Year of the Golden Ape Read online

  Nor did LeCat linger. Inside the car which met them at Dorval airport was an American, Joseph Walgren, a fifty-year-old ex-accountant LeCat had got to know rather well when he was living in Denver in 1968. Walgren, a round-faced man with wary eyes, had given up accountancy years earlier when he muddled up a client's money with his own bank account. Since then his method of earning a living had not been completely legal. Twenty-four hours after LeCat's arrival in Montreal, Walgren drove him over the border into the States. They were heading for Illinois, a part of America Walgren knew well. They had the man to make the nuclear device. Now they needed the material.

  3

  Extract from transcript of Columbia Broadcasting System's television '60 Minutes' report, August 101973 ·

  Dr John Gofman: 'Any reasonably capable physicist, say, getting out of a university with a Ph.D., I would estimate would be able to come up with a design to use plutonium in a bomb in a very short time...'

  Carole Bannermann was driving too fast for the road, for the weather, for her own safety. In Illinois, ten miles from the city of Morris, the highway was awash from an earlier flash-flood as rain swept across it, great driving sweeps of rain which passed her headlight beams in the night like moving curtains. Recklessly, because she was late for the party, she kept her speedometer needle at sixty, five above the regulation fifty-five.

  At nine in the evening in March the highway was deserted; few people took the car out at night during the present energy crisis - not since gas had been rationed. Carole, fair-haired - her mother had named her after Lombard - had no patience with the gas situation. You were twenty only once in a lifetime and she was going to make the most of her natural resources. To hell with the energy crisis. She pressed her foot down, the speedometer climbed, the rain curtains whipped past her headlights probing the darkness.

  She was reckless, but she had split-second reflexes, and she believed in watching the road ahead. Beyond her headlights another light was flashing, like a torch waving up and down as it signalled frantically. Hell, some hitch-hiker nut - standing in the middle of the highway. She lost speed, getting ready to pick it up again, to drive round the man in the night when she could locate him precisely. Pick up a guy at this hour, after dark - in the middle of nowhere? He must be out of his crazy mind ...

  Carole's eyes narrowed and she lost more speed, travelling at less than thirty as the headlight beams hit the silhouette of an armoured truck parked broadside on across the highway. It must have skidded, turned through ninety degrees, and then stopped like a barricade across the highway. The beams shone on a driver or guard standing on the highway, wearing helmet, leather tunic and boots, which gave him a para-military look. She felt reassured as she stopped and the man walked towards her in the rain, staying inside the headlight beams.

  A security truck is reassuring - like a security guard or a highway patrolman. He was still carrying the heavy torch he had flashed as he came closer, rain streaking his visor which hid the upper half of his face. Carole was reassured, but still conscious enough of the loneliness of the place to keep her motor running. She lowered the window as he came up on her side and leaned an elbow on the cartop while he looked down at her. He had, she noticed, glanced into the back of her Dodge.

  Rain from his visor dripped on the short, wide-shouldered man's chest as he looked down without speaking. She kept her hand on the brake. 'We hit a flash-flood,' he explained. 'Jo braked too hard and there we were - turned on a dime like you see us. With the motor stopped...'

  He spoke with an accent she couldn't place and she frowned. What did he expect her to do? She seemed to have heard that these security trucks carried a radio link, so why did he need help? She was still uncertain, not sure why she was uncertain, when the security man moved. He brought down the heavy torch he had been holding as he leaned against the cartop with a crushing blow. It struck her on the temple with such force she died instantly.

  Studying her for a moment as she lay slumped in the seat, LeCat opened the door, and hauled her half way out of the car, propping her head against the wheel. Then he stood up and flashed the torch three times rapidly in the direction of the parked truck.

  The second armoured truck was moving down the highway at fifty-five miles an hour, keeping inside the regulation limit as its headlights shone on the driving rain. The driver, Ed Taglia, was not wearing his helmet, which lay on the seat beside him, which was against regulations. Beyond the helmet sat Bill Gibson, who always wore his helmet.

