Triple

by Ken Follett

  Rostov shook his head. "Even the Israelis aren't that irresponsible. Besides, why then would Dickstein be in Luxembourg?"

  "Who knows?"

  Rostov sat down again. "What is there, here in Luxembourg? What makes it an important place? Why is your bank here, for example?"

  "It's an important European capital. My bank is here because the European Investment Bank is here. But there are also several Common Market institutions--in fact, there's a European Center over on the Kitchberg."

  "Which institutions?"

  "The Secretariat of the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers, and the Court of Justice. Oh, and Euratom."

  Rostov stared at Hassan. "Euratom?"

  "It's short for the European Atomic Energy Community, but everybody--"

  "I know what it is," Rostov said. "Don't you see the connection? He comes to Luxembourg, where Euratom has its headquarters, then he goes to visit a nuclear reactor."

  Hassan shrugged. "An interesting hypothesis. What's that you're drinking?"

  "Whiskey. Help yourself. As I recall, the French helped the Israelis build their nuclear reactor. Now they've probably cut off their aid. Dickstein may be after scientific secrets."

  Hassan poured himself a drink and sat down again. "How shall we operate, you and I? My orders are to cooperate with you."

  "My team is arriving this evening," Rostov said. He was thinking: Cooperate, hell--you'll follow my orders. He said, "I always use the same two men--Nik Bunin and Pyotr Tyrin. We operate very well together. They know how I like things done. I want you to work with them, do what they say--you'll learn a lot, they're very good agents."

  "And my people . . ."

  "We won't need them much longer," Rostov said briskly. "A small team is best. Now, our first job is to make sure we see Dickstein if and when he comes back to Luxembourg."

  "I've got a man at the airport twenty-four hours a day."

  "He'll have thought of that, he won't fly in. We must cover some other spots. He might go to Euratom . . ."

  "The Jean-Monnet building, yes."

  "We can cover the Alfa Hotel by bribing the desk clerk, but he won't go back there. And the nightclub in the Rue Dicks. Now, then, you said he hired a car."

  "Yes, in France."

  "He'll have dumped it by now--he knows that you know the number. I want you to call the rental company and find out where it was left--that may tell us what direction he's traveling in."

  "Very well."

  "Moscow has put his photograph on the wire, so our people will be looking out for him in every capital city in the world." Rostov finished his drink. "We'll catch him. One way or another."

  "Do you really think so?" Hassan asked.

  "I've played chess with him, I know how his mind works. His opening moves are routine, predictable; then suddenly he does something completely unexpected, usually something highly risky. You just have to wait for him to stick out his neck--then you chop his head off."

  Hassan said, "As I recall, you lost that chess match."

  Rostov gave a wolfish grin. "Yes, but this is real life," he said.

  There are two kinds of shadow: pavement artists and bulldogs. Pavement artists regard the business of shadowing people as a skill of the highest order, comparable with acting or cellular biophysics or poetry. They are perfectionists, capable of being almost invisible. They have wardrobes or unobtrusive clothes, they practice blank expressions in front of their mirrors, they know dozens of tricks with shop doorways and bus queues, policemen and children, spectacles and shopping bags and hedges. They despise the bulldogs, who think that shadowing someone is the same as following him, and trail the mark the way a dog follows its master.

  Nik Bunin was a bulldog. He was a young thug, the type of man who always becomes either a policeman or a criminal, depending on his luck. Luck had brought Nik into the KGB: his brother, back in Georgia, was a dope dealer, running hashish from Tbilisi to Moscow University (where it was consumed by--among others--Rostov's son Yuri). Nik was officially a chauffeur, unofficially a bodyguard, and even more unofficially a full-time professional ruffian.

  It was Nik who spotted The Pirate.

  Nik was a little under six feet tall, and very broad. He wore a leather jacket across his wide shoulders. He had short blond hair and watery green eyes, and he was embarrassed about the fact that at the age of twenty-five he still did not need to shave every day.

  At the nightclub in the Rue Dicks they thought he was cute as hell.

