Golovko frowned. His visitor had just strung three possibilities into a threat. He was thinking like an intelligence officer, and an especially paranoid one at that. But those were often the best kind.

"What else do you have?"

"Thirty possible names." He handed a file over. "We've spoken with our people - those who helped the Germans set up the Greifswald plant, I mean. Based on their recollections, these are the people most likely to be part of the project, if any. Half a dozen of them are remembered as being very clever indeed, good enough to work with us at Sarova."

"Any of them make overt inquiries into?"

"No, and not necessary. Physics is physics. Fission is fission. Laws of science do not respect rules of classification. You cannot conceal nature, and that's exactly what we're dealing with here. If these people can operate a reactor, then the best of them can design nuclear weapons, given the necessary materials - and our reactor design gave them the ability to generate the proper materials. I think it is something you need to look into - to see what they did, and what they have. In any case, that is my advice."

"I have some very good people in Directorate T of the First Chief Directorate," Golovko said. "After we digest this information, some of them will come to speak with you." Sarova was only a few hours away by train.

"Yes, I've met with some of your technology analysts.

A few of them are very good indeed. I hope you still have good contacts in Germany."

Golovko didn't answer that. He had many contacts still in Germany, but how many of them had been doubled? He'd recently done a reliability assessment of former penetration agents in the Stasi, and concluded that none could be trusted - more properly, that those who could be trusted were no longer in positions of any use, and even those He decided on the spot to make this an all-Russian operation.

"If they have the materials, how soon might they fabricate weapons?"

"Given their level of technical expertise, and the fact that they've had access to American systems under NATO, there is no reason whatever why they could not have home-made weapons already in their inventory. They would not be crude weapons, either. In their position, and given the special nuclear materials, I could easily have produced two-stage weapons within months of unification. More sophisticated three-stage weapons maybe another year."

"Where would you do it?"

"In East Germany, of course. Better security. Exactly where?" The man thought for a minute. "Look for a place with extremely precise machine tools, the sort associated with high-precision optical instruments. The X-ray telescope we just orbited was a direct spin-off of H-Bomb research. Management of X-rays, you see, is very important in a multi-stage weapon. We learned much of American bomb technology from open-source papers on focusing X-rays for astrophysical observations. As I said, it's physics. It cannot be hidden, only discovered; once discovered, it is open for all who have the intelligence and the desire to make use of it."