Rules of Deception (11 page)

20

At five minutes before midnight,
an unmarked van pulled up to the loading dock at the rear of Robotica AG’s headquarters in the industrial quarter of Zurich. Four men climbed out. All were dressed in dark clothing and wore watch caps pulled low over their brows, surgeon’s gloves, and crepe-soled shoes. Their leader, the shortest by three inches, rapped once on the passenger door and the van drove away.

Clambering onto the dock, he walked past the corrugated steel curtain that secured the delivery bay. He held two keys in his hand. The first disarmed the security system. The second opened the employee entrance. The men filed into the darkened building.

“We have seventeen minutes until the patrolman makes his next rounds,” said Chief Inspector Marcus von Daniken as he closed the door behind them. “Move fast, be careful what you touch, and under no circumstances are you to remove anything from the premises. Remember, we are not here.”

The men slipped flashlights out of their jackets and headed down the corridor. With von Daniken were Myer from Logistics/Support, Kübler from Special Services, and Krajcek from Kommando. All had been apprised of the circumstance surrounding the operation. All knew that if caught, their careers would be terminated and that each stood a chance of going to jail. Their loyalty to von Daniken superseded the risks.

It was Myer from Logistics who’d contacted the security company to obtain the watchman’s schedule, as well as the keys to safely enter the premises. Swiss industry had a long history of cooperating with the Federal Police.

Allowing the others to pass, Kübler removed a rectangular device resembling a large, bulky cell phone from his workbag and held it in front of him. He moved slowly down the corridor, his eyes glued to the histogram pulsing across the backlit screen. Abruptly, he stopped and punched the red button beneath his thumb. The histogram disappeared. In its place appeared “Am-241.” He glanced up. Directly over his head was a smoke detector.

The device he was carrying was a handheld explosives and radiation sensor. He was not worried about Am-241—or americium-241—a mineral used in smoke detectors. He was looking for something a little more exciting. He continued down the corridor, waving the radiation sensor in front of him as if it were a divining rod. The space looked clean. So far.

Von Daniken didn’t have the key to Theo Lammers’s office. Cooperative or not, the security company couldn’t provide what it didn’t have, and the chief executive’s office was strictly out-of-bounds. Myer spread a chamois roll containing his picks and blanks on the floor and set to work. A former instructor at the cantonal police academy, he needed just thirty seconds to open the lock.

Von Daniken swept the beam around the office. The MAV was on the table where he’d last seen it. He picked it up, studying it from varying angles. It was amazing that such a small device could travel at such high speeds. What interested him more was its purpose, peaceful or otherwise.

He put down the MAV and took several photographs of it with his digital camera, then moved on to Lammers’s desk. Surprisingly, the drawers were unlocked. One after another, he removed the dead executive’s folders, spread the documents on the desk, and photographed them. Most appeared to be customer correspondence and internal memoranda. He saw nothing to indicate why a man might feel it necessary to keep three passports and a loaded Uzi in his home.

This is his public life, von Daniken told himself. The smiling side of the mirror.

“Twelve minutes,” whispered Krajcek, sticking his head into the office. Krajcek was the muscle, and the silenced Heckler & Koch MP-5 he carried in his hands proved it.

The agenda.

Von Daniken spotted it almost by accident on a sideboard next to a photograph of Lammers with his wife and children. He picked up the leather-bound book and skimmed through the pages. The entries were curt to the point of being coded, mostly notations for meetings with the name of a company and its representative. He turned to the last entry, made the day of Lammers’s death. Dinner at 1900 hours at Ristorante Emilio with a “G.B.” A phone number was listed beside it.

Von Daniken photographed the page.

Finished in the office, he and Myer made their way past the reception area and through a pair of swinging doors onto the factory floor. “Where’s his workshop?” Myer asked as the two men snaked between mobile pushcart workstations.

“How should I know? I was only told that Lammers built the MAVs there.”

Myer stopped and held him by the arm. “But you’re sure it’s here?”

“Reasonably.” Von Daniken recalled that Lammers’s assistant had not specifically indicated that the workshop was on the premises.

