Triple (19 page)

TIUPLE

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

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 KOB: his brother, back in Georgia, was a dope

dealer, running hashish from Tbilisi to Moscow University (where it was

consumed by--among othem-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.

Ni1c 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 bell.

He came in at seven-thirty, soon after the club opened, and sat in the

same comer 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

105

Kon Foll*ff

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.

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

"Goodl". said Rostov. "Whafs he doing?"

"Waiting."

"Good. Alone?"

"Yes.

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

"I'm sending Pyotr down. Hell 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 . . . its 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, maybeT'

"Don't know."

"Did they speak?"

106

TJUPLE

"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. "Me mark just come 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

. . ."

"Ira a delivery. Good."

"Ibe 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!& 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 evening, 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.

107

Ken Folloff

"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. Nil 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 placenames from

various European countries, words such as "TamN" and "TRucx!I with

distances affixed next to them and names with suffixes "SA" or "mc,"

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 mix-

tures-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

108

71UPLE

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 Soci6t6 Generale de

la Chimie, a mining conglomerate with headquarters in Brussels. SGC had

sold the yelloweake to a German concern called F.A. Pedler of Wiesbaden.

Pedler planned to use it for "manufacture of uranium compoun4 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 seat 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 SGCs refinery to the docks

at ' Antwerp. There the yelloweake 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-4ooking like sand but yellower-would be

packed into five hundred and sixty 200-liter oil drums with heavily

sealed lids. The trainvould require

109

Ken Folleff

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 forThe 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 voyage: 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-secarity Israel.

Dickstein glanced at his wristwatch. It was past midnight. He began to

undress for bed. He needed to know more about the Coparelth her tonnage,

bow 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 Iloyd's of London.

There was something else be 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 disapptared---coincidence, or another

big

110