Ultimatum by Antony Trew

passport and ticket now?’
    ‘Please.’
    A bell rang in the shop below. ‘Customer,’ she said. ‘I’d better go.’
    She came back later with a French passport and the airline ticket. ‘The passport’s been in the safe since you left it there with Tewfik. He bought the ticket yesterday.’
    ‘Good.’ He handed her the Algerian passport. ‘Keep this for me, Magda. Tell Tewfik I’ll pick it up again. In a couple of weeks, I hope.’
    She looked at him sadly. ‘Is it dangerous? Your mission?’
    ‘There is always danger, Magda. Every time one crosses the street.’
    ‘This is different, Zeid.’
    ‘Danger isn’t. The objective is.’
    She shook her head. ‘How nice if you could stay in Paris for a while.’
    ‘Just as well I can’t. It might start all over again. Tewfik wouldn’t like that.’
    She smiled sadly, knowing he was right.
     
    The immigration officer in Heathrow’s Terminal 1 looked at the passport – Simon Dufour Charrier, born September 7th, 1948, Philippeville, Algeria – and his well-trained eyes checked the man’s age, height and colouring, then the face on the photograph – high forehead, eyes set well apart, high cheekbones, prominent nose, mole on right cheek – against the face in front of him. Satisfied, he pushed the passport back, nodded curtly. ‘Right,’ he said, looking at the next passenger.
    Zeid Barakat turned up the collar of his raincoat, tightened the silk scarf which so well concealed the scar, and puton dark glasses before boarding the British Airways bus which took him to the West London Terminal in the Cromwell Road. There he changed to a taxi. ‘South Kensington tube station,’ he told the driver.
     
    After two weeks of exhaustive enquiry the Deuxième Bureau in Beirut, assisted by their colleagues from Damascus, had made no progress in solving the mystery of the whereabouts of the two packing cases removed from Shed 27 during the Israeli commando raid on the night of October 5th/6th.
    Nor had they succeeded in tracing the truck which had passed through the Port gates early in the morning of the 6th October, evidently carrying the missing warhead and detonator. It had been established that the truck did not belong to D.B. Mahroutti Bros. although the name of that firm had appeared on it. The Deuxième Bureau assumed that it had been re-sprayed and given new plates immediately after the incident.
    Checks at Djebel Naqura, the border post between Lebanon and Israel – reserved for UN traffic – revealed that the truck had not crossed at that point. At the end of the two-week search the head of the Lebanese security police informed his minister that there were two workable hypotheses:
    One, the warhead and detonator had been taken into Israel by sea immediately after the attack, the use of the Mahroutti truck being a calculated diversion; or, two, the missing weapons had been taken out of the Port by the truck and were either still in the Lebanon or had been smuggled into Israel in a manner not yet known.
    Digesting these facts, and with the outcry of the world’s media and chancelleries still ringing in their ears, the Lebanese Cabinet decided that the Israeli attack on Shed 27 had been both politically and technologically motivated:
    The Israelis’ political objective had been to reveal in dramatic fashion that France was supplying nuclear weaponsto the Middle East, and by so doing justify in advance any subsequent Israeli decision to equip its forces in the field with nuclear weapons.
    The technological objective had been to assist Israeli physicists working on the MD-660 project by making available a recent example of French nuclear technology in a tactical weapons system.
    Reluctantly, the Lebanese Cabinet had to agree with their Syrian colleagues that the Israelis appeared to have achieved both objectives.

10
    43 St Peter’s Road, Fulham, was an old Victorian terraced house somewhat in need of repair. It belonged to a maiden lady, Miss Katherine