The Fifth Horseman

PART II

The answer to an anguished President’s question could be traced back to a November afternoon in Paris not quite one year before the Libyan’s threat message had been delivered to the White House gate.

France’s President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, punctual as usual, entered the Cabinet Room of his Elysee Palace precisely at four o’clock that afternoon.

He circled the table to greet first the Prime Minister, then the Ministers of Finance, Industry, Foreign Affairs, the Interior and Defense. When he got to Pierre Foucault, Chairman of France’s Atomic Energy Commission, a broad smile broke out on his composed features.

“Bravo, mon cher,” he said to his old friend and schoolmate.

Foucault’s reply was a glance at the empty chair beside his. The scientist he had summoned to this restricted and secret meeting was late.

A slight flaring of his nostrils betrayed Giscard’s irritation. “We shall proceed as planned,” he said. He took his seat at the head of the table and, in — that slow, precise enunciation he reserved for particularly solemn occasions, began.

“Messieurs,” he declared, “I have asked you here today to inform you of an event that is certain to have an overwhelming impact on the destiny of our nation. A team of French scientists working at our laser fusion research center at Fontenay-aux-Roses has succeeded within the past week in solving one of the most formidable scientific challenges in man’s history. Indeed, they have done something scientists around the world have been trying to do for thirty years-produce energy from fusion. The results of their work will ultimately permit this country, and indeed the entire world, to resolve the most intransigent problem we all face, the global energy crisis.”

He paused to allow the impact of his words to register. “We have asked the man responsible for our success, Monsieur Alain Pr6vost, to join us, but he has apparently been held up in traffic, so I shall ask Monsieur Foucault to begin.”

The President nodded to his Atomic Energy Chairman, who picked up the carafe in front of him and filled his water glass. He took a sip. Then he held up the glass as though he were about to propose a toast.

“Messieurs,” he began, “the meaning of our breakthrough is that the water in this glass …” he paused an instant for dramatic effect, swirling the water in his upraised glass, allowing it to glisten in the pale sunlight, “is now a source of energy capable of lighting the lamps of mankind. It means that there is now in this glass of water alone enough energy to meet the power requirements of the entire city of Paris and all its inhabitants for fortyeight hours.”

Foucault brought the glass back to the ministerial table with a sharp crash. The men around him gasped. He paused, savoring the shock his words had produced. Then he began again, his voice softer. “Until now, man has met his energy needs by exploiting the heritage of the past, the coal, oil, gas and uranium buried in the earth’s crust. His long-term survival on this planet has depended, however, on finding a new source of energy, one that is by its very nature virtually inexhaustible. There are only two, the sun-and water.

“With water,” he said, “we begin with the most abundant resource on the planet. It is, after all, everywhere. All water contains one of the simplest atoms on earthdeuterium, or, as we say, ‘heavy hydrogen.’ This water glass is full of them. If we can bang two of these atoms together hard enough so that they meld-that is, fusethe result is a release of energy so enormous it staggers the mind.

“Let me give you an example. One kilogram of the petroleum we now purchase at such an exorbitant cost in the Persian Gulf releases thirteen kilowatt hours of energy when it burns. One kilogram of heavy hydrogen, properly fused, will release …” again Poucault paused, measuring each word for dramatic effect, “ninety-one million kilowatt hours of energy.”

The ministers let out what was nearly a collective gasp.

“The search for this energy form,” he told his now spellbound audience, “goes back to the 1930s when the English astrophysicists at the Cavendish Laboratories realized that this was the process which explained the unac-countable energy releases of the sun and the stars. If it could be done in the stars, they asked, why couldn’t it be done on earth?”

Foucault leaned forward, savoring for an instant the role of a pedagogue.

“It meant, messieurs, dealing with time in billionths of seconds. A billionth of a second is to one second as one second is to three hundred and thirtytwo years. It meant creating conditions of temperature and pressure that are equivalent to hell on earth.

“The Soviets made the first great leap forward in 1958 with the ingenious use of magnetic force to produce the effect we sought. In the late sixties when the scientific community introduced the power of the laser beam into our work, real progress began. As you all know, we here in France have been at the forefront of laser technology. Our stunning and quite unexpected breakthrough of a fortnight ago comes as a result of the scientific advances we made in the late seventies developing our new carbondioxide laser.

“I must caution you all,” the Minister warned, “on the need for the utmost secrecy about our advance. What we have done is to demonstrate for the first time the scientific feasibility of the fusion process. Applying it commercially will require years and years of work. The potential commercial benefits to this country of our head start, however, are incalculable. We must not allow the premature disclosure of our discovery to deprive France of the just-and immeasurable-rewards of our scientists’ work.”

So mesmerized were the men around the table, no one noticed a hussier slip into the council chamber and discreetly hand an envelope to the Minister of the Interior. The Minister glanced at its contents, then, his face a register of the gravity of the message he had just read, turned to Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

“Monsieur le President,” he said, interrupting Foucault’s speech, “the Brigade Criminelle of the Prefecture of Police has just informed me they have discovered a car with a corpse in it abandoned in the Allee de Longchamps in the Bois de Boulogne. The corpse has been tentatively identified through a laissez-passer issued to attend this meeting. It appears to belong to this scientist we are waiting for―” he glanced at his paper — “Alain Prevost.”

Three blue police vans, yellow roof lights blinking, marked the scene.

A cordon of policemen screened off passersby, prostitutes and poodle walkers gawking in morbid curiosity at the Renault and the shrouded figure laid out on the ground beside it. Ignoring his policemen’s salutes, the Minister of the Interior, trailed by Pierre Foucault, swept through the cordon up to Maurice Lemuel, head of the Police Judiciaire, France’s top police investigatory force.

“Alors?” barked the Minister.

Lemuel turned to a plastic sheet laid out on the Bois de Boulogne grass. On it were two items, a wallet and a slide rule, its white lacquer surface yellowed by age and use.

“That’s all?” the Minister asked. “No sign of the documents he was carrying?”

“That’s all, sir,” Lemuel replied. “That and the pass we identified him with.”

The Minister turned to the Atomic Energy Chairman. “It’s perfectly incredible,” he said, his voice full of barely controlled anger. “You let these people go walking about Paris carrying secret papers as though they were taking shirt, to the laundry.”

“Olivier,” Foucault protested, “these men are scientists. They lust don’t think about security the way you do.”

“Maybe they don’t,” the Minister said. “But you’re supposed to. You’re personally responsible for the security of your agency. Which has been appallingly bad in this case.” He turned back to Lemuel. “What have you learned?”

“Very little,” the policeman answered. “We’ll need an autopsy to be sure of the cause of death. I would guess from the expression on his face that he was either smothered or had his windpipe broken by a very forceful, expert karate blow.”

Shortly after 4:30 A.M. the following day a telephone’s harsh summons jarred the stillness of the Minister of the Interior’s private apartment above the Place Beauvau. He groaned. From under the covers, his hand flayed uncertainly at the darkness, searching out the sound.

His caller was the Atomic Energy Chairman. “They called,” Foucault gasped.