  He came in at seven-thirty, soon after the club opened, and sat in the same corner all night, drinking iced vodka with lugubrious relish, just watching. Somebody asked him to dance, and he told the man to piss off in bad French. When he turned up the second night they wondered if he was a jilted lover lying in wait for a showdown with his ex. He had about him the air of what the gays called rough trade, what with those shoulders and the leather jacket and his dour expression.

  Nik knew nothing of these undercurrents. He had been shown a photograph of a man and told to go to a club and look out for the man; so he memorized the face, then went to the club and looked. It made little difference to him whether the place was a whorehouse or a cathedral. He liked occasionally to get the chance to beat people up, but otherwise all he asked was regular pay and two days off every week to devote to his enthusiasms, which were vodka and coloring books.

  When Nat Dickstein came into the nightclub, Nik felt no sense of excitement. When he did well, Rostov always assumed it was because he had scrupulously obeyed precise orders, and he was generally right. Nik watched the mark sit down alone, order a drink, get served and sip his beer. It looked like he, too, was waiting.

  Nik went to the phone in the lobby and called the hotel. Rostov answered.

  "This is Nik. The mark just came in."

  "Good!" said Rostov. "What's he doing?"

  "Waiting."

  "Good. Alone?"

  "Yes."

  "Stay with him and call me if he does anything."

  "Sure."

  "I'm sending Pyotr down. He'll wait outside. If the mark leaves the club you follow him, doubling with Pyotr. The Arab will be with you in a car, well back. It's a . . . wait a minute . . . it's a green Volkswagen hatchback."

  "Okay."

  "Get back to him now."

  Nik hung up and returned to his table, not looking at Dickstein as he crossed the club.

  A few minutes later a well-dressed, good-looking man of about forty came into the club. He looked around, then walked past Dickstein's table and went to the bar. Nik saw Dickstein pick up a piece of paper from the table and put it in his pocket. It was all very discreet: only someone who was carefully observing Dickstein would know anything had happened.

  Nik went to the phone again.

  "A queer came in and gave him something--it looked like a ticket," he told Rostov.

  "Like a theater ticket, maybe?"

  "Don't know."

  "Did they speak?"

  "No, the queer just dropped the ticket on the table as he went by. They didn't even look at each other."

  "All right. Stay with it. Pyotr should be outside by now."

  "Wait," Nik said. "The mark just came into the lobby. Hold on . . . he's going to the desk . . . he's handed over the ticket, that's what it was, it was a cloakroom ticket."

  "Stay on the line, tell me what happens." Rostov's voice was deadly calm.

  "The guy behind the counter is giving him a briefcase. He leaves a tip . . ."

  "It's a delivery. Good."

  "The mark is leaving the club."

  "Follow him."

  "Shall I snatch the briefcase?"

  "No, I don't want us to show ourselves until we know what he's doing, just find out where he goes, and stay low. Go!"

  Nik hung up. He gave the cloakroom attendant some notes, saying: "I have to rush, this will cover my bill." Then he went up the staircase after Nat Dickstein.

  Out on the street it was a bright summer evenin
g, and there were plenty of people making their way to restaurants and cinemas or just strolling. Nik looked left and right, then saw the mark on the opposite side of the road, fifty yards away. He crossed over and followed.

  Dickstein was walking quickly, looking straight ahead, carrying the briefcase under his arm. Nik plodded after him for a couple of blocks. During this time, if Dickstein looked back he would see some distance behind him a man who had also been in the nightclub, and he would begin to wonder if he were being shadowed. Then Pyotr came alongside Nik, touched his arm, and went on ahead. Nik dropped back to a position from which he could see Pyotr but not Dickstein. If Dickstein looked again now, he would not see Nik and he would not recognize Pyotr. It was very difficult for the mark to sniff this kind of surveillance; but of course, the longer the distance for which the mark was shadowed, the more men were needed to keep up the regular switches.

  After another half mile the green Volkswagen pulled to the curb beside Nik. Yasif Hassan leaned across from the driving seat and opened the door. "New orders," he said. "Jump in."

  Nik got into the car and Hassan steered back toward the nightclub in the Rue Dicks.

