‘I guess we should cool things for a while.’
‘I don’t have any alternative,’ said Johnson, anxious to separate himself from the American.
‘I’m going to find one.’
‘I don’t want to know about it.’ The southern fried chicken had been cold and Fenby hadn’t served any wine, either.
chapter 30
G unther Schumann, the intended Russian-speaking interrogator who met Charlie at Tegel airport, was a superintendent in the special nuclear smuggling division of the Bundeskriminalamt. An appropriate piratical black patch covered a missing left eye, although not the scar from it that ran down his cheek, and he’d developed the habit of winking the good right one conspiratorially when he talked, which he did a lot in excellent English during their preparatory lunch at the Kempinski, where Charlie had made a nostalgic reservation.
The arrests had been a coordinated German and Polish operation made entirely possible from the identification of the Warsaw hotel. The five Russians had arrived at the Zajazd Karczma, which Polish intelligence was staking out, eight days earlier. The initial reason for checking them had only been that they were Russian. On the first night the boot of one of their two cars was picked and three canisters discovered. It had obviously been a contact point because they’d stayed there two days; because he’d occupied the Napoleon room they’d decided a Russian carrying a passport in the name of Fedor Alekseevich Mitrov was the leader. There had been no calls made from the hotel. Mitrov used outside street kiosks five times, never the same one twice. He was the only one to telephone, a further indication of his being in charge. He’d been seen to make notes every time but they hadn’t been found after his arrest. The surveillance had been constant, night and day, but there had been no meeting with anyone else in Warsaw or during the interrupted drive to the border. The accelerator cable of one car, a Volkswagen, had snapped near Lodz and they’d lost half a day getting it replaced. They’d been allowed to cross the border because the German nuclear smuggling legislation was stronger and more wide ranging than in Poland. The Bundeskriminalamt had tapped the Cottbus hotel switchboard but again there had been no calls, either in or out. Mitrov had used a kiosk once, within an hour of their Cottbus arrival, but made no notes.
On their third day at Cottbus the group because very agitated. Two watching Bundeskriminalamt officers, a man and a woman, had been too far away at a pavement cafe to hear an obvious argument between two of the men, with Mitrov visibly gesturing around him to warn of their being overheard. The group had split, leaving separately: one man had gone direct to the railway station and noted train departures for Berlin. Frightened of losing some of the group – but more importantly what they were carrying – the decision had been made to arrest them. It had been done at four in the morning. They had all been asleep and there had been no resistance, although each had been, armed either with Walther or Markarov handguns. Three Uzi machine guns had been found in the two cars, a Mercedes saloon in addition to the repaired Volkswagen. So had a total of six nuclear canisters, equally split between both vehicles. The cars had been legitimately bought, both for cash, from separate Berlin salesrooms, and each was registered at separate Berlin addresses, although the identities of the named owners on both the purchase and registration documents were false. The Bundeskriminalamt were totally satisfied the people living at the addresses – an accountant and his girlfriend and the widow of a railway inspector – were uninvolved and that their homes had been chosen at random, possibly from a telephone book. None of the arrested Russians had made any statement or admission. The canisters alone, marked with the fingerprints of each of the five, guaranteed a case that could be traced backwards to Russia but not forwards, to the plutonium’s destination.
‘And working from your count of twenty-two, there’s still ten containers missing, seven if we use the Russian figure,’ concluded Schumann. ‘Like always, nothing’s ever complete: it’s a bastard.’
‘Maybe not quite as incomplete as usual,’ said Charlie, tapping the bulging briefcase firmly wedged between his feet.
It took Charlie longer than it had the German to set out what he’d brought from Moscow and which had taken him a full day after Balg’s early morning call to collect and collate, from the frantic-for-participation US embassy Bureau and from Rupert Dean in London. Long before Charlie finished Schumann was smiling and nodding, his good eye stuttering up and down.
‘I couldn’t assimilate all that properly to break them and they’d realize it: Mitrov quicker than the others. Is your Russian good enough?’
‘Yes,’ assured Charlie, quickly.
‘We’ll need to build a stage set!’ announced Schumann.
‘And give an Oscar performance,’ agreed Charlie.
Late that evening Charlie surveyed the efforts of nearly seven hours’ work and decided it was indeed very much like a stage set. There were pinboards stretching the entire length of one wall to display every one of the 150 satellite photographs enlarged to their highest definition. Each was accompanied by a separate enhancement of the individuals featured on the general prints, the physical analysis annotated alongside the images. The pictures showing the killing of the train guards were repeated in another display section. Along a second wall was installed a relay of specialized recording and replay equipment and halfway along the third were five full-length criminal line-up boards, calibrated to a giant-sized three metres. Alongside each were scales upon which a person had to sit for their weight to be accurately calculated by counters moved along a minutely marked pendulum bar. Each place was fronted by cameras, Polaroid as well as tripod-mounted. The centre of the room was empty except for five chairs side by side against a table. Official stenographers had their places directly behind and after them, on an elevated platform, were video cameras to record everything.
Schumann said, ‘There should be music and someone yelling “Lights! Action!”’
‘I want to hear much more than that,’ said Charlie.
He and the German spent another hour that night and two the following morning finalizing their confrontation, Schumann eventually but without offence conceding the orchestration to Charlie.
The German still, however, initially played the lead. At Schumann’s order the Russians were quick-marched, militarily, to the weighing and measuring section of the room. To their total, half-resisting bewilderment their height and weight were established and after that the medical teams carefully recorded chest, waist, stomach, biceps and leg dimensions. Finally they were photographed against the scaled height charts, both by the sophisticated cameras and on the instant Polaroid equipment.
Charlie and Schumann positioned themselves so that at all times they could gauge the reaction of the men when, one at a time but led by Mitrov, they were paraded with enforced slowness in front of the Pizhma photographic collage, finishing at the repeated section showing the guard murders at their moment of being committed. From each the reaction was total astonishment: in two cases it was brief, gap-mouthed astonishment. The procession concluded at the electronic equipment, where each warily uneasy man was questioned once more about his involvement in the Pizhma robbery – by Russian speakers other than Charlie and Schumann – to get voice recordings against legally established identities from the repeated although hesitant denials.
Mitrov was a blond-haired, pale-faced man whose thinness was accentuated by his height. None of the others was as tall, although Charlie estimated two to be just short of two metres. The third was middle height, the fourth much shorter. All were thick set, the particularly small man positively fat. In the chaired line to which they were led Mitrov maintained the best control. The small man feasted off his fingernails and another man, blond like Mitrov, kept palming back hair that didn’t need putting into place.