The Fist Of God Part 6

He dismantled the dish, stored it back beneath the floor with the batteries and transceiver, slowed down the message, and listened to it play back. There was a fresh list of demands for information from Jericho and an agreement to the agent's last demand for money, which had now been transferred into his account. In under a month the renegade on the Revolutionary Command Council had earned over a million dollars. Added to the list were two further instructions for Martin. The first was to send Jericho a message, not in the form of a question, that it was hoped he could somehow filter into the thinking of the planners in Baghdad. It was to the effect that the news from London probably meant that the Coalition action to recover Kuwait would be called off if the Rais stood firm. Whether this disinformation reached the highest councils of Baghdad will never be known, but within a week Saddam Hussein had claimed that the toppling of Thatcher was due to the revulsion of the British people at her opposition to him. The final instruction on Mike Martin's tape that night was to ask Jericho if he had ever heard of a weapon or weapon system referred to as the Fist of G.o.d. By the light of a candle, Martin spent most of the rest of the night writing the questions in Arabic onto two sheets of thin airmail paper. Within twenty hours, the papers had been secreted behind the loose brick in the wall close to the Imam Aladham shrine in Aadhamiya. It took a week for the answers to come back. Martin read the spidery Arabic script of Jericho's handwriting and translated everything into English. From a soldier's point of view, it was interesting. The three Republican Guard divisions facing the British and Americans along the border, the Tawakkulna and Medina, now joined by the Hammurabi, were equipped with a mix of T-54/55, T-62, and T72 main battle tanks, all three Russian. But on a recent tour, Jericho continued, General Abdullah Kadiri of the Armored Corps had discovered to his horror that most of the crews had removed their batteries and used them to power fans, cookers, radios, and ca.s.sette players. It was doubtful if, in combat conditions, any of them would now start. There had been several executions on the spot, and two senior commanders had been relieved and sent home. Saddam's half-brother, Ali Ha.s.san Majid, now Governor-General of Kuwait, had reported that the occupation was becoming a nightmare, with attacks on Iraqi soldiers still unquenchable and desertions rising. The resistance showed no signs of abating, despite vigorous interrogations and numerous executions by Colonel Sabaawi of the AMAM and two personal visits by his boss, Omar Khatib. Worse, the resistance had now somehow acquired the plastic explosive called Semtex, which is much more powerful than industrial dynamite. Jericho had identified two more major military command posts, both constructed in subterranean caverns and invisible from the air. The thinking in the immediate circle around Saddam Hussein was definitely that a seminal contribution to the fall of Margaret Thatcher had been his own influence. He had twice reiterated his absolute refusal even to consider pulling out of Kuwait. Finally, Jericho had never heard of anything code-named the Fist of G.o.d but would listen for such a phrase. Personally, he doubted there existed any weapon or weapon system unknown to the Allies. Martin read the entire message onto tape, speeded it up, and transmitted it. In Riyadh it was seized upon avidly and the radio technicians logged its time of arrival: 2355 hours, November 30, 1990.

Leila Al-Hilla came out of the bathroom slowly, pausing in the doorway with the light behind her to raise her arms to the doorframe on each side and pose for a moment. The bathroom light, shining through the negligee, showed off her ripe and voluptuous silhouette to full advantage. It should; it was black, of the sheerest lace, and had cost a small fortune, a Paris import acquired from a boutique in Beirut. The big man on the bed stared hungrily, ran a furred tongue along a thick lower lip, and grinned. Leila liked to dawdle in the bathroom before a session of s.e.x. There were places to be washed and anointed, eyes to be accentuated with mascara, lips to be etched in red, and perfumes to be applied, different aromas for different parts of her body. It was a good body at thirty summers, the sort clients liked: not fat, but well-curved where it ought to be, full-hipped and breasted, with muscle beneath the curves. She lowered her arms and advanced toward the dim-lit bed, swinging her hips, the high-heeled shoes adding four inches to her height and exaggerating the hip-swing. But the man on the bed, on his back and naked, covered like a bear in black fur from chin to ankles, had closed his eyes. Don't go to sleep on me now, you oaf, she thought, not tonight when I need you. Leila sat on the side of the bed and ran sharp red fingernails up through the hair of the belly to the chest, tweaked each nipple hard, then ran her hand back again, beyond the stomach to the groin. She leaned forward and kissed the man on the lips, her tongue prying an opening. But the man's lips responded halfheartedly, and she caught the strong odor of arak.