“The people who killed Prevost. They want a million francs for the attache case. They just got through to our director of research at Fontenay, Pierre Lebrun. They told him if we want it back he has to be at the Cintra Bar on the Vieux-Port in Marseilles at exactly twelve noon today with one million francs in hundredfrane notes in a plastic shopping bag of the Bazaar d’Hotel de Ville. He’s supposed to wear a darkblue suit, black shoes, a white shirt and tie and a felt hat.”

Despite the seriousness of his caller’s words, the Minister could not help laughing. “Dressed like that, your poor Monsieur Lebrun is going to stand out like a nun in a whorehouse down there.”

He rose from his bed, looking about for his clothes. “Have Monsieur Lebrun at my office at eight o’clock,” he ordered. “I’m going to convene a meeting of my top people immediately.”

The four senior police officials of the French Republic sat respectfully in front of the Interior Minister’s desk, a gift from Napoleon to one of his distant predecessors. rhey were Paul-Robert de Villeprieux, the director of the DST, France’s counter-espionage service; his bald, slightly stoop-shouldered colleague General Henri Bertrand, head of what was familiarly known in the Ministry as La Piscine (” the Pool”), the SDECE, France’s intelligence service; Maurice Fraguier, the forty-five-yearold director general of the National Police; and General Marcel Piqueton, commander of the forty-thousand-man Gendarmerie Nationale. The Minister quickly summarized the details of the extortionist’s call.

“Gentlemen,” he said, sipping at the black coffee he had ordered for them all, “what are your views?”

Fraguier, chief of the Police Nationale, began. “Quite frankly, Monsieur le Ministre, I had suspected we were dealing with an affair of state here, a theft of industrial secrets by a foreign intelligence service, the CIA probably, or the KGB. This message makes it quite clear it’s a banal case of extortion organized by the Corsican milieu. This is characteristic of the way the Corsicans behave in payoff delivery situations.” Fraguier lit a cigarette and sat back in his chair. “It doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to predict how it’s going to work. Right near the Cintra Bar down there in Marseilles they’ve got the biggest Corsican neighborhood in France, the ‘Bread Basket.’ They’ll use it for the payoff, because they feel safe in there.

“They’ll let Monsieur Lebrun sit and marinate for a while in the Cintra while they study the neighborhood to make sure we’re not around. Then he’ll get a telephone call. He’ll be told to leave immediately for another address up in the Bread Basket by a very precise route. They’ve picked l’heure du pastis, so they’ll probably send him to another bar and they’ll give him a pseudonym, Jean Dupont. Once he’s in the bar he’ll get another call with the instructions as to where to leave the money. It will be very nearby, but out of sight of the bar. The trashcan in front of 17 Rue Belles pcuelles. Or they’ll say, `Hang it on the handlebars of the blue bicycle leaning against the door of 10 Rue des Trois-Lucs. Do it immediately and come back to the bar.’ When they’ve picked up the payoff, he’ll get a last call telling him where the papers are.”

The Minister placed his hands before him as though in prayer, lightly tapping his fingertips together, contemplating the scenario his police chief had outlined. He turned to the head of the SDECE. Eyes half closed like a monk in meditation, a Gauloise cigarette that never seemed to move dangling from his mouth, General Henri Bertrand sat motionless on his spindly chair. The perfect stillness of the man was attested to by the inch-and-a-half-long ash dangling at the end of his cigarette. He spoke and it spilled over the lapels of his gray suit.

“Since when have your Corsican friends been so interested in science?” he asked Fraguier.

“When the Russians wanted to get hold of our designs for the Concorde, what did they do?” Fraguier replied. “They went down to Marseilles and knocked on the right Corsican’s door, did they not? Perhaps that experience taught our Corsican friends the value of industrial secrets.”

Bertrand brushed the ashes from his suit. “Their asking price seems low,” he suggested in his quiet voice.

“Yes,” Fraguier agreed. “But remember, for them it’s a lot of money. They may not realize just how valuable those papers are.”

“What guarantee do we have,” asked the Minister, “that they haven’t photostated those documents and won’t try to hold us up again?”

“None whatsoever,” Fraguier answered. He paused. “But they won’t. Corsicans are honorable people. They only cheat you once.”

For a moment, the only sound in the office was the creaking of the Minister’s chair as he slowly rocked back and forth. In a sense, they had been fortunate. If they made the payoff, it would all be over. The incident would never get to the public and the secret of the scientific advance would be kept safe.

“All right, do it,” he ordered his police chief. “I’ll arrange with the Treasury for the million francs.”

A gray stain seeped along the edges of night. Dawn was about to break over the barren immensity of the desert. That period immediately preceding the emergence of the solar disc on the horizon was known to the followers of the Prophet as EI Fedji, the first dawn. It lasted only minutes, just the tune required by the Faithful to recite the first of their five sourates, the daily prayers prescribed by the Koran., Dressed in a crude shepherd’s cloak of brown and white stripes, a flowing white kafliyeh held in place by one cord on his head, a man in his late thirties emerged from his goatskin tent and spread a prayer rug on the sand. Turning east, he began to invoke the name of Allah, Master of the World, the All-Merc: ifUl and: \ll-Compassionate, the Supreme Sovereign of the Last Judgment.

He prostrated himself three times, touching his forehead to the earth each time, glorifying as he did the name of God and His Prophet. llis prayer finished, Muammar al-Qaddafi, the undisputed ruler of the Libyan nation, sat back on his rug and watch, — :d the rising sun flame the desert sky. He was a son of the desert. He had entered the world in a goatskin tent similar to the one in which he had just passed the night. His birth had been heralded by the rumble of the artillery duel fought that evening between the gunners of Rommel’s Afrika Korps and Montgomery’s Eighth Army. He had spent his boyhood wandering the desert with his tribe, maturing to the searing gusts of the siroccos, the blessings of the winter rains, the quick flowering of the pastures. From the sand seas below Cyrenaica southwest to the palm trees of Fezzan, there was not a prickly bush, a sweep of grass or a dried-out riverbed that had escaped his predator’s gaze in the nomad’s quest for pasturage for his flock.

Regularly, when he felt overwhelmed by the frustrations and disappointments of the power that was now his, he retreated back here to his desert to immerse himself again in the wellsprings of his being. Now, as he meditated on his prayer rug, his eye caught the gleam of a pair of headlights on the horizon. A white Peugeot 504 drew toward the small military encampment half a mile from his tent where his visitors were screened and the communications which tied him to Tripoli were installed. The three sentries on duty waved it to a halt and meticulously scrutinized first its driver, then his papers. When they had finished they ordered the driver out of his car. They ran a metal detector over his body. Finally, satisfied, they allowed him to set out alone, on foot, toward the Libyan dictator.

Qaddafi followed his progress across the sands. When he was a hundred yards away Qaddafi stood and walked out to met him. “Salaam alaikum!” he called out.

“Alaikum salaam,” the visitor replied.

Qaddafi advanced a few steps and embraced him on both cheeks. “Welcome, my brother,” he said. He drew back and looked at him, amused. Whalid Dajani was redfaced from the unaccustomed exertion of his half-mile walk in the desert.

“I have …” he began in an excited gasp.

Qaddafi raised his hand to interrupt him. “First, coffee, my friend,” he said. “Afterward, inch’ Allah, we will talk.”

