The Fifth Horseman (12 page)

By the mid-seventies, the CIA began picking up indications that Libya was trying to recruit European nuclear engineers by dangling large Swiss-banked sums of money in front of them. One indication of how far the program’s tentacles could reach was the dismissal of Dr. Klaus Traube, manager of Germany’s Interatom Company responsible for research on the fast breeder reactor. Traube was revealed to have had a close relationship with Hans Joachim Klein, a young Libyan-trained terrorist who participated along with “Carlos” in the Vienna kidnapping of the OPEC oil ministers in December 1975.

It was, however, to the explosion of India’s atomic “device” in the Rajasthan desert on May 19, 1974, that the Libyan owed his access to the secret of the atom. Pakistan’s Zulficar Ali Bhutto vowed that night that his countrymen would one day possess nuclear weapons to rival his neighbors’ even if they had “to eat grass” to get them. Given the impoverished state of Pakistan’s treasury, his might have been an idle boast had it not been for a secret deal Bhutto negotiated with Qaddafi. Its terms were simple: in return for Libya’s financing Pakistan’s purchase of a plutonium-reprocessing plant and several reactors from France, Qaddafi would receive some of the plutonium the Pakistanis intended to divert from the plant and access to their advanced nuclear technology.

That arrangement ultimately collapsed when the French, under pressure from the United States, agreed to abandon the sale.

In the meantime, Bhutto’s overthrow and subsequent execution had brought a brief chill to Libyan-Pakistani relations. The combination of Libyan financing and Pakistani technology was too promising, however, to be lost in a clash of personalities, and the original collaboration was renewed in General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq’s pursuit of the “Islamic Bomb.”

While his cooperative effort with Pakistan continued, Qaddafi also pursued his attempts to set up a purely national program. In 1976 he persuaded Jacques Chirac, then France’s Prime Minister, to sell him the nuclear reactor for desalinizing sea water the Americans had earlier refused him.

President Giscard d’Estaing quietly let the project fade until, under the pressures on France’s balance of payments created by the 1979-80 oil price rises, he reluctantly authorized the reactor’s sale.

The most dramatic confrontation in Qaddafi’s long pursuit of the atomic bomb, however, had for its setting a place as remote from the goatskin tents in which he enjoyed resting as could be imagined. It was an ornate salon in the Palace of the Czars, the Kremlin. Qaddafi’s interlocutor that December day in 1976 was not a Russian but the proudest industrial baron of the nation that had once colonized Qaddafi’s people. Who could have better symbolized the unsettled and indulgent world whose way of life was menaced by the austere visionary emerging from his deserts than Gianni Agnelli: aristocrat, playboy, heir to a technological complex as sophisticated and as powerful as any in the world, the Fiat Motor Company.

Agnelli was the supplicant that day. He had come to Moscow in secret because he needed something Qaddafi had to offer, money. Qaddafi already owned ten percent of his firm, purchased a few months before for $415

million, more than triple the market value of the shares. To an astonished Agnelli, he proposed to buy even more or release to him large investment sums if Agnelli could convert part of his company, with Soviet help, into an advanced weapons industry, including a major branch devoted to nuclear research and development.

It was a diabolical proposition. Agnelli was being asked to set an unstable nation just across the Mediterranean from his homeland on the road to weapons of mass destruction in return for the funds that might save his industrial giant from collapse. The Italian’s readiness to consider the proposition, however briefly, was one more confirmation of the premise underlying Qaddafi’s enterprise: that the day would come when, under the pressure of the energy crisis, there would be nothing in the West that was not for sale.

Whalid Dajani drove along the eucalyptus-and laurel-lined highway leading to the Libyan capital, sweating profusely, his mind still back in the desert, on the harrowing hours he’d lived since they’d brought him the transcript of Prevost’s phone call a week ago. He could feel in his stomach the ache of the ulcer his doctor had warned him he was developing.

A man is dead because of me, he thought. A man like me, who had the ideals I once had. My God, he reflected, how far I’ve come, how far away I am from what I set out to be. He saw ahead, not the highway into Tripoli, but the other terrible road on which he was embarked.

