Triple (1991) Page 4

  Borg let his disappointment show. "Is that all Towfik could manage?" Suddenly there was anger in the soft voice of the Arab. "Tbe kid died for you," he said. "IM thsink him in heaven. Did he die in vain?" "He took this from Schules apartment." Kawash drew a hand from inside his coat and showed Borg a small, square box of blue plastic. Borg took the box. "How do you know where he got it?" "It has SchuWs fingerprints on it. And we arrested Towfik right after he broke into the apartment." Borg opened the box and fingered the light-proof,envelope. It was unsealed. He took out the photographic negative. Ile Arab said, "We opened the envelope and developed the film. It's blank." With a deep sense of satisfaction, Borg reassembled the box and put it into his pocket. Now it all made sense; now he understood; now he knew what he had to do. A train came in. "You want to catch this oner' he said. Kawash frowned slightly, nodded assent, and moved to the edge of the platform as the train stopped and the doors opened. He boarded, and stood just inside. He said, "I don't know what on earth the box is." Borg thought, You don't like me, but I think you're just great. He smiled thinly at the Arab as the doors of the subway train began to slide shut. "I do," he said.

  Chapter Two

  The American girl was quite taken with Nat Dickstein. They worked side by side in a dusty vineyard, weeding and hoein& with a light breeze blowing over them from the Sea of Galilee. Dickstein had taken off his shirt and worked in shorts and sandals, with the contempt for the sun which only the city-born possess. He was a thin man, small-boned, with narrow shoulders, a shallow chest, and knobby elbows and knees. Karen would watch him when she stopped for a break-which she did often, although he never seemed to need a rest. Stringy muscles moved like knotted rope under his brown, scarred skin. She was a sensual woman, and she wanted to touch those scars with her fingers and ask him how he got them. Sometimes he would look up and catch her staring. mid he would grin, unembarrassed, and carry on working. His face was regular and anonymous in repose. He had dark eyes behind cheap round spictacles of the kind which Karen's generation liked because John Lennon wore them. His hair was dark, too, and short: Karen would have liked him to grow it. When he grinned that lopsided grin, he looked younger, though at any time it was hard to say just how old he might be. He had the strength and energy of a young man, but she had seen the concentration-camp tattoo under his wristwatch, so he could not be much less than forty, she thought. He had. arrived at the kibbutz shortly after Karen, in the summer of 1967. She had come, with her deodorants and her contraceptive pills, looking for a place where she could live out hippy ideals without getting stoned twenty-four hours a day. He had been brought here in an ambulance. She assumed he had been wounded in the Six-Day War, and the other kibbutzniks agreed, vaguely, that it was something like that

  His welcome had been very different from hers. Karen's reception had been friendly but wary: in her philosophy they saw their own, with dangerous additions. Nat Dickstein returned like a long-lost son. They clustered around him, fed hun soup and came away from his wounds with tears in their eyes. If Dickstein was their son, Esther was their mother. She was the oldest member of the kibbutz. Karen had said, "She looks like Golda Meir's mother," and one of the others had said, "I think she's Golda's father," and they all laughed affectionately. She used a walking stick, and stomped about the village giving unsolicited advice, most of it very wise. She had stood guard outside Dickstein's sickroom chasing away noisy children, waving her stick and threatening beatings which even the children knew would never be administered. Dickstein had recovered very quickly. Within a few days he was sitting out in the sun, peeling vegetables for the kitchen and telling vulgar jokes to the older children. Two weeks later he was working in the fields, and soon he was laboring harder than all but the youngest men. His past was vague, but Esther had told Karen the story of his arrival in Israel in 1948, during the War of Independence. Nineteen forty-eight was part of the recent past for Esther. She had been a young woman in London in the first two decades of the century, and had been an activist in