The Rocket Man (2 page)

‘Did he leave a note?'

‘Yes, but it didn't say why. Just that he couldn't live with himself any longer and that he knew they would be happier without him. He said his affairs were in order and his will was with his lawyer.' Katie hesitated. ‘He said that he loved them but that was the only thing that was at all personal.'

‘And the police are happy with this?'

‘I think so. I don't think there's any doubt that it was suicide.' Katie's voice trembled for a moment. ‘But Lieselotte doesn't understand why. They seemed perfectly happy at home, with the baby, and everything. He wasn't that depressed, he hadn't threatened it or anything.'

‘People who really mean to kill themselves rarely do.'

‘She thought it might be something to do with work. It couldn't be, could it, Bob?'

‘No, I don't think so. But I suppose we'll have to go through all that. Maybe I'd better go straight into the office.'

‘Oh Bob, please don't do that. Surely it can wait till tomorrow. Anna would be terribly disappointed.'

He turned round to Anna and smiled. He said, softly, ‘Okay.' Anna was the key to his heart; he would do almost anything for her. Katie looked ahead, concentrating on her driving. She said, ‘It's all been rather difficult. I was lonely, without you.'

Bob patted her thigh. ‘Well, I'm back now.'

When they got home Bob had a shower and Katie made some lunch. Bob came up behind her in the kitchen, towelling his hair.

‘Was there anything in the papers?'

‘About Hans? No, I'm sure there wasn't.'

‘I'd better call Lascalles.' He went back into the bedroom. Through the open door she could see him on the phone, fiddling with the telephone cord. Katie felt irritated. His work always came first; she shouldn't have expected anything different. She let him talk for ten minutes and then went to the door to mime that lunch was ready. Bob smiled at her and held up his hand to ask her not to interrupt.

She could hear snatches of the conversation. ‘I really don't think I have anything that will shed any light on it. No, I don't. I can't understand it. No, everything was just fine. Yes, it was unfortunate about Gavrilov but then I did warn you about that when it was first suggested… No. No other problems that I know of. Hans seemed quite happy about it. Have you written to Cruz? I see. No – tomorrow at eleven will be fine. Yes, of course. See you then. Okay.'

He hung up but remained seated on the bed. He looked suddenly overwhelmingly weary. Katie went up to him and put her arm on his shoulder and he looked up at her. Only then did he ask the question which she might have expected from him first: ‘And how is Lieselotte?'

The next morning, when Bob had left for work, Katie went into the city centre to meet her friend Nihal Senanayake for their regular Tuesday coffee. The weather had turned milder and it was still raining, and as Katie walked down the hushed, pedestrianised streets near the Stephansdom a lone street musician played a mournful, haunting tune on a flute. Katie felt herself overwhelmed for an instant with that particular melancholy of the expatriate, a feeling of being always isolated and detached, living in a culture she didn't belong to despite her fluency in the language; an outsider, an observer, mixing mainly with a population of transient foreigners. As the daughter of a diplomat, she knew this rootless existence only too well, and by now it had lost its appeal.

She wandered down the Graben, looking into the shop windows, passing the time till they were due to meet at eleven. She settled herself in a corner at Hawelka's and they brought her coffee with a glass of water on a silver tray. Nihal, as usual, was late. She saw him at last through the window; he was unmistakable, his short, dark figure advancing out of the rain. He fumbled with the door and hung his coat and umbrella on the hut-stand. Slightly out of breath, he sat down opposite her, putting his newspaper and a sheaf of documents on the table.

He ran his hand through his damp hair, realigning the broad white streak which he considered very distinguished, and smiled broadly. Katie silently accepted that he knew her too well to feel he had to apologise for his customary lateness. Then he pulled a face.

‘What is it?'

‘My shoes leak, and my socks are wet.'

‘Why don't you buy a new pair?'

Nihal looked sheepish. Katie knew that he was always short of money; as a freelance journalist his income was erratic, Vienna was an expensive place to live, and she knew he sent a lot of money home to his ex-wife and children in England. Nihal was, like her, a Cambridge graduate, one of those highly educated Sri Lankans who seem more English than the English; Katie always felt at home with him. Their friendship went back a long way, to the days they both worked at the BBC World Service in London. Katie had relied on him heavily when she first came to Vienna; he knew everyone and everything. She met him once a week to exchange gossip; today, as she had anticipated, he wanted to know about the suicide.

‘How was the funeral?'

‘Miserable.' Katie didn't want to go into too many details; Nihal, of course, was always looking for a possible story, and she knew that he would view anything she said principally for its news potential; she didn't hold this against him, after all, journalists are like that. The waiter came and they both ordered coffee. Katie sipped hers slowly, skimming the milk off the top with her spoon.

‘Nihal, at the graveside I was standing next to this Russian. At least I'm pretty sure he was a Russian.'

‘What did he look like?'

‘Tall. Dark brown hair, thinning a bit. In his forties.'

‘Going grey?'

‘No. His English is very good, a deep voice.'

‘Tall? Over six foot?'

‘Oh yes, at least.'

‘It's probably Dmitry Gavrilov. He was with Müller on that last inspection in Brazil.' Nihal lit up a cigarette. ‘I'm doing a piece on this new safeguards deal there, looking into all the background. No-one at the IAEA thinks his death has anything to do with that, do they?'

