Chapter 11
It was a long walk through the early evening from the bus station in the north of the city to the house of the Soviet First Secretary in the district of Mansour, but Martin welcomed it.
For one thing, he had been cooped up in two separate buses for twelve hours, covering the 240 miles from Ar-Rutba to the capital, and they had not been luxury coaches. For another, the walk gave him the chance to inhale once again the feel of the city he had not seen since leaving on an airliner for London as a very nervous schoolboy of thirteen, and that had been twenty-four years earlier.
Much had changed. The city he remembered had been very much an Arab city, much smaller, grouped around the central districts of Shaikh Omar and Saadun on the northwestern bank of the Tigris in Risafa, and the district of Aalam across the river in Karch. Within this inner city was where most of life had been; here narrow streets, alleys, markets, mosques, and their minarets had dominated the skyline to remind the people of their subservience to Allah.
Twenty years of oil revenue had brought long divided highways plunging through the once-open spaces, with rotaries, overpasses, and cloverleaf intersections. Cars had proliferated, and skyscrapers pushed upward into the night sky, Mammon nudging his old adversary.
Mansour, when he reached it down the long stretch of Rabia Street, was hardly recognizable. He recalled wide open spaces around the Mansour Club where his father had taken the family on weekend afternoons.
Mansour was still clearly an upscale suburb, but the open spaces had been filled with streets and residences for those who could afford to live in style.
He passed within a few hundred yards of Mr. Hartley's old preparatory school, where he had learned his lessons and played during the breaks with his friends Hassan Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, but in the darkness he did not recognize the street.
He knew just what job Hassan was doing now, but of Dr Badri's two sons he had heard no word in almost a quarter of a century. Had the little one, Osman, with his taste for mathematics, ever become an engineer after all? he wondered. And Abdelkarim, who had won prizes for reciting English poetry--had he in turn become a poet or a writer?
If Martin had marched in the manner of the SAS, heel-and-toe, shoulders swinging to assist his moving legs, he could have covered the distance in half the time. He could also have been reminded, like those two engineers in Kuwait, that "you may dress like an Arab, but you still walk like an Englishman."
But his shoes were not laced marching boots. They were canvas slippers with rope soles, the footwear of a poor Iraqi fellagha, so he shuffled along with bowed shoulders and head down.
In Riyadh they had shown him an up-to-date map of the city of Baghdad, and many photographs taken from high altitude but magnified until, with a magnifying glass, one could look into the gardens behind the walls, picking out the swimming pools and cars of the wealthy and powerful.
All these he had memorized. He turned left into Jordan Street and just past Yarmuk Square took a right into the tree-lined avenue where the Soviet diplomat lived.
In the sixties, under Kassem and the generals who followed him, the USSR had occupied a favored and prestigious position in Baghdad, pretending to espouse Arab nationalism because it was seen to be anti-Western, while trying to convert the Arab world to Communism.
In those years the Soviet embassy had purchased several large residences outside its main compound, which could not accommodate the swelling staff, and as a concession these residences and their grounds had been accorded the status of Soviet territory. It was a privilege even Saddam Hussein had never gotten around to rescinding, the more so as until the mid-eighties his principal arms supplier had been Moscow, and six thousand Soviet military advisers had trained his Air Force and Armored Corps with their Russian equipment.
Martin found the villa and identified it from the small brass plaque that announced this was a residence belonging to the embassy of the USSR. He pulled on the chain beside the gate and waited.
After several minutes the gate opened to reveal a burly, crop-haired Russian in the white tunic of a steward. "Da?" he said.
Martin replied in Arabic, the wheedling whine of a supplicant who speaks to a superior. The Russian scowled. Martin fumbled inside his robe and produced his identity card. This made sense to the steward; in his country they knew about internal passports. He took the card, said, "Wait," in Arabic, and closed the gate.
He was back in five minutes, beckoning the Iraqi in the soiled dishdash through the gate into the forecourt. He led Martin toward the steps leading to the main door of the villa. As they reached the bottom of the steps a man appeared at the top.
"That will do. I will handle this," he said in Russian to the manservant, who glowered at the Arab one last time and went back into the house.
Yuri Kulikov, First Secretary to the Soviet embassy, was a wholly professional diplomat who had found the order he received from Moscow outrageous but unavoidable. He had evidently been caught at dinner, for he clutched a napkin with which he dabbed his lips as he descended the steps.
"So here you are," he said in Russian. "Now listen, if we have to go through with this charade, so be it. But I personally will have nothing to do with it. Panimayesh?"
Martin, who did not speak Russian, shrugged helplessly and said in Arabic: "Please, bey?"
Kulikov took the change of language as dumb insolence. Martin realized with a delicious irony that the Soviet diplomat really thought his unwelcome new staff member was a fellow-Russian who had been sicced onto him by those wretched spooks up at the Lubyanka in Moscow. "Oh, very well then, Arabic if you wish," he said testily. He too had trained in Arabic, which he spoke well with a harsh Russian accent. He was damned if he was going to be shown up by this agent of the KGB.
So he continued in Arabic. "Here is your card. Here is the letter I was ordered to prepare for you. Now, you will live in the shack at the far end of the garden, keep the grounds in order, and do the shopping as the chef instructs. Apart from that, I do not want to know. If you are caught, I know nothing except that I took you on in good faith. Now, go about your business and get rid of those damned hens. I will not have chickens ruining the garden."
Some chance, he thought bitterly as he turned back to resume his interrupted dinner. If the oaf is caught up to some mischief, the AMAM will soon know he is a Russian, and the idea that he is on the First Secretary's personal staff by accident will be as likely as a skating party on the Tigris. Yuri Kulikov was privately furious with Moscow.
