Watchlist (23 page)

It took longer than normal for the answers to appear. A good 10 seconds. Must have been Middleton’s broadband connection, she thought.

He sat in the restaurant near Piccadilly Circus, glued to the iPhone they’d given him, working the private application that linked through the mobile network, securely, privately, to the field HQ. He’d no idea where that was. In Kashmir. In Paris. Two doors away in the heart of London. It was irrelevant. The days of fixed bases, of dangerous safe houses and physical networks capable of penetration . . . all these things were in the past. It was thirteen months since he’d last met another comrade in person. As far as he knew anyway. Orders came via secure encrypted email delivered to a series of ever-changing addresses. Plans and projects arrived as password protected zipped pdfs, read, absorbed, and then deleted forever. This was the way of the world. Everything was virtual. Nothing was real. Except, he reminded himself, blood and money.

A YouTube video had just begun—the trailer for some new Bollywood movie—when the phone throbbed and flashed up an alert. It took a second or two for the signal to deal with the amount of data that followed. Then, as the little handset caught up, he watched as a series of web search requests were mirrored to his little screen. The results narrowed constantly. The scope and scale of the queries made him realize why they’d got in touch. A small window in the upper right hand corner showed the IP address of the source. It was in central London, somewhere near the British Museum. He tapped a few buttons. There was a pause then he found himself in the My Documents folder of the remote computer. A long list of correspondence was stored there. It was all encrypted. He hunted around the remote hard drive until he found the folder where the word processor stored its templates, unseen, often forgotten by those who used them. Sure enough when he got there he found a single file marked “personal letter.” It was open, unsecured by encryption, just text.

He clicked the icon and the document drew itself on the screen of the phone. Dragging his finger across the letters he managed to copy the address into a note. Then he clicked a button in the private app marked “key-log all remote.” Every letter and number typed on the distant machine would now be echoed directly into a file somewhere in the Bicchu system then passed on discreetly, encrypted from beginning to end, to his phone where the private app would decode the text automatically.

After that he copied the house number and street in the heading and pasted them into Google Maps. He knew the general area. It was no more than ten minutes away on foot. Pocketing the iPhone he walked back into the kitchen. It was full of the familiar smells, cumin and turmeric, a tandoori oven and scorched spiced chicken.

The sous chef watched him come in, as if half expecting what was about to happen. The little man from Bangladesh was staring mutinously at an office lunch booking for sixteen. It had been pinned to the order board just thirty minutes before.

“You can cope,” he said, taking off his apron and his stained tocque. Then he walked out of the back, stopping only to collect his little Walther pistol on the way.

Bicchu was feeling talkative. Soon the answers began to come so quickly her head started to spin. She thought of the fearful years after Chernobyl, the pain, the uncertainty. And the school friends she lost, two, who died slowly, almost in front of everyone, day by day.

This was the world of the past, or so she’d thought. A world of hard, cruel science, in the thrall of men who didn’t care about the consequences of their actions. Watching the hints and clues and links begin to assemble as minutes turned to an hour, she felt herself both repelled and attracted by what she was uncovering. This was important, she knew. And forbidden, terrible knowledge.

After one significant breakthrough, she tore herself away from the computer, made herself a cup of green tea, felt briefly guilty about neglecting her instrument and chose, instead, to listen to one of her favorite renditions of the piece she would play later. A fellow Pole, Henryk Szeryng, playing his famed Guarneri del Gesu “Le Duc” for Deutsche Grammophon in 1968: fourteen and a half minutes of bliss.

Then she went back and looked at what she’d found. A lot. Too much. It made her mind turn in on itself, craving the peace and simple faith of the music.

She called Middleton’s cell phone. There was no answer. There wasn’t even the chance to leave a message.

“That’s not your real number is it, Harold?” she said to herself, half listening to Szeryng tackle the music with a studied assurance she hoped one day she might possess.