half a dozen radical left-wing causes from suffragism to pacifism before emigrating to Palestine; but her memory went back further, to pogroms in Russia which she recalled vaguely in monstrous nightmare images. She had sat under a fig tree in the heat of the day, varnishing a chair she had made with her own gnarled hands, and talked about Dickstein like a clever but mischievous schoolboy. "Mere were eight or nine of them, some from the university, some working men from the East End. If they ever had any money, they'd spent it before they got to France. They hitched a ride on a truck to Paris, then jumped a freight train to Marseilles. From there, it seems, they walked most of the way to Italy. Then they stole a huge car, a German Army staff car, a Mercedes, and drove all the way to the toe of Italy." Esther's face was creased in smiles, and Karen thought: She would love to have been there with them. "Dickstein had been to Sicily in the war, and it seems he knew the Mafia there. They had all the guns left over from the war. Dickstein wanted guns for Israel, but he had no money. He persuaded the Sicilians to sell a boatload of submachine guns to an Arab purchaser, and then to tell the Jews where the pickup would take place. They knew what he was up to, and they loved it. The deal was done, the Sicilians got their money, and then Dickstein and his friend stole the boat with its cargo and sailed to Israell" Karen had laughed aloud, there under the fig tree, and a grazing goat looked up at her balefully. "Wait," said Esther, "you haven't heard the end of it Some of the university boys had done a bit of rowing, and one of the other lot was a docker, but that was all the experience they had of the sea, and here they were sailing a fivethousand-ton cargo vessel on their own. They figured out a little navigation from first principles: the ship had charts and a compass. Dickstein had looked up in a book how to start the ship, but he says the book did not tell how to stop it So they steamed into Haifa, yelling and waving and throwing their hats into the air, just like it was a varsity rag--and ploughed straight into the dock. "lley were forgiven instantly, of course-the guns were more precious than gold, literally. And that!s when they started to call Dickstein The Pirate'." He did not look much like a pirate, working in the vineyard in his baggy shorts and his spectacles, Karen thought. AN the same, he was attractive. She wanted to seduce him, but she could not figure out how. He obviously liked her, and she had taken care to let him know she was available. But he never made a move. Perhaps he felt she was too young and innocent. Or maybe he was not interested in women. His voice broke into her thoughts. "I think we've finished." She looked at the sun: it was time to go. "You've done twice as much as me." 'Tm used to the work. Ive been here, on and off, for twenty years. 'Me body gets into the habit." They walked back toward the village as the sky turned purple and yellow. Karen said, "What else do you do-when you're not here?" "Oh ... poison wells, kidnap Christian children." Karen laughed.

  Dickstein said, "How does this life compare with Californiar, "This is a wonderful place," she told him. "I think theres a lot of work still to be done before the women are genuinely equal." "That seems to be the big topic at the moment." "You never have much to say about it." "Listen, I think you're right; but it's better for people to take their freedom rather than be given it." Karen said, "That sounds like a good excuse for doing nothing." Dickstein laughed. As they entered the village they passed a young man on a pony, carrying a rifle, on his way to patrol the borders of the settlement Dickstein called out, "Be careful, Yisrael." The shelling from the Golan Heights had stopped, of course, and the children no longer had to sleep underground; but the kibbutz kept up the patrols. Dickstein had been one of those in favor of maintaining vigilance. -rm going to read to Mottie," Dickstein said. "Can I comer, "Why not?" Dickstein looked at his watch. "We've just got time to wash. Come to my room in five minutes." They parted, and Karen went into the showers. A kibbutz was the best place to be an orphan, she thought as she took off her clothes. McAtie's parents were both dead-the father blown up in the attack on the Golan Heights during the last war, the mother killed a year earlier in a shoot-out with Fedayeen.
