‘Hardly. What do you want me to do? Shoot him?’
‘It’s a tempting thought, but no. Smash his window open with the butt of your gun and tell him to open up. His name is Raminoff and he looks a bit like a weasel, which he is. He carries a gun. Donahure reckons he’s his top undercover man. I’ve had tabs on him for years. He’s not a cop – he’s a criminal with several sentences behind him. You’ll find a policeband radio transmitter. Ask him for his licence. He won’t have one. Ask him for his police identification. He won’t have that either. Make the usual threatening noises and tell him to push off.’
Jeff smiled widely. ‘Retirement has its compensations.’
Jablonsky looked after him doubtfully. ‘You sure got a lot of faith in that boy, Sergeant.’
‘Jeff can look after himself,’ Ryder said comfortably. ‘Now, Doctor, I hope you’re not going to be evasive about telling me why Ferguson was being evasive.’
‘Why should I?’ He looked glum. ‘Seeing that I’m a marked man anyway.’
‘He was evasive with me?’
‘Yes. I feel more upset about your wife than you realize. I think you have the right to know anything that can help you.’
‘And I think that deserves another drink.’ It was a measure of Jablonsky’s preoccupation that he’d emptied his glass without being aware of it. Ryder went to the bar and returned. ‘What didn’t he tell me?’
‘You asked him if any nuclear material had been hi-jacked. He said he didn’t know. Fact is, he knows far too much about it to be willing to talk about it. Take the recent Hematite Hangover business, so-called, I imagine, because it’s given a headache to everybody in nuclear security. Hematite is in Missouri and is run by Gulf United Nuclear. They may have anything up to a thousand kilograms of U-235 on the premises at any given time. This comes to them, bottled, in the form of UF-Six, from Portsmouth, Ohio. This is converted into U-235 oxide. Much of this stuff, fully enriched and top weapons-grade material, goes from Hematite to Kansas City by truck, thence to Los Angeles as air cargo then is again trucked a hundred and twenty miles down the freeways to General Atomic in San Diego. Three wide-open transits. Do you want the horrifying details?’
‘I can imagine them. Why Ferguson’s secretiveness?’
‘No reason really. All security men are professional clams. There’s literally tons of the damned stuff missing. That’s no secret. The knowledge is in public domain.’
‘According to Dr Durrer of EKDA – I spoke to him this evening – the government’s computer system can tell you in nothing flat if any significant amount of weapons-grade material is missing.’
Jablonsky scowled, a scowl which he removed by fortifying himself with some more Scotch. ‘I wonder what he calls significant. Ten tons? Just enough to make a few hundred atom bombs, that’s all. Dr Durrer is either talking through a hole in his hat, which, knowing him as I do, is extremely unlikely, or he was just being coy. ERDA have been suffering from very sensitive feelings since the GAO gave them a black eye in, let me see, I think it was in July of ‘76.’
‘GAO?’
‘General Accounting Office.’ Jablonsky broke off as Jeff entered and deposited some material on a table. He looked very pleased with himself.
‘He’s gone. Heading for the nearest swamp I should imagine.’ He indicated his haul. ‘One police radio: he’d no licence for it so I couldn’t let him keep that, could I? One gun: clearly a criminal type so I couldn’t let him keep that either, could I? One driving licence: identification in lieu of police authorization which he didn’t seem to have. And one pair of Zeiss binoculars stamped “LAPD”: he couldn’t recall where he got that from and swore blind that he didn’t know that the initials stood for Los Angeles Police Department.’
‘I’ve always wanted one of those,’ Ryder said. Jablonsky frowned in heavy disapproval but removed that in the same way as he had removed his scowl.
‘I also wrote down his licence plate number, opened the hood and took down the engine and chassis numbers. I told him that all the numbers and confiscated articles would be delivered to the station tonight.’
Ryder said: ‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve gone and upset Chief Donahure. Or he’s going to be upset any minute now.’ He looked wistful. ‘I wish we had a tap on his private line. He’s going to have to replace the equipment, which will hurt him enough but not half as much as replacing that van is going to hurt him.’
Jablonsky said: ‘Why should he have to replace the van?’
‘It’s hot. If Raminoff were caught with that van he’d get laryngitis singing at the top of his voice to implicate Donahure. He’s the kind of trusty henchman that Donahure surrounds himself with.’
‘Donahure could block the enquiry.’
‘No chance. John Aaron, the Editor of the Examiner, has been campaigning for years against police corruption in general and Chief Donahure in particular. A letter to the editor asking why Donahure failed to act on information received would be transferred from the readers’ page to page one. The swamp, you say, Jeff? Me, I’d go for Cypress Bluff. Two hundred feet sheer into the Pacific, then sixty feet of water. Ocean bed’s littered with cars past their best. Anyway, I want you to take your own car and go up there and drop all this confiscated stuff and the rest of those old police badges to join the rest of the ironmongery down there.’
