The Fist of God

  “It just wasn’t there,” he told the head of Counterintelligence. “If it had been, we’d have found it. So it has to be the fourth villa, the home of the diplomat.”

  “You’re sure you can’t be wrong?” asked Rahmani. “It couldn’t be in another house?”

  “No, sir. The nearest house to those four is well outside the area indicated by the crossed beams. The source of those burst transmissions was inside that diamond on the map. I’d swear to it.”

  Rahmani was hesitant. Diplomats were the very devil to investigate, always prepared to rush to the Foreign Ministry with a complaint. To get inside Comrade Kulikov’s residence, he would have to go high—as high as he could.

  When the major was gone, Rahmani phoned the Foreign Ministry. He was in luck; the Foreign Minister, who had been traveling almost constantly for months, was in Baghdad. More, he was still at his desk.

  Rahmani secured his interview for ten the next morning.

  The pharmacist was a kindly man, and he just kept trying all through the night. He never did reach the older son, but using a contact in the Army, he managed to get a message through to the younger of his dead friend’s two boys. He could not speak to the man himself, but the Army contact passed it on.

  The message reached the younger son at his base far away from Baghdad at dawn. As soon as he heard it, the officer took his car and began to drive. Normally it would have taken him no more than two hours.

  That day, February 17, it took him six. There were patrols and roadblocks. Using his rank, he could drive to the head of the line, flash his pass, and be waved on.

  That did not work for the wrecked bridges. At each one he had to wait for the ferry. It was midday when he arrived at his parents’ house in Qadisiyah.

  His mother ran into his embrace and cried against his shoulder. He tried to extract from her details of precisely what had happened, but she was no longer young herself and was hysterical.

  Finally, he picked her up and carried her to her room. In the mess of medications the soldiers had left strewn all over the bathroom floor, he found a bottle of sleeping pills his father had used when winter cold brought on the arthritis. He gave his mother two, and soon she slept.

  In the kitchen he ordered old Talat to make them both a coffee, and they sat at the table while the servant described what had happened since dawn of the previous day. When he was finished, he showed his dead master’s son the hole in the garden where the soldiers had found the bag with the radio set. The younger man shinnied lip the garden wall and found the scratches where the intruder had come over in the night to bury it. Then he went back to the house.

  Hassan Rahmani was kept waiting, which he did not like, but he had his appointment with the Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, just before eleven.

  “I don’t think I quite understand you,” said the gray-haired minister, peering owlishly through his glasses.

  “Embassies are allowed to communicate with their capitals by radio, and their transmissions are always coded.”

  “Yes, Minister, and they come from the Chancery building. That is part of normal diplomatic traffic. This is different. We are talking here about a covert transmitter, as used by spies, sending burst transmissions to a receiver we are sure is not in Moscow but much closer.”

  “Burst transmissions?” asked Aziz.

  Rahmani explained what they were.

  “I still fail to follow you. Why should some agent of the KGB—and presumably this must be a KGB

  operation—be sending burst messages from the residence of the First Secretary, when they have a perfect right to send them on much more powerful transmitters from the embassy?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Then you must offer me some kind of better explanation. Brigadier. Have you any idea what is going on outside your own office? Do you not know that late yesterday I arrived back from Moscow after intensive discussions with Mr. Gorbachev and his representative Yevgeny Primakov, who was here last week? Do you not know that I brought with me a peace proposal that, if the Rais accepts it—and I am presenting it to him in two hours—could cause the Soviet Union to recall the Security Council and forbid the Americans to attack us?

  “And in the face of all this, at this precise moment, you expect me to humiliate the Soviet Union by ordering a raid on their First Secretary’s villa? Frankly, Brigadier, you must be mad.”

  That was the end of it. Hassan Rahmani left the Ministry seething but helpless. There was one thing, however, that Tariq Aziz had not forbidden. Within the walls of his house, Kulikov might be impregnable.

  Inside his car he might be untouchable. But the streets did not belong to Kulikov.

  “I want it surrounded,” Rahmani told his best surveillance team, when he returned to his office. “Keep it quiet, discreet, low-profile. But I want total surveillance of that building. When visitors come and go—and there must be visitors—I want them tailed.”

  By noon, the watcher teams were in place. They sat in parked cars beneath the trees covering all four walls of the Kulikov compound and monitored both ends of the only street that led to it. Others, farther away but linked by radio, would report on anyone approaching and follow anyone who left.

  The younger son sat in the dining room of his parents’ house and looked at the long canvas bag that contained his father. He let the tears run down his face to make damp marks on the jacket of his uniform, and he thought of the good days long ago. His father had been a prosperous doctor then, with a large practice, even tending to the families of some of the British community after being introduced to them by his friend Nigel Martin.

  He thought of the times he and his brother had played in the Martins’ garden with Mike and Terry, and he wondered what had ever happened to those two.

  After an hour he noticed some stains on the canvas that seemed to be larger than they had been. He rose and went to the door.

  “Talat.”

  “Master?”

  “Bring scissors and a kitchen knife.”

