Triple (12 page)

TRiPLE

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.99

Hassan gave him two hundred Luxembourg francs. "Would you tell me what

name he was registered under?"

"Certainly. sir." The clerk consulted a f3le. "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. "Defi-

nitely 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

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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 referred 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.

67

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 pic-

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TIUPLE

tares, 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 station7a 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

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Ken Folloff

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,

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