The Fifth Horseman by Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre

Author:Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre [Collins, Larry & Lapierre, Dominique]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: thriller
ISBN: 9780380547340
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 1980-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

It was a few minutes before half past four, Paris time, when General Henri Bertrand, the director of France’s intelligence service, returned to his office from his interview with PaulHenri de Serre, the man who had installed Libya’s French reactor. The initiatives he had ordered earlier in the day after his first contact with the CIA’s Paris station chief had borne fruit. On his desk were four attache cases belonging to the DST, France’s internal-security agency. They contained the dossiers of all the Frenchmen assigned to work on the Libyan reactor and transcripts of all the telephone calls they had made to France.

The transcripts represented only a miniscule part of the material swept from the atmosphere each day by the DST in its communications laboratory on the top floor of its Rue de Saussaies headquarters, just behind the Ministry of the Interior. There white-smocked technicians functioning in a controlled, dust-free environment employed oscilloscopes, high-speed computers, ultrasensitive direction finders and listening devices to record every transmission and international telephone call originating on French soil, then stored them up on the computers from which they had been patiently culled. It was the ultimate transposition of the old concierge-as-watchdog system to the technology of the twentieth century.

Bertrand was still signing for the DST’s documents when his phone rang. It was his scientific adviser, Patrick Cornedeau. “Chief,” he said, “the inspection reports came in from Vienna an hour ago. I’ve just finished going through them and there’s something I should see you about right away.”

Cornedeau brought a file of papers three inches thick enclosed in a blue-and-white folder stamped with the seal of the United Nations into the General’s office. Bertrand gasped looking at it.

“Dear Lord! Did you have to wade through all that?”

“I did,” replied Cornedeau, scratching his bald pate, “and I’m confused.”

“Good,” his superior replied. “I prefer confusion to certitude in my operatives.”

Cornedeau placed the reports on Bertrand’s desk and began to thumb through them.

“On May seventh, the Libyans informed the IAEA in Vienna they had found radioactivity in their reactor’s cooling system. They said they had concluded they had a faulty fuel charge and they were shutting down the reactor to take out the fuel.”

Cornedeau pointed to his report. “The IAEA immediately sent a team of three inspectors to Libya. A Jap, a Swede and a Nigerian. Good people. They were present while the fuel was taken out and put into the storage pond. They installed their sealed cameras I told you about this morning around the pond. They’ve run two inspections since.”

“To what result?”

“Everything is perfect. The cameras’ records are complete. They saw no sign whatsoever of any attempt to take out the fuel. And at each inspection they checked the level of radioactivity coming out of the fuel in the pond with their gamma-ray analyzers. It was perfect.”

“In that case,” the General remarked, “I don’t see the reason for your confusion.”

“It’s this.” Cornedeau got up and returned to his blackboard. “To make a bomb, you want very, very pure plutonium 239.

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