Mike Martin found his quarters up against the rear wall of the quarteracre garden, a one-room bungalow with a cot, a table, two chairs, a row of hooks on one wall, and a washbasin set in a shelf in a corner.
Further examination revealed an earth-closet close by and a cold-water tap in the garden wall. Hygiene would clearly be pretty basic and food presumably served from the kitchen door at the rear of the villa. He sighed. The house outside Riyadh seemed a long way away.
He found a number of candles and some matches. By their dim light, he slung blankets across the windows and went to work on the rough tiles of the floor with his penknife. An hour of scratching at the moldy mortar brought four of the tiles up, and a further hour of digging with a trowel from the nearby potting shed produced a hole to take his radio transmitter, batteries, tape recorder, and satellite dish. A mixture of mud and spittle rubbed into the cracks between the tiles hid the last traces of his excavation.
Just before midnight, he used his knife to cut away the false bottom of the chicken cage and set the litter into the real base, so that no trace remained of the four-inch cavity. While he worked the chickens scratched around the floor, looking hopefully for a nonexistent grain of wheat but finding and consuming several bugs.
Martin finished off the last of his olives and cheese and shared the remaining fragments of pita bread with his traveling companions, along with a bowl of water drawn from the outside tap. The hens went back into their cage, and if they found their home now four inches deeper than it used to be, they made no complaint. It had been a long day, and they went to sleep. In a last gesture, Martin peed all over Kulikov's roses in the darkness before blowing out the candles, wrapping himself in his blanket, and doing the same.
His body clock caused him to wake up at four A.M. Extracting the transmitting gear in its plastic bags, he recorded a brief message for Riyadh, speeded it up by two hundred times, connected the tape recorder to the transmitter, and erected the satellite dish, which occupied much of the center of the shack but pointed out the open door.
At four forty-five A.M. he sent a single-burst transmission on the channel of the day, then dismantled it all and put it back under the floor. The sky was still pitch-black over Riyadh when a similar dish on the roof of the SIS residence caught the one-second signal and fed it down to the communications room. The transmitting time "window" was from four-thirty until five A.M., and the listening watch was awake. Two spinning tapes caught the burst from Baghdad, and a warning light flashed to alert the technicians. They slowed the message down by two hundred times until it came over the headphones in clear. One noted it down in shorthand, typed it up, and left the room.
Julian Gray, the Head of Station, was shaken awake at five fifteen. "It's Black Bear, sir. He's in." Gray read the transcript with mounting excitement and went to wake Simon Paxman.
The head of the Iraq Desk was now on extended assignment to Riyadh, his duties in London having been taken over by his subordinate. He too sat up, wide awake, and read it. "Bloody hell, so far so good."
"The problem could start," said Gray, "when he tries to raise Jericho."
It was a sobering thought. The former Mossad asset in Baghdad had been switched off for three full months. He might have been compromised or caught, or simply changed his mind. He could have been posted far away, especially if he turned out to be a general now commanding troops in Kuwait. Anything could have happened.
Paxman stood up. "Better tell London. Any chance of coffee?" "I'll tell Mohammed to get it together," said Gray.
Mike Martin was watering the flowerbeds at five-thirty, when the house began to stir. The cook, a bosomy Russian woman, saw him from her window and, when water was hot, called him over to the kitchen window. "Kak mazyvaetes?" she asked, then thought for a moment and used the Arabic word: "Name?" "Mahmoud," said Martin. "Well, here's a cup of coffee, Mahmoud."
Martin bobbed his head several times in delighted acceptance, muttering "shukran" and taking the hot mug in two hands. He was not joking; it was delicious real coffee and his first hot drink since the tea on the Saudi side of the border.
Breakfast was at seven, a bowl of lentils and pita bread, which he devoured. It appeared that the houseman of the previous evening and his wife, the cook, looked after First Secretary Kulikov, who seemed to be single.
By eight, Martin had met the chauffeur, an Iraqi who spoke a smattering of Russian and would be useful translating simple messages to the Russians. Martin decided not to get too close to the chauffeur, who might be a plant by the AMAM Secret Police or even Rahmani's counterintelligence people.
That turned out to be no problem; agent or not, the chauffeur was a snob and treated the new gardener with contempt. He agreed, however, to explain to the cook that Martin had to leave for a while because their employer had ordered him to get rid of his chickens.
Back on the street, Martin headed for the bus station, liberating his hens onto a patch of waste ground on the way.
As in so many Arab cities, the bus station in Baghdad is not simply a place for boarding vehicles leaving for the provinces. It is a seething maelstrom of working-class humanity where people have things to buy and sell. Running along the south wall is a useful flea market.
It was here that Martin, after the appropriate haggle, bought a rickety bicycle that squeaked piteously when he rode it but was soon grateful for a shot of oil.
He had known he could not get around in a car, and even a motorcycle would be too grand for a humble gardener. He recalled his father's houseman pedaling through the city from market to market, buying the daily provisions, and from what he could see, a bicycle was still a perfectly normal way for working people to get around.
A little work with the penknife sawed off the top of the chicken cage, converting it into an open-topped square basket, which he secured to the rear pillion of the bicycle with two stout rubber cords, former car fan belts, that he bought from a back-street garage.
He bicycled back into the city center and bought four different-colored sticks of chalk from a stationer in Shurja Street, just across from St. Joseph's Catholic Church, where the Chaldean Christians meet to worship.
He recalled the area from his boyhood, the Agid al Nasara, or Area of the Christians, and Shurja and Bank streets were still full of illegally parked cars and foreigners prowling through the shops selling herbs and spices.