Drunk again, she thought-why can't the fool stay off the stuff. Still, it had its advantages, that bottle of arak every evening. Oh well, to work. Leila Al-Hilla was a good courtesan, and she knew it. The best in the Middle East, some said, and certainly among the most expensive. She had trained years ago, as a child, in a very private academy in Lebanon where the s.e.xual wiles and tricks of the ouled-nails of Morocco, of the nautch girls of India, and the subtle technocrats of f.u.kutomi-cho were practiced by the older girls while the children watched and learned. After fifteen years as a professional on her own, she knew that ninety percent of the skill of a good wh.o.r.e had nothing to do with the problem of coping with insatiable virility. That was for p.o.r.n magazines and films. Her talent was to flatter, compliment, praise, and indulge, but mainly to elicit a real male erection out of an endless succession of jaded appet.i.tes and faded powers. She ran her probing hand out of the groin and felt the man's p.e.n.i.s. Sighed inwardly. Soft as a marshmallow. General Abdullah Kadiri, commander of the Armored Corps of the Army of the Republic of Iraq, was going to need a little encouraging this evening. From beneath the bed where she had secreted it earlier, she took a soft cloth bag and tipped its contents onto the sheet beside her. Smearing her fingers with a thick, creamy jelly, she lubricated a medium-size d.i.l.d.o-vibrator, lifted one of the general's thighs, and slipped it expertly into his a.n.u.s. General Kadiri grunted, opened his eyes, glanced down at the naked woman crouching beside his genitals, and grinned again, the teeth flashing beneath the thick black moustache. Leila pressed the disk on the base of the vibrator, and the insistent pulsing throb began to fill the general's lower body. Beneath her hand the woman felt the limp organ begin to swell. From a flask with a tube sticking through the seal she half-filled her mouth with a swig of tasteless, odorless petroleum jelly, then leaned forward and took the man's stirring p.e.n.i.s into her mouth. The combination of the oily smoothness of the jelly and rapid probing of her skillful pointed tongue began to have an effect. For ten minutes, until her jaw ached, she caressed and sucked until the general's erection was as good as it was ever going to be. Before he could lose it, she lifted her head, swung an ample thigh across him, inserted him into her, and settled across his hips. She had felt bigger and better ones, but it was working-just. Leila leaned forward and swung her b.r.e.a.s.t.s over his face. "Ah, my big strong black bear," she cooed, "you are superb, as ever." He smiled up at her. She began to rise and settle, not too fast, rising until the helmet was just still between the l.a.b.i.a, settling slowly until she had enveloped everything he had. As she moved, she used developed and practiced v.a.g.i.n.al muscles to grip and squeeze, relax, grip and squeeze. She knew the effect of the double incitement. General Kadiri began to grunt and then shout, short harsh cries forced out of him by the sensation of the deep pulsing throb in his sphincter area and the woman rising and falling on his shaft with steadily increasing rhythm. "Yes, yes, oh yes, this is so good, keep going, darling," she panted into his face until finally he had his o.r.g.a.s.m. While he climaxed into her hips, Leila straightened her torso, towering over him, jerking in spasm, screaming with pleasure, faking her own tremendous climax. When he was spent, he deflated at once and in seconds she had removed herself and his d.i.l.d.o, tossing it to one side lest he fall asleep too soon. That was the last thing she wanted after all her hard work. There was yet more work to do. So she lay beside him and drew the sheet over them both, propping herself on one elbow, letting her bosom press against the side of his face, smoothing his hair and stroking his cheek with her free right hand. "Poor bear," she murmured. "Are you very tired? You work too hard, my magnificent lover. They work you too hard. What was it today, eh? More problems on the Council, and always you who has to solve them? Mmmmmm? Tell Leila, you know you can tell little Leila." So before he slept, he did. Later, when General Kadiri was snoring away the effects of arak and s.e.x, Leila retired to the bathroom where, with the door locked and seated on the toilet with a tray across her lap, she noted everything down in a neat, crabbed Arabic script. Later still, in the morning, the sheets of flimsy paper rolled into a hollowed-out tampon to avoid the security checks, she would hand it over to the man who paid her. It was dangerous, she knew, but it was lucrative, double earnings for the same job, and one day she intended to be rich-rich enough to leave Iraq forever and set up her own academy, perhaps in Tangier, with a string of nice girls to sleep with and Moroccan houseboys to whip whenever she felt the need.

