'Course he didn't say anything, didn't give him much of a chance to get a word in,' she'd said to herself.
Soon the dew would be forming on the grass, and the coolness of the middle evening was beginning to embrace her bared shoulders. She shivered a little, and reached out for the jersey she had brought with her. She'd come equipped this time to be out late in the open air, uncertain what the next few hours would bring, but excited and expectant.
'I'll catch my death, dressed with nothing, like this,' she giggled, and turned toward the boy anticipating he would be smiling back at her. But he was sitting up now, his head arched back, neck taut, long fair hair pressed against his shoulder blades, eyes staring and intent on the huge obliterating frame of the Boeing 747 three thousand feet above them.
'You're late, big bird,' he said soundlessly against the roar of the aircraft. 'Don't be late next week, not for the plucking of the Mushroom Man.'
'What did you say?' she shouted, wriggling closer to him to hear his reply.
'Nothing, nothing. Just that they're flying late tonight.'
Her ear was close to his mouth, and he spoke softly, with his delicate Irish brogue flavouring the words.
'What plane is that?' she said, watching over his shoulder the vast airborne mass, almost beautiful with its white fuselage and the deep sky-blue livery line running its length, tail erect and crowned with the simple star on the pure background.
'That, my little girl, is a Boeing seven-four-seven, manufactured at Seattle, in the State of Washington, USA. It's valued at a little more than fifteen million pounds, and that one is flying in Israel's colour. El Al, and late again.'
He got up from the grass, and began to pull on his trousers over the dried-out swim suit. Before he draped his shirt over his shoulders she saw again the reddened disfigurement of the healed wound, in diameter little more than a pencil width, low to the left side of his chest. She had asked about it the day before, and been told of a stumble while carrying a pitch fork, on the farm, many years back.
'Are we doing anything tonight?' She mentioned it hesitantly, though she'd already told her mother she'd be out late, at her friend's home.
'I'm sorry,' he said, seeing her face fall open with the disappointment. 'I'm sorry, I really am, but I can't tonight.
I have to meet a man…'
'About a dog,' she said.
'No, it's real. I have to meet a man tonight. It's been planned a long time, and he's coming over from abroad to see me. Really. There's some business I have to do, take a few days. I'll see you then, again. Definitely. Definitely.
Come on, I'll walk you down to the bus stop.'
She was near to tears when he left her, waiting for a red double-decker to take her back to an early night at home.
For two hours Ciaran McCoy stayed beside the train departure board at Waterloo Station, waiting for the man he was to meet to come forward and introduce himself.
He had fulfilled all his instructions. Red tie, light raincoat over his right arm, Avis Rentacar sign displayed in his hand. Endless faces scurried past him, running to catch their trains, running away from them, all anxious not to stay a minute longer in the belly of the great terminus than was necessary. It was futile and frustrating. He'd been buffeted, pushed and shoved by those who saw him as an obstruction in their path, but never noticed, not acknowledged. Close to midnight, he walked across the now near-empty concourse to the battery of telephone booths and dialled the seven-figure number he had been given.
His call was answered by a switchboard deep behind the Edwardian facade that housed a North African embassy in a smart SW7 address overlooking the favoured Rotten Row and the spaces of Hyde Park. McCoy asked for an extension, was surprised when the operator did not demur that there would be no one there at this hour, and was further surprised when the phone was promptly answered.
He couldn't remember the word he was supposed to give.
Been waiting too long, too wrought up to remember it.
Bloody foreign word, and he didn't know what it meant. it's McCoy here. Ciaran McCoy. I was told to call this number. Our friend hasn't shown.'
The voice at the other end was calm, reassuring, in perfect English. Unmindful of the lack of the code- word.
There had been a delay. The situation was uncertain. The project might be called off, might not. Developments were awaited. He should telephone again tomorrow evening, but not so late. The voice wished him goodnight, and the call was terminated.
Five seconds after McCoy put the receiver back into its rest the tape recorder stopped rolling. It was standard procedure that all calls to that number were automatically monitored; and had been so ever since the extension number was obtained from a second officer of that embassy in exchange for Foreign Office silence about his drinking habits. The diplomat had done well from the bargain; the conservative Moslem government he represented in London would have looked badly upon his behaviour.
The tape would be one of scores of conversations recorded that night that would be replayed by short-hand typists working from the basement of a substantial building in Curzon Street, Mayfair, a bare mile from the embassy.
THREE
David Sokarev always carried the Mauser pistol in the glove compartment of his car. It rested there on top of the maps and the packet of boiled sweets that his wife had bought him as an aid to ending his smoking habit. On top of the gun and hiding it was the rag that he used to clean the overnight moisture from his windscreen. The pistol was loaded, but with the safety catch in force, and was used only twice a year, when he went on the shooting range east of Beersheba. Left to himself he would have placed it in a drawer and forgotten about it, but he had been ordered to possess a gun, and therefore it was easier simply to leave it in the car. If the occasion had arisen when he was obliged to fire in anger he would probably have missed. His chunky iron-rimmed spectacles were a witness to his poor eyesight. The pistol was never disturbed, rejected like the boiled sweets, but, like them, of insufficient importance to have an issue made of it.
There had been a suggestion that his work made him too sensitive a man to be driving himself to work, and there had been talk that he should have a driver pick him up from his home, take him to the laboratory, and then late in the day bring him back to Beersheba. He had railed at that as preposterous, asked them whether there were so many able-bodied men without proper jobs to do that they could spare one for such sterile activity. He had won his case, and drove himself.
He was a careful and methodical man, and unlike so many of his fellow-countrymen drove slowly and with circumspection. It took him between forty-seven and fifty minutes from the time he left his flat on the third floor of the block till he presented his identity card at the gate of Dimona. Colleagues using the same route would flash past him, hoot their horns and wave cheerfully at old 'Tortoise', as they had nicknamed him. It was a boring ride to have made most days a week, and most weeks a year for the last sixteen years, but his mind was seldom concerned with the other traffic. The problems of plutonium, sub-critical masses, fission, isotope separation, neutrons — they were what enveloped him, as the little car trudged its way back and forth the twenty-four miles across the Negev desert.
He would read, too, as he drove, the book propped against the steering wheel. He was able, apparently, to take in the printed word while successfully avoiding the fast-moving hazards which shared his road; but few of his colleagues lightly accepted the offer of a lift.
When he had started work at Dimona the project had been at the apex of Israel's secret list. He had not been able to tell any family friends where he went each day, nor the nature of his work. The buildings, tucked away among the sandhills and placed well back from the road, were described to the outside world as housing a textile factory, and no one who knew him could comprehend a link between David Sokarev and man-made fibres.
