"Doing the tritium is easy."

"Yes, I know." Ghosn motioned for the German to go outside. "You are fully satisfied with the design and the assembly?"

"Completely," Fromm said confidently. "It will function exactly as I predict."

"Excellent," Qati said, waiting outside with one of his bodyguards.

Fromm turned, noting the Commander's presence, along with one of his ubiquitous guards. Dirty, scruffy people, but he had to admire them, Fromm told himself, as he turned to look at the darkened valley. There was a quarter moon, and he could just make out the landscape. It was so dry and harsh. Not these people's fault that they looked as they did. The land here was hard. But the sky was clear. Fromm looked up at the stars on this cloudless night. More stars than one could see in Germany, especially the Eastern part, with all its air pollution, and he thought about astrophysics, the path he might have taken, so closely related to the path he had.

Ghosn stood behind the German. He turned to Qati and nodded. The Commander made the same gesture to his bodyguard, whose name was Abdullah.

"Just the tritium remains," Fromm said, his back to them.

"Yes," Ghosn said, "I can do that myself."

Fromm was about to say that there was one more thing. He let it wait a moment, and didn't pay attention to Abdullah's footsteps. There was no sound at all as the guard removed a silenced pistol from his belt and pointed it at Fromm's head from a range of one meter. Fromm began to turn, to make sure that Ghosn knew about the tritium, but he never made it around. Abdullah had his orders. It was supposed to be merciful, as it had been for the machinists. It was a pity that it had been necessary at all, Qati thought, but it was necessary, and that was that. None of that mattered to Abdullah, who merely followed his orders, squeezing on the trigger smoothly and expertly until the round fired. The bullet entered the back of Fromm's skull, soon thereafter exiting through his forehead. The German dropped in a crumpled mass. Blood fountained out, but sideways, without reaching Abdullah's clothing. The guard waited until the blood flow stopped, then summoned two comrades to carry the body to the waiting truck. He'd be buried with the machinists. That, at least, was fitting, Qati thought. All the experts in the same place.

"A pity," Ghosn observed quietly.

"Yes, but do you really think we would have further use of him?"

Ibrahim shook his head. "No. He would have been a liability. We could not trust him. An infidel and a mercenary. He fulfilled his contract."

"And the device?"

"It will work. I have checked the numbers twenty times. It is far better than anything I might have designed."

"What's this about tritium?"

"In the batteries. I only need to heat them up and bleed off the gas. Then the gas is pumped into the two reservoirs. You know the rest."