The science that was relevant to Frederick Bissett was the moment, too fast for any but the most powerful computer to register, when chemical explosive was driven by uniform spherical detonation against the fissionable material of highly enriched uranium and plutonium creating some millions of pounds overpressure per square inch… His head dropped. In front of him the page blurred.
… With regret, therefore, I have to inform you that we are not in a position to offer you employment in any research division of the company.
Yours sincerely
Arnold R. Dobson, Personnel Director.
(dictated, and signed in his absence)
He felt sick. He took the letter and the envelope out of his office and down to the abandoned area at the end of the corridor. He fed the sheet of paper and the envelope into the shredding machine beside Carol's desk.
He went back to his room.
Later he would hear Carol's laughter, and Wayne's giggle, and the clumping tread of Basil's iron-tipped shoes, and the coarse grate of Reuben Boll's voice. And later he would hear the dull punch of explosive detonations. He would work until it was time to go home, on the new warhead design that would replace the free-fall W E – 1 7 7 bomb with an air-launched cruise system. He would work on the mathematics of implosion until, in the late afternoon, he cleared his desk, and took his briefcase, with empty sandwich box and empty coffee flask, to his car, and drove home.
In crisp early morning sunshine the Air Force plane touched down at Andrews Air Base.
Nothing hurried, none of the subterfuge of moving a body quietly and in the dead of night out of Athens. The networks were there, penned behind a steel barrier. The high-level officials from State Department stamped their feet on the tarmac and waited for the aircraft doors to open. There was a bearer party, old friends and colleagues of Harry's. The Director of the Agency and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were there.
The F. B. I. Director said, ' M y first man into Athens, a young man but a good friend of Lawrence's, has promised the widow that we'd go for the jugular on this one.'
The Agency Director mused, 'But, whose jugular?'
'Whichever.'
'Something tells me you may bump into a little politics on the way. '
The F. B. I. Director said, 'Just this once, fuck the politics.'
The Agency Director said, 'I didn't hear that… but I wish you luck.'
They had brought Agency men back to Andrews, in caskets, from Europe, from Lockerbie, from Lebanon, from Central America. It was a regular run for the Agency Director, down the Capital Beltway from Langley to Andrews. He was used to shaking the hand, gravely, of a young widow. He was accustomed to dropping his arm round the shoulders of young and fatherless children.
The aircraft door was open, and the cargo hatch.
They saw, at the top of the steps, the small, intimidated figure of Elsa Lawrence, her children behind her. They saw the casket taken from the cargo hatch, and draped in their flag, and lifted onto the shoulders of Harry Lawrence's work friends.
The Agency Director said, ' You know what? Half the C. B. S. story on Lawrence last night was time taken explaining where Athens is.'
When it came to their turn, both men shook Elsa Lawrence's hand, felt her limp grasp in theirs. And both men put their arms round the children, and felt them flinch from the touch of strangers.
Dr Tariq, frail and looking as though the gentle zephyr that came in off the Tigris might flatten him, could muster a savage temper when attacked.
He had been badly damaged when the Zionists had sent their commando squad with explosives to La Seine- sur-Mer, close to the French port of Toulon, to destroy the two reactors that were to have been shipped to Tuwaithah 48 hours later.
That had been twelve years ago, just one year after the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council had promoted him to Director at the Atomic Energy Commission.
They had hurt him again, killing el-Meshad in Paris in 1980, and frightening off the Italian companies who had been engaged to deliver hot cell boxes.
And ten years ago he had been hurt worst of all when the Zionist Air Force, the F – i 6 s and the F-15S, had come to Tuwaithah out of the setting sun to put down 16 tons of explosive ordnance onto the Osirak reactor. He would never forget the great dust cloud that climbed over the reactor shell, broken like a duck's egg, after the jets had soared away into the June evening. Hundreds of millions of dollars blown away. Hundreds of thousands of working hours lost. And the ground defence system had not got one shot off in retaliation. He could remember lying on the floor of his office on a carpet bright with the shards of his shattered windows, and how he had howled in his frustration. Over long years, he had sought to rebuild the nuclear programme, as he had been charged to by the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. In those long years when the war had taken priority, Dr Tariq had rethought the detail of the programme.
On the day alter the Cease Fire he had been granted an audience with the Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and he had argued his case for the revitalisation of his dream.
And now the Zionists had attacked him again. Professor Khan had been a crucial cog in the great mesh of wheels that made up the whole for the creation of an Iraqi nuclear warhead. He was a foreigner, he had been bought, just as Frenchmen had been bought, and Italians.
In the brigade post at Fao, Dr Tariq had won his day The Chairman gave orders for the military helicopter to fly the scientist back to Baghdad.
In spite of the headset that he wore for the flight, his ears were still ringing when he climbed down from the helicopter. Waiting for him was an army officer, squat and powerful, rocking on the soles of his paratroop boots.
The voice of the Colonel was faint, hard to understand, as they scurried bent low from the helicopter's hatch door to safety beyond the reach of the thrashing rotor blades.
'I am at your service, Dr Tariq. Whatever it is that you wish, I am instructed to provide.'
In the late afternoon, Erlich was back from the airport. Protocol and politeness had taken him out to the airport to meet the Temporary Duty men off the flight. It was what should have happened to him when he had come in from Athens, and hadn't.
Nothing better than a smoothed way through Customs and Immigration, and ready transportation for the trip into a new city.
They would be on the same corridor as him in the Embassy's accommodation annexe, and later they would talk through the case history together.
The three T. D. Y. s were all senior to him, all had done more than ten years in the Bureau. He hadn't met any of them before.
That was the way of these things. Only a small chance that an overseas liaison Fed would know the guys coming in as firemen from Stateside The one who was born Greek and fluent, had lost his baggage, presumably in transit in London, and wanted action, and seemed to think that young Erlich would do the needful.
Erlich smiled coldly at him and said nothing. All three were exhausted, and two, the older two, would crash out and try and sleep away the jet lag, and the Greek ethnic could shout all afternoon and all night into the telephone for his bags. What it came down to was that Erlich had one last evening as an independent, and that from first light, from waffles and coffee time, he'd be part of their team and doing their bidding. The senior man, who had come in from Los Angeles to F. B. I. H. Q. after Erlich had left Washington, he'd be everybody's friend, he'd have them eating out of his hand down at Counter-Terrorism, he'd probably take out citizenship. The other older one had been in Chicago, moved to Washington less than a year back, and Erlich knew his name because he'd the distinction of having run the sting in the Board of Trade's soybean futures pit. He left them to get their heads down.
They were all top of the ladder. He didn't know their long-term histories, but each one of them would have had the break far back, hooked into it, started climbing. He didn't reckon to waste his last evening as an independent.
He had the Embassy driver take him out, again, to 28th October Street.
He told the driver that he would find his own way back.