Jeff pursed his lips. ‘You don’t think that old goat would have the nerve to come around here with a search warrant?’
‘Sure I do. Trump up any old reason – he’s done it often enough before.’
Jeff said, wooden-faced: ‘He might even invent some charge about tampering with evidence at the reactor plant?’
‘Man’s capable of anything.’
‘There’s some people you just can’t faze.’ Jeff left to fetch his car.
Jablonsky said: ‘What was that meant to mean?’
‘Today’s generation? Who can tell? You mentioned the GAO. What about the GAO?’
‘Ah, yes. They produced a report on the loss of nuclear material for a government department with the memorable name of the “House Small Business Subcommittee on Energy and Environment”. The report was and is classified. The Subcommittee made a summary of the report and declassified it. The GAO would appear to have a low opinion of ERDA. Says it doesn’t know its job. Claims that there are literally tons of nuclear material – number of tons unspecified – missing from the thirty-four uranium and plutonium processing plants in the country. GAO say they seriously question ERDA’s accountability procedures, and that they haven’t really a clue as to whether stuff is missing or not.’
‘Dr Durrer wouldn’t have liked that.’
‘ERDA were hopping. They said there was – and I know it to be true – up to sixty miles of piping in the processing system of any given plants, and if you multiply that by thirty-four you have a couple of thousand miles of piping, and there could be a great deal of nuclear material stuck in those pipes. GAO completely agreed but rather spoiled things by pointing out that there was no way in which the contents of those two thousand miles could be checked.’
Jablonsky peered gloomily at the base of his empty glass. Ryder rose obligingly and when he returned Jablonsky said accusingly but without heat: ‘Trying to loosen my tongue, is that it?’
‘What else? What did ERDA say?’
‘Practically nothing. They’d even less to say shortly afterwards when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission compounded that attack on them. They said in effect two things: that practically any plant in the country could be taken by a handful of armed and determined men and that the theft-detection systems were defective.’
‘You believe this?’
‘No silly questions, please – especially not after what happened today.’
‘So there could be tens of tons of the stuff cached around the country?’
‘I could be quoted on my answer?’
‘Now it’s your turn for silly questions.’
Jablon
sky sighed. ‘What the hell. It’s eminently possible and more than probable. Why are you asking those questions, Sergeant?’
‘One more and I’ll tell you. Could you make an atom bomb?’
‘Sure. Any competent scientist – he doesn’t have to be a nuclear physicist – could. Thousands of them. School of thought that says that no one could make an atomic bomb without retracing the Manhattan project – that extremely long, enormously complicated and billion-dollar programme that led to the invention of the atom bomb in World War Two. Rubbish. The information is freely available. Write to the Atomic Energy Commission, enclose three dollars and they’ll be glad to let you have a copy of the Los Alamos Primer, which details the mathematical fundaments of fission bombs. A bit more expensive is the book called Manhattan District History, Project Y, the Los Alamos Project. For this you have to approach the Office of Technical Services of the US Department of Commerce, who will be delighted to let you have a copy by return post. Tells you all about it. Most importantly, it tells you of all the problems that arose in the building of the first atomic bomb and how they were overcome. Stirring stuff. Any amount of works in public print – just consult your local library – that consist of what used to be the supersecret information. All else failing, the Encyclopedia Americana will probably tell any intelligent person as much as he needs to know.’
‘We have a very helpful government.’
‘Very. Once the Russians had started exploding atom bombs they reckoned the need for secrecy was past. What they didn’t reckon on was that some patriotic citizen or citizens would up and use this knowledge against them.’ He sighed. ‘It would be easy to call the government of the day a bunch of clowns but they lacked the gift of Nostradamus: “hindsight makes us all wise”.’
‘Hydrogen bombs?’
‘A nuclear physicist for that.’ He paused then went on with some bitterness: ‘Provided, that is, he’s fourteen years of age or over.’
‘Explain.’
‘Back in nineteen-seventy there was an attempted nuclear blackmail of a city in Florida. Police tried to hush it up but it came out all the same. Give me a million dollars and a safe conduct out of America or I’ll blast your city out of existence, the blackmailer said. Next day came the same threat, this time accompanied by a diagram of a hydrogen bomb – a cylinder filled with lithium hydride wrapped in cobalt, with an implosion system at one end.’
‘That how they make a hydrogen bomb?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Isn’t that sad? And you a nuclear physicist. They nailed the blackmailer?’
‘Yes. A fourteen-year-old boy.’
‘It’s an advance on fireworks.’ For almost a minute Ryder gazed into the far distance, which appeared to be located in the region of his toe-caps, through a drifting cloud of blue-grey smoke, then said:
‘It’s a come-on. A con-job. A gambit. A phoney. Don’t you agree?’
Jablonsky was guarded. ‘I might. If, that is to say, I had the faintest idea what you were talking about.’
‘Will this theft of the uranium and plutonium be made public?’
