Honour Among Thieves Part 1

HONOUR AMONG THIEVES.

by Jeffrey Archer.

NEW YORK,

February 15th 1993

ANTONIO CAVALLI stared intently at the Arab, who he considered looked far too young to be a Deputy Amba.s.sador.

'One hundred million dollars,' Cavalli said, p.r.o.nouncing each word slowly and deliberately, giving them almost reverential respect.

Hamid Al Obaydi flicked a worry bead across the top of his well-manicured thumb, making a click that was beginning to irritate Cavalli.

'One hundred million is quite acceptable,' the Deputy Amba.s.sador replied in a clipped English accent.

Cavalli nodded. The only thing that worried him about the deal was that Al Obaydi had made no attempt to bargain, especially as the figure the American had proposed was double that which he had expected to get. Cavalli had learned from painful experience not to trust anyone who didn't bargain. It inevitably meant that they had no intention of paying in the first place.

'If the figure is agreed,' he said, 'all that is left to discuss is how and when the payments will be made.'

The Deputy Amba.s.sador flicked another worry bead before he nodded.

'Ten million dollars to be paid in cash immediately,' said Cavalli, 'the remaining ninety million to be deposited in a Swiss bank account as soon as the contract has been carried out.'

'But what do I get for my first ten million?' asked the Deputy Amba.s.sador, looking fixedly at the man whose origins were as hard to hide as his own.

'Nothing,' replied Cavalli, although he acknowledged that the Arab had every right to ask. After all, if Cavalli didn't honour his side of the bargain, the Deputy Amba.s.sador had far more to lose than just his government's money.

Al Obaydi moved another worry bead, aware that he had little choice - it had taken him two years just to get an interview with Antonio Cavalli. Meanwhile, President Clinton had settled into the White House, while his own leader was growing more and more impatient for revenge. If he didn'taccept Cavalli's terms, Al Obaydi knew that the chances of finding anyone else capable of carrying out the task before July the fourth were about as promising as zero coming up on a roulette wheel with only one spin left.

Cavalli looked up at the vast portrait that dominated the wall behind the Deputy Amba.s.sador's desk. His first contact with Al Obaydi had been only days after the war had been concluded. At the time the American had refused to deal with the Arab, as few people were convinced that the Deputy Amba.s.sador's leader would scill be alive by the time a preliminary meeting could be arranged.

As the months pa.s.sed, however, it began to look to Cavalli as if his potential client might survive longer than President Bush. So an exploratory meeting was agreed.

The venue selected was the Deputy Amba.s.sador's office in New York, on East 79th Street. Despite being a little too public for Cavalli's taste, it had the virtue of proving the credentials of the party claiming to be willing to invest one hundred million dollars in such a daring enterprise.

'How would you expect the first ten million to be paid?'

enquired Al Obaydi, as if he were asking a real estate agent about a down-payment on a small house on the wrong side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

'The entire amount must be handed over in used, unmarked hundred-dollar bills and deposited with our bankers in Newark, New Jersey,' said the American, his eyes narrowing.

'And Mr Obaydi,' Cavalli added, 'I don't have to remind you that we have machines that can verify...'

'You need have no anxiety about us keeping to our side of the bargain,' interrupted Al Obaydi. 'The money is, as your Western cliche suggests, a mere drop in the ocean. The only concern I have is whether you are capable of delivering your part of the agreement.'

'You wouldn't have pressed so hard for this meeting if you doubted we were the right people for the job,' retorted Cavalli. 'But can I be as confident about you putting together such a large amount of cash at such short notice?'

'It may interest you to know, Mr Cavalli,' replied the Deputy Amba.s.sador, 'that the money is already lodged in a safe in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the United Nations building. After all, no one would expect to find such a vast sum deposited in the vaults of a bankrupt body.'

The smile that remained on Al Obaydi's face indicated thatthe Arab was pleased with his little witticism, despite the fact that Cavalli's lips hadn't moved.

