The Fifth Horseman (48 page)

“You think you’re going to retire in a few months, don’t you?” He almost hissed the words. “And you’re going to need every sou of your pension to go on living like this, aren’t you? I know because I spent the afternoon studying your bank accounts. Including the secret one you’ve been building up illegally in the Cosmos Bank in Geneva.”

De Serre gasped.

“You’re going to cooperate with me, Monsieur de Serre. Because if you don’t, I’m going to ruin you. By the time I’m finished with you, your wife won’t have enough money to bring you oranges out at Fresnes.”

Bertrand relaxed the pressures on de Serre’s collarbones and allowed his voice to take on a more gentle tone. “But if you do cooperate, I’ll promise you this. What brings me here is very important. So important that I shall go personally to the President of the Republic and intercede with him on your behalf. I’ll see that this is written off as completely as your little episode in India was.”

De Serre’s face was gray now. His chest heaved twice and his jaw fell open.

My God, Bertrand thought, the bastard is going to have a heart attack on me. A gagging sound rumbled up from the depths of de Serre’s bowels. The scientist let his cognac glass tumble to the floor and clapped his hand to his mouth to staunch the flow of vomit that spurted through his fingers and cascaded in a vile-smelling yellow-green stream down his burgundy dinner jacket’s lapels and onto the lap of his black trousers. Desperately, he pawed at his pocket for a handkerchief.

Bertrand grabbed his own handkerchief to clean him up, but the scientist had already half collapsed, holding his head in his hands, his chest shaking with sobs.

“Oh God, oh God!” The voice was shrill. “I didn’t want to do it. They made me!”

Bertrand picked up the cognac glass, went to the bar and filled it with Fernet Branca, the dark-brown liqueur the French use to settle queasy stomachs. He had his man. There was no need to continue playing the Spanish Inquisitor. He brought the glass back to the shaking scientists. As de Serre gratefully sipped it, Bertrand dabbed at the worst of the mess on his dinner jacket.

“If you were coerced,” he said, his tone as reassuring as that of an aging family physician at the bedside of a familiar patient, “it will make everything easier. Begin at the beginning and tell me exactly what happened.”

De Serre sobbed. “I didn’t want to,” three more times before he was able to continue.

“Every weekend I used to go down to Leptis Magna. One could find things occasionally in the sands there, particularly after a storm.” He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, fighting to regain his composure. “There was a Libyan guard I met there. Sometimes, for a few dinars, he’d indicate where I could find things. Then one day he asked me into his but for tea.

He had that bust.” He pointed to the stone head glowing in its cabinet with what seemed now a mocking beauty. For a pathetic instant, de Serre stared at it as an older man might look at a younger woman with whom he is desperately in love at the moment of parting. “He offered it to me for ten thousand dinars.”

“An insignificant sum, 1 suppose, for such a piece?”

“God, yes.” De Serre sniffled. “It’s worth millions. Two weeks later, I was going to Paris for the Pentecost weekend. The Libyans had never, never looked at my bags, so I decided to take it with me.”

“And at the airport, Customs went right for your bags?”

“Yes.” De Serre seemed puzzled by the swiftness of Bertrand’s observation.

“Why wouldn’t they, since they had set you up? And then what happened?”

The wild, terrified look that had swept de Serre’s face earlier at the mention of the word “prison” illuminated his features with a fear akin to that of a trapped animal. He gagged and gulped at the Fernet Branca.

“They put me in prison.” The man, Bertrand saw, was becoming hysterical.

“Their prison was a black hole. A black hole with no light and no windows.

I couldn’t even stand up. There was nothing in it, no bed, no toilet bowl, nothing. I had to live in my own excrement.” De Serre shook. A touch of madness glowed on his face now, a glimpse of how close he must have come to insanity in that hole. Poor son of a bitch, Bertrand thought. He knew something about holes like that. No wonder he almost went over the edge when I mentioned the word “prison.” The scientist’s fingers clutched the flesh of Bertrand’s arms. “There were rats in there. In the dark I could hear them. I could feel them brushing against me. Biting me.” He shrieked involuntarily at his recollection of the rats’ nibbling bites, their jabbing little paws. “They gave me rice once a day. I had to eat it with my fingers before the rats could get it.” De Serre was crying uncontrollably now. “I got dysentery. For three days I sat in a corner in my own shit screaming at the rats.

