It was more complicated than Charlie had imagined. ‘The secondary system only operates under heat pressure?’
‘That’s all it needs to.’
‘What would have happened at Pizhma? We know the canisters leaked there.’
‘The tops were simply smashed off. It would have been easier just to unscrew them but I guess they didn’t know that.’
‘Using those half-handles on the same level as the gauges and meters?’
‘And a lot of strength: they’re filled at below zero temperature and the metal expands afterwards: it’s a further way of ensuring a protective seal.’
Charlie thought there seemed far too many. ‘You need a special tool?’
‘Not necessarily, on those we saw. They’re pretty basic, like most of the Russian technology. But a wrench might help.’
‘What if the meter or gauge controls came unscrewed?’
He knew Hillary was still looking directly at him. ‘Charlie, you considering a Masters in nuclear packaging?’
‘I’m trying to understand what could go wrong.’
‘The ones I examined were split-pinned.’
Charlie hadn’t noticed that. ‘Split-pins can shake loose.’
‘The ones we saw were spring-ended, splayed after being inserted to prevent that happening.’
‘What’s highly enriched mean?’
‘That’s it’s highly irradiated.’
‘I don’t understand the danger of a leak.’
Hillary turned to look outside the car and Charlie was relieved. ‘OK, you know what a laser is, an amplification of a monochromatic light beam? Seen all the movies of it cutting through metal on its way up to James Bond’s crotch, stuff like that?’
Charlie nodded.
‘Same thing here. Except that it’s an X-ray and it’s invisible. You don’t feel it or hear it but it penetrates most things except substances like lead, and as I told you before, it melts bones like butter and you can take your pick of the cancers.’
‘Why hasn’t it affected Mitrov and Raina? We’ve pictures of them breaking canisters open.’
‘We don’t know it hasn’t. But I’d guess they’re OK. Our time frames give us just that: the times. They weren’t exposed for longer than a few minutes, at any one time. Say half an hour, in totaclass="underline" maybe even less.’
‘How long does it take to be fatal?’
‘After two hours, closely exposed to something as hot as we’re talking about, you’re wasting your money buying a new suit for Christmas.’
‘I wasn’t planning to.’
‘Don’t plan anything else,’ said Hillary, with a prescience Charlie found unnerving.
They got into Kalisz late in the afternoon, with the town already shrouded in winter half-light. It was almost completely dark by the time Charlie located the Atilia. There were no BMWs in the small parking area visible to the side of the hotel. Charlie drove by without stopping.
Having established his marker Charlie separated them from it by four streets before he actively began looking for where they could stay. He explored a further two roads before he found a pre-Solidarity relic boxed between a uniform row of shops and apartment buildings. It was an ugly, falling-apart example of the central planning hotel design once imposed from Moscow, a concrete and formica and factory-wood mausoleum. Off a cavernous vestibule there was an even more cavernous bar, already filled with noise and smoke. The carpet of their room was scarred by cigarette burns and ran the spectrum of stains. The wardrobe door was so thin it rippled as it opened and the bedstead achieved the same shimmer at the slightest touch. The sheets were grey and transparent and matched some of the carpet stains, and through the net of their curtains, which was all that covered the window, they could see through the net of the facing room a man scratching his groin beneath his underpants, which was all he wore. He saw them looking and went on scratching. There was no connected bathroom, which Charlie was glad about for the later excuse, if he needed one. The mirror over the handbasin was verdigrised in every corner and the basin grimy from the dirt of previous occupants. There was no plug. There was no heating, although the pipes groaned with the constipated ettort to provide it.
Hillary said, ‘You sure know how to give a girl a good time.’
‘It’ll do,’ said Charlie. He would have sought out such a place if he hadn’t found it the first time because its overwhelming benefit was that such hotels never closed and no interest was ever given to comings and goings. There was no restaurant and bills were settled at the moment of booking in. Charlie thought it was perfect.
‘What happens if they got picked up crossing the Russian border into Poland?’ demanded Hillary.
‘We’d already know of an interception at the Russian border.’
‘I’m not sure that’s the point,’ argued Hillary. ‘You really being straight with me, Charlie?’
‘I said I’d keep you safe.’
‘That wasn’t the question.’
‘I’m being straight with you.’ Charlie mentally chanted the mantra that the end justified the means, whatever those means were. ‘I’m going to check out the Atilia. Alone.’
‘I’m not sitting here watching that guy across the yard jerk off.’
From experience, Charlie went to the town square. The war legacy restoration had been done well enough for the wine restaurant to look original. They chose a table against the balcony rail, overlooking the ground-floor dining room and the spits upon which the meat slowly revolved, over two separate open fires. Hillary agreed the view was much better.
As he negotiated the sidestreets in the most direct line to the Atilia, Charlie tried to reassure himself with all the other reasons for the Russians being delayed, apart from that suggested by Hillary. The rendezvous with Sergei Sobelov and the man who called himself Turkel was still more than a week away. So there was more than sufficient failsafe time. And although it might spook them, which he wanted to avoid above all else, he could always postpone the transaction. Eighty kilos of nuclear material on the one hand balanced by $22,000,000 on the other was a powerful argument for a little patience.
But the BMWs were there.
Not at the side, which was now much fuller, but in a corner tight to the rear of the hotel and shadowed by some trees so that at first he didn’t see them and momentarily felt the first dip of real alarm. There were enough other cars, as well as the tree canopy, for Charlie to get right alongside. The bonnet of each car was cold and Charlie guessed they’d already been parked when he’d passed the first time. He checked the dashboards of each for the warning flicker of an alarm system. There was none.
‘They’re there,’ he announced as he sat down with Hillary thirty minutes later.
‘Crisis over then?’
‘There never was one.’
‘You know I’ve got to check them, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Do you need to go inside the trunks?’
She shook her head. ‘If anything’s gone wrong I’ll pick it up from the outside.’
Charlie hurried the meal, wanting the advantage of the crowded car park and insisted on getting Hillary’s equipment satchel from the boot of their Mercedes for the opportunity to check the tool kit. There were some pliers, although they didn’t look particularly substantial, and a tyre lever but no other tool he could utilize. The tiny pen torch worked perfectly.
The going home exodus had begun by the time they got to the Atilia, which they intruded into as if making for their own car, needing only minutes for Hillary to check the readings virtually as she passed the BMWs. Back on the road, clear of the hotel, she said, ‘There was no reading at all. Everything’s fine.’