“‘Reasonably’?” asked Myer. “I’m risking my pension for ‘reasonably’?”

A walled-in enclosure occupied the far corner of the floor. Entrance was governed by a steel door decorated with a sign that read
“Privat.”

“I’m
reasonably
sure this is it,” said von Daniken.

Myer took a knee and brought his flashlight to bear. “Shut up as tight as the National Bank,” he muttered.

“Can you open it?” von Daniken asked.

Myer shot him a withering glance. “I’m
reasonably
certain I can.”

Myer laid out his tools and began fitting one after another into the keyhole. Von Daniken stood nearby, his heart pounding loud enough to be heard in Austria. He wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing. First, breaking and entering without a warrant, and now, tampering with private property. What had gotten into him? He’d never been one for the cloak-and-dagger stuff. The fact was that he was a desk man and proud of it. Fifty years of age was a little long in the tooth to be participating in one’s first surreptitious operation.

“Nine minutes,” said Krajcek, his nerveless voice funneling through von Daniken’s earpiece.

By now, Kübler and his radiation detector had made their way onto the factory floor. He shunted the detector to his right and the histogram morphed into a new signature. The display read “C3H6N6O6,” and next to it the word “Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine.” He recognized the name, but he was more accustomed to calling it by its trade name. RDX. Maybe this wasn’t a wild-goose chase after all.

“Eight minutes,” said Krajcek.

Kneeling on the factory floor, Myer manipulated two picks with a conjurer’s touch. “Got it,” he said as the tumblers fell into place and the door swung open.

Von Daniken stepped inside. The beam of his flashlight landed on a workbench littered with power tools, pliers, screws, wires, and scrap metal. One look and he knew that they’d found it. Theo Lammers’s workshop.

Von Daniken turned on the lights. It was a larger version of the one he’d seen the night before in Erlenbach. Drafting tables stood at either end of the room. Both were covered with mechanical drawings and schematic blueprints. All manner of boxes sat on the floor. He recognized the names printed on them as manufacturers of electrical equipment.

Taped to the nearest wall was a blueprint for some type of aircraft. Standing on his tiptoes, he studied the specifications. Length: two meters. Wingspan: four and a half meters. This was no MAV. This was the real thing. The drawings identified it as a drone, the remote-controlled aircrafts used to overfly enemy territory and, if he wasn’t mistaken, on occasion to fire missiles. The thought raised the hackles on his neck. There, pinned to the corner of the blueprints, was a photograph of the finished product. It
was
large. A great condor of an aircraft. A man was standing next to it. Dark hair. Dark complexion. He brought the photo closer. The timestamp showed it was taken one week ago. He turned it over. “T.L. and C.E.,” as well as a date, were written on the back. T.L. was Lammers. Who was C.E.?

“Four minutes,” said Krajcek.

Von Daniken traded concerned looks with Myer. The men continued with their search. Myer foraged through the boxes while von Daniken rooted around the papers on the drafting desks.

“Two minutes,” said Krajcek.

Just then, von Daniken remembered the initials in Lammers’s agenda.
G.B.
He looked at the back of the photograph again. The initials weren’t “C.E.” but “G.B.”

He brought up the photo he’d taken and used the in-camera zoom to read the phone number next to G.B.’s name. Area code 078. The Tessin, the country’s southernmost canton, where the cities of Lugano, Locarno, and Ascona were located. It was his first real lead.

It was then that he saw Kübler standing in the doorway. The man didn’t speak, but walked toward them like an automaton, his eyes fixed to the radiation detector. “RDX,” he said. “The place is thick with it.”

The initials required no explanation. RDX, short for Royal Demolition Explosive, was well known to any law enforcement official involved in counterterrorism. First developed by the British prior to the Second World War, RDX was the prime component in many types of plastic explosives, and the inciting charge used in all nuclear weapons.

Von Daniken felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. A drone, a company that manufactured hyperaccurate guidance systems, and now plastic explosives. “But I don’t see any in here,” he protested. “Where could it be hidden?”

“It’s not here now. I’m just detecting traces. But the readings are fresh.”

“How fresh?”

Kübler studied the display. “By the rate of decay, I’d say twenty-four hours.”