  "You did very well," Hassan said.

  Nik ignored this.

  "We want you to go back to the club, pick out the delivery man and follow him home," Hassan said.

  "Colonel Rostov said this?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay."

  Hassan stopped the car close to the club. Nik went in. He stood in the doorway, looking carefully all about the club.

  The delivery man had gone.

  The computer printout ran to more than one hundred pages. Dickstein's heart sank as he flicked through the prized sheets of paper he had worked so hard to get. None of it made sense.

  He returned to the first page and looked again. There were a lot of jumbled numbers and letters. Could it be in code? No--this printout was used every day by the ordinary office workers of Euratom, so it had to be fairly easily comprehensible.

  Dickstein concentrated. He saw "U234." He knew that to be an isotope of uranium. Another group of letters and numbers was "180KG"--one hundred and eighty kilograms. "17F68" would be a date, the seventeenth of February this year. Gradually the lines of computer-alphabet letters and numbers began to yield up their meanings: he found place-names from various European countries, words such as "TRAIN" and "TRUCK" with distances affixed next to them and names with suffixes "SA" or "INC," indicating companies. Eventually the layout of the entries became clear: the first line gave the quantity and type of material, the second line the name and address of the sender, and so on.

  His spirits lifted. He read on with growing comprehension and a sense of achievement. About sixty consignments were listed in the printout. There seemed to be three main types: large quantities of crude uranium ore coming from mines in South Africa, Canada and France to European refineries; fuel elements--oxides, uranium metal or enriched mixtures--moving from fabrication plants to reactors; and spent fuel from reactors going for reprocessing and disposal. There were a few nonstandard shipments, mostly of plutonium and transuranium elements extracted from spent fuel and sent to laboratories in universities and research institutes.

  Dickstein's head ached and his eyes were bleary by the time he found what he was looking for. On the very last page there was one shipment headed "NON-NUCLEAR."

  He had been briefly told, by the Rehovot physicist with the flowered tie, about the non-nuclear uses of uranium and its compounds in photography, in dyeing, as coloring agents for glass and ceramics and as industrial catalysts. Of course the stuff always had the potential for fission no matter how mundane and innocent its use, so the Euratom regulations still applied. However, Dickstein thought it likely that in ordinary industrial chemistry the security would be less strict.

  The entry on the last page referred to two hundred tons of yellowcake, or crude uranium oxide. It was in Belgium, at a metal refinery in the countryside near the Dutch border, a site licensed for storage of fissionable material. The refinery was owned by the Societe Generale de la Chimie, a mining conglomerate with headquarters in Brussels. SGC had sold the yellowcake to a German concern called F.A. Pedler of Wiesbaden. Pedler planned to use it for "manufacture of uranium compounds, especially uranium carbide, in commercial quantities." Dickstein recalled that the carbide was a catalyst for the production of synthetic ammonia.

  However, it seemed that Pedler were not going to work the uranium themselves, at least not initially. Dickstein's interest sharpened as he read that they had not applied for their own works in Wiesbaden to be licensed, but instead for permission to ship the yellowcake to Genoa by sea. There it was to undergo "non-nuclear processing" by a company called Angeluzzi e Bianco.

  By sea! The implications struck Dickstein instantly: the load would be passed through a European port by someone else.

  He read on. Transport would be by railway from SGC's refinery to the docks at Antwerp. There the yellowcake would be loaded on to the motor vessel Coparelli for shipment to Genoa. The short journey from the Italian port to the Angeluzzi e Bianco works would be made by road.

  For the trip the yellowcake--looking like sand but yellower--would be packed into five hundred and sixty 200-liter oil drums with heavily sealed lids. The train would require eleven cars, the ship would carry no other cargo for this voyage, and the Italians would use six trucks for the last leg of the journey.

  It was the sea journey that excited Dickstein: through the English Channel, across the Bay of Biscay, down the Atlantic coast of Spain, through the Strait of Gibraltar and across one thousand miles of the Mediterranean.

  A lot could go wrong in that distance.

