‘Nothing — they’re on their way home — now come on, Yitzi, you don’t think they’ve been out laying mines?’
‘Look you old devil, knowing the way you operate, nothing would surprise me — okay?’
‘Well I can assure you that whatever blew that tanker up is not my doing. Okay?’
‘Sure okay — just thought you’d better know about it. Talk to you soon.’
‘Sure. ’Bye.’ Ephraim replaced the receiver; he was drenched in sweat. He telephoned Haifa; the sailors had not arrived back yet. No sooner had he hung up, than his green international secure telephone rang: it was Ellie Katz, chief of London operations, calling to inform him that Baenhaker was currently being scraped off the walls of the Lower Thames Street multi-storey car park. The loss of Baenhaker did not please him at all. He thought hard about Elleck, whom he knew, and the man Rocq, whom he didn’t; there was still a fury deep inside him over Elleck, but professionally, he knew his death would be too late now, as would Rocq’s. He could still order Elleck’s death, but now it would be personal, not in the cause of business. One day, he vowed, he would get even with Elleck, face to face: that was how he would like it, but now was not the time. He thanked Katz, weakly, for the call, and hung up. He had a distinct feeling this was not going to be his morning.
Half an hour later, the feeling was proved right. The yellow telephone rang again; it was the Prime Minister and he wanted to see him — in Jerusalem — immediately.
When Isser Ephraim left the Prime Minister’s office, the security guard on the front door of the Knesset building was remarkably well informed. ‘Good morning, Mr Ephraim,’ he said. For the first time in all the years he could remember, Ephraim left the Knesset building unsaluted. It was also the first time that there had not been a chauffeur-driven car waiting for him. There was, in fact, no car waiting at alclass="underline" the car and driver that had been at his disposal for the past fifteen years, that had become as natural a mode of transport to him as putting on his shoes in the morning, had quietly and discreetly vanished.
Humiliated, he turned right and walked along the road, in search of a taxi to take him the twenty miles back to Tel Aviv. The Prime Minister had, in the last hour, stripped him of his rank and his job, effective immediately. His passport was cancelled, and he was to face an in-camera court martial for, in the words of the Prime Minister, ‘Performing traitorous acts calculated to bring the state of Israel into international disrepute.’
Ephraim reflected on the last hour and a half, which was the most unpleasant hour and a half he had ever spent in his life, concentration camps included. The United States Armed Forces in Oman had detected a concentrated mass of radioactive fallout, compatible with the fallout resulting from the exploding of a nuclear weapon, spreading downwind from where the Arctic Sundance had exploded. Their only possible conclusions were that either the Arctic Sundance was carrying in its cargo a nuclear explosive, which was detonated when the oil tank exploded, or that the ship was blown up by a nuclear device either placed in it or in the water, such as a mine.
The mine theory was lent not a little weight when an American frigate went to the rescue of a coaster which had run out of fuel, to discover it was carrying 100 sailors from the Israeli Navy, with its decks and cargo hold piled high with nuclear mines.
There was, as Ephraim had said to the Prime Minister, and thought, puzzled, to himself now, no immediate answer he could give to that.
33
There were two men who knew the answer to the riddle the ex-head of the Mossad could not solve, and both of them were happy men. One of them was Sheik Abr Qu’Ih Missh; the other was Alex Rocq. Three and a half thousand miles apart, they replaced their telephone receivers and calculated their respective gains.
Sheik Missh stared out of his sixty-sixth floor window in the Palace of Tunquit and smiled again: during the past week he had bought a fraction less than $2 billion worth of gold, all on margin, and all of it below $550 an ounce. Indeed, some of it he had bought below $500 an ounce. Fuelled by this buying, which had been spread into small parcels throughout the world by Theo Barbiero-Ruche and masterminded by Rocq, and fuelled equally by the rumours the influential Barbiero-Ruche had spread that there was to be a major Israeli-Arab conflict, Missh had used his nation’s entire reserves to buy in at the very bottom of one of the greatest rises in gold the world had ever seen. At $710, on Rocq’s advice, he had started to sell, using a different broker Rocq had arranged for him in Dubai. He had made a profit on the deal, he estimated, of some $6 billion, quite satisfactory enough for one week’s work, he decided.
But there was more than just the money, something which to him was far more important: he had managed to avoid what could have been a devastating blow to the international standing of his country. If Jimmy Culundis had had his way, the Persian Gulf would have been knee-deep in fishing dhows, all clearly registered in Umm Al Amnah and all carrying crews of Israeli sailors and cargoes of nuclear mines. Amnah would have been inextricably entwined and implicated in the conflict that would ensue between Israel and the rest of the world. It would have destroyed, for years, any chance of friendship with almost any country in the world, and friendships with other nations were something his tiny nation needed badly. Rocq’s warning had enabled him to sabotage Culundis’s plans extremely effectively: he had flung Culundis’s entire army out, arrested the entire force of 100 Israeli sailors, and set them adrift into the Gulf with a cargo of the mines and no identification other than their Israeli passports. Someone, somewhere, was going to be taught one hell of a lesson. He smiled.
Rocq sat at his desk, finding it hard to contain his excitement, harder still to keep his activities out of range of the telephoto ears of Mozer, Slivitz, and the rest of his office.
On a split commission with Theo Barbiero-Ruche, he calculated he had earned £380,000; he was out of the hole and into big money. The Toronto light on his switchboard lit up; Rocq picked up his phone, and pushed the button: the voice of the bouncing Baron Mellic boomed down the receiver.
‘Hey, Rocky — what did you do wrong?’
‘What do you mean?’ Rocq became worried.
‘You got something right for a change.’
‘And what a fucking waste to go and give it to you.’ A wave of relief swept Rocq. ‘You did it properly?’
‘You ever know me not to do anything properly?’
‘Only when you have a puncture.’
On Rocq’s advice, Missh had gone along with every penny he had, when gold was at its lowest. Knowing that when Missh sold, coupled with the no-show of the Lasserre-Culundis plot, the price of gold would cascade downwards, Rocq had advised the Baron to go short, with every penny he had, at the exact moment Missh issued his sell instructions. The Baron had gone short when gold was at $712 an ounce. The price was now $558. The Baron was not quite in the money league of the Emir of Amnah, but he had still netted some $120 million on the deal. Rocq’s half share of the commission, which he had split with a tame broker in Zurich, came to £500,000 — tax free, paid into the numbered Swiss account Monsieur Jean-Luis Vençeon, the Swiss avocat in Verbier, had kindly opened for him.
‘Up yours, Rocky — I’m off to go and spend some of my loot.’
‘Does that mean I ought to go long on rubber?’
‘Yeah — and you’d better hurry.’ The Baron hung up.
‘You talking to your bicycle repair man?’ said Slivitz.