Both had been close friends of Dickstein. It was a tragedy for the child, of course; but he still slept in the same bed, ate in the same room, and had almost one hundred other adults to love and care for him-he was not foisted onto unwilling aunts or aging grandparents or, worst of all, an orphanage. And he had Dickstein. When she had washed off the dust Karen put on clean clothes and went to Dickstein's room. Mottie was already there, sifting on Dickstein's lap, sucking his thumb and listening to Treavure Island in Hebrew. Dickstein was the only person Karen had ever met who spoke Hebrew with a Cockney accent. His speech was even more strange now, because he was doing different voices for the characters in the story: a high-pitched boy's voice for Jim, a deep snarl for Long John Silver, and a half whisper for the mad Ben Gunn. Karen sat and watched the two of them in the yellow electric light, thinking how boyish Dickstein appeared, and how grown-up the child was. When the chapter was finished they took Mottie to his dormitory, kissed him goodnight, and went into the dining room. Karen thought: If we continue to go about together like this, everyone will think we!re lovers already. They sat with Esther. After dinner she told them a story, and there was a young womWs twinkle in her eye. "When I first went to Jerusalem, they used to say that if you owned a feather pillow, you could buy a house." Dickstein willingly took the bait. "How was that?" "You could sell a good feather pillow for a pound. With that pound you could join a loan society, which entitled you to borrow ten pounds. Then you found a plot of land. The owner of the land would take ten pounds deposit and the rest in promissory notes. Now you were a landowner. You went to a builder and said, 'Build a house for yourself on this plot of land. All I want is a small flat for myself and my family.' " They all-Iaughed. Dickstein looked toward the door. Karen followed his glance and saw a stranger, a stocky man in his forties with a coarse, fleshy face. Dickstein got up and went to him. Esther said to Karen, "Don't break your heart, child. That one is not made to be a husband." Karen looked at Esther, then back at the doorway. Dickstein had gone. A few moments later she heard the sound of a car starting up and driving away. Esther put her old hand on Karen's young one, and squeezed. Karen never saw Dickstein again.

  Nat Dickstein and Pierre Borg sat in the back seat of a big black CitroEn. Borg's bodyguard was driving, with his machine pistol lying on the front seat beside him. They traveled through the darkness with nothing ahead but the cone of light from the headlamps. Nat Dickstein was afraid. He had never come to see himself the way others did, as a competent, indeed brilliant, agent who had proved his ability to survive just about anything. Later, when the game was on and he was living by his wits, grappling at close quarters with strategy and problems and personalities, there would be no room in his mind for fear; but now, when Borg was about to brief him, he had no plans to make, no forecasts to refine, no characters to assess. He knew only that he had to turn his back on peace and simple hard work, the land and the sunshine and caring for growing things; and that ahead of him there were terrible risks and great danger, lies and pain and bloodshed and, perhaps, his death. So he sat in the corner of the seat, his arms and legs crossed tightly, watching Borg's dimly lit face, while fear of the unknown knotted and writhed in his stomach and made him nauseous. In the faint, shifting light, Borg looked like the giant in a fairy story. He had heavy features: thick lips, broad cheeks, and protruding eyes shadowed by thick brows. As a child he had been told he was ugly, and so he had grown into an ugly man. When he was uneasy-like now-his bands went continually. to his face, covering his mouth, rubbing his nose, scratching his forehead, in a subconscious attempt to hide his unsightliness. Once, in a relaxed moment, Dickstein had asked him, "Why do you yell at everybody?" and he had replied, "Because they're all so fucking handsome." They never knew what language to use when they spoke. Borg was French-Canadian originally, and found Hebrew a struggle. Dickstein's Hebrew was good and his French only passable. Usually they settled for English. Dickstein had worked under Borg for ten years, and still he did not like the man. He felt he understood Borg's troubled, unhappy nature; and he respected his professionalism and his obsessional devotion to Israeli Intelligence; but in Dickstein's book this was not enough 'cause to like a person. When Borg lied to him, there were always good sound reasons, but Dickstein resented the lie no less. He retaliated by playing Borg's tactics back against him. He would refuse to say where he was going, or he would lie about it. He never checked in on schedule while he was in the field: bLe simply called or sent messages with peremptory demands. And he would sometimes conceal from Borg part or all of his game plan. This prevented Borg from- interfering with schemes of his own, and it was almost more secure--for what Borg knew, he might be obliged to tell the politicians, and what they knew might