Below the Thunder Page 11

  Marcus was still talking.

  ‘The Service had been tracking Strange’s arms dealing and – when I saw your name on the audience list for a Bayreuth performance he was due to attend – it was too good an opportunity to miss. We put Agnete in place. Remarkable how little difficulty she had making contact with you.’

  Bryn could almost hear his lip curl. But if Marcus had intended some tasteless follow-up, he evidently thought better of it.

  ‘It was her job,’ he continued seamlessly, ‘to effect a meeting between you and Strange and, if necessary, oil the wheels till you were both as chummy as could be. In the event, she did not have to do a great deal: I would say you and Strange got on like a house on fire. What a lot you must have in common.’

  ‘He was interested in what I had to say.’

  ‘I’m sure. At first, some basic level of acquaintance was all I dared expect. Sufficient for you to be able to recognise him should the need arise in the future. The restaurant invitation therefore was a complete bonus.’

  Tolerant bemusement had finally given way to indignation. This was intolerable.

  ‘Marcus,’ Bryn interrupted. ‘Stop right there. You know what I do. I teach. I am not an employee of MI6, or some kind of, God knows, gun for hire. Being able to recognise one of your targets has absolutely less than nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Right. Quite right,’ said Marcus.

  He paused.

  And carried on pretty well as if Bryn had said nothing at all.

  ‘You see, this is what we call serendipity. In my business, you are always looking out for an opportunity. You invest a fair amount of energy in things that may or may not be useful later. We were frankly struggling to find a way of getting alongside Strange. And you were a Godsend.’

  ‘No, Marcus. No.’

  Marcus swilled the whisky around his mouth.

  ‘Now try and look at it from my point of view, Bryn,’ he drawled silkily. ‘I know you to be a resilient and self-reliant individual. One who, well, currently has time on his hands. And, crucially, who is what we call a “cleanskin”. In my business, everyone knows everybody else. But not you. So, given such an opportunity in Bayreuth, why should I not take advantage? Naturally, there is no way I could know whether – if asked – you would agree to assist us further. That’s the way it is in our business. You put up a lot of kites and see which will fly.’

  ‘No. No, Marcus. The only flying I propose is out of Canada, if possible tomorrow.’

  Agnete came down from her rock and picked at Bryn’s bag of cherries. He slid his wilting burger and the Budweiser out of sight.

  Marcus was already pressing on.

  ‘When Agnete heard Strange inviting you to dinner, she got on to me and we arranged a stake-out. A surveillance.’

  ‘You were in Bayreuth?’

  ‘No. Not me. I was in Munich with the BND. The German Secret Service to you. Agnete was looking after things in Bayreuth. We wired her up and got her into the restaurant with some BND people. We patched her into Strange’s frequency and she was able to listen in.’

  ‘To our conversation?’

  ‘Oh yes. Agnete’s wire allowed her to monitor everything that passed through Strange’s earpiece. I suppose you thought he was wearing a hearing aid. In fact it was quite a conventional two-way device. Your conversation was relayed to his men outside; and messages were also coming in to him. Strange is a careful man. He likes to watch his back. What he never realised was that Agnete was a few yards away. And neither, fortunately, did you.’

  ‘Ah. Well now… ’

  ‘You see,’ interjected Agnete, ‘we have been working with the Germans tracking Mr Strange’s middle-eastern arms contacts. He was rendezvousing with them in Bayreuth.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Marcus. ‘So when his people ID’d the Israeli agent in the restaurant – the little fellow who was photographing you – Agnete heard their message to Strange and alerted me. We got the landpolizei in just in time or else, I think, there might have been bloodshed.’

  Bryn could work out the rest for himself. Strange must have come to Bayreuth to meet his Arab partners in the privacy of the Wagner box. He doubted he’d have seen very much of The Mastersingers at all. And of course, the Israelis – or their secret service – would have been tracking Strange every bit as energetically as the Germans and MI6 and God knows who else. Espionage was beginning to seem a crowded business.

