Leitzig shook his head. ‘You cannot hurt me any more than I have already been hurt. I am immune to pain now.’
Whitlock shoved Leitzig aside and entered the lounge where he picked up the nearest photograph. ‘I’ll smash them, one by one, until you tell me what I want to know.’
Leitzig stared at the photograph Whitlock was about to drop as though it were a priceless Ming vase. ‘Please, I beg of you, do not hurt her.’
‘You answer my questions and I won’t hurt her.’
‘I will answer any question you ask. Please, please, do not hurt her.’
Whitlock put the picture back on the sideboard and crossed to the heater.
Leitzig took the same picture from the sideboard and sat down in the single armchair.
‘My wife,’ he said softly, tracing his finger over the outline of her face.
‘I assumed it was. When did she pass away?’
‘Three years ago. I killed her.’
‘You killed her?’
‘She was dying from cancer. I could not bear the sight of her suffering so I killed her. I only did it because I loved her so much.’
‘Euthanasia,’ Whitlock said.
‘Call it what you like but I still killed her,’ Leitzig continued. ‘I took her back to Travemunde where we had spent our honeymoon twenty-six years before. I wanted her to have the holiday of a lifetime. On the last night there I deliberately got her drunk at dinner then took her for a walk along the beach.’ He gripped the frame in both hands and swallowed back the emotion which was threatening to surface. ‘That was when I drowned her.’
‘And you got away with it?’
‘The inquest recorded a verdict of accidental death, if that is what you mean. I did not go unpunished up here,’ Leitzig said, tapping his forehead. ‘The guilt is like a migraine. It will never go away. I have often thought about suicide but I do not have the courage to go through with it.’
Whitlock rubbed his own forehead; the throbbing was incessant. He touched the gash above his eye and was relieved to feel that it had stopped bleeding.
Leitzig seemed to notice Whitlock’s dishevelled appearance for the first time. ‘Do you want some dry clothes? I have plenty of sweaters and pants.’
It was a tempting offer but Whitlock was determined to remain in control. ‘You stay where you are.’
‘What’s going to happen to me?’
‘That all depends on your cooperation. How did you first get involved in the diversion?’
Leitzig stared at the photograph in his lap. ‘I was blackmailed into helping them.’
‘What did they have on you?’
‘I will show you. Can I get up?’
‘Where are you going?’ Whitlock asked.
‘To the sideboard.’
Leitzig opened one of the drawers and withdrew a brown envelope which he handed to Whitlock before sitting down again.
Whitlock extracted the six enlarged black and white photographs. They had all been taken with a night lens and showed Leitzig forcibly holding his wife’s head under the water. The last photograph had caught him as he was emerging from the sea, his wife’s lifeless body floating face down in the water. He slipped the photographs back into the envelope and handed it to Leitzig.
‘Those pictures would have put me behind bars for life.’
‘Who took them?’ Whitlock asked.
‘I do not know but I received them two days after the inquest.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Nothing initially, then about six months later I was contacted at the Planck University where I was working and told to apply for the vacant post of senior technician at the reprocessing plant. With my experience I was accepted after the first interview. I found out later that my predecessor had been killed under mysterious circumstances while skiing at St Anton in Austria. Make of it what you want but I am pretty sure he was murdered so they could put their own man on the inside.’
‘Did you ever see any of your blackmailers?’
‘I liaised with two of them. The senior of the two was a Machiavellian type. Totally evil. A powerfully-built man with dark black hair and hooded eyes.’
‘And his name?’
‘Hendrick, Hendricks, something like that. He was not the sort of person you asked to repeat himself.’
‘And the other man?’
‘Canadian, called himself Vanner. Blond hair, blond moustache, always wore a trilby. He used to chauffeur Hendricks around in a black Mercedes.’
Another piece of the jigsaw had fallen into place. ‘So when did the diversion start?’
Leitzig removed a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. ‘About six or seven months after I started at the plant. In the interim period I had to recruit four new technicians and although I interviewed dozens of applicants I could only take on those put up by Hendricks. They were all fully qualified so it did not arouse any unnecessary suspicion. With the five of us working together the diversion went like clockwork.’
‘I’ve been through reams of computer print-outs but I can’t find any discrepancies. You must have siphoned the plutonium off sometime during the actual reprocessing, but how did you manage it with so many other technicians around? Or were there others in on it?’
‘Apart from a few guards and drivers nobody else was involved, certainly not any of my personnel. I had my team. We did not siphon the plutonium off during reprocessing, we siphoned it off afterwards.’
‘Afterwards? But those figures are checked by several sources before being stored in the computer.’
‘Agreed, tampering with bulk figures is virtually impossible. There is an insignificant column in the stat sheets headed “Residual Figures”, you probably did not even notice it.’
‘I remember it, the figures were all pretty negligible. Karen said it was something to do with the fissile material left in the residue. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me.’
Leitzig stubbed out his cigarette. ‘As I told you when I showed you around the plant, the uranium and plutonium undergo several extraction stages to remove any lingering impurities before they separate to form uranyl nitrate and plutonium nitrate respectively. Naturally there is both uranium and plutonium left in the residue, albeit in very small amounts. That residue then goes under its own extraction stage to release the trapped uranium and plutonium. The amounts vary with each magazine, even if it is only a matter of grams. It all counts in the end.’
He lit a second cigarette. ‘I covered my tracks right at the start by going to the plant manager and expressing my dissatisfaction at the residual extraction process. He played into my hands by asking me to supervise it personally. So I had a free hand. Over a three-day shift we could siphon off eight, maybe nine grams without it affecting the stat figures. We worked over a two-year period. Six kilograms of high-enriched, “weapons-grade” plutonium.’
‘Where is it destined for?’
‘I overheard Hendricks once say it was to be shipped to a secret laboratory in Libya.’
‘Did he mention the name of the ship?’
‘That is all I heard.’
‘Did he say what it was going to be used for?’
‘Use your imagination. It could be used for nuclear warheads but it is my guess it will be converted into an atom bomb. Six kilograms is the perfect size.’
‘Libya with an atom bomb? Sweet Jesus.’ Whitlock felt his head beginning to throb harder. ‘I want the name of all your fellow conspirators. Technicians, guards, drivers, the lot.’
The doorbell chimed.
‘Can I answer it, or am I still a prisoner?’
‘You always will be,’ Whitlock replied, picking up one of the photographs on the mantelpiece.