Billionaire

16

General Ephraim had sat at his desk for a long time on the morning of the Monday that Elleck, Lasserre and Culundis had met, staring down through the smoked glass windows at the bustle of the traffic. There were three piles on his desk: a pile of memorandums, a pile of letters and a pile of sealed despatches, and they all remained untouched. He pulled open a drawer in the desk, pulled out a piece of chewing gum, unwrapped it and put it in his mouth.

He thought over and over about the Frenchman he had met in the bar of L’Hermitage Hotel in La Baule. It was a massive hotel, fronting onto a beach which was part of a vast south west-facing bay. The tide was out, and the stranger suggested a walk along the sand. There, among the stench of putrid fish and damp seaweed, stepping across a million empty clam shells and past the occasional carcass of a crab, the Frenchman had dictated his instructions to him. He hadn’t liked the Frenchman, in his fashionable pastel trousers and thin, open jacket, when they had first met, and he liked him even less during the next hour.

‘You are to return to Israel, and wait until you receive your intelligence report from Amnah concerning the arrival into the country of the nuclear mines, and the subsequent reports you will receive concerning the threat to use these mines by Amnah and Libya to extort the withdrawal from certain occupied territories by Israel.

‘You will also learn that these are not the only requests that will be made — merely the first, for the Libyans will know that they have got you over a barrel, and you will have no choice but to give in to all and every demand they make. With that information to hand,’ said the Frenchman, who had introduced himself as Arnauld Bauté, ‘your Government could not possibly treat your recommendations of immediate invasion with anything other than full support. It would be a different matter, indeed, if the mines were already in place, for then there would be a danger of them being detonated, which would cause havoc, and for which Israel would be blamed. But the advance intelligence you will receive will tell you that you have probably a few days before these mines will be despatched out in the dhows — all the more reason to act!’

‘Are the mines really going to be there?’ said Ephraim.

‘But sure they are; put there by my people.’

‘And who are your people?’

‘We are called the “Executioners of Mohammed”. We are funded by the PLO.’

‘I’ve never heard of your organization,’ said Ephraim.

‘You will hear of it soon. The whole world will hear of it soon. Very soon.’

It was an overcast day but although it was quite hot, and the schools were now on holiday for the summer, there were not many people on the beach. Ephraim stared ahead at the miles of wet sand, to the left at the battery of white hotels and apartment buildings, most in need of a lick of paint, which trailed off into the horizon, and then to the right, at the breaking waves and, beyond them, the calm, still sea. Somewhere, two and a half thousand miles beyond that horizon was America. It was strange, felt Ephraim, walking out here, in this vast open space, and feeling as trapped as if he had been crammed into a cupboard.

After they had parted, Ephraim had driven straight to Paris and, to his relief, Chaim Weisz, the Chief of Israeli Intelligence Operations in France, was at home. By midnight on the Saturday, he knew for sure that there was no such organization as the ‘Executioners of Mohammed’. He also knew that Arnauld Bauté’s real name was Jean-Luc Menton, and that he lived in an apartment overlooking the old German U-boat pens at St Nazaire. The information on Bauté he had been able to acquire through his foresight in not going to La Baule without someone to cover him.

He was so deep in thought, he did not notice his coffee being brought in, placed on his desk, and his secretary leaving again. His mind was on one thing and one thing only: finding out who the hell was behind all this, and breaking them apart with his bare hands. He had filing cabinets stuffed full with dossiers on terrorist organizations, but he didn’t need to open them: he could reel off pretty well every terrorist organization in the world from the top of his head by memory. He was going through them now, one by one, thinking about the way they operated, the people they used, trying to think whether the events so far matched any of their normal styles of operating. It was a difficult task; so many were unpredictable, and liable to chop and change. Menton, he knew, was his best hope. France had him under twenty-four-hour surveillance, and when offices started up for the week, at about 9.00 — an hour-and-a-half’s time, Israeli time — a full search to discover everything there was to discover about Monsieur Bauté, né Menton, and his mystery employers, would be under way.

Ephraim chewed the gum thoughtfully and slowly, then removed the ball from his mouth, held it between his index finger and thumb, drank a mouthful of coffee, swallowed it, then replaced the gum in his mouth. On Friday, the nuclear mines were due to start arriving in Umm Al Amnah; by the middle of the following week the shipment would be complete. By then, he would have made his reports, and his recommendations; if he went along with what he had been instructed to do, the invasion of Umm Al Amnah and Libya should commence approximately two weeks from today.

In many ways, he would dearly have loved the opportunity to invade Libya. That country had been a thorn in Israel’s side for many years. He believed that without Libya, Israel would be much nearer to a realistic, lasting peace than she ever was now, and somehow, with Libya lurking in the background of the Arab world, there was always a shadow cast on any future hopes. Umm Al Amnah until now had never bothered him much; he had always considered it a tin-pot nation, and too small to be of any consequence. It had connections, no doubt with Libya and with the Soviet Union, but it was a long way away from Israel, and he had never considered it as a likely threat. Israel had limited resources, which meant that the Mossad had limited resources; he would have loved to have had agents in every city in every country of the world, but it just was not possible on his budget, and with the manpower available.

During the past twelve hours, he had instructed twelve of his crack agents to drop everything and infiltrate Amnah; but he knew that with a tiny country it was not going to be easy. Umm Al Amnah was not as yet aware that there was such a thing as a tourist industry and as it had, in any event, at the present time, little to offer tourists other than high-rise buildings, factories, sand and camel dung, it was hardly surprising it was not to be found within the pages of Thomas Cook’s glossy brochures. The chance of any agent successfully infiltrating Amnah in a pork-pie hat, flowered shirt, Bermuda shorts and an Instamatic hanging around his neck were not high. Business required visas, which were readily available, but due to a bureaucratic system established by Emir Missh’s father, took nine weeks to come through. General Ephraim’s team of men were faced with the options of arrival in the harbour by boat or parachute, or across the desert by foot or camel.

During the next seventy-two hours, Amnah’s population of 17,328 was about to be swollen by twelve: five bedouins, two fishermen, three sailors, and a truck-driver and his mate delivering machine tool parts for a deepfreeze manufacturer.

To satisfy himself, he had already been to the electronics surveillance department and looked at the first minute of the tape. He hadn’t needed to look any further; he had pressed the ‘Erase’ button, run the tape through forward and backwards twice, and then checked to make sure the image was completely gone. Only then did he hand the tape over, with instructions to find out everything that could be learned from a blank RCA videotape. Ephraim suspected, not incorrectly, that it wouldn’t be much.