The Alexandria Connection (41 page)

N
adar and Boulos squeezed past the other tourists on the narrow landing of St Paul’s Golden Gallery at the top of the great dome. They waited until there were two vacant spots on the northern side, which overlooked Paternoster Square and the London Stock Exchange. Nadar placed his briefcase on top of the metal guardrail, and surreptitiously connected the detonator cord. He needn’t have worried. The other tourists, oblivious to the deadly gamma rays, were all absorbed in the sweeping views of London.

Nadar turned to his young companion and smiled.

‘
Allahu Akbar!
’ he shouted. Tourists turned in alarm. Nadar screamed again, uncontrollably now. ‘
Allahu Akbar!
’ The briefcase exploded in a horrific blast of fire and smoke. Millions of fine particles of radioactive Cobalt 60 drifted across the stock exchange and the financial district, the wind carrying residues as far as New Oxford Street to the west, Pentonville Road to the north, and the Moorfields Eye Hospital to the east.

Within minutes, London’s streets were filled with sirens.

The northerly wind was blowing strongly across the roof of the Willis Tower in downtown Chicago. Touma and Botros took a last look across Lake Michigan.

‘This will bring the Great Satan to his knees,’ Touma said, extracting the detonator cord and plugging it into the socket in the briefcase. They walked around the rooftop to the southernmost area which overlooked the crucial financial district. Hundreds of metres below them, thousands of workers sat glued in front of their screens, watching for fluctuations in the markets around the world. The Dwight D. Eisenhower Expressway was packed with cars and buses, and on West Jackson Boulevard, the coffee shops and pizza bars were doing a brisk business.

‘Let’s do this together, said Nasib and he and Botros grasped the detonator.

‘
Allahu Akbar!
’ they shouted in unison. The explosion bent the antennae off their footings and the wind quickly spread the Cobalt 60. Within minutes, deadly gamma rays enveloped the busy, thriving city.

‘H
ave you heard from your man?’ Badawi asked Aleta as they descended the front steps of the Cairo Museum and headed toward his carpark.

‘I wish,’ Aleta said. ‘I’ve come to accept that there are things he does that I can’t know about . . . and to be honest, I think I’d rather not know. I’d die worrying about him.’

The hot, velvet Cairo night was closing in, and Ruger observed the pair from a distance as they got into Badawi’s Volvo.

‘Are you in love with him?’ Badawi asked.

‘I’m not sure that “love” in the normal sense of the word is a good descriptor,’ she said, as they headed south along the Nile Corniche. Badawi’s villa was in Maadi, a fashionable suburb on the banks of the river to the south of Cairo in the older area of El Sarayat.

‘I care deeply about him, and we share a lot of interests . . . and, dare I say it, there is a sense of adventure about him that I’m crazy for, but I take it one day at a time.’

Ruger followed at a distance. He knew where they were going – Area 15 had already provided the address. Having cased the villa earlier, he’d confirmed that Badawi was the only occupant – no servants, not even a gardener. His plan was simple, and sometimes the simple plans were the best.

Rather than having names, most of the streets in Maadi had numbers, and Ruger closed up on the Volvo as they drove along Street Thirteen and turned off into Street Eighty-Six. Ruger slowed as the gates on the villa swung open and he followed Badawi up his short drive.

Ruger leapt from the car and wrenched open the door of the Volvo.

‘Get out of the car, both of you, now!’ he ordered. ‘Do exactly as you’re told and no one is going to get hurt. Inside the house. Move it!’

Shocked, Aleta and the professor did as they were told.

‘Empty your pockets, slowly, and no false moves. You first, Professor Badawi.’

Aleta glanced at her mentor. At first she thought they had fallen victim to one of the increased numbers of robberies taking place since the tourist dollar had dried up. Now she wasn’t so sure. If their assailant knew their names . . .

Ruger pocketed Badawi’s mobile phone. ‘Now yours, Doctor Weizman,’ he said, pointing his gun at her.

‘Into the study, both of you,’ Ruger ordered

Once in the room, he turned to the professor. ‘Open the safe.’

Aleta’s heart sank. It was becoming clear what the purpose of the robbery was, but she had no way of knowing what was to follow. She and the professor would soon be bound and gagged, and headed for Corsica.

