Triple by Ken Follett

thousands of
    families without a home, a purpose or a hope. To see his father, who had
    been a clever, decisive man ruling a large business with a firm hand,
    reduced now to queuing for food and wasting his life playing backgammon,
    made Yasif want to throw bombs at school buses.
    The women fetched water and cleaned house much as al-ways, but the men
    shuffled around in secondhand clothes, waiting for nothing, their bodies
    getting flabby while their minds grew dull. Teenagers strutted and
    squabbled and fought with knives, for there was nothing ahead of them but
    the prospect of their lives shriveling to nothing in the baking heat of
    the sun.
    The camp smelled of sewage and despair. Hassan never returned to visit,
    although he continued to write to his mother. He had escaped the trap,
    and if he was deserting his father, well, his father bad helped him do
    it, so it must have been what he wanted.
    He was a modest success as a bank clerk. He had intelligence and
    integrity, but his upbringing did not fit him for careful, calculating
    work involving much shuffling of memoranda and keeping of records in
    triplicate. Besides, his heart was elsewhere.
    He never ceased bitterly to resent what had been taken from him. He
    carried his hatred through life like a secret burden. Whatever his
    logical mind might tell him, his soul said be had abandoned his father
    in time of need, and the guilt fed his hatred of Israel. Each year he
    expected the Arab armies to destroy the Zionist invaders, and each time
    they failed he grew more wretched and more angry.
    In 1957 he began to work for Egyptian Intelligence.
    He was not a very important agent, but as the bank eXpanded its European
    business be, began to pick up the occasional tidbit, both in the office
    and from general banking gossip. Sometimes Cairo would ask him for
    specific information about the finances of an arms manufacturer, a Jewish
    philanthropist, or an Arab millionaire; and if Hassan did not have the
    details in his bank's files he could often get them from friends and
    business contacts. He also had a general brief to keep an eye on Israeli
    businessmen in Europe, in case they were agents; and that was why he had
    approached Nat Dickstein and pretended to be friendly.
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TRiPLE
    Hassan thought Dickstein's story was probably true. In his shabby suit~
    with the same round spectacles and the same inconspicuous air, he looked
    exactly like an underpaid sale
    with a product he could not promote. However, there was that odd business
    in the Rue Dicks the previous night: two youths, known to the police as
    petty thieves, had been found in the gutter savagely disabled. Hassan had
    got all the details from a contact on the city police force. Clearly they
    had picked on the wrong sort of victim. Their injuries were professional:
    the man, who had inflicted them had to be a soldier, a policeman, a
    bodyguard . . . or an agent After an incident like that, any Israeli who
    flew out in a hurry the next morning was worth checking up on.
    Hassan drove back to the Alfa Hotel and spoke to the desk clerk. "I was
    here an hour ago when one of your guests was checking out;'he said. "Do
    you remember?"
    "I think so, sir.99
    Hassan gave him two hundred Luxembourg francs. "Would you tell me what
    name he was registered under?"
    "Certainly. sir." The clerk consulted a f3le. "Edward Rodgers, from
    Science International magazine."
    "Not Nathaniel Dickstein?"
    The clerk shook his head patiently.
    "Would you just see whether you had a Nathaniel Dickstein, from Israel,
    registered at all?"
    "Certainly." The -clerk took several minutes to look through a wad of
    papers. Hassan's excitement rose. If Dickstein had registered under a
    false name, then he was not a wine salesman--so what else could he be but
    an Israeli agent? Finally the clerk closed his fae and looked up. "Defi-
    nitely not, sir."
    "Thank you." Haman left. He was jubilant as he drove back to his office:
    he had used his wits and discovered