Doctor Gavrilov (15 page)

Tim laughed. He said, ‘Well, you could give me his number, anyway.'

Katie said, ‘He's staying with someone who isn't on the phone, but he did give me a number where I could leave a message. And there's his sister's number, I could give you that. If you come upstairs for a moment I'll give them to you.'

They went up the stairs together. With the children asleep, the room was quiet and peaceful. Katie found the address book and wrote down the numbers for him on a piece of paper. She stood in darkness, illuminated only by the light of the desk lamp, and Tim found himself staring at the back of her neck, at the downy hair and the smooth curve of her shoulders, and was almost overwhelmed by the desire to kiss her. She turned to him, and he saw that she saw it, and he thought too, from her expression that she didn't mind; that she was enjoying the fact that he was attracted to her. This impression lasted only for an instant; she stepped backwards, away from him, and he restrained himself, afraid he might upset her.

He said, ‘I'll pop up and see you before I go.'

‘All right Tim, thanks, that would be nice.' She seemed to have retreated now, was suddenly distant, preoccupied. He wondered if he had made a mistake, had misjudged her, but anyway, it was too late; the moment had passed. He said, almost as an afterthought, ‘You don't think they mind, do you? Him running round loose with what he must have in his head?'

Katie looked at him, her lips slightly parted. She said, with a slight wildness in her voice, ‘Who's they, Tim?'

‘The authorities. In Russia. The… I don't know.'

She stared at him, aghast. He could see what she was thinking. He could see that he had worried her, had frightened her, more than she would admit. He wanted to unsay what he had said, but of course he couldn't. Katie turned towards the door, said ‘Thank you, Tim, for the supper.' Tim didn't want to leave her but he knew he had to. As he went out he caught a glimpse of her standing in the middle of the room, burying her face in her hands.

‘W
ELCOME to Libya.'

The Director of the Nuclear Research Centre at Tajura, Dr Abdul Masoud, was waiting for him on arrival. He held out his hand and shook Dmitry's, and they stood in the courtyard under the dazzling sun. Dmitry held up his hand to shield his eyes. The brightness of the sky above him was so intense it could hardly be called blue.

In the centre of the courtyard, surrounded by greenery, stood a huge sculpture of a metallic atom resting on top of a stone crescent. They stood in front of it and Masoud insisted on photographs being taken, despite Dmitry's protests. They walked over to the main building. Above the front entrance was a slogan in Arabic, saying, Masoud explained, ‘The Revolution Forever.' On the wall, to one side, he saw a representation of the periodic table. He couldn't help reflecting that it was this table, a stroke of genius by his countryman and namesake, which had first aroused his interest in science and started him on the path that had lead to him studying nuclear physics. It was the beauty of nature's fundamental structure so logically ordered that had entranced him then, and fascinated him still.

Beyond the complex of buildings stood a high fence and a gate. A tank was parked by the gate; special forces with khaki-coloured berets prowled the entrance with their submachine guns and bayonets.

He was taken on a tour of the facilities. Masoud was clearly proud of everything they saw. The water was provided by a reverse osmosis desalination plant. The buildings had been built to withstand a sizable earthquake. He was taken round the reactor building – the 10-megawatt research reactor supplied by the Soviet Union. In the reactor hall he could see the seals, cameras and other equipment which showed the centre was under international safeguards and inspected regularly. The reactor ran on 80 per cent enriched U235 fuel rods, which is why, he was told, they were anxious to develop their own uranium enrichment programme rather than relying on supplies from Moscow. Dmitry noticed that the reactor was covered by a sliding steel protective slab, and that the casks of used radioactive material from the reactor bore IAEA seals.

Then they showed him round the research laboratories, computer rooms and library. Though he had known the facilities were good he was surprised at just how good, and at how much expensive Western equipment there was, computers and electronic equipment from Switzerland, and instrumentation from the US. It was more modern and far better equipped than the research institutes he'd worked in previously in Russia, places so secret they didn't even appear on maps. The normality of it all reassured him.

At the end of the afternoon, they showed him the café, the medical centre, and his quarters. They took him to his room and he sat there on the edge of the bed, exhausted and bewildered. He looked out of the window. The plant was surrounded by a high fence and a radiation protection zone which was thinly wooded, perhaps irrigated by the water from the desalination plant. He could see the trees stretching away far into the distance.

So here he was, imprisoned in his air-conditioned room, like an alchemist of old or a princess in a fairy tale locked in a tower and forced to spin the dull straw into gold. His room was a simple grey box, with a bed, a cupboard, a desk and chair, and a small bathroom. On the empty bookshelves were a copy of the Koran and Gaddafi's Green Book. Unlike the other buildings, this accommodation block seemed cheaply built, and nothing in the room was quite right; the desk rocked, the bed creaked, the door caught on the floor and closed only with difficulty, and the curtains did not quite cover the window.

The sun was sinking lower in the sky but its heat could still be felt through the window pane. Dmitry lay down on the bed, trying to overcome the lassitude which gripped him. He took off his shoes and they dropped on to the floor with a hollow thud. He stared up at the ceiling; there was a grey box on it, in which a red bulb dimly glowed. He wondered what it was; whether behind it there was a camera, looking down at him.

The thought disturbed him; abruptly he leapt to his feet. He showered, shaved, dressed, then went out and walked across the courtyard to the canteen.

He slept surprisingly well. In the morning after he'd showered and shaved, taken his time over coffee and a roll, he walked along the corridors, past the emergency evacuation signs in both Russian and Arabic. His technician was already waiting for him in the lab and stood up when Dmitry came in.

‘I've been waiting for you.'