‘L
ook what they’ve done for Allah in Melbourne, Iqbal!’ Hazim Gerges, the younger and more fiery of the two jihadis, almost spat the words at his fellow terrorist, Iqbal Safar. ‘Why are we waiting?’

‘There’s been nothing posted on the stamp website. We were told to wait.’

‘We don’t even know who we’re waiting for, Iqbal. He’s probably dead by now. Look at the carnage in Melbourne,
Alhamdulillah
 . . . thanks be to Allah!’ Gerges pointed to the television. The coverage of the chaos had been non-stop since the attack.

‘We have the explosives, wire cutters, and thanks to our contact on the inside, we know where to put them. We need to move, Iqbal! Are we soldiers for Allah? Are we
Mujahideen
or not?’ The term literally meant struggle.

‘We
are
Mujahideen,’ Safar agreed. ‘We’ll go tonight.’

Safar kept to the speed limit as they drove out of Liverpool and south along Heathcote Road. It was after midnight and the traffic was light and Safar drove steadily around a long sweeping bend.

‘That’s the intersection,’ Gerges said excitedly, as the New Illawarra Road, which would have taken them to the entrance to the nuclear reactor, loomed up on the left.

Safar slowed and extinguished the lights as he pulled off the shoulder into a spot they’d reconnoitred earlier. It was partially hidden from the highway. They quickly extracted from the boot their big backpacks filled with explosive, AK-47 Kalashnikovs and wire cutters, and together they headed into the bush toward the reactor, Safar leading.

Safar checked his compass. ‘It’s a little over 200 metres to the fence, Hazim,’ he said. Ten minutes later, they reached the fence at a point near Einstein Avenue, and Safar went to work with his heavy wire cutters.

Back on the highway, a police patrol car picked up the terrorists’ parked car in their headlights.

‘What do you reckon that is, Sarge? Abandoned?’ Constable Murphy mused as he slowed.

‘Dunno . . . pull in behind it and we’ll run a rego check.’ New South Wales patrol cars were equipped with the most sophisticated image-recognition cameras available, and hundreds of thousands of registration plates were fed into the police central computers every day, identifying stolen cars – and a surprising number that were not registered.

‘Registered to an Iqbal Safar at an address in Liverpool, so he’s local,’ Constable Murphy said.

‘Run a check on him,’ Sergeant Willis replied, shining his torch into the vehicle.

‘Nothing unusual inside the car,’ he said.

‘And no criminal convictions, Sarge, but he’s on ASIO’s radar . . . spent time in Syria, but they couldn’t pin anything on him.’

‘Ordinarily I’d say he might have broken down,’ the alert sergeant remarked, ‘but he’s parked as far into the bushes as he could get it, and the bloody reactor’s only about 200 metres in through there. Put a call through to Security. Tell them we don’t want to be alarmist, but just in case.’

‘Move it, Iqbal,’ an agitated Gerges urged his partner. ‘There are cameras on this fence.’

The phone rang in the central security guardhouse.

‘Okay,’ Bill Sullivan said, ‘thanks for the warning.’ The duty guard checked the screens. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he swore. His colleague looked up from his paperwork. ‘What’s up?’

‘The southern border fence near Einstein Avenue,’ Sullivan said, pointing to the screen. ‘Sound the alarm, and grab your weapon.’

‘They’re on to us!’ Gerges said nervously as a siren began to wail. They climbed through the fence and raced toward the new OPAL reactor on the western side of the complex.

The security car, lights flashing, came flying along Rutherford Avenue and down Fermi Street, catching the terrorists in the headlights.

‘You – hold it right there!’ Sullivan yelled. He and his partner both leapt from the car, pistols drawn.

Safar had spent many months in Syria, training for just such a moment. He calmly fired two bursts from his AK-47, killing the guards instantly.

‘Security’s four-wheel drive . . . we’ll go in that,’ Safar yelled. He gunned the Toyota down Mendeleeff Avenue, lined up the entrance to the reactor and floored the accelerator. The vehicle bounced up the steps and the bull bar hit the doors in an explosion of glass, setting off more alarms.

Armed with the layout of the reactor, Safar blasted his way through several more doors, Gerges urging him on from behind. They reached the reactor’s pool. Glowing an eerie blue and contained by reinforced concrete, it was precisely this design that would work in their favour. The concrete block would direct the force of the explosion into the core of the reactor, spilling the highly radioactive coolant, and exposing the core.