When he was a boy, there had only been three bridges across the Tigris: the Railway Bridge in the north, the New Bridge in the middle, and the King Faisal Bridge in the south. Now there were nine.
Four days after the start of the air war still to come, there would be none, for all had been targeted inside the Black Hole in Riyadh, and destroyed they duly were. But that first week of November, the life of the city flowed across them ceaselessly.
The other thing he noticed was the presence everywhere of the AMAM Secret Police, though most of them made no attempt to be secret. They watched on street corners and from parked cars. Twice he saw foreigners stopped and required to produce their identity cards, and twice saw the same thing happen to Iraqis. The demeanor of the foreigners was of resigned irritation, but that of the Iraqis was of visible fear.
On the surface the city life went on, and the people of Baghdad were as good-humored as he recalled them; but his antennae told him that beneath the surface, the river of fear imposed by the tyrant in the great palace down by the river near the Tammuz Bridge ran strong and deep.
Only once that morning did he come across a hint of what many Iraqis felt every day of their lives. He was in the fruit and vegetable market at Kasra, still across the river from his new home, haggling over the price of some fresh fruit with an old stallholder. If the Russians were going to feed him lentils and bread, he could at least back up this diet with some fruit.
Nearby, four AMAM men frisked a youth roughly before sending him on his way. The old fruit seller hawked and spat in the dust, narrowly missing one of his own eggplants.
"One day the Beni Naji will come back and chase this filth away," he muttered.
"Careful, old man, these are foolish words," whispered Martin, testing some peaches for ripeness.
The old man stared at him. "Where are you from, brother?"
"Far away. A village in the north, beyond Baji."
"Go back there, if you take an old man's advice. I have seen much. The Beni Naji will come from the sky --aye, and the Beni el Kalb." He spat again, and this time the eggplants were not so fortunate.
Martin made his purchase of peaches and lemons and pedaled away.
He was back at the house of the Soviet First Secretary by noon. Kulikov was long gone to the embassy and his driver with him, so though Martin was rebuked by the cook, it was in Russian, so he shrugged and got on with the garden.
But he was intrigued by what the old greengrocer had said. Some, it seemed, could foresee their own invasion and did not oppose it. The phrase "chase this filth away" could only refer to the Secret Police and,
by inference, to Saddam Hussein.
On the streets of Baghdad, the British are referred to as the Beni Naji. Exactly who Naji was remains lost in the mists of time, but it is believed he was a wise and holy man. Young British officers posted in those parts under the empire used to come to see him, to sit at his feet and listen to his wisdom. He treated them like his sons, even though they were Christians and therefore infidel, so people called them the "Sons of Naji."
The Americans are referred to as the Beni el Kalb. Kalb in Arabic is a dog, and the dog, alas, is not a highly regarded creature in Arab culture.
Gideon Barzilai could at least take one comfort from the report on the Winkler Bank provided by the embassy's banking sayan. It showed him the direction he had to take.
His first priority had to be to identify which of the three vicepresidents, Kessler, Gemuetlich, or Blei, was the one who controlled the account owned by the Iraqi renegade Jericho.
The fastest route would be by a phone call, but judging from the report, Barzilai was sure none of them would admit anything over an open line.
He made his request by heavily encoded signal from the fortified underground Mossad station beneath the Vienna embassy and received his reply from Tel Aviv as fast as it could be prepared.
It was a letter, forged on genuine letterhead extracted from one of Britain's oldest and most reputable banks, Coutts of The Strand, London, bankers to Her Majesty the Queen. The signature was even a perfect facsimile of the autograph of a genuine senior officer of Coutts, in the overseas section.
There was no addressee by name, either on the envelope or the letter, which began simply, "Dear Sir."
The text of the letter was simple and to the point. An important client of Coutts would soon be making a substantial transfer into the numbered account of a client of the Winkler Bank--to wit, account number so-and-so. Coutts's client had now alerted them that due to unavoidable technical reasons, there would be a delay of several days in the effecting of the transfer.
Should Winkler's client inquire as to its nonarrival on time, Coutts would be eternally grateful if Messrs. Winkler could inform their client that the transfer was indeed on its way and would arrive without a moment's unnecessary delay.
Finally, Coutts would much appreciate an acknowledgment of the safe arrival of their missive.
Barzilai calculated that as banks love the prospect of incoming money, and few more than Winkler, the staid old bank in the Ballgasse would give the bankers of the Royal House of Windsor the courtesy of a reply--by letter.
He was right. The Coutts envelope from Tel Aviv matched the stationery and was stamped with British stamps, apparently postmarked at the Trafalgar Square post office two days earlier. It was addressed simply to "Director, Overseas Client Accounts, Winkler Bank."
There was, of course, no such position within the Winkler Bank, since the job was divided among three men. The envelope was delivered, in the dead of night, by being slipped through the mail slot of the bank in Vienna.
The yarid surveillance team had been watching the bank for a week by that time, noting and photographing its daily routine, its hours of opening and closing, the arrival of the mail, the departure of the messenger on his rounds, the positioning of the receptionist behind her desk in the ground-floor lobby, and the positioning of the security guard at a smaller desk opposite her.
The Winkler Bank did not occupy a new building. Ballgasse--and indeed, the whole of the Franziskanerplatz area--lies in the old district just off Singerstrasse.
The bank building must once have been the Vienna dwelling of a rich merchant family, solid and substantial, secluded behind a heavy wooden door adorned with a discreet brass plaque.
To judge from the layout of a similar house on the square which the yarid team had examined while posing as clients of the accountant who dwelt there, it had only five floors, with about six offices per floor.