“Then they came for me. They said I had violated their antiquities law.

They refused to let me call the consul. They said I would either have to spend a year in a jail like that or …”

“Or help them divert plutonium from the reactor?”

“Yes.”

The word was a quick, despairing gasp. Bertrand rose, took de Serre’s empty glass and refilled it with Fernet Branca.

“After what they had put you through, who can blame you?” he said, passing the glass to the trembling scientist. “How did you do it?”

De Serre took a gulp of the drink, then sat still a moment, panting, trying to regain his composure.

“It was relatively simple. The most frequent problem in any light-water reactor is faulty fuel rods. Some failure in the cladding that surrounds them. The fission products that build up in there as the fuel burns leak out through the fault into the reactor’s cooling water and contaminate it.

We pretended that had happened in our case.”

“But,” Bertrand said, thinking back to his talk with his scientific adviser, “those reactors are such complex machines. They have such an array of safety devices built into them. How did you manage such a thing?”

De Serre shook his head, still trying to force the ugly images of the last few minutes from his mind. “Cher monsieur, the reactors themselves are perfect. They are equipped with so many marvelous safety systems they are, indeed, inviolable. It’s the little things around them that are always vulnerable. It’s like …” de Serre paused. “Years ago, I had a dear friend who raced Formula One cars. I was with him once at the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo. He was racing with Ferrari then, and they had given him a superb new twelve-cylinder prototype. Worth millions, it was. The car broke down the first time he went past the Hotel de Paris. Not because anything was wrong with Monsieur Ferrari’s beautiful engine. But because a two-franc rubber gasket failed to hold.

“In this case, we started with the instruments that measure the radioactivity in each of the reactor’s three fuel compartments. They’re like all instruments of that sort. They work on rheostats based on a zero setting. By simply altering the setting upward, we arranged to have the instrument tell us there was radioactivity-when, of course, there wasn’t any. We drew off a sample of the cooling water and sent it to the lab for analysis. Since the lab was run by the Libyans, they gave us the answer we wanted.”

“How about the inspectors and safeguards of the United Nations in Vienna?”

“We notified the International Atomic Energy Agency that we were shutting down the reactor to remove a faulty fuel charge. By mail, of course, to win a few days. As we had suspected they would, they sent out a team of inspectors to watch us make the change.”

“How did you convince them that something was really wrong with your fuel?”

“We didn’t have to. We had the printouts from the faked meters which we then set back to their zero setting. We had the lab results. And the fuel itself was so radioactive, who would want to get near it?”

“And they didn’t suspect that you were faking?”

“The only thing they got suspicious about was the fact that all three of the reactor’s fuel charges went bad at the same time. You see, the fuel is loaded into three completely sealed-off compartments. But the fuel had all come from the same source, so it was conceivable. Barely, but conceivable.”

“And how did you get the fuel rods out of the storage pond after they’d left their cameras there taking pictures every fifteen minutes?”

“The Libyans had worked that out. The cameras the IAEA use are Austrian-made, Psychotronics. The Libyans bought half a dozen of them through an intermediary. Each camera has two lenses, a wide-angle and a normal, and they are set to go off in a sequence. The Libyans listened to the IAEA’s cameras with very sensitive stethoscopes until they had worked out the sequence. Then with their own cameras they shot the same scene the IAEA’s cameras were shooting from exactly the same spot. They blew up big prints and placed them in front of the IAEA’s cameras, so what those cameras were doing, in effect, was taking a picture of a picture.”

“And so they took out the fuel rods at their leisure.” Again Bertrand thought back to his conversation with his scientific adviser. “But how did they fool the inspectors when they came back to see if the rods were still there?”

