Triple (1991)

by Ken Follett

  The four people in the chilly garden were still for one long heartbeat. Then Hassan's hands moved on Eila's body. Instantly Dickstein and Cortone moved away, through the gap in the hedge and out of sight. The lovers never saw them. They walked toward the house When they were well out of earshot Cortone said, "Jesus, that was hot stult" "Let's not talk about it," Dickstein said. He felt like a an who, looking backward over his shoulder, has walked into a lamppost: there was pain and rage, and nobody to blame but himself. Fortunately the party was breaking up. They left without speaking to the cuckold, Professor Ashford, who was in a comer deep in conversation with a graduate student. They went to the George for lunch. Dickstein ate very litfle but drank some beer. Cortone said, "Listen, Nat, I don't know why you're getting so down in the mouth about it.' I mean, it just goes to show shes available, right?" "Yes," Dickstein said, but he did not mean it. The bill came to more than ten shillings. Cortone paid it. Dickstein walked him to the railway station. They shook hands solemnly, and Cortone got on the train. Dickstein walked in the park for several hours, hardly noticing the cold, trying to sort out his feelings. He failed. He knew he was not envious of Hassan, nor disillusioned with Eila, nor disappointed in his hopes, for he had never been hopeful. He was shattered, and he had no words to say why. He wished he had somebody to whom he could talk about it Soon after this he want to Palestine, although not just because of Eila.

  In the next twenty-one years he never had a woman; but that, too, was not entirely because of Efla.

  Yasif Hassan drove away from Luxembourg airport in a black rage. He could picture, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the young Dickstein: a pale Jew in a cheap suit, thin as a girl, always standing slightly hunched as if he expected to be flogged, staring with adolescent longing at the ripe body of Eila Ashford, arguing doggedly that his people would have Palestine whether the Arabs consented or not. Hassan had thought him ridiculous, a child. Now Dickstein lived in Israel, and grew grapes to make wine: he had found a home, and Hassan had lost one. Hassan was no longer rich. He had never been fabulously wealthy, even by Levantine standards, but he had always had fine food, expensive clothes and the best education, and he had consciously adopted the manners of Arab aristocracy. His grandfather had been a successful doctor who set up his elder son in medicine and his younger son in business. The younger, Hassan's father, bought and sold textiles in Palestine, Lebanon and Transiordan. The business prospered under British rule, and Zionist immigration swelled the market. By 1947 the family had shops all over the Levant and owned their native village near Nazareth. The 1948 war rained them. When the State of Israel was declared and the Arab armies attacked, the Hassan family made the fatal mistake of packing their bags and fleeing to Syria. They never came back. The warehouse in Jerusalem burned down; the shops were destroyed or taken over by Jews; and the family lands became "administered" by the Israeli government Hassan had heard that the village was now a kibbutz. Hassan's father had lived ever since in a United Nations refugee camp. The last positive thing he had done was to write a letter of introduction for Yasif to his Lebanese bankers. Yasif had a university degree and spoke excellent English: the bank gave him a job. He applied to the Israeli government for compensation under the 1953 Land Acquisition Act, and was refused. He visited his family in the camp only once, but what he !aw there stayed with him for the rest of his life. They lived in a hut made of boards and shared the communal toilets.

  They got no special treatment: they were just one among thousands of families without a home, a purpose or a hope. To see his father, who had been a clever, decisive man ruling a large business with a firm hand, reduced now to queuing for food and wasting his life playing backgammon, made Yasif want to throw bombs at school buses. The women fetched water and cleaned house much as al-ways, but the men shuffled around in secondhand clothes, waiting for nothing, their bodies getting flabby while their minds grew dull. Teenagers strutted and squabbled and fought with knives, for there was nothing ahead of them but the prospect of their lives shriveling to nothing in the baking heat of the sun. The camp smelled of sewage and despair. Hassan never returned to visit, although he continued to write to his mother. He had escaped the trap, and if he was deserting his father, well, his father bad helped him do it, so it must have been what he wanted. He was a modest success as a bank clerk. He had intelligence and integrity, but his upbringing did not fit him for careful, calculating work involving much shuffling of memoranda and keeping of records in triplicate. Besides, his heart was elsewhere. He never ceased bitterly to resent what had been taken from him. He carried his hatred through life like a secret burden. Whatever his logical mind might tell him, his soul said be had abandoned his father in time of need, and the guilt fed his hatred of Israel. Each year he expected the Arab armies to destroy the Zionist invaders, and each time they failed he grew more wretched and more angry. In 1957 he began to work for Egyptian Intelligence. He was not a very important agent, but as the bank eXpanded its European business be, began to pick up the occasional tidbit, both in the office and from general banking gossip. Sometimes Cairo would ask him for specific information about the finances of an arms manufacturer, a Jewish philanthropist, or an Arab millionaire; and if Hassan did not have the details in his bank's files he could often get them from friends and business contacts. He also had a general brief to keep an eye on Israeli businessmen in Europe, in case they were agents; and that was why he had approached Nat Dickstein and pretended to be friendly.

