The Fist of God

  The figure eight meant that a message awaited him under the flagstone in the abandoned courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, down by the river barely half a mile away.

  As a boy he had played down there, running along the quaysides with Hassan Rahmani and Abdelkarim Badri, where the vendors cooked the delicious mosgouf over beds of camelthorn embers, selling the tender portions of the Tigris river carp to passersby.

  Now the shops were closed, the tea houses shuttered; few people wandered along the quays as they used to. The silence served him well. At the top of Abu Nawas he saw a group of AMAM plainclothes guards, but they took no notice of the fellagha pedaling on his master’s business. He was heartened by the sight of them; the AMAM was nothing if not clumsy. If they were going to stake out a dead-letter box, they would not put a group of men so obviously at the head of the street. Their stake-out would be an attempt at sophistication, but flawed.

  The message was there. The brick went back into its place in a second, the folded paper into the crotch of his underpants. Minutes later, he was crossing the Ahrar Bridge over the Tigris, back from Risafa into Karch, and on to the Soviet diplomat’s house in Mansour.

  In nine weeks his life had settled down in the walled villa. The Russian cook and her husband treated him fairly, and he had picked up a smattering of their language. He shopped every day for fresh produce, which gave him good reason to service all his dead-letter boxes. He had transmitted fourteen messages to the unseen Jericho and had received fifteen from him.

  Eight times he had been stopped by the AMAM, but each time his humble demeanor, his bicycle and basket of vegetables, fruit, coffee, spices, and groceries, plus his letter from the diplomatic household and his visible poverty had caused him to be sent on his way.

  He could not know what war plans were shaping up in Riyadh, but he had to write all the questions and queries for Jericho in his own Arabic script after listening to them on the incoming tapes, and he had to read Jericho’s answers in order to send them back in burst transmissions to Simon Paxman.

  As a soldier, he could only estimate that Jericho’s information, political and military, had to be invaluable to a commanding general preparing to attack Iraq.

  He had already acquired an oil heater for his shack and a kerosene lamp to light it. Hessian sacks from the market now made curtains for all the windows, and the crunch of feet on the gravel warned him if anyone approached the door.

  That night, he returned gratefully to the warmth of his home, bolted the door, made sure all the curtains covered every square inch of the windows, lit his lamp, and read Jericho’s latest message. It was shorter than usual, but that did not lessen its impact. Martin read it twice to make sure that even he had not suddenly lost his grasp of Arabic, muttered “Jesus Christ,” and removed his loose tiles to reveal the tape recorder.

  Lest there be any misunderstanding, he read the message slowly and carefully in both Arabic and English into the tape machine before switching the controls to speed-wind and reducing his five-minute message to one and a half seconds.

  He transmitted it at twenty minutes after midnight.

  Because he knew there was a transmission window between fifteen and thirty minutes after twelve that night, Simon Paxman had not bothered to go to bed. He was playing cards with one of the radio men when the message came in. The second radio operator brought the news from the communications room.

  “You’d better come and listen to this now , Simon,” he said.

  Although the SIS operation in Riyadh involved a lot more than four men, the running of Jericho was regarded as so secret that only Paxman, the Head of Station Julian Gray, and two radio men were involved. Their three rooms had been virtually sealed off from the rest of the villa.

  Simon Paxman listened to the voice on the big tape machine in the radio shack, which was in fact a converted bedroom. Martin spoke in Arabic first, giving the literal handwritten message from Jericho twice, then his own translation twice.

  As he listened, Paxman felt a great cold hand moving deep in his stomach. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong. What he was hearing simply could not be. The other two men stood in silence beside him.

  “Is it him?” asked Paxman urgently as soon as the message had finished. His first thought was that Martin had been taken and the voice was that of an impostor.

  “It’s him—I checked the ossy. There’s no doubt it’s him.”

