The Rocket Man (31 page)

The German Government was clearly embarrassed. It tried to distance itself from the project, in particular the terms of the contract with Paraguay. In a TV interview the German Foreign Minister said, ‘We did not know the full details, we were not asked about the details. This is a purely private affair between a German company and the development of the area.' When the interviewer pointed out that a copy of the contract had been sitting in the Ministry's files for over two years he refused to comment. When pressed further, he said that as far as he knew the RASAG project was for purely peaceful purposes. In any case, since no sensitive parts were made on German soil, it was not a German problem.

Shortly afterwards the Bolivian Ambassador stood up in the United Nations General Assembly and accused Paraguay of pursuing military ambitions and potentially threatening to invade the Bolivian Chaco, which unlike the Paraguayan Chaco, was known to contain oil. He hinted that there was American backing for the project. ‘The RASAG project… is the barrel of a gun pointing at the heart of Latin America,' he said. The terms of the contract were attacked as ‘Blatantly neo-colonialist… this is a violation pure and simple of the sovereignty of an independent state.'

Nihal had not been able to pursue the RASAG story further. He hadn't succeeded in getting money to go to Paraguay; and anyway, recent experiences had given him a healthy fear of poking his nose in where it wasn't wanted. He had also been busy with the IAEA end of the continuing Brazilian story. Eduardo Cruz was still missing; it turned out that he had been booked on a flight to Venezuela the day he disappeared but had never turned up. It was now feared that he was dead. Heads had rolled in the Brazilian navy. New accounts had been submitted by CNEN to the IAEA, but not all the highly enriched uranium produced at Valadares could be accounted for. A significant quantity was still missing; Brazil had been given thirty days to account for it by the UN Security Council.

After a week in hospital and ten days at a convalescent clinic, Dmitry had discharged himself and was now at home under a police guard. He appeared to be acutely depressed and hardly saw anyone, although Hilde came in every day to bring his mail and to deliver his shopping. Nihal was worried about him and made a point of dropping in regularly on some pretext or other, for example to show him a copy of a recent article by Nihal's friend Jaime dos Santos which had appeared in the Brazilian press, claiming that a hunt was on for the highly enriched uranium in secret military sites in Amazonia. One of the military from Valadares who had been arrested had been quoted as saying that he would not reveal what had happened to the missing material even under torture.

Dmitry had been told by Kaisler that there had been no definite evidence to implicate Bob Haynes, and that since he had strenuously denied knowing anything, no action could be taken against him; besides, he'd resigned. Articles had appeared all over the world criticising the IAEA's safeguards programme and it was clear that Kaisler didn't want to give them any further ammunition.

The day before they were due to leave Vienna Katie went to have lunch with Nihal at the International Centre. She had hardly seen him in recent weeks; she'd had the distinct impression that he'd been avoiding her, but when she met him he seemed as pleased to see her as ever. She deliberately didn't ask about Dmitry till the end; he told her he was fine, he had started back at work that week, but she thought she detected a faint disapproval of her which she found very saddening. She left Nihal with a warm embrace, making him promise he would write to her; and, after leaving him, on a sudden impulse went up to Dmitry's office on the twentieth floor.

When she emerged from the lift she began to feel shaky. As she walked along the corridor she thought, this is not a good idea. She reached his door before thinking better of it and turned and walked away back to the lifts; she pressed the button, thought again and turned back, retracing her footsteps. The door to Hilde's office was open; Hilde was sitting at her desk, typing, and frowned at her as she stepped in. She asked, ‘Have you got an appointment?'

‘No.'

‘You're not meant to see him without an appointment… I'll go and tell him you're here.' She returned in a minute and said, ‘He says he's very busy. You can go in if you like.' Hilde was hostile, protective. It occurred to Katie that she might be in love with him herself.

Dmitry was not sitting at his desk; he was standing facing the window, reading a document in a blue folder. He looked round briefly when she came in. She shut the door behind her and said, hesitantly, ‘I didn't know you were back at work.'

‘I started yesterday.'

‘You seem well.'

‘Do I? So everybody tells me.' His voice sounded tired, as if he did not have the energy to talk to her. Katie felt a dry sensation in her mouth, and suddenly weak as if all feeling had drained out of her. She thought, I was right to end this, it would never have come right between us. She wished she hadn't come. He was still reading the file, intent, concentrated; Katie took a couple of steps towards him, putting out her hand to touch his arm without being aware that she was doing so, and as she did he suddenly turned round, evading her, and said abruptly, ‘Please don't touch me.'

She snatched her hand back as swiftly as if she had received an electric shock. He folded the file, put it down on his desk, sat down, picked up the phone and pressed one of the numbers, asked Hilde to get someone on the phone for him. Then he hung up. Still without looking at Katie, almost as if he dared not, he said, ‘Why did you come here?'

‘I just came to say goodbye. I'm leaving Vienna with Bob. I expect Nihal told you.'

‘Yes, he did tell me. I wish you well, then.'

She almost hated him at that moment; she knew she had to leave, but she could not stop herself from looking at him for a moment longer. The fact that he did not look at her enabled her to do so; she would not have been able to look him in the eyes. She felt at least relieved that there were no obvious signs of his injury, but she also thought that something had changed in him. He looked thinner, paler, but it was not just that; some of that inner energy which had charged him was gone, and because he did not look at her or smile she had a strange sensation for a moment that he was not real, that this could not be happening, as if she was looking at a reflection in a mirror, or as if he had indeed risen from the dead.

She said, slowly and painfully, ‘I did hope that I might keep in touch with you… that we might…' She could not bring herself to say, be friends.