He took Dajani by the arm and led him into the tent, where he picked up a brass coffee pot from the fire glowing in his brazier. He poured the pale Bedouin coffee into handleless porcelain cups shaped like oversized thimbles and offered the first one to his guest. They drank. Then Qaddafi lay back on the Oriental rugs thrown around the floor of his tent. The suspicion of a smile crossed his handsome face. “Now, my brother,” he said, “tell me your news.”

“The package arrived,” the visitor replied, “last night.” He took a deep breath and held it trapped in his lungs as though trying to hold back with it the rush of words ready to spill from his mouth. Finally he exhaled a breath that reeked of the dozens of peppermint Lifesavers he had gulped to kill the odor of the Chivas Regal whiskey he had been sipping all night long. Alcohol was totally banned in Qaddafi’s domain.

“I can’t believe it yet,” he said. “It’s all there. I studied it all night.” He shook his head in disbelief. Once again he saw the columns of figures plunging toward an infinity of power such as few minds had ever been privileged to contemplate.

His vision, however, was not that of the limitless reserves of energy that had enfevered the mind of the French scientist who had first looked at them barely a week before. What Dajani had glimpsed was a vision of hell, the dark underside of the dream of fusion, the terms of a Faustian compact Alain Prevost and others pursuing his dream around the world had had to strike with the capricious gods of science. For, in opening to man the vista of unlimited energy for as long as he and his planet might endure, they had also exposed the keys to a force so destructive it could set a premature end to his, and his environment’s, existence. Frozen into the endless rows of figures in the computer printout Pr6vost had been taking to his meeting at the tlysee Palace was the secret of the hydrogen bomb.

“Carlos and his people worked quickly,” Qaddafi observed. “You’re sure there’s no way this can be traced back here? Our relations with the French are vital.”

Dajani shook his head. “They copied the papers right away. Then they called the French as though they were Corsican gangsters looking for a ransom.”

“And the French believed them?”

“Apparently.”

Qaddafi rose from his carpet and moodily stirred the coals glowing in his brazier. “My brother,” he said, “when we started this operation you said the Frenchman was working on a new kind of energy.”

His visitor nodded.

“Why is it,” Qaddafi continued, “you were able to get the secret of the hydrogen bomb from what he was doing?”

“Essentially,” Dajani replied, “what they were trying to do in Paris was to make a mini-mini-hydrogen-bomb explosion. A controlled one so that they could use the energy it released. People have been trying to do that for thirty years since the Americans exploded the first hydrogen bomb.”

He paused, then reached to his temple and with a dramatic gesture plucked a single strand of hair from his balding head. He held it up before Qaddafi’s intrigued eyes. “What they were trying to do was to make a bubble no thicker than this hair explode. To do it, they had to squeeze it to one thousand times its normal density with a laser beam in a time so short the mind can’t imagine it.”

Qaddafi’s eyes widened. “But why did the secret of the hydrogen bomb come out of that?”

“Because with all experiments like this, the evolution of every ingredient is being constantly recorded by computer. For one tiny, tiny instant just before that little bubble exploded, it took on the one perfect configuration of a hydrogen bomb. Its secret, the exact relationship between its ingredients, is detailed here in the computer printout.”

Qaddafi rose and walked in silence to the entrance of the tent. He stood there scrutinizing the horizon, incarnadined now by the fast-rising sun.

For an instant he forgot what the scientist had just told him.

Instinctively, as he had every dawn in the desert since he was a boy, he studied the sky for some precursor foretelling the arrival of the Bedouin’s timeless enemy, the guebli, the searing wind that rose in the desolate expanse of the Sahara. When the guebli blew, death rode its wings, and man and beast huddled together, as often he had with his father’s herd, seeking protection against the onrushing clouds of sand under which whole tribes had been known to vanish.

This morning, though, the sky was a violent blue, not the silvery gray that heralded the guebli. He looked at it reassured, at the oneness of the vast canopy of sky and the endless horizons of his desert. The world stretching away from his tent was a cruel, harsh world; but it was a simple one in which choices and their consequences were clear: You crossed the sands in search of the well. You found the well and you survived. You did not and you died.

Perhaps now with what his visitor had brought him, he had reached his well, the one for which he had been searching for so many years. For a moment, standing there in the morning sunlight before reentering his tent, Qaddafi thought of the story his father had told him of the kettate, the tattooed fortuneteller, who had appeared at their campsite as his mother screamed in the pain that preceded his birth. She had gone to the tent in which the men of the tribe sipped tea waiting for the birth and shook out on a carpet the twenty-three rigidly prescribed oddments of her trade, an old coin, a shard of glass, a dried date kernel, a bone from a camel’s hoof. Then she proclaimed it would beg a boy. He would be an anointed of God, she announced, a man destined to stand out from all the others, to perform God’s work in the service of his people. She had barely finished when the first part of her prophecy was confirmed. The scream of the midwife rang out from the woman’s tent calling out the ritual phrase that greeted a newborn male: “Allah akhbar-God is great.”

Qaddafi turned back into the tent. From a copper pot he took a thick, creamy bowlful of leben, goat’s curd, and a black wad of dates, the Bedouin’s traditional breakfast. He set them on the carpet and bade his guest eat.

Dipping a date into his curds, Qaddafi pondered, as he often did, on the old woman’s prophecy and how favored indeed he was in Allah’s eyes. Allah had given him a mission, to bring His peoples back to God’s way, to re-awaken the Arab people to their true destiny, to right the wrongs that had been done to his brothers. And He had given him the means to accomplish it, the oil without which those who had so long exploited his people could not survive. To get it from him, the others had had to offer him the means to his vision: wealth, the arms he had bought, the technology he had acquired, the science his people had learned, and now this prospect his visitor had laid before him-the prospect of the ultimate power on earth.

“And, my brother,” he said to Dajani, “we can build this from these documents they brought you last night?”

“It’s a long, hard road with many, many problems. First we must finish our atomic program. There will be difficulties and risks-the danger the Israelis will find out what we are doing and destroy us before we can succeed.”

Qaddafi looked out to the desert stretching away from the tent, a distant gaze in his dark, brooding eyes. “My friend, there has never been greatness without danger. There has never been a great victory without great risks.”

He rose, indicating to Dajani that the conversation was over. “You have done well, my brother,” he said, his voice almost reverent, “ever since Allah sent you here to help us. Now, thanks to you, at last we shall make justice prevail.”

This time he walked his visitor back across the sands to his car. Gently he placed a hand on Whalid’s elbow. A faint, ironic smile crossed his features. “My brother,” he murmured, “perhaps you should not eat so many peppermints. Such things are bad for the good health God gave you.”

The vista laid bare to Muammar al-Qaddafi in his desert retreat was only the last, terrifying consequence of an enterprise the Libyan had pursued from the moment, almost, that he had seized power. Power was something the Bedouin dictator understood instinctively, and what better way to assert his claim to the leadership of a resurgent Arab world than to be the first Arab leader to arm his nation with the ultimate weapon?

Qaddafi had taken his first step on the road to his desert rendezvous in 1969, shortly after he had consolidated his revolution. He sent his Prime Minister, Abdul Salam Jalloud, to Peking with an offer to buy half a dozen atomic bombs from China’s nuclear arsenal. Rebuffed by the Chinese, Qaddafi turned to Westinghouse with a proposal to purchase a 600-megawatt nuclear reactor to desalinize sea water for irrigating his desert. Since no one in the world knew how to do that at anything remotely approaching an economically justifiable cost, the implication that Qaddafi had other uses in mind for the plant was clear. The State Department refused to authorize the sale despite the protests of Westinghouse and its congressional lobby.