  Speech patterns have varying tones and rhythms, highs and lows, cadences that can be recorded on an oscilloscope that reduces them to a series of lines on a screen, like a heart monitor in a cardiac unit.

  Every human voice is slightly different, no matter how good the mimic. Before leaving for Baghdad, Mike Martin’s voice had been recorded on such a machine. Later transmissions out of Baghdad had endured the same fate, in case the slowing-down and speeding-up, together with any distortion by tape machine or satellite transmission, caused distortions.

  The voice that came from Baghdad that night checked with the recorded voice. It was Martin speaking and no one else.

  Paxman’s second fear was that Martin had been caught, tortured, and turned, that he was now broadcasting under duress. He rejected the idea as very unlikely.

  There were preagreed words, a pause, a hesitation, a cough, that would warn the listeners in Riyadh if ever he were not transmitting as a free agent. Besides, his previous broadcast had been only three days earlier.

  Brutal the Iraqi Secret Police might be, but they were not quick. And Martin was tough. A man broken and turned at such speed would be shattered, a tortured wreck, and it would show in the speech delivery.

  That meant Martin was on the level—the message he had read was precisely what he had received that night from Jericho. Which left more imponderables. Either Jericho was right, mistaken, or lying.

  “Get Julian,” Paxman told one of the radio men.

  While the man went to fetch the British Head of Station from his bed upstairs, Paxman rang the private line of his American counterpart, Chip Barber.

  “Chip, better get your backside over here—fast,” he said.

  The CIA man came awake fast. Something in the Englishman’s voice told him this was no time for sleepy banter.

  “Problem, ol’ buddy?”

  “That’s the way it looks from here,” admitted Paxman.

  Barber was across the city and into the SIS house in thirty minutes, sweater and trousers over his pajamas. It was oneA.M.

  By then, Paxman had the tape in English and Arabic, plus a transcript in both languages. The two radio men, who had worked for years in the Middle East, were fluent and confirmed Martin’s translation was quite accurate.

  “He has to be joking,” breathed Barber when he heard the tape.

  Paxman ran through the checks he had already made for authenticity of Martin’s speaking voice.

  “Look, Simon,” said Barber, “this is just Jericho reporting what he claims he heard Saddam say this morning—sorry, yesterday morning. Chances are, Saddam’s lying. Let’s face it, he lies like he breathes.”

  Lie or not, this was no matter to be dealt with in Riyadh. The local SIS and CIA stations might supply their generals with tactical and even strategic military information from Jericho, but politics went to London and Washington. Barber checked his watch: sevenP.M. in Washington.

  “They’ll be mixing their cocktails by now,” he said. “Better make ’em strong, boys. I’ll get this to Langley right away.”

  “Cocoa and biscuits in London,” said Paxman. “I’ll have this to Century. Let them sort it out.”

  Barber left to send his copy of the transmission in heavily encrypted code to Bill Stewart, with an urgency rating of “flash,” the highest known. That would mean that wherever he was, the cipher people would find him and tell him to go to a secure line.

  Paxman did the same for Steve Laing, who would be awakened in the middle of the night and told to leave his warm bed to step into a freezing night and head back to London. br />
  There was one last thing Paxman could do, which he did. Martin had a transmission window for listening only, and it was at fourA.M. Paxman waited up and sent his man in Baghdad a very short but very explicit message. It said Martin should make no attempt until further notice to approach any of his six dead-letter boxes. Just in case.

  Karim, the Jordanian student, was making slow but steady progress in his courtship of Fräulein Edith Hardenberg. She allowed him to hold her hand when they walked through the streets of Old Vienna, the sidewalks crackling with frost beneath their feet. She even admitted to herself that she found the hand-holding pleasant.

  In the second week of January she obtained tickets at the Burgtheater—Karim paid. The performance was of a play by Grillparzer, Gygus und sein Ring .

  She explained excitedly before they went in that it was about an old king with several sons, and the one to whom he bequeathed his ring would be the successor. Karim sat through the performance entranced and asked for several explanations in the text, to which he referred constantly during the play.

