Part 5 (2/2)

”Yes, sir. But he must be able to live somewhere-quietly, discreetly, innocently-while he picks up the messages and delivers our own inquiries. We ask that he be allowed to pose as an Iraqi on the staff of a senior member of the Soviet emba.s.sy.”

Gorbachev steepled his chin on the tips of his fingers. He was anything but a stranger to covert operations; his own KGB had mounted more than a few. Now he was being asked to a.s.sist the KGB's old antagonists in mounting one, and to lend the Soviet emba.s.sy as their man's umbrella. It was so outrageous, he almost laughed.

”If this man of yours is caught, my emba.s.sy will be compromised.

”No, sir. Your emba.s.sy will have been cynically duped by Russia's traditional Western enemies. Saddam will believe that,” said Laing.

Gorbachev thought it over. He recalled the personal entreaty of one president and one prime minister in this matter. They evidently held it to be important, and he had no choice but to regard their goodwill to him as important. Finally he nodded. ”Very well. I will instruct General Vladimir Kryuchkov to give you his full cooperation.” Kryuchkov was, at that time, Chairman of the KGB. Ten months later, while Gorbachev was on vacation on the Black Sea, Kryuchkov, with Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and others, would launch a coup d'etat against their own President. The two Westerners s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably. ”With the greatest respect, Mr. President,” asked Laing, ”could we ask that it be your Foreign Minister and him only in whom you confide?” Eduard Shevardnadze was then Foreign Minister and a trusted friend of Mikhail Gorbachev. ”Shevardnadze and him alone?” asked the President. ”Yes, sir, if you please.” ”Very well. The arrangements will be made only through the Foreign Ministry.” When the Western intelligence officers had gone, Mikhail Gorbachev sat lost in thought. They had wanted only him and Eduard to know about this. Not Kryuchkov. Did they, he wondered, know something that the President of the USSR did not?

There were eleven Mossad agents in all-two teams of five and the mission controller, whom Kobi Dror had picked personally, pulling him off a boring stint as lecturer to the recruits at the training school outside Herzlia.

One of the teams was from the yarid branch, a section of the Mossad concerned with operational security and surveillance. The other was from neviot, whose speciality is bugging, breaking and entering-in short, anything where inanimate or mechanical objects are concerned. Eight of the ten had reasonable or good German, and the mission controller was fluent. The other two were technicians anyway. The advance group for Operation Joshua slipped into Vienna over three days, arriving from different European points of departure, each with a perfect pa.s.sport and cover story. As he had with Operation Jericho, Kobi Dror was bending a few rules, but none of his subordinates were going to argue. Joshua had been designated ain efes, meaning a no-miss affair, which, coming from the boss himself, meant top priority. Yarid and neviot teams normally have seven to nine members each, but because the target was deemed to be civilian, neutral, amateur, and unsuspecting, the numbers had been slimmed down. Mossad's Head of Station in Vienna had allocated three of his safe houses and three bodlim to keep them clean, tidy, and provisioned at all times. A bodel, plural bodlim, is usually a young Israeli, often a student, engaged as a gofer after a thorough check of his parentage and background. His job is to run errands, perform ch.o.r.es, and ask no questions. In return he is allowed to live rent-free in a Mossad safe house, a major benefit for a short-of-money student in a foreign capital. When visiting ”firemen” move in, the bodel has to move out but can be retained to do the cleaning, laundry, and shopping. Though Vienna may not seem a major capital, for the world of espionage it has always been very important. The reason goes back to 1945, when Vienna, as the Third Reich's second capital, was occupied by the victorious Allies and divided into four sectors-French, British, American, and Russian. Unlike Berlin, Vienna regained her freedom-even the Russians agreed to move out-but the price was complete neutrality for Vienna and all Austria. With the cold war getting under way during the Berlin blockade of 1948, Vienna soon became a hotbed of espionage. Nicely neutral, with virtually no counterintelligence net of its own, close to the Hungarian and Czech borders, open to the West but seething with East Europeans, Vienna was a perfect base for a variety of agencies. Shortly after its formation in 1951, the Mossad also saw the advantages of Vienna and moved in with such a presence that the Head of Station outranks the amba.s.sador. The decision was more than justified when the elegant and world-weary capital of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire became a center for ultradiscreet banking, the home of three separate United Nations agencies, and a favored entry point into Europe for Palestinian and other terrorists. Dedicated to its neutrality, Austria has long had a counterintelligence and internal security apparatus that is so simple to evade that Mossad agents refer to these well-intentioned officers as fertsalach, a not terribly complimentary word meaning a fart. Kobi Dror's chosen mission controller was a tough katsa with years of European experience behind him in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels. Gideon Barzilai had also served time in one of the kidon execution units that had pursued the Arab terrorists responsible for the ma.s.sacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic games. Fortunately for his own career, he had not been involved in one of the biggest fiascos in Mossad history, when a kidon unit shot down a harmless Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, after wrongly identifying the man as Ali Ha.s.san Salameh, the brains behind the ma.s.sacre. Gideon ”Gidi” Barzilai was now Ewald Strauss, representing a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures in Frankfurt. Not only were his papers in perfect order, but a search of the contents of his briefcase would have revealed the appropriate brochures, order books, and correspondence on company stationery. Even a phone call to his head office in Frankfurt would have confirmed his cover story, for the telephone number on the stationery gave an office in Frankfurt manned by the Mossad. Gidi's paperwork, along with that of the other ten on his team, was the product of another division of the Mossad's comprehensive backup services. In the same subbas.e.m.e.nt in Tel Aviv that housed the forgery department is another series of rooms dedicated to storing details of a truly amazing number of companies, real and fictional. Company records, audits, registrations, and letterhead stationery are stored in such abundance that any katsa on a foreign operation can be equipped with a corporate ident.i.ty virtually impossible to penetrate. After establis.h.i.+ng himself in his own apartment, Barzilai had an extended conference with the local Head of Station and began his mission with a relatively simple task: finding out everything he could about a discreet and ultratraditional private bank called the Winkler Bank, just off the Franziskanerplatz.

