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.”