‘I'm sorry. Have you finished the inventory?'

‘It's all here.'

The first few days would be spent in unpacking and checking all the equipment he'd requested. His technician, Djambul Suzarbayev, was an enthusiastic young man from Khazakstan, who had formerly worked at a uranium enrichment plant in Russia. He made a good impression on Dmitry; he seemed clever, and inventive. He was honest, too. He said straight away that he doubted Dmitry's project would work and made a joke of it. Suzarbayev told Dmitry that he was a Muslim, but if so he didn't seem to be a particularly devout one; he was also quick to laugh at the more bizarre aspects of the Libyan regime. He pointed out to Dmitry how much better it was working here than in Russia; at least here you got paid properly.

Dmitry ran through his proposal. The first step would be to check all his calculations on the computer; this he hoped would confirm that he had achieved a quite remarkable accuracy. Next they would have to construct the test cell and measure the degree of separation. If this was too low, they would have to find ways of improving on it. Thirdly, and this would be the trickiest bit, they would have to find ways of reliably isolating the fraction richest in U235 so that this could be pumped on to the next unit. Then they would need to construct a small cascade, perhaps of a dozen units, before proceeding to construction of any kind of facility. Dmitry thought it would take much more than two years.

He didn't intend to be around here for that long.

He felt that his mission was hopeless. There was nothing here that he had seen that the Russians wouldn't know about already. He did not see any foreign personnel. No-one else spoke to him about what they did and the compound was tightly guarded. But he must try to do something to justify his trip.

Walking down the corridor, he passed a room on his right, where on the first day he had caught a glimpse of filing cabinets and piles of papers on shelves. On impulse he stopped and tried the door; it opened and he went in. There was no reason why he shouldn't, no-one had told him not to. It was not locked, after all.

He looked through the files. Many of them were old, dating back to when Tajura was set up. He carried on for some time, sliding open the drawers, flipping through the files, looking for anything that might be of interest, anything that might not have been declared to the IAEA.

Something made him look up. On the wall, above the shelves, he saw an electronic eye or camera. It seemed to be looking straight at him. He casually replaced the file he was looking at, and left the room. A guard passed by him as he closed the door; Dmitry smiled at him but he did not respond.

He returned to the lab. He felt increasingly uneasy. Why had he done this? There was no point. Why should he put himself at risk in this way for Rozanov? He wasn't even likely to learn anything useful.

At the end of his trip, which was meant to be his first, Masoud looked in to see how he was doing. ‘How is it going? Is there anything you need?'

Dmitry handed Masoud a list. He said, ‘I want to begin with three units, slightly different in design, because I am not sure exactly… Here are the specifications.' He had thought, before he came here, that he would make errors in them, so that the equipment the Libyans ordered would be useless, because he assumed this was what Rozanov would have intended, but in practise he found he couldn't do this. It wasn't just because he thought that this was risky; it was also because he realised that he believed in his experiment and wanted it to work. He realised that he had entered into his role; that he was becoming what he feared.

‘First, we need these cylinders to be material resistant to UF6, which may of course alert the manufacturers to their potential use… but they won't be able to make head nor tail of it. This bears no resemblance to a gas centrifuge. Also the fluorocarbon seals, then the vacuum pumps… all these things, as you know, are in the IAEA's trigger list, but I suppose you know how to get around it… well, you just put something else on the shipping documents and hope nobody is going to check anything.'

He looked at Masoud who did not react at all. He said, ‘As for the UF6 itself… I gather you have a supply.'

‘Absolutely. That is no problem.'

‘And these tuning forks… they will have to be very precise… well, no-one will know what these are for. Perhaps you could say they are for some special musical instrument you need to extol the virtues of your leader.'

Masoud grinned. He took the papers and laughed. He said, ‘This is excellent progress, wonderful… we have bought ourselves little short of a genius. You know, Farzad had some reservations, after he met you, but I think he was wrong… I think we are going to get on very well together, you and I.'

M
OSCOW was hot, dusty, humid. Grey thunderclouds hung over the apartment blocks and distant cooling towers and near the entrance to the metro station rubbish blew about the streets. Everyone complained about the rubbish; this was new, ever since Yeltsin had decreed that street traders should be allowed to set up wherever they wished.

Tim had been met at the airport by Mike Harris. He was an old Moscow hand, had been in Moscow for the BBC in the fifties, been expelled and finally allowed to return last year. He was jaundiced and tired. He talked as he drove, about the disastrous state of the country. ‘Don't you have any illusions about things getting better here, now communism's gone. The problems are just so huge, so enormous, they don't even know how to begin to solve them. Let me tell you right now; Russia is finished.'

They were driving round the ring road; huge rusty lorries thundered in both directions and at the side of the road, at every petrol station, were enormous queues. As they drove in to the centre Mike Harris pointed out the landmarks, and, near the office, the tall spire of the Hotel Ukraina looming out of the heat haze just across the river.

Mike told him what they had been able to set up so far and gave him a desk with a phone in the corner.

‘How's your Russian?'

‘Practically non-existent.'

‘That's all right. We can provide you with an interpreter if you need it… Alya isn't in right now but she's at your disposal.'

Tim's first contact was the woman who had supervised the filming of the supposed dealer in highly enriched uranium. Her name was Larissa Sukhoruchkin and she now produced her own programme for Russian State television. She said that she was very busy but that she would meet him to talk about it further. She could see him that evening. She gave him her address near Taganyskaya metro but said that, since it was so difficult to find, she would meet him in the underground station, at the top of the escalators under the big dome. She said it was the exit on Zemlyana Val, but it wouldn't give this name on his map because, like many other streets in Moscow, it had been re-named.