He wondered what would happen in the restaurant with him gone. The Bangladeshi was competent but slow. It was still a business, still a place that needed to look after its customers.

Later, he thought. The top end of Lamb’s Conduit Street, after the pubs and shops, was deserted. Everyone had gone to work. This was good. The only vehicle around was a large black van with opaque windows on a meter at the park end of the street. Children leapt and danced in the little playground on the other side of the road. He glanced at the van and shook his head. London mothers. They wouldn’t let their precious little princes walk half a mile any more.

She typed what she’d discovered into an email for Middleton and made sure to mark it for encryption, adding the digital signature he’d convinced her to use always on the net. No one could read what she’d written once it traveled beyond her computer and Middleton could be assured the message really came from her, not some imposter who knew how to spoof an email address.

“Fact one,” she wrote, and she shivered as she was unable to force the true import of her words from her mind. “The picture of the dead man, Kavi Balan. What you didn’t notice was the very peculiar green brown tint to his eyes. That may be normal. But it may be a symptom of copper poisoning, due to very heavy exposure to the metal. Look up Kayser-Fleischer ring for more information. The discoloration is caused by copper deposits in the eye.”

She looked at her notes then checked her watch. Six minutes to the end of the Bach. Then she really would practice.

“Fact two. India is the world’s largest producer of heavy water. This is a very resource-intensive exercise. Depending on the process it can take up to 340,000 tons of ordinary water, H
₂
O, to make one ton of heavy water, D
₂
O (that’s deuterium, Harold—look it up). Maybe this is why your people are looking for new sources.”

The tea was getting tepid.

“Remember what I told you about Chernobyl and heavy water? You don’t always need it. But if you want to produce weapon-grade plutonium it’s a wonderful way of bypassing the uranium enrichment process, which involves a lot of technological infrastructure that’s impossible to hide. Not that heavy water is easy to manufacture but the process is a little like distilling cognac from wine. The difference is the conventional process uses a phosphor-bronze system to handle the distillation process whereas liquor is traditionally made using a copper still.”

She looked at the words on the page and felt proud of herself. Or, more accurately, of Bicchu, which had thrown up the answers so quickly she could scarcely believe the ease with which they had been assembled.

“Fact three. Eleven years ago, a patent was filed in the U.S. for a new heavy-water development process. As far as I can see it’s never been put into industrial production because some of the technology isn’t in place to go large scale yet. The patent was lodged by the U.S. subsidiary of an Indian company that appears to be a shell outfit. At least I can’t see any financial filings for it in the U.S. or in India.” She’d retrieved the entire submission from the U.S. Patents Office database for free and saved it as a separate document.

“Sikari’s name is on the patent too, along with a couple of other people. According to the patent submission the process would halve the amount of feed water normally needed to distill heavy water, shorten the process considerably and allow for minimal startup costs. You could almost see it as a DIY kit for making the raw material for a plutonium plant. And . . . ”

Always save the best for last. The dead Henryk Szeryng, bowing away at his Guarneri in the background, did.

“The particular circular piping structure used for the process is at the heart of the patent. It’s what makes it unique. The filing calls it ‘the copper bracelet.’ Except this one happens to be thirty feet tall.”

She finished the cold tea and listened to the music enter its final, closing phase.

The doorbell rang as she hit send. Felicia cursed the interruption. One of the less attractive aspects of Lamb’s Conduit Street was the number of people who came to private houses trying to sell everything from fake DVDs to Chinese paintings. Middleton had a little sign by the front of the house: no hawkers. It was useless. This being England, he didn’t have a door video camera. There was trust in a quiet, upper-class street like this, along with big powerful locks and a high-tech alarm system.

The bell rang once more while she was walking out of the living room into the corridor.

“I don’t want any,” she shouted, and was surprised to hear an American twang in her voice. Two years in New York did this to you, she guessed.