Among their observations, the yarid team had noted that the outgoing mail was taken each evening, just before the hour of closing, to a mailbox on the square.
This was a chore performed by the commissionaire or guard, who then returned to the building to hold the door open while the staff trooped out. Finally he let in the nightwatchman before going home himself. It was the nightwatchman who shut himself in, slamming enough bolts across the wooden door to keep out an armored car.
Before the envelope from Coutts of London was dropped through the bank's door, the head of the neviot technical team had examined the mailbox on Franziskanerplatz and snorted with disgust. It was hardly a challenge.
One of his team was a crack lockpick and had the mailbox open and reclosed inside three minutes. From what he learned the first time he did it, he could make up a key to fit, which he did. After a couple of minor adjustments, it worked as well as the postman's key.
Further surveillance revealed that the bank guard always dropped off the bank's outgoing mail between twenty and thirty minutes ahead of
the regular six P.M. pickup from the mailbox by the official post office van.
The day the Coutts letter went into the mail slot in the door, the yarid team and the neviot lockpick worked together. As the bank guard returned to the bank down the alley after making the dropoff that evening, the lockpick had the door of the mailbox open.
The twentytwo letters going out from the Winkler Bank lay on top. It took thirty seconds to abstract the one addressed to Messrs. Coutts of London, replace the rest, and relock the box.
All five of the yarid team had been posted in the square in case anyone tried to interfere with the "postman," whose uniform, hurriedly purchased in a secondhand shop, bore a marked resemblance to the real uniforms of Viennese mailmen. But the good citizens of Vienna are not accustomed to agents from the Middle East breaking the sanctity of a mailbox.
There were only two people in the square at the time, and neither took any notice of what appeared to be a post office employee going about his lawful business.
Twenty minutes later, the real postman did his job, but by then the passersby were gone and replaced with fresh ones. Barzilai opened Winkler's reply to Coutts and noted that it was a brief but courteous reply of acknowledgment, written in passable English, and signed by Wolfgang Gemuetlich.
The Mossad team leader now knew exactly who handled the Jericho account. All that remained was to break him or penetrate him. What Barzilai did not know was that his problems were just beginning.
It was well after dark when Mike Martin left the compound in Mansour. He saw no reason to disturb the Russians by going out
through the main gate; there was a much smaller wicket gate in the rear wall, with a rusty lock to which he had been given the key.
He wheeled his bicycle out into the alley, relocked the gate, and began to pedal. It would be, he knew, a long night.
The Chilean diplomat Moncada had described perfectly well to the Mossad officers who debriefed him when he came out just where he had sited the three dead-letter boxes destined for messages from him to Jericho and where to put the chalk marks to alert the invisible Jericho that a message awaited him.
Martin felt he had no choice but to use all three at once, with an identical message in each. He had written out those messages in Arabic on flimsy airmail paper and folded each one into a square glassine bag. The three bags were taped to his inner thigh. The chalk sticks resided in a side pocket.
The first drop was the Alwazia cemetery, across the river in Risafa. He knew it already, remembered from long ago and studied at length on photographs in Riyadh.
Finding the loose brick in darkness was another matter. It took ten minutes, scrabbling with fingertips in the darkness of the walled cemetery compound, before he found the right one. But it was just where Moncada had said.
He eased the brick from its niche, slipped one glassine bag behind it, and replaced the brick.
His second drop was in another old and crumbling wall, this time near the ruined citadel in Aadhamiya, where a stagnant pond is all that remains of the ancient moat. Not far from the citadel is the Imam Aladham shrine, and between them a wall, as old and crumbled as the citadel itself.
Martin found the wall and the single tree growing against it. He reached behind the tree and counted ten rows of bricks down from the top. The tenth brick down rocked like an old tooth. The second envelope went behind it, and the brick went back. Martin checked to see if anyone was watching, but he was completely alone; no one would want to come to this deserted place after dark.
The third and last drop was in another cemetery, but this time the British one, long abandoned, in Waziraya, near the Turkish embassy.
As in Kuwait, it was a grave, but not a scrape beneath the marble of the tomb; rather, it was the inside of a small stone jar cemented where the headstone would be, at one end of a long-abandoned plot.
"Never mind," murmured Martin to whatever long-dead warrior of the empire lay beneath. "Just carry on, you're doing fine."
Because Moncada had been based at the United Nations building, miles down the Matar Sadam Airport road, he had wisely made his chalk-mark sites closer to the wider-spaced roads of Mansour, where they could be seen from a passing car.
The rule was that whoever -- Moncada or Jericho--saw a chalk mark, he should note which drop it referred to, then erase it with a damp cloth. The placer of the mark, passing a day or so later, would see that it was gone and know his message had been received and (presumably) the drop visited and the package retrieved. In this way both agents had communicated with each other for two years and never met.
Martin, unlike Moncada, had no car, so he cycled the whole distance. His first mark, a Saint Andrew's cross in the figure of an X, was made with blue chalk on a stone post of the gate of an abandoned mansion. The second was in white chalk, on the rusty-red sheet-iron door of a garage at the back of a house in Yarmuk. It took the form of a cross of Lorraine. The third was in red chalk--a crescent of Islam with a horizontal bar through the middle--placed on the wall of the compound building of the Union of Arab Journalists, on the edge of
Mutanabi district. Iraqi journalists are not encouraged to be a very investigative crowd, and a chalk mark on their wall would hardly make headlines.
Martin could not know whether Jericho, despite Moncada's warning that he could return, was still patrolling the city, peering from his car window to see if marks had been placed on walls. All Martin could now do was check daily and wait.