That same weekend, two American Chinook helicopters lifted into the air from a military base outside Riyadh and headed north to cut into the Tapline Road that runs along the Saudi-Iraq border from Khafji all the way to Jordan. Squeezed inside the hull of each Chinook was a single long-base LandRover, stripped down to basic essentials but equipped with extralongrange fuel tanks. There were four SAS men traveling with each vehicle, squeezed into the area behind the flight crews. Their final destination was beyond their normal range, but waiting for them on the Tapline Road were two large tankers, driven up from Dammam on the Gulf coast. When the thirsty Chinooks set down on the road, the tanker crews went to work until the helicopters were again br.i.m.m.i.n.g with fuel. Taking off, they headed up the road in the direction of Jordan, keeping low to avoid the Iraqi radar situated across the border. Just beyond the Saudi town of Badanah, approaching the spot where the borders of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan converge, the Chinooks set down again. There were two more tankers waiting to refuel them, but it was at this point they unloaded their cargoes and their pa.s.sengers. If the American aircrew knew where the silent Englishmen were going, they gave no sign, and if they did not know, they did not inquire. The loadmasters eased the sand-camouflaged trucks down the ramps and onto the road, shook hands, and said, ”Hey, good luck, you guys.” Then they refueled and set off back the way they had come. The tankers followed them. The eight SAS men watched them go, then headed in the other direction, farther up the road toward Jordan. Fifty miles northwest of Badanah they stopped and waited. The captain commanding the two-vehicle mission checked his position. Back in the days of Colonel David Stirling in the Western Desert of Libya, this had been done by taking bearings of the sun, moon, and stars. The technology of 1990 made it much easier and more precise.

In his hand the captain held a device the size of a paperback book. It was called a Global Positioning System, or SATNAV, or Magellan. Despite its size, the GPS can position its holder to a square no bigger than ten yards by ten yards anywhere on the earth's surface. The captain's hand-held GPS could be switched to either the Q-Code or the P-Code. The P-Code was accurate to the ten-by-ten-yard square, but it needed four of the American satellites called NAVSTAR to be above the horizon at the same time. The Q-Code needed only two NAVSTARs above the horizon but was accurate only to a hundred yards by a hundred. That day there were only two satellites to track by, but they were enough. No one was going to miss anyone else a hundred yards away in that howling wilderness of sand and shale, miles from anywhere between Badanah and the Jordanian border. Satisfied that he was on the rendezvous site, the captain switched off the GPS and crawled under the camouflage nets spread by his men between the two vehicles to s.h.i.+eld them from the sun. The temperature gauge said it was 130 degrees Fahrenheit. An hour later, the British Gazelle helicopter came in from the south. Major Mike Martin had flown from Riyadh in an RAF Hercules transport to the Saudi town of Al Jawf, the place nearest to the border at that point that had a munic.i.p.al airport. The Hercules had carried the Gazelle with its rotors folded, its pilot, its ground crew, and the extra fuel tanks needed to get the Gazelle from Al Jawf to the Tapline Road and back. In case of watching Iraqi radar even in this abandoned place, the Gazelle was skimming the desert, but the pilot quickly saw the Very starsh.e.l.l fired by the SAS captain when he heard the approaching engine.

