Cornedeau brought a file of papers three inches thick enclosed in a blue-and-white folder stamped with the seal of the United Nations into the General’s office. Bertrand gasped looking at it.
“Dear Lord! Did you have to wade through all that?”
“I did,” replied Cornedeau, scratching his bald pate, “and I’m confused.”
“Good,” his superior replied. “I prefer confusion to certitude in my operatives.”
Cornedeau placed the reports on Bertrand’s desk and began to thumb through them.
“On May seventh, the Libyans informed the IAEA in Vienna they had found radioactivity in their reactor’s cooling system. They said they had concluded they had a faulty fuel charge and they were shutting down the reactor to take out the fuel.”
Cornedeau pointed to his report. “The IAEA immediately sent a team of three inspectors to Libya. A Jap, a Swede and a Nigerian. Good people. They were present while the fuel was taken out and put into the storage pond. They installed their sealed cameras I told you about this morning around the pond. They’ve run two inspections since.”
“To what result?”
“Everything is perfect. The cameras’ records are complete. They saw no sign whatsoever of any attempt to take out the fuel. And at each inspection they checked the level of radioactivity coming out of the fuel in the pond with their gamma-ray analyzers. It was perfect.”
“In that case,” the General remarked, “I don’t see the reason for your confusion.”
“It’s this.” Cornedeau got up and returned to his blackboard. “To make a bomb, you want very, very pure plutonium 239. Normally, the plutonium you’d get out of the fuel burned up in a reactor like this one contains a very high percentage of another isotope, plutonium 240. You can make bombs with it, but it’s a tricky business.”
“Interesting,” Bertrand commented, “but what’s the relevance here?”
“Time,” Cornedeau continued. “The shorter the time the fuel is in the reactor, the more plutonium 239 it’s going to contain.”
Bertrand squirmed apprehensively in his chair. “And how much would there be in the fuel they took out?”
“That’s what concerns me.” Cornedeau turned to the blackboard to reconfirm the calculations he had already made in his head. “If you wanted to get ideal, ninetyseven-percent weapons-grade plutonium out of this reactor’s fuel, you’d leave it in the reactor exactly twenty-seven days.”
He turned back to Bertrand. “Chief, that happens to be just how long they kept the fuel in that reactor down there.”
The idea for the meeting was Quentin Dewing’s. Every ninety minutes, the FBI’s assistant director for investigation had decreed that the principals running the New York search effort would gather around his desk at the underground command post to review their progress. He looked at them now, coughed nervously and pointed to the FBI assistant director in charge of the effort to locate every Arab who had come into the area in the past six months.
“All the names we’re after have come in from Washington or JFK and are on the computer next door,” the man announced. “There are 18,372 of them.”
The dimension of his figure sent a shock wave through the room. “I’ve got two thousand people out there running them down. They’ve already cleared 2,102 names. Those they can’t locate on first effort but which seem okay we’re putting into Category Blue on the computer. Those who were unavailable but who looked doubtful are going into Category Green. Clear cases of infiltration we’re putting into Category Red.”
“How many of those have you got?” Dewing asked.
“Right now, two.”
“What are you doing about them?”
“I’ve stripped fifty agents out of my pool and put them to work on the Red and Green names. As we clear more people, I’ll be shifting additional agents to the effort.”
Dewing nodded, satisfied. “Henry?”
The question was addressed to the director of the Washington Bureau, who’d been sent up to run the pier operation.
“Things are moving a little faster than we’d hoped, Mr. Dewing. Lloyd’s Shipping Intelligence in London and the Maritime Association down at 80 Broad Street have furnished us the list of all the ships we’re looking for, the dates they came in and the piers they used.
There were 3,816, about half the ships that called on the port in the last six months. Our dock teams have gotten through the manifests of eight hundred of them. We’ve been able to clear the cargoes on about half of them in the last hour. Washington’s really got the bureaus around the country fired up.”
“Good. Mr. Booth?” Dewing said to the director of NEST. “What have you got for us?”
Booth heaved himself wearily from his chair and walked to a map of Manhattan he had pinned on the wall. “We’ve had our organization fully operational since ten up in the Seventh Regiment Armory at 643 Park. Right now, I’ve got all two hundred of my vans and our choppers working lower Manhattan.” His finger ran along the tip of the island. “From Canal Street down to the Battery.”
“Anything suspicious yet?” Dewing queried.
The scientist turned glumly to the FBI man. “Sure. The problem with those detectors of ours is they don’t just pick up nuclear bombs. So far we’ve gotten an old lady who collects Big Ben alarm clocks with radium dials, the dump that supplies half the gardens in the city with fertilizer and two people coming out of a hospital who’d had barium milkshakes for a stomach X ray. But no bomb.” He looked once again at his map. “We’re covering the streets and the rooftops very thoroughly. But, as I told you gentlemen this morning, if it’s above the third story of one of those buildings, we’re not going to find it. We just haven’t got the equipment or the manpower to walk through them.”
When Salisbury of the CIA had made his report, Dewing turned to Harvey Hudson, the Bureau’s New York director. He had control of coordinating the rest of the investigation.
“I’ve got two things, Quent. One just came in from Boston and it looks very, very promising. It’s one of those guys who was trained in Qaddafi’s camps. Here’s his ticket and picture.” He passed a sheet of nmimeographed paper around the room.
“This guy disappeared from his home Sunday morning about ten A.M. and hasn’t been seen since. New England Bell just finished a run-through of his phone records. He got a collect call from a pay phone at Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, two hours before he took off.”
“Terrificl”
“He drives a green Chevelle, Massachusetts number plates 792-K83. I’m going to send the flying squad”the flying squad was a team of fifty FBI agents and New York detectives being held in strategic reserve”into Brooklyn right now to see if they can pick up some trace of him.”
“That’s the best lead we’ve had all morning,” Dewing said enthusiastically.
“What was the other thing you’ve got?”
“One of our informers, a black pimp with FALN ties, gave us a second-rate drug dealer who got some medicine Saturday for an Arab woman up at the Hampshire House. She checked out this morning and apparently gave the hotel a false lead on where she was going.”
Hudson picked up the sheaf of paper on which he’d made a few notes on his way to the meeting. “We had to come down on the drug dealer pretty hard to get him to open up. It turned out she called him. A PLO/FALN link. Knew the right words. Asked him to get her the medicine because she didn’t want to go to a doctor herself. The problem is, the guy swears he never got a look at her. Just left the medicine at the desk, which the hotel confirms, by the way. She was a pretty good tipper, so we had some trouble getting the hotel staff to talk. Seems to be involved in fashion. A jet-set type.”