At noon the entire workforce gathered in the front office where tables were laden with good Italian food and bottles of French champagne. After everyone held a flute of champagne in their hand Ollie, Andreas, Professor Modena and Dr. Jay raised their glasses together and Ollie delivered a toast praising them all for their exceptional achievement. He then addressed the professor and asked them all to have a drink honoring him and wished him luck in gaining the long deserved recognition of his genius by his colleagues and by the Nobel Prize committee. Next he toasted Dr. Jay and acknowledged his great contribution to the cause and told him that he would be remembered by history as the man who had constructed the device that would purify Europe of all inferior races. Finally, he faced Andreas and thanked him for his leadership in the unification of the European racist (he used the term "true nationalist") movements under one common cause. He also wished all separatists success in achieving their goals, particularly the Catalan movement heralded by Professor Modena. Then he opened his large duffel bag and removed several envelopes stuffed with large denomination Euro notes and distributed them among the workers. He asked them all to stay in the warehouse for another hour and then leave quietly in groups of two or three and return to their home countries without raising suspicion, or to take a well deserved vacation in their favorite location. He strongly warned them not to say a word to anyone about the project, its objective, about the laboratory and especially about their colleagues.
With the help of several men the device was moved into the garage where a standard shipping container marked as "agricultural machinery" was waiting on the platform of the truck he had rented. Assisted by the crane, and some manual force, the device was loaded inside the container, the steel suitcase with the detonators and the car battery were also placed in the container and its doors were sealed with a stamped optical tamper proof seal. Ollie took the duffel bag that still contained a lot of cash that he figured he would need and then he and Andreas got into the truck's cabin and slowly backed out of the garage. The doors of the garage closed behind them and they headed on the short drive towards the farmhouse. They drove slowly in order not to attract police attention and within less than 30 minutes were at the cattle gate of the farm. Ollie got out of the cabin and opened the gate while Andreas drove carefully into the farm grounds. Ollie closed the gate and got back in the truck that was driven into the empty barn where the container was unloaded with the trucks winch and placed on the ground. Ollie locked the barn door and directed Andreas to drive back to Padova while he remained at the farm to keep an eye of the device and container. They had arranged for Andreas to return the rental truck and come back to the farm with a regular car. Then Ollie went into the farmhouse to prepare a "warm welcome party" for Andreas.
An hour later Andreas returned to the farmhouse and found Ollie sitting on the veranda, enjoying the last rays of the setting sun and a bottle of Chianti red wine. Ollie held up his full glass and invited Andreas to join him in celebrating the great success of the Astraea project. Andreas sat down and Ollie poured him a glass of wine from the open bottle. Andreas and Ollie took large sips of their wine and a couple of minutes later Andreas's head dropped on the table and he passed out. Ollie lifted him out of his chair, no easy feat as Andreas weighed some 140 kg, and managed to drag him into the living room and seat him in a solid wooden chair and tie his hands and feet to the chair with strong plastic manacles. Two hours later Andreas slowly regained consciousness and shook his head. When he tried to move his hands and feet he realized that he was restrained by these cuffs. Ollie faced him and proceeded to tell Andreas what his real objective was and that he had manipulated the most chauvinistic fanatical and xenophobic movements to support the Jihad holy war of Islam against the European colonialists and racists. Andreas was so shocked by these revelations that he almost forgot to fear for his own life. Ollie was extremely pleased by this reaction and for a moment he even considered letting Andreas live in shame but then cold logic told him that if Andreas lived to disclose his plan it would make it more difficult to smuggle the device out of Italy and to Jerusalem. In comradeship he told Andreas that he would allow him to choose his mode of death — quickly by knife or to starve slowly. Andreas looked him in the eye, spat at his feet and said he did not care one way or the other. Ollie coolly pulled a commando knife from his boot and with the serrated edge cut Andreas's throat leaving him tied to the chair.
Ollie left Andreas's body in the chair and entered the barn with a radiation detector. As he approached the sealed container the detector clicked more and more rapidly as he got closer. He then moved away and out of the barn and noted that the reading of the detector, the background level, was below 1 count per second (cps). At a distance of 10 meters from the container there was only a very slight increase in the reading, at 5 meters it already increased to 2 cps and at 1 meter was near 50 cps. This bothered him as he realized two things: first, the radioactivity might trigger an alarm if the container was monitored by a dedicated portal when it was loaded on a ship in Italy or after being unloaded in Israel. Secondly, this meant that the U-232 level was higher than expected which could cause failure of the device. While he knew that he could alleviate the first problem by adding another layer or two of radiation absorbent materials such as lead or even depleted uranium, there was nothing he could do about the second problem. Even dissolving the U-233 core and purifying it would not remove the U-232 isotope, so all he could do was pray to Allah and hope for the best. The fact that the radiation outside the barn was at the background level assured him that unless someone opened the barn door and entered it with a radiation detector the device would remain secure and protected from detection. If someone would see the container in the barn he would assume it was just some piece of agricultural equipment unless he had a radiation detector or broke the seal and opened the container.
He left the farm in the car that Andreas had rented and headed towards the Rijeka port in Croatia where he expected security to be much less rigorous than in Venice or Trieste ports that he had planned to use earlier. He also assumed that there wouldn't be any radiation detectors and monitors there. He knew that this change of plans would involve crossing borders but also knew that arrangements could be made to evade a close examination of the container's contents by bribing the customs and border people. He would tell them that the "agricultural machinery" was actually a shipment of electronic commodities that he intended to sell in Zagreb. In Rijeka he would say that he was smuggling the same commodities to the Palestinian Authority via the Haifa port in Israel. In both cases he would make sure that the generous payment would keep their eyes closed and their mouths shut for at least a month. For a short while he regretted Andreas's death as he knew that the Swede had connections in Italy and Croatia that could smooth the way, but the remorse did not last more than a moment.