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  Then when he had made certain that half of Moscow would associate his name and no one else's 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 Israeli agent named Nat Dickstein had been spotted in Luxembourg and was now under surveillance. Because of the circumstances, the report got less attention than it deserved. There was only one man in the KGB who entertained the mildest suspicion that the two items might be connected.

  His name was David Rostov.

  David Rostov's father had been a minor diplomat whose career was stunted by a lack of connections, particularly secret service connections. Knowing this, the son, with the remorseless logic which was to characterize his decisions all his life, joined what was then called the NKVD, later to become the KGB.

  He had already been an agent when he went to Oxford. In those idealistic times, when Russia had just won the war and the extent of the Stalin purge was not comprehended, the great English universities had been ripe recruiting-grounds for Soviet Intelligence. Rostov had picked a couple of winners, one of whom was still sending secrets from London in 1968. Nat Dickstein had been one of his failures.

  Young Dickstein had been some kind of socialist, Rostov remembered, and his personality was suited to espionage: he was withdrawn, intense and mistrustful. He had brains, too. Rostov recalled debating the Middle East with him, and with Professor Ashford and Yasif Hassan, in the green-and-white house by the river. And the Rostov-Dickstein chess match had been a hard-fought affair.

  But Dickstein did not have the light of idealism in his eyes. He had no evangelical spirit. He was secure in his convictions, but he had no wish to convert the rest of the world. Most of the war veterans had been like that. Rostov would lay the bait--"Of course, if you really want to join the struggle for world socialism, you have to work for the Soviet Union"--and the veterans would say "Bullshit."

  After Oxford Rostov had worked in Russian embassies in a series of European capitals--Rome, Amsterdam, Paris. He never got out of the KGB and into the diplomatic service. Over the years he came to realize that he did not have the breadth of political vision to become the great statesman his father wanted him to be. The earnestness of his youth disappeared. He still thought, on balance, that socialism was probably the political system of the future; but this credo no longer burned inside him like a passion. He believed in Communism the way most people believed in God: he would not be greatly surprised or disappointed if he turned out to be wrong, and meanwhile it made little difference to the way he lived.

  In his maturity he pursued narrower ambitions with, if anything, greater energy. He became a superb technician, a master of the devious and cruel skills of the intelligence game; and--equally important in the USSR as well as the West--he learned how to manipulate the bureaucracy so as to gain maximum kudos for his triumphs.

  The First Chief Directorate of the KGB was a kind of Head Office, responsible for collection and analysis of information. Most of the field agents were attached to the Second Chief Directorate, the largest department of the KGB, which was involved in subversion, sabotage, treason, economic espionage and any internal police work considered politically sensitive. The Third Chief Directorate, which had been called Smersh until that name got a lot of embarrassing publicity in the West, did counterespionage and special operations, and it employed some of the bravest, cleverest, nastiest agents in the world.

  Rostov worked in the Third, and he was one of its stars.

  He held the rank of colonel. He had gained a medal for liberating a convicted agent from a British jail called Wormwood Scrubs. Over the years he had also acquired a wife, two children and a mistress. The mistress was Olga, twenty years his junior, a blonde Viking goddess from Murmansk and the most exciting woman he had ever met. He knew she would not have been his lover without the KGB privileges that came with him; all the same he thought she loved him. They were alike, and each knew the other to be coldly ambitious, and somehow that had made their passion all the more frantic. There was no passion in his marriage anymore, but there were other things: affection, companionship, stability and the fact that Mariya was still the only person in the world who could make him laugh helplessly, convulsively, until he fell down. And the boys: Yuri Davidovitch, studying at Moscow State University and listening to smuggled Beatles records; and Vladimir Davidovitch, the young genius, already considered a potential world champion chess player. Vladimir had applied for a place at the prestigious Phys-Mat School No. 2, and Rostov was sure he would succeed: he deserved the place on merit, and a colonel in the KGB had a little influence too.

  Rostov had risen high in the Soviet meritocracy, but he reckoned he could go a little higher. His wife no longer had to queue up in markets with the hoi polloi--she shopped at the Beryozka stores with the elite--and they had a big apartment in Moscow and a little dacha on the Baltic; but Rostov wanted a chauffeur-driven Volga limousine, a second dacha at a Black Sea resort where he could keep Olga, invitations to private showings of decadent western movies, and treatment in the Kremlin Clinic when old age began to creep up on him.

  His career was at a crossroads. He was fifty this year. He spent about half his time behind a desk in Moscow, the other half in the field with his own small team of operatives. He was already older than any other agent still working abroad. From here he would go in one of two directions. If he slowed up, and allowed his past victories to be forgotten, he would end his career lecturing to would-be agents at KGB school No. 311 in Novosibirsk, Siberia. If he continued to score spectacular points in the intelligence game, he would be promoted to a totally administrative job, get appointed to one or two committees, and begin a challenging--but safe--career in the organization of the Soviet Union's intelligence effort--and then he would get the Volga limousine and the Black Sea dacha.

