Triple (13 page)

TRIPLE

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

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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.

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 miclear power station,

traveling by bus and taxi, driving a rented car,

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and walking. By the end of the day he had identified the three

vehicles--the gray Opel, a dirty little fiatbe4 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 be 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.

T'he Opel went by on the opposite side of the highway.

They were following the booL

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.

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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."

Ilere was a godalmighty panic in Moscow when they heard about the Arab

atom bomb.

The Foreign Ministry panicked because they bad 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 whos-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 chose 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

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very carefully what he should do with the information. Ifis 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 boas

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, stiff bearing the previous day's date, and sent

around to the interested departments that afternoon by hand.

Then when he had made certain that half Moscow would associate his name

and no one elses with the news, he went to see his boss.

The same day a much less striking piece of news came in. As part of the

routine exchange of information between Egyptian Intelligence and the

KGB, Cairo sent notice that an

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