The Fist of God (40 page)

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 Gemütlich rose from his desk, shook hands, gestured his guest to a chair opposite him, and resumed his place behind his desk.

The word
Gemütlich
in German means “comfortable,” with a hint of geniality. Never was a man less aptly named. This Gemütlich 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 The Fist of God

ornate desk, whose surface was bare of any hint of clutter.

Wolfgang Gemütlich 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 Gemütlich 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 Gemütlich 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 Gemütlich 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. Gemütlich frowned at the nuisance.

“You did say they were important, Herr Gemütlich. 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 Gemütlich, and held out his hand for the letters.

The Fist of God

“
Entschuldigung
...,” he asked his guest.

He and the spotter had been using German, after establishing that Gemütlich spoke only halting English. The spotter, however, got to his feet and bobbed a small bow at the newcomer.

“Grüss Gott, Fräulein
,” he said. She looked flustered. Gemütlich’s guests did not usually rise for a secretary. However, the gesture forced Gemütlich 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 The Fist of God

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 Gemütlich and, for good measure, Fräulein 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.

The Fist of God

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 Gemütlich.

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?

The Fist of God

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 The Fist of God

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?”

The Fist of God

“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 The Fist of God

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 attaché case a cassette player and a tape.