“Where are you?”
“I can be in Henderson tonight.”
“Ellis—”
“It’s not about back then, Joost. I’m hoping you can help me find something.”
Joost went silent. Shafer had only pay-phone static for company. He wondered if he’d pushed too hard, lost the old man.
“I’ve left all that behind.”
“I swear. Nothing to be worried about.”
“Then I look forward to seeing you tonight.”
Henderson was on the outskirts of Vegas, four hundred miles down I-15 from Provo. Shafer decided to stick to the Regal instead of flying out of Salt Lake, a way to avoid using credit cards and the TSA.
Still, as the mile markers rolled by and the Buick’s gauges rose toward red, Shafer wished he’d splurged for the second-cheapest car on the lot. The ninety-point checklist at Great Deals Used Cars didn’t seem to include the engine. Shafer turned the Regal’s heat to high to relieve the radiator and kept the speedometer steady at fifty-three. Anything beat blowing the engine in the Utah desert.
The six-hour trip took eight hours. But finally Shafer knocked on the door of Joost’s house in Henderson. A tidy ranch in a tidy subdivision, as far from the chaos of Kinshasa as Shafer could imagine. The Regal had cooled after sunset. Shafer believed it might even survive the return trip north.
The door swung wide open. Joost looked surprisingly like the man Shafer had known a generation before. Gray hair and age spots notwithstanding, he held himself ramrod-straight, ready to head upriver into the heart of darkness.
“Joost. You look good.”
“So do you.” To Shafer’s surprise, Joost opened his arms and wrapped him up. “Come, come.”
Joost’s living room was covered with pictures of Joost and a stout Hispanic woman maybe twenty years younger. She definitely hadn’t been his wife in Kinshasa. Shafer vaguely remembered that woman as tall and blond. “Is that—”
“Janneke died in 2005. Cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Linda was her nurse. She thinks I was a mining engineer over there.”
Now Shafer understood why Joost had been wary of his call. “She’s out tonight?”
“She plays poker with the tourists once a week. You’d be surprised how much she wins. Sit, please. If you’d like a drink—” On the coffee table Joost had set out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black and a bowl of ice. “I don’t drink much these days, but I thought tonight. Just a taste.”
“Please.”
Joost poured them two shallow drinks. “Cheers.”
“It’s good to see you, Joost.”
And it was. Not because Joost had been a good intelligence officer, or even a good man. He’d had a long-running affair with a secretary at the Dutch embassy, if Shafer remembered right. But Joost had kept his promises, a rare trait in their business. In any case, seeing him offered a more intimate version of a college reunion, a reminder that everyone was headed the same way.
“You’re still working, Ellis?”
“For now.”
“Can you believe Zaire is even worse now than it was back then?”
“We didn’t exactly leave them a winning hand.”
“Always this excuse. They’ve been independent fifty years now. Time to take responsibility for themselves. I remember you saying something like that to one of the big men. You were never afraid to say what you thought. Though you must have known after a few months that you were wasting your breath.”
Story of my life.
“Worst that could happen, they send me back to Langley, I stop getting malaria.”
“You remember the time when Mobutu’s secretary called you in, that crazy one who drove the pink Rolls-Royce—”
For an hour, they talked about nothing but the past.
“So,” Shafer said finally. “There was something I wanted to ask you about.”
Joost tapped his wrist. “Now we come to the point.”
“We can talk all night.”
“Please, Ellis. You didn’t come all this way to reminisce about Mobutu.”
Shafer poured them both fresh splashes of whiskey.
“Were you ever involved with the nuclear stuff?”
“Our program? So, so, so.” All one word: sososo. “No.”
“Joost, I promise, I’m not here officially. I’m not fishing to get you in trouble.”
“You see the life I live, Ellis. I don’t want reporters at the door.”
Shafer waited.
Joost sipped his drink and seemed to decide he had to give Shafer something. “Look, South Africa isn’t like the States. Inside the apparatus, we all knew each other.”
“After ’77, it wasn’t any great secret,” Shafer said, hoping to encourage him.
In 1977, South Africa had been close to conducting an underground nuclear test when the United States discovered its preparations.
“One of the scientists, a little man named Alfred, he’s dead now, we grew up together in the Transvaal. When I came back from Zaire, he told me bits and pieces.”
“You were working with Israel.”
“Yes. The Jews didn’t care about the sanctions. People hated them even more than us. We had money and uranium ore. They had the scientists. We traded.”
“And the enrichment project succeeded.”
“These stories you see now that we had six nuclear weapons, that’s an exaggeration. Cubs trying to be lions, we say. But we did make enough for one.”
“This was in the eighties.”
“Yes. I can’t remember exactly which year.”
“And what happened to it? That highly enriched uranium.”
Joost poured himself another whiskey, a big one this time, and offered the bottle to Shafer, who covered his glass.
“I don’t suppose all these questions have anything to do with what you found in Istanbul.”
“You know I can’t answer that.” Shafer already regretted telling the story to Evan.
“For what it’s worth, the stuff we produced was very pure. Just like the uranium you found over there.”
“You’re sure.”
“It was a point of pride.”
“So the stuff is still in a vault in Pretoria?” Shafer couldn’t believe finding it would be this easy. Wells and Duto had gone all over the world, and Shafer was about to get the answer.
“Of course not. We wouldn’t have left it for the ANC. It’s not even in Africa anymore.”
Shafer’s elation vanished. “So where?”
“Where do you think? We sent it to the Jews as a present. Why not? At least they’d helped us.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
Another brick wall. If the South Africans had given up the uranium twenty years before, the Israelis had no doubt long since blended it into a nuclear warhead now pointing at Iran.
Still, he’d come too far not to finish his questions.
“How much HEU was it, anyway?”
“A bit more than fifteen kilos.”
Shafer hadn’t expected such a precise answer. “That’s oddly specific.”
“Because fifteen was always the amount we needed to reach for a bomb. The scientists celebrated for a week when they reached it, my friend told me. But then the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry had a big fight and de Klerk halted the program.”
“Because you knew what was coming.”
“What could we do with it? Blow up Soweto?” The giant slum southwest of Johannesburg. “The joke was that it would look better after.”
“So the program stopped at fifteen kilos. One bomb.”
“Fifteen-point-three sticks with me, for some reason. But it’s all gone now. Ask your friends in Tel Aviv.”
“Did Israel pay for it? How did you arrange the transfer?”
Joost splashed more Johnnie Walker into his glass. He seemed to have forgotten his promise of “just a taste.” “Now you’ve dug too deep for me. You need someone closer to the program. But none of them came to the States.”