”the thingumajig.

“Sure, Chief,” he sighed. “The agency has its limitations. But the real problem isn’t them. It’s that no one really wants effective controls. The companies that sell the reactors, like Westinghouse and our friends over at Framatome, give a lot of public lip service to the idea, but privately they oppose controls like poison. No Third World government wants those inspectors running around their country. And we haven’t been very anxious to tighten controls ourselves, despite everything we say. There’s too much at stake in our reactor sales.”

“Well, my boy,” the General murmured through the veil of cigarette smoke now cloaking him like a shroud, “a sound balance of payments is an imperative of state with which it’s difficult to argue these days. I think you should get the inspection reports from Vienna immediately. Also ask our representative there whether he has any coffee-house gossip about inspectors being bought, bribed. Or too enamored of the bar girls or whatever it is they have over there now.” There was a sudden brightening in the General’s eyes as he recalled his last visit to the Austrian capital in 1971. “Handsome creatures, those Viennese. One could hardly blame the odd Japanese for going off the deep end for one of them.” He leaned forward. “What about our own people down in Libya? What do we have on them?”

“We’ve got their security clearances over at the DST. And, of course, the DST has recorded all their telephone conversations coming into this country.”

“Who was our senior representative down there?”

“A Monsieur de Serre,” Cornedeau replied. “He’s been back for a couple of months waiting for his next posting.”

Bertrand looked at the Hermes clock in a black onyx frame on his desk. It was almost lunchtime. “Do we have his current whereabouts?”

“I believe so. He’s here in Paris.”

“Good. Get his address for me. While you’re getting all that material from our friends at the DST, I’ll see if I can’t have a cup of coffee and a chat with Monsieur de Serre.”

The sight of the three grave and unfamiliar men surrounding Harvey Hudson, the director of the New York office of the FBI, told Michael Bannion that something very, very serious was going on in his city. Just how serious dawned on the Police Commissioner when he heard the words “Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories” appended to his introduction to the suntanned man with an ornament around his neck sitting at Hudson’s left.

Bannion looked at Hudson. The Commissioner had darkblue eyes, “the color of Galway Bay on a June morning,” his grandmother had once loved to tell him.

They were clouded with fear and concern, with a question he did not have to articulate.

“Yes, Michael, it’s happened.”

Bannion sank into his place at the conference table.

“How long have you had it?”

“Since last night.”

Normally, that answer would have provoked a burst of Celtic fury from Bannion. It was typical of the Bureau. Even in a matter that concerned the life and death of thousands of the people in his city, the FBI hadn’t brought his force into their confidence immediately. This time, he reined in his fury and listened with growing horror as Hudson reviewed the threat and what had been done about it.

“We’ve got until three o’clock tomorrow afternoon to find that device,”

Hudson concluded. “And we’ve got to do it without anyone finding out that we’re looking for something. We’re under the strictest orders from the White House to keep this secret.”

Bannion glanced at his watch. It was three minutes past eight. Just a month ago, he recalled, he and Hudson had discussed the possibility of nuclear terrorism together. “People have been shouting `the nuclear terrorists are coming’ for years,” he had cynically remarked to his FBI colleague. “How, I want to know-galloping down the Hudson Valley Re Lochinvar?” Now they had arrived and he felt totally, helplessly inadequate to deal with them.

“Don’t your people out at Los Alamos have some technological resources we can employ to track it down?” Bannion asked John Booth. “These things have to give off some kind of radiation, don’t they?”

It was indicative of the secrecy that shrouded NEST’s operations that the Police Commissioner of New York didn’t know that the NEST teams existed or anything about the way they operated. Quickly, as succinctly as he could, Booth described to the Commissioner and the rest of the conference room how his teams would work.

“Aren’t people going to spot your rented trucks?” the Commissioner asked.

“It’s very unlikely. The only giveaway is a small device like a radar pod we attach to the undercarriage. You’d have to really look for it.” Booth took a long drag on his cigarette. “The whole concept behind the operation is to be very discreet, unobtrusive. We don’t want the terrorist sitting on his bomb up in the attic to know we’re out there looking for him.”

“How about helicopters?”

Booth glanced at his watch. “Our own choppers should be getting into the air now. We’ve borrowed three more from New York Airways and we’re equipping them with detection devices.

They’ll be ready in an hour or so. I decided to start them on the waterfront. The choppers are very effective down there. They can run over the wharves very quickly and they can read through those thin warehouse roofs without much trouble.” He grimaced. “Although if it’s in a ship, we’d have to do a foot search to pick it up. The deck layers would shield out the rays we’re looking for.”

Those words brought all the frustrations, the hopelessness of his task welling up in Booth. He stubbed out his cigarette with an angry, impatient gesture. “Look, Commissioner, don’t expect any miracles from us, because there aren’t going to be any. We’ve got the best technology there is and it’s completely inadequate.”

The scientist saw the startled bulge of the Commissioner’s blue eyes, the nervous tic of his Adam’s apple. “All the tactical advantages are with our adversaries. My trucks can only read up to four stories. The choppers can only read down two at best. Everything in between’s a blank. If whoever put this bomb there wanted to shield it, all they would have to do is throw a water bed over it and we couldn’t pick it up three feet away.” Booth’s nervous hands went up to the Navajo medallion Bannion had noted on his neck.

The scientist made no effort to conceal his anguish, his deep sense of implicit guilt at being forced to admit to the men around him that he was incapable of finding in the streets of their city one of the terrible weapons he had spent a lifetime designing.

“Without intelligence, gentlemen, to narrow down the search area there’s no way in the world we can find that bomb in the time we’ve been given.”

Two stories below the director’s conference room, a telephone rang in one of the offices assigned to the FBI’s intelligence unit. The agent picked it up.

“Hey, man, this is Rico.”

The agent sat up, suddenly alert. He activated the device that would record his incoming call.

“Watcha got for me, Rico?”

“Not much, man. I spent the whole night looking, but the only thing I got is this brother, he be asked to get some medicine for an Arab lady.”

“Drugs or medicine, Rico?”