The Gazelle settled on the road fifty yards from the Land-Rovers, and Martin climbed out. He carried a kitbag over his shoulder and a wicker basket in his left hand, the contents of which had caused the Gazelle pilot to wonder if he had joined the Royal Army Air Corps-or some branch of the Farmers Union. The basket contained two live hens. Otherwise, Martin was dressed like the eight SAS men waiting for him: desert boots, loose trousers of tough canvas, s.h.i.+rt, sweater, and desert-camouflage combat jacket. Round his neck was a checkered keffiyeh that could be pulled up to s.h.i.+eld his face from the swirling dust, and on his head a round knitted woolen helmet surmounted by a pair of heavy-duty goggles. The pilot wondered why the man did not die of heat in all that gear, but then, he had never experienced the chill of the desert night. The SAS men hauled from the rear of the Gazelle the plastic gasoline cans that had given the little reconnaissance chopper its maximum all-up weight, and they refilled the tanks. When he was full up again, the pilot waved good-bye and took off, heading south for Al Jawf, the ride back to Riyadh, and a return to sanity from these madmen in the desert. Only when he was gone did the SAS men feel at ease. Though the eight with the Land-Rovers were D Squadron men-light-vehicle experts-and Martin was an A Squadron freefaller, he knew all but two. With greetings exchanged, they did what British soldiers do when they have the time: they brewed up a strong pot of tea. The point where the captain had chosen to cross the border into Iraq was wild and bleak for two reasons. The rougher the country they were running over, the less chance there would be of running into an Iraqi patrol. His job was not to outpace the Iraqis over open ground but to escape detection completely.

The second reason was that he had to deposit his charge as near as possible to the long Iraqi highway that snakes its way from Baghdad westward across the great plains of desert to the Jordanian border crossing at Ruweis.h.i.+d. That miserable outpost in the desert had become very familiar to television viewers after the conquest of Kuwait, because it was where the hapless tide of refugees-Filipinos, Bengalis, Palestinians, and others-were wont to cross after fleeing the chaos that the conquest had caused. In this far northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia, the distance from the border to the Baghdad road was at its shortest. The captain knew that to his east, from Baghdad down to the Saudi border, the land tended to be flat desert, smooth as a billiard table for the most part, lending itself to a fast run from the border to the nearest road heading for Baghdad. But it was also likely to be occupied by Army patrols and watching eyes. Here in the west of Iraq's deserts, the land was hillier, cut by ravines that would carry flash floods during the rains and that still had to be carefully negotiated in the dry season but were virtually empty of Iraqi patrols. The chosen crossing point was fifty kilometers north of where they stood, and beyond the unmarked border only another hundred to the Baghdad-Ruweis.h.i.+d road. But the captain decided he would need a full night, a layup under camouflage nets during the next day, and the night after, in order to deliver his charge to a point within walking distance of the road. They set off at four in the afternoon. The sun still blazed, and the heat made driving seem like moving past the door of a blast furnace. At six the dusk approached, and the air temperature began to drop-fast. At seven it was completely black, and the chill set in. The sweat dried on them, and they were grateful for the thick sweaters that the Gazelle pilot had mocked. In the lead vehicle the navigator sat beside the driver and ran a constant series of checks on their position and course. Back at their base, he and the captain had spent hours poring over a series of large-scale, high-definition photographs, kindly provided by an American U2 mission out of their Taif base, which formed a picture better than a mere map. They were driving without lights, but with a penlight the navigator kept track of their swerving pa.s.sage, correcting every time a gully or defile forced them to divert several kilometers east or west. Every hour, they stopped to confirm position with the Magellan. The navigator had already calibrated the sides of his photographs with minutes and seconds of longitude and lat.i.tude, so that the figures produced by the Magellan's digital display told them exactly where they were on the photos. Progress was slow because at each ridge one of the men had to run forward and peer over, to ensure that there was no unpleasant surprise on the other side. An hour before dawn, they found a steep-sided wadi, drove in, and covered themselves with netting. One of the men withdrew to a nearby prominence to look down on the camp and order a few adjustments until he was satisfied a spotter plane would practically have to crash into the wadi to see them. During the day they ate, drank, and slept, two always on guard in case of a wandering shepherd or another lonely traveler. Several times they heard Iraqi jets high overhead, and once the bleating of goats ranging a nearby hill. But the goats, which seemed to have no herdsman with them, wandered off in the opposite direction. After sundown they moved on. There is a small Iraqi town called Ar-Rutba that straddles the highway, and shortly before four A.M. they saw its lights dimly in the distance. The Magellan confirmed they were where they wanted to be, just south of the town, a five-mile hike to the road. Four of the men scouted around until one found a wadi with a soft, sandy bottom. Here they dug their hole, silently, using the trenching tools slung on the sides of the Land-Rovers for digging them out of drifts. They buried the cross-country motorcycle with its reinforced tires, and the jerrycans of spare fuel to get it to the border, should the need arise. All were wrapped in tough polyethylene bags to protect against sand and water, for the rains had still to come. To protect the cache from being washed away, they erected a cairn of rocks to prevent water erosion. The navigator climbed to the hill above the wadi and took an exact bearing from the spot to the radio mast above Ar-Rutba, whose red warning light could be seen in the distance. While they worked, Mike Martin stripped to the buff and from his kitbag took the robe, headdress, and sandals of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, the Iraqi laborer and gardener-handyman. With a cloth tote bag containing bread, oil, cheese, and olives for breakfast, a tattered wallet with ident.i.ty card and pictures of Mahmoud's elderly parents, and a battered tin box with some money and a penknife, he was ready to go. The Land-Rovers needed an hour to get clear of the site before turning in for the day. ”Break a leg,” said the captain, ”Good hunting, boss,” said the navigator. ”At least you'll have a fresh egg for breakfast,” said another, and there was a subdued rumble of laughter. Mike Martin waved a hand and began to hike across the desert to the road. Minutes later, the Land-Rovers had gone, and the wadi was empty again.