“Quite simply. When they took the real fuel rods out they put dummy rods treated with cobalt 60 back into the pond. They give off the same bluish glow, the Czerinkon effect, that the real fuel rods do. And they give an identical reading on the gamma-ray detectors the IAEA inspectors put into the pond to check what’s in there.”

Bertrand could not suppress a glimmer of admiration for the Libyans’

ingenuity. “How did they separate out the plutonium?” The hostility had left his voice now, replaced by a sympathy for the shattered man before him.

“I wasn’t involved in that at all. I only saw the place where they did it once. It was in an agricultural substation fifteen miles up the seacoast from the plant. They had a set of designs for a small reprocessing plant they got in the United States. A company over there, Phillips Petroleum, circulated them in the sixties. They contained very detailed sketches and designs of all the components in the process. They had made shortcuts.

Neglected quite a number of basic safety precautions. But the fact is, everything you need to build a plant like that is available on the world market. There is nothing that’s required that’s so exotic as to be unobtainable.”

“Isn’t all that terribly dangerous?” The director of the SDECE thought back to his young scientist’s warning in the morning about radiation.

De Serre was suddenly distracted by the stench of the vomit on his dinner jacket, an acrid reminder of the nightmare through which he had just passed. “God, I’ve got to get out of these clothes,” he said. “Look, they were volunteers, all of them. Palestinians. I shouldn’t wish to write an insurance policy on their lives. In five, ten years …” De Serre shrugged. “But they got their plutonium.”

“How many bombs would they be able to make with it?”

“They told me they were reprocessing two kilograms of plutonium a day.

Enough for two bombs a week. That was back in June. Altogether, allowing for error, I should say they should have been able to get enough for forty bombs out of there.”

Bertrand whistled softly, spilling as he did the ashes of his Davidoff.

“Mon Dieu! Could you recognize any of those people in a photograph?”

“Perhaps. The man I dealt with was a Palestinian, not a Libyan. Heavy fellow with a moustache. Spoke perfect French.”

“Get out of those clothes,” Bertrand ordered. “You’re coming to the Boulevard Mortier with me.”

The scientist staggered to his feet, vomit dripping from his filth-covered pants, and started for the door. “I’ll go and change.”

Bertrand followed him. “I trust,” he said, “that in the circumstances you won’t mind if I accompany you.”

There comes a time in every international crisis when the President of the United States feels the need to get away for a few moments from his formal circle of advisers, to isolate himself with the one or two intimates with whom he feels totally at ease, in whose judgment and candor his confidence is total. In the dark moments after Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt inevitably turned to the frail figure of Harry Hopkins. The voice that Jack Kennedy listened to in the White House corridors during the Cuban Missile Crisis was that of his brother Bobby. Now, in the aftermath of his disastrous phone call with Qaddafi, the President was alone with Jack Eastman, pacing slowly up and down the colonnaded terrace linking the West Wing to the Executive Mansion.

The afternoon sun was still warm, and all around them melting snowdrops pattered to the ground with the gentle rustle of a light rain. The President was silent, his hands thrust into his pockets. At the end of the colonnade, a Secret Service agent, arms folded across his chest, kept a discreet watch.

“You know, Jack,” the President said finally, “I got the feeling we’re like a guy who’s got some obscure virus and none of the miracle drugs his doctor recommends seem to do anything for it.” He stopped and looked across the White House gardens toward the Ellipse. Somewhere down there was the national Christmas tree he was supposed to light in a couple of hours, a reassuring annual demonstration of hope, an affirmation of the constancy of certain values his nation liked to think it stood for in good times and bad. Hope, it occurred to him, was in precious short supply at the moment.

He stopped and threw an arm around Eastman’s shoulder. “Where do we go from here?”

Eastman had been waiting for the question. “Well, one place I don’t think we go is back to him. You’d have to crawl. And despite what the doctors say, I don’t think he’s going to be reasoned out of this. Not after listening to him.”

“Neither do I―” The President withdrew his hand and ran it through his wavy hair. “That leaves us Begin, doesn’t it?”

“Begin or those people in New York finding that damn thing., The two men resumed their pacing.