"If you don't want money, sit down, have some coffee, stay all day," said Cohen, and he laughed. Dickstein sat. Cohen was a short man in spectacles, bald and clean-shaven, and looked to be about fifty years ol(L He wore a brown check suit that was not very new. He had a good little business here, Dickstein guessed, but, he was no millionaire, Dickstein said, "Were you here in World War ur, Cohen nodded. "I was a young man. I went into the country and worked on a farm where nobody knew me, nobody knew I was Jewish. I was lucky." "Do you think it will happen againr' "Yes. It's happened all through history, why should it stop now? It will happen again-but not in my lifetime. It's all right here. I don't want to go to Israel." "Okay. I work for the government of Israel. We would like you to do something for us." Cohen shrugged. "So?- "In a few weeks' time, one of your clients will call you with an urgent request. They will want an engineer officer for a ship called Coparefli. We would like you to send them a man supplied by us. His name is Koch, and he is an Israeli, but he will be using a different name and false papers. However, he is a ships engineer-your clients *Will not be dissatisfied." Dickstein waited for Cohen to say something. You're a nice man, he thought; a decent Jewish businessman, smart and hardworking and a little frayed at the edges; don't make me get tough with you. Cohen said, "You*re not going to tell me why the government of Israel wants this man Koch aboard the Coparelli?~ "No." There was a silence. "You carry any identification?"
The secretary came in without knocking and gave them coffee. Dickstein got hostile vibrations from her. Cohen used the interruption to gather his thoughts. When she had gone out he said, "I would have to be meshugah to do this." G#Wh3q* "You come in off the street saying you represent the government of Israel, yet you have no identification, you don't even tell me your name. You ask me to take part in something that is obviously underhanded and probably criminal; you will not tell me what it is that you're trying to do. Even if I believe your story, I doet know that I would approve of the Israelis doing what yop want to do." Dickstein sighed, thinking of the alternatives:, blackmail him, kidnap his wife., take over his office on the crucial day ... He said, "Is there anything I can do to convince you?" "I would need a personal request from the Prime Minister of Israel before I would do this thing." Dickstein stood up to leave, then he thought: Why not? Why the hell not? It was a wild idea, they would think he was crazy ... but it would work, it would serve the purpose ... He grinned as he thought it through. Pierre Borg would have apoplexy. He said to Cohen, "All right." "What do you mean, 'all right?" "Put on your coat. Well go to Jerusalem." "Now?" "Are you busy?" "Are you serious?" "I told you it's important." Dickstein pointed to the phone on the desk, "Call your wife." "She's just outside." Dickstein went to the door and opened it. "Mrs. Cohen?" "Yes." "Would you come in here, please?" She hurried in, looking worried. 'That is it, Josef?" she asked her husband. '1This man want me to go to Jerusalem with him." 'Vhen?#9 "Now." "You mean this week?" Dickstein said, "I mean this morning, Mrs. Cohen. I must tell you that all this is highly confidential. I've asked your husband to do something for the Israeli governmen Naturally he wants to be certain that it is the government that is asking this favor and not some criminal. So I'm going to take him there to convince him." She said, "Don't get involved, Josef---w" Cohen shrugged. "I'm Jewish, I'm involved already. Mind the shop."
"You don't know anything about this mant" "So I'm going to find out." "I don't like it." "There's no danger," Cohen told her. "Well take a scheduled flight, we'll go to Jerusalem, IT see the Prime Minister and well come back." "The Prime Ministerl" Dickstein realized how proud she would be if her husband met the Prime Minister of Israel. He said, '11iis has to be secret, Mrs. Cohen. Please tell people your husband has gone to Rotterdam on business. He will be back tomorrow." She stared at the two of them. "My Josef meets the Prime Minister, and I can't tell Rachel Rothstein'r' Then Dickstein knew it was going to be all right. Cohen took his coat from a book and put it on. Mrs. Cohen kissed him, then put her arms around him. "It's all right," be told her. "This is very sudden and strange, but it's all right.- She nodded dumbly and let him go.