  Hassan thought Dickstein's story was probably true. In his shabby suit~ with the same round spectacles and the same inconspicuous air, he looked exactly like an underpaid sale with a product he could not promote. However, there was that odd business in the Rue Dicks the previous night: two youths, known to the police as petty thieves, had been found in the gutter savagely disabled. Hassan had got all the details from a contact on the city police force. Clearly they had picked on the wrong sort of victim. Their injuries were professional: the man, who had inflicted them had to be a soldier, a policeman, a bodyguard . . . or an agent After an incident like that, any Israeli who flew out in a hurry the next morning was worth checking up on. Hassan drove back to the Alfa Hotel and spoke to the desk clerk. "I was here an hour ago when one of your guests was checking out;'he said. "Do you remember?" "I think so, sir. Hassan gave him two hundred Luxembourg francs. "Would you tell me what name he was registered under?" "Certainly. sir." The clerk consulted a file. "Edward Rodgers, from Science International magazine." "Not Nathaniel Dickstein?" The clerk shook his head patiently. "Would you just see whether you had a Nathaniel Dickstein, from Israel, registered at all?" "Certainly." The -clerk took several minutes to look through a wad of papers. Hassan's excitement rose. If Dickstein had registered under a false name, then he was not a wine salesman--so what else could he be but an Israeli agent? Finally the clerk closed his fae and looked up. "Definitely not, sir." "Thank you." Haman left. He was jubilant as he drove back to his office: he had used his wits and discovered something important. As soon as he got to his desk he composed a message.

  SUSPECTED ISRAELI AGENT SEEN HERE. NAT DICKSTEIN ALIAS ED RODGERS. FIVE FOOT SIX, SMALL BUILD, DARK HAIR, BROWN EYES, AGE ABOUT 40.

  He encoded the message, added an extra code word at its top and sent it by telex to the banles Egyptian headquartem It would never get there: the extra code word instructed the Cairo post office to reroute the telex to the Directorate of General Investigations. Sending the message was an anticlimax, of course. There would be no reaction, no thanks from the other end. Hassan had nothing to do but get on with his bank work, and try not to daydream. Then Cairo caged him on the phone. It had never happened before. Sometimes they sent him cables, telexes, and even letters, all in code, of course. Once or twice he had met with people from Arab embassies and been given verbal instructions. But they had never phoned. His report must have caused more of a stir than he had anticipated. The caffer wanted to know more about Dickstein. "I want to confirm the identity of the customer refer
red to in your message," he said. "Did he wear round spectacles?" "Yea." "Did he speak English with a Cockney accent? Would you recognize such an accent?" "Yes, and yes." "Did he have a number tattooed on his forearm?" "I didn't see it today, but I know he has it ... I was at Oxford University with him, years ago. I'm quite sure it is him." "You know him?" There was astonishment in the voice from Cairo. "Is this information on your file?" "No, Irve never-Y "Then it should be," the man said angrily. "How long have you been with us?" "Since 1957." 'Mat explains it those were the old days. Okay, now listen. This man is a very important ... client. We want you to stay with him twenty-four hours a day, do you understand?" "I caWt," Hassan said miserably. "He left town." "Where did he go?" "I dropPed him at the airport. I don't know where he went.* "Then find out. Phone the airlines, ask which flight he was on, and call me back in fifteen minutes." TJUPLE

  "I'll do my best---r "I'm not interested in your best," said the voice from Cairo. "I want his destination, and I want it before he gets there. Just be sure you call me in fifteen minutes. Now that we've contacted him, we must not lose him again." "I'll get on to it right away," said Hassan, but the line was dead before he could finish the sentence. He cradled the phone. True, he had got no thanks from Cairo; but this was better. Suddenly he was important, his work was urgent, they were depending on him. He had a chance to do something for the Arab cause, a chance to strike back at I ast. He picked up the phone again and started calling the airlines.

