The Last Compromise (18 page)

Hans
didn’t listen to Siim anymore. In the same conversation, in the same breath her
grandmother could show her deep sympathy, her despair at the misfortune or
plain suffering of her fellow Russians. The poor pensioners during the nineties,
the murdered journalists in the decade that followed; the corrupt officials,
the national wealth that got stolen. The government’s carelessness with individuals’
dignity, property and lives. The passionately patriotic bellicosity came only
when it came to geopolitics and history. It was completely detached from the
fact that she had been happily married to an Estonian all her life, and that
she felt at home in Estonia, probably more so than she would have felt in
Russia itself.

‘Anyway,
you should go out with a lady from Denmark,’ Siim continued. ‘Some of them are
freakishly tall, their legs go right up to your chin. Which is perfect, if you
know what I mean. Whatever happened to Clarissa’s flatmate?’

At
some point Hans had concluded that discussing geostrategic situations at the
kitchen table was basically the most popular Russian national sport, much more
so than ice hockey. Not their main preoccupation, but certainly part of the mindset.
He had read somewhere that when an American said ‘that’s history’, it meant
that it wasn’t important. In Eastern Europe the opposite was true. Maybe that’s
why Estonia kept trying to rebrand itself as Northern Europe, instead of
Eastern Europe.

‘We
need to fuel up before crossing into Holland,’ Siim said. ‘And this warning
light’s on again, the car needs oil. And I’ll buy us a bottle of wine. Or
better two.’

Prince
Ivan chose the path to the right. He survived, as the inscription on the stone
had promised. His horse got torn to pieces. Lots of adventures ensued. He
returned to his home town a hero.

Brussels

Anatoly
Slavkin was back behind the large wooden table for phone duty when the phone
rang.

‘Yes,
I am listening.’

‘This
is Pavel. Where is he?’

‘Please
say the new numbers, then I’ll tell you.’

Pavel
exhaled through the nose, then quoted a new sequence of numbers.

‘Correct.
The car came, the driver with the glasses dropped off a young man in a dark
grey winter jacket. He walked across the street and drove off with another
young man in another car. Do you want the description?’

‘Did
you do what I told you to do?’

‘Yes,
I did.’

‘Then
I don’t need a description.’

‘Anything
else?’

‘No.
I’ll come to the embassy to pick up equipment.’

They
both hung up. Well done. There was certainly a reason they had posted Slavkin
where they had. And he knew precisely what that reason was. He would get very,
very far.

Petten

They
had left the motorway at a town called Alkmaar, north of Amsterdam, and had
driven on straight country roads through the dark, flat landscape. They had reached
the compound of the Petten nuclear research centre twenty minutes later.

The
entrance was a high-security gate, illuminated in the darkness by powerful
lamps. A uniformed guard came to the driver’s side of the car, his colleague
waiting at the passenger’s side. They both carried submachine guns.

Hans
and Siim identified themselves with their national identity cards and their
Commission badges. Clarissa had made sure in advance that they would be allowed
to pass. The guard waved into the darkness and the steel gate slowly opened
sideways while the barrier behind it was raised. They drove for another one
hundred metres through the dunes to reach the first actual facilities.

Clarissa
met them in the middle of a yard. Hans and Siim stepped out of the car into the
cold wind and the darkness, and heard the roar of the sea behind the dunes. Clarissa
came closer, and she and Siim embraced for a passionate kiss with their mouths
open. They kept it short, though, presumably because Hans was standing right
next to them. Alternatively they could have chosen a less erotic but then
longer kiss. Yet they had preferred the passion.

Even
though it was darker here than it had been at the gate, Hans had recognised Clarissa
immediately. Her long black hair, her oval face, her dark eyes. She had been
the roommate of his Danish acquaintance in Brussels, plus she was Siim’s
girlfriend, so he had met her a few times before.

Hans
looked around. The whole area looked like a military installation. High fences,
patrolled by security men with dogs. Dozens of buildings, beyond them the dunes
and, somewhere behind them, the vast blackness of the sea. On the compound
itself the view was ominously dominated by a gigantic grey dome.