Katie knew he asked her this in case Bob had said anything to her about it. She was instantly defensive.

‘Bob never talks to me about work, you know that. Anyhow, he's been away.'

Nihal asked, ‘And what does Lieselotte make of it all?' As Katie didn't answer, he tried again, ‘You're a good friend – she must have said something to you – what does she think?'

Katie drank the remains of her coffee. ‘Oh, I think she's too shocked to think anything.'

An awkward silence fell. Nihal extinguished his cigarette, staring at Katie and obviously wondering if it was prudent to push things any further. Abruptly he changed the subject. ‘Actually, since you mentioned him, I had a briefing with Gavrilov last week. He's one of the new breed, you know; here because he's good at his job and not just for political reasons… I found him very impressive.'

Katie was staring out of the window. She was thinking of the coffin going into the ground, of how she had stood by the grave in the rain, of his intent face as he had looked at her, and the way he had offered her his arm to lean on.

Nihal sat at his desk in the hallway of his small flat in the Tulpengasse. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and watched the smoke drift up towards the ceiling, lit by an ancient Anglepoise lamp. He had not yet written the first sentence. That was always the most difficult; where to begin. Once he had got beyond that things usually started to flow.

He tapped in the first sentence of his article.

In September 1990 President Collor de Mello of Brazil publicly threw the first spadeful of lime into a 320-metre deep concrete lined shaft in Amazonia which the military had built to test a nuclear weapon, thus heralding the official end to Brazil's nuclear weapons programme.

He paused, put down his cigarette, went on typing, gathering speed.

A few weeks ago, on 28 November, at Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil and Argentina signed a far-reaching treaty in which they agreed to end their nuclear arms race and open up all their nuclear installations to international safeguards. President Collor has also made public the demise of a secret military plan, code-named Project Solimões, which was rumoured to show that Brazil had been within a year or so of having the bomb.

Nihal was typing without a break now; his cigarette, neglected, burned out in the ashtray.

Brazil's secret nuclear weapons programme goes back a long way. In 1975 West Germany signed a controversial deal to supply Brazil with a complete nuclear fuel cycle. This included four nuclear power stations, a uranium enrichment plant, and a reprocessing plant. All this would come under IAEA safeguards. But it has been known for years that Brazil has meanwhile been running a so-called parallel programme, under the control of the military, and that some of the West- German know-how was transferred from the safeguarded installations to the military ones.

Nihal paused for thought. If only he could get something out of Bob Haynes or Gavrilov about the inspection… Haynes was hopeless. He was a real organisation man, would never reveal anything that might reflect badly on the IAEA. On the other hand… On impulse, Nihal picked up the little pale blue IAEA phone directory and flicked through the pages. The Director of Information had arranged for him to have a briefing on uranium enrichment technologies from Dmitry Gavrilov last week; Nihal had found him refreshingly open, honest, and ironic. Perhaps if he could get to see him again he could steer the conversation round to Brazil.

He rang the extension number. Gavrilov answered at once.

‘This is Nihal Senanayake… you remember? Yes. I'm looking at my notes from that briefing you gave me. There are a few things I'm not clear about. I'll be in the building later this afternoon, I just wondered…'

‘Yes, of course. I'll be in my office at five-thirty, come to see me then.'

Nihal hung up. He thought, he is not going to tell me anything about Brazil. It's a waste of time. Still… He looked at his watch. If he was going to see Gavrilov at five-thirty, he didn't have much time. He typed out a couple more paragraphs, saved what he had done so far, found his coat, put his notebook in his pocket, and set out in the freezing cold for the UN building, wondering again what had made him decide to live in this beastly climate.

The Vienna International Centre stands on the banks of the Danube, three large towers surrounding a central rotunda. The towers are curved, wider at the ends than in the middle, and inside the curved corridors soon prove disorientating. Nihal had been in the building countless times and still had trouble finding his way around it. It was said that even people who had worked there for years had been known to go downstairs to the coffee machine and fail to find their way back to their offices again.

For once, he arrived on time. Gavrilov's secretary, a young Austrian called Hilde, showed him in. Gavrilov got up from his desk and indicated that Nihal should sit down on one of the comfortable chairs at the other side of the room.

Nihal sank into the chair with pleasure. He opened his notebook. They went over various abstruse points about the workings of gas centrifuges. Then Nihal said, ‘I wanted to ask you about Brazil.' He explained about his feature. What puzzled him, he said, was why Brazil had so unaccountably changed its mind on accepting safeguards; after all, it was only a short while ago that the Brazilian Government had voted against accepting international inspections.

Gavrilov sighed. He seemed to realise at once that the first part of the conversation had been a ruse but showed no irritation. ‘Well, of course we have had all the accounts from Brazil and now the results of the inspection. You know I cannot reveal anything about this. I can give you some general information, the kind of thing you could already get from published reports. Probably you know it all already. There were some recent leaks in the Brazilian press – you read Portuguese? No? Let me see, I have some copies somewhere.'

Gavrilov went over to a bookcase and found what he was looking for. He returned to his desk and began reading aloud. ‘The Valadares Centre claims to be operating 990 centrifuges. But over the past two years, the Centre has added three buildings, M-1, M-2, and M-3, covering a total of 24,000 square metres. This could hold about 6,000 centrifuges.'