The Libyan then sought to buy an experimental reactor from Gulf General Atomic of San Diego. The reactor itself could not have been used to make an atomic bomb, but the fuel that Gulf General was ready to sell Qaddafi along with it-fully enriched uranium-was ideal bomb material. Henry Kissinger’s personal intervention was required to block that initiative.

Qaddafi’s program got into high gear after the 1973 war and his realization that Israel possessed atomic weapons. He himself picked the program’s code name, Seif al Islam-“The Sword of Islam”-and placed it under the direct control of Prime Minister Jalloud’s office. Three principles were to guide it. First, the weapons program would be carried out under the cover of a peaceful nuclear-energy program. Second, Libya would look primarily to Europe for its technology. Third, every effort would be made to staff the program with Arab scientists, men either recruited from universities and nuclear programs or trained at Libyan expense in the best universities in the world.

By the mid-seventies, the CIA began picking up indications that Libya was trying to recruit European nuclear engineers by dangling large Swiss-banked sums of money in front of them. One indication of how far the program’s tentacles could reach was the dismissal of Dr. Klaus Traube, manager of Germany’s Interatom Company responsible for research on the fast breeder reactor. Traube was revealed to have had a close relationship with Hans Joachim Klein, a young Libyan-trained terrorist who participated along with “Carlos” in the Vienna kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers in December 1975.

It was, however, to the explosion of India’s atomic “device” in the Rajasthan desert on May 19, 1974, that the Libyan owed his access to the secret of the atom. Pakistan’s Zulficar Ali Bhutto vowed that night that his countrymen would one day possess nuclear weapons to rival his neighbors’ even if they had “to eat grass” to get them. Given the impoverished state of Pakistan’s treasury, his might have been an idle boast had it not been for a secret deal Bhutto negotiated with Qaddafi. Its terms were simple: in return for Libya’s financing Pakistan’s purchase of a plutonium-reprocessing plant and several reactors from France, Qaddafi would receive some of the plutonium the Pakistanis intended to divert from the plant and access to their advanced nuclear technology.

That arrangement ultimately collapsed when the French, under pressure from the United States, agreed to abandon the sale.

In the meantime, Bhutto’s overthrow and subsequent execution had brought a brief chill to Libyan-Pakistani relations. The combination of Libyan financing and Pakistani technology was too promising, however, to be lost in a clash of personalities, and the original collaboration was renewed in General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq’s pursuit of the “Islamic Bomb.”

While his cooperative effort with Pakistan continued, Qaddafi also pursued his attempts to set up a purely national program. In 1976 he persuaded Jacques Chirac, then France’s Prime Minister, to sell him the nuclear reactor for desalinizing sea water the Americans had earlier refused him.

President Giscard d’Estaing quietly let the project fade until, under the pressures on France’s balance of payments created by the 1979-80 oil price rises, he reluctantly authorized the reactor’s sale.

The most dramatic confrontation in Qaddafi’s long pursuit of the atomic bomb, however, had for its setting a place as remote from the goatskin tents in which he enjoyed resting as could be imagined. It was an ornate salon in the Palace of the Czars, the Kremlin. Qaddafi’s interlocutor that December day in 1976 was not a Russian but the proudest industrial baron of the nation that had once colonized Qaddafi’s people. Who could have better symbolized the unsettled and indulgent world whose way of life was menaced by the austere visionary emerging from his deserts than Gianni Agnelli: aristocrat, playboy, heir to a technological complex as sophisticated and as powerful as any in the world, the Fiat Motor Company.

Agnelli was the supplicant that day. He had come to Moscow in secret because he needed something Qaddafi had to offer, money. Qaddafi already owned ten percent of his firm, purchased a few months before for $415

million, more than triple the market value of the shares. To an astonished Agnelli, he proposed to buy even more or release to him large investment sums if Agnelli could convert part of his company, with Soviet help, into an advanced weapons industry, including a major branch devoted to nuclear research and development.

It was a diabolical proposition. Agnelli was being asked to set an unstable nation just across the Mediterranean from his homeland on the road to weapons of mass destruction in return for the funds that might save his industrial giant from collapse. The Italian’s readiness to consider the proposition, however briefly, was one more confirmation of the premise underlying Qaddafi’s enterprise: that the day would come when, under the pressure of the energy crisis, there would be nothing in the West that was not for sale.

Whalid Dajani drove along the eucalyptus-and laurel-lined highway leading to the Libyan capital, sweating profusely, his mind still back in the desert, on the harrowing hours he’d lived since they’d brought him the transcript of Prevost’s phone call a week ago. He could feel in his stomach the ache of the ulcer his doctor had warned him he was developing.

A man is dead because of me, he thought. A man like me, who had the ideals I once had. My God, he reflected, how far I’ve come, how far away I am from what I set out to be. He saw ahead, not the highway into Tripoli, but the other terrible road on which he was embarked.

“Since Allah sent you here to help us,” Qaddafi had said. Whalid smiled bitterly. Allah had had nothing to do with it. It had been his brother Kamal and it had all begun that morning in January 1977 when Kamal had arrived in Paris.

The debarking passengers of Austrian Airlines Flight 705 from Vienna to Paris mounted the futuristic walkway of Charles de Gaulle Airport and clustered around the passport-control desk of Gate 26. Kamal Dajani was wearing a beige suede jacket and blue jeans, an Austrian Airlines carry-on bag hanging from his shoulder. A dark suntan, the product, presumably, of the ski slopes of the Tyrol, burnished his lean face and emphasized the delicate blue of his eyes.

He presented the passport oflicer at the desk an Austrian passport identifying him as Fredi Mueller, an agricultural-machinery salesman from Linz, then strolled casually into the lobby and on to the nearest men’s room.

He hesitated a moment before entering the last stall in line. He locked the door and set his airline bag on the floor. An instant later, a hand pulled it into the adjacent stall, then slid an absolutely identical bag back to his feet.

Kamal opened it up and methodically checked its contents: a Walther P-38 automatic; three magazines of 9mm. ammunition; two U.S. Army fragmentation grenades; a switchblade knife; a red guide, Paris par Arrondissement, on which he could locate his destination and the safe house whose address he had committed to memory; another set of identity papers, these French, identifying him as Mohammed Yaacef, an Algerian postgraduate student studying in France; a small vial of liquid; and, finally, five thousand French francs in assorted notes and coins. As he passed the toilet attendant on the way out, he sent a one-franc coin clattering into the saucer beside her. No need, he thought, to give her any reason to glare at him.

Forty minutes later, he got out of a taxicab at the junction of the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain at the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter. He crossed the Place du Luxembourg and strolled along the iron fence of the Luxembourg Gardens down to the Rue d’Assas. There he turned left until he reached number 89 at the corner of the Rue Tavard opposite the Tarnier Maternity Clinic. The building’s ground floor was occupied by a bakery, and as Kamal climbed to the first floor he savored the odor of warm bread and fresh croissants that seemed to impregnate the dark stairwell.