  During the intermission Edith was happy to answer them. Later, Avi Herzog would tell Barzilai it was all as exciting as watching paint dry.

  “You’re a philistine,” said the Mossad man. “You have no culture.”

  “I’m not here for my culture,” said Avi.

  “Then get on with it, boy.”

  On Sunday Edith, a devout Catholic, went to morning mass at the Votivkirche. Karim explained that as a Moslem he could not accompany her but would wait at a café across the square.

  Afterward, over coffee that he deliberately laced with a slug of schnapps that brought a pink flush to her cheeks, he explained the differences and similarities between Christianity and Islam—the common worship of the one true God, the line of patriarchs and prophets, the teachings of the holy books and the moral codes. Edith was fearful but fascinated. She wondered if listening to all this might imperil her immortal soul, but she was amazed to learn that she had been wrong in thinking Moslems bowed down to idols.

  “I would like dinner,” said Karim three days later.

  “Well, yes, but you spend too much on me,” said Edith. She found she could gaze into his young face and his soft brown eyes with pleasure, while constantly warning herself that the ten-year age gap between them made anything more than a platonic friendship quite ridiculous.

  “Not in a restaurant.”

  “Where then?”

  “Will you cook a meal for me, Edith? You can cook? Real Viennese food?”

  She went bright red at the thought. Each evening, unless she was going alone to a concert, she prepared herself a modest snack that she ate in the small alcove of her flat that served as a dining area. But yes, she thought, she could cook. It had been so long.

  Besides, she argued with herself, he had taken her to several expensive meals in restaurants ... and he was an extremely well-brought-up and courteous young man. Surely there could be no harm in it.

  To say that the Jericho report of the night of January 12-13 caused consternation in certain covert circles in London and Washington would be an understatement. Controlled panic would be nearer the mark.

  One of the problems was the tiny circle of people who knew of Jericho’s existence, let alone the details.

  The need-to-know principle may sound persnickety or even obsessive, but it works for a reason. All agencies feel an obligation to an asset working for them in a very high-risk situation, no matter how ignoble that asset may be as a human being. The fact that Jericho was clearly a mercenary and no high-minded ideologue was not the point. The fact that he was cynically betraying his country and its government was irrelevant. The government of Iraq was perceived to be repulsive anyway, so one rogue was playing traitor to another bunch.

  The point was, apart from his obvious value and the fact that his information might well save Allied lives on the battlefield, Jericho was a high-value asset, and both the agencies running him had kept his very existence known only to a tiny circle of initiates. No government ministers, no politicians, no civil servants, and no soldiers had been formally told that any Jericho existed. His product therefore had been disguised in a variety of ways. A whole range of cover stories had been devised to explain where this torrent of information was coming from.

  Military dispositions were supposed to stem from a series of defections by Iraqi soldiers from the Kuwait theater, including a nonexistent major being extensively debriefed at a secret intelligence facility in the Middle East but outside Saudi Arabia.

  Scientific and technical information regarding weapons of mass destruction was said to have been gleaned from an Iraqi science graduate who had defected to the British after studying at Imperial College, London, and falling in love with an English girl, and an intensive second run-through of European technicians who had worked inside Iraq between 1985 and 1990.

  Political intelligence was attributed to a mix of refugees pouring out of Iraq, covert radio messages from occupied Kuwait, and brilliant signals intelligence and electronic intelligence—sigint and elint—listening-in, and aerial surveillance.

  But how to explain a direct report of Saddam’s own words, however bizarre their claim, conducted within a closed meeting inside his own palace, without admitting to an agent in the highest circles of Baghdad?

  The dangers of making such an admission were appalling. For one thing, there are leaks. There are leaks all the time. Cabinet documents leak, civil service memoranda leak, and interdepartmental messages leak.