The Head of Station in Vienna had on his books a sayan who was himself in banking, a senior executive with one of the nation's leading clearing banks. It was he who was asked to prepare a report, as full as he could make it, upon the Winkler Bank. The sayan was told only that certain Israeli enterprises had entered into a relations.h.i.+p with Winkler and wished to be rea.s.sured as to its solidity, antecedents, and banking practices. There was, he was told regretfully, so much fraud going on these days. The sayan accepted the reason for the inquiry and did his best, which was pretty good considering that the first thing he discovered was that Winkler operated along lines of almost obsessive secrecy. The bank had been founded almost a hundred years earlier by the father of the present sole owner and president. The Winkler of 1990 was himself ninety-one and known in Viennese banking circles as der Alte, ”the Old Man.” Despite his age, he refused to relinquish the presidency or sole controlling interest. Being widowed but childless, there was no natural family successor, so the eventual disposal of the controlling interest would have to await the reading of his will. Nevertheless, day-to-day running of the bank rested with three vice-presidents. Meetings with Old Man Winkler took place about once a month at his private house, during which his princ.i.p.al concern seemed to be to ensure that his own stringent standards were being maintained. Executive decisions were with the vice-presidents, Kessler, Gemutlich, and Blei. It was not a clearing bank, of course, had no current account holders, and issued no checkbooks. Its business was as a depository for clients' funds, which would be placed in rock-solid, safe investments, mainly on the European market. If interest yields from such investments were never going to enter the top ten performers league, that was not the point. Winkler's clients did not seek rapid growth or sky-high interest earnings. They sought safety and absolute anonymity. This Winkler guaranteed them, and his bank delivered. The standards on which Old Man Winkler placed such stress included utter discretion as to the ident.i.ty of the owners of its numbered accounts, coupled with a complete avoidance of what the Old Man termed ”new-fangled nonsense.” It was this distaste for modern gimmickry that banned computers for the storage of sensitive information or account control, fax machines, and where possible, telephones. The Winkler Bank would accept instructions and information by telephone, but it would never divulge it over a phone line. Where possible, the Winkler Bank liked to use old-fas.h.i.+oned letter-writing on its expensive cream linenfold stationery, or personal meetings within the bank itself. Within Vienna the bank messenger would deliver all letters and statements in wax-sealed envelopes, and only for national and international letters would the bank trust the public mailing system. As for numbered accounts owned by foreign clients-the sayan had been asked to touch upon these-no one knew quite how many there were, but rumor hinted at deposits of hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, if this was so, and given that a percentage of the secretive clients would occasionally die without telling anyone else how to operate the account, the Winkler Bank was doing quite nicely, thank you. Gidi Barzilai, when he read the report, swore long and loud. Old Man Winkler might know nothing of the latest techniques of phone-tapping and computer-hacking, but his gut instincts were right on target. During the years of Iraq's buildup of her poison gas technology, every one of the purchases from Germany had been cleared through one of three Swiss banks. The Mossad knew that the CIA had hacked into the computers of all three banks-originally the search had been for laundered drug money-and it was this inside information that had enabled Was.h.i.+ngton to file its endless succession of protests to the German government about the exports. It was hardly the CIA's fault that Chancellor Helmut Kohl had contemptuously rejected every one of the protests; the information had been perfectly accurate. If Gidi Barzilai thought he was going to hack into the Winkler Bank central computer, he was mistaken; there wasn't one. That left room-bugging, mail-interception, and phone-tapping. The chances were, none of these would solve his problem. Many bank accounts need a Losungswort, a coded pa.s.sword, to operate them, to effect withdrawals and transfers. But account holders can usually use such a pa.s.sword to identify themselves in a phone call or a fax, as well as in a letter. The way the Winkler Bank seemed to operate, a high-value numbered account owned by a foreign client such as Jericho would have had a much more complicated system for its operation; either a formal appearance with ample identification by the account holder, or a written mandate prepared in a precise form and manner, with precise coded words and symbols appearing at precisely the preagreed places. Clearly, the Winkler Bank would accept an in-payment from anyone, anytime, anywhere. The Mossad knew that because it had been paying Jericho his blood money by transfers to an account inside Winkler that was identified to them by a single number. Persuading the Winkler Bank to make a transfer out would be a whole different affair. Somehow, from inside the dressing gown where he spent most of his life listening to church music, Old Man Winkler seemed to have guessed that illegal information-interception technology would outpace normal information-transfer techniques. d.a.m.n and blast the man. The only other thing the sayan could vouchsafe was that such high-value numbered accounts would certainly be handled personally by one of the three vice-presidents and no one else. The Old Man had chosen his subordinates well: The reputation of all three was that they were humorless, tough, and well-paid. In a word, impregnable. Israel, the sayan had added, need have no worries about the Winkler Bank. He had, of course, missed the point. Gidi Barzilai, that first week of November, was already getting extremely fed up with the Winkler Bank.