He knocked at the first door on the left. Inside, he heard the thump of bare feet on wood, then felt someone staring at him through the door’s peephole. “It’s me,” he whispered in Arabic, “Kamal.”

His sister Laila opened the door. For an instant brother and sister looked at each other. Then, with half-stifled cries, they fell into each other’s arms.

“Five years,” Laila whispered. “Why so long?”

“I had no choice,” Kamal replied.

She beckoned him inside. Before closing the door, she glanced down the stairwell, making sure he had not been followed. Then she fixed the door with a double lock.

“Show me what they did to you,” Laila demanded as soon as they reached the sitting room. She was a year younger than Kamal, yet she had always managed to treat him with an air of superiority as though somehow the mere fact of having been born a female had given her a head start in life.

Grudgingly, Kamal removed his jacket and shirt. The scar along his neck ran down to an ugly tangle of scar tissue planted like the imprint of a tiger’s claw below his left shoulder blade.

Laila gasped at the sight of that most visible heritage of the career her brother had begun crawling under a screen of machine-gun fire at a training camp for commandos of the Refusal Front on a windswept plateau above Damascus.

“They told me you were dead.”

“That’s what the bastards thought when they ran away and left me,” her brother noted. Six times Kamal had taken a squad of fedayeen out of Fatah Land in Southern Lebanon to rocket a kibbutz, mine a road or ambush a passing car. On the seventh, an unsuccessful effort to fire a Katushka rocket into the Haifa oil refineries, his squad had been intercepted by an Israeli patrol. A cluster of well-placed grenades had wounded Kama] and scattered his men.

“You were lucky the Israelis didn’t finish you off when they found you,”

Laila remarked.

“Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s because you can’t interrogate a dead fedayeen.” The Israeli patrol had rushed Kamal to the prisoners’ ward of Tel Aviv’s Tal Hashomer Hospital. There he had lain in a coma for a week until the medical skill of his captors and the vitality of his own constitution had combined to save him.

He picked up his beige jacket and drew from its pocket the pendant-shaped vial three inches long that had been in his second airline bag. Laila gasped at the sight of the pale-yellow fluid in its bulbous base.

“My jasminel”

Kamal nodded. His sister grabbed the vial, plucked out its stopper and thrust it to her nostrils. She gulped its odor the way a suffocating man might gasp at the first rush of air flowing from an oxygen mask. Laila closed her eyes. A world, a forgotten world, swam back at her as the pungent scent invaded her senses. Abdul’s perfume shop in the souk of Old Jerusalem, a dark cavern of olfactory miracles, its air so heavy with musky smells it seemed she could almost caress it between her fingertips.

“How did you-” she started.

“One of our people who was in Jerusalem on a mission brought it out,” Kamal explained. Illicit traffic across the Israeli-Jordanian border was something Kamal understood. He had been an illegal export himself, hidden at the bottom of a truckload of oranges after his escape from the prisoners’ ward at Tal Hashomer Hospital.

Laila clutched the vial to her breast. “Dear, sweet Abdul,” she said.

Her brother started at her phrase. Those blue eyes of his, the eyes that, the family had always joked, were the legacy of an errant Crusader knight’s dalliance with a member of the Dajani clan, seemed to protrude from their sockets, their delicate robin’s-egg cast darkened by some interior storm.

“Don’t be in a rush to use up that jasmine,” he said. “It happens to be the last your dear, sweet Abdul ever sold. He’s dead.”

Laila gasped.

“He was executed for treason.”

His sister looked unbelievingly at the vial in her hands, then at her brother who had brought it for her.

“May I have some tea?” he asked.

Too stunned to speak, Laila turned to the kitchen alcove behind her and prepared to light the gas stove.

Her brother continued. “I’ve come to see you because I need your help.”

Laila spun, the match still sputtering in her hand. She had found her voice. “Why? Is there some poor grocer down the street you want killed?”

The tone of her brother’s reply was as sharp as the snap of a breaking bone. “Laila, we never kill without a reason. He sold two of our people to the Jews.” He paused, throttling down his anger before he continued. “1

want you to convince Whalid to help us in a very important operation.”

“Why me? Why don’t you talk to him? He’s your brother, too, isn’t he?”

“Because Whalid and I don’t talk to each other. We only argue. And I’m interested in getting his help, not winning an argument.” Kamal got up and moved to the window overlooking the clinic across the street.

“Whalid would never understand what I’ve been doing.” Kamal looked out the window, almost melancholy, groping for a phrase, for a thought to explain himself to his sister. “The end justifies the means.” He uttered the words as though they were an original thought he had just discovered, the absolution of a new age designed to be pronounced before rather than after confession. “For me they do. Not for him. Except in those laboratories of his where everything’s an abstraction.” He gestured with his head to the crowded street below. “Never down there where it matters. He’d call me a criminal,” he said softly. “I’d call him a coward. After five minutes we wouldn’t have anything left to say to each other.”

“You never did have much to say to each other,” Laila remarked. “Long before he went into those laboratories of his and you …” She paused, searching for a word.

Kamal provided it. “Became a terrorist. Or a patriot. The line between them is sometimes thin.” Kamal walked back across the room, gesturing as he did to the kitchen. “You were going to make me a cup of tea, remember?”

Laila set the kettle on her stove and came back to the sitting room. “He’s changed, you know. He’s more French than the French are now. What happened to us, our parents, Palestine-all that just seems to have faded away like it was a part of a life he lived in another incarnation. He’s like everyone else. The car. The house. The cleaning woman on Thursdays. His work. His wife. A happily married man, no?”

“We’re not going to ask him to give up all that, Laila,” Kamal’s voice was calm, almost serene. “But he’s not like everyone else. Not for us at least.”

His words sent a tremor of apprehension through Laila, confirming what she had suspected from the moment Kamal had mentioned their elder brother.

“It’s about his work-what you’re after?”

Kamal nodded.

The kettle whistled. Laila rose. She walked to the alcove, her steps paced off in the slowed rhythm of someone whose mind is lost in thought. So that’s what it is, she told herself. After all the years, after all the rumors, the angry late-night discussions, they were going to do it now.

She set the cups on the table beside Kamal’s chair, the noonday sun highlighting as she did the rich rolls of auburn hair cascading down to her shoulders. She shivered inadvertently as the enormity of what her brother contemplated overwhelmed her.

“How in God’s name will we ever get him to help us?” she asked.

Outside, the harsh bleat of an ambulance rushing toward the clinic across the street pierced the noonday quiet.

Laila Dajani’s face lit up at the sight of the familiar figure advancing toward her through the crowded waiting room of the Marseilles airport.

Her brother Whalid still walked with his splay-footed gait. John Wayne, she had always thought, ambling away from his horse in an old Western.

As he drew closer, something else struck Laila about her elder brother.

My God, she thought, he’s put on weight!

“Frangoise feeds you well,” she laughed.

Selfconsciously her brother drew in his stomach. “You’re right,” he said.

Smiling broadly, Whalid led Laila out of the airport to his Renault 16

parked in the airport’s reserved parking area, opposite the arrival lounge.

