by Ken Follett
Then Cairo called 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 caller wanted to know more about Dickstein. "I want to confirm the identity of the customer referred to in your message," he said. "Did he wear round spectacles?"
"Yes."
"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, I've never--"
"Then it should be," the man said angrily. "How long have you been with us?"
"Since 1957."
"That 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 can't," 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."
"I'll do my best--"
"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 last.
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 language he spoke passably well, except for English, but England was not part of Euratom. He traveled to the power station in a bus with an assorted party of students and tourists. 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 east. 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 minds 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 lounge. There in a glass case was a rugby football trophy won by the power station's team. An aerial photograph of the establishment hung on the wall. Dickstein stood in front of it, imprinting 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 fish 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 countryside 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 consignment?" Dickstein said.
"This is done at the fuel fabrication plant. The consignment is sealed there, and only the seals are checked here."
"Thank 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 Dickstein's 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, "The 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 rep
rocessing 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 truck--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 truck 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 shells. The dud elements would gradually find their way into the reactor, five at a time, over a period of months. Eventually the reactor's 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.
He had been spotted. It had happened either here or in Luxembourg, probably Luxembourg. The spotter might have been Yasif Hassan--no reason why he should not be an agent--or someone else. They must be following him out of general curiosity because there was no way--was there?--that they could know what he was up to. All he had to do was lose them.
He spent a day in and around the town near the nuclear power station, traveling by bus and taxi, driving a rented car, and walking. By the end of the day he had identified the three vehicles--the gray Opel, a dirty little flatbed truck, and a German Ford--and five of the men in the surveillance team. The men looked vaguely Arabic, but in this part of France many of the criminals were North African: somebody might have hired local help. The size of the team explained why he had not sniffed the surveillance earlier. They had been able continually to switch cars and personnel. The trip to the power station, a long there-and-back journey on a country road with very little traffic, explained why the team had finally blown themselves.
The next day he drove out of town and on to the autoroute. The Ford followed him for a few miles, then the gray Opel took over. There were two men in each car. There would be two more in the flatbed truck, plus one at his hotel.
The Opel was still with him when he found a pedestrian bridge over the road in a place where there were no turnoffs from the highway for four or five miles in either direction. Dickstein pulled over to the shoulder, stopped the car, got out and lifted the hood. He looked inside for a few minutes. The gray Opel disappeared up ahead, and the Ford went by a minute later. The Ford would wait at the next turnoff, and the Opel would come back on the opposite side of the road to see what he was doing. That was what the textbook prescribed for this situation.
Dickstein hoped these people would follow the book, otherwise his scheme would not work.
He took a collapsible warning triangle from the trunk of the car and stood it behind the offside rear wheel.
The Opel went by on the opposite side of the highway.
They were following the book.
Dickstein began to walk.
When he got off the highway he caught the first bus he saw and rode it until it came to a town. On the journey he spotted each of the three surveillance vehicles at different times. He allowed himself to feel a little premature triumph: they were going for it.
He took a taxi from the town and got out close to his car but on the wrong side of the highway. The Opel went by, then the Ford pulled off the road a couple of hundred yards behind him.
Dickstein began to run.
He was in good condition after his months of outdoor work in the kibbutz. He sprinted to the pedestrian bridge, ran across it and raced along the shoulder on the other side of the road. Breathing hard and sweating, he reached his abandoned car in under three minutes.
One of the men from the Ford had got out and started to follow him. The man now realized he had been taken in. The Ford moved off. The man ran back and jumped into it as it gathered speed and swung into the slow lane.
Dickstein got into his car. The surveillance vehicles were now on the wrong side of the highway and would have to go all the way to the next junction before they could cross over and come after him. At sixty miles per hour the round trip would take them ten minutes, which meant he had at least five minutes start on them. They would not catch him.
He pulled away, heading for Paris, humming a musical chant that came from the football terraces of West Ham: "Easy, easy, eeeezeee."
There was a godalmighty panic in Moscow when they heard about the Arab atom bomb.
The Foreign Ministry panicked because they had not heard of it earlier, the KGB panicked because they had not heard about it first, and the Party Secretary's office panicked because the last thing they wanted was another who's-to-blame row between the Foreign Ministry and the KGB, the previous one had made life hell in the Kremlin for eleven months.
Fortunately, the way the Egyptians c
hose to make their revelation allowed for a certain amount of covering of rears. The Egyptians wanted to make the point that they were not diplomatically obliged to tell their allies about this secret project, and the technical help they were asking for was not crucial to its success. Their attitude was "Oh, by the way, we're building this nuclear reactor in order to get some plutonium to make atom bombs to blow Israel off the face of the earth, so would you like to give us a hand, or not?" The message, trimmed and decorated with ambassadorial niceties, was delivered, in the manner of an afterthought, at the end of a routine meeting between the Egyptian Ambassador in Moscow and the deputy chief of the Middle East desk at the Foreign Ministry.
The deputy chief who received the message considered very carefully what he should do with the information. His first duty, naturally, was to pass the news to his chief, who would then tell the Secretary. However, the credit for the news would go to his chief, who would also not miss the opportunity for scoring points off the KGB. Was there a way for the deputy chief to gain some advantage to himself out of the affair?
He knew that the best way to get on in the Kremlin was to put the KGB under some obligation to yourself. He was now in a position to do the boys a big favor. If he warned them of the Egyptian Ambassador's message, they would have a little time to get ready to pretend they knew all about the Arab atom bomb and were about to reveal the news themselves.
He put on his coat, thinking to go out and phone his acquaintance in the KGB from a phone booth in case his own phone were tapped--then he realized how silly that would be, for he was going to call the KGB, and it was they who tapped people's phones anyway; so he took off his coat and used his office phone.
The KGB desk man he talked to was equally expert at working the system. In the new KGB building on the Moscow ring road, he kicked up a huge fuss. First he called his boss's secretary and asked for an urgent meeting in fifteen minutes. He carefully avoided speaking to the boss himself. He fired off half a dozen more noisy phone calls, and sent secretaries and messengers scurrying about the building to take memos and collect files. But his master stroke was the agenda. It so happened that the agenda for the next meeting of the Middle East political committee had been typed the previous day and was at this moment being run off on a duplicating machine. He got the agenda back and at the top of the list added a new item: "Recent Developments in Egyptian Armaments--Special Report," followed by his own name in brackets. Next he ordered the new agenda to be duplicated, still bearing the previous day's date, and sent around to the interested departments that afternoon by hand.