It was the seventh of November when he noticed that the white chalk mark was gone. Had the garage door owner decided to clean up his sheet of rusty metal of his own accord? Martin cycled on. The blue chalk on the mansion gatepost was missing; so was the red mark on the journalists' wall.
That night, he serviced the three dead-letter boxes dedicated to messages from Jericho to his controller. One was behind a loose brick in the rear of the wall enclosing the Kasra vegetable market off Saadun Street. There was a folded sheet of onionskin paper for him.
The second drop, under the loose stone windowsill of a derelict house up an alley in that maze of tacky streets that make up the soukh on the north bank of the river near Shuhada Bridge, yielded the same offering.
The third and last, under the loose flagstone of an abandoned courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, gave up a third square of thin paper.
Martin hid them under sticky tape around his left thigh and pedaled home to Mansour. By the light of a flickering candle, he read them all.
The message was the same: Jericho was alive and well. He was prepared to work again for the West, and he understood that the British and Americans were now the recipients of his information. But the risks had now increased immeasurably, and so would his fees. He awaited agreement to this and an indication of what was wanted.
Martin burned all three messages and crushed the ashes to powder. He already knew the answer to both queries. Langley was prepared to be generous, really generous, if the product was good.
As for the information needed, Martin had memorized a list of questions concerning Saddam's mood, his concept of strategy, and the locations of major command centers and sites of manufacture for weapons of mass destruction. Just before dawn, he let Riyadh know that Jericho was back in the game.
It was on November 10 that Dr. Terry Martin returned to his small and cluttered office in the School of Oriental and African Studies to find a scrap of paper from his secretary placed foursquare on his blotter: "A Mr. Plummer called; said you had his number and would know what it was about."
The abruptness of the text indicated that Miss Wordsworth was miffed. She was a lady who liked to protect her academic charges with the possessive wraparound security of a mother hen. Clearly, this meant knowing what was going on at all times. Callers who declined to tell her why they were phoning or what the matter concerned did not meet with her approval.
With the autumn term in full swing and a whole cast of new students to cope with, Terry Martin had almost forgotten his request to the Director of the Arabic Services at Government Communications Headquarters. When Martin called, Plummer was out at lunch; then afternoon lectures kept him busy until four. His connection with Gloucestershire found its target just before he went home at five.
"Ah, yes," said Plummer. "You recall you asked for anything odd, anything that did not make sense? We picked up something yesterday at our outstation in Cyprus that seems to be a bit of a stinker. You can listen to it, if you like."
"Here in London?" asked Martin.
"Ah, no, afraid not. It's on tape here, of course, but frankly you'd need to hear it on the big machine, with all the enhancement we can get. A simple tape player wouldn't have the quality. It's rather muffled; that's why even my Arab staff can't work it out."
The rest of the week was fully booked for both of them. Martin agreed to drive over on Sunday, and Plummer offered to stand him lunch at a "quite decent little pub about a mile from the office." The two men in tweed jackets caused no raised eyebrows in the beamed hostelry, and each ordered the Sunday-roast dish of the day, beef and Yorkshire pudding.
"We don't know who is talking to whom," said Plummer, "but clearly they are pretty senior men. For some reason the caller is using an open telephone line and appears to have returned from a visit to forward headquarters in Kuwait. Perhaps he was using his car phone; we know it wasn't on a military net, so probably the person being spoken to was not a military man. Senior bureaucrat, perhaps."
The beef arrived, and they ceased talking while it was served with roast potatoes and parsnips.
When the waitress left their corner booth, Plummer went on. "The caller seems to be commenting on Iraqi Air Force reports that the Americans and Brits are flying an increasing number of aggressive fighter patrols right up to the Iraqi border, then veering away at the last minute."
Martin nodded. He had heard of the tactic. It was designed to monitor Iraqi air-defense reactions to such seeming attacks on their air space, forcing them to "illuminate" their radar screens and SAM missile sights, thus revealing their exact positions to the watching AWACS circling out over the Gulf.
"The speaker refers to the Beni el Kalb, 'the sons of dogs,' meaning the Americans, and the listener laughs and suggests Iraq is wrong to respond to these tactics, which are evidently meant to trap them into revealing their defensive positions.
"Then the speaker says something that we can't work out. There's some garbling at this point, static or something. We can enhance most of the message to clear the interference, but the speaker muffles his words at this point.
"Anyway, the listener gets very annoyed and tells him to shut up and get off the line. Indeed, the listener--who we believe to be in Baghdad--slams the phone down. It's the last two sentences I'd like you to hear."
After lunch, Plummer drove Martin over to the monitoring complex, which was still functioning precisely as on a weekday.
GCHQ operates on a seven-days-per-week schedule. In a soundproofed room rather like a recording studio, Plummer asked one of the technicians to play the mystery tape. He and Martin sat in silence as the guttural voices from Iraq filled the room. The conversation began as Plummer had described. Toward the end, the Iraqi who had initiated the call appeared to become excited.
The voice pitch rose. "Not for long, Rafeek. Soon we shall ..." Then the clutter began, and the words were garbled. But their effect on the man in Baghdad was electric. He cut in.
"Be silent, ibn-al-gahba." Then he slammed the phone down, as if suddenly and horribly aware that the line was not secure. The technician played the tape three times and at slightly different speeds.
"What do you think?" asked Plummer.
"Well, they're both members of the Party," said Martin. "Only Party hierarchs use the address Rafeek, or Comrade."
"Right, so we have two bigwigs chatting about the American arms buildup and the U.S. Air Force provocations against the border."