He owed that privilege to a yellow-and-green sticker in one corner of his windshield. It was a security pass to the Nuclear Research Center at Cadarache, the heart of France’s atomic-energy program and, above all, the developmental work on the Super-Phenix, the breeder reactor which France counted on to replace the world’s first generation of nuclear reactors.

Whalid Dajani was an expert on the bizarre behavior patterns of one of the most precious and dangerous elements on earth, plutonium. His doctorate thesis for the University of California’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, “A Revised Projection of Neutron Release Across the Plutonium Isotope Spectrum,” had been published in the March 1970 Bulletin of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and stamped him as one of the most brilliant young physicists of his generation. A paper he had delivered on the same subject at a Paris forum in November 1973 had prompted the French to offer him a key position in the Phenix program.

Whalid steered the car out of the parking lot, away from the flashing traffic of the autoroute toward the narrow country road leading to the Provengal inn in which he’d told his wife, Frani~oise, to meet them for lunch.

After the spontaneous emotion of their greeting, a strained silence fell between brother and sister.

Smoking nervously, Laila watched the rolling fields of vineyards, vines pruned down to gaunt skeletons, fleeing past her window. As they entered a small village, Whalid glanced at his sister. Her eyes were fixed on the square ahead, its dirt surface baked hard by the sun and the tramping of generations of boules players like the halfdozen men gathered there now, casting their lead balls on it in the pale winter sunshine.

“You said in your telegram you had something urgent to talk to me about.”

A moving car is not a place for a serious conversation, Laila thought. You talk in a car when you want to say something without having to look at the person you’re saying it to. End an affair. Give an order. Announce un-pleasant news. But for what she had to say to her brother, she had to be able to watch him, to fix her eyes on his.

“What a lovely squarel” she said. “So calm. Let’s stop for a drink.”

Whalid parked the car, and brother and sister walked to one of the three cafes whose terraces gave onto the square. Whalid ordered a pastis.

Laila hesitated. “No alcohol,” she said.

“Try a nice mint tea, ma petite,” the proprietress proposed. She turned and gave Whalid a friendly leer. “Very aphrodisiac.”

As she bustled away, Whalid turned to his sister. “What was it you wanted to talk about?” he prodded gently. “Is it about Kamal?”

Laila’s fingers plucked nervously over the clutter in her handbag until they came on her Gitanes cigarettes. She lit one and inhaled several times.

“No, Whalid, it’s about you.”

“Me?”

“You. The Brothers need your help.”

Whalid felt a twinge of nervous tension cramp his stomach. “Laila, all that’s behind me now. I have a life here, a life I’ve worked hard to build.

I’ve got a wife I love. And I’m doing something that I love and that I know is important. I’m not going to jeopardize that. Not for the Brothers. Not for anyone.”

Whalid could not help thinking of the lithe blond French girl who would be waiting for them at lunch. He had met Frangoise in the Cadarache senior employees’ restaurant. Passing her a mustard pot, they liked to joke. She had given him so much: a sense of place at last, a meaning to his existence that gave dimension to the work in which he so passionately believed. Their seventeenth-century dwelling in the little medieval city of Meyrargues was for Whalid a citadel, a citadel his beautiful wife was helping to build against the encroaching tides of his past.

Beside him, Laila sipped her tea. “Whalid, you can never escape your past.

Palestine is your home. Jerusalem. Not here.”

Whalid did not answer. Brother and sister sat side by side a moment, united in silence by the bond of the suffering they had once shared. Neither had ever known the horror of life in a Palestinian refugee camp, but the pain of their exile from their native land had been nonetheless real for that.

They represented a face of the Palestinian problem that a world used to the stereotyped miseries of the camps rarely saw: a Palestine that had once produced the Arab world’s elite, a proud flow of scholars, doctors, businessmen, scientists. Forty-five successive generations of Dajanis had dwelt upon the hillsides of Jerusalem, deeding the city an unending flow of Arab leaders and thinkers, until 1947. Twice since then, in 1948 and again in 1967, Israeli gunfire had driven them from their homes. Israeli bulldozers had reduced their graceful ancestral dwelling to rubble in 1968

to make way for a new apartment complex. Three months later, their father had died of a broken heart in his Beirut exile.

Whalid took his sister’s hand in his and softly caressed it. “My heart screams out against what happened to us, just as loudly as yours or anyone else’s,” he said. “But it’s not the only thing it screams out for. I suppose now Palestine is the only cause in your life. It’s not in mine.”

Laila fell silent, reflecting on what her brother had just said. “Whalid,”

she asked after a long sip of her tea, “do you remember the last time we were all together?”

Whalid nodded. It was the evening after his father’s funeral.

“You said something that night I’ve always remembered. Kamal was leaving for Damascus to join the Brothers to get vengeance for our people. He wanted you to go with him and you said no. The Israelis were so strong, you said, because they understood what education meant.

You’d been accepted to do your doctorate in California. Berkeley was going to be your Damascus, you told us. Getting the best scientific education in the world was going to be your way of helping your people and the cause.”

“I remember. And so?”

Laila glanced at the square, at the boules players, at the dark-robed women gossiping in front of the Prisunic, cord shopping bags bulging in their hands. “Where is the cause, where are your people, in all this?”

“Right here,” Whalid replied, tapping his chest. “Where it always was, in my heart.”

“Please, Whalid,” his sister entreated, “don’t get angry. I wanted to say you were right that night. Each of us has to help the cause in his own way.

With what he has. Maybe carrying messages to Beirut in my bra isn’tmuch of a contribution. But it’s what I can do. Kamal fights. That’s his way. But you’re special, Whalid. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of us who can carry a Kalishnikov. But there’s only one Palestinian in the world who can do for his people what you can.”

Whalid sipped his pastis and turned a cold, appraising regard to Laila.

“And just what is this special thing the Brothers expect me to do for our people?”

“Help them to steal plutonium. But not for themselves, Whalid, for Qaddafi.”

Whalid exhaled slowly, softly. He lowered his pastis to the table.

Instinctively, he looked around to see if there was anyone in earshot who could overhear them. He ran his fingers across his forehead, feeling as he did the little beads of sweat that had formed there.

“I suppose the Brothers think I can just put a few kilos of plutonium in the back seat of my car some Sunday afternoon and drive out of Cadarache with it?”

“Whalid,” Laila replied, “the Brothers are many things, but they are not crazy. The whole thing has already been thought over and studied in great detail. All the Brothers want from you is information. Where the plutonium is stored. How it’s guarded. How many people protect it. Some idea of how they can get in and out of Cadarache without getting caught.”

She opened her purse and picked through its contents until she came upon a thick white envelope. “What the Brothers need to know is all set out here.

And I’m authorized to promise you one thing. No one will ever know where it came from. No one will ever be able to trace it back to you.”

“And suppose I refuse?”

“You won’t.”

His sister’s smug reply, the presumptuousness of those who had sent her to him, infuriated her brother.

“I won’t?” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Well, I do! Right now! And I’m going to tell you why.”

He grabbed for her pack of cigarettes. His gesture prevented him from seeing the expression sweeping across his sister’s face. It remained there just an instant, a strange, distant glance full of compassion and horror, fear and respect.