  ‘So the photographer was from Mossad?’

  ‘Oh certainly,’ said Marcus. ‘And now quite compromised. Strange’s man took his camera with everything he had shot in Bayreuth. There was nothing left to do but pull him out.’

  ‘I saw that on the news,’ said Bryn. ‘Mossad had been caught using fake German passports. There was a political kerfuffle. All the Israeli agents got expelled.’

  Marcus looked at him pityingly.

  ‘Wholly contrived,’ he said. ‘Mossad wanted them out anyway – their job was done. Meantime the Germans wanted to look good with the Arabs. It’s all politics, old boy. Don’t forget that the Germans have alliances with both sides in the Middle East. Like the rest of us.’

  Bryn remembered the policeman at the hotel and his sense of being watched through the rest of his time in Bavaria. He wondered if his ignorance had been shared by the local Bayreuth constabulary. And how much anyone knew at levels lower than Marcus and a few high-placed international colleagues.

  His cousin’s words, though, had had a settling effect. At the least a degree of clarity had emerged from the confusion. It was not that Bryn felt necessarily less in danger. But he did feel better informed.

  And then the truth began to dawn upon him. What had hitherto been unthinkable. That, in some way or another, everything since Bayreuth – the whole of the last two weeks – was the malign consequence of that ‘serendipitous’ meeting with Strange. And that Marcus – his cousin – was responsible for it all.

  He drew in a large breath. Marcus was looking at him almost if he expected what was to come.

  ‘I cannot believe what you’re telling me,’ Bryn said as slowly, and as icily, as he could manage.

  Marcus did not reply.

  ‘It was not his fault,’ said Agnete. ‘The stakes were so high.’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  ‘I really need your help,’ said Marcus quietly.

  He offered him the open cake tin, like a kid offering a trade.

  Bryn shrugged his shoulders.

  The chocolate brownies did look appetising.

  ‘Events did not turn out as anticipated, it’s true,’ Marcus continued. ‘It was unfortunate that you went holidaying to Yosemite and, of all places, Lassen.’

  ‘Strange recommended it.’

  ‘I know. We heard him. But nobody anticipated that Stratton would be headed that way.’

  ‘The scientist? The dead man?’

  Bryn felt as if he was in shock. He wanted to know more. On the other hand, he dared not encourage his cousin with too great a show of interest. But he was sure to tell him anyway.

  Chapter 10

  ‘Sidney Stratton is the beginning of everything,’ Marcus began.

  For the first time since Bryn had arrived in Rainier, the sky was clear of clouds. The ski college on the glacier was already making for home. Marcus took a pair of heavy military binoculars from his bag and watched them before continuing.

  ‘Stratton was a nuclear scientist, working in a federal government laboratory. And an outdoors man – loved walking in country like this. One day, a few years ago, when he was hiking in Lassen, he came across a peculiar lode of rock. No one knows yet its exact location, simply that it was within a mile or so of the summit, and almost certainly thrown up in the eruptions of 1914 to 1921.

  ‘It reminded him of some lithium bearing rocks he had seen years before in Australia. So he took a sample back to his government laboratory – didn’t tell the Park authorities – and did some experiments. To cut a long story short, he managed to derive a ne
w isotope from it. I don’t suppose you know anything about tritium?’

  Bryn did. There had been a story in the newspapers in the late 1990s. Revelations of a clandestine trade between South Africa and Israel involving nuclear materials and an isotope called tritium, derived from enriched lithium. It was designed to boost the explosive power of White South Africa’s nuclear weapons.

  ‘Stratton’s new isotope was like tritium.’ Marcus was speaking even more quietly now than before. ‘But hugely more effective. It had the capacity to increase the power of a nuclear explosion at least a hundredfold.

  ‘It was the nuclear scientist’s Eldorado: an isotope which reduced the quantity of fissile material required to achieve critical mass to a fraction of what was necessary before. The downside was that he may also have generated the heaviest substance known to man. A small flask the size of a pint bottle – still enough though to fuel a sectoral conflict – would weigh in at thirty or forty pounds.