  Politicians, so far as the covert community is concerned, are the worst. To believe the nightmares of the master spooks, they talk to their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, hairdressers, drivers, and bartenders.

  They even talk confidentially to each other with a waiter bending over the table.

  Add to that the fact that Washington and London have press and other media veterans whose investigative talents make the FBI and Scotland Yard seem slow on the uptake, and one has a problem explaining away Jericho’s product without admitting to a Jericho.

  Finally, London still had hundreds of Iraqi students—some certainly agents of Dr. Ismail Ubaidi’s Foreign Intelligence arm of the Mukhabarat—prepared to report back anything they saw or heard.

  It was not just a question of someone denouncing Jericho by name; that would be impossible. But one hint that information had come out of Baghdad that should not have come, and Rahmani’s counterintelligence net would go into overdrive to detect and isolate the source. At best, that could ensure Jericho’s future silence as he clammed up to protect himself; at worst, his capture.

  As the countdown for the start of the air war rolled on, the two agencies recontacted all their former experts in the matter of nuclear physics and asked for a rapid reassessment of the information already given. Was there, after all, any conceivable possibility that Iraq might have a greater and faster isotope separation facility than previously thought?

  In America experts at Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos were consulted again and in Britain experts at Harwell and Aldermaston. Department Z at Livermore, the people who constantly monitor Third World nuclear proliferation, was especially pressed.

  The experts came back, rather testily, to reconfirm their advice. Even taking a worst-case scenario, they said—assuming not one but two entire gas diffusion centrifuge cascades operating not for one but for two years—there was no way in creation Iraq could have more than half the uranium-235 she would need for a single medium-yield device.

  That left the agencies with a menu of options.

  Saddam was mistaken because he had been lied to himself. Conclusion: unlikely. Those responsible would pay with their lives for such an outrage against the Rais.

  Saddam had said it, but he was lying. Conclusion: quite feasible—to boost morale among his flagging and apprehensive supporters. But why confine the news to the innermost fanatics, who were not flagging and who were not apprehensive? Morale-boosting propaganda is f
or the masses and abroad.

  Unanswerable.

  Saddam did not say it. Conclusion: the whole report was a farrago of lies. Secondary conclusion: Jericho lied because he is greedy for money and thinks with the war coming his time will soon be over. He had put a million-dollar price tag on his information.

  Jericho lied because he has been unmasked and has revealed all. Conclusion: also possible, and this option posed horrendous personal hazard to the man in Baghdad to maintain the link.

  At this point the CIA moved firmly into the driver’s seat. Langley, being the paymaster, had a perfect right to do so.

  “I’ll give you the bottom line, Steve,” said Bill Stewart to Steve Laing on a secure line from the CIA to Century House on the evening of January 14. “Saddam’s wrong or he’s lying; Jericho’s wrong or he’s lying. Whatever, Uncle Sam is not going to pay a million greenbacks into an account in Vienna for this kind of trash.”

  “There’s no way the unconsidered option might be right after all, Bill?”

  “Which one’s that?”

  “That Saddam said it and he’s right.”

  “No way. It’s a three-card trick. We’re not going to swallow it. Look, Jericho’s been great for nine weeks, even though we’re now going to have to recheck what he gave us. Half has already been proved, and it’s good stuff. But he’s blown it with this last report. We think that’s the end of the line. We don’t know why, but that’s the wisdom from the top of the mountain.”

  “Creates problems for us, Bill.”

  “I know, pal, and that’s why I’m calling within minutes of the end of the conference with the Director.

  Either Jericho has been taken and has told the goon squad everything, or he’s up and running. But if he gets to know we’re not sending him any million dollars, I guess he’ll turn nasty. Either way, that’s bad news for your man in there. He’s a good man, right?”

  “The best. Hell of a nerve.”

  “So get him out of there, Steve. Fast.”

  “I think that’s what we’ll have to do, Bill. Thanks for the tip. Pity—it was a good op.”