My meeting with the successor — I may as well call him Barlev — took place in a house near Nicosia. We spoke in English; he had a “regional” British accent. All he offered me in the way of refreshment was a revolting bottled orangeade.
I began by explaining who and what I was, but he cut me short. He already knew all he needed to know about me, he said. What had I to tell him that I thought he didn’t know and should?
I started with my discovery of Issa’s private work in the laboratory, which seemed to amuse him, and went on to the appearance on the scene of Ghaled. That, I was glad to see, he found less funny. Ghaled had killed a lot of his people over the years and was taken seriously. The details of Teresa’s and my recruitment intrigued him and he wanted the exact wording of the oath we had sworn. When I told him about the bogus confessions we had been forced to sign, he nodded.
“Yes, I’d heard they were doing that. Awkward for you.”
Awkward, I thought, was an understatement, but I didn’t pursue the matter. He wasn’t really interested in Teresa and me as persons, only in what I knew. So I went on to tell him about the fuse adapter rings. He stopped me again.
“Hold it.” We were sitting at a desk and he pushed a note pad across to me. “How about drawing that gaine you saw?”
“All right.”
I made a rough sketch. When I started to put in the approximate dimensions, he stopped me again.
“That’ll do, Mr. Howell. We know all about those things.”
“What is it?”
“You guessed right. It’s from a rocket. The hundred and twenty millimetre Katyusha. Has a fifty-kilogram warhead and a maximum range of around eleven kilometres. Quite a lot of the terrorist gangs have them. Good for hit-and-run work. They attacked a hospital with one a few weeks back. A single round killed ten people. The launcher is a simple affair, easy to make with angle iron. They don’t mind leaving it behind them when they run.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Is that a serious question? Oh, I see what you mean — how does Ghaled get them? Well, he could have brought a few with him from Jordan. More likely the Algerians let him have them. Those Chinese fuses were probably smuggled in by the Turkish liberation underground. Or maybe — ’’ He broke off. “I thought you were here to tell me something I didn’t know.”
“I was just curious.”
“Well let’s get on. There’s nothing in this for us so far. I’d be surprised if Ghaled didn’t have a few Katyushas.”
So then I told him about the ship thing and about the remote-control radio detonators. I described the test firing and gave him the notes I had made on it.
He read the notes carefully enough; in fact, he read them twice, but of course he pretended to be unimpressed.
“This doesn’t tell us much, does it? Did you get a sample of this electronic component, this part you think may have been used?”
“Yes, I did.” I got it out of my briefcase. It looked more like a bar of toffee than an electronic component — very hard toffee with red, yellow, and green nuts embedded in it. Metal connector tags stuck out from one end.
He put it on the desk in front of him and peered at it “Does it have a name?”
“No, just a part number. It’s stamped on the end — U seventeen.”
“U for Ubertragen, do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you find out exactly what it was?”
“The person to ask would have been Taleb. That didn’t seem a good idea.”
“Pity. Nothing was said about the radio frequency they’re using?”
“Nothing that we heard. I assumed that your people could find out by examining that thing.”
“It’s possible.”
“Well, there you are. All you have to do then is jam their transmission.”
“Do what?”
“Jam their transmission.”
“And detonate all their bombs for them? Are you kidding?”
“I’m not am expert. But surely with that knowledge you can do something.”
He regarded me pityingly. “Look, Mr. Howell, unless this thing is operated by a coded signal — that is, a combination of signals acting like the wards of a lock which won’t turn unless you use the right key — any jamming on the frequency it responds to is going to have the same effect as that music box gadget you saw. This relay, or whatever it is, doesn’t look complex enough to me for the kind of circuitry you need for an elaborate coded arrangement. As you call it in your notes, a small, simple device. Why, it could be set off accidentally.”
“Accidentally?”
For a moment he did not reply. He was gazing into the middle distance, rather as if he had lost the thread of his argument. Then he seemed to recover it.
“I’ll give you an example. A few months ago in Tel Aviv they had trouble with a new apartment building. The architect was an American and he had installed one of those fancy remote-control openers on the garage door. Each of the tenants was given a little thing with a press-button on it to keep in the glove compartment of his car. Press the button and the door opened, press again and it closed. Everything was fine except that the door would open and close sometimes when nobody pressed a button. In the end the door did its closing act while a tenant was actually driving in and the roof of his car got crushed. They had to do something then. It took time, but they solved the mystery eventually. There’s a hospital two blocks away. One piece of apparatus in the physiotherapy department was sending out a radio signal every time it was used. Not a very strong signal, but it was on the same frequency as the door opener and just strong enough to do the trick. See what I mean?”
“Yes, but. .”
“Let’s go back to this ship business.”
It was a very abrupt change of subject, and I didn’t understand the reason for it until very much later. At the time I made no attempt to resist the change.
“What about the ship?”
“Tell me again what was said.”
I told him.
“These four passengers — I take it that Ghaled will be one of them — are to be allowed to give orders about the ship’s course and speed. I’ve got it right?”
“That’s right.”
He frowned. “Why speed? Why course and speed? See what I’m getting at? If all this speculation of yours is correct — and it is only speculation — someone, let’s say Ghaled, wants to be a few kilometres offshore in the Tel Aviv area on the night of the third. There he’s going to press the button on the music box and set off some bombs planted ashore. That’s your idea, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a simple change of course would bring him into a position to do his button-pressing. He doesn’t really have to nominate the course for that matter. All he has to do is ask what time the ship will be passing Tel Aviv and ask the captain to go in a bit closer so that he can see the pretty lights.”
“He’d have to be sure that he was within range.”
“All right, I’ll accept that. But it still doesn’t explain why speed matters.”
“Timing? The Herzl anniversary?”
“He stipulated the evening of the third before midnight, according to you.”
“Yes.”
“What other timing is involved? The charges to be exploded — certainly if there are to be as many as you think — will have to have been placed much earlier. You’ve no idea where he plans to have them placed, of course?”
“No.”
He sipped his orangeade. “It’s all very scrappy,” he complained. “Nothing solid.”
I pointed to the Magisch component “At least that’s solid.”
“It may tell us something, it may not. The question is now, what are you going to do?”
“Me? I’m here talking to you, aren’t I? I’ve done all I intend to do. It’s up to you now.”
“To stop Ghaled playing with that music box and pressing buttons? How do you suggest we do that, Mr. Howell? The Amalia Howell is your ship, not ours.”