Bertrand’s scientist shrugged his shoulders. He had gamed dozens of ways by which a dictator like Qaddafi could get the bomb: hijack a plutonium shipment, do what the Indians did — buy a Canadian heavy-water reactor that runs on natural uranium and duplicate it right down to the thumbtacks. But this was different. Cheating with a standard light-water reactor was the toughest challenge of all.
Cornedeau got up and walked over to the blackboard hanging on one wall of Bertrand’s office. For a minute he stood in front of it, idly tossing a piece of chalk in his hand, marshaling his thoughts like a schoolmaster about to begin a lecture.
“Mon general,” he said, “if you’re going to cheat on a nuclear reactor, any reactor, you cheat with the fuel. When the fuel burns, or fissions, it gives off heat, boils water to make steam to run turbines to make electricty. It also sends a stream of stray neutrons flying around. Some of them”-he punched the blackboard-“go banging into the unburned fuel, lowly enriched uranium in this case, and start a reaction in there which converts a part of that into plutonium.
“In this reactor,” he continued, making a sketch on the blackboard, “the fuel is in a pressurized core inside the shell that looks like this. You change it only once a year. It comes in enormous, heavy bundles of fuel rods. To get it out, you have to shut down your reactor. Then you need two weeks’ time, a lot of heavy equipment and plenty of people. Don’t forget we have twenty technicians assigned to it. There is absolutely no way the Libyans could have gotten the fuel out of there, spirited it away some dark night, without some of them noticing it.”
Bertrand drew on his Gauloise. “And what happens to that fuel when it comes out?”
“First of all, it’s so hot, radioactively speaking, it would turn you into a walking cancer cell if you got close to it. The assemblies are packed in lead shells and taken to a storage pond where they’re left to cool off.”
“And so the rods just sit there in the pond. What prevents Qaddafi from taking them out and getting the plutonium?”
“The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna has inspectors who are responsible for seeing that people don’t cheat on these things. They run at least two inspections a year down there. And in between they have sealed cameras run on sealed lines which constantly monitor the pond. There are usually at least two of them there, timed to take wide-angle shots of the pond every fifteen minutes or so.”
“And that, presumably, doesn’t leave him enough time to remove the rods?”
“Goodness, no. You’ve got to put them into huge, shielded lead containers if you don’t want to be irradiated yourself. They have to be handled by heavy cranes. You need at least an hour for the operation. Two is more likely.”
“Could the inspectors alter the film?”
“No. They don’t even develop them. That’s done in Vienna. Besides, they also lower gamma-ray analyzers into the pond each time they make an inspection, to be sure the rods are radioactive. That way they can be sure a switch hasn’t been made.”
Bertrand leaned back, his head pressed against the headrest of his chair, his half-closed eyes focused on one corner of the ceiling. “You make a very persuasive case against the Libyans being capable of obtaining plutonium from this thing.”
“I think it’s very, very unlikely, Chief.”
“Unless they had complicity at some stage in their operations.”
“But where, how?”
“Personally, I have always managed to contain my enthusiasm for the workings of the United Nations.”
Comedau crossed the room and slumped into his chair, his legs sprawled uncomfortably before him. His superior was an old-school Gaullist and everyone in the house knew he shared the former President’s distaste for a body de Gaulle had once referred to as “Le Machin”the thingumajig.
“Sure, Chief,” he sighed. “The agency has its limitations. But the real problem isn’t them. It’s that no one really wants effective controls. The companies that sell the reactors, like Westinghouse and our friends over at Framatome, give a lot of public lip service to the idea, but privately they oppose controls like poison. No Third World government wants those inspectors running around their country. And we haven’t been very anxious to tighten controls ourselves, despite everything we say. There’s too much at stake in our reactor sales.”
“Well, my boy,” the General murmured through the veil of cigarette smoke now cloaking him like a shroud, “a sound balance of payments is an imperative of state with which it’s difficult to argue these days. I think you should get the inspection reports from Vienna immediately. Also ask our representative there whether he has any coffee-house gossip about inspectors being bought, bribed. Or too enamored of the bar girls or whatever it is they have over there now.” There was a sudden brightening in the General’s eyes as he recalled his last visit to the Austrian capital in 1971. “Handsome creatures, those Viennese. One could hardly blame the odd Japanese for going off the deep end for one of them.” He leaned forward. “What about our own people down in Libya? What do we have on them?”
“We’ve got their security clearances over at the DST. And, of course, the DST has recorded all their telephone conversations coming into this country.”
“Who was our senior representative down there?”
“A Monsieur de Serre,” Cornedeau replied. “He’s been back for a couple of months waiting for his next posting.”
Bertrand looked at the Hermes clock in a black onyx frame on his desk. It was almost lunchtime. “Do we have his current whereabouts?”
“I believe so. He’s here in Paris.”
“Good. Get his address for me. While you’re getting all that material from our friends at the DST, I’ll see if I can’t have a cup of coffee and a chat with Monsieur de Serre.”
The sight of the three grave and unfamiliar men surrounding Harvey Hudson, the director of the New York office of the FBI, told Michael Bannion that something very, very serious was going on in his city. Just how serious dawned on the Police Commissioner when he heard the words “Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories” appended to his introduction to the suntanned man with an ornament around his neck sitting at Hudson’s left.
Bannion looked at Hudson. The Commissioner had darkblue eyes, “the color of Galway Bay on a June morning,” his grandmother had once loved to tell him.
They were clouded with fear and concern, with a question he did not have to articulate.
“Yes, Michael, it’s happened.”
Bannion sank into his place at the conference table.
“How long have you had it?”
“Since last night.”
Normally, that answer would have provoked a burst of Celtic fury from Bannion. It was typical of the Bureau. Even in a matter that concerned the life and death of thousands of the people in his city, the FBI hadn’t brought his force into their confidence immediately. This time, he reined in his fury and listened with growing horror as Hudson reviewed the threat and what had been done about it.
“We’ve got until three o’clock tomorrow afternoon to find that device,”
Hudson concluded. “And we’ve got to do it without anyone finding out that we’re looking for something. We’re under the strictest orders from the White House to keep this secret.”
Bannion glanced at his watch. It was three minutes past eight. Just a month ago, he recalled, he and Hudson had discussed the possibility of nuclear terrorism together. “People have been shouting `the nuclear terrorists are coming’ for years,” he had cynically remarked to his FBI colleague. “How, I want to know-galloping down the Hudson Valley Re Lochinvar?” Now they had arrived and he felt totally, helplessly inadequate to deal with them.
“Don’t your people out at Los Alamos have some technological resources we can employ to track it down?” Bannion asked John Booth. “These things have to give off some kind of radiation, don’t they?”