Clarissa
turned to Hans, and hugged him, too. ‘I’ve heard it in the news,’ she said
softly, her mouth already behind his ear, her chin resting on his shoulder. He
held her body as she held his. It’d been a long time since he had been
embraced, since he’d held someone in his arms. The wind blew her hair in his
face.

Hans
let go. He didn’t want to draw it out to an inappropriate length.

‘Let’s
go inside,’ Clarissa said. ‘Hans, I booked you a room in the guesthouse for the
night. The house is almost empty anyway now, just me and my colleague Kenneth.
And there’s a kitchen.’

She
took Siim by the hand and led the way to a small two-storey building at the
edge of the central yard. They entered into a warm glow of hospitality, agreeably
reinforced by the deliciously sweet smell of fresh onions fried in a pan.

They’d had a
very pleasant late dinner around the guesthouse kitchen table. Kenneth,
Clarissa’s co-worker at the research reactor, had sat with them for a while.
He’d had a glass of the red wine they’d opened, and they’d all talked a little
about where in the world they’d been and what they’d seen. Hans had enjoyed
talking and thinking of something else. And Kenneth had turned out to be an amazing
individual. He had toured the globe, he’d worked as a translator, as a teacher,
as an election monitor in Botswana. But he had studied physics originally, in
his native Britain, at a pretty high level even, and now he had returned to
nuclear science. He had worked in a nuclear research lab in America before
coming to Petten on a scholarship.

And
now it was just the three of them. Hans, Siim and Clarissa were sitting around
the table. Kenneth had left the compound to visit someone in town, a mystery
relation as he’d put it. The bottle was empty, Siim was trying to squeeze the
screw exactly vertically into the cork of the next one.

Clarissa
said to Hans, ‘So, are you going to tell us, or tell me, what happened?’

Hans
finished his glass and put it down. He was thinking where and how to start.

Finally
he said, ‘Okay. None of what I’ll say is certain, but I’ll give you the most
plausible version so far. I believe there is a man who covered up the theft of uranium
that was intended for reactors across Europe, including this one maybe. I also
believe that the man was a Russian agent. He is now dead, and I believe he was
killed.’

Clarissa
listened attentively. She didn’t interrupt.

‘But
I don’t know very much about that uranium, to be honest. I know it’s
low-enriched, and I know it had the form of fission targets, but I’m not
completely sure what that implies. If this material is being diverted, then I
don’t know what it could be used for, other than for research somewhere else. Or
for hospitals. I am worried that it could be used to build a dirty bomb, with uranium
of Western rather than Russian origin. And I was hoping you could help me,
Clarissa.’

Siim
opened the bottle with a plop, and poured some more for everyone. He put the
bottle on the table and whispered to Clarissa, ‘Can I get you anything else? Water,
something from the fridge?’

‘No
thanks,’ she whispered.

‘You,
Hans?’

Hans
shook his head. He had noticed already earlier that Siim became a completely different
person around Clarissa.

Clarissa
took a sip of her wine and started her reply. ‘Uranium is a metal, you extract
it from ore, and it’s actually pretty common. But it comes in different forms, or
isotopes, depending on the number of neutrons in the atomic core, and it’s the
mix that counts. The interesting isotopes in the mix are those that are
fissile, meaning that their atomic core splits up if you shoot more neutrons at
it. In its natural state most of the uranium is not fissile, so you have to
enrich it to increase the percentage of fissile isotopes in the mix. Are you
following?’

Hans
was following, in spite of the wine. He nodded, and Clarissa continued. ‘Now, the
purest mix, if you like, is the weapons-grade uranium. It’s high-enriched and
almost completely fissile. This is what supports an uncontrolled chain reaction
in atomic bombs. For power plants you typically use a less pure mix, the
low-enriched uranium. The chain reaction is controlled, it just produces heat.
The heat boils water, the steam drives turbines which make electricity.’

Siim
took another big sip of wine. Hans didn’t. Clarissa didn’t, either.

