it's all right.- She nodded dumbly and let him go.
They took a cab to the airport. Dickstein's sense of delight grew as they traveled. The scheme had an air of mischief about it, he felt a bit like a schoolboy, this was a terrible prank. He kept grinning, and had. to turn his face away so that Cohen would not see. Pierre Borg would go through the root. Dickstein bought two round-trip tickets to Tel Aviv, paying with his credit card. They had to take a connecting flight to Paris. Before they took off he called the embassy in Paris and arranged for someone to meet them in the transit lounge. In Paris he gave the man from the embassy a message to send to Borg, explaining what was required. The diplomat was a Mossad man, and treated Dickstein with deference. Coben was allowed to listen to the conversation, and when the man had gone back to the embassy he said, 'We could go back, I'm convinced already.- 'Oh, no,' Dickstein said. 'Now that weve come this far I want to be sure of you.' On the plane Cohen said, 'You must be an important man in ISMCL' 'No. But what Im doing is important.' Cohen wanted to know how to behave, how to address the Prime Minister. Dickstein told him, 'I don't know, I've never met him. Shake hands and call him by his name.' Cohen smiled. He was beginning to share Dickstein!s feeling of mischievousness. Pierre Borg met them at Lod Airport with a car to take them to Jerusalem. He smiled and shook hands with Cohen, but he was seething underneath. As they walked to the car he muttered to Dickstein, 'You better have a fucking good reason for all this.' 'I have.' They were with Cohen all the while, so Borg did not have an opportunity to cross-examine Dickstein. They went straight to the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem. Dickstein and Cohen waited in an anteroom while Borg explained to the Prime Minister what was required and why. A couple of minutes later they were admitted. 'This is Nat Dickstein, sir,' Borg said. They shook hands, and the Prime Minister said, 'We haven't met before, but I've heard of you, Mr. Dickstein.' Borg said, 'And this is Mr. Josef Cohen of Antwerp.' 'Mr. Cohen.' IMe Prime Minister smiled. 'You're a very cautious man. You should be a politician. Well, now . . . please do this thing for us. It is very important, and you will come to no harm from it.' Cohen was bedazzled. 'Yes, sir, of course I Will do this, Ilm sorry to have caused so much trouble . . .' 'Not at all. You did the right thing.' He shook Cohen!s hand again. 'Thank you for coming. Goodbye.' Borg was less polite on the way back to the airport. He sat fient in the front seat of the car, smoking a cigar and fidgeting. At the airport he managed to get Dickstein alone for a minute. 'If you ever pull a stunt like this again . . .' 'It was necessary,' Dickstein said. 'It took less than a minute. Why not?- 'Why not, is because half my fucking department has been working all day to fix that minute. Why didn't you just point a gun at the man's head or something?' 'Because were not barbarians,' Dickstein said. 'So people keep telling me.' 'They do? Tliat!s a bad sign.'
'Because you shouldn!t need to be told.'
Then their fight was called. Boarding the plane with Cohen, Dickstein reflected that his relationship with Borg was in ruins. They had always talked like this, with bantering insults, but until now there had been an undertone of . . . perhaps not affection, but at least respect. Now that had vanished. Borg was genuinely hostile. Dickstein's refusal to be pulled out was a piece of basic defiance which could not be tolerated. If Dickstein had wanted to continue in the Mossad, he would have had to fight Borg for the job of director-there was no longer sufficient room for both men in the organization. But there would be no contest now, for Dickstein was going to resign. Flying back to Europe through the night, Cohen drank some gin and went to sleep. Dickstein ran over in his mind the work he had done in the past five months. Back in May he had started out with no real idea of how he was going to steal the uranium Israel needed. He had taken the problems as they came up, and found a solution to each one: how to locate uranium, which uranium to steal, how to hijack a ship, how to camouflage the Israeli involvement in the theft, how to prevent the disappearance of the uranium being reported to the authorities, how to placate the owners of the stuff. If he had sat down at the beginning and tried to dream up the whole. scheme he could never have foreseen all the complications. He had had some good luck and some bad. The fact that the owners of the Coparelli used a Jewish crew agency in Antwerp was a piece of luck; so was the existence of a consignment of uranium for non-nuclear purposes, and one going by sea. The bad luck mainly consisted of the accidental meeting with Yasif Hassan. Hassan, the fly in the ointment. Dickstein was reasonably certain he had shaken off the opposition when he flew to Buffalo to see Cortone, and that they had not picked up his trail again since. But that did not mean they had dropped the case. It would be useful to know how much they had found out before they lost him. Dickstein could not see Suza again until the whole affair was over, and Hassan was to blame for that too. If he were to go to Oxford, Hassan was sure to pick up the trail somehow.
