His call was answered by a switchboard deep behind the Edwardian facade that housed a North African embassy in a smart SW7 address overlooking the favoured Rotten Row and the spaces of Hyde Park. McCoy asked for an extension, was surprised when the operator did not demur that there would be no one there at this hour, and was further surprised when the phone was promptly answered.
He couldn't remember the word he was supposed to give.
Been waiting too long, too wrought up to remember it.
Bloody foreign word, and he didn't know what it meant. it's McCoy here. Ciaran McCoy. I was told to call this number. Our friend hasn't shown.'
The voice at the other end was calm, reassuring, in perfect English. Unmindful of the lack of the code-word.
There had been a delay. The situation was uncertain. The project might be called off, might not. Developments were awaited. He should telephone again tomorrow evening, but not so late. The voice wished him goodnight, and the call was terminated.
Five seconds after McCoy put the receiver back into its rest the tape recorder stopped rolling. It was standard procedure that all calls to that number were automatically monitored; and had been so ever since the extension number was obtained from a second officer of that embassy in exchange for Foreign Office silence about his drinking habits. The diplomat had done well from the bargain; the conservative Moslem government he represented in London would have looked badly upon his behaviour.
The tape would be one of scores of conversations recorded that night that would be replayed by short-hand typists working from the basement of a substantial building in Curzon Street, Mayfair, a bare mile from the embassy.
THREE
David Sokarev always carried the Mauser pistol in the glove compartment of his car. It rested there on top of the maps and the packet of boiled sweets that his wife had bought him as an aid to ending his smoking habit. On top of the gun and hiding it was the rag that he used to clean the overnight moisture from his windscreen. The pistol was loaded, but with the safety catch in force, and was used only twice a year, when he went on the shooting range east of Beersheba. Left to himself he would have placed it in a drawer and forgotten about it, but he had been ordered to possess a gun, and therefore it was easier simply to leave it in the car. If the occasion had arisen when he was obliged to fire in anger he would probably have missed. His chunky iron-rimmed spectacles were a witness to his poor eyesight. The pistol was never disturbed, rejected like the boiled sweets, but, like them, of insufficient importance to have an issue made of it.
There had been a suggestion that his work made him too sensitive a man to be driving himself to work, and there had been talk that he should have a driver pick him up from his home, take him to the laboratory, and then late in the day bring him back to Beersheba. He had railed at that as preposterous, asked them whether there were so many able-bodied men without proper jobs to do that they could spare one for such sterile activity. He had won his case, and drove himself.
He was a careful and methodical man, and unlike so many of his fellow-countrymen drove slowly and with circumspection. It took him between forty-seven and fifty minutes from the time he left his flat on the third floor of the block till he presented his identity card at the gate of Dimona. Colleagues using the same route would flash past him, hoot their horns and wave cheerfully at old 'Tortoise', as they had nicknamed him. It was a boring ride to have made most days a week, and most weeks a year for the last sixteen years, but his mind was seldom concerned with the other traffic. The problems of plutonium, sub-critical masses, fission, isotope separation, neutrons — they were what enveloped him, as the little car trudged its way back and forth the twenty-four miles across the Negev desert.
He would read, too, as he drove, the book propped against the steering wheel. He was able, apparently, to take in the printed word while successfully avoiding the fast-moving hazards which shared his road; but few of his colleagues lightly accepted the offer of a lift.
When he had started work at Dimona the project had been at the apex of Israel's secret list. He had not been able to tell any family friends where he went each day, nor the nature of his work. The buildings, tucked away among the sandhills and placed well back from the road, were described to the outside world as housing a textile factory, and no one who knew him could comprehend a link between David Sokarev and man-made fibres.
But the Bedouin who used to pass, listlessly urging their camels between the dunes, had taken the news of the cranes and bulldozers and cement-making apparatus across the border to the military governor of the Egyptian town of El Arish. The message had gone to Cairo of huge construction works deep in the Negev desert, of wire fences sprouting up, of armed troops patrolling. The concern in Cairo was passed to the American State Department in Washington. There, too, anxiety was expressed and the foolproof system of international espionage set in motion.
From a United States Air Force base in northern Iran a U2 plane had taken off with orders to fly over Dimona and photograph the new complex. The pilot had violated Israeli air space at an altitude of fractionally more than fifteen miles. At the IAF field which had specific responsibility for Dimona they could only watch the radar blip of the American reconnaissance aircraft and contain the frustration that it was beyond their own operational ceiling. It had been a brilliantly hot October day, back in 1960, when the photographs were taken. Sokarev had been working in his temporary, prefabricated wooden offices, awaiting the fulfilment of the Director's promise that he was high on the list for more suitable and permanent premises. He, like everyone else who pored over charts and diagrams and formulae, was unaware of the pictures being recorded in the upper stratosphere.
After the Uz landed in Turkey the rolls of film were rushed under conditions of great secrecy direct from the cameras in the plane's nose to another aircraft standing ready and fuelled to fly to Washington. They showed the little wooden hut where Sokarev worked — or at least its roof — but there was small interest in that compared with the bulky shape discernible a hundred yards away across the sand and surrounded by the lorries that were needed to bring up the materials. The men expert in interpreting altitude photography identified a medium-sized nuclear reactor, the integral plant necessary in the manufacture of the plutonium that is at the heart of an atomic explosion.
When Dimona was washed out into the open the news made slight adjustments to Sokarev's life. The degree of security that had wrapped round the very existence of the project was relaxed. The Israeli Government issued statements about the requirement for nuclear energy for peace-ful uses, ranging from electricity power to the extended life of vegetables on shop counters. Sokarev was pleased.
Fewer of his friends regarded him with such curiosity. Life became more normal.
In the halcyon days after the June victory of 1967, when the nation's defences seemed secure and the Arabs had taken a bloodied, broken nose, been pushed back far from the Israeli settlements, across the great buffer zones of Sinai, the Jordan valley, and the Golan Heights, then there was little to concern Sokarev about the pace of his work.
He was at forty-one a young man for his job, on the up, regarded by his colleagues as brilliant and directing his energies toward what his project director blithely called the 'agro-nuclear complexes': the reclaiming of desert land through the use of thousands of millions of gallons of sea water, distilled through nuclear power. The project did not last.