“I believe in what I do, Laila. I believe in it as passionately as I ever believed in Palestine.” He paused, inhaling slowly. Despite the passion of his words, his tone was grave and measured. “Florence Nightingale once said, ‘The first thing a hospital should not do is spread germs.’ Well, the first thing a nuclear physicist should not do is spread this terrifying knowledge he has so man kills himself with it instead of using it to build a better world.”

This time it was his sister’s turn to erupt. “A better world!” she said scornfully. “Why does Qaddafi want the bomb? Because the Israelis have it.

You know damn well they do. Do you think they got it to build a better world with? Like hell! To use on us if they have to.”

Her brother remained impassive. “Yes, I know they have it.”

“And you can sit here beside me, admit the Israelis have it, and still tell me you won’t help your own people, your own people who’ve been trampled on like no other people in the world, to get it?”

“I can. And I am, because I feel a commitment to something higher than Palestine. Or the cause. Or whatever you want to call it.”

“Higher than to your own flesh and blood? Your own dead father?”

Brother and sister were silent for a moment, each spent by the intensity of their argument. The midday sun was warm now and the stucco houses across the square seemed to radiate a terra-rosa glow in the bright light. The knot of hangers-on around the boules game had thickened, and the sound of their muttered comments lapped at the edge of the square, wavelets of a gentle sea sliding along a beach.

“The answer is no, Laila. I’m not going to do it.”

A sense of emptiness, of despair filled Laila. For a second she felt physically ill.

A pair of boys, perhaps twelve years old, set their skateboards onto the hard-packed square. In an instant, they were swinging through it with the gentle grace of birds cruising a summer sky. Laila glanced at her brother’s forearm. On the inside of his wrist, just above the steel band of his Rolex Submariner watch, was a tattoo, a blue serpent entwined around a heart pierced by a dagger. Laila leaned over to her brother and slowly, almost sensually, scratched the surface of the tattoo with her crimson fingernail.

“And this?” she asked.

He looked at her, furious. That tattoo was a souvenir of the most painful moment of his life, the death of his father after their exile from Jerusalem in 1968. The day of his funeral, he and Kamal had gone to a Saudi Arabian tattoo artist in the souks of Beirut. The Saudi had fixed that design on the flesh of each brother’s forearm: a pierced heart for their lost father, a serpent for the hatred they bore those responsible for his death, a dagger for the vengeance they had sworn to obtain. Then they had sworn together a vow from the fourth chapter of the Koran to use their lives to avenge their father’s death under pain of losing them if they faltered in their pursuit.

Laila saw his muscles twitching. At least, she thought, I’ve given a face to the people, to the cause, I’m pleading for.

“You got out, Whalid,” she said. Her voice was tender; there was no hint of reproach in its tone. “You’ve been able to forget here with your new life, your wife. But how about the ones who didn’t? Are they to be a people without a home forever? Without an address? Is our own father’s body never to go home again?”

Whalid looked at the tattoo under his watchband, glowering at it as though somehow his glare might erase its stigmata from his flesh.

“What am I supposed to be?” His voice was an angry, sibilant hiss. “A prisoner of this skin because I was born with it? Do I have to go against my reason, against the things I believe in, just because I was born in a place called Palestine thirty-eight years ago?”

Laila waited along and thoughtful moment before answering. “Yes, Whalid,” she said. “You do. I do. We all do.”

After lunch with Whalid’s wife, Frangoise, brother and sister drove back to the airport in silence. Laila went immediately to the checkin counter to register for her return flight to Paris. When she had finished, she walked across the airport lounge toward the newsstand where Whalid scanned the headlines of the evening papers. His dark eyes seemed distant and melancholy, shutters turning his vision back into some interior world of his own. He’s understood, Laila thought. He’s miserable, but he knows he has no choice. She laid a hand on his elbow. “I’ll tell them it’s all right. You’ll do it.”

Whalid flicked the pages of a magazine on the kiosk before him, an unconscious effort to postpone a few seconds the terrible decision his sister’s words bad thrust on him.

“No, Laila,” he said finally. “Tell them I won’t do it.”

His sister felt her legs tremble. She thought for an instant she would retch on the airport floor.

“Whalid,” she whispered. “You’ve got to. You have to.”

Whalid shook his head. The sound of his own voice saying “No” had dispelled his lingering indecision. “I said ‘No,’ Laila, and I meant it.”

Laila was pale, her eyes blinking, unfocused. He doesn’t understand, she thought. Or if he does, he doesn’t give a damn. “Whalid, you must. You must.”

He shook his head. Laila understood. There was no appealing his decision now. To her horror, she realized that she had failed. Fingers trembling, she opened her pocketbook and took out a second envelope, this one much smaller. “They told me to give you this if you said no,” she said, pressing the envelope into her brother’s hands.

Whalid began to open it. Her fingers closed over his. “Wait until I’ve left.” Laila pressed her cheek, damp with tears, against her brother’s. “Ma salaam,” she whispered. Then she was gone.

Whalid watched from the terrace of the airport as his sister crossed the tarmac to her waiting flight. She did not turn back. As she disappeared into the 727’s rear hatch, he opened the envelope clutched in his hands.

Glancing at the single sheet of paper it contained, he staggered. He had recognized instantly both the verse from the fourth chapter of the Koran and the handwriting in which it was written.

“And if they turn back from their vow,” it read, “take them and kill them, wherever ye find them.”

On Sunday, March 3, 1977, explaining to Frangoise that he had family business in Paris, Whalid Dajani boarded the Mistral, the French railroad’s crack express, for the French capital. Shortly before midnight that evening, the doorbell’s raw screech shattered the quiet of Frangoise Dajani’s darkened bedroom. At the sight of the three shadowy figures gathered on her doorstep, the identification card with its official tricolor slashes thrust sharply at her half-closed eyes, Frangoise gasped. Oh my God, she thought. There’s been an accident. He’s dead.

The three agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire pushed abruptly past her into the living room.

“What is it?” she cried. “Has something happened to my husband?”

Ignoring her, two of the agents headed upstairs toward her bedroom.

“Where are you going? What do you think you’re doing?” she shrieked after them.

The leader of the trio, a stout florid man, grabbed her by the shoulders.

“Get dressed,” he ordered. “Immediately. Pack a bag with whatever toilet articles you will need for the next seventy-two hours.”

Franc oise protested. The agent reached into his pocket for the only explanation he was prepared to offer her, a brief typewritten order from a juge d’instruction, authorizing the DST to detain her for seventy-two hours.

Frangoise moved toward the telephone. “I’m going to call my father,” she announced angrily.

The agent reached the phone first. He locked the receiver into its cradle with his hand. “No, madame, no calls.”

Not quite an hour later, Franeoise Dajani was led into the office of the regional director of the DST, located on the twelfth floor of a commercial office building overlooking the Vieux-Port of Marseilles.

Outside, the mistral moaned through the deserted streets, tearing at the wooden shutters of the old buildings nearby, its violent gusts rattling the plateglass windows of the director’s office.

The regional director, studiously ignoring her presence, scrutinized a report on his desk. Finally he pushed it aside and looked up at her with the cold, appraising air of an insurance adjuster trying to downgrade a claim. “We arrested your husband in Paris this afternoon. Together with his brother and sister.”

“Arrested him?” Frangoise gasped. “For what?”