'The ten million will be delivered to your bank by midday tomorrow,' continued Al Obaydi as he rose from the table to indicate that, as far he was concerned, the meeting was concluded. The Deputy Amba.s.sador stretched out his hand and his visitor reluctantly shook it. Cavalli glanced up once again at the portrait of Saddam Hussein, turned, and quickly left.

When Scott Bradley entered the room there was a hush of expectancy.

He placed his notes on the table in front of him, allowing his eyes to sweep around the lecture hall. The room was packed with eager young students holding pens and pencils poised above yellow legal pads.

'My name is Scott Bradley,' said the youngest Professor in the Law School, 'and this is to be the first of fourteen lectures on Const.i.tutional Law.' Seventy-four faces stared down at the tall, somewhat dishevelled man who obviously hadn't noticed that the top b.u.t.ton of his shirt was missing and who couldn't have made up his mind which side to part his hair that morning.

'I'd like to begin this first lecture with a personal statement,' he announced. Some of the pens and pencils were laid to rest. 'There are many reasons to practise law in this country,' he began, 'but only one which is worthy of you, and certainly only one that interests me. It applies to every facet of the law that you might be interested in pursuing, and it has never been better expressed than in the engrossed parchment of The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.

' "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." That one sentence is what distinguishes America from every other country on earth.

'In some aspects, our nation has progressed mightily since 1776,' continued the Professor, still not having referred to his notes as he walked up and down tugging the lapels of his well-worn Harris tweed jacket, 'while in others we have moved rapidly backwards. Each of you in this hall can be part of the next generation of law makers or law breakers -' he paused, surveying the silent gathering, '- and you have been granted the greatest gift of all with which to help makethat choice, a first-cla.s.s mind. When my colleagues and I have finished with you, you can if you wish go out into the real world and ignore the Declaration of Independence as if it were worth no more than the parchment it was written on, outdated and irrelevant in this modern age. Or,' he continued, 'you may choose to benefit society by upholding the law. That is the course great lawyers take. Bad lawyers, and I do not mean stupid ones, are those who begin to bend the law, which, I submit, is only a step away from breaking it. To those of you in this cla.s.s who wish to pursue such a course I must advise that I have nothing to teach you, because you are beyond learning. You are still free to attend my lectures, but "attending" is all you will be doing.'

The room was so silent that Scott looked up to check they hadn't all crept out. 'Not my words,' he continued as he stared at the intent faces, 'but those of Dean Thomas W.

Swan, who lectured in this theatre for the first twenty-seven years of this century. I see no reason not to repeat his philosophy whenever I address an incoming cla.s.s of the Yale Law School.'

The Professor opened the file in front of him for the first time. 'Logic,' he began, 'is the science and art of reasoning correctly. No more than common sense, I hear you say. And nothing so uncommon, Voltaire reminds us. But those who cry "common sense" are often the same people who are too lazy to train their minds.

'Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote: "The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience." ' The pens and pencils began to scratch furiously across the yellow pages, and continued to do so for the next fifty minutes.

When Scott Bradley had come to the end of his lecture, he closed his file, picked up his notes and marched quickly out of the room. He did not care to indulge himself by remaining for the sustained applause that had followed his opening lecture for the past ten years.

Hannah Kopec had been considered an outsider as well as a loner from the start, although the latter was often thought by those in authority to be an advantage.

Hannah had been told that her chances of qualifying were slim, but she had now come through the toughest part, the twelve-month physical, and although, despite her background, she had never killed anyone - six of the last eight applicants had - those in authority were now convinced she was capable of doing so. Hannah knew she could.As the plane lifted off from Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport for Heathrow, Hannah pondered once again what had caused a twenty-five-year-old woman at the height of her career as a model to want to apply to join the Inst.i.tute for Intelligence and Special Tasks - better known as Mossad - when she could have had her pick of a score of rich husbands in a dozen capitals.

Thirty-nine Scuds had landed on Tel Aviv and Haifa during the Gulf War. Thirteen people had been killed. Despite much wailing and beating of b.r.e.a.s.t.s, no revenge had been sought by the Israeli Government because of some tough political bargaining by James Baker, who had a.s.sured them that the Coalition forces would finish the job. The American Secretary of State had failed to fulfil his promise. But then, as Hannah often reflected, Baker had not lost his entire family in one night.