  Chapter Four

  Nat Dickstein chose to visit a nuclear power station in France simply because French was the only European lan guage he spoke passably well, except for English, but En gland was not part of Euratom. He traveled to the power station in a bus with an assorted party of students and tour ists. The countryside -slipping past the windows was a dusty southern green, more like Galilee than Essex, which had been "the country" to Dickstein as a boy. He had traveled the world since, getting on planes as casually as any jet-setter, but he could remember the time when his horizons had been Park Lane in the west and Southend-on-Sea in the easL He could also remember how suddenly those horizons had receded, when he began to try to think of himself as a man, after his bar mitzvah and the death of his father. Other boys of his age saw themselves getting jobs on the docks or in printing plants, marrying local girls, finding houses within a quarter of a mile of their parents' homes and settling down; their ambitions were to breed a champion greyhound, to see West Ham win the Cup Final, to buy a motorcar. Young Nat thought he might go to California or Rhodesia or Hong Kong and become a brain surgeon or an archaeologist or a millionaire. It was partly that he was cleverer than most of his contemporaries; partly that to them foreign languages were alien, mysterious, a school subject like algebra rather than a way of talking; but mainly the difference had to do with being Jewish. Dickstein's boyhood chess partner, Harry Chieseman, was brainy and forceful and quick-witted, but he saw himself as a working-class Londoner and believed he would always be one. Dickstein knew-although he could not remember anyone actually telling him this-that wherever they were born, Jews were able to find their way into the greatest universities, to start new industries like motion pictures, to become the most successful bankers and lawyers and manufacturers; and if they could not do it in the country where they were born, they would move somewhere else and try again. It was curious, Dickstein thought as he recollected his boyhood, that a people who had been persecuted for centuries'should be so convinced of their ability to achieve anything they set their mind to. Like, when they needed nuclear bombs; they went out and got them. The tradition was a comfort, but it gave him no help with the ways and means. The power station loomed in the distance. As the bus got closer, Dickstein realized that the reactor was going to be bigger than he had imagined. It occupied a ten-story building. Somehow he had imagined the thing fitting into a small room. The external security was on an industrial, rather than military, level. The premises were surrounded by one high fence, not electrified. Dickstein looked into the gatehouse while the tour guide went through the formalities: the guards had only two closed-circuit television screens. Dickstein thought: I could get fifty men inside the compound in broad daylight without the guards noticing anything amiss. It was a bad sign, he decided glumly: it meant they had other reasons to be confident. He left the bus with the rest of the party and walked across the tar-macadamed parking lot to the reception building. The place had been laid out with a view to the public image of nuclear energy: there were well-kept lawns and flower beds and lots of newly planted trees; everything was clean and natural, white-painted and smokeless. Looking back toward the gatehouse, Dickstein saw a gray Opel pull up on the road. One of the two men in it got out and spoke to the security guards, who appeared to give directions. Inside the car, something glinted briefly in the sun. Dickstein followed the tour party into the Jounge. There in a glass case was a rugby football trophy won by the power station a team. An aerial photograph of the establishment hung on the wall. Dickstein stood in front of it, imprintifig its details on his mind, idly figuring out how he would raid the place while the back of his mind worried about the gray Opel. They were led around the power station by four hostesses in smart uniforms. Dickstein was not interested in the massive turbines, the space-age control room with its banks of dials and switches, or the water-intake system designed to save the ft and return them to the. river. He wondered if the men in the Opel had been following him, and if so, why. He was enormously interested in the delivery bay. He asked the hostess, "How does the fuel arrive?" "On trucks," she said archly. Some of the party giggled nervously at the thought of uranium running around the cotmtryside on trucks. "It's not dangerous," she went on as soon as she had got the expected laugh. "It isn't even radioactive until it is fed into the atomic pile. It is taken off the truck straight into the elevator and up to the fuel store on the seventh floor. From there, everything is automatic." "What about checking the quantity and quality of the consignmentr Dickstein said. "This is done at the fuel fabrication plant The consignment is sealed there, and only the seals are checked here." "Mank you." Dickstein nodded, pleased. The system was not quite as rigorous as Mr. Pfaffer of Euratom had claimed. One