There was a bus an hour after dawn, and it slowed for the single pa.s.senger sitting on a rock by the road three miles short of Ar-Rutba when he got up and waved. He handed over two grubby dinar notes, took a seat in the back, balanced his basket of chickens on his lap, and fell asleep. There was a police patrol in the center of the town, where the bus jolted to a halt on its old springs and a number of pa.s.sengers got off to go to work or to the market, while others got on. But while the police checked the ID cards of those getting on, they contented themselves with glancing through the dusty windows at the few who remained inside and ignored the peasant with his chickens in back. They were looking for subversives, suspicious characters.

After a further hour, the bus rumbled on to the east, rocking and swaying, occasionally pulling onto the hard shoulder as a column of Army vehicles roared past, their stubbled conscripts sitting morosely in the back, staring at the swirling dust clouds they raised. With his eyes closed, Mike Martin listened to the chatter around him, latching on to an unaccustomed word or a hint of accent that he might have forgotten. The Arabic of this part of Iraq was markedly different from that of Kuwait. If he were to pa.s.s for an ill-educated and harmless fellagha in Baghdad, these out-of-town provincial accents and phrases would prove useful. Few things disarm a city cop more quickly than a hayseed accent. The hens in their cage on his lap had had a rough ride, even though he had scattered corn from his pocket and shared the water from his flask, now inside a Land-Rover baking under netting in the desert behind him. With each lurch the birds clucked in protest or squatted and c.r.a.pped into the litter beneath them. It would have taken a keen eye to observe that the base of the cage on its external measurement was four inches more than on the inside. The deep litter around the hens' feet hid the difference. The litter was only an inch deep. Inside the four-inch-deep cavity beneath the twenty-bytwenty-inch cage were a number of items that those police at Ar-Rutba would have found puzzling but interesting. One was a fold-away satellite dish, turned into a stumpy rod like a collapsible umbrella. Another was a transceiver, more powerful than that Martin had used in Kuwait. Baghdad would not offer the facility of being able to broadcast while wandering around the desert. Lengthy transmissions would be out, which accounted, apart from the rechargeable cadmium-silver battery, for the last item in the cavity. It was a tape recorder, but a rather special one.