  Alone in the room, Colonel Osman Badri cut open the canvas bag, along the top, down one side and along the bottom. Then he pulled the top of the sack away and rolled it back. His father’s body was still quite naked.

  According to tradition, it was supposed to be woman’s work, but this was no task for his mother. He called for water and bandages, bathed and cleaned the ravaged body, bound up the broken feet, straightened and swaddled the shattered legs, and covered the blackened genitalia. As he worked, he cried; and as he cried, he changed.

  At dusk he called the Imam at the Alwazia cemetery in Risafa and made arrangements for a funeral the next morning.

  Mike Martin had in fact been into the city on his bicycle that Sunday morning, February 17, but he had returned after buying his groceries and checking the three walls for any chalk marks, arriving back at the villa just before midday. During the afternoon he was kept busy tending the garden. Mr. Kulikov, while neither Christian nor Moslem and celebrating neither the Moslem holy day on Friday nor the Christian sabbath on Sunday, was at home with a cold, complaining about the state of his roses.

  While Martin worked over the flower beds, the Mukhabarat watcher teams were quietly sliding into place beyond the wall. Jericho, he reasoned, could not possibly have news in less than two days; Martin would patrol his chalk marks again the following evening.

  The burial of Dr. Badri took place at Alwazia shortly after nine o’clock. The cemeteries of Baghdad were busy in those times, and the Imam had much to do. Only a few days earlier, the Americans had bombed a public air raid shelter, causing more than three hundred deaths. Feelings were running high.

  Several mourners at another funeral close by asked the silent colonel if his relative had died from American bombs. He replied shortly that death had been by natural causes.

  In Moslem custom, burial takes place quickly, with no long period of waiting between death and interment. And mere was no wooden coffin in the manner of Christians; the body was wrapp
ed in cloth.

  The pharmacist came, supporting Mrs. Badri, and they left in a group when the brief ceremony was over.

  Colonel Badri was barely yards from the gate of Alwazia when he heard his name called. Standing a few yards away was a limousine with blackened windows. One at the rear was half open. The voice called him again.

  Colonel Badri asked the pharmacist to take his mother home to Qadisiyah; he would join them later.

  When they had gone, he walked over to the car.

  The voice said: “Please join me, Colonel. We need to talk.” He opened the car door and peered inside.

  The sole occupant had moved to the far side to make space. Badri thought he knew the face, but vaguely. He had seen it somewhere. He climbed in and closed the door. The man in the dark gray suit pressed a button, and the window rose, shutting out the sounds from outside.

  “You have just buried your father.”

  “Yes.” Who was this man? Why could he not place the face?

  “It was foul, what was done to him. If I had learned in time, I might have stopped it. I learned too late.”

  Osman Badri felt something like a punch in the stomach. He realized to whom he was talking—a man who had been pointed out to him at a military reception two years earlier. “I am going to say something to you, Colonel, that, if you were to report it, would cause me to die more terribly than your father.”

  There was only one such thing, thought Badri. Treason.

  “Once,” said the man quietly, “I loved the Rais.”

  “So did I,” said Badri.

  “But things change. He has gone mad. In his madness he piles cruelty upon cruelty. He must be stopped.

  You know about the Qa’ala, of course.”

  Badri was surprised again, this time by the sudden change of subject.

  “Of course. I built it.”

  “Exactly. Do you know what now resides within it?”

  “No.”

  The senior officer told him.

  “He cannot be serious,” said Badri.

  “He is completely serious. He intends to use it against the Americans. That may not be our concern. But do you know what America will do in return? It will reply in kind. Not a brick here will stand on brick, not a stone on stone. The Rais alone will survive. Do you want to be part of this?”

  Colonel Badri thought of the body in the cemetery, over which the sextons were even then still heaping the dry earth.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Tell me about Qa’ala.”

  “Why?”

  “The Americans will destroy it.”

  “You can get this information to them?”

  “Trust me, there are ways. The Qa’ala ...”

  So Colonel Osman Badri, the young engineer who had once wanted to design fine buildings to last for centuries, as his ancestors had done, told the man called Jericho.

  “Grid reference.”

  Badri gave him that too.

  “Go back to your post, Colonel. You will be safe.”

  Colonel Badri left the car and walked away. His stomach was heaving, turning and turning. Within a hundred yards he began to ask himself, over and again: What have I done? Suddenly, he knew he had to talk to his brother, that older brother who had always had the cooler head, the wiser counsel.

  The man the Mossad team called the spotter arrived back in Vienna that Monday, summoned from Tel Aviv. Once again he was a prestigious lawyer from New York, with all the necessary identifying paperwork to prove it.

  Even though the real lawyer was no longer on vacation, the chances that Gemütlich, who hated telephones and fax machines, would telephone New York to check were regarded as minimal. It was a risk the Mossad was prepared to take.

  Once again the spotter installed himself at the Sheraton and wrote a personal letter to Herr Gemütlich.

  He again apologized for his unannounced arrival in the Austrian capital but explained he was accompanied by his firm’s accountant, and that the pair of them wished to make a first substantial deposit on behalf of their client.

