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.”