  Journeys on land were straightforward, controlled: a train left at noon one day and arrived at eight-thirty the following morning; a truck traveled on roads that always carried other traffic, including police cars; a plane was continually in contact with someone or other on the ground. But the sea was unpredictable, with its own laws--a trip could take ten days or twenty, there might be storms and collisions and engine trouble, unscheduled ports of call and sudden changes of direction. Hijack a plane and the whole world would see it on television an hour later; hijack a ship and no one would know about it for days, weeks, perhaps forever.

  The sea was the inevitable choice for The Pirate.

  Dickstein thought on, with growing enthusiasm and a sense that the solution to his problem was within his reach. Hijack the Coparelli . . . then what? Transfer the cargo to the hold of the pirate ship. The Coparelli would probably have its own derricks. But transferring a cargo at sea could be chancy. Dickstein looked on the printout for the proposed date of the vovage: November. That was bad. There might be storms--even the Mediterranean could blow up a gale in November. What, then? Take over the Coparelli and sail her to Haifa? It would be hard to dock a stolen ship secretly, even in top-security Israel.

  Dickstein glanced at his wristwatch. It was past midnight. He began to undress for bed. He needed to know more about the Coparelli: her tonnage, how many crew, present whereabouts, who owned her, and if possible her layout. Tomorrow he would go to London. You could find out anything about ships at Lloyd's of London.

  There was something else he needed to know: who was following him around Europe? There had been a big team in France. Tonight as he left the nightclub in the Rue Dicks a thuggish face had been behind him. He had suspected a tail, but the face had disappeared--coincidence, or another big team? It rather depended on whether Hassan was in the game. He could make inquiries about that, too, in England.

  He wondered how to travel. If somebody had picked up his scent tonight he ought to take some precautions tomorrow. Even if the thuggish face were nobody, Dickstein had to make sure he was not spotted at Luxembourg airport.

  He picked up the phone and dialed the desk. When the clerk answered, he said, "Wake me at six-thirty, please."

  "Very good, sir."

  He hung up and got into bed. At last he had a defin
ite target: the Coparelli. He did not yet have a plan, but he knew in outline what had to be done. Whatever other difficulties came up, the combination of a non-nuclear consignment and a sea journey was irresistible.

  He turned out the light and closed his eyes, thinking: What a good day.

  David Rostov had always been a condescending bastard, and he had not improved with age, thought Yasif Hassan. "What you probably don't realize . . ." he would say with a patronizing smile; and, "We won't need your people much longer--a small team is better"; and, "You can tag along in the car and keep out of sight"; and now, "Man the phone while I go to the Embassy."

  Hassan had been prepared to work under Rostov's orders as one of the team, but it seemed his status was lower than that. It was, to say the least, insulting to be considered inferior to a man like Nik Bunin.

  The trouble was, Rostov had some justification. It was not that the Russians were smarter than the Arabs; but the KGB was undoubtedly a larger, richer, more powerful and more professional organization than Egyptian Intelligence.

  Hassan had no choice but to suffer Rostov's attitude, justified or not. Cairo was delighted to have the KGB hunting one of the Arab world's greatest enemies. If Hassan were to complain, he rather than Rostov would be taken off the case.

  Rostov might remember, thought Hassan, that it was the Arabs who had first spotted Dickstein; there would be no investigation at all had it not been for my original discovery.

  All the same, he wanted to win Rostov's respect; to have the Russian confide in him, discuss developments, ask his opinion. He would have to prove to Rostov that he was a competent and professional agent, easily the equal of Nik Bunin and Pyotr Tyrin.

  The phone rang. Hassan picked it up hastily. "Hello?"

  "Is the other one there?" It was Tyrin's voice.

  "He's out. What's happening?"

  Tyrin hesitated. "When will he be back?"

  "I don't know," Hassan lied. "Give me your report."

  "Okay. The client got off the train at Zurich."

  "Zurich? Go on."

  "He took a taxi to a bank, entered and went down into the vault. This particular bank has safe-deposit boxes. He came out carrying a briefcase."

  "And then?"

  "He went to a car dealer on the outskirts of the city and bought a used E-type Jaguar, paying with cash he had in the case."