B-marked fuel rods and bundles – what the hell was special about them? It was looking more and more as though Quoit was right. I needed to get hold of one and quickly. I still didn’t know which power stations they were for. Seventy-two bundles for England. I remembered that the daily average per reactor was about thirty-six bundles; that was two days’ supply for one reactor – or one day’s supply for two reactors. We could notify all the countries concerned, have them check all fuel bundles in every power station until they found the B-marked ones; but that wouldn’t necessarily work. If the stations were already infiltrated, there was no way of being sure that whoever did the checking wasn’t an accomplice and therefore wouldn’t report anything. Those telexes were dated 23 December. It was unlikely that anything would have been shipped before Christmas, so the bundles were at the moment almost certainly still at AtomSled in Hamburg. They were probably to be sent between Christmas and the New Year, when most industries are running short of manpower and security tends to be lax. Sleder was evidently monitoring everything like a hawk. We had to stop the fuel leaving Hamburg until we could get surveillance organized on all AtomSled’s factories and warehouses – the stuff could have been anywhere – and then we had to follow it to wherever it was shipped and stick with it. Sleder somehow, for a few days, had to be removed from the scene; just long enough to delay the start of the shipment until it could be identified. Getting a man like Sleder out of the way was not going to be easy.

I went to bed and dreamed dreams of mockery, and failure, and death, and woke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat – one of the great perks of my trade. Then I went back to sleep again, and this time the night was kinder to me.

Chapter 22

22

I got up early and took a cab to La Guardia airport. I went to the Air Canada desk and bought a ticket for the eight o’clock shuttle to Toronto, then went to the bookstall and bought a copy of Fear of Flying. I had read it before and it didn’t put me off air travel; it had about as much to do with flying as Breakfast at Tiffany’s had to do with eating.

An hour and a half later the McDonnell-Douglas DC9 was sinking down slowly across Lake Ontario. Out to the right I could see bits of Toronto rising from the vast whiteness of snow: the CN Tower with its blinking lights, billed as the world’s tallest free-standing structure, the black towers of the Toronto Dominion Centre, the silver-blue Commerce Court, a small concentrated clump of modern high-rise office blocks around these, and beyond them a massive urban sprawl stretching thirty miles down the lake and fifteen miles back from it.