  Sometime in the next two or three years he would need to pull off another great coup. When the news about Nat Dickstein came in, he wondered for a while whether this might be his chance.

  He had watched Dickstein's career with the nostalgic fascination of a mathematics teacher whose brightest pupil has decided to go to art school. While still at Oxford he had heard stories about the stolen boatload of guns, and as a result had himself initiated Dickstein's KGB file. Over the years additions had been made to the file by himself and others, based on occasional sightings, rumors, guesswork and good old-fashioned espionage. The file made it clear that Dickstein was now one of the most formidable agents in the Mossad. If Rostov could bring home his head on a platter, the future would be assured.

  But Rostov was a careful operator. When he was able to pick his targets, he picked easy ones. He was no death-or-glory man: quite the reverse. One of his more important talents was the ability to become invisible when chancy assignments were being handed out. A contest between himself and Dickstein would be uncomfortably even.

  He would read with interest any further reports from Cairo on what Nat Dickstein was doing in Luxembourg; but he would take care not to get involved.

  He had not come this far by sticking his neck out.

  The forum for discussion on the Arab bomb was the Middle East political committee. It could have been any one of eleven or twelve Kremlin committees, for the same factions were represented on all the interested committees, and they would have said the same things; and the result would have been the same, because this issue was big enough to override factional considerations.

  The committee had nineteen members, but two were abroad, one was ill and one had been run over by a truck on the day of the meeting. It made no difference. Only three people counted: one from the Foreign Ministry, one KGB man and one man who represented the Party Secretary. Among the supernumeraries were David Rostov's boss, who collected all the committee memberships he could just on general principles, and Rostov himself, acting as aide. (It was by signs such as this that Rostov knew he was
being considered for the next promotion.)

  The KGB was against the Arab bomb, because the KGB's power was clandestine and the bomb would shift decisions into the overt sphere and out of the range of KGB activity. For that very reason the Foreign Ministry was in favor--the bomb would give them more work and more influence. The Party Secretary was against, because if the Arabs were to win decisively in the Middle East, how then would the USSR retain a foothold there?

  The discussion opened with the reading of the KGB report "Recent Developments in Egyptian Armaments." Rostov could imagine exactly how the one fact in the report had been spun out with a little background gleaned from a phone call to Cairo, a good deal of guesswork and much bullshit, into a screed which took twenty minutes to read. He had done that kind of thing himself more than once.

  A Foreign Ministry underling then stated, at some length, his interpretation of Soviet policy in the Middle East. Whatever the motives of the Zionist settlers, he said, it was clear that Israel had survived only because of the support it had received from western capitalism; and capitalism's purpose had been to build a Middle East outpost from which to keep an eye on its oil interests. Any doubts about this analysis had been swept away by the Anglo-Franco-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. Soviet policy was to support the Arabs in their natural hostility to this rump of colonialism. Now, he said, although it might have been imprudent--in terms of global politics--for the USSR to initiate Arab nuclear armament, nevertheless once such armament had commenced it was a straightforward extension of Soviet policy to support it. The man talked forever.

  Everyone was so bored by this interminable statement of the obvious that the discussion thereafter became quite informal: so much so, in fact, that Rostov's boss said, "Yes, but, shit, we can't give atom bombs to those fucking lunatics."

  "I agree," said the Party Secretary's man, who was also chairman of the committee. "If they have the bomb, they'll use it. That will force the Americans to attack the Arabs, with or without nukes--I'd say with. Then the Soviet Union has only two options: let down its allies, or start World War Three."

  "Another Cuba," someone muttered.

  The man from the Foreign Ministry said, "The answer to that might be a treaty with the Americans under which both sides agree that in no circumstances will they use nuclear weapons in the Middle East." If he could get started on a project like that, his job would be safe for twenty-five years.

  The KGB man said, "Then if the Arabs dropped the bomb, would that count as our breaking the treaty?"

  A woman in a white apron entered, pulling a trolley of tea, and the committee took a break. In the interval the Party Secretary's man stood by the trolley with a cup in his hand and a mouth full of fruitcake and told a joke. "It seems there was a captain in the KGB whose stupid son had great difficulty understanding the concepts of the Party, the Motherland, the Unions and the People. The captain told the boy to think of his father as the Party, his mother as the Motherland, his grandmother as the Unions and himself as the People. Still the boy did not understand. In a rage the father locked the boy in a wardrobe in the parental bedroom. That night the boy was still in the wardrobe when the father began to make love to the mother. The boy, watching through the wardrobe keyhole, said, "Now I understand! The Party rapes the Motherland while the Unions sleep and the People have to stand and suffer!"

  Everybody roared with laughter. The tea-lady shook her head in mock disgust. Rostov had heard the joke before.

  When the committee went reluctantly back to work, it was the Party Secretary's man who asked the crucial question. "If we refuse to give the Egyptians the technical help they're asking for, will they still be able to build the bomb?"