"Then the speaker gets excited, probably angry, with a hint of exultation. Uses the phrase 'not for long.' "
"Indicating some changes are going to be made?" asked Plummer.
"Sounds like it," said Martin.
"Then the garbled bit. But look at the listener's reaction, Terry. He not only slams the phone down, he calls his colleague 'son of a whore.' That's pretty strong stuff, eh?"
"Very strong. Only the senior man of the two could use that phrase and get away with it," said Martin. "What the hell provoked it?"
"It's the garbled phrase. Listen again." The technician played the single phrase again. "Something about Allah?" suggested Plummer.
" 'Soon we shall be with Allah? Be in the hands of Allah?' "
"It sounds to me like: 'Soon we shall have ... something ... something ... Allah.'"
"All right, Terry. I'll go along with that. 'Have the help of Allah,' perhaps?"
"Then why would the other man explode in rage?" asked Martin. "Attributing the goodwill of the Almighty to one's own cause is
nothing new. Nor particularly offensive. I don't know. Can you let me have a duplicate tape to take home with me?"
"Sure."
"Have you asked our American cousins about it?"
"Of course. Fort Meade caught the same conversation, off a satellite. They can't work it out, either. In fact, they don't rate it highly. For them it's on the back burner."
Terry Martin drove home with the small cassette tape in his pocket. To Hilary's considerable annoyance, he insisted on playing and replaying the brief conversation over and over again on their bedside cassette player.
When he protested, Terry pointed out that Hilary sometimes worried and worried over a single missing answer in the Times crossword puzzle. Hilary was outraged at the comparison. "At least I get the answer the following morning," he snapped, and rolled over and went to sleep.
Terry Martin did not get the answer the following morning, or the next. He played his tape during breaks between lectures, and at other times when he had a few spare moments, jotting down possible alternatives for the jumbled words.
But always the sense eluded him. Why had the other man in that conversation been so angry about a harmless reference to Allah?
It was not until five days later that the two gutturals and the sibilant contained in the garbled phrase made sense.
When they did, he tried to get hold of Simon Paxman at Century House, but he was told his contact was away until further notice. He asked to be put through to Steve Laing, but the head of Ops for the Mid-East was also not available. Though he could not know it, Paxman was on an extended stay at the SIS headquarters in Riyadh, and Laing was visiting the same city for a
major conference with Chip Barber of the CIA.
The man they called the "spotter" flew into Vienna from Tel Aviv via London and Frankfurt, was met by no one, and took a taxi from Schwechat Airport to the Sheraton Hotel, where he had a reservation.
The spotter was rubicund and jovial, an all-American lawyer from New York with documents to prove it. His American-accented English was flawless--not surprising, as he had spent years in the United States --and his German passable.
Within hours of arriving in Vienna, he had employed the secretarial services of the Sheraton to compose and draft a courteous letter on his law firm's letterhead to a certain Wolfgang Gemuetlich, vice-president of the Winkler Bank.
The stationery was perfectly genuine, and should a phone check be made, the signatory really was a senior partner at that most prestigious New York law firm, although he was away on vacation (something the Mossad had checked out in New York) and was certainly not the same man as the visitor to Vienna.
The letter was both apologetic and intriguing, as it was meant to be. The writer represented a client of great wealth and standing who now wished to make substantial lodgements of his fortune in Europe. It was the client who had personally insisted, apparently after hearing from a friend, that the Winkler Bank be approached in the matter, and specifically the person of the good Herr Gemuetlich.
The writer would have made a prior appointment, but both his client and the law firm placed immense importance upon utter discretion, avoiding open phone lines and faxes to discuss client business, so the writer had taken advantage of a European visit to divert to Vienna
personally.
His schedule, alas, only permitted him three days in Vienna, but if Herr Gemuetlich would be gracious enough to spare him an interview, he--the American--would be delighted to come to the bank.
The letter was dropped by the American personally through the bank's mail slot during the night, and by noon of the next day, the bank's messenger had deposited the reply at the Sheraton.
Herr Gemuetlich would be delighted to see the American lawyer at ten the following morning.
From the moment the spotter was shown in, his eyes missed nothing. He took no notes, but no detail escaped and none were forgotten. The receptionist checked his credentials, phoned upstairs to confirm he was expected, and the commissionaire took him up--all the way to the austere wooden door, upon which he knocked. Never was the spotter out of sight.
Upon the command "Herein," the commissionaire opened the door and ushered the American visitor in, withdrawing and closing it behind him before returning to his desk in the lobby.
Herr Wolfgang Gemuetlich rose from his desk, shook hands, gestured his guest to a chair opposite him, and resumed his place behind his desk.
The word Gemuetlich in German means "comfortable," with a hint of geniality. Never was a man less aptly named.
This Gemuetlich was thin to the point of cadaverous, in his early sixties, gray-suited, gray-tied, with thinning hair and face to match. He exuded grayness. There was not a hint of humor in the pale eyes, and the welcoming smile of the papery lips was less a grin than the rictus of something on a slab.
The office conveyed the same austerity as its occupier; dark paneled walls, framed degrees in banking in place of pictures, and a large ornate desk, whose surface was bare of any hint of clutter.
Wolfgang Gemuetlich was not a banker for fun; clearly, all forms of fun were something of which he disapproved. Banking was serious--more, it was life itself. If there was one thing that Herr Gemuetlich seriously deplored, it was the spending of money. Money was for saving, preferably under the aegis of the Winkler Bank.
A withdrawal could cause him serious acidic pain, and a major transfer from a Winkler account to somewhere else would ruin his entire week.
