The Fist of God (38 page)

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.”

The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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, The Fist of God

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 vice-presidents, Kessler, Gemütlich, 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 The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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 Fist of God

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 twenty-two 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 Gemütlich. 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 The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God