She
continued. ‘Hospitals don’t really need uranium at all. What they use are weakly
radioactive forms of other elements that are collectively called medical
isotopes. These are used for example in tracer liquid. They inject it into the
bloodstream, so on the image it lights up and you see where the blood vessels
are. Another medical use is radiotherapy, whereby the radiation is used to
destroy tumour cells in cancer patients.’

Now
she took a sip as well. Hans did the same. Siim hadn’t really stopped sipping.

‘The
medical isotopes are essentially a by-product from splitting up uranium. That’s
what research reactors like Petten are for, or it’s one of the things we do. We
take low-enriched uranium, we put it into the reactor, we split it up and that
way we produce medical isotopes for customers across Europe. Like Mo-99, which
slowly decomposes into other isotopes. We’re one big isotope factory to supply
hospitals, basically.’ She waved at the kitchen door, indicating the direction
of the reactor dome in the compound. ‘Plus there’s the actual research,
obviously. What Kenneth and I do, in a team led by Professor Koopmans, is test
new cooling technology. So we can power reactors up and down more quickly, for
a more efficient electricity production if combined with wind and solar. We’re
trying liquefied gases in various combinations, to see how they interact with
each other and how the cooling affects the chain reaction itself and the
production of isotopes.’

The
research, of course.

‘Publish
or perish, right?’, Hans said. Clarissa nodded.

It’s
what Julia had explained to Hans once. The quest to expand humanity’s
scientific knowledge and understanding of the world was at the same time a
climb up the academic pyramid. And to take the steps, researchers had to
publish their findings in ever better scientific journals while also advancing
in the name ranking to become, ideally, a paper’s first or second author in a
team of half a dozen co-authors or more.

‘And
as far as dirty bombs are concerned, their environmental impact is very much
overrated,’ Clarissa concluded. ‘It all depends on the quantity and the
location, of course. But if we take the quantities that a terrorist group could
accumulate from medical waste, a blast would have very little effect, even in a
city. The radiation wouldn’t be much higher than what you get from the sunlight
when skiing in the mountains. Clean-up is expensive but possible.’

‘So
it’s mostly about the psychological effect, right?’, Siim said. ‘Take a city
like Tallinn. It’s not exactly New York, but it’s a capital city, a financial
centre for the country, with hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. And
then there is radiation in the middle of it. Who would want to live there? It
would be more disastrous than the cyber-attack.’

In
2007 the internet services of Estonia’s government institutions had been
subjected to a hacker attack on an unseen scale. Popular consensus was that the
attack had originated in, and been sponsored by, a neighbouring country. And it
wasn’t Latvia. It had been in the middle of a row over the relocation of a
Soviet-era memorial to the Red Army soldiers who had died in the liberation of
Estonia from the Nazis. A memorial to just another set of occupants, critics in
Estonia had said. The tomb of the unknown rapist. Hans had found it all unnecessary
at the time; the critics he’d found hysterical, and the mostly Russian-speaking
protesters out of control. But the cyber-attack hadn’t been virtual, it had
caused real economic damage. There were powers willing to use disruptive force
against his country.

‘There’s
more than just Tallinn,’ Hans said. ‘I’m from Tartu, the second city. My parents
live there. They’d have to evacuate them.’ He thought of his father’s plans to
build a simple little house up the river. Maybe that would come in handy. Hans
frowned. He was getting ahead of himself. What was he talking about? The point
had been clear anyway. It was the wine.

‘In
both cases this would be the main application of a dirty bomb,’ Clarissa nodded,
ignoring the emotional interjection. ‘A disruption of the economy, the
spreading of fear.’

Hans
asked, ‘Can you use low-enriched uranium or medical isotopes to make a dirty bomb?’

‘Sure,
you can use anything you like, as long as it’s radioactive.’

‘Is
it true that the origin of uranium can be traced?’

‘Yes,
by looking at the impurities in the uranium ore.’

‘Sorry,
I’ll be right back.’ Siim left for the bathroom.

Hans
and Clarissa sat in silence for a moment.

‘This
man died in an explosion, they said in the news,’ Clarissa said in a low voice.
‘Were you close by, Hans?’

‘It
wasn’t a big explosion.’

‘How
did he die then?’

Hans
hesitated, then he said it. ‘Someone put an explosive in his mouth.’