  This speed limit chews me up,' Taglia said as he stared at the highway ahead. 'Why build freeways and then make us crawl? Screw those A-rabs...'

  'There's an energy crisis...'

  'Screw that. I want to get home...'

  With what we have aboard, fifty-five is fast enough,' the older man observed. 'If you turn her over and the truck busts open ...'

  Taglia was tired and didn't reply. When you got old, you got old. You slowed down with women and you slowed down with cars. Gibson was all of fifty years old. Screw Gibson for coming on the trip. On his own Taglia would have pressed his foot down and to hell with it. He squinted through the windscreen where the wipers were just coping with the cloudburst.

  'Trouble,' Gibson said quietly. 'Don't stop - just drive slow until we see what it's made of...'

  'Stop leaning on me - I know the routine...'

  Like Carole Bannermann had done, he was reducing speed as he came up closer to the flashing torch waving about in the middle of the highway. With one hand he jammed the helmet on his head and snapped the catch under his jaw. Gibson reached for the mike, switched it on. 'Angel One calling Roosevelt... Angel One calling Roosevelt...' He repeated the call back to base in Morris several times and then gave a grunt of disgust. 'Must be the storm - Goddam thing is full of static...'

  Taglia was moving slowly now, approaching what lay ahead with extreme caution. Then he whistled. 'One of us . . .' In front his lights picked out a grisly scene. Another armoured truck sat broadside across the highway, its hood tucked inside the rear door of a green Dodge. The front door of the car was open and a blonde-haired girl lay sprawled half in and half out of the car, sprawled on her back with her head propped up against the wheel.

  It was a tableau which immediately aroused Gibson's suspicions - the classic set-up for a hi-jack. First, the seeming car accident with the girl lying on the highway, apparently injured. A classic set-up except for two things - the second armoured truck, the sight of which reassured Gibson to some extent, and the appearance of the girl. 'Drive a little closer,' Gibson ordered as he leaned close to the windscreen. The lights played over the sprawled girl and Gibson saw her face. He told Taglia to stop as a helmeted figure appeared from behind the other truck.

  'What do you think?' Taglia asked.

  'I think it's OK. Look at her face, for God's sake. Keep trying to raise Roosevelt,' he added as he opened his door.

  The security man with the helmet and visor waited for him in the rain with one hand behind his back as Gibson jumped down beside him.

  Behind the wheel Taglia was getting a lot of static on the radio link. The security man whose face Gibson couldn't see had a shaky voice. 'She was hitting seventy, I swear to God she was. She just came out of nowhere...'

  'They always do,' Gibson said as rain hit his face. 'And they end up nowhere. She has to be dead, of course?'

  'I'm not sure ...' The security man sounded in a bad way, in a state of shock, Gibson guessed. 'I thought I felt a pulse at the side of her neck. Trouble is we can't get through to the base - the static is hell tonight...'

  'Same problem.' Gibson glanced over his shoulder to see how Taglia was getting on, then something rammed into his stomach. He looked down and saw the Colt .45 as the helmeted man pulled the trigger. The heavy bullet threw him against the cab as the man stepped back and raised the revolver. Inside the cab Taglia, the mike still in his hand, stared in disbelief at Gibson, at the man holding the Colt. The man whose face they never saw fired twice at Taglia, lowered the gun, fired once more at Gibson. Both men died inside fifteen seconds.

  Another man wearing security guard uniform came from behind the truck which appeared to have crashed into the Dodge and ran forward. 'I was monitoring their set - they didn't get through the jamming...'

  'Stop jabbering, Walgren, and get this thing open ...'

  LeCat found the keys inside Gibson's pocket and used them to open the back of the truck. Rows of steel boxes were stacked along either side of the truck and each box had a legend stencilled across its lid. LeCat started on the difficult task of levering off the padlock from one of the boxes with a wrench. 'Keep an eye on the bloody road,' he told Walgren as he strained at the heavy padlock. Then the hasp cracked. LeCat switched on his torch again, lifted the lid cautiously, stared inside. The box contained two large steel canisters, each protected with foam rubber to minimise travel shake.

