Perhaps, and perhaps not. Morgan leaned both shoulders against the door. There was no indication in the message that the girlfriend knew anything. Indeed, the very fact that the author of the e-mail had decided to raise the point meant that the matter was far from certain. The author had a large portfolio of abilities, and it was their understanding that the obvious decisions would be made in the field and not questioned. That the e-mail had arrived meant the sender was unsure, and wanted to ascertain Morgan’s wishes — and willingness to pay — before proceeding.
A girlfriend. Morgan thought of the twins, who might be said to be among his most intimate acquaintances, at least so far as Zurich was concerned. But neither of them knew the least speck of his business. Killing either would be a foolish waste of resources.
On the other hand, an irate girlfriend seeking to avenge a lover’s death — grand operas had been built from less substantial stuff.
The operative could eliminate her in the usual, efficient manner. But what if there were an investigator on the trail? Eliminate him as well? All Scotland would meet with unfortunate accidents before every possible connection to the difficulty was erased.
Nonsense. Not worth the effort.
It occurred to Morgan, as he stared at the white tile floor, that this was the inchworm’s problem. Constance Burns was gradually but steadily becoming a liability. She remained useful to the Antarctica enterprise — but for how long? He did not think he could trust her if pressure were applied. If, by some far-fetched chance, things went wrong in a manner he had not foreseen, could she be relied on? Would she crumble before a hard-pressing investigator from Her Majesty’s Ministry? If she were confronted, would she give Morgan up to save her skin?
It occurred to Morgan that she might. It also occurred to him that he would not allow her the chance to do so. And perhaps this Scottish business allowed him to construct one of his elaborate escape hatches. Certain gestures might be made that allowed, if things were to reach a difficult juncture, the blame to be placed on her for a range of activities. And in that case, the more murders that could be laid at her door the better.
Morgan also had an idea that his favorite international corporation might add its credibility to the operation. Not that, strictly speaking, this was necessary, but there was a certain symmetry that made it all the more attractive — the Bordeaux that tweaked a neighbor’s nose.
“Await further instructions,” he thumbed in response to the message.
The rest of the notes were, thankfully, mere gibberish. He clicked the T, Z, and K together, then shut the device. As the programs in the servers ten thousand miles away went to work erasing the electronic path he had taken into the e-mail system, he went to the sink and washed his hands.
FIVE
The documents were scrupulously fabricated, which was how they were able to execute the whole unscrupulous and illegal operation without interference.
On paper the four shielded casks, essentially welded steel-and-lead sarcophagi, each contained ten fifty-five-gallon drums of spent fuel assemblages generated by the Turm nuclear power facility in Austria, a landlocked country dependent on foreign ports for its international marine transport.
The fact of the matter was that the radioactive waste had originated at Fels-Hauden, a state-run power plant in central Switzerland.
On paper the casks were brought by freight train to Trieste in northeastern Italy via the Österreichische Bundesbahn, or Austrian Federal Railway, which interlocked with the European Transfer Express Freight Train System, to be forwarded to the Port of Naples on the Mediterranean coast.
The fact was that the Swiss rail system, Schweizerische Bundesbahn, had picked up the casks at a departure station in Berne. In Naples, they cleared customs within hours for transshipment aboard the German-flagged tanker Valkyrie.
On paper the end point destination of the receptacles was specified as Rokkashi Village, Aomori Prefecture, Japan, where they would be stored for eventual reprocessing into plutonium-uranium mixed oxide — known as MOX — and utilized as fuel by the light-water reactors that provided the nation with a third of its energy demands. As plotted, the Valkyrie’s sea route was to take it through the Strait of Gibraltar, down along the Ivory Coast of Africa, then around South Africa into the Indian Ocean, through the Indonesian Archipelago to the Pacific Ocean, and finally to the Japanese shore for delivery.
The fact was that the cargo’s end point was nowhere near Aomori. The Swiss and Japanese had abruptly discontinued negotiations for the transfer after records of the clandestine talks were rumored to have been leaked to the American government, which, under exercise of the United States-Switzerland Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, had recently clamped down on the shipment of radioactive materials with a potential to yield the weapons-capable MOX extract. Executives at Fels-Hauden had later discreetly sought out another channel for the waste disposal. And found one.
Thus Valkyrie deviated from its charted course beyond the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and forged on into the Antarctic Ocean rather than heading east to the Pacific Rim.
In the open sea outside South Africa’s territorial waters, beneath a black and moonless night sky, the casks were moved by mechanized winch onto an ice-strengthened fishing trawler registered to an import/export firm based in Argentina.
Once aboard the trawler, they were placed in a special rad-insulated storage hold and ferried deeper into the southern latitudes, eventually crossing the Antarctic Convergence.
As it passed the subantarctic islands, the vessel encountered thin sea ice, which its riveted double-steel hull was able to nose through with relative ease. Further into its trip, the trawler used ice-distribution satellite maps composed weekly by the U.S. Navy and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — and made available over the Internet for the safeguard of research vessels in subantarctic and antarctic waters — to locate and weave its way around heavy floes of pack ice as it circumnavigated the continent to the Ross Ice Shelf, an immense sheet of ice fastened like glue to the coastline and extending over fifty miles outward into the Ross Sea.
On March 4th, the trawler dropped anchor at the edge of this immense ice sheet and off-loaded its hot cargo onto rubber-belted Caterpillar trucks for conveyance to the mainland. It had reached the end of its outbound voyage.
Where in the continental interior the casks eventually wound up was a detail that neither its marine carriers, nor the administrators at Fels-Hauden, sought to learn.
In certain types of dealings, it is not unusual for all participants to agree that there are some questions better left unasked.
More than five hundred stone forts once sat along the northern stretches of the Highland coast and the islands nearby in the north of Scotland, each in its own way the center of the universe. Their remains haunt the hills; besides the better-known attractions, a hundred walls, foundations, and bits of ceremonial markers lie scattered across many a square mile, some hidden by vegetation, others easily seen. Built during the Iron Age, the brochs remain outposts of distant memory, small and variable bits of the past whose worn rocks can be interpreted in endless ways. A row of stones together in a cow field might have seen incredible glory in the days after they were first chiseled and stacked; or perhaps they witnessed only cowardice and evil. A tourist touching them for the first time might feel his or her breath taken away, the mind recreating battles of kilt-clad warriors wrestling in the morning mist as pipers urged them together. A local growing up nearby might view the rocks as an apt patch for a tryst or a sip of something away from the folks.