‘Like
a hand grenade?’, Clarissa asked. She hadn’t paused for a second.

‘A
grenade is too big and too powerful. Something smaller.’

Something
smaller that fits into a mouth. Something smaller that fits into a box not much
larger than his phone.

The
box.

Uranium.

‘Do
you have a Geiger counter?’, Hans asked Clarissa. ‘I’m sure you do.’

‘Of
course we do. You need one now?’

‘If
it’s not too much trouble, yes please.’

Clarissa
nodded, got up, touched Siim on the shoulder as he came back from the bathroom,
took her coat from the coat hanger in the hallway and left the guesthouse.

‘Where
are we going?’, Siim asked.

‘Clarissa
will fetch a Geiger counter,’ Hans said. To check out how hot we are. Hans
didn’t want to say it.

***

Clarissa
lifted the black tube that was connected by a cable to a box with a number
display. The box started emitting irregular clicking sounds, each click
representing a radioactive particle passing through the tube, as far as Hans
remembered.

Siim
was very enthusiastic about this. ‘At school they told us that the man Geiger
was a research assistant who got sick of counting the flashes by hand, with
pencil and paper. So he invented the counter.’

Clarissa
didn’t answer. She held the tube against Hans, then against Siim, then against
herself. The frequency of the clicking stayed at the same low level.

Hans
got op, went to the coat hanger, unzipped the pocket of his jacket, took out
the black box and laid it on the table.

Clarissa
held the tube above it. There was no sudden crackle. The radioactivity was the
same as before.

‘Okay,
thank you Clarissa,’ Hans said. ‘I just needed to be sure.’

He
sat down again.

‘Last
glass and bedtime?’, Siim said.

‘One
more question,’ Hans said, still addressing Clarissa. ‘Where do you get your uranium
from?’

‘A
company called A&C, they sit in Austria, in Vienna. They’re one of the
largest sellers on the world market.’

‘How
does it get here?’

‘By
container ship to Rotterdam, then by road to here. Not all of it is for us,
though. We distribute a part of each shipment to facilities in other European
countries.’

‘Is
it safe to just transport it by road like that?’

Clarissa
smiled. ‘There are thousands of transports across Europe every day, mostly
medical isotopes but also the uranium itself.’

‘Are
there often cases of non-delivery here?’

Clarissa
thought for a moment. ‘It happens sometimes, but not often. The last shipment
was cancelled completely, which is unusual because, even if there are problems,
normally at least a part of it arrives. The thing is that the production and
transit of the uranium is sometimes hindered by events beyond the seller’s
control. International sanctions on a producing country, for example, or
corrupt customs officials, or accidents or weather events. Then a half-empty
container is delivered, with just the content from digging sites that weren’t
affected.’

‘What
happens then?’

Siim
was caressing Clarissa’s neck with his thumb. She didn’t respond very much
because she was still talking to Hans.

‘We
report our planned use as cancelled to the nuclear inspectorate, and they
report it to you guys, to the Commission I mean. And our insurance pays out a little
premium for our costs of the delay. And then we wait for the next boat.’

Now
she started responding a little more. It was late. The conversation was over.

***

Hans
was lying on his back, on the bed of his dark guestroom, with his eyes wide
open. They had all gone to bed fifteen minutes ago. Hans to his room, Siim and
Clarissa to theirs. He had put his shirt, socks and trousers on the chair, his
shoes under it, and had lied down, pulling the blanket over his body. And now
he was lying there, staring up into the darkness.

The
interior walls in this guesthouse were very thin. Hans heard Clarissa’s badly
suppressed moaning. It went on for quite a while. He didn’t hear Siim. The
house was otherwise completely silent, he could only faintly hear the wind
outside. And because of the darkness there was nothing to look at. There were
only things to hear. Things to listen to. The sounds coming from the bedroom
next door.

The
moaning stopped, and after a few seconds the roles were reversed. He heard Siim,
but not Clarissa.

Hans
was lying on his back, feeling his erection with his hand. He only held it,
though, and not very firmly. He wasn’t moving his hand either. His eyes were
still wide open.