‘Right?’
‘About their being held in racks, in the lorries. The outside of every one was scored at exactly the same height, where they’d shifted slightly during the drive from Pizhma.’
‘So how was Volkhonka itself?’
‘Charlie, you wouldn’t believe it!’
He thought he probably would. ‘Try me.’
‘Even though I’m classified a scientist I’ve gone through the courses at Quantico, right? Done the basics. This wasn’t even Keystone Kops. By the time I got to the garage there were at least eight guys, all standing around looking at each other doing fuck all but hoping to get into the television pictures that were being set up; their scientific guys – the same ones that were at the Arbat, I think although I’m not sure – had come and gone. It might have been them who’d put one of the canisters on its side but I’m not sure about that, either. There was a Militia man actually sitting on it, smoking a cigarette: if there’d been a leak he’d have been frying the balls he was trying to prove he had!’ She needed a breath, after the outrage. ‘And don’t worry. I left before the cameras started shooting and I wasn’t wearing FBI cover-alls anyway.’
Although he already had the lead from Natalia he still wanted to hear it from Hillary. ‘What about forensic?’
She snorted a laugh. ‘Nothing. And I mean just that: nothing. No dusting, no fibre checks, no positional diagrams, no ground casts, no scene-of-crime measurements, no nothing. Is there such a word as evidence in the Russian language?’
Charlie wished he had been at Ulitza Volkhonka, to have overheard the conversations among the posing policemen: he was surprised a Russian-speaking old timer like Lyneham hadn’t hung around with Hillary. There was a crowd building around them, with Hillary the attraction, so Charlie pushed their way through the linking corridor to the Savoy restaurant, confident he wouldn’t lose the momentum. The more he thought about it, and he was thinking about nothing else now, the more he realized how important Hillary Jamieson was and could be to him. Charlie didn’t hurry with the comparison he wanted with what he’d been told on his first day at the British embassy. He went along with the predictable enthusiasm for the baroque decor and translated the menu and agreed it would be interesting to have the beluga before the sturgeon and took care over the imported Montrachet. Only then did he say, intentionally obtuse, ‘I’m not really sure what we’re up against here.’
Hillary looked at him blankly. ‘You want to help me with that?’
‘I don’t mean the chaos and the inefficiency. What’s plutonium and all the rest of it do? Where’s the danger?’
Hillary smiled, nodding her head in a gesture Charlie didn’t immediately understand. ‘It’s what makes the atom go bang: what splits it. By itself it emits rays you can’t see – the radiation like X-rays – which burn and cause several kinds of cancer. It destroys bones literally within the body. And mutates unborn foetuses.’
‘I wouldn’t sit on it,’ agreed Charlie.
‘It’s best not to.’
‘How many weapons could be made from what’s missing?’
She smiled again. ‘Everybody’s question: it was one of the first that Fenby wanted answering. I can’t give one, specifically. Depends what sort of tactical weapon you want. If you’re talking Hiroshima, Nagasaki size and we’ve still got more than 200 kilos missing, then a minimum of forty.’
‘Minimum! You mean there could be more?’ queried Charlie, who’d thought the lower figure was inconceivable.
‘Nuclear technology has come a long way in half a century, Charlie!’
‘How endangered are the men who breached the canisters at Pizhma? And the soldiers who cordoned it off, later?’
‘The thieves, hardly at all. I’ve gone through our picture sequences: their exposure was very brief, less than ten minutes and that wasn’t concentrated. The soldiers would have been stationary for a much longer time, just standing around being subjected to the contamination. They’ll need a lot of monitoring: it could already be in their thyroids. They’ll all be on iodine treatment. Or should be.’
This could all be academic, acknowledged Charlie. But if he succeeded in what he intended to propose the following day, it could literally be the difference between life and death: maybe his life and death. ‘Could the Russians have hosed the contamination away from where the train was stopped? And the train itself, like they said they had?’
‘They should have been able to, although I hope to Christ their nuclear people are better at what they do than their police are.’
‘How long’s the danger last if they aren’t?’
She made her curious head-nodding movement again. ‘We’re talking plutonium 239 here, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So here’s your question, for the kewpie doll on the back row. What’s the life span of plutonium 239? You get one clue: give it your longest shot.’
‘A hundred years,’ guessed Charlie.
She laughed at him over the iced vodka he’d ordered with the caviare. ‘Two hundred and forty thousand years. Not even Methuselah would have been safe; he only made it to 969.’
‘You saying that’s how long Chernobyl’s going to be dangerous!’
‘And a lot of that time lethal. Some nuclear scientists reckon the final death toll is going to be 500,000. But let’s not stop at Chernobyl. After exploding their first atom bomb in 1949 the Russians concentrated a lot of their nuclear research around Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk. And used the Techa river as their radioactive disposal sewer. The current casualty figure is 100,000…’ She gave a resigned shrug. ‘But it’s not only Russia that deserves the finger. There’s been more fuck-ups, cover-ups and outright murderous criminality in every country in the world developing nuclear technology than any other supposed science. In America we contaminated hundreds of people and hundreds of acres around Hanford, in Washington State; babies were bom deformed. In Oregon Penitentiary American doctors paid lifers five bucks a month to let them do what that stupid bastard could have been risking at Volkhonka this afternoon, subjecting their testicles to radiation exposure to see what happened. Your people did fuck all to clear the aborigines out of your Australian test sites…’
‘Whoa!’ stopped Charlie, abruptly aware of the growing vehemence. ‘Are we getting a statement here?’
She flushed, which surprised him. ‘There are mistakes with every new discovery: they can’t be helped. We developed nuclear fission fifty years ago. The mistakes should have stopped by now. And the nuclear power lobby shouldn’t have been allowed to grow so strong or remain unchallenged, like they’re too strong to be challenged now.’
‘That why you’re not part of it?’
She flushed again. ‘Shouldn’t I have a bright light shining into my face, with you hitting me with a rubber truncheon?’
‘That isn’t an answer.’
‘Maybe,’ she finally conceded. ‘Now my question for you.’
‘OK.’
‘Have I passed?’
It took Charlie a moment to reply. ‘You think I was testing you?’
‘Weren’t you?’
‘No!’ At last he understood the head nodding.
She regarded him doubtfully. ‘I thought you thought I was a dumb-assed bimbo.’
‘I don’t think the FBI would include a dumb-assed bimbo in an investigation into a nuclear robbery of this size.’
‘Sometimes people get the wrong impression.’ It was an observation, not a defence.
‘I haven’t formed one yet.’ Which wasn’t true. Charlie had already decided she was anything but dumb-assed and wanted her to be very much part of what he had in mind, although he hadn’t worked out how or what. In addition to which, he was enjoying the closeness of a woman, which was something he hadn’t known for a long time. The continued envy of the other men in the restaurant, like that of others in the bar, wasn’t hurting his ego, either.
‘So far this hasn’t been what I expected.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Didn’t you say something about up and down?’
‘It’s a place, not an activity,’ reminded Charlie.