The day she was discharged from hospital, Hannah had immediately applied to join Mossad. They had been dismissive of her request, a.s.suming she would, in time, find that the wound healed. Hannah visited the Mossad headquarters every day for the next two weeks, by which time even they acknowledged that the wound remained open and, more importantly, was still festering.

In the third week they reluctantly allowed her to join a course for trainees, confident that she couldn't hope to survive for more than a few days, and would then return to her career as a model. They were wrong a second time. Revenge for Hannah Kopec was a far more potent drug than ambition.

For the next twelve months she worked hours that began before the sun rose and ended long after it had set. She ate food that would have been rejected by a tramp and forgot what it was like to sleep on a mattress. They tried everything to break her, and they failed. To begin with the instructors had treated her gently, fooled by her graceful body and captivating looks, until one of them ended up with a broken leg. He simply didn't believe Hannah could move that fast. In the cla.s.sroom the sharpness of her mind was less of a surprise to her instructors, though once again she gave them little time to rest.

But now they'd come onto her own ground.

Hannah had always, from a young age, taken it for granted that she could speak several languages. She had been born in Leningrad in 1968, and when fourteen years later her father died, her mother immediately applied for an emigration permitto Israel. The new liberal wind that was blowing across the Baltics made it possible for her request to be granted.

Hannah's family did not remain in a kibbutz for long: her mother, still an attractive, sparkling woman, received several proposals of marriage, one of which came from a wealthy widower. She accepted.

When Hannah, her sister Ruth and brother David took up their new residence in the fashionable district of Haifa, their whole world changed. Their new stepfather doted on Hannah's mother and lavished gifts on the family he had never had.

After Hannah had completed her schooling she applied to universities in America and England to study languages. Mama didn't approve, and had often suggested that with such a figure, glorious long black hair and looks that turned the heads of men from seventeen to seventy, she should consider a career in modelling. Hannah laughed and explained that she had better things to do with her life.

A few weeks later, after Hannah had returned from an interview at Va.s.ser, she joined her family in Paris for their summer holiday. She also planned to visit Rome and London, but she received so many invitations from attentive Parisians that when the three weeks were over she found she hadn't once left the French capital. It was on the last Thursday of their holiday that the Mode Rivoli Agency offered her a contract that no amount of university degrees could have obtained for her. She handed her return ticket to Tel Aviv back to her mother and remained in Paris for her first job. While she settled down in Paris her sister Ruth was sent to finishing school in Zurich, and her brother David took up a place at the London School of Economics.

In January 1991, the children all returned to Israel to celebrate their mother's fiftieth birthday. Ruth was now a student at the Slade School of Art; David was completing his studies for a PhD; and Hannah was appearing once again on the cover of Elle.

At the same time the Americans were ma.s.sing on the Kuwaiti border, and many Israelis were becoming anxious about a war, but Hannah's stepfather a.s.sured them that Israel would not get involved. In any case, their home was on the north side of the city and therefore immune to any attack.

A week later, on the night of their mother's fiftieth birthday, they all ate and drank a little too much, and thenslept a little too soundly. When Hannah eventually woke, she found herself strapped down in a hospital bed. It was to be days before they told her that her mother, brother and sister had been killed instantly by a stray Scud, and only her stepfather had survived.

For weeks Hannah lay in that hospital bed planning her revenge. When she was eventually discharged her stepfather told her that he hoped she would return to modelling, but that he would support her in whatever she wanted to do.

Hannah informed him that she was going to join Mossad.

It was ironic that she now found herself on a plane to London that, under different circ.u.mstances, her brother might have been taking to complete his studies at the LSE. She was one of eight trainee agents being despatched to the British capital for an advanced course in Arabic. Hannah had already completed a year of night cla.s.ses in Tel Aviv. Another six months and the Iraqis would believe she'd been born in Baghdad. She could now think in Arabic, even if she didn't always think like an Arab.

