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 pictures, 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 station a 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 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, he might steal used fuel. Now he knew why nobody had suggested it. It would be easy enough to hijack the track-he could do it singlehanded-but how would he sneak a fifty-ton lead flask out of the country and take it to Israel without anyone noticing? Stealing uranium from inside the power station was no more promising an idea. Sure, the security was flimsy-the very fact that he had been permitted to make this reconnaissance, and had even been given a guided tour, showed that. But fuel inside the station was locked into an automatic, remote-controlled system. The only way it could come out was by going right through the nuclear process and emerging in the cooling ponds; and then he was back with the problem of sneaking a huge flask of radioactive material through some European port. There had to be a way of breaking into the fuel store, Dickstein supposed; then you could manhandle the stuff into the elevator, take it down, put it on a track and drive away; but that would involve holding some or all of the station personnel at gunpoint for some time, and his brief was to do this thing surreptitiously. A hostess offered to refill his cup, and he accepted. Trust the French to give you good coffee. A young engineer began a talk on nuclear safety. He wore unpressed trousers and a baggy sweater. Scientists and technicians all had a look about them, Dickstein had observed: their clothes were old, mismatched and comfortable, and if many of them wore beards, it was usually a sign of indifference rather than vanity. He thought it was because in their work, force of personality generally counted for nothing, brains for everything, so there was no point in trying to make a good visual impression. But perhaps that was a romantic view of science. . He did not pay attention to the lecture. The physicist from the Weizmann Institute had been much more concise. 'There is no such thing as a safe level of radiation,' he had said. 'Such talk makes you think of radiation like water in a pool: if it's four feet high you're safe, if it's eight feet high you drown. But in fact radiation levels are much more like speed limits on the highway-thirty miles per hour is safer than eighty, but not as safe as twenty, and the only way to be completely safe is not to get in the car.' Dickstein turned his mind back to the problem of stealing uranium. It was the requirement of secrecy that defeated every plan he dreamed up. Maybe the whole thing was doomed to failure. After all, impossible is impossible, he thought. No, it was too soon to say that. He went back to first principles. He would have to take a consignment in transit: that much was clear from what he had seen today. Now, the fuel elements were not checked at this end, they were fed straight into the system. He could hijack a truck, take the uranium out of the fuel elements, close them up again, reseal the consignment and bribe or frighten the truck driver to deliver the empty shell& The dud elements would gradually find their way into the reactor, five at a time, over a period of months. Eventually the reactoes output would fall marginally. There would be an investigation. Tests would be done. Perhaps no conclusions would be reached before the empty elements ran out and new, genuine fuel elements went in, causing output to rise again. Maybe no one would understand what had happened until the duds were reprocessed and the plutonium recovered was too little, by which time-four to seven years later-the trail to Tel Aviv would have gone cold. But they might find out sooner. And there was still the problem of getting the stuff out of the country. Still, he had the outline of one possible scheme, and he felt a bit more cheerful. . The lecture ended. There were a few desultory questions, then the party trooped back to the bus. Dickstein sat at the back. A middle-aged woman said to him, 'That was my seat,' and he stared at her stonily until she went away. Driving back from the power station, Dickstein kept looking out of the rear window. After about a mile the gray Opel Pulled out of a turnoff and followed the bus. Dickstein's cheerfulness vanished.
He had been spotted. It had happened either here or in Luxembourg, probably Luxembourg. The spotter might have been Yasif Hassan-no reason why he should not be an agent-or someone else. They must be following him out of general curiosity because there was no way-was there?---that they could know what he was up to. All he had to do was lose them. He spent a day in and around the town near the miclear power station, traveling by bus and taxi, driving a rented car, and walking. By the end of the day he had identified the three vehicles--the gray Opel, a dirty little flatbed truck, and a German Ford-and five of the men in the surveillance team. The men looked vaguely Arabic, but in this part of France many of the criminals were North African: somebody might have hired local help. The size of the team explained why he had not sniffed the surveillance earlier. They had been able continually to switch cars and personnel. The trip to the power station, a long there-and-back journey on a country road with very little traffic, explained why the team had finally blown themselves. The next day be drove out of town and on to the autoroute. The Ford followed him for a few miles, then the gray Opel took over. There were two men in each car. There would be two more in the flatbed truck, plus one at his hotel. The Opel was still with him when he found a