  ‘But this is the real fear. The new isotope would allow much smaller warheads than ever before. Integrated into highly mobile systems. Capable of being deployed in suicide missions. Imagine it falling into the wrong hands. The Middle East for example – Stratton’s flaskful would be sufficient to reverse the whole balance of power.’

  ‘And make an arms trader’s fortune.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said Marcus. ‘You’re already ahead of me.’

  Agnete was back on her Valkyrie rock, monitoring the pathway. It was as if she preferred not to overhear this part of Marcus’s narrative.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he continued, ‘Stratton was a complex character. At first, he was open about his experiments. But he must have realised the terrifying potential of what he was doing. And decided that he was not – or not yet at least – prepared to share it with his superiors. He began to falsify the laboratory outcomes so that it looked as though he was going nowhere. People lost interest in what he was doing.

  ‘But, in the usual cliché, he had stumbled upon a Frankenstein’s monster. He was shocked by the implications but reluctant to abandon his baby. And determined not to divulge its existence to people whom he thought might abuse it. Government, politicians, the military.

  ‘He seems to have sat on his discovery for a while. It was easy for him to hide something so small and supposedly useless, particularly in a working laboratory with so much going on. But he must have brooded on his situation until he could stand it no more. So he shared his terrible dilemma with a trusted colleague. Or someone he thought he could trust.

  ‘The truth is that, in any organisation dealing in assets as marketable as cutting edge arms technology, there’ll always be people taking kick-backs for information. And his trusted colleague reported Stratton’s discovery straight back – to Udell Strange.

  ‘What happened next is not entirely clear. There were certainly discreet meetings between Stratton and Strange, brokered by the colleague. Stratton may naïvely have hoped Strange would ensure his product only be used for acceptable, perhaps peace-making, purposes. Perhaps he even thought that, like the atom bomb, possession by both sides would have a mutually deterrent effect. I am sure Strange tried to satisfy his fantasies. But in the end something went wrong. Perhaps Stratton rumbled the other’s self-interest. Perhaps he asked for guarantees of a kind that Udell Strange was not prepared to deliver.

  ‘At all events, we know that Strange proceeded to steal the isotope. He correctly calculated that Stratton was too far up to his neck to report the loss to his superiors. He also took the precaution of transferring a hundred thousand dollars from one of his anonymised off-shore funds into an account set up in Stratton’s name; and told Stratton about it so that he would realise the extent to which he was compromised. Where the isotope is now, we do not know. Strange has spirited it away somewhere. Our job is to find it before anybody else does, or anything worse happens to it.’

  Bryn felt a chill settle upon him. He was quite certain he knew what Marcus intended by this last remark; and was careful not to respond. A light aircraft passed along the line of the mountains to the west. Marcus watched it through his binoculars until it disappeared.

  ‘Do you remember Jack C Smith?’ he said.

  Of course he remembered Jack C Smith.

  Jack C Smith was the defeated Vice-Presidential candidate in the recent Presidential Election, the lost leader of the neoconservatives who had gone down in flames with the disgraced front-runner.

  When it had emerged within the week before Election Day that the Presidential candidate was a closet gay, with a naked photograph of him in flagrante delicto to prove it, the media was heavy with rumour that the information had been leaked from Jack C Smith’s own office. But – disastrously – some weeks or months before he had intended it. Then, a few weeks after the Election, Jack had been accidentally and tragically shot by a political associate while out quail hunting in the Sierra Nevada. He had died without recovering consciousness.

  ‘A terrible loss,’ said Marcus.

  ‘Why do you mention him?’ Bryn asked.

  ‘Because Strange, apparently, christened the lethal isotope in his memory. It is called smithium. Isn’t that nice?’

  ‘What happened to Stratton?’