Once the 757 had broken through the clouds, Hannah stared down at the winding River Thames through the little porthole window. When she had lived in Paris she had often flown over to spend her mornings working in Bond Street or Chelsea, her afternoons at Ascot or Wimbledon, her evenings at Covent Garden or the Barbican. But on this occasion she felt no joy at returning to a city she had come to know so well.

Now, she was only interested in an obscure sub-faculty of London University and a terraced house in a place called Chalk Farm.

ON THE JOURNEY BACK to his office on Wall Street, Antonio Cavalli began to think more seriously about Al Obaydi and how they had come to meet. The file on his new client supplied by their London office, and updated by his secretary Debbie, revealed that although the Deputy Amba.s.sador had been born in Baghdad, he had been educated in England.

When Cavalli leaned back, closed his eyes and recalled the clipped accent and staccato delivery, he felt he might have been in the presence of a British Army officer. The explanation could be found in Al Obaydi's file under Education: The King's School, Wimbledon, followed by three years at London University reading law. Al Obaydi had also eaten his dinners at Lincoln's Inn, whatever that meant.

On returning to Baghdad, Al Obaydi had been recruited bythe Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He had risen rapidly, despite the self-appointment of Saddam Hussein as President and the regular placement of Ba'ath Party apparatchiks in posts they were patently unqualified to fill.

As Cavalli turned another page of the file, it became obvious that Al Obaydi was a man well capable of adapting himself to unusual circ.u.mstances. To be fair, that was something Cavalli also prided himself on. Like Al Obaydi he had studied law, but in his case at Columbia University in New York. When that time of the year came round for graduates to 611 out their applications to join leading law firms, Cavalli was always shortlisted when the partners saw his grades, but once they realised who his father was, he was never interviewed.

After working fourteen hours a day for five years in one of Manhattan's less prestigious legal establishments, the young Cavalli began to realise that it would be at least another ten years before he could hope to see his name embossed on the firm's masthead, despite having married one of the senior partners' daughters. Tony Cavalli didn't have ten years to waste, so he decided to set up his own law practice and divorce his wife.

In January 1982 Cavalli and Co. was incorporated, and ten years later, on April 15th 1992, the company declared a profit of $157,000, paying its tax demand in full. What the company books did not reveal was that a subsidiary had also been formed in 1982, but not incorporated. A firm that showed no tax returns, and despite its profits mounting year on year, could not be checked up on by phoning Dun & Bradstreet and requesting a complete VIP business report. This subsidiary was known to a small group of insiders as 'Skills'

- a company that specialised in solving problems that could not be taken care of by thumbing through the Yellow Pages.

With his father's contacts, and Cavalli's driving ambition, the unlisted company soon made a reputation for handling problems that their unnamed clients had previously considered insoluble. Among Cavalli's latest a.s.signments had been the recovery of taped conversations between Sinatra and Nancy Reagan that were due to be published in Rolling Stone and the theft of a Vermeer from Ireland for an eccentric South American collector. These coups were discreetly referred to in the company of potential clients.

The clients themselves were vetted as carefully as if they were applying to be members of the New York Yacht Clubbecause, as Tony's father had often pointed out, it would only take one mistake to ensure that he would spend the rest of his life in less pleasing surroundings than 23 East 75th Street, or their villa in Lyford Cay.

Over the past decade, Tony had built up a small network of representatives across the globe who supplied him with clients requiring a little help with a more 'imaginative'

proposition. It was his Lebanese contact who had been responsible for introducing the man from Baghdad, whose proposal unquestionably fell into this category.

When Tony's father was first briefed on the outline of Operation 'Desert Calm' he recommended that his son demand a fee of one hundred million dollars to compensate for the fact that the whole of Washington would be at liberty to observe him going about his business.

'One mistake,' the old man warned him, licking his lips, 'and you'll make more front pages than the second coming of Elvis.'

Once he had left the lecture theatre, Scott Bradley hurried across Grove Street Cemetery, hoping that he might reach his apartment in St Ronan Street before being accosted by a pursuing student. He loved them all - well, almost all -and he was sure that in time he would allow the more serious among them to stroll back to his rooms in the evenings for a drink and to talk long into the night. But not until they were well into their second year.