The sirens were growing in the distance. Safar quickly connected the detonators to the 50-kilogram ammonium nitrate bombs in each backpack.

‘
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!’
the pair screamed together as Sergeant Willis’ patrol car and a second and then a third patrol car screeched to a halt and the police ran into the building, guns drawn.

For Sergeant Willis and his young constable, it was their last day on the job. The massive explosion ripped the heart out of the reactor, and the reinforced concrete block concentrated the explosion against the core. Freed of its coolant, the core began to heat dangerously toward a meltdown, as thousands of litres of radioactive coolant escaped.

B
arbara Murray was shown into McNamara’s office where he was following the financial carnage on Wall Street on the TV screen. They could see the despair on the faces of the brokers and traders amid the chaos on the floor of the New York stock exchange.

‘The Melbourne bombing sent a shudder through the markets,’ CNC’s finance correspondent observed, ‘and the London and Chicago bombings started a wholesale sell-off, but when the Australian nuclear reactor was bombed, raising the prospect of attacks on other nuclear facilities, the markets went into free-fall.’ Her face white, the normally calm and well-respected correspondent was clearly rattled. The shot cut first to the streets of a deserted Chicago, then Melbourne, and then to London, where vast areas of the city north of the River Thames had been evacuated, including the financial district. Then there were images of Sydney, the harbourside city eerily deserted, the streets jammed with cars and vans, left when their owners fled on foot. Smoke was still billowing from the reactor at Lucas Heights, with the authorities desperately trying to contain the meltdown. Outside the hospitals, patients – both the seriously ill and the ‘worried well’ – had spilled on to the footpaths. The situation had only been made worse by the numbers of doctors and nurses who had also fallen ill.

‘No analyst has been brave enough to predict where this might end, but the Dow Jones has suffered its biggest one-day fall since records began,’ she said. ‘After the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the markets fell 62 per cent, but already we’re in unthinkable territory, and a short while ago, the Dow had fallen a staggering 71 per cent. It would have fallen even further were it not for some aggressive buying that once again is thought to be coming from the Crédit Group banks.’

McNamara turned to Murray. ‘If that were the only problem we had, we could probably get by,’ he said, a grim look on his face. ‘I’ve just been advised that Doctor Weizman and Professor Badawi have been taken hostage,’ and he brought Murray up to date on the seizure of the missiles aboard
EVRAN I
.

‘Do we know who’s responsible for the kidnap?’

‘There’s been no announcement as to who might have done it . . . although obviously we have our suspicions.’

‘Pharos?’ Murray asked.

‘Or Crowley . . . or Crowley acting on behalf of Pharos. Crowley’s not in Dallas, and his office is saying they can’t comment on the chairman’s whereabouts for security reasons. The president’s called an emergency meeting of the National Security Council, but as soon as that breaks up, I’ll clear the way for a warrant to search EVRAN’s headquarters on the basis of the missile discovery. But it’s still not a smoking gun – for all we know, Crowley may not be involved, so we’ll need some top cover.’

‘Where’s O’Connor at the moment?’

‘On his way back from Belém in the Amazon. Why?’

‘Because you may want to redirect him to Venice, or at least alert the Italian
polizia
,’ she said, passing over a top-secret summary of her latest intercepts. ‘After some months in hospital, Khan has recovered, and is now in Venice picking up what we suspect is the Tutankhamun falcon pendant from Rubinstein. He obviously still has a lot of pull in the Pakistani military, because he’s travelling on a Pakistani Air Force Gulfstream IV executive jet, and interestingly, its return flight plan is via Figari Sud-Corse.’

‘Corsica?’

Murray nodded. ‘We’re still working on it, but one of those intercepts seems to indicate that he has something else to pick up . . . I can’t be sure, but it seems very odd that a Pakistani Air Force jet would be using an airport other than Corsica’s main international one.’

McNamara read the transcript, and for a while said nothing, weighing up the risks. ‘If we alert the Italian
polizia,
they’ll want to bring in the Guardia di Finanza, their financial police, and that will make the media. If there’s a connection with Crowley, that may tip his hand, and put Weizman and Badawi at even greater risk . . . if they’re still alive,’ he added chillingly. ‘It’s risky, but I think we’d better get O’Connor to have a look inside Galleria d’Arte Rubinstein.’