  ‘Oh. Stratton. He had some kind of breakdown. He couldn’t go to his bosses. He was out of his depth with Udell Strange and his people. I wouldn’t be surprised if they threatened to kill him, or even make a move on his family. A bit of a lost soul, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And dying from radiation sickness,’ Bryn said. ‘The police said so.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said Marcus. ‘It makes sense.’

  He pondered a few moments before returning to his story.

  ‘I think he decided to blow up his secret lode-bearing seam on Lassen and probably himself with it. He had the equipment. Rock drills. High explosive. At least – as a dying achievement – he might hope that no more smithium could be manufactured. I don’t imagine for a moment he was good at covering his tracks. You don’t buy quantities of plastique without being noticed. We were onto him. But so was your friend with the cowboy lifts.’

  ‘Jack Wilson.’

  ‘Wilson. He’s an ex-CIA agent. I used to bump into him when we were working in the same theatres. He’s been around a bit since, made himself unpopular in a few countries. Even had plastic surgery to make himself less recognisable. Wilson is what you’d call a hired gun. Resourceful, exceptionally private, dangerous. He works for whoever is the highest payer and we believe that, at this point in time, that happens to be Udell Strange.’

  ‘I know it is,’ Bryn said.

  Marcus ignored him.

  ‘They’d been concerned about Stratton for a while. Strange must have decided finally he was too great a risk. But unfortunately for them – fortunately for us – Wilson made a strategic error. He killed Stratton before he reached the secret lode. Maybe Wilson was disturbed. My best guess is he saw you in the distance, coming up the track behind him, put a silencer on the gun and despatched Stratton right away. But the consequence is that no more smithium can be manufactured – certainly for the time being. The prime source has been lost.

  ‘Which leaves us of course with one very clear task. We need to find that one existing flask of the isotope. And destroy it.’

  And who might Marcus have in mind to perform that labour? A ‘cleanskin’ no doubt. Someone with time to spare. Who could be trusted not to run away with a billion dollar property in his trouser pocket.

  ‘I’m really not that interested,’ said Bryn. ‘Why don’t you just move in and take Strange? And Wilson too.’

  Marcus sighed.

  ‘My dear cousin. We are not discussing a common criminal here. Strange is an immensely powerful and influential man. If we get it wrong now, we lose everything. It’s one thing to know and even to have the evidence; quite another to be able to take open action against him. Don’t forget that most of our information could never be used in court.’

  ‘“T
op secret”?’

  ‘Yes, if you want to call it that.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve interrogated the duplicitous colleague?’

  ‘We might have done.’

  He was curiously ill at ease, and gave another sigh.

  ‘To be frank with you, Bryn, things got a little out of hand. We’d been monitoring Stratton and Strange discreetly for some time – well, you know that. It’s important not to frighten the horses. There was always a chance that someone would lead us to the flask. And then Stratton suddenly took off before we could speak to him.’

  ‘So if I understand this,’ said Bryn, ‘you’ve lost Stratton, and Strange has made off with the isotope, and you don’t know where it is and you’re in no position to do anything about it.’

  For some time Marcus had been holding an uneaten brownie in his hand. He closed his fingers round it and watched the crumbs skip away down the mountainside.

  ‘Here’s the situation,’ he murmured, as if talking to himself. ‘Strange wants to destabilise the Middle East to put pressure on the Lady President. He’s a good businessman and knows he can do that and make a packet at the same time.

  ‘So what he’s looking for is someone militant and oil rich. He’s found a possible buyer in one of the Gulf States where the old sheikh has been replaced by his extreme Islamist son.

  ‘And there’s the Israelis. They’ve known about the isotope for some time. Longer than us, probably. I wouldn’t put it past Strange to be playing them off against the Islamists. Anything that helps to ratchet up tension in that part of the world.

  ‘I don’t know how much time we have. We’re still working on the flask’s whereabouts. But my guess is we won’t get a lead till Strange is close to a deal or needs to prove he has the isotope. At best we’ll get a very brief window of opportunity.’

  ‘To destroy it?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we cannot afford to let it fall into the hands of the jihadists or the Israelis or even the Americans.’