“For planning to steal plutonium from the nuclear installations at Cadarache for the benefit of the Palestine Liberation Organization.”

The slender blond woman tightened the muscles around her eyes, fighting a flow of tears. “I don’t believe you.”

“Madame, I’m not concerned whether you believe me or not. They were traced through an Israeli agent who saw your brother-in-law arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport. They were arrested with the evidence of their guilt on them. All three have confessed. My only concern is whether or not you were involved in their crime.”

There was not even a hint of sympathy for her in the middle-aged DST agent, only the professional interrogator’s search for the revealing flicker of the eyes, the subtle shift in vocal tone, that would expose his quarry.

“Where are you holding my husband?”

The.director glanced at his watch. “We’re not. He’ll be landing in Beirut in two hours. And he will not return to France-ever. The government has declared him persona non grata, although, in the circumstances, he has every reason to consider himself fortunate. It has been so decided by higher authority.”

Just how high even the DST agent did not realize. Developing the Super-Ph6nix breeder reactor for overseas sale was a cornerstone of France’s export program for the decade of the 1980s. The public revelation in a trial that a group of Palestinians had formulated a plan to steal plutonium from Cadarache could have been a devastating blow to the program in a Europe already alive with antinuclear sentiments. Rather than run that risk, the Minister of the Interior, with the President’s concurrence, had ordered the three Dajanis deported.

Frangoise sagged in her chair. Instinctively, her fingers went to the wafer-thin gold medallion around her neck. It was a representation of the fish which, on the walls of ancient Rome’s catacombs, had symbolized the early Christians. She was a Pisces, and her father had given it to her on the eve of their marriage. She adored her father as she had never adored anyone else, even her husband. She had been a sickly child, and it was he who had nursed her, given her the strength to live. What had happened would leak out one day and then the gossip would start, the vile, vicious gossip.

It would kill her father as surely, as cruelly, as a cancer slowly ravaging a vital organ. Beyond the director’s window, twelve stories below, Frangoise could see the blink of the Jardin du Pharo at the throat of the Vieux-Port. She listened to the desolate wail of the mistral, the sad music of her childhood, and saw herself as a young girl standing on the quay of the Vieux-Port with her father watching the fishing dories bobbing in the choppy blue sea. Despair, a bitter unreasoning despair at what her husband’s act would do to him, sickened her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel ill. May I have a glass of water?”

The DST official was only a few strides from his office on his way to the toilet down the hall when he heard the shattering of his plateglass windows.

For just an instant there on his mother’s balcony, his eyes idly roving the long and gentle swell of the Mediterranean, Kamal Dajani was at peace. To his left were the familiar crags of Pigeon Rock, the landmark which had pointed seamen the way to Beirut harbor since the Phoenicians had first planted their venturing triremes on the outgoing tide. Below Kamal’s perch, along the coastal road, sweeping up the seashore from Al Maza Airport, was a gigantic open-air market: thousands of merchants, driven from the city center by the Lebanese civil war, hawking everything from eggs to transistor radios and Dior dresses off blankets tossed on the roadside, folding camp tables, out of automobile trunks.

The Lebanese, Kamal thought contemptuously-the only thing they prefer to killing each other is making money. That scornful observation brought Kamal back to reality. Failure did not sit well with him, and the failure of his operation could not have been more complete. He had only one minor consolation: they had managed, thanks to his muttered Arabic injunction to the others, to conceal their Libyan connection from the French. The DST had been only too ready to accept the idea that they were in the employ of the PLO.

Kamal’s only concern at the moment was salvaging what he could from the disaster of their failed operation. If he could not deliver to Muammar al-Qaddafi the plutonium he wanted, perhaps he could deliver something else, something which in the long run might prove far more valuable: the scientific genius of his brother.

“fI table!”

Kamal turned at his mother’s words. Whatever their diverse accomplishments, their violent careers, her three children still instinctively obeyed the imperious commands of Sulafa Dajani. Small wonder. She was an imposing figure, the very antithesis of the stereotyped image of the Arab woman. No veil had ever shrouded her face. Her tall, lithe figure was clothed in a black Saint-Laurent suit, its beautifully tailored lines clinging to each indentation of a body that could still command lovers closer to her children’s age than hers. A single strand of pearls set off the pale skin of her long graceful neck and the haughty cast of her chin. Her hair was black, close-cropped and curly, a few defiant streaks of gray illuminating it like flashes of light.

To her, her children’s summary ejection from France was a reason for rejoicing. She did not need to know what their crime was. It had been committed for the cause and that was enough. Spread out on her livingroom table was a huge Arabic mezze, a tapestry of hors d’oeuvres. She poured each child a glass of arak, crystalclear licorice-flavored liquid, and raised her own in a toast.

“To the memory of your father; to the freedom of your people; to the liberation of your land,” she said and swallowed the burning alcohol in one gulp. Not all the injunctions of Islam were to her liking.

Laila and Kamal turned hungrily on the food. The mother thrust a samboussac, a delicate meat pastry, at her disconsolate elder son.

“Eat,” she commanded.

Whalid listlessly nibbled at its crust.

“What do you intend to do?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It depends on what FranBoise wants to do when she gets here. If she comes. If she can forgive me for what I did.”

“She will come,” his mother stated emphatically. “It is her duty.”

“Whalid.” Kamal’s tone was wary. He did not know how much of his brother’s bitterness at what had happened was directed at him. “Why don’t you come to Libya with me?”

“Waste my life in that Godforsaken place?”

“That Godforsaken place may surprise you,” Kamal continued. “There is more happening there than you know. Or most people know.” Kamal stretched his heavy torso. “A man like you should never have a closed mind. At least come. Take a look. And then decide.”

A telephone rang. Sulafa Dajani rose to answer it. None of her children noticed the faint glistening in her eyes when she returned and sat next to her elder son. Gently, she reached for his hand and pressed it to her lips.

“My son, I’m so sorry. It was an officer of the French Embassy. Frangoise is dead.”

“Dead!” Whalid gasped.

Sulafa Dajani caressed his shaking head. “She jumped from a very high building while the police were questioning her.”

Whalid slumped against his mother’s shoulder. “Oh my God,” he sobbed.

“Frangoise, my poor Frangoise.”

Kamal got up and lit a cigarette. He stared at his weeping brother.

“I did it,” Whalid cried. “I killed her.”

Kamal circled behind him and squeezed his shoulders with his powerful fingers. If there was any pity in his gesture it was not so much for his brother’s grief as for his stupidity.

“Whalid, you didn’t kill her. They did.”

Whalid looked at him, uncomprehending.

“You don’t believe that she jumped from that window, do you?”

Alarm and horror swept his brother’s grief-ravaged face. “The French police wouldn’t …”

“Don’t be a poor fool! They threw her out of that window, for God’s sake.

Those French you loved so much. You wanted to be so damn loyal to. What do you think happened?” Kamal was flinging his words in short, bitter bursts.

“And God knows what they did to her first.”

Whalid turned to his mother, blinking through tears of sorrow and disbelief, searching for knowledge, for consolation.

Sulafa Dajani shrugged her graceful shoulders. “It is the way of all our enemies.” She kissed her first son’s forehead. “Go to Libya with your brother. You belong there now. B’is Allah-it is God’s will.”