New technology tends to start large, c.u.mbersome, and difficult to use. As it develops, two things happen. The innards become more and more complicated, although smaller and smaller, and the operation becomes simpler. The radio sets hauled into France by agents for the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War were a nightmare by modern standards. Occupying a suitcase, they needed an aerial strung for yards up a drainpipe, had c.u.mbersome valves the size of light bulbs, and could only transmit messages on a Morse-sender. This kept the operator tapping for ages, while German detector units could triangulate on the source and close in. Martin's tape recorder was simple to operate but also carried some useful features inside. A ten-minute message could be read slowly and clearly into the mouthpiece. Before it was recorded on the spool, a silicon chip would encrypt it into a garble that, even if intercepted, the Iraqis could probably not decode. At the push of a b.u.t.ton, the tape would rewind. Another b.u.t.ton would cause it to rerecord, but at one two-hundredth of the speed, reducing the message to a three-second burst that would be just about impossible to trace. It was this burst that the transmitter would send out when linked to the satellite dish, the battery, and the tape recorder. In Riyadh the message would be caught, slowed down, decrypted, and replayed in clear. Martin left the bus at Ramadi, where it stopped, and took another one on past Lake Habbaniyah and the old Royal Air Force base, now converted to a modern Iraqi fighter station. The bus was stopped at the outskirts of Baghdad, and all ident.i.ty cards were checked. Martin stood humbly in the line, clutching his chickens, as the pa.s.sengers approached the table where the police sergeant sat. When it was his turn, he set the wicker basket on the floor and produced his ID card. The sergeant glanced at it. He was hot and thirsty. It had been a long day. He gestured to the place of origin of the card-bearer. ”Where is this?” ”It is a small village north of Baji. Well known for its melons, bey.” The sergeant's mouth twitched. Bey was a respectful form of address that dated back to the Turkish empire, only occasionally heard, and then only from people out of the real backwoods. He flicked a dismissive hand; Martin picked up his chickens and went back to the bus. Shortly before seven, the bus rolled to a stop and Major Martin stepped out into the main bus station in Kadhimiya, Baghdad.

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 s.p.a.ces, with rotaries, overpa.s.ses, and cloverleaf intersections. Cars had proliferated, and skysc.r.a.pers 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 s.p.a.ces around the Mansour Club where his father had taken the family on weekend afternoons. Mansour was still clearly an upscale suburb, but the open s.p.a.ces had been filled with streets and residences for those who could afford to live in style. He pa.s.sed 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 Ha.s.san Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, but in the darkness he did not recognize the street. He knew just what job Ha.s.san 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 a.s.sist 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 alt.i.tude but magnified until, with a magnifying gla.s.s, 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 Ka.s.sem 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 emba.s.sy 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 princ.i.p.al 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 bra.s.s plaque that announced this was a residence belonging to the emba.s.sy 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 ident.i.ty card. This made sense to the steward; in his country they knew about internal pa.s.sports. He took the card, said, ”Wait,” in Arabic, and closed the gate. He was back in five minutes, beckoning the Iraqi in the soiled dish-dash 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 emba.s.sy, 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 d.a.m.ned 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 d.a.m.ned 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 quarter-acre 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 a.s.signment to Riyadh, his duties in London having been taken over by his subordinate. He too sat up, wide awake, and read it.

”b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, so far so good.”

”The problem could start,” said Gray, ”when he tries to raise Jericho.”

It was a sobering thought. The former Mossad a.s.set 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 sn.o.b 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-cla.s.s 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 wors.h.i.+p. 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 ident.i.ty 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 emba.s.sy 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 emba.s.sy's banking sayan. It showed him the direction he had to take. His first priority had to be to identify which of the three vice-presidents, Kessler, Gemutlich, 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 emba.s.sy 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 Ballga.s.se 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. Ballga.s.se-and indeed, the whole of the Franziskanerplatz area-lies in the old district just off Singerstra.s.se. 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 bra.s.s 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

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