Scott managed to reach the staircase before a single would-be lawyer had caught up with him. But then, few of them knew that he had once covered four hundred metres in 48.1 seconds when he'd anch.o.r.ed the Georgetown varsity relay team.

Confident he had escaped, Scott leapt up the staircase, not stopping until he reached his apartment on the third floor.

He pushed open the unlocked door. It was always unlocked.

There was nothing in his apartment worth stealing - even the television didn't work. The one file that would have revealed that the law was not the only field in which he was an expert had been carefully secreted on his bookshelf between Tax and Torts. He failed to notice the books that were piled up everywhere or the fact that he could have written his name in the dust on the sideboard.

Scott closed the door behind him and glanced, as he always did, at the picture of his mother on the sideboard. He dumped the pile of notes he was carrying by her side and retrievedthe mail poking out from under the door. Scott walked across the room and sank into an old leather chair, wondering how many of those bright, attentive faces would still be attending his lectures in two years' time. Forty per cent would be good - thirty per cent more likely. Those would be the ones for whom fourteen hours' work a day became the norm, and not just for the last month before exams. And of them, how many would live up to the standards of the late Dean Thomas W. Swan? Five per cent, if he was lucky.

The Professor of Const.i.tutional Law turned his attention to the bundle of mail he held in his lap. One from American Express - a bill with the inevitable hundred free offers which would cost him even more money if he took any of them up; an invitation from Brown to give the Charles Evans Hughes Lecture on the Const.i.tution; a letter from Carol reminding him she hadn't seen him for some time; a circular from a firm of stockbrokers who didn't promise to double his money but...; and finally a plain buff envelope postmarked Virginia, with a typeface he recognised immediately.

He tore open the buff envelope and extracted the single sheet of paper which gave him his latest instructions.

Al Obaydi strolled onto the floor of the General a.s.sembly and slipped into a chair directly behind his Head of Mission.

The Amba.s.sador had his earphones on and was pretending to be deeply interested in a speech being delivered by the Head of the Brazilian Mission. Al Obaydi's boss always preferred to have confidential talks on the floor of the General a.s.sembly: he suspected it was the only room in the United Nations building that wasn't bugged by the CIA.

Al Obaydi waited patiently until the older man flicked one of the earpieces aside and leaned slightly back.

'They've agreed to our terms,' murmured Al Obaydi, as if it was he who had suggested the figure. The Amba.s.sador's upper lip protruded over his lower lip, the recognised sign among his colleagues that he required more details.

'One hundred million,' Al Obaydi whispered. 'Ten million to be paid immediately. The final ninety on delivery.'

'"Immediately"?' said the Amba.s.sador. 'What does "immediately" mean?'

'By midday tomorrow,' whispered Al Obaydi.

'At least Sayedi antic.i.p.ated that eventuality,' said the Amba.s.sador thoughtfully.

Al Obaydi admired the way his superior could always make the term 'my master' sound both deferential and insolent atthe same time.

'I must send a message to Baghdad to acquaint the Foreign Minister with the details of your triumph,' added the Amba.s.sador with a smile.

Al Obaydi would also have smiled, but he realised the Amba.s.sador would not admit to any personal involvement with the project while it was still in its formative stage.

As long as he distanced himself from his younger colleague for the time being, the Amba.s.sador could continue his undisturbed existence in New York until his retirement fell due in three years' time. By following such a course he had survived almost fourteen years of Saddam Hussein's reign while many of his colleagues had conspicuously failed to become eligible for their state pension. To his knowledge one had been shot in front of his family, two hanged and several others posted as 'missing', whatever that meant.

The Iraqi Amba.s.sador smiled as his British counterpart walked past him, but he received no response for his trouble.

'Stuck-up sn.o.b,' the Arab muttered under his breath.

The Amba.s.sador pulled the earpiece back over his ear to indicate that he had heard quite enough from his number two.

He continued to listen to the problems of trying to preserve the rainforests of Brazil, coupled with a request for a further grant from the UN of a hundred million dollars.

Not something he felt Sayedi would be interested in.