The spotter knew he was there to note and report back. His primary task, now accomplished, was to identify the person of Gemuetlich for the yarid team out in the street. He was also looking for any safe that might contain the operational details of the Jericho account, as well as security locks, door bolts, alarm systems--in short, he was there to case the joint for an eventual burglary.
Avoiding specifics of the amounts his client wished to transfer to Europe but hinting at their immense size, the spotter kept the conversation to inquiring as to the level of security and discretion maintained by the Winkler Bank.
Herr Gemuetlich was happy to explain that numbered accounts with Winkler were impregnable and discretion was obsessive. Only once during the conversation were they interrupted.
A side door opened to admit a mouse of a woman, bearing three letters for signature. Gemuetlich frowned at the nuisance.
"You did say they were important, Herr Gemuetlich. Otherwise ..." said the woman.
At second glance, she was not as old as her appearance would have indicated--perhaps forty. It was the scraped-back hair, the bun, the tweed suit, the lisle stockings, and flat shoes that suggested more.
"Ja, ja, ja ..." said Gemuetlich, and held out his hand for the letters.
"Entschuldigung ...," he asked his guest. He and the spotter had been using German, after establishing that Gemuetlich spoke only halting English. The spotter, however, got to his feet and bobbed a small bow at the newcomer. "Gr黶s Gott, Fr鋟lein," he said.
She looked flustered. Gemuetlich's guests did not usually rise for a secretary. However, the gesture forced Gemuetlich to clear his throat and mutter: "Ah, yes, er--my private secretary, Miss Hardenberg."
The spotter noted that, too, as he sat down.
When he was shown out, with assurances that he would offer his client in New York a most favorable account of the Winkler Bank, the regimen was the same as for entry.
The commissionaire was summoned from the front hall and appeared at the door. The spotter made his farewells and followed the man out. Together they went to the small, grille-fronted elevator, which clanked its way downward.
The spotter asked if he might use the men's room before he left. The commissionaire frowned as if such bodily functions were not really expected within the Winkler Bank, but he stopped the elevator at the mezzanine. Close to the elevator doors, he indicated to the spotter an unmarked wooden door, and the spotter went in.
It was clearly for the bank's male employees: a single stall, a single booth, a handbasin and towel roll, and a closet. The spotter ran the taps to create noise and did a quick check of the room.
A barred, sealed window, run through with the wires of an alarm system--possible, but not easy. Ventilation by automatic fan. The closet contained brooms, pans, cleaning fluids, and a vacuum cleaner. So they did have a cleaning staff. But when did they work? Nights or weekends? If his own experience was anything to go by, even the cleaner would work inside the private offices only under supervision.
Clearly, the commissionaire or the nightwatch could easily be taken care of, but that was not the point. Kobi Dror's orders had been specific: No clues to be left behind.
When he emerged from the men's room, the commissionaire was still outside. Seeing that the broad marble steps to the lobby half a floor down were farther along the corridor, the spotter smiled, gestured to it, and strode along the corridor rather than take the elevator for such a short ride. The commissionaire trotted after him, escorted him down to the lobby, and ushered him out of the door.
The spotter heard the big brass tongue of the self-locking mechanism close behind him. If the commissionaire were upstairs, he wondered, how would the female receptionist admit a client or messenger boy?
He spent two hours briefing Gidi Barzilai on the internal workings of the bank, so far as he had been able to observe them, and the report was gloomy.
The head of the neviot team sat in, shaking his head. They could break in, he said. No problem. Find the alarm system and neutralize it. But as for leaving no trace--that would be a bastard. There was a nightwatchman who probably prowled at intervals.
And then, what would they be looking for? A safe? Where? What type? How old? Key or combination or both? It would take hours. And they would have to silence the nightwatch. That would leave a trace. But Dror had forbidden it.
The spotter flew out of Vienna and back to Tel Aviv the next day. That afternoon, from a series of photographs, he identified Wolfgang Gemuetlich and, for good measure, Fr鋟lein Hardenberg.
When he had gone, Barzilai and the neviot team leader conferred again. "Frankly, I need more inside information, Gidi. There's too much I don't know still. The papers you need--he must keep them in a safe.
Where? Behind the paneling? A floor safe? In the secretary's office? In a special vault in the basement? We need inside information here."
Barzilai grunted. Long ago, in training, one of the instructors had told them all: There is no such thing as a man with no weak point. Find that point, press the nerve, and he'll cooperate.
The following morning the whole yarid and neviot teams began an intensive surveillance of Wolfgang Gemuetlich. But the acidulous Viennese was about to prove the instructor wrong. Steve Laing and Chip Barber had a major problem.
By mid-November, Jericho had come up with his first response to the questions put to him via a dead-letter box in Baghdad. His price had been high, but the American government had made the transfer into the Viennese account without a murmur.
If Jericho's information was accurate--and there was no reason to suspect it was not--then it was extremely useful. He had not answered all the questions, but he had answered some and confirmed others already half-answered.
Principally, he had named quite specifically seventeen locations linked to the production of weapons of mass destruction. Eight of these were locations already suspected by the Allies; of these, he had corrected the locations of two. The other nine were new information, chief among them the exact spot of the buried laboratory in which operated the functioning gas-diffusion centrifuge cascade for the preparation of bomb-grade uranium-235.
The problem was: How to tell the military, without blowing away the fact that Langley and Century had a high-ranking asset who was betraying Baghdad from the inside?
Not that the spymasters distrusted the military. Far from it, they were senior officers for a reason. But in the covert world there is an old and well-tested rule called "need to know." A man who does not know something cannot let it slip, however inadvertently. If the men in civilian clothes simply produced a list of fresh targets out of nowhere, how many generals, brigadiers, and colonels would work out where it had come from?