  The KGB man who had presented the report said, "There is not enough information to give a definite answer, sir. However, I have taken background briefing from one of our scientists on this point, and it seems that to build a crude nuclear bomb is actually no more difficult, technically, than to build a conventional bomb."

  The Foreign Ministry man said, "I think we must assume that they will be able to build it without our help, if perhaps more slowly."

  "I can do my own guessing," the chairman said sharply.

  "Of course," said the Foreign Ministry man, chastened.

  The KGB man continued, "Their only serious problem would be to obtain a supply of plutonium. Whether they have one or not, we simply do not know."

  David Rostov took in all this with great interest. In his opinion there was only one decision the committee could possibly take. The chairman now confirmed his view.

  "My reading of the situation is as follows," he began. "If we help the Egyptians build their bomb, we continue and strengthen our existing Middle East policy, we improve our influence in Cairo, and we are in a position to exert some control over the bomb. If we refuse to help, we estrange ourselves from the Arabs, and we possibly leave a situation in which they still have a bomb but we have no control over it."

  The Foreign Ministry man said, "In other words, if they're going to have a bomb anyway, there had better be a Russian finger on the trigger."

  The chairman threw him a look of irritation, and continued, "We might, then, recommend to the Secretariat as follows: the Egyptians should be given technical help with their nuclear reactor project, such help always to be structured with a view to Soviet personnel gaining ultimate control of the weaponry."

  Rostov permitted himself the ghost of a satisfied smile: it was the conclusion he had expected.

  The Foreign Ministry man said, "So move."

  The KGB man said, "Seconded."

  "All in favor?"

  They were all in favor.

  The committee proceeded to the next item on the agenda.

  It was not until after the meeting that Rostov was struck by this thought: if the Egyptians were in fact not able to build their bomb unaided--for lack of uranium, for instance--then they had done a very expert job of bluffing the Russians into giving them the help they needed.

  Rostov liked his family, in small doses. The advantage of his kind of job was that by the time he got bored with them--and it was boring, living with children--he was off on another trip abroad, and by the time he came back he was missing them enough to put up with them for a few more months. He was fond of Yuri, the elder boy, despite his cheap music and contentious views about dissident poets; but Vladimir, the younger, was the apple of his eye. As a baby Vladimir had been so pretty that people thought he was a girl. From the start Rostov had taught the boy games of logic, spoken to him in complex sentences, discussed with him the geography of distant countries, the mechanics of engines, and the workings of radios, flowers, water taps and political parties. He had come to the top of every class he was put into--although now, Rostov thought, he might find his equals at Phys-Mat No. 2.

  Rostov knew he was trying to instill in his son some of the ambitions he himself had failed to fulfill. Fortunately this meshed with the boy's own inclinations: he knew he was clever, he liked being clever, and he wanted to be a Great Man. The only thing he balked at was the work he had to do for the Young Communist League: he thought this was a waste of time. Rostov had often said, "Perhaps it is a waste of time, but you will never get anywhere in any field of endeavor unless you also make progress in the Party. If you want to change the system, you'll have to get to the top and change it from within." Vladimir accepted this and went to the Young Communist League meetings: he had inherited his father's unbending logic.

  Driving home through the rush-hour traffic, Rostov looked forward to a dull, pleasant evening at home. The four of them would have dinner together, then watch a television serial about heroic Russian spies outwitting the CIA. He would have a glass of vodka before bed.

  Rostov parked in the road outside his home. His building was occupied by senior bureaucrats, about half of whom had small Russian-built cars like his, but there were no garages. The apartments were spacious by Moscow standards: Yuri and Vladimir had a bedroom each, and nobody had to s
leep in the living room.

  There was a row going on when he entered his home. He heard Mariya's voice raised in anger, the sound of something breaking, and a shout; then he heard Yuri call his mother a foul name. Rostov flung open the kitchen door and stood there, briefcase still in hand, face as black as thunder.

  Mariya and Yuri confronted one another across the kitchen table; she was in a rare rage and close to hysterical tears, he was full of ugly adolescent resentment. Between them was Yuri's guitar, broken at the neck. Mariya has smashed it, Rostov thought instantly; then, a moment later: but this is not what the row is about.

  They both appealed to him immediately.

  "She broke my guitar!" Yuri said.

  Mariya said, "He has brought disgrace upon the family with this decadent music."

  Then Yuri again called his mother the same foul name again.

  Rostov dropped his briefcase, stepped forward and slapped the boy's face.

  Yuri rocked backward with the force of the blow, and his cheeks reddened with pain and humiliation. The son was as tall as his father, and broader: Rostov had not struck him like this since the boy became a man. Yuri struck back immediately, his fist shooting out: if the blow had connected it would have knocked Rostov cold. Rostov moved quickly aside with the instincts of many years' training and, as gently as possible, threw Yuri to the floor.

  "Leave the house," he said quietly. "Come back when you're ready to apologize to your mother."

  Yuri scrambled to his feet. "Never!" he shouted. He went out, slamming the door.