The Rocket Man (36 page)

It was starting to get dark; they walked back toward where Anatoly had left his car. He said, ‘You must come and see Nina and the girls. What about tomorrow? You said you had an official dinner tonight.'

‘Yes, tomorrow would be fine. It's my last night.'

‘Well, then. Come at eight. You have the address? Let me give it to you.' He scribbled it down on a page from his diary, tore it out and handed it to Dmitry.

The following morning Dmitry was standing by the entrance to the main conference hall when someone came up behind him and tapped his shoulder. ‘I am Jaime dos Santos, you know, Nihal's friend, on the
Jorno do Brasil
. He told me to look out for you. Shall we go and have a drink?'

Jaime dos Santos looked about thirty; he was tall and lean, with a sensitive, intelligent face. They found their way to the bar. Dmitry bought the drinks and carried them to a table, Dos Santos sat close to him, nursing his drink. ‘I have something to tell you. Nihal explained to me what had happened to you, told me you were someone I could trust. I have to say, for months I have been trying to find out further details about Project Solimões. There have been several of us onto it, but we have not got very far. We are trying to find out just how far the bomb project had got, how far Collor had got in dismantling it. What has happened to the bomb-making facilities for example? What has happened to the scientists working on it? They all appear to be in their posts. We have no idea at all what is happening.

‘Then Nihal rang me about this lead with Carneiro de Amaral and his daughter, Liliana Richter. I turned up at the house pretending to be delivering something and chatted up the maid. I borrowed a friend's red sports car to impress her and took her to some night-clubs. I really turned her head. She was a bright girl; I think she saw through it; but anyway she went along with it. She didn't care too much as long as she was having a good time.

‘We went through the kind of people Carneiro entertained, who he mixed with, where he met them. Eventually I got her to tell me about this meeting that had taken place in Carneiro's house back in December last year, just after the Foz do Iguaçu agreement had been signed.

‘There were a number of the Brazilian Military there. Rear Admiral Oliveira, from the Valadares Centre, a man from the Brazilian air force, Air Marshall Gonçalo Cardoso Soares, a representative of a German company which I suspect was RASAG, and a Paraguayan General, Luís Hería Prieto. I told you she was a smart girl; she remembered their names. I have checked up on him; he is one of the anti-democratic elements who are not happy with the changes in Paraguay. You have to understand that a lot of the military there are very unhappy at seeing their power eroded, just as they have been in my country. In Brazil in particular they blame all its economic and social problems on weak government. They cannot see that a return to the military regime would be the very worst thing that could happen to us.'

Dos Santos had finished his beer. He was so gripped by what he was saying that he went on without needing any encouragement at all from Dmitry.

‘Of course I can only imagine what they were discussing at this meeting. But here is the next thing. This colleague of mine had established that there have been flights between the Paraguayan Chaco and a military site in the south of Brazil. From there are regular military flights to Cachimbo, in Amazonia; you know, the place where they built the test bores for atomic bombs. One of the planes, a small one, was stopped in the north of Paraguay, near San Pedro Caballero. They said they were looking for drugs. A Paraguayan journalist who was investigating this was later dragged out of his car in broad daylight and shot by people who they claimed were drug-runners. The story was in the papers; nobody has done much in the way of investigating it. The journalist was found with seventeen bullets in his body. As you may imagine, other journalists are not very anxious to look into what he found.'

‘Have you published anything about this?'

‘Not yet, we don't have enough evidence. There have been so many crazy stories circulating about the rocket project. What are we to suppose? A number of the military have been arrested already. Nobody can understand why they haven't found out what is going on. The Brazilian government cannot be behind this thing, but why haven't they exposed it?'

‘I don't understand. Oliveira is dead. The scandal at Valadares has been looked into. I thought this was all over.'

‘Look. They still haven't accounted for all the highly enriched uranium that was produced at Valadares. Who knows where it is. It's even possible it's been sold for vast sums to Libya or Iraq. Nobody knows how many people might be involved, how high up this thing is going to go. Maybe they don't want the extent of it to be known. It's always like this in such situations. You have to flush these guys out, one by one. It takes a long time.'

‘But this possible connection with Richter. This I don't understand. You're surely not suggesting he has tried to lay his hands on an atomic warhead? Why should he do such a thing? Hold the world to ransom?' Dmitry's voice expressed his contempt for the very idea.

‘No. No, I agree, that would be too incredible. No, I'm not suggesting that. But maybe it's the other way round. Maybe the Brazilian military want a rocket to launch their bomb.'

Dmitry shrugged. ‘The intelligence services must know what's going on. They must know if this Richter really is a threat.'

Dos Santos snorted. ‘Yes, but it's only once things become public that there is ever any action. Anyway, you can tell all this to Nihal. You're going back tomorrow? Greet him for me, won't you? Tell him to watch the Brazilian press.'

‘I will. And you, be careful won't you?'

‘Sure.' Dos Santos shook Dmitry's hand and turned to go.

Dmitry stood outside the entrance to the conference centre for a few moments, to breathe in the fresh air. He watched dos Santos walk down the road, heading for the car park. The United Nations flags were fluttering in the breeze. Dmitry turned to go back in through the doors when he heard it happen.

He heard a squeal of brakes and a muffled cry. Dmitry spun round to see a car reverse back over a body on the ground and lurch across the grass. He saw the car drive down to the main road, screech across the pavement and smash into an oncoming truck. Then the door swung open and a young man leapt out and ran into the side streets so fast that he caught only a glimpse of a white tee-shirt, jeans and white trainers.

