“Good afternoon,” said a rather strange little man, checking his watch. “ Mr Meir, it is an honor to meet you.”
“Sorry, have we met?” asked Ben, gesturing for the man to be seated. Ben could not take his eyes off the man’s face. He was wearing the most ridiculous looking glasses Ben had ever seen. That, combined with his small but rotund stature, gave him the look of a mole.
“No, I can’t say we have,” he answered, offering nothing else.
After a moment of awkward silence, Ben spoke.
“Sorry, why are you here?”
“Because of this.” The man reached down and rather clumsily produced a photo from his briefcase and laid it in front of Ben.
Ben looked at the photo and saw little more than a grainy picture from a high angle looking down on what he recognized to be the Rafah border-crossing from Gaza to Egypt.
“Where are you from?” asked Ben, still trying to assess why the little mole was in his office.
“Intelligence Group, IAF,” replied the mole succinctly.
The mention of the non-Arab Affairs Department caught him off-guard, particularly as he was looking at a picture of the Rafah crossing. With everything else on his plate, the last thing he needed was something unconnected to the Arabs.
Ben was beginning to lose it. He did not have time for some emotional retard to waste his time and addressed him as evenly as he could.
“Would you mind telling me, what exactly it is I’m looking at?”
“Well, you see,” the mole replied, pulling another photo from his case. “This was just,” he took back the first photo from Ben’s desk. “To pinpoint the location.” And replaced it with the new one. “This one is a much greater resolution.”
Ben rubbed his forehead as he tried to stay calm. The mole had stopped talking as he lay the second photo down. All Ben could see were a number of blurred faces. He still did not know what the hell he was supposed to be looking at.
Ben looked up from the pointless photo and stared at the mole.
The mole just stared back at him somewhat vacantly. A knock at the door and the entrance of the Commander of the IAF (Israeli Air Force) interrupted the awkward stand-off.
The Air Chief knew Ben well and could see the anger and frustration in his face. He looked at the mole who smiled back at him.
“I see you’ve met Harry?” he said with a smile.
“Kind of,” replied Ben as evenly as his temper would allow. It was the busiest day he had had in years and he had no time to waste.
The Chief turned to Harry. “Harry, I told you to make the appointment but you were to wait for me before going in.”
Harry just smiled back at his Chief.
Ben shook his head. “I’m sorry but what the hell is going on? Is he some kind of re…”
“I should explain,” the Chief interrupted. “Harry is an analyst in one of our photo surveillance departments. And is an autistic savant.”
Ben began to calm down. There was something wrong with ‘Harry’. He understood the term ‘autistic’ but not ‘savant’.
“Savant?”
“They have a special skill. They can be musical, scientific, artistic or any number of things. Harry here, has a photographic memory and remembers every face he has ever seen and any detail about that person that we know. Address, phone number, date of birth, anything.”
Ben began to understand. He looked down at the photo again.
“So who are we looking at?”
Harry leaned forward and pointed to a face in the foreground. It was slightly blurred but revealed a middle- aged man with pale skin, something which did help single him out.
“Professor Ilya Keilson, graduate of the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. Hero of Socialist Labor, Order of Lenin and winner of the Stalin Prize. Born November 16th 1960. He worked until 1992 in Kremlyov which changed its name to Sarov in 1995 and is the center for Russia’s nuclear research program. His particular specialty is maximizing yield potential and detonation. His father was Klaus Fuchs born 29 December 1911…”
Ben held his hand up to stop Harry who was reciting all of the detail from memory.
“What use is he in Gaza?” asked Ben. “The weapons were moved to Israel months ago.”.
The Air Chief looked at Ben.
“This photo was amongst a number taken some time ago. It was only by accident that Harry here spotted it. Harry’s a Russian specialist and as such, doesn’t cover Gaza or the West bank. He only spotted it as he walked past a desk this morning and instantly recognized the face. I’m afraid this photo is about nine months old.”
Ben’s mouth went dry. Nine months ago was almost exactly when they believed the Palestinians had been given the bombs.
“So this guy, Keilsen, can take a bomb and improve its yield?”
“Yep,” replied Harry confidently.
“But only by so much. The mass material is key. There is a maximum. So for example, a 75kt device may be able to improve by say 20–30 %, it’s unlikely you could get higher than that.”
Ben relaxed a little. Was a 100kt nuclear weapon really that much worse than a 75kt?
“He also specializes in trigger and detonation systems,” added Harry.
“And that means?”
“He can take a device and reconfigure the trigger or design an entirely new one.”
Ben’s heart almost stopped.
“Ben? Ben?!” The Air Chief rushed around the desk, as Ben’s face turned sheet white.
Ben held his hand up, he was still alive.
“If you wouldn’t mind excusing me, I have some calls to make,” he whispered in a tremble.
Chapter 40
Sam arrived back to find Clark and his brother sound asleep on the sofas. The house remained, as per his instructions, in darkness. He grabbed a couple of blankets from a closet and placed them over the pair. Sam had purchased the house from a German diplomat who, at the end of his time in America, just wanted to take his clothes and leave. It meant that Sam was left with pretty much everything you would ever need. The German had, much to Sam’s amusement, even agreed to the realtor’s discount to cover the cost of removing unwanted goods. He not only got a fully furnished house, he got it for $30,000 less than an empty one.
Sam had spent less than two minutes deciding on the purchase three years earlier and since then, he had not stepped foot in the property and had no idea where anything was, let alone his own bedroom. He climbed the stairs, opened the first door and finding two twin beds, fell on the first one and was asleep by the time his head hit the pillow.
By the time Rebecca reached Edison, she reckoned she was 50 minutes behind whoever had killed the couple. She fished around in the bottom of her make-up bag and pulled out another federal badge. This time, she would be FBI but with no witnesses in the house who could speak, she kept a lower profile and canvassed the neighbors. She soon had the registration and description of the woman’s Ford Focus. Within five minutes, she left the scene and taking an educated guess, she headed South so as not to lose any valuable time as she worked through the leads.
Her first three calls were to
