Triple (1991)

by Ken Follett

  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 pedestrian bridge over the road in a place where there were no turnoffs from the highway for four or five miles in either direction. Dickstein pulled over to the shoulder, stopped the car, got out and lifted the hood. He looked inside for a few minutes. The gray Opel disappeared up ahead, and the Ford went by a minute later. The Ford would wait at the next turnoff, and the Opel would come back on the opposite side of the road to see what he was doing. That was what the textbook prescribed for this situation. Dickstein hoped these people would follow the book, otherwise his scheme would not work. He took a collapsible warning triangle from the trunk of the car and stood it behind the offside rear wheel. T'he Opel went by on the opposite side of the highway. They were following the booL Dickstein began to walk. When he got off the highway he caught the first bus he saw and rode it until it came to a town. On the journey he spotted each of the three surveillance vehicles at different times. He allowed himself to feel a little premature triumph: they were going for it. He took a taxi from the town and got out close to his car but on the wrong side of the highway. The Opel went by, then the Ford pulled off the road a couple of hundred yards behind him. Dickstein began to run.

  He was in good condition after his months of outdoor work in the kibbutz. He sprinted to the pedestrian bridge, ran across it and raced along the shoulder on the other side of the road. Breathing hard and sweating, he reached his abandoned car in under three minutes. One of the men from.the Ford had got out and started to follow him. The man now realized he had been taken in. The Ford moved off. The man ran back and jumped into it as it gathered speed and swung into the slow lane. Dickstein got into his car. The surveillance vehicles were now on the wrong side of the highway and would have to go all the way to the next junction before they could cross over and come after him. At sixty miles per hour the round trip would take them ten minutes, which meant he had at least five minutes start on them. They would not catch him. He pulled away, heading for Paris, humming a musical chant that came. from the football terraces of West Ham: "Easy, easy, eeeezeee."

  Ilere was a godalmighty panic in Moscow when they heard about the Arab atom bomb. The Foreign Ministry panicked because they bad not heard of it earlier, the KGB panicked because they had not heard about it first, and the Party Secretary's office panicked because the last thing they wanted was another whos-to-blame row between the Foreign Ministry and the KGB, the previous one had made life hell in the Kremlin for eleven months. Fortunately, the way the Egyptians chose to make their revelation allowed for a certain amount of covering of rears. The Egyptians wanted to make the point that they were not diplomatically obliged to tell their allies about this secret project, and the technical help they were asking for was not crucial to its success. Their attitude was "Oh, by the way, we're building this nuclear reactor in order to get some plutonium to make atom bombs to blow Israel off the face of the earth, so would you like to give us a hand, or not?" The message, trimmed and decorated with ambassadorial niceties, was delivered, in the manner of an afterthought, at the end of a routine meeting between the Egyptian Ambassador in Moscow and the deputy chief of the Middle East desk at the Foreign Ministry. The deputy chief who received the message considered very carefully what he should do with the information. Ifis first duty, naturally, was to pass the news to his chief, who would then tell the Secretary. However, the credit for the news would go to his chief, who would also not miss the opportunity for scoring points off the KGB. Was there a way for the deputy chief to gain some advantage to himself out of the affair? He knew that the best way to get on in the Kremlin was to put the KGB under some obligation to yourself. He was now in a position to do the boys a big favor. If he warned them of the Egyptian Ambassador's message, they would have a little time to get ready to pretend they knew all about the Arab atom bomb and were about to reveal the news themselves. He put on his coat, thinking to go out and phone his acquaintance in the KGB from a phone booth in case his own phone were tapped-then he realized how silly that would be, for he was going to call the KGB, and it was they who tapped people's phones anyway; so he took off his coat and used his office phone. The KGB desk man he talked to was equally expert at working the system. In the new KGB building on the Moscow ring road, he kicked up a huge fuss. First he called his boss's secretary and asked for an urgent meeting in fifteen minutes. He carefully avoided speaking to the boas himself. He fired off half a dozen more noisy phone calls, and sent secretaries and messengers scurrying about the building to take memos and collect files. But his master stroke was the agenda. It so happened that the agenda for the next meeting of the Middle East political committee had been typed the previous day and was at this moment being run off on a duplicating machine. He got the agenda back and at the top of the list added a new item: "Recent Developments in Egyptian Armaments-Special Report," followed by his own name in brackets. Next he. ordered the new agenda to be duplicated, stiff bearing the previous day's date, and sent around to the interested departments that afternoon by hand. Then when he had made certain that half Moscow would associate his name and no one elses 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 an 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 WW-lZe learned how to manipulate the bureaucracy so as to gain maximum kudos for his triumphs. ne First Chief Directorate of the KGB was a kind of Head Of[ice, 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 bad 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. Ile 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-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 Fast 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.) Ilie 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. T'he Party Secretary was against, because if the Arabs. were to win decisively in the Middle Past, 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 mikes-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, "Tbe answer to that might be a treaty with the A
mericans 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 understandl The Party rapes the Motherland while the Unions sleep and the People have to stand and sufferl" 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 joint, 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."