Before Lammers’s dinner with G.B.

“Sixty seconds,” said Krajcek. “I have the watchman’s car three blocks away and closing.”

“Out,” said von Daniken as he furiously snapped photographs of the blueprints. Kübler hustled out of the workshop. Myer followed. Von Daniken moved to the door. It was as he was going to turn off the lights that he saw it.

A baby brother.

At the far end of the room, pushed back on a shelf beneath the counter, was a smaller version of the MAV in Lammers’s office, perhaps half the size—no more than twenty centimeters long, another twenty high. The wings, however, were cut from a different shape, nearly triangular. He observed that they were fixed to a central hinge and flapped up and down, like a bird’s wings.

Caught for a moment between staying and going, he rushed over and grabbed the miniature aircraft. The assembly weighed no more than five hundred grams. Not exactly light as a feather, but pretty damn close.

“Does it fly?”
he’d asked Michaela Menz earlier that afternoon.

“Of course,”
was the indignant reply. “We launch it from the loading docks.”

Von Daniken noted that the underside of the wings was covered with a light, tensile fabric that was colored a flashy yellow and patterned with a familiar black marking.

Myer pushed his head back into the office. “Goddamn it, man, what are you doing? We have to get out of here!”

Von Daniken held up the MAV. “Look at this.”

“Leave it!” Myer fired back. “What the hell do you want with a toy butterfly, anyway?”

21

Outside the city of Vienna,
in the wooded hamlet of Sebastiansdorf, lights burned in the windows of Flimelen, a traditional Austrian hunting lodge. Built as a retreat for Emperor Franz Josef, the rambling estate had followed its owner to the grave at the close of the First World War. For forty years, it had sat abandoned and uncared for. Windows broken, doors pried loose for firewood, the stones of its foundation removed to build other, less majestic homes, it seemed to have been swallowed whole by the forest itself.

And then in 1965, it was reborn. From one day to the next, workmen arrived and began to restore the decrepit building. New windows were put in. Sturdy doors installed. Farther down the road a guard post was built. Needing a secluded getaway in which to discuss its most confidential affairs, another organization had claimed Flimelen for its own. Not a government, but the creation of many intent on preventing disaster or war.

Four men and one woman sat around a long table in the Great Hall. At the table’s head presided a stiff, unsmiling man of Middle Eastern extraction with a fringe of graying hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. He wore a scholar’s narrow spectacles, and indeed, he held degrees in law and diplomacy from universities in Cairo and New York. Though it was close to midnight, and the others had long since taken off their neckties and loosened their collars, he kept his jacket on, his necktie in the finest order. He viewed his position with the utmost gravity. For his efforts, he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Few people could boast that the fate of the world depended on him and not be branded an arrogant, bald-faced liar. He was one.

His name was Mohamed ElBaradei. He was the chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“This can’t be true,” said ElBaradei, running his finger across the report.

“I’m afraid there’s no doubting it,” said the man next to him, Yuri Kulikov, a poker-faced Russian who headed the IAEA’s Department of Nuclear Energy.

“But how?” ElBaradei searched the faces gathered at the table. “If this is so, we’ve failed in our every duty.”

“A program of institutionalized deception,” said Kulikov. “A shell game. For years, we’ve concentrated our inspection efforts in one spot, while they were secretly working in another.”

The men and woman seated beside him came from the top ranks of the secretariat, the professional staff that ran the IAEA. There was Oniguchi, a native of Japan, who headed Nuclear Science and Applications; Brandt, an Austrian and the sole woman in the room, who ran Technical Cooperation; Kulikov; and Pekkonen, the stolid Finn who headed up Safeguards and Verification, the IAEA’s most well-known department.

“There can be no question as to the data’s accuracy,” said Pekkonen. “The sensor was equipped with a next-generation chip capable of pinpointing gamma ray emission signatures with ten times the precision of the older model.”

ElBaradei was not a trained scientist, but twenty years’ work at the IAEA in Vienna had provided a grounding in the principles of nuclear physics. Emissions from radioactive materials like uranium or plutonium give off unique signatures. If accurately measured, those signatures indicate the age and enrichment of the radioactive material, and more importantly, as far as he and the individuals seated around the table were concerned, its intended use.