or two schemes began to take vague shape in Dicksteiifs mind. They saw the reactor loading machine in operation. Worked entirely by remote control, it took the fuel element from the store to the reactor, lifted the concrete lid of a fuel channel, removed the spent element, inserted the new one, closed the lid and dumped the used element into a water-filled shaft which led to the cooling ponds. The hostess, speaking perfect Parisian French in an oddly seductive voice, said, "T'he reactor has three thousand fuel channels, each channel containing eight fuel rods. The rods last four to seven years. The loading machine renews five channels in each operation." They went on to see the cooling ponds. Under twenty feet of water the spent fuel elements were loaded into pannets, then-cool, but still highly radioactive-they were locked into fifty-ton lead flasks, two hundred elements to a flask, for transport by road and rail to a reprocessing plant. As the hostess served coffee and pastries in the lounge Dickstein considered what he had learned. It had occurred to him that, since plutonium was ultimately what was wanted, he might steal used fuel. Now he knew why nobody had suggested it. It would be easy enough to hijack the track-he could do it singlehanded-but how would he sneak a fifty-ton lead flask out of the country and take it to Israel without anyone noticing? Stealing uranium from inside the power station was no more promising an idea. Sure, the security was flimsy-the very fact that he had been permitted to make this reconnaissance, and had even been given a guided tour, showed that. But fuel inside the station was locked into an automatic, remote-controlled system. The only way it could come out was by going right through the nuclear process and emerging in the cooling ponds; and then he was back with the problem of sneaking a huge flask of radioactive material through some European port. There had to be a way of breaking into the fuel store, Dickstein supposed; then you could manhandle the stuff into the elevator
, take it down, put it on a track and drive away; but that would involve holding some or all of the station personnel at gunpoint for some time, and his brief was to do this thing surreptitiously. A hostess offered to refill his cup, and he accepted. Trust the French to give you good coffee. A young engineer began a talk on nuclear safety. He wore unpressed trousers and a baggy sweater. Scientists and technicians all had a look about them, Dickstein had observed: their clothes were old, mismatched and comfortable, and if many of them wore beards, it was usually a sign of indifference rather than vanity. He thought it was because in their work, force of personality generally counted for nothing, brains for everything, so there was no point in trying to make a good visual impression. But perhaps that was a romantic view of science. . He did not pay attention to the lecture. The physicist from the Weizmann Institute had been much more concise. "There is no such thing as a safe level of radiation," he had said. "Such talk makes you think of radiation like water in a pool: if it's four feet high you're safe, if it's eight feet high you drown. But in fact radiation levels are much more like speed limits on the highway-thirty miles per hour is safer than eighty, but not as safe as twenty, and the only way to be completely safe is not to get in the car." Dickstein turned his mind back to the problem of stealing uranium. It was the requirement of secrecy that defeated every plan he dreamed up. Maybe the whole thing was doomed to failure. After all, impossible is impossible, he thought. No, it was too soon to say that. He went back to first principles. He would have to take a consignment in transit: that much was clear from what he had seen today. Now, the fuel elements were not checked at this end, they were fed straight into the system. He could hijack a truck, take the uranium out of the fuel elements, close them up again, reseal the consignment and bribe or frighten the truck driver to deliver the empty shell& The dud elements would gradually find their way into the reactor, five at a time, over a period of months. Eventually the reactoes output would fall marginally. There would be an investigation. Tests would be done. Perhaps no conclusions would be reached before the empty elements ran out and new, genuine fuel elements went in, causing output to rise again. Maybe no one would understand what had happened until the duds were reprocessed and the plutonium recovered was too little, by which time-four to seven years later-the trail to Tel Aviv would have gone cold. But they might find out sooner. And there was still the problem of getting the stuff out of the country. Still, he had the outline of one possible scheme, and he felt a bit more cheerful. . The lecture ended. There were a few desultory questions, then the party trooped back to the bus. Dickstein sat at the back. A middle-aged woman said to him, "That was my seat," and he stared at her stonily until she went away. Driving back from the power station, Dickstein kept looking out of the rear window. After about a mile the gray Opel Pulled out of a turnoff and followed the bus. Dickstein's cheerfulness vanished.