If Gidi Barzilai had been frustrated by the security procedures of the Winkler Bank, two weeks of trailing Wolfgang Gemutlich were driving him to distraction. The man was impossible. After the spotter's identification, Gemutlich had quickly been followed to his house out beyond the Prater Park. The next day, while he was at work, the yarid team had watched the house until Frau Gemutlich left to go shopping. The girl member of the team went after her, staying in touch with her colleagues by personal radio so that she could warn them of the lady's return. In fact, the banker's wife was away for two hours-more than ample time. The break-in by the neviot experts was no problem, and bugs were quickly planted in sitting room, bedroom, and telephone. The search-quick, skilled, and leaving no trace-yielded nothing. There were the usual papers: deeds to the house, pa.s.sports, birth certificates, marriage license, even a series of bank statements. Everything was photographed, but a glance at the private bank account revealed no evidence of embezzlement from the Winkler Bank-there was even a horrible chance that the man would turn out to be completely honest. The wardrobe and bedroom drawers revealed no sign of bizarre personal habits-always a good blackmail lever among the respectable middle cla.s.ses-and indeed the neviot team leader, having watched Frau Gemutlich leave the house, was not surprised. If the man's personal secretary was a mousy little thing, his wife was like a sc.r.a.p of discarded paper. The Israeli thought he had seldom seen such a downcast little shrimp. By the time the yarid girl came on the radio with a muttered warning that the banker's wife was heading home, the neviot break-in experts were finished and out. The front door was relocked by the man in the telephone company uniform after the rest had scuttled out the back and through the garden. From then on, the neviot team would man the tape recorders in the van down the street to listen to the goings-on inside the house. Two weeks later a despairing team leader told Barzilai they had hardly filled one tape. On the first evening they had recorded eighteen words. She had said: "Here's your dinner, Wolfgang"-no reply. She had asked for new curtains-refused. He had said, "Early day tomorrow, I'm off to bed." "He says it every b.l.o.o.d.y night, it's like he's been saying it for thirty years," complained the neviot man. "Any s.e.x?" asked Barzilai. "You must be joking, Gidi. They don't even talk, let alone screw." All other leads to a flaw in the character of Wolfgang Gemutlich came up zero. There was no gambling, no small boys, no socializing, no nightclubbing, no mistress, no scuttling through the red-light district. On one occasion he left the house, and the spirits of the trailing team rose. Gemutlich was in a dark coat and hat, on foot, after dark and after supper, moving through the darkened suburb until he came to a private house five blocks away. He knocked and waited. The door opened, he was admitted, and it closed. Soon a ground-floor light came on, behind heavy drapes. Before the door closed, one of the Israeli watchers caught a glimpse of a grim-looking woman in a white nylon tunic. Aesthetic baths, perhaps? a.s.sisted showers, mixed sauna with two hefty wenches to handle the birch twigs? A check the next morning revealed that the woman in the tunic was an elderly chiropodist who ran a small practice from her own home. Wolfgang Gemutlich had been having his corns trimmed. On the first of December, Gidi Barzilai received a rocket from Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. This was not an operation without a limit of time, he was warned. The United Nations had given Iraq till January 16 to get out of Kuwait. After that, there would be war. Anything might happen. Get on with it.

"Gidi, we can follow this b.a.s.t.a.r.d till h.e.l.l freezes over," the two team leaders told their controller. "There's just no dirt in his life. I don't understand the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Nothing-he does nothing we can use on him." Barzilai was in a dilemma. They could kidnap the wife and threaten the husband that he had better cooperate or else. ... Trouble was, the sleaze would trade her in rather than steal a luncheon voucher. Worse, he would call the cops. They could kidnap Gemutlich and work him over. The trouble there was, the man would have to go back to the bank to make the transfer to close down the Jericho account. Once inside the bank, he'd yell blue murder. Kobi Dror had said, no miss and no traces. "Let's switch to the secretary," Barzilai said. "Confidential secretaries often know everything their boss knows." So the two teams switched their attentions to the equally dull-looking Fraulein Edith Hardenberg. She took even less time, just ten days. They tailed her to her home, a small apartment in a staid old house just off Trautenauplatz far out in the Nineteenth District, the northwestern suburb of Grinzing. She lived alone. No lover, no boyfriend, not even a pet. A search of her private papers revealed a modest bank account, a mother in retirement in Salzburg. The apartment itself had once been rented by the mother, as the rent book showed, but the daughter had moved in seven years earlier when the mother returned to her native Salzburg. Edith drove a small Seat car, which she parked on the street outside the flat, but she mainly commuted to work by public transportation, no doubt due to the parking difficulties in the city center. Her pay stubs revealed a stingy salary-"mean b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," exploded the neviot searcher when he saw the sum-and her birth certificate revealed she was thirty-nine-"and looking fifty," remarked the searcher.