“Since Allah sent you here to help us,” Qaddafi had said. Whalid smiled bitterly. Allah had had nothing to do with it. It had been his brother Kamal and it had all begun that morning in January 1977 when Kamal had arrived in Paris.

The debarking passengers of Austrian Airlines Flight 705 from Vienna to Paris mounted the futuristic walkway of Charles de Gaulle Airport and clustered around the passport-control desk of Gate 26. Kamal Dajani was wearing a beige suede jacket and blue jeans, an Austrian Airlines carry-on bag hanging from his shoulder. A dark suntan, the product, presumably, of the ski slopes of the Tyrol, burnished his lean face and emphasized the delicate blue of his eyes.

He presented the passport oflicer at the desk an Austrian passport identifying him as Fredi Mueller, an agricultural-machinery salesman from Linz, then strolled casually into the lobby and on to the nearest men’s room.

He hesitated a moment before entering the last stall in line. He locked the door and set his airline bag on the floor. An instant later, a hand pulled it into the adjacent stall, then slid an absolutely identical bag back to his feet.

Kamal opened it up and methodically checked its contents: a Walther P-38 automatic; three magazines of 9mm. ammunition; two U.S. Army fragmentation grenades; a switchblade knife; a red guide, Paris par Arrondissement, on which he could locate his destination and the safe house whose address he had committed to memory; another set of identity papers, these French, identifying him as Mohammed Yaacef, an Algerian postgraduate student studying in France; a small vial of liquid; and, finally, five thousand French francs in assorted notes and coins. As he passed the toilet attendant on the way out, he sent a one-franc coin clattering into the saucer beside her. No need, he thought, to give her any reason to glare at him.

Forty minutes later, he got out of a taxicab at the junction of the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain at the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter. He crossed the Place du Luxembourg and strolled along the iron fence of the Luxembourg Gardens down to the Rue d’Assas. There he turned left until he reached number 89 at the corner of the Rue Tavard opposite the Tarnier Maternity Clinic. The building’s ground floor was occupied by a bakery, and as Kamal climbed to the first floor he savored the odor of warm bread and fresh croissants that seemed to impregnate the dark stairwell.

He knocked at the first door on the left. Inside, he heard the thump of bare feet on wood, then felt someone staring at him through the door’s peephole. “It’s me,” he whispered in Arabic, “Kamal.”

His sister Laila opened the door. For an instant brother and sister looked at each other. Then, with half-stifled cries, they fell into each other’s arms.

“Five years,” Laila whispered. “Why so long?”

“I had no choice,” Kamal replied.

She beckoned him inside. Before closing the door, she glanced down the stairwell, making sure he had not been followed. Then she fixed the door with a double lock.

“Show me what they did to you,” Laila demanded as soon as they reached the sitting room. She was a year younger than Kamal, yet she had always managed to treat him with an air of superiority as though somehow the mere fact of having been born a female had given her a head start in life.

Grudgingly, Kamal removed his jacket and shirt. The scar along his neck ran down to an ugly tangle of scar tissue planted like the imprint of a tiger’s claw below his left shoulder blade.

Laila gasped at the sight of that most visible heritage of the career her brother had begun crawling under a screen of machine-gun fire at a training camp for commandos of the Refusal Front on a windswept plateau above Damascus.

“They told me you were dead.”

“That’s what the bastards thought when they ran away and left me,” her brother noted. Six times Kamal had taken a squad of fedayeen out of Fatah Land in Southern Lebanon to rocket a kibbutz, mine a road or ambush a passing car. On the seventh, an unsuccessful effort to fire a Katushka rocket into the Haifa oil refineries, his squad had been intercepted by an Israeli patrol. A cluster of well-placed grenades had wounded Kama] and scattered his men.

“You were lucky the Israelis didn’t finish you off when they found you,”

Laila remarked.

“Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s because you can’t interrogate a dead fedayeen.” The Israeli patrol had rushed Kamal to the prisoners’ ward of Tel Aviv’s Tal Hashomer Hospital. There he had lain in a coma for a week until the medical skill of his captors and the vitality of his own constitution had combined to save him.