find its way to the opposition. Dickstein knew the strength of his position-he was responsible for many of the triumphs which had distinguished Bores career--and he played it for all it was worth. The CitroL% roared through the Arab town of Nazarethdeserted now, presumably under curfew-and went on into the night, heading for Tel Aviv. Borg lit a thin cigar and began to speak. "After the Six-Day War, one of the bright boys in the Ministry of Defense wrote a paper entitled 'The Inevitable Destruction of Israel! The argument went like this. During the War of Independence, we bought arms from Czechoslovakia. When the Soviet bloc began to take the Arab side, we turned to France, and later West Germany. Germany called off all deals as soon as the Arabs found out. France imposed an embargo after the Six-Day War. Both Britain and the United States have consistently refused to supply us with arms. We are losing our sources one by one. "Suppose we are able to make up those losses, by continually finding new suppliers and by building our own munitions industry: even then, the fact remains that Israel must be the loser in a Middle East arms race. The off countries will be richer than us throughout the foreseeable future. Our defense budget is already a terrible burden on the national economy whereas our enemies have nothing better to spend their billions on. When they have ten thousand tanks, well need six thousand; when they have twenty thousand tanks, we'll need twelve thousand; and so on. Simply by doubling their arms expenditure every year, they will be able to cripple our national economy without firing a shot. . "Finally, the recent history of the Middle East shows a pattern of limited wars about once a decade. The logic of this pattern is against us. The Ambs can afford to lose a war from time to time. We can't: our first defeat will be our last war. "Conclusion: the survival of Israel depends on our breaking out of the vicious spiral our enemies have prescribed for us." Dickstein nodded. "It's not a novel line of thought. It's the usual argument for 'peace at any price.' I should think the bright boy got fired from the Ministry of Defense for that paper." "Wrong both times. He went on to say, 'We must inflict, or have the power to inflict, permanent and crippling damage to the next Arab army that crosses our borders. We must have nuclear weapons. Is Dickstein was very still for a moment; then he let out his breath in a long whistle. It was one of those devastating ideas that seems completely obvious as soon as it has been sai(L It would change everything. He was silent for a while, digesting the implications. His mind teemed with questions. Was it technically feasible? Would the Americans help? Would the Israeli Cabinet approve it? Would the Arabs retaliate with their own bomb? What he said was, "Bright boy in the Ministry, hell. That was Moshe Dayan's paper." "No comment," said Borg. Did the Cabinet adopt it?- 'There has been a long debate, Certain elder statesmen argued that they had not come this far to see the Middle East wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. But the opposition faction relied mainly on the argument that if we have a bomb, the Arabs will get one too, and we will be back at square one. As it UnWA out, that was their big mistake." Borg reached into his pocket and took out a small plastic box. He handed it to Dickstein. Dickstein switched on the interior light and examined the box. It was about an inch and a half square, thin, and blue in color. It opened to reveal a small envelope made of heavy light-proof paper. "What!s this?" he -said. Borg said, "A physicist named Friedrich Schulz visited Cairo in February. He is Austrian but
he works in the United States. He was apparently on holiday in Europe, but his plane ticket to Egypt was paid for by the Egyptian government. "I had him followed, but he gave our boy the slip and disappeared into the Western Desert for forty-eight hours. We know from CIA satellite pictures that there is a major construction Project going on in that part of the desert. When Schulz came back, he had that in his pocket It's a personnel dosimeter. The envelope, which is light-tight, contains a piece of ordinary Photographic film. You carry the box in your pocket, or pinned to your lapel or trouser belt. If you!re exposed to radiation, the film will -show fogging when irs d&veloped. Dosimeters are carried, as a matter of routine, by everyone who visits or works in a nuclear power station." Dickstein switched off the light and gave the box back to Borg. "You're telling me the Arabs are already making atom bombs," he said softly. "That's right." Borg spoke unnecessarily loudly. "So the Cabinet gave Dayan the go-ahead to make a bomb of his own." "In principle, yes." "How so?" "Mere are some practical difficulties. The mechanics of the business are simple-the actual clockwork of the bomb, so. to speak. Anyone who can make a conventional bomb can make a nuclear bomb. Ile problem is getting hold of the explosive material, plutonium. You get plutonium out of an atomic reactor. It's a by-product. Now, we have a reactor, at Dimona in the Negev Desert. Did you know thair, "Yes." "It's our worst-kept secret. However, we don't have the