The plane began its descent. Dickstein fastened big seat belt. It was all done now, the scheme in place, the preparations made. Ile cards had been dealt. He knew what was in his hand, and he knew some of his opponents' cards, and they knew some of his. All that remained was to play out the game, and no one could foretell the outcome. He wished he could see the future more clearly, 'he wished big plan were less complicated, he wished he did not have to risk his life once mom, and he wished the game would start so that he could stop wishing and start doing things. Cohen was awake. 'Did I dream all that?' he said. 'No.' Dickstein smiled. There was one more unpleasant duty he had to perform: he had to scare Cohen half to death. 'I told you this was important, and secret.' 'Of course, I understand.' 'You don't understand. If you talk about this to anyone other than your wife, we will take drastic action.' 'Is that a threat? What are you saying?' 'I'm saying, if you don't keep your mouth shut, we will kill your wife.' Cohen stared, and went pale. After a moment he turned away and looked out of the window at the airport coming up to meet them.
Chapter Thirteen
Moscow's Hotel Rossiya was the largest hotel in Europe. It had 5,738 beds, ten miles of corridors, and no air-conditioning. Yasif Hassan slept very badly there. It was simple to say, 'The Fedayeen should hijack the ship before Dickstein gets there,' but the more he thought about it, the more terrified he was. The Palestine Liberation Organization in 1968 was not the tightly-knit political entity it pretended to be. It was not even a loose federation of individual groups working together. It was more like a club for people with a common interest: it represented its members, but it did not control them. The individual guerrilla groups could speak with one voice through the PLO, but they did not and could not act as one. So when Mahmoud said the Fedayeen would do something, he spoke only for his own group. Furthermore, in this case it would be unwise even to ask for PLO cooperation. The organization was given money, facilities and a home by the Egyptians, but it had also been infiltrated by them: if you wanted to keep something secret from the Arab establishment, you had to keep it secret from the PLO. Of course, after the coup, when the world's press came to look over the captured ship with its atomic cargo, the Egyptians would know and would probably suspect that the Fedayeen had deliberately thwarted them, but Mahmoud would play innocent and the Egyptians would be obliged to join in the general acclamation of the Fedayeen for frustrating an Israeli act of aggression. Anyway, Mahmoud believed he did not need the help of the others. His group had the best connections outside Palestine, the best European set-up, and plenty of money. He was now in Benghazi arranging to boxTow a ship while his international team was gathered up from various parts of the world. But the most crucial task devolved on Hassan: if the Fedayeen were to get to the Coparelli before the Israelis, he would have to establish exactly when and where Dickstein!s hijack was to take place. For that, he needed the KGB. He felt terribly uneasy around Rostov now. Until his visit to Mahmoud he had been able to tell himself he was working for two organizations with a common objective. Now he was indisputably a double agent, merely pretending to work with the Egyptians and the KGB while he sabotaged their plans. He felt different-he felt a traitor, in a way-and he was afraid that Rostov would observe the difference in him. When Hassan bad flown in to Moscow Rostov himself had been uneasy. He had said there was not enough room in his apartment for Hassan to stay, although Hassan knew the rest of the family were away on holiday. It seemed Rostov was hiding something. Hassan suspected he was seeing some woman and did not want his colleague getting in the way. After his restless night at the Hotel Rossiya, Hassan met Rostov at the KGB building on the Moscow ring road, in the officeof Rostov's boss, Feliks Vorontsov. There were undercurrents there too. The two men were having an argument when Hassan entered the room, and although they broke it off immediately the air was stiff with unspoken hostility. Hassan, however, was too busy with his own clandestine moves to pay much attention to theirs. He -sat down. 'Have there been any developments?' Rostov and Vorontsov looked at one another. Rostov shrugged. Vorontsov said, 'The Stramberg has been fitted with a very powerful radio beacon. She's out of dry dock now and heading south across the Bay of Biscay. The assumption would be that she is going to Haifa to take on a crew of Mossad agents. I think we can all be quite satisfied with our intelligence~-gathering work. The project now falls into the sphere of positive action. Our task becomes prescriptive rather than descriptive, as it were.' 'They all talk like this in Moscow Center,' Rostov said irreverently. Vorontsov glared at him. Hassan said, 'What action?' 'Rostov here is going to Odessa to board a Polish merchant ship called the Karla,' V6rontsov said. 'Shes an ordinary cargo vessel superficially, but shes very