‘I see. Well, write and let me have your address.'

Katie could not speak another word; she felt as if everything was crumbling around her. She watched him for a moment as he started to go through some document at great speed, crossing out words and phrases, jotting things in the margin, writing something on a sheet of paper which he pinned to the front; he tossed it into his out tray and picked up another sheaf of papers. She looked on as he wrote out a memo, his handwriting large and childlike as he wrote in English. It was impossible to believe now that the same hand with which he held the pen had once caressed her, touched her most intimate places, had aroused in her the most immense desire and pleasure.

Katie turned to go. Hilde came in; she said, ‘Excuse me. The Director General just rang to say he will see you now. There are some letters for you to sign; I'll leave them on your desk. They've confirmed you're going to the Buenos Aires conference. And Personnel rang, they want your medical report.'

‘Yes, of course, it's in here, perhaps you could drop it in on them.' Then he turned to Katie and said, as if she were a casual acquaintance, ‘I'm sorry, I have to go. If you'll excuse me…' He opened the door for her to leave.

Katie walked slowly down the corridor. The carpet and the grey walls absorbed all sound; she felt that if she screamed the place down nobody would hear her. She went to the lift. As she stood waiting, listening to the distant whirring of the cables in the long shaft, she wondered for an instant whether to go back and try to explain herself, give the reasons why she hadn't been in touch with him, to say everything that was in her heart, but she pushed aside this desire at once; she would only make a fool of herself. Better to put it all behind her as he had done and accept that it was finished.

The lift doors opened and she stepped in. She pressed the button for the ground floor and cast her mind back over everything that had happened, trying to find an image of him less painful than the recent ones to hold in her mind. As she did so she saw quite clearly Dmitry's face in the garden at Schönbrunn, looking at her as she said, ‘It's over,' and his soft voice asking her: ‘But is it?'

K
atie stood on a street corner in Asunción, watching the wind from the Rio Paraguay stir the pale green branches of a tree. Below her stretched the city, the low, white colonial buildings, the dusty squares, and then the muddle of wooden shacks along the river. The warm, clean air caressed her face and for a moment she felt happy.

She had come to Asunción two days ago to join Bob for three weeks; he had come out here to take a temporary job, as he had told Katie, with a German engineering company. Since leaving Vienna Katie had been staying outside London at her parents' house with Anna, while Bob jetted from one place to another for interviews, looking up contacts and trying to get some work. When Bob had rung to tell her that he would be away in South America for three months she had broken down on the phone and asked if she could come and join him; Anna would be fine with her parents for a short while. Bob had, somewhat reluctantly, agreed.

But since arriving in Paraguay she had been shocked to discover that Bob was working for Wolf Richter. He had told her almost as soon as she had arrived. They were sitting in a restaurant, half shaded on the balcony, a cool breeze stirring the branches of an overhanging tree and rustling in the palm leaves. The bright light, the warmth, the throaty roar of traffic and the cries of unfamiliar birds reminded her with a jolt of her lost tropical childhood, the paradise from which she had been banished at the age of eleven back to grey old England and the purgatory of boarding school. She closed her eyes in pleasure, feeling the sun on her skin, when Bob's words penetrated her dream.

‘We're staying with the Richters, they've rented a house here, it's very pleasant. I'm working for his company.'

Katie's eyes flew open. ‘But I read about it in the papers, Nihal wrote something. He's making missiles, isn't he? He's a crook.'

‘Most of what Nihal wrote was quite wrong. They're not missiles, they're rockets – launching systems for satellites.'

‘That's potentially the same thing.'

‘That's not his intention. Look, it's work. I had to get a job – it's only temporary.'

‘You shouldn't have taken it. What good is it going to do your career?'

‘What he's doing is quite legal. In fact, it's an exciting concept, Katie. Of course he has enemies, because he's threatening the status quo, but there's enormous potential.'

Katie felt slightly sick. She didn't want immediately to start rowing with him, as soon as she had stepped off the plane. She studied the menu. ‘I'm not interested in this kind of argument. I just wish you had told me what you were doing, that's all.' She stopped herself before saying that if she'd known, she would not have come.

After lunch Bob took her back to the large house on the Avenida Mariscal Lopez, a huge, colonial-style mansion set among trees, with green shutters and a lantern on the porch. He took her upstairs, to a spacious room overlooking the garden, and she flung herself on the large, antique bed. The journey had taken her twenty-two hours, changing planes at Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and she was exhausted. She fell asleep almost instantly, sleeping right through to wake up at dawn to a thin blue light filtering through the shutters and a cock crowing hoarsely from the garden.

Bob was lying asleep beside her, naked under the sheet, his skin tanned and smooth. Katie felt light-headed and very sick. She got up, went to the bathroom and stood over the sink, retching. Was it the meal she had eaten yesterday? Surely she couldn't have picked up some stomach bug already? But she knew this feeling; she'd had it before. She realised with sudden shock that it was a very long time since her last a period.

She sat down heavily on a cane chair in the bathroom and tried to remember when it had been. She hadn't given it a thought, with the move from Vienna, trying to find a school for Anna in England, worrying about Bob's work. She knew that stress and travel often upset things, but she was not sure. She had been so tired, for three or four weeks now she had been feeling exhausted; she had put it down to disorientation and depression after moving from Vienna and all the trauma she had been through. But the moment she thought about it, she knew; she must have been suppressing it, not wanting to think about it. All the signs were there. In the mornings she had sometimes felt that characteristic twinge of nausea as she had poured the coffee at breakfast. How could she have been so stupid? It was well over two months. How could she not have thought of it before?