They took a cab to the airport. Dickstein's sense of delight grew as they traveled. The scheme had an air of mischief about it, he felt a bit like a schoolboy, this was a terrible prank. He kept grinning, and had. to turn his face away so that Cohen would not see. Pierre Borg would go through the root. Dickstein bought two round-trip tickets to Tel Aviv, paying with his credit card. They had to take a connecting flight to Paris. Before they took off he called the embassy in Paris and arranged for someone to meet them in the transit lounge. In Paris he gave the man from the embassy a message to send to Borg, explaining what was required. The diplomat was a Mossad man, and treated Dickstein with deference. Coben was allowed to listen to the conversation, and when the man had gone back to the embassy he said, "We could go back, I'm convinced already.- "Oh, no," Dickstein said. 'Now that weve come this far I want to be sure of you." On the plane Cohen said, "You must be an important man in ISMCL" "No. But what Im doing is important." Cohen wanted to know how to behave, how to address the Prime Minister. Dickstein told him, "I don't know, I've never met him. Shake hands and call him by his name." Cohen smiled. He was beginning to share Dickstein!s feeling of mischievousness. Pierre Borg met them at Lod Airport with a car to take them to Jerusalem. He smiled and shook hands with Cohen, but he was seething underneath. As they walked to the car he muttered to Dickstein, "You better have a fucking good reason for all this." "I have." They were with Cohen all the while, so Borg did not have an opportunity to cross-examine Dickstein. They went straight to the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem. Dickstein and Cohen waited in an anteroom while Borg explained to the Prime Minister what was required and why. A couple of minutes later they were admitted. "This is Nat Dickstein, sir," Borg said. They shook hands, and the Prime Minister said, "We haven't met before, but I've heard of you, Mr. Dickstein." Borg said, "And this is Mr. Josef Cohen of Antwerp." "Mr. Cohen." IMe Prime Minister smiled. "You're a very cautious man. You should be a politician. Well, now . . . please do this thing for us. It is very important, and you will come to no harm from it." Cohen was bedazzled. "Yes, sir, of course I Will do this, Ilm sorry to have caused so much trouble . . ." "Not at all. You did the right thing." He shook Cohen!s hand again. 'Thank you for coming. Goodbye." Borg was less polite on the way back to the airport. He sat fient in the front seat of the car, smoking a cigar and fidgeting. At the airport he managed to get Dickstein alone for a minute. "If you ever pull a stunt like this again . . ." "It was necessary," Dickstein said. "It took less than a minute. Why not?- "Why not, is because half my fucking department has been working all day to fix that minute. Why didn't you just point a gun at the man's head or something?" "Because were not barbarians," Dickstein said. "So people keep telling me." 'They do? Tliat!s a bad sign."
"Because you shouldn!t need to be told."
Then their fight was called. Boarding the plane with Cohen, Dickstein reflected that his relationship with Borg was in ruins. They had always talked like this, with bantering insults, but until now there had been an undertone of . . . perhaps not affection, but at least respect. Now that had vanished. Borg was genuinely hostile. Dickstein's refusal to be pulled out was a piece of basic defiance which could not be tolerated. If Dickstein had wanted to continue in the Mossad, he would have had to fight Borg for the job of director-there was no longer sufficient room for both men in the organization. But there would be no contest now, for Dickstein was going to resign. Flying back to Europe through the night, Cohen drank some gin and went to sleep. Dickstein ran over in his mind the work he had done in the past five months. Back in May he had started out with no real idea of how he was going to steal the uranium Israel needed. He had taken the problems as they came up, and found a solution to each one: how to locate uranium, which uranium to steal, how to hijack a ship, how to camouflage the Israeli involvement in the theft, how to prevent the disappearance of the uranium being reported to the authorities, how to placate the owners of the stuff. If he had sat down at the beginning and tried to dream up the whole. scheme he could never have foreseen all the complications. He had had some good luck and some bad. The fact that the owners of the Coparelli used a Jewish crew agency in Antwerp was a piece of luck; so was the existence of a consignment of uranium for non-nuclear purposes, and one going by sea. The bad luck mainly consisted of the accidental meeting with Yasif Hassan. Hassan, the fly in the ointment. Dickstein was reasonably certain he had shaken off the opposition when he flew to Buffalo to see Cortone, and that they had not picked up his trail again since. But that did not mean they had dropped the case. It would be useful to know how much they had found out before they lost him. Dickstein could not see Suza again until the whole affair was over, and Hassan was to blame for that too. If he were to go to Oxford, Hassan was sure to pick up the trail somehow.