"We'll be working together, kid," Dore Peretz was saying. "We're a
team." He swept back his mane of salt-and-pepper hair, then moved next
to Georges LeFarge. The young engineer didn't like anything about the
Israeli, right down to the cheap aftershave he was wearing, but he had
to admit the guy seemed unfazed by all the hardware that controlled Big
Benny, the Fujitsu supercomputer.
It was a correct assessment. Dore Peretz was definitely in his element.
He had taken his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1984, then
returned to Israel to accept a high-paying research job at the Weizman
Institute, Israel's top- secret nuclear facility near Tel Aviv. During
the next seven years he had advanced to the level of senior institute
scientist, becoming an expert in every technology connected with
nuclear weapons.
From the specialty of mass destruction he graduated to another hot
topic--the emerging preeminence of smart weapons. Conventional delivery
technologies, the war in the Gulf had shown, were no match for the new
"smart" antimissile systems. It was back to the drawing board. What
Israel needed in her arsenal was the next generation of weaponry.
He had gone on to head up a research team that played computerized war
games, studying the "what ifs" of whole new generations of technologies
matched against each other. The end result of this fascination was that
he became a computer and missile-guidance expert--which, when added to
his knowledge of nuclear weapons, made him a double-threat man.
It also made him perfect for what Sabri Ramirez wanted to do.
When Ramirez found him, he already had departed the institute, and also
for reasons that suited Ramirez perfectly. Whereas Dore Peretz had an
IQ off the scale, his social development was considered--even by those
who tried to like him--as scarcely progressed beyond the infantile. His
was an independent . . . make that irreverent . . . temperament that
was bound to clash with the bureaucracy of a straitlaced place like the
institute. He had particular trouble fitting in with the deadly-
serious, high-security environment that surrounded military contract
research. The problem had been obvious from the first day he arrived,
but his genius was such that it had been overlooked and worked around
by both sides. His final rupture with the Israeli defense establishment
resulted from what--to his mind--was a totally compelling event.
He had personally developed a computer-assist program that provided
special procedures for the quick arming of a nuclear device in case
Israel found itself facing an imminent attack. It was important, and it
worked.
He had expected, reasonably enough, a rousing financial tribute for
this effort, or at the very least a citation. What he got instead was
screwed. When the yearly Summary of Technical Research arrived on his
desk January last, he discovered the computer program had been
"created" by the vice president in charge of his section, with the
"assistance" of someone named Dr. D. Peretz.
A reaming by an incompetent bureaucrat whom he had hated from the
beginning was the last straw. He resigned in traditional style,
papering the institute with a fusillade of memos that reviewed in
detail the failings of its top management and then for good measure
scrambling the electronic combination on his personal safe as he was
readying to walk out the door.
At that point he did not know what he wanted to do next, but he was
damned sure it would not involve further interaction with a
bureaucracy.
Being no dummy, he also fully anticipated the response to his outrage.
And sure enough, he found he had transformed himself into a high-
profile security risk that Mossad suddenly found very interesting.
Israel's intelligence service remembered all too well the case of
Mordecai Vanunu, the thirty-one-year-old technician who had worked at
the plutonium separation facility at the Dimona complex for nine years,
then left in a huff and sold pictures and a detailed description of the
facility to the London Sunday Times. Mossad had no intention of letting
it happen again.
Dore Peretz was interrogated for weeks, threatened repeatedly, then
placed under close surveillance. They had no grounds to arrest him, but
they were going to intimidate the hell out of him.
Their harassment, however, achieved precisely the opposite effect. They
galvanized his anger. In a degree of soul searching quite foreign to
his normal mental activity, he found himself wondering why he owed
Israel such allegiance in the first place. This was their thanks for
all his service.
So why not give it back to the bastards, in spades? He became a
"scientific adviser" to the PLO.
That only confirmed Mossad's fears and intensified their harassment:
his phone was tapped, his mail opened, his stylish Tel Aviv apartment
repeatedly and blatantly searched in his absence. The overall effect
was cumulative, rendering him an ever-more-vociferous critic of
Israel's conservative coalition government.
It was at this time, when his name was being linked to the PLO, that
Sabri Ramirez got wind of him and knew he had found a gold mine--a
disaffected, activist Israeli nuclear and rocket expert looking for a
cause. He sounded perfect, and he was. Ramirez approached him at a
demonstration supporting a Palestinian homeland, and made him an offer
he could not refuse. How would he like to get rich? He would not need
to betray his country, merely lend his skills to help teach the
Americans a lesson.
Fuck Israel, he had declared. Then in a lower voice he had added--come
to that, fuck the Palestinians, who were basically a pain in the ass.
Acquiring personal wealth was a much more inspiring cause. He could not
get work in Israel, any kind of work, and he was fast running through
his savings.
Ramirez advanced him thirty thousand American dollars on the spot, in
crisp hundreds. He immediately dropped his PLO affiliation and began
lowering his profile--much to Mossad's relief. Their surveillance eased
up as they gratefully turned to more pressing matters, and four months
later he took advantage of his new freedom to slip into Jordan one
night and from there make his way, a week later, to Beirut. It was in
that ravaged city that he and Sabri Ramirez worked out the technical
details of the plan.
. . . Which thus far had gone perfectly.
"We'll be modifying the payload," he announced, turning to the
keyboard. "Therefore the weight will be different, so we'll have to
factor that into the SORT program on the Fujitsu and run it again."
Shit, LeFarge thought, he knows about SORT. Which probably means he
knows everything he needs to make VX-1
fly.