  LeCat lifted one canister out by its handle, grinning sourly as the American stepped away from the truck. 'Frightened, mon ami? This stuff is as safe as milk - until our associate, Antoine, has treated it. One five-kilogram canister would be more than enough, he said ...'

  He slid the canister carefully inside a reinforced carton Walgren had placed on the floor of the truck, a carton which was the right size because the American had known in advance the exact dimensions of the canister. Like the steel boxes, the canister carried the same warning legend. GEC, Morris, Illinois. Highly Dangerous -Plutonium.

  On the night when LeCat attacked the armoured truck in Illinois, the plutonium was flown across the United States border aboard a Beechcraft piloted by Walgren, who had served with the US Army Airforce during the war. So while a huge dragnet was spread out south of the border, the plutonium canister was taken across Canada to Vanco
uver by car. As a precaution, LeCat kept the canister inside a house in Winnipeg for a few days, then, when it was clear that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had not spread its own dragnet, he completed his journey across the continent.

  Antoine had to wait two weeks for the canister's arrival, but for the French physicist it was a busy fortnight. He constructed his laboratory in the large basement of the house from equipment LeCat had arranged to be delivered there. For a man of Antoine's background it was not too difficult; Walgren, using Arab money, had earlier found the engineering workshop by the simple process of consulting the 'for sale' section in trade magazines. There were plenty to choose from with so many small firms going bankrupt through the mounting energy crisis. And the nuclear physicist had just completed his preparations when LeCat delivered the plutonium late one evening at the end of March.

  It took Antoine seven months to make the nuclear device.

  During that time he never left the house on Dusquesne Street. He worked a twelve-hour day, working alone except for an ex-OAS engineer, Varrier, who produced the required metal casing and parts under Antoine's instruction. There was one other man in the house, forty-four year old Andre Dupont, the man who had met them with Walgren when they arrived in Montreal. Dupont doubled up as cook and housekeeper. It was a regime most men could never have endured, but Antoine was a scientist who lived only for work and reading the novels of Marcel Proust. And the cuisine was good - Dupont in his youth had once served an apprenticeship in the kitchens of the Ritz in Paris before he was discovered trying to blackmail a wealthy woman of a certain age staying at the hotel.

  LeCat had delivered to Antoine no more than five kilograms of reprocessed plutonium - used fuel refined back to its original energy-producing state at the GEC plant at Morris, Illinois. This plutonium had been on its way back to a nuclear power plant when it was hi-jacked by LeCat. Antoine's task was to design a nuclear device and insert the charge inside it. The public, with memories of the vast plant required to make the first atomic bomb, still imagined that something on the same scale was necessary to make a nuclear device. But that vast plant had been required to process the plutonium - and Antoine had in his possession the end-product which came from Morris, Illinois.

  Antoine's agreed price for this dangerous assignment was fifty thousand tax-free dollars, together with the passport to enable him to start a new life in the province of Quebec once his work was finished. Being a solitary man, he probably enjoyed the seven months it took him to complete his task.

  Following LeCat's detailed instructions, he constructed a device which was the size of a largish suitcase. In fact, when the device was ready, he fitted it inside a specially reinforced suitcase and then plastered the outside with hotel labels from different parts of the world which André Dupont supplied. The case was very heavy - the plutonium charge was packed inside a heavy steel shell to maximise its power on detonation and weighed almost two hundred pounds. But a man of exceptional strength like LeCat could carry it short distances as though he were transporting an ordinary suitcase. When Antoine completed his work in late October, LeCat was informed and flew direct to Vancouver from London on a BOAC flight.

  'Show me how it works,' LeCat demanded when they stood in the basement laboratory with the suitcase open on a work-bench.

  'This activates the trigger...'

  'I shall need to attach a time mechanism...'

  'I would suggest...'

