Rostov's error was that he would be forced to work with the wretched Arabs. That was bad enough. Rostov had his own littlie team, Nik Bunin and Pyotr Tyrin, and they worked well together. And Cairo was as leaky as a sieve: half the stuff that went through them got back to Tel Aviv. The fact that the Arab in question was Yasif Hassan might or might not help. Rostov remembered Hassan very clearly: a rich kid, indolent and haughty, smart enough but with no drive, shallow politics, and -too many clothes. His wealthy father had got him into Oxford, not his bmins; and Rostov resented that more now than he had then. Still, knowing the man should make it easier to control him. Rostov planned to start by making it clear Hassan was essentially superfluous, and was on the team for purely political reasons. He would need to be very clever about what he told Hassan and what he kept secret: say too little, and Cairo would bitch to Moscovr, too much, and Tel Aviv would be able to frustrate his every move. It was damned awkward, and he had only himself to blame for it.
He was uneasy about the whole affair by the time he reached Luxembourg. He had flown in from Athens, having changed identities twice and planes three times since Moscow. He took this little precaution because, if you came direct from Russia, the local intelligence people sometimes made a note of your arrival and kept an eye on you, and that could be a nuisance. There was nobody to meet him at the airport, of course. He took a taxi to his hotel. He had told Cairo he would be using the name David Roberts. When he checked into the hotel under that name, the desk clerk gave him a message. He opened the envelope as he, went up in the lift with the porter. It said simply 'Room 179.' He tipped the porter, picked up the room phone and dialed 179. A voice said, 'Hello?' 'I'm in 142. Give me ten minutes, then come here for a conference.' 'Fine. Listen, is that-' 'Shut up!' Rostov snapped. 'No names. Ten minutes.' 'Of course, I'm sorry, 1-2' Rostov hung up. What kind of idiots was Cairo hiring now? The kind that used your real name over the hotel phone system, obviously. It was going to be even worse than he had feared. TUere was a time when he would have been over-professional, and turned out the lights and sat watching the doorway with a gun in his hand until the other man arrived, in case of a trap. Nowadays be considered that sort of behavior to be obsessive and left it to the actors in the television shows. Elaborate personal precautions were not his style, not anymore. He did not even carry a gun, in case customs officials searched his luggage at airports. But there were precautions and precautions, weapons and weapons- he did have one or two KOB gadgets subtly concealed-including an electric toothbrush that gave out a hum calculated to jam listening devioes, a miniature Polaroid camera, and a bootlace garrote. He unpacked his small case quickly. There was very little in it: a safety razor, the toothbrush, two American-made wash-and-wear shirts and a change of underwear. He made himself a drink from the room bar-scotch whiskey was one of the perks of working abroad. After exactly ten minutes there was a knock on the door. Rostov opened it~ and Yasif Hassan came in. Hassan smiled broadly. 'How are you?' 'How do you do,' said Rostov, and shook his hand. 'It's twenty years ... how have you been?' to BUSY. 'Ibat we should meet again, after so long, and because of Dickstein!' 'Yes. Sit down. Let's talk about Dickstein.' Rostov sat, and Hassan followed suit. 'Bring me up to date,' Rostov continued. 'You spotted Dickstein, then your people picked him up again at Nice airport. What happened next?' 'He went on a guided tour of a nuclear power station, then shook off his tail,' Hassan said. 'So we've lost him again.st Rostov gave a grunt of disgust. 'We'll have to do better than that.' Hassan smiled-a salesman's smile, Rostov thought-and said, 'If he wasn't the sort of agent who is bound to spot a tail and lose it, we wouldn't be so concerned about him, would wer, Rostov Ignored that. 'Was he using a carr' 'Yes. He hired a Peugeot.' 'OkaY. What do you know about his movements before that, when he was here in Luxembourg?' Hassan spoke briskly, adopting Rostov's businesslike air. 'He Stayed at the Alfa Hotel for a week under the name Ed Rodgers. He gave as his address the Paris bureau of a mag*zffie called Sciewe International. There is such a magazine; theY do have a Paris address, but ifs only a forwarding address for mail; they do use a freelance called Ed Rodgers, but theY haven't heard from him for over a year.' Rostov nodded. 'As you may know, that is a typical Mossad cover story. Nice and tight. Anything else?' 'Yes. The night before he left there was an incident in the Rue Dicks. Two men were found quite savagely beatem It had the look of a professional job-neatly broken bones, you know the kind of Oft. The police aren't doing anything about It: the men were known thieves, thought to have been lying in wait close to a homosexual nightclub.' 'Robbing the queers as they come out!'