There were no pictures of men in the flat, just one of her mother, one of them both on vacation by some lake, and one of her apparently deceased father in the uniform of the customs service.

If there was any man in her life, it appeared to be Mozart.

"She's an opera buff, and that's all," the neviot team leader reported back to Barzilai, after the flat had been left exactly as they found it.

"There's a big collection of LP records-she hasn't gotten around to compact disks yet-and they're all opera. Must spend most of her spare cash on them. Books on opera, on composers, singers, and conductors. Posters of the Vienna Opera winter calendar, though she couldn't begin to afford a ticket."

"No man in her life, eh?" mused Barzilai.

"She might fall for Pavarotti, if you can get him. Apart from that, forget it."

But Barzilai did not forget it. He recalled a case in London, long ago.

A civil servant in Defence, real spinster type; then the Sovs had produced this stunning young Yugoslav ... even the judge had been sympathetic at her trial.

That evening Barzilai sent a long encrypted cable to Tel Aviv.

By the middle of December, the buildup of the Coalition army south of the Kuwaiti border had become a great, inexorable tidal wave of men and steel.

Three hundred thousand men and women of thirty nations stretched in a series of lines across the Saudi desert from the coast and westward for over a hundred miles.

At the ports of Jubail, Dammam, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi, and

Dubai the cargo ships came in from the sea to disgorge guns and tanks, fuel and stores, food and bedding, ammunition and spares in endless succession. From the docks the convoys rolled west along the Tapline Road to establish the vast logistic bases that would one day supply the invading army. A Tornado pilot from Tabuq, flying south from a feint attack on the Iraqi border, told his squadron colleagues he had flown over the nose of a convoy of trucks and then on to the tail of the line. At five hundred miles per hour, it had taken him six minutes to reach the end of the line of trucks fifty miles away, and they had been rolling nose to tail. At Logistic Base Alpha one compound had oil drums stacked three high on top of each other, on pallets six feet by six, with lines between them the width of a forklift truck. The compound was forty kilometers by forty. And that was just for fuel. Other compounds at Log Alpha had sh.e.l.ls, rockets, mortars, caissons of machine-gun rounds, armor-piercing ant.i.tank warheads, and grenades. Others contained food and water, machinery and spares, tank batteries and mobile workshops. At that time the Coalition forces were confined by General Schwarzkopf to the portion of desert due south of Kuwait. What Baghdad could not know was that before he attacked, the American general intended to send more forces across the Wadi al Batin and another hundred miles farther west into the desert, to invade Iraq itself, pushing due north and then east to take the Republican Guard in flank and destroy it. On December 13 the Rocketeers, the 336th Squadron of the USAF Tactical Air Command, left their base at Thumrait in Oman and transferred to Al Kharz in Saudi Arabia. It was a decision that had been made on December 1. Al Kharz was a bare-bones airfield, constructed with runways and taxi tracks but nothing else. No control tower, no hangars, no workshops, no accommodations for anyone-just a flat sheet in the desert with strips of concrete. But it was an airfield. With amazing foresight, the Saudi government had commissioned and built enough air bases to host an air power totaling more than five times the Royal Saudi Air Force. After December 1 the American construction teams moved in. In just thirty days a tented city capable of housing five thousand people and five fighter squadrons had been built. Princ.i.p.al among the builders were the heavy engineers, the Red Horse teams, backed by forty huge electric generators from the Air Force. Some of the equipment came by road on low-loaders, but most by air. They built the clamsh.e.l.l hangars, workshops, fuel stores, ordnance depots, flight and briefing rooms, operations rooms, control towers, store tents, and garages. For the aircrew and ground crew they erected streets of tents with roadways between, latrines, bathhouses, kitchens, mess halls, and a water tower to be replenished by convoys of trucks from the nearest water source. Al Kharz lies fifty miles southeast of Riyadh, which turned out to be just three miles beyond the maximum range of the Scud missiles in Iraq's possession. It would be home for three months to five squadrons: two of F-15E Strike Eagles-the 336th Rocketeers and the Chiefs, the 335th Squadron out of Seymour Johnson, who joined at this point; one of F-15C pure-fighter Eagles; and two of F-16 Falcon fighters.

