“Whalid,” she told her brother, “you’ve probably got a less memorable face than I have. Why don’t you do the shopping? There’s no sense in taking any chances we don’t need to.”
Whalid smiled and slipped out of the car. As he did, Laila flicked on the radio. She felt herself growing more nervous, more desperate, with each passing moment. She played with the dial until she settled on the loud wail of a Dolly Parton lament. She turned it up as loud as she dared, hoping that somehow the din would overwhelm the black thoughts assailing her.
Almost desperately, she clutched at the steering wheel. Don’t, she told herself, don’t, don’t, don’t think.
But Michael’s image would not leave her: Michael calcinated to black ash; Michael at the instant the incandescent heat seared the life from his body in a flash of pain. It’s not going to go off, she kept telling herself.
It’s not. But in the depths of her soul there was the whisper what if it does?
She started, her painful reverie broken by the sound of Whalid opening the car door. He got in and Laila reached for the ignition key. As she did, she caught a glimpse of the shopping bag’ he had set on the seat between them.
Aghast, she half pulled a fifth of Johnnie Walker from the bag. “What about your ulcer?”
“Don’t worry about my ulcer.” Her brother smiled. “It’s fine now.”
In Paris, the lunch hour was already over. General Henri Bertrand’s eyes were half closed and the vacant expression on his face as he advanced along the corridor of an apartment in the city’s elegant Sixteenth Arrondissement gave the impression his mind was miles away. It was, in fact, concentrated with a connoisseur’s delight on the twitching buttocks of the Spanish maid leading him toward her employer’s study.
“Monsieur will be with you in a moment,” she intoned, opening the door.
The director of France’s intelligence agency nodded gravely and entered the room. It was a miniature museum. One wall was a large window overlooking the Bois. The other three were lined with display cases, each subtly illuminated and backed with velvet fabrics that set off the priceless collection of Oriental and Greco-Roman antiquities they contained. Bertrand himself had been born in Indochina and he had more than a layman’s appreciation of Oriental art. Some of the Hindu pieces, notably a finely chiseled stone representation of Shiva which Bertrand judged to date back to the seventh or eighth century, were priceless.
The centerpiece of the collection was an enormous Roman head three or four times life size locked in a display cabinet in the center of the room.
Wrapped in the diffused glow cast by a spotlight overhead, that ancient marble radiated a beauty such as Bertrand had rarely contemplated.
Behind him, the SDECE director heard a door opening. He turned to find himself facing a portly bald man in a scarlet silk dressing gown buttoned tightly around his neck, its flaring skirt falling to his ankles. A mandarin, Bertrand thought, or a cardinal on his way into the Sistine Chapel for a conclave.
PaulHenri de Serre was a senior member of France’s nuclear establishment.
He had begun his career working on Zoe, France’s first atomic reactor, a device so primitive its control rods had been manipulated with an engine taken from a Singer sewing machine. Most recently, he had supervised the Libyan project, overseeing the reactor’s construction, then presiding over its functioning during the critical first six months of its operation.
“How like our American friends to wave an accusing finger at us,” he sighed when Bertrand, after apologizing for disturbing his host’s siesta, explained the reason for his visit. “They’ve been jealous of our program for years. The very idea the Libyans could have somehow extracted plutonium from our reactor is ridiculous.”
Bertrand took out a Gauloise and politely asked de Serre if he minded if he smoked. Seconds later, the cigarette was in its usual resting place in the righthand corner of his mouth, fixed there so firmly it appeared to be an appendage to his lips. He sat back in the high leather wing chair de Serre had offered, his hand folded over the slight paunch forming on his midriff.
“Our scientific people confirm what you say,” he noted. “Damned embarrassing for us if it did happen, however. Tell me, cher monsieur, did anything take place down there that gave you any grounds for suspicion?
Anything that seemed unusual, out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing at all,” De Serre sipped thoughtfully on the coffee that Paquita, the Spanish maid, had brought them. “Now, this is not to say I don’t belive that Qaddafi wouldn’t like to get his hands on some plutonium. Every time the word `nuclear’ comes up, there’s a gleam in his people’s eyes. I’m merely saying be didn’t get it from us.”
“Would you have any idea where he might have gotten it?”
“Quite frankly, no.”
“How about your personnel? Were there any among them with pronounced sympathies for the Arab cause? Sympathies that might have made them amenable to a plea for help from the Libyans?”
“As you know, all of our people were given security checks by the DST before being assigned to the project. To weed out just the sort of individual you’re talking about. They all came down more or less sympathetic to the Arab cause. Although, I might add, working with the Libyans tended to disabuse most of them of those notions rather swiftly.”
“Difficult people, are they?”
“Impossible.”
The General noted with interest the vehemence with which de Serre seemed to spit out the word. Here is one man, he thought, who bears the Libyans no affection.
Their conversation continued for another half hour. Nothing in it, it seemed to the head of the SDECE, opened up an avenue his agency might want to explore. The source of Qaddafi’s plutonium was probably elsewhere; an outright theft, perhaps.
“Well, cher monsieur, I think I’ve taken up quite enough of your time,” he declared, rising from his armchair.
“If there’s anything else I can do, please don’t hesitate to call on me,” his host murmured.
Turning to leave, Bertrand was once again struck by the breathtaking beauty of the head locked in its display case in the center of the room, by the perfect serenity of that marble mask casting its stone gaze across the centuries.
“A remarkable piece,” he said admiringly. “Where did you get it?”
“It came originally from Leptis Magna on the Libyan seacoast.” De Serre’s eyes caressed his treasure with an expression so adoring that it struck his visitor. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Indeed.” Bertrand waved at the glowing display cabinets lining the study.
“Your entire collection is extraordinary.” He stepped to the head of Shiva he had noted earlier. “This is quite unusual. At least a thousand years old, I should have thought. Did you get it in India?”
“Yes. I was assigned out there as a technical adviser in the early seventies.”
The General stared appreciatively at the delicately wrought stone sculpture. “You’re a fortunate man,” he sighed, “a fortunate man indeed.”
Jack Rand finished the last manifest of the Hellenic Stevedore Company’s Brooklyn pier and laid it carefully on the stack of papers on the desk.
He buttoned his shirt collar and started to tighten his tie, noting irritably as he did that his partner had already finished. Angelo Rocchia’s feet were propped up on the desk and he was gnawing a Hostess cupcake to which he had helped himself from the clutter of half-eaten jelly doughnuts and pastries scattered around the office’s hot plate.
Once again Angelo and Tony Piccardi were bullshitting.
“I think everything’s fine here,” Rand announced. “Let’s get on to the next pier.”