Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

“You can cope,” he said, taking off his apron and his stained tocque. Then he walked out of the back, stopping only to collect his little Walther pistol on the way.

Bicchu was feeling talkative. Soon the answers began to come so quickly her head started to spin. She thought of the fearful years after Chernobyl, the pain, the uncertainty. And the school friends she lost, two, who died slowly, almost in front of everyone, day by day.

This was the world of the past, or so she’d thought. A world of hard, cruel science, in the thrall of men who didn’t care about the consequences of their actions. Watching the hints and clues and links begin to assemble as minutes turned to an hour, she felt herself both repelled and attracted by what she was uncovering. This was important, she knew. And forbidden, terrible knowledge.

After one significant breakthrough, she tore herself away from the computer, made herself a cup of green tea, felt briefly guilty about neglecting her instrument and chose, instead, to listen to one of her favorite renditions of the piece she would play later. A fellow Pole, Henryk Szeryng, playing his famed Guarneri del Gesu “Le Duc” for Deutsche Grammophon in 1968: fourteen and a half minutes of bliss.

Then she went back and looked at what she’d found. A lot. Too much. It made her mind turn in on itself, craving the peace and simple faith of the music.

She called Middleton’s cell phone. There was no answer. There wasn’t even the chance to leave a message.

“That’s not your real number is it, Harold?” she said to herself, half listening to Szeryng tackle the music with a studied assurance she hoped one day she might possess.

He wondered what would happen in the restaurant with him gone. The Bangladeshi was competent but slow. It was still a business, still a place that needed to look after its customers.

Later, he thought. The top end of Lamb’s Conduit Street, after the pubs and shops, was deserted. Everyone had gone to work. This was good. The only vehicle around was a large black van with opaque windows on a meter at the park end of the street. Children leapt and danced in the little playground on the other side of the road. He glanced at the van and shook his head. London mothers. They wouldn’t let their precious little princes walk half a mile any more.

She typed what she’d discovered into an email for Middleton and made sure to mark it for encryption, adding the digital signature he’d convinced her to use always on the net. No one could read what she’d written once it traveled beyond her computer and Middleton could be assured the message really came from her, not some imposter who knew how to spoof an email address.

“Fact one,” she wrote, and she shivered as she was unable to force the true import of her words from her mind. “The picture of the dead man, Kavi Balan. What you didn’t notice was the very peculiar green brown tint to his eyes. That may be normal. But it may be a symptom of copper poisoning, due to very heavy exposure to the metal. Look up Kayser-Fleischer ring for more information. The discoloration is caused by copper deposits in the eye.”

She looked at her notes then checked her watch. Six minutes to the end of the Bach. Then she really would practice.

“Fact two. India is the world’s largest producer of heavy water. This is a very resource-intensive exercise. Depending on the process it can take up to 340,000 tons of ordinary water, H 2O, to make one ton of heavy water, D 2O (that’s deuterium, Harold-look it up). Maybe this is why your people are looking for new sources.”

The tea was getting tepid.

“Remember what I told you about Chernobyl and heavy water? You don’t always need it. But if you want to produce weapon-grade plutonium it’s a wonderful way of bypassing the uranium enrichment process, which involves a lot of technological infrastructure that’s impossible to hide. Not that heavy water is easy to manufacture but the process is a little like distilling cognac from wine. The difference is the conventional process uses a phosphor-bronze system to handle the distillation process whereas liquor is traditionally made using a copper still.”

She looked at the words on the page and felt proud of herself. Or, more accurately, of Bicchu, which had thrown up the answers so quickly she could scarcely believe the ease with which they had been assembled.

“Fact three. Eleven years ago, a patent was filed in the U.S. for a new heavy-water development process. As far as I can see it’s never been put into industrial production because some of the technology isn’t in place to go large scale yet. The patent was lodged by the U.S. subsidiary of an Indian company that appears to be a shell outfit. At least I can’t see any financial filings for it in the U.S. or in India.” She’d retrieved the entire submission from the U.S. Patents Office database for free and saved it as a separate document.

“Sikari’s name is on the patent too, along with a couple of other people. According to the patent submission the process would halve the amount of feed water normally needed to distill heavy water, shorten the process considerably and allow for minimal startup costs. You could almost see it as a DIY kit for making the raw material for a plutonium plant. And… ”

Always save the best for last. The dead Henryk Szeryng, bowing away at his Guarneri in the background, did.

“The particular circular piping structure used for the process is at the heart of the patent. It’s what makes it unique. The filing calls it ‘the copper bracelet.’ Except this one happens to be thirty feet tall.”

She finished the cold tea and listened to the music enter its final, closing phase.

The doorbell rang as she hit send. Felicia cursed the interruption. One of the less attractive aspects of Lamb’s Conduit Street was the number of people who came to private houses trying to sell everything from fake DVDs to Chinese paintings. Middleton had a little sign by the front of the house: no hawkers. It was useless. This being England, he didn’t have a door video camera. There was trust in a quiet, upper-class street like this, along with big powerful locks and a high-tech alarm system.

The bell rang once more while she was walking out of the living room into the corridor.

“I don’t want any,” she shouted, and was surprised to hear an American twang in her voice. Two years in New York did this to you, she guessed.

She unlocked the latch and half opened the door. A stocky man of Middle Eastern appearance was standing there. He was no more than 30, wore a Chelsea football shirt under a jacket, a trendy slicked-back haircut and the kind of stupid self-satisfied grin some young London men liked to sport when they encountered the opposite sex.

“I don’t want any,” she repeated with a sigh.

He looked pleased with himself and held up what looked like a brand new iPhone. Her email to Harold Middleton was there, with the last few paragraphs including the words “except this one happens to be thirty feet tall” visible in large black lettering. Puzzled, Felicia Kaminski blinked.

“You got it anyway,” the man said.

She drew back to slam the door in his face. The wood hit something along the way. She heard a yelp of pain but he was through, and there was no way of getting him outside again. A glancing blow struck her cheek and she stumbled toward the living room and grabbed the wooden inner door, sending it flying behind her.

He got struck hard in the face a second time and yelled again. Anger. Hurt. She liked both of them.

She propped herself against the sofa, trying to think, trying to locate something that might pass as a weapon.

“Hey,” he said.

He had his hands up and looked offended. His right eye had gone purple from where the door had caught him.