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Treaty Team had come knocking at their front door again.
    â€œLet’s get back,” he shouted to the pilot, and the chopper peeled off to the south.
    God help us all if the secret was out, Potok thought. It would probably mean war. A war in which the Soviets would almost certainly participate.
    Â 
    Dr. Lorraine Abbott sat in the backseat of the Mercedes with Scott Hayes whom she had joined in London. He was with the British arm of the NPT Inspection Service. They’d been together
now almost continuously for twenty-four hours. First the briefings and then the travel to Israel, and she decided that she didn’t like him very much.
    â€œA waste of time,” he grumbled from where he sat slouched against the door. “They’re not going to tell us a bloody thing.”
    Hayes was short, and dumpy-looking with long hair, a scraggly beard, and dull gray eyes. He was reputed to be a fair nuclear physicist and engineer and was a Greenpeacer, a combination Lorraine found oddly out of synch.
    â€œAt least they’ll know that we’re interested, and that we’re keeping on top of things,” she replied.
    Hayes looked at her with a little smirk. “Do you think they’ll bloody well care?”
    Lorraine, who held her Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Berkeley, presently worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and was on call by the NPT Inspection Service as a field observer, a job which took her away from home half a dozen times each year. She was tall, slender, and attractive, with light California blond hair and wide green eyes. Her colleagues were always surprised by her chic appearance the first time they met her.
    â€œYou don’t look like a physicist,” they would invariably say.
    Her response, if she were feeling irascible, often would be: “You do.”
    â€œThey definitely care,” she answered Hayes, but she didn’t bother pointing out the helicopter which had just turned to the south toward the En Gedi Nuclear Research Facility a few miles off.
    â€œSo what are you going to ask them: ‘Say, old chum, mind telling us where you’re keeping the goodies these days?’”
    Lorraine smiled. “Something like that,” she said.
    â€œBloody hell,” Hayes responded and looked out the window, a petulant set to his shoulders.
    Lorraine opened her purse and with long, delicate fingers took out a cigarette and lit it, drawing the smoke deeply into her lungs. Her former fiance, a surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center, had always been on her back about her one vice. “You’re too bright for that, Lor,” he’d said.

    She hadn’t minded, though, even if he was right; his one vice was his harping. No one was perfect after all.
    The NPT had gotten its preliminary report that something might be amiss here at En Gedi from the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade. An unusual amount of activity had been observed from one of the KH-series flyby satellites. Photos had been sent over to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, where analysis suggested that some sort of an alarm might have been set off two and a half days ago, around three in the morning, local time.
    There had been no apparent damage, no fire, and certainly no detectable radiation leaks. In addition, the Israelis had so far made no announcement about any trouble at their research reactor facility—though it would have been highly unusual for them to do so. They had been extremely tight-lipped about their involvement with nuclear energy.
    Still, they had not seemed overly surprised to learn that an NPT team was being sent out to look over the situation.
    Her instructions were simple, as they had been for each of her inspection trips: Keep your eyes and ears open for anything out of the ordinary.
    Israel had the capacity to produce plutonium from her two research reactors, and presently she had operational one enrichment plant, one heavy water plant, and