He picked up his beige jacket and drew from its pocket the pendant-shaped vial three inches long that had been in his second airline bag. Laila gasped at the sight of the pale-yellow fluid in its bulbous base.

“My jasminel”

Kamal nodded. His sister grabbed the vial, plucked out its stopper and thrust it to her nostrils. She gulped its odor the way a suffocating man might gasp at the first rush of air flowing from an oxygen mask. Laila closed her eyes. A world, a forgotten world, swam back at her as the pungent scent invaded her senses. Abdul’s perfume shop in the souk of Old Jerusalem, a dark cavern of olfactory miracles, its air so heavy with musky smells it seemed she could almost caress it between her fingertips.

“How did you-” she started.

“One of our people who was in Jerusalem on a mission brought it out,” Kamal explained. Illicit traffic across the Israeli-Jordanian border was something Kamal understood. He had been an illegal export himself, hidden at the bottom of a truckload of oranges after his escape from the prisoners’ ward at Tal Hashomer Hospital.

Laila clutched the vial to her breast. “Dear, sweet Abdul,” she said.

Her brother started at her phrase. Those blue eyes of his, the eyes that, the family had always joked, were the legacy of an errant Crusader knight’s dalliance with a member of the Dajani clan, seemed to protrude from their sockets, their delicate robin’s-egg cast darkened by some interior storm.

“Don’t be in a rush to use up that jasmine,” he said. “It happens to be the last your dear, sweet Abdul ever sold. He’s dead.”

Laila gasped.

“He was executed for treason.”

His sister looked unbelievingly at the vial in her hands, then at her brother who had brought it for her.

“May I have some tea?” he asked.

Too stunned to speak, Laila turned to the kitchen alcove behind her and prepared to light the gas stove.

Her brother continued. “I’ve come to see you because I need your help.”

Laila spun, the match still sputtering in her hand. She had found her voice. “Why? Is there some poor grocer down the street you want killed?”

The tone of her brother’s reply was as sharp as the snap of a breaking bone. “Laila, we never kill without a reason. He sold two of our people to the Jews.” He paused, throttling down his anger before he continued. “1

want you to convince Whalid to help us in a very important operation.”

“Why me? Why don’t you talk to him? He’s your brother, too, isn’t he?”

“Because Whalid and I don’t talk to each other. We only argue. And I’m interested in getting his help, not winning an argument.” Kamal got up and moved to the window overlooking the clinic across the street.

“Whalid would never understand what I’ve been doing.” Kamal looked out the window, almost melancholy, groping for a phrase, for a thought to explain himself to his sister. “The end justifies the means.” He uttered the words as though they were an original thought he had just discovered, the absolution of a new age designed to be pronounced before rather than after confession. “For me they do. Not for him. Except in those laboratories of his where everything’s an abstraction.” He gestured with his head to the crowded street below. “Never down there where it matters. He’d call me a criminal,” he said softly. “I’d call him a coward. After five minutes we wouldn’t have anything left to say to each other.”

“You never did have much to say to each other,” Laila remarked. “Long before he went into those laboratories of his and you …” She paused, searching for a word.

Kamal provided it. “Became a terrorist. Or a patriot. The line between them is sometimes thin.” Kamal walked back across the room, gesturing as he did to the kitchen. “You were going to make me a cup of tea, remember?”

Laila set the kettle on her stove and came back to the sitting room. “He’s changed, you know. He’s more French than the French are now. What happened to us, our parents, Palestine-all that just seems to have faded away like it was a part of a life he lived in another incarnation. He’s like everyone else. The car. The house. The cleaning woman on Thursdays. His work. His wife. A happily married man, no?”

“We’re not going to ask him to give up all that, Laila,” Kamal’s voice was calm, almost serene. “But he’s not like everyone else. Not for us at least.”

His words sent a tremor of apprehension through Laila, confirming what she had suspected from the moment Kamal had mentioned their elder brother.

“It’s about his work-what you’re after?”

Kamal nodded.

The kettle whistled. Laila rose. She walked to the alcove, her steps paced off in the slowed rhythm of someone whose mind is lost in thought. So that’s what it is, she told herself. After all the years, after all the rumors, the angry late-night discussions, they were going to do it now.