Jablonsky gave an exaggerated shrug. ‘No, sir. Not if we can help it. Mustn’t give the shivers to the great American public’
‘Not if you can help it. I’ll take long odds that the bandits won’t be so bashful and that the story will have banner head-lines in every paper in the State tomorrow. Not to mention the rest of the country. It smells, Doc. The people responsible are obviously experts and must have known that the easiest way to get weapons-grade materia: is to hi-jack a shipment. With all that stuff already missing it’s long odds that they’ve got more than enough than they need already. And you know as well as I do that three nuclear physicists in the State have just vanished in the past couple of months. Would you care to guess who their captors were?’
‘I don’t think so – I mean, I don’t think I have to.’
‘I didn’t think so. You could have saved me all this thinking – I prefer to avoid it where possible. Let’s assume they already had the fuel. Let’s assume they already had the physicists to make the nuclear devices, quite possibly even hydrogen explosives. Let’s even assume that they have already got one of those devices – and why stop at one? – manufactured and tucked away at some safe place.’
Jablonsky looked unhappy. ‘It’s not an assumption I care to assume.’
‘I can understand that. But if something’s there wishing it wasn’t won’t make it go away. Some time back you described something as being eminently possible and more than probable. Would you describe this assumption in the same words?’
Jablonsky thought for some moments then said: ‘Yes.’
‘So. A smoke-screen. They didn’t really need the fuel or the physicists or the hostages. Why did they take something they didn’t need? Because they needed them.’
‘That makes a lot of sense.’
Ryder was patient. ‘They didn’t need them to make bombs. I would think they needed them for three other reasons. The first would be to obtain maximum publicity, to convince people that they had means to make bombs and meant business. The second is to lull us into the belief that we have time to deal with the threat. I mean, you can’t make a nuclear bomb in a day or a week, can you?’
‘No.’
‘So. We have breathing space. Only we haven’t.’
‘Getting the hang of your double-talk takes time. If our assumption is correct we haven’t.’
‘And the third thing is to create the proper climate of terror. People don’t behave rationally when they’re scared out of their wits, do they? Behaviour becomes no longer predictable. You don’t think, you just react.’
‘And where does all this lead us?’
‘That’s as far as my thinking goes. How the hell should I know?’
Jablonsky peered into his Scotch and found no inspiration there. He sighed again and said: ‘The only thing that makes sense out of all of this is that it accounts for your behaviour.’
‘Something odd about my behaviour?’
‘That’s the point. There should be. Or there should have been. Worried stiff about Susan. But if you’re right in your thinking – well, I understand.’
‘I’m afraid you don’t. If I’m right in what you so kindly call “my thinking” she’s in greater danger than she would have been if we’d accepted the facts at their face value. If the bandits are the kind of people that I think they are then they’re not to be judged on ordinary standards. They’re mavericks. They’re power-mad, megalomaniacs if you like, people who will stop at nothing, people who will go all the way in ruthlessness, especially when thwarted or shoved into a corner.’
Jablonsky digested this for some time then said: ‘Then you ought to look worried.’
‘That would help a lot.’ The door bell rang. Ryder rose and went to the lobby. Sergeant Parker, a bachelor who looked on Ryder’s house as a second home, had already let himself in. He, like Jablonsky, was carrying a briefcase: unlike Jablonsky, he looked cheerful.
‘Evening. Shouldn’t be associating with a fired cop, but in the sacred name of friendship –’
‘I resigned.’
‘Comes to the same thing. Leaves the way clear for me to assume the mantle of the most detested and feared cop in town. Look on the bright side. After thirty years of terrifying the local populace you deserve a break.’ He followed Ryder into the living-room. ‘Ah! Dr Jablonsky. I didn’t expect to find you here.’
‘I didn’t expect to be here.’
‘Lift up your spirits, Doc. Consorting with disgraced cops is not a statutory crime.’ He looked accusingly at Ryder. ‘Speaking of lifting – or lifting up spirits – this man’s glass is almost empty. London gin for me.’ A year on an exchange visit to Scotland Yard had left Parker with the profound conviction that American gin hadn’t advanced since prohibition days and was still made in bath-tubs.
‘Thanks to remind me.’ Ryder looked at Jablonsky. ‘He’s only consumed about
a couple of hundred crates of the stuff here in the past fourteen years. Give or take a crate.’
Parker smiled, delved into his briefcase and came up with Ryder’s photograph. ‘Sorry to be so late with this. Had to go back and report to our fat friend. Seemed to be recovering from some sort of heart attack. Less interested in my report than in discussing you freely and at some length. Poor man was very upset so I congratulated him on his character analysis. This picture has some importance?’
‘I hope so. What makes you think so?’
‘You asked for it. And it seems Susan was going to take it with her then changed her mind. Seems she took it with her into the room where they were all locked up. Told the guard she felt sick. Guard checked the wash-room – for windows and telephone, I should imagine – then let her in. She came out in a few minutes looking, so I’m told, deathly pale.’