‘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.’
chapter 36
Q uite sure he could judge her moral reaction from twice having heard Hillary’s denunciation of nuclear cynicism and hypocrisy, it was unthinkable for Charlie to tell her in advance what he was going to do, even though he could have omitted the secondary intention and just argued his need to survive. Wrong, even, to have brought Hillary with him. But he still needed her. He’d hoped to have seen enough in the Moscow warehouse and thought he had, but Hillary’s Wiesbaden account of the cylinder examination had convinced Charlie he needed to know much more, more probably than it was possible to assimilate.
Once safely across the border, Charlie drove more leisurely, satisfied they were undetected, and with time to spare stopped at a roadside shrine for Hillary to take photographs and again at an ornate church, where she crossed herself and genuflected and lit two candles and he realized she was a Catholic. Unasked, she said the candles were a prayer to keep everyone safe, them most of all.
He let Hillary lead them into it, when they started driving once more, waiting for her to ask again about Kalisz, feeling her eyes upon him when he repeated the danger of too many people.
‘You sure that’s all it is?’ she challenged, openly.
‘What more could there be?’
‘You tell me.’
‘It makes sense to see they’re on schedule. The last time everything was thrown out by the Volkswagen breakdown.’ Intent on keeping the conversation where he wanted it, he said, ‘You seemed very confident there was no danger of the cylinders leaking?’
‘No reason why they should, providing they aren’t thrown around.’
‘And then there’s the secondary protection system,’ he prompted. Which worked, as he’d expected it would, because with him at first and certainly at dinner with Popov and Natalia, he’d discerned the expert’s pleasure Hillary got explaining her esoteric science.
Although enriched plutonium could act as an atomic trigger, by itself it was latent as an explosive but lethal in content. It could expand if there was an abrupt or sustained temperature change, which was why there was an inbuilt cooling system: America and Britain had once used the same sort of storage but didn’t any longer. There was actually an additional protection in the Russian canisters, an expansion provision that was always allowed. Abrupt expansion could spring both the meters and the gauges, the primary function of which was measuring. The moment the pressure went beyond their tolerance, stronger seals were released completely to close off the cylinder neck.