other way out. Come on, he thought. Take the carrot. It’s the only rational choice, pick it up, you humar: thinking if it didn’t work, he’d have to kill the Moroccan.
“Just this one night and no more?” Abdelhakim said, picking up the bank card and staring at it as though he had never seen one before.
“Just tonight. Nothing will be disturbed or taken. No one will ever know.”
“And I get to keep the thirty thousand?” he said, and Scorpion smiled inwardly. Get greedy, he thought. The greedier the better.
Abdelhakim tapped the card thoughtfully, then put it in his wallet. Scorpion let out the breath he’d been holding.
“Do you like the woman? She’s very pretty.”
“I never touched such a woman. So beautiful,” Abdelhakim said softly.
“She likes you; she told me.”
“And my wife never knows?”
“I’ll give you the chip from the camera before I leave tonight.”
“I have to go to work,” he said, getting up and putting on his shirt and windbreaker, then hesitated. “And it’s good for the Muslim ummah?”
“Ilhamdulilah, it is a good thing you’ll have done, Brother. Come,” Scorpion said, walking him to the apartment door.
S corpion watched the mosque through night vision goggles from the BMW parked down the block. The night was cool and the wind had come up, blowing dust and scraps of paper in the street. The greatest danger was when Abdelhakim had second thoughts; something that Koenig cautioned was inevitable once the Joe was out of the immediate confrontation. Scorpion could only hope that greed and sex and the threat of public humiliation would outweigh his old loyalty. “Most people,” Koenig had said, “would rather be a traitor than be thought of as a traitor.”
If Abdelhakim did have second thoughts, it could go either of two ways. Either he would tell someone and there would be militants lying in wait for him at the mosque, or it could come days, months, or even years later, when Abdelhakim put a bullet through his own head. The only way to know was to watch the mosque and wait, so there would be no surprises and he could try to figure out what the hell was happening, because nothing made any sense after what Professor Groesbeck had told him over beers at a brown bar near the university earlier that evening.
Rabinowich had responded to his Web question with a code that turned out to be Groesbeck’s cell phone number. The bar was noisy and crowded with students, some of whom were still carrying books from late classes. Groesbeck wasn’t what he had expected-an older academic along the lines of Rabinowich, someone whose brilliant sarcasm could fall like a guillotine on an unsuspecting undergraduate. But the professor was young, in his thirties, dark-haired, and with an eye for female students.
“Did Rabinowich tell you anything about me?” Scorpion asked him.
“He said don’t bother asking you anything because anything you told me would be a lie, including hello and good-bye,” Groesbeck said in English, with only a slight accent, meanwhile checking out a statuesque blonde in a yellow tank top and tight jeans at the bar. “Of course, that told me exactly who you are, not that it matters.”
“He said you were on the IAEA inspection teams in Iran and North Korea.”
“Mmm… she’s something, ja?” Groesbeck said, and for a moment the two men contemplated the blonde’s chest.
“Healthy girl,” Scorpion said.
“Lovely. So you want to know how to make a nuclear bomb? It’s easy. All you need is enough Uranium-235. Just slap it together and- pop!” he illustrated by splaying his fingers open like an explosion.
“Why not plutonium?”
“Nasty to work with, Pu-239. The radiation will kill you, and it’ll start fires at ordinary room temperature unless you have an extensive, dry-because ordinary water makes it worse-inert gas facility. U-235, on the other hand, is beautiful stuff. You can work it, shape it, you don’t need an elaborate facility, and the radioactivity is so mild, you could put it under your pillow and sleep on it.”
“So how much U-235 do I need to make a bomb?”
“Depends,” Groesbeck said, putting down his beer and trying to make eye contact with the blonde.
“I have top security clearance. I’m sure Dave told you,” Scorpion said.
“It isn’t security. It’s just not a simple number. It varies depending on how pure the U-235 is. For an ordinary nuclear reactor, all you need is four or five percent purity. For a weapon to go supercritical, much more. For the Hiroshima bomb, they used 64.1 kilos, about 141 pounds, of ninety-plus percent pure U-235, and the bomb was so inefficient that only one percent, perhaps one pound or so, went supercritical. The other ninety-nine percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima bomb was wasted.”
“How about a terrorist with twenty-one kilos at seventy-six percent?”
“I already told you.” Groesbeck shrugged. “It depends.”
“On what?”
“Many factors. The shape and fit when the pieces of uranium are pushed together. The temperature. The density when fission starts to expand the uranium. What kind of a reflector around the U-235 is used to bounce the neutrons back into the uranium. What kind of emitter you use to start the reaction. Of course, the big problem is how do you slam the separate pieces of uranium together.”
Groesbeck leaned closer. “The simplest way, the way I would do it if I were a small group instead of a government, is the gun mechanism. As you know, the basic principle of all explosives is that explosive force is directed perpendicular to the surface of the explosive material. By shaping the material you can aim the force of the explosion like a gun. Using a small regular explosive, just shoot one piece of U-235 into another, like a bullet into a cylinder made from the second piece of U-235, and have the impact start the neutron emitter. The whole thing should take less than a second or the bomb won’t work.”
“Maybe I’m wrong but it doesn’t seem like twenty-one kilos would be enough?”
“At seventy-six percent, extremely unlikely.” Groesbeck shook his head and motioned having a drink at the blonde, who signaled back Why not? “Unless you have a very sophisticated device, I would say fifty kilos of ninety- plus percent pure U-235 would be the minimum.”
“I get the feeling you don’t believe the seventy-six percent figure.”
“Seems unlikely. It’s not that hard to go from seventy-six to over ninety percent. Why would you stop? Of course, there is another possibility, I’m sure you thought of.”
“You mean, what if there’s more? The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Suppose your imaginary terrorist already has, say, another thirty or so kilos of almost pure U-235 sitting somewhere to add to the twenty-one, which is maybe already ninety-plus. Then, my friend, I would definitely worry. Actually, I would worry more about your terrorist selling it to someone who does have the resources to do something with it, like the Iranians. Listen, I have a colleague I absolutely have to speak to,” Groesbeck said, getting up and going over to the blonde at the bar. Which now left Scorpion sitting in a car in Utrecht in the middle of the night with the pieces to a puzzle that didn’t fit. What in hell did the Palestinian want with the twenty-one kilos of U-235, which probably cost millions, if it wouldn’t make a bomb?
He had other concerns too. His only lead to the Palestinian had suddenly become what Groesbeck would have called a “supercritical” red zone. According to the detective, Zeedorf, whom he had called on his cell phone from the BMW after meeting with Groesbeck, the imam of the Kanaleneiland mosque hadn’t been seen in over a month.
“The imam’s name is Ali el Alechaoui, age seventy-four,” the Dutch detective had said. “He is an immigrant from Rabat, Morocco; a widower, with three grown sons and sixteen grandchildren. The only address listed for him is the mosque. He receives a disability pension from the government.”
“What’s his disability?”
“He’s blind, despite which, he has written a book. A commentary…” Zeedorf paused, and Scorpion waited while he consulted his notes. “…on the Hadith of Sahih Bukhari, which is, I gather, some sort of Muslim religious text. I have a copy of his identiteitsbewijs card if you wish. One interesting thing.”
“What’s that?”
“He regularly led services at the mosque, but for the past five or six weeks he seems to have dropped out of sight. I have been unable to get any information from our sources with either the Utrecht or the KLPD National