'That's the general idea. Anyway, there's nothing to connect Dickstein with the incident, except that he is capable of it and he was here at the time.' 'llat's enough for a strong presumption,' Rostov said. 'Do you think Dickstein is a homosexual?' 'It's possible, but Cairo says there's nothing like that in his file, so he must have been very discreet about it all these years.' 'And therefore too discreet to go to queer clubs while he~s on assignment. Your argument is self-defeating, isn't it?' A trace of anger showed in Hassan's face. 'So what do you think?' he said defensively. 'My guess is that he had an informant who is queer.' He stood up and began to pace the room. He felt he had made the right start with Hassan, but enough was enough: no point in making the man surly. It was time to ease up a little. 'Let's speculate for a moment. Why would he want to look around a nuclear power station?' Hassan said, 'The Israelis have been on bad terms with the French since the Six-Day War. De Gaulle cut off the supply of arms. Maybe the Mossad plans some retaliation: like blowing up the reactor?' Rostov shook his head. 'Even the Israelis aren!t that irresponsible. Besides, why then would Dickstein be in Luxembourg?' 'Who knows!' Rostov sat down again. 'What is there, here In Luxembourg? What makes it an important place? Why is your bank here, for exampler' 'It's an important European capital. My bank is here because the Euronean Investment Bank is here. But there are also several Common Market institutions-in fact, there's a European Center over on the Kitchberg.' 'Which institutions?' 'Me Secretariat of the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers, and the Court of Justice. Oh, and Euratom.' Rostov stared at Hassan. 'Euratom?' 'It's short for the European Atomic Energy Community, but everybody----~' 'I know what it is,' Rostov said. 'Don't you see the connection? He comes to Luxembourg, where Euratom has its headquarters, then he goes to visit a nuclear reactor.' Hassan shrugged. 'An interesting hypothesis. What's that you're drinking?' 'Whiskey. Help yourself. As I recall, the French helped the Israelis build their nuclear reactor. Now they've probably cut off their aid. Dickstein may be after scientific secrets.' Hassan poured himself a drink and sat down again. 'How shall we operate, you and I? My orders are to cooperate with You! ' 'My, team is arriving this evening,' Rostov said. He was thinking: Cooperate, hell-youll follow my orders. He said, 'I always use the same two men-Nik Bunin and Pyotr Tyrin. We operate very well together. They know how I like things done. I want you to work with them, do what they say-youll learn a lot, they're very good agents.' 'And my people. . .' 'We won't need them much longer,' Rostov said briskly. 'A small team is best. Now, our first job is to make sure we we Dickstein if and when he comes back to Luxembourg.' 'I've got a man at, the airport twenty- four hours a day.' 'Hell have thought of that, he won't fly in. We must cover sorni other spots. He might go to Euratom. . 'vMe Jean-Monnet building, yes.' 'We can cover the Alfa Hotel by bribing the desk clerk, but he won't go back there. And the nightclub in the Rue Dicks. Now, then, you said he hired a car.' 'Yes, in France.' 'Hell have dumped it by now-he knows that you know the number. I want you to call the rental company and find out where it was left-that may tell us what direction hes traveling in.' 'Very well.' 'Moscow has put his photograph on the wire, so our people will be looking out for him in every capital city in the world.' Rostov finished his drink. 'We'll catch him. One way or another.' 94M you really think sor Hassan asked. 'I've played chess with him, I know how his mind works. His opening moves are routine, predictable; then suddenly he does something completely unexpected, usually something highly risky. You just have to wait for him to stick out his neck-then you chop his head off.' Hassan said, 'As I recall, you lost that chess match.'
Rostov gave a wolfish grin. 'Yes, but this is real life,' he mdd.
There are two kinds of shadow: pavement artists and bulldogs. Pavement artists regard the business of shadowing people as a skill of the highest order, comparable with acting or cellular biophysics or poetry. They are perfectionists, capable of being almost invisible. They have wardrobes or unobtrusive clothes, they practice blank expressions in front of their mirrors, they know dozens of tricks with shop doorways and bus queues, policemen and children, spectacles and shopping bags and hedges. They despise the bulldogs, who think that shadowing someone is the same as following him, and trail the mark the way a dog follows its master. Nik Bunin was a bulldog. He was a young thug, the type of man who always becomes either a policeman or a criminal, depending on his luck. Luck had brought Nik into the KOB: his brother, back in Georgia, was a dope dealer, running hashish from Tbilisi to Moscow University (where it was consumed by--among othem-Rostov's son Yuri). Nik was officially a chauffeur, unofficially a bodyguard, and even more unofficially a full-time professional ruffian. It was Nik who spotted The Pirate. Nick was a little under six feet tall, and very broad. He wore a leather jacket across his wide shoulders. He had short blond hair and watery green eyes, and he was embarrassed about the fact that at the age of twenty-five he still did not need, to shave every day. At'the nightclub in the Rue Dicks they thought he was cute as bell. He came in at seven-thirty, soon after the club opened, and sat in the same comer all night, drinking iced vodka with lugubrious relish, Just watching. Somebody asked him to dance, and he told the man to piss off in bad French. When