A knot of people who had been standing by a nearby car crowded round the body. The uniformed men at the door started running towards them. Dmitry walked over slowly behind them. Someone ran for an ambulance but the security guard who was there said it was already too late as he waved at the gathering crowd to move away.

Dmitry pushed his way through them. He looked down at the body. Dos Santos was lying face down; he saw the blood, but fortunately he couldn't see the young man's broken face. He thought, this can't have happened. If only this could not have happened. He felt as if an enormous weight had suddenly descended on him. He felt as if he had been handed the poisoned chalice; this thing would not go away from him.

He told the security guard where the police could get hold of him if they wanted a description of the incident and pointed out the direction in which he had seen the man running. He went back into the conference centre, into the main hall, sat down, and put on his headphones. He could not listen to one word. So it was still going on. Had they known who dos Santos was talking to? Did they know he was here? Who was he going to talk to about it? There was no point in hoping the police would get anywhere. He was not going to go to the KGB again; not after what happened last time. There was also no point in going to a newspaper; he had not enough to go on, and no way to convince them. He didn't want to ring Nihal and then put him at risk. He hadn't the slightest idea what he could do.

Why had they killed dos Santos here, in Argentina? Wouldn't it have been easier to kill him in Brazil? They hadn't – and this was too terrible to think about, this must surely be a product of his paranoia – known that dos Santos had made contact with him? But what did that matter – what did he know? Besides, it had happened too quickly – there hadn't been time to set up a killing.

And what if Richter really was involved in this nuclear diversion business? What had a RASAG representative been doing at a meeting of these military types? What was Richter hoping to do? If he had dreams of commercial success it was the worst thing he could get involved with. Nobody was going to let him get mixed up in something like this. None of it made the slightest sense.

The easiest thing, the best thing that he could do, would be to walk away from it. In any case, he had no power to do anything. He would ring dos Santos's paper now and tell them the manner of his death and what he thought was behind it. That was the end of his responsibility. He would go and see Tolya this evening and return to Vienna tomorrow. He was not going to think about it any more. He tried to listen to the final speeches, forcing himself to concentrate.

He was called out of the final session to give a brief statement to the police. They said it seemed to be a clear case of hit and run. Dmitry asked if the car had been traced; he was told that it had been reported stolen earlier that afternoon. Probably it was a young joy-rider. The police couldn't account for his presence near the conference centre; but they didn't think there was anything more to it. Dmitry did not try to persuade them otherwise; he didn't want to spend hours with them explaining about Project Solimões and the Paraguayan rocket project. He would leave it to dos Santos's paper to raise that with them later.

After the police had gone Dmitry left the conference centre in a taxi. He didn't want to go back to his hotel; he was too restless; he wanted to keep busy. On impulse he decided to go and wander round the fashionable Barrio Norte, where Anatoly lived. He got out of his taxi at one of the coffee houses, walked in one entrance, out the other, just in case anyone was following him, and took a bus, a Buenos Aires
colectivo
. He consulted the map he had in his pocket. After turning off the Avenida 9 de Julio the streets became like those in Paris; grand nineteenth century apartment buildings, shops selling fashion clothes, interior decoration, art, antiques. He stepped off the
colectivo
and wandered aimlessly along the streets. He looked in the shop windows, but he did not want to buy anything; what would be the point? Even the bookshops did not entice him. Suddenly he laughed aloud. In his youth he would have given anything to travel out of the Soviet Union; Buenos Aires would have sounded like a magic incantation on his tongue. Now that he was here he felt no joy at all; he would have felt the same despair had he been anywhere.

He was on the Avenida Santa Fe, walking northwards slowly, irresolutely, trying to spin out the time till eight o'clock, when the sun sank behind the buildings. A blazing stream of copper light shone across the street and caught on the metal of the shop signs, the bonnets of the cars and
colectivos
filling the air with a strange luminosity. The light shone on his hands, turning them deep gold, on the fabric of his dark coat, on the pavement which seemed to melt beneath his feet. His heart seemed to stop for an instant and then to pound again, stricken with an unbearable mixture of beauty and pain. If God were ever to enter the world, he would come in such a blaze of light as this, he thought, stopping to look into the light for an instant before the intensity of it hurt his eyes. In another moment the sun passed behind another building, and he was cut off, left behind in an inky darkness for a moment till his eyes adjusted to the coming twilight.

He felt dizzy. Something had happened to him; he could not say what it was. He turned into a side-street shaded by plane trees and began to walk faster and still faster. He came to a little square and sat down on a bench; there were children in the park, their mothers and nannies gathering up coats and jackets and calling that it was time to go home. He thought, I am not going to run away from this. He felt that it had somehow been given to him; there must be some point in it. He was not going to sit and do nothing about that young man's death. It must be possible for him to do something; he had to get to the bottom of it somehow. He could not just sit there and let these people carry on their killing.

He looked at his map; he was only a street or two away from Anatoly's apartment. He had an hour and a half to wait until he was due there; after a while when the square had emptied he got up, bought a paper,
La Nación
, at a news-stand, found a café, and sat down to read it I over a cup of coffee.

On page three was a short item:

Rocket launch in Paraguay

A third rocket launch from the RASAG site in north-west Paraguay took place yesterday watched by Air Force Chief General Martinez. The launch was not an unqualified success as the rocket failed to follow its planned trajectory after a fuel inlet valve malfunctioned. The launch of a larger, sixteen-engine rocket is planned for next month.