She unlocked the latch and half opened the door. A stocky man of Middle Eastern appearance was standing there. He was no more than 30, wore a Chelsea football shirt under a jacket, a trendy slicked-back haircut and the kind of stupid self-satisfied grin some young London men liked to sport when they encountered the opposite sex.

“I don’t want any,” she repeated with a sigh.

He looked pleased with himself and held up what looked like a brand new iPhone. Her email to Harold Middleton was there, with the last few paragraphs including the words “except this one happens to be thirty feet tall” visible in large black lettering. Puzzled, Felicia Kaminski blinked.

“You got it anyway,” the man said.

She drew back to slam the door in his face. The wood hit something along the way. She heard a yelp of pain but he was through, and there was no way of getting him outside again. A glancing blow struck her cheek and she stumbled toward the living room and grabbed the wooden inner door, sending it flying behind her.

He got struck hard in the face a second time and yelled again. Anger. Hurt. She liked both of them.

She propped herself against the sofa, trying to think, trying to locate something that might pass as a weapon.

“Hey,” he said.

He had his hands up and looked offended. His right eye had gone purple from where the door had caught him.

“We just want to talk,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Who wants to talk?” she asked, still looking, feeling behind the sofa with her right hand.

“Some big guys. They don’t mean you no harm. They told me that. They just want you to visit.”

“There are nicer ways to ask.”

He reached into his jacket with his free hand and took out a handgun.

“There are nastier ones too. Alive isn’t the same as undamaged. You choose, little girl. One way or another you’re coming with me.”

Szeryng was playing one of her most cherished passages. Felicia Kaminski hated this anonymous man for ruining it.

She looked him in the eye and said, “They won’t hurt me? That’s a promise?”

“A promise.”

He still had the iPhone in his left hand. She watched the way he held it. The obvious affection he had for the thing.

She put a hand to her head and let down her long brown hair she had fastened for practice. He watched her, smiling again.

“Isn’t that, like, the new version?” she asked, pointing at the phone. “The one with GPS or something?”

They all loved them. Sometimes it seemed there was nothing more precious on the planet.

“Yeah . . . ” He held it a little higher and pressed a button. A video of MIA began to play on the screen. “I got . . . ”

She was wearing the pointed leather boots she’d bought in a Gucci outlet place near San Giovanni. Those needle-like toes were going out of fashion but she liked them. She took one strong step forward, let her right leg fall back a little to gain momentum, then let loose with a kick, as hard as she could manage—right where it hurt most.

He screamed. The gun went sideways. She took his wrist and punched it back against the sharp edge of the wardrobe that contained Harold Middleton’s armory. The weapon clattered to the floor. The iPhone he held on to, but not after the second kick. By then he was on the ground, squirming, looking madder than ever.

If he gets up, I’m dead, she thought.

Her hand strayed to the nearest available object. She felt it and wanted to cry. It was the precious Bela Szepessy that Harold Middleton had bought for her. The finest musical instrument Felicia Kaminski had ever owned.

She smashed the bone-hard composite chin rest hard into his face. The bottom of the fiddle tore away from the body immediately. It was gone and she knew it. So she took the neck in both hands swung the century-old instrument round like a mallet, dashing the jagged wood into his head until he fell once more to the floor, his nose a bloody mess, his eyes filling with pain and fear.

There was an old vase, big and heavy within reach. She let go of the ruined violin, picked up the vase and threw it at his head, hitting him square on the temple.

He went quiet.

Quickly, efficiently, she snatched a set of spare metal strings from her fiddle case, kicked him over onto his chest, put one knee on his spine and bound his hands behind, then his feet.

By the time she’d finished he was coming to again. He wasn’t moving anywhere. She was thorough. Just in case, she bent down, retrieved his gun and held the weapon tightly in her right hand, hating the feel of the thing.

With tears beginning to well in her eyes, she looked at the ruined remnants of her fiddle and then the crushed man on the floor and said, “I am not little. And I am not a girl.”