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 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 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.
A
fter 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 sixP.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 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 a
pproval.
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.”