  LeCat listened only to the first part of the explanation. As an explosives and boobytrap specialist, the Frenchman knew before Antoine explained how he was going to deal with the problem - he simply wanted confirmation that he would be going about it the right way. After all, the nuclear physicist had produced a bomb large enough to destroy a medium-sized city.

  Antoine had carefully not enquired to what purpose the device would be put; he believed he knew - that it would be handed over to either Israel or one of the Arab states for a large sum of money. The Frenchman had managed to persuade himself that he was going into business like any other armaments manufacturer; if he did not supply the device, someone else would. It was the way of the world, and fifty thousand dollars was a sum he would never have seen all his life had he remained in the service of his own government.

  'You are leaving tonight,' LeCat said abruptly. 'You will be driven from here after dark.'

  Antoine was surprised at the suddenness of his departure, and a worry he had been nursing for some time came to the surface. 'The fifty thousand dollars ...'

  'I shall bring it here in a few hours. We do not want you travelling back the same way you came - across Canada. I have to drive you into the States by a devious route to Seattle. From there you will catch a train to Chicago and you will enter Canada again from America. Then we are finished with you.'

  Antoine, clever enough at his own job, did not fully understand the reasons for this, but the complexity of the plan impressed him. Except for one question. 'I can enter America without a visa?'

  'Of course! You forget - you are now a Canadian citizen with your new passport. Canadians can go across the border as often as they like - they only have to show their passport. I will see you this evening ...'

  LeCat left the house with the suitcase and drove to the ferry point where he crossed to Victoria. He took a cab to the wharf where the trawler Pêcheur was anchored and spent some time aboard the vessel. Most of the time he spent chatting to the French captain while the hours passed, and during his stay he enjoyed a typically French meal of endless duration. It was after dark when he arrived back at the house on Dusquesne Street with another suitcase.

  'You can count it if you like,' LeCat said, 'but we have a long journey ahead of us...'

  Fifty thousand dollars. Antoine opened several of the hundred dollar bill packets inside the suitcase and checked the currency with a feeling of embarrassment - and relief - which amused Le-Cat. Then he closed the case, locked it, put the key inside his wallet. 'I suppose I'd better bank it a little at a time ?'

  'That's right,' LeCat said amiably. 'Keep the rest inside a safety deposit. And now, if you're ready...'

  LeCat suggested putting the suitcase in the boot of the car, but Antoine said he would prefer to ride in the back with the case beside him. LeCat shrugged, climbed behind the wheel, and they drove off, leaving Dupont and the engineer, Varrier, to remove the laboratory equipment Antoine had dismantled and packed up. They drove east out of the city in the darkness, up into the mountains.

  LeCat shot Antoine three times through the chest when they had stopped by the side of a lake. He weighted the body with chains he had concealed under canvas in the boot, put it inside a small boat moored to the water's edge, and rowed the boat far out. Antoine was dropped in the lake, which at this point was over one hundred feet deep, and LeCat returned to the car and the suitcase containing fifty thousand dollars.

  LeCat did not take the money for himself: it was part of the arrangement with Ahmed Riad - who had hired him in Algiers -that this amount would be used to pay the French crew of the trawler Pêcheur; one-third to be paid now, the balance of two-thirds to be handed over when the trawler had served its ultimate purpose.

  When he returned to the Pêcheur, Andre Dupont was waiting for him, and a powerful launch was putting out to sea in the middle of the night with the crates of laboratory equipment aboard. Like the man who had used the equipment, the crates would be dropped overboard in deep water. A perfectionist for detail, LeCat checked to make sure Dupont had not overlooked anything.

  His subordinate had not overlooked anything. While LeCat had driven off with the nuclear physicist, Dupont had thoroughly dusted the rooms in the house Antoine had used, wiping away all fingerprints. He had then Hoovered the basement and the other rooms to remove any particles or clothing threads a police scientist might find interesting - the police scientist, if he ever came, would himself use a special Hoover in search of the evidence Dupont had so carefully removed. The Hoover went overboard with the laboratory equipment.