Uranium in its natural form could not be used to incite a nuclear reaction. It had to be enriched, or pumped up with a particular isotope—uranium-235. The most common means was to process uranium hexafluoride gas through a centrifuge, a rapidly spinning steel drum. Every time the gas was cycled, it became more enriched. To speed up the process, centrifuges were linked one to another so that the gas cascaded from one machine to the next. The path to success was straightforward: the more centrifuges you had, the quicker the uranium could be enriched.

For use in nuclear power plants, the radioactive mineral had to be enriched to thirty percent. For use as a fissile material—that is, to be capable of generating a nuclear reaction—it needed to achieve a level of ninety-three percent. The paper under ElBaradei’s eyes reported gamma ray signatures of an astounding ninety-six percent.

“The butterfly was over the target area for seven days,” Pekkonen went on. “In that time, it sent back thousands of atmospheric measurements. It’s unlikely that they’re all wrong.”

“But these readings are sky-high,” protested ElBaradei. “How could they have hidden it from us for so long?”

“The new facility was built deep beneath the ground and disguised as an underground reservoir.”

“If it’s so well disguised, how did we find it?”

Pekkonen leaned forward, his blond forelock contrasting with his florid complexion. “A rumor about its location was passed to us by a member of the American delegation to the United Nations. It came from a source high in the Iranian government. The Americans thought we might be able to confirm or disprove it. We had an inspection team in a country a hundred miles to the south. We were able to launch and monitor the butterfly from that site without attracting attention.”

“And you did this without my approval and in complete violation of our mandate to inspect facilities with the permission and cooperation of our hosts?”

Pekkonen nodded.

“Well done,” said ElBaradei. “Do the Americans know about our findings yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Keep it that way.” ElBaradei looked at the faces around the table. “A year ago, we came to the consensus that Iran possessed five hundred centrifuges and had been successful in enriching no more than a half kilo of uranium to sixty percent. Nowhere near weapons grade. Now this! Just how many centrifuges are necessary to generate these kinds of readings?”

“Over fifty thousand,” said Oniguchi from Nuclear Science.

“And just where are we to assume they obtained these centrifuges? This isn’t a crate of counterfeit iPods we’re talking about. It’s a planeload full of the most highly monitored, closely regulated machinery in the world.”

“Clearly, they were smuggled in,” said Pekkonen.

“Clearly,” ElBaradei repeated. “But by whom? From where? I have four hundred inspectors whose job it is to keep an eye out for this kind of thing. It was my opinion until five minutes ago that they were competent in the extreme.” He removed his eyeglasses and set them on the table. “And so? How much weapons-grade uranium are we to assume they now possess?”

Pekkonen looked nervously at his superior. “Sir, it’s our conclusion that the Republic of Iran currently possesses no less than one hundred kilograms of enriched uranium-235.”

“One hundred? And how many bombs can they make out of that?”

The Finn swallowed. “Four. Maybe five.”

Mohamed ElBaradei replaced his glasses.
Four. Maybe five.
He might as well have said a thousand. “Until we receive an independent evaluation of this data, no one in this room is to repeat a word of these findings.”

“But mustn’t we share—” began Milli Brandt, the Austrian woman.

“Not a word,” hammered ElBaradei. “Not to the Americans. Not to our colleagues in Vienna. I want absolute silence. The last thing we need is an incident before we can confirm these findings.”

“But sir, we have a responsibility,” she went on.

“I’m fully aware of our responsibility. Do I make myself understood?”

Milli Brandt nodded her head, but her eyes betrayed a different decision.

“The meeting is adjourned.”

As ElBaradei waited for the others to leave, he sat listening to the wind rattle the windows, tormented by his thoughts. Finally, the door slammed. The voices died. He was alone.

Cupping his hands, he stared out into the night sky. He was not a religious man, but he found himself lacing his fingers in prayer. If news of the report were to leave this room, the consequences would be immediate and devastating.

“God help us, every man,” he whispered. “It will be war.”