There was a special street for the 250 female personnel in the wing; these included the lawyer, ground-crew chiefs, truck drivers, clerks, nurses, and two squadron intelligence officers. The aircrew flew themselves up from Thumrait; the ground crew and other staff came by cargo airplane. The entire transshipment took two days, and when they arrived, the engineers were still at work and would remain so until Christmas. Don Walker had enjoyed his time in Thumrait. Living conditions were modern and excellent, and in the relaxed atmosphere of Oman, alcoholic drinks were permitted within the base. For the first time, he had met the British SAS, who have a permanent training base there, and other "contract officers" serving with the Omani forces of Sultan Qaboos. Some memorable parties were held, members of the opposite s.e.x were eminently datable, and flying the Eagles on feint missions up to the Iraqi border had been great. Of the SAS, after a trip into the desert with them in light scout cars, Walker had remarked to the newly appointed squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner: "These guys are certifiably insane." Al Kharz would turn out to be different from Thumrait. As the home of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia enforces strict teetotalism, as well as any exposure of the female form below the chin, excluding hands and feet. In his General Order Number, One, General Schwarzkopf had banned all alcohol for the entire Coalition forces under his command. All American units abided by that order, and it strictly applied at Al Kharz. At the port of Dammam, however, the American off-loaders were bemused by the amount of shampoo destined for the British Royal Air Force. Crate after crate of the stuff was unloaded, put onto trucks or C130 Hercules air-freighters, and brought to the RAF squadrons. They remained puzzled that in a largely waterless environment, the British aircrew could spend so much time washing their hair. It was an enigma that would continue to puzzle them until the end of the war. At the other side of the peninsula, on the desert base of Tabuq, which British Tornados shared with American Falcons, the USAF pilots were even more intrigued to see the British at sundown, seated beneath their awnings, decanting a small portion of shampoo into a gla.s.s and topping it up with bottled water. At Al Kharz the problem did not arise-there was no shampoo. Conditions, moreover, were more cramped than at Thumrait. Apart from the wing commander, who had a tent to himself, the others from colonel on down shared on the basis of two, four, six, eight, or twelve to a tent, according to rank. Even worse, the female personnel were out of bounds, a problem made even more frustrating by the fact that the American women, true to their culture and with no Saudi Mutawa-religious police-to see them, took to sun-bathing in bikinis behind low fences that they erected around their tents. This led to a rush by the aircrew to commandeer all the hilux trucks on the base, vehicles with their cha.s.sis set high above the wheels. Only from the top of these, standing on tiptoe, could a real patriot proceed from his tent to the flight lines, pa.s.sing through an enormous diversion to drive down the street between the female tents, and check that the women were in good shape. Apart from these civic obligations, for most it was back to a creaking cot and the "happy sock." There was also a new mood for another reason. The United Nations had issued its January 15 deadline to Saddam Hussein. The declarations coming out of Baghdad remained defiant. For the first time it became clear that they were going to go to war. The training missions took on a new and urgent edge.