  The letter was delivered by hand in the late afternoon, and the following morning Gemütlich’s reply arrived at the hotel, offering a meeting at ten in the morning.

  The spotter was indeed accompanied. The man with him was known simply as the cracksman, for that was his speciality.

  If the Mossad possesses at its Tel Aviv headquarters a virtually unrivaled collection of dummy companies, false passports, letterhead stationery, and all the other paraphernalia for deception, pride of place must still go to its safecrackers and locksmiths. The Mossad’s ability to break into locked places has its own niche in the covert world. At the science of burglary, the Mossad has long been regarded simply as the best. Had a neviot team been in charge at the Watergate, no one would ever have known.

  So high is the reputation of Israeli lock-pickers that when British manufacturers sent a new product to the SIS for their comments, Century House would pass it on to Tel Aviv. The Mossad, devious to a fault, would study it, find how to pick it, then return it to London as “impregnable.” The SIS found out about this.

  The next time a British lock company came up with a particularly brilliant new lock, Century House asked them to take it back, keep it, but provide a slightly easier one for analysis. It was the easier one that was sent to Tel Aviv. There it was studied and finally picked, then returned to London as

  “unbreakable.” But it was the original lock that the SIS advised the manufacturer to market.

  This led to an embarrassing incident a year later, when a Mossad locksmith spent three sweaty and infuriating hours working at such a lock in the corridor of an office building in a European capital before emerging livid with rage. Since then, the British have tested their own locks and left the Mossad to work it out for themselves.

  The lock-picker brought from Tel Aviv was not the best in Israel but the second best. There was a reason for this: He had something the best lock-pick did not have.

  During the night the young man underwent a six-hour briefing from Gidi Barzilai on the subject of the eighteenth-century work of the German-French cabinetmaker Riesener, and a full description by the spotter of the internal layout of the Winkler building. The yarid, surveillance team completed his education with a rundown of the movements of the nightwatch, as observed by the times and places of lights going on and off inside the bank during the night.

  That same Monday, Mike Martin waited until five in the afternoon before he wheeled his bone-shaker bicycle across the graveled yard to the rear gate of the Kulikov garden, opened the gate, and let himself out.

  He mounted and began to ride down the road in the direction of the nearest ferry crossing of the river, at the place where the Jumhuriya Bridge used to be before the Tornados offered it their personal attention.

  He turned the corner, out of sight of the villa, and saw the first parked car. Then the second, farther on.

  When the two men emerged from the second car and took up position in the center of the road, his stomach began to tighten. He risked a glance behind him; two men from the other car had blocked any retreat. Knowing it was all over, he pedaled on. There was nothing else to do. One of the men ahead of him pointed to the side of the road.

  “Hey you!” he shouted. “Over here!”

  He came to a stop under the trees by the side of the road. Three more men emerged, soldiers. Their guns pointed straight at him. Slowly he raised his hands.

  Chapter 21

  That afternoon in Riyadh, the British and American ambassadors met, apparently informally, for the purpose of indulging in the peculiarly English habit of taking tea and cakes.

  Also present on the lawn of the British embassy were Chip Barber, supposedly on the U.S. embassy staff, and Steve Laing, who would tell any casual inquirer that he was with his country’s Cultural Section.

  A third guest, in a rare break from his duties belowground, was General Norman Schwarzkopf.

  Within a
short time, all five men found themselves together in a corner of the lawn, nursing their cups of tea. It made life easier when everyone knew what everyone else really did for a living.

  Among all the guests, the sole topic of talk was the imminent war, but these five men had information denied to all the rest. One piece of information was the news of the details of the peace plan presented that day by Tariq Aziz to Saddam Hussein, the plan brought back from Moscow and the talks with Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a subject of worry for each of the five guests, but for different reasons.

  General Schwarzkopf had already that day headed off a suggestion out of Washington that he might attack earlier than planned. The Soviet peace plan called for a declared cease-fire, and an Iraqi pullout from Kuwait on the following day.

  Washington knew these details not from Baghdad but from Moscow. The immediate reply from the White House was that the plan had merits but failed to address key issues. It made no mention of Iraq’s annulment forever of its claim on Kuwait; it did not bear in mind the unimaginable damage done to Kuwait—the five hundred oil fires, the millions of tons of crude oil gushing into the Gulf to poison its waters, the two hundred executed Kuwaitis, the sacking of Kuwait City.

  “Colin Powell tells me,” said the general, “that the State Department is pushing for an even harder line.

  They want to demand unconditional surrender.”

  “So they do, to be sure,” murmured the American envoy.

  “So I told ’em,” said the general, “I told ’em, you need an Arabist to look at this.”

  “Indeed,” replied the British ambassador, “and why should that be?”

  Both the ambassadors were consummate diplomats who had worked for years in the Middle East. Both were Arabists.

  “Well,” said the Commander-in-Chief, “that kind of ultimatum does not work with Arabs. They’ll die first.”

  There was silence in the group. The ambassadors searched the general’s guileless face for a hint of irony.

  The two intelligence officers stayed quiet, but both men had the same thought in their minds: That is precisely the point, my dear general.