equipment for extracting the plutonium from the spent fuel. We could build a reprocessing plant, but the problem is that we have no uranium of our own to put through the reactor." "Wait a minute." Dickstein frowned. "We must have uranium, to fuel the reactor for normal use." "correct. We get it from France, and it's supplied to us on condition we return the spent fuel to them for reprocessing, so they get the plutonium." "Other suppliers?" "Would impose the same condition-it's part of all the nuclear non-proliferation treaties." Dickstein said, "But the people at Dimona could siphon off some of the spent fuel without anyone noticing." "No. Given the quantity of uranium originally supplied, it's possible to calculate precisely how much plutonium comes out the other end. And they weigh it very carefully-it's expensive stuff." "So the problem is to get hold of some uranium." "Right" "And the solution?" "Me solution is, you're going to steal it." Dickstein looked out of the window. The moon came out, revealing a flock of sheep huddled in a corner of a field, watched by an Arab shepherd with a staff: a Biblical scene. So this was the game: stolen uranium for the land of milk and honey. Last time it had been the murder of a terrorist leader in Damascus; the time before, blackmailing a wealthy Arab in Monte Carlo to stop him funding the Fedayeen. Dickstein's feelings had been pushed into the background while Borg talked about politics and Schulz and nuclear reactors. Now he was reminded that this involved him; and the fear came back, and with it a memory. After his father died the family had been desperately poor, and when creditors called, Nat had been sent to the door to say mummy was out. At the age of thirteen, he had found it unbearably humiliating, because the creditors knew he was lying, and he knew they knew, and they would look at him with a mixture of contempt and pity which pierced him to the quick. He would never forget that feeling-and it came back, like a reminder from his unconscious, when somebody like Borg said something like, "Little Nathaniel, go steal some uranium for your motherland." To his mother he had always said, "Do I have to?" And now he said to Pierre Borg, "If we're going to steal it any~-way, why not buy it and simply refuse to send it back for reprocessing?" "Because that way, everyone would know what we're up tO.,V "SO?" "Reprocessing takes time-many months. During that time two things could happen: one, the Egyptians would hurry their program; and two, the Americans would pressure us not to build the bomb." "Oh!" It was worse. "So you want me to steal this stuff without anyone knowing that it's us." "More than that." Borg's voice was harsh and throaty. "Nobody must even know it's been stolen. It must look as if the stuff has just been lost. I want the owners, and the international agencies, to be so embarrassed about the stuff disappearing that they will hush it up. Then, when they discover they've been robbed, they will be corhpromised by their own cover-up. "It's bound to come out eventually." "Not before we've got our bomb." They had reached the coast road from Haifa to Tel Aviv, and as the car butted through the night Oickstein could see, over to the right, occasional glimpses of the Mediterranean, glinting like jewelry in the moonlight. When he spoke he was surprised at the note of weary resignation in his voice. "How much uranium do we need?" "They want twelve bombs. In the yellowcake form-that's the uranium oro--it would mean about a hundred tons." "I won't -be able to slip it into my pocket, then." Dickstein frowned. 'Vhat would all that cost if we bought it." "Something over one million U.S. dollars." "And you think the losers will just hush it up?" "If it's done right" "Howr "That's your job, Pirate." -rm not so sure its possible," Dickstein said. "It's got to be. I told the Prime Minister we could pun it off. I laidray career on the line, Nat." "Don't talk to me about your bleeding career." Borg Ht another cigar-a nervous reaction to Dickstein's scorn. Dickstein opened his window an inch to let the smoke out. His sudden hostility bad nothing to do with Borg's clumsy personal appeal: that was typical of the man's inability to understand how people felt toward him What had unnerved Dickstein was a sudden vision of mushroom clouds over Jerusalem and Cairo, of cotton fields by the Nile and vineyards beside the Sea of Galilee blighted by fallout, the Middle East wasted by fire, its children deformed for generation& He said, "I still think peace is an alternative." Borg shrugged. "I wouldn't know. I don't get involved in politics." "Btillshit." Borg sighed. "Look, if they have a bomb, we have to have one too, don't we?" "If that was all there was to it, we could just hold a press conference, announce that the Egyptians are making a bomb, and let the rest of the world stop them. I think our people want the bomb anyway. I think they're glad of the excuse." "And maybe they're right!" Borg said. "We can't go on fighting a war every few years-one of these days we might lose one." "We could make peace." Borg snorted. "You're so fucking naive." "If we gave way on a few things-the Occupied Territories, the Law of Return, equal rights for Arabs in Israel---~'