Being not only patriotic, but also aware of who paid my rent, I turned my attentions first to the sheath marked Great Britain. The first page listed the names, locations and types of all the operating nuclear power stations in the British Isles. The second page listed the fuel types required for the advanced gas-cooled reactors, the magnox reactors, the pressurized-water reactors and for the one fast breeder reactor, and the third and fourth pages gave the exact technical specifications of the fuel required for each of the types. The fifth and sixth pages gave the amount of fuel consumed daily, weekly and annually by each of the reactors, and whether they were required to shut down for refuelling or whether they were on a continual-feed system.

The pages that followed listed all the organizations that comprised Britain’s nuclear energy industry, their addresses, telephone numbers and all key personnel of all sections.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the back of the last page was some tiny printing. It was so small as to be hardly legible to the naked eye and it took me some minutes of straining before I could decipher it. It said: Printed in the USSR. I thought about that for some moments. Sleder was without doubt a man who went to great lengths to get whatever he wanted. The information that was contained in here was readily available, surely, from a damned sight easier and more accessible source than the Soviet Union?

The other four bundles contained similar information about the nuclear energy industries of the other four countries, and all had the same tiny printing on the back of the last page.

The next sheath of papers interested me even more. The first page was a memorandum, undated, unsigned and not addressed to anyone specific. It stated simply: All substitute fuel rods or bundles will be identifiable by the initial B in capital letter form following the third digit of their serial numbers. Under no circumstances whatsoever are any rods or bundles of B-marked fuel to be shipped anywhere without my personal authorization.

There was a second memorandum. It stated: Instruct Hamburg to allocate 72 bundles for British Nuclear Fuels Limited, 75 bundles for Electricité de France, 71 bundles for confirmation for Spain. Under each word was a short string of numbers, and attached to the memorandum was a telex from AtomSled Hamburg which read: 101–5–5 /226–18–1 /40–28–2. I picked up the copy of Fear of Flying, turned to page 101 and counted five lines down and then five words across. The word was We. The next two words were are holding. It was an old but very effective form of code – a book code. They would have a copy of the same novel in Hamburg. Unless anyone intercepting the message knew what the book was, it was virtually impossible to crack the code on such a short message as this. Sleder had evidently been reading his detective novels.