Ralston attended Bartlett’s lecture. He sat at the back of the hall trying to control his yawning boredom. Many members of the audience – some still pale from the explosive aftermath of their Arab meal – seemed equally bored. But perhaps that was how geologists reacted to their own entertainments.
He wasn’t quite sure why he had come. Perhaps to see how this deceptively absent-minded Englishman performed in his own field. He noticed Raquel Rabinovitz sitting two rows in front of him.
After five minutes of rocks, igneous and otherwise, Ralston’s thoughts drifted back to his own profession. His colleagues and his adversaries. One adversary at least had left the current scene. Ralston had checked with the hotel and El Al: Yosevitz had caught the London via Munich plane presumably believing that his assignment had been carried out successfully. Ralston’s instinct told him that the Israelis might not leave it there: if they killed Yosevitz in London it would look like another Arab outrage …
As Ralston considered his own ironic success some of the diamond sparkle returned to his sense of purpose, its lustre enhanced by the thought of Arabs and Russian agents in Cairo exalting over the negotiating material they had captured. He chuckled and a geologist with a face as stony as his work glared at him.
In the end American prestige had been well served. So had the cause of peace in the Middle East. The two were not really incompatible. The diamond positively glittered. Just the same, Ralston hoped that on the next mission the considerations would be simpler: them versus us.
By the time Bartlett was two strata under the surface of the Sinai, Ralston decided that enough was enough. He would go back to the hotel and mentally begin his report. Just as he used to at the precinct.
He stood up, apologised to the geologists on either side of him, and left the hall.
As he walked out an American geologist whispered to his neighbour: ‘You know something,’ he said, ‘that guy looks just like a cop.’
His neighbour who was an Englishman turned round, stared at Ralston and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he looks too much like a policeman to be a policeman.’