In the third week of the month, Barber and Laing had a private meeting in the basement of the Saudi Defense Ministry, with General Buster Glosson, deputy to General Chuck Horner, who commanded the air war in the Gulf Theater.
Though he must have had a first name, no one ever referred to General Glosson as anything other than "Buster," and it was he who had planned and continued to plan the eventual comprehensive air attack on Iraq that everyone knew would have to precede any ground invasion.
London and Washington had long since concurred in the view that, regardless of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein's war machine simply had to be destroyed, and that very much included the manufacturing capabilities for gas, germs, and nuclear bombs.
Before Desert Shield had finally destroyed any chance of a successful Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia, the plans for the eventual air war were well under way, under the secret code name of Instant Thunder. The true architect of that air war was Buster Glosson.
By November 16, the United Nations and various diplomatic chancelleries around the world were still scratching around for a "peace plan" to end the crisis without a shot being fired, a bomb dropped, or a rocket launched. The three men in the subterranean room that day all knew that such a call-it-all-off plan was just not going to happen.
Barber was concise and to the point: "As you know, Buster, we and the Brits have been trying to get hard identification of Saddam's WMD facilities for months now." The Air Force general nodded warily. He had a map along the corridor with more pins than a porcupine, and each one was a separate bombing target. What now?
"So we started with the export licenses and traced the exporting countries, then the companies in those countries that had fulfilled the contracts. Then the scientists who fitted out the interiors of these facilities, but many of them were taken to the sites in black-windowed buses, lived on base, and never really knew where they had been.
"Finally, Buster, we checked with the construction people, the ones who actually built most of Saddam's poison gas palaces. And some of them have come up roses. Real paydirt."
Barber passed the new list of targets across to the general. Glosson studied them with interest. They were not identified with map grid references, such as a bomb-campaign plotter would need, but the descriptions would be enough to identify them from the air photos already available.
Glosson grunted. He knew some of the listings were already targets; others, with question marks, were now being confirmed; others were new. He raised his eyes. "This is for real?"
"Absolutely," said the Englishman. "We are convinced that the construction people are a good source, maybe the best yet, because they are hard-hats who knew what they were doing when they built these places, and they talk freely,, more so than the bureaucrats."
Glosson rose. "Okay. You going to have any more for me?"
"We'll just keep digging up there in Europe, Buster," said Barber. "We get any more hard-fact targets, we'll pass them on. They've buried a hell of a lot of stuff, you know. Deep under the desert. We're talking major construction projects."
"You tell me where they've put 'em, and we'll blow the roof down on them," said the general.
Later, Glosson took the list to Chuck Horner. The USAF chief was shorter than Glosson, a gloomy-looking, crumpled man with a bloodhound face and all the diplomatic subtlety of a rhino with piles. But he adored his aircrew and ground crew, and they responded in kind. It was known that he would fight on their behalf against the contractors, the bureaucrats, and the politicians right up to the White House if he thought he had to, and never once moderate his language. What you saw was what you got.
Visiting the Gulf States of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, where some of his crews were posted, he avoided the fleshpots of the Sheratons and Hiltons where the good life flowed (literally) in order to chow with the flight crews down at the base and sleep in a cot in the bunkhouse.
Servicemen and women have no appetite for dissembling; they know quickly what they like and what they despise. The USAF pilots would have flown string-and-wire biplanes against Iraq for Chuck Horner.
Horner studied the list from the covert intelligence people and grunted. Two of the sites showed up on the maps as bare desert. "Where did they get this from?" he asked Glosson.
"Interviewing the construction teams who built them, so they say," said Glosson. "Bullshit," said General Horner. "Those cocksuckers have got
themselves someone in Baghdad. Buster, we don't say anything about this--to anyone. Just take their goodies and rack 'em up on the hit list."
He paused and thought, then added, "Wonder who the bastard is."
Steve Laing made it home to London on the eighteenth, a London in frenzied turmoil over the crisis gripping the Conservative government as a back-bench Member of Parliament sought to use the party rules to topple Margaret Thatcher from the premiership.
Despite his tiredness, Laing took the message on his desk from Terry Martin and called him at the school. Because of Martin's excitement, Laing agreed to see him for a brief drink after work, delaying Laing's return to his home in the outer suburbs by as little as possible.
When they were settled at a corner table in a quiet bar in the West End, Martin produced from his attach?case a cassette player and a tape. Showing them to Laing, he explained his request weeks ago to Sean Plummer, and their meeting the previous weekend. "Shall I play it for you?" he asked.
"Well, if the chaps at GCHQ can't understand it, I know damned well I can't," said Laing. "Look, Sean Plummer's got Arabs like Al-Khouri on his staff. If they can't work it out ..."
Still, he listened politely. "Hear it?" asked Martin excitedly. "The 'k' sound after have? The man's not invoking the help of Allah in Iraq's cause. He's using a title. That's what got the other man so angry. Clearly, no one is supposed to use that title openly. It must be confined to a very tiny circle of people."
"But what does he actually say?" asked Laing in complete
bewilderment.
Martin looked at him blankly. Didn't Laing understand anything?
"He is saying that the vast American buildup doesn't matter, because 'soon we shall have Qubth-ut-Allah.' "
Laing still looked perplexed. "A weapon," urged Martin. "It must be. Something to be available soon that will hold the Americans."
"Forgive my poor Arabic," said Laing, "but what is Qubth-ut-Allah?"
"Oh," said Martin. "It means 'the Fist of God.' "