For some reason, December 15 in Vienna was quite warm. The sun shone, and the temperature rose. At the lunch hour Fraulein Hardenberg left the bank as usual for her modest lunch and decided on a whim to buy sandwiches and eat them in the Stadtpark a few blocks away from the Ballga.s.se. It was her habit to do this through the summer and even into the autumn, and for this she always brought her sandwiches with her. On December 15 she had none. Nevertheless, looking at the bright blue sky above Franzis-kanerplatz and protected by her neat tweed coat, she decided that if nature was going to offer, even for one day, a bit of Altweibersommer-old ladies' summer, to the Viennese-she would take advantage and eat in the park. There was a special reason she loved the small park across the Ring. At one end is the Hubner Kursalon, a gla.s.s-walled restaurant like a large conservatory. Here during the lunch hour a small orchestra is wont to play the melodies of Strauss, that most Viennese of composers. Without being able to afford to lunch there, others can sit outside the enclosure and enjoy the music for free. Moreover, in the center of the park, protected by his stone arch, stands the statue of the great Johann himself. Edith Hardenberg bought her sandwiches at a local lunch-bar, found a park bench in the sun, and nibbled away while she listened to the waltz tunes."Entschuldigung."She jumped, jerked out of her reverie by the low voice saying "Excuse me."If there was one thing Miss Hardenberg would have none of, it was being addressed by a complete stranger. She glanced to her side.He was young and dark-haired, with soft brown eyes, and his voice had a foreign accent. She was about to look firmly away again when she noticed the young man had an ill.u.s.trated brochure of some kind in his hand and was pointing at a word in the text. Despite herself she glanced down. The brochure was the ill.u.s.trated program notes for The Magic Flute."Please, this word-it is not German, no?"His forefinger was pointing at the word port.i.tura.She should have left there and then, of course, just gotten up and walked away. She began to rewrap her sandwiches."No," she said shortly, "it's Italian.""Ah," said the man apologetically. "I am learning German, but I do not understand Italian. Does it mean the story, please?""No," she said, "it means the score, the music.""Thank you," he said with genuine grat.i.tude. "It is so hard to understand your Viennese operas, but I do love them so much."Her fingers slowed in their flutter to wrap the remaining sandwiches and leave."It is set in Egypt, you know," the young man explained. Such nonsense, to tell her that, she who knew every word of Die Zauberflote."Indeed it is," she said. This had gone far enough, she told herself.

Whoever he was, he was a very impudent young man. Why, they were almost in conversation. The very idea."The same as Aida," he remarked, back to studying his program notes. "I like Verdi, but I think I prefer Mozart."Her sandwiches were rewrapped; she was ready to go. She should just stand up and go. She turned to look at him, and he chose that moment to look up and smile.It was a very shy smile, almost pleading; brown spaniel eyes topped by lashes a model would have killed for."There is no comparison," she said. "Mozart is the master of them all."His smile widened, showing even white teeth."He lived here once. Perhaps he sat here, right on this bench, and made his music.""I'm sure he did no such thing," she said. "The bench was not here then."She rose and turned. The young man rose too and gave a short Viennese bow."I am sorry I disturbed you, Fraulein. But thank you for your help."She was walking out of the park, back to her desk to finish her lunch, furious with herself. Conversations with young men in parks-whatever next? On the other hand, he was only a foreign student trying to learn about Viennese opera. No harm in that, surely. But enough is enough. She pa.s.sed a poster. Of course; the Vienna Opera was staging The Magic Flute in three days. Perhaps it was part of the young man's study course.Despite her pa.s.sion, Edith Hardenberg had never been to an opera in the Staatsoper. She had, of course, roamed the building when it was open in the daytime, but an orchestra ticket had always been beyond her.

They were almost beyond price. Season tickets for the opera were handed down from generation to generation. A season's abonnement was for the seriously rich. Other tickets could be obtained only by influence, of which she had none. Even ordinary tickets were beyond her means. She sighed and returned to her work. That one day of warm weather had been the end. The cold and the gray clouds came back. She returned to her habit of lunching at her usual cafe and at her usual table. She was a very neat lady, a creature of habit. On the third day after the park she arrived at her table at the usual hour, to the minute, and half-noticed that the one next to her was occupied. There was a pair of student books-she did not bother with the t.i.tles-and a half-drunk gla.s.s of water. Hardly had she ordered the meal of the day when the occupant of the table returned from the men's room. It was not until he sat down that he recognized her and gave a start of surprise. "Oh, Gruss Gott-again," he said. Her lips tightened into a disapproving line. The waitress arrived and put down her meal. She was trapped. But the young man was irrepressible. "I finished the program notes. I think I understand it all now." She nodded and began delicately to eat. "Excellent. You are studying here?" Now why had she asked that? What madness had gotten into her? But the chatter of the restaurant rose all around her. What are you worrying about, Edith? Surely a civilized conversation, even with a foreign student, could do no harm? She wondered what Herr Gemutlich would think. He would disapprove, of course. The dark young man grinned happily. "Yes. I study engineering. At the Technical University. When I have my degree, I will go back home and help to develop my country. Please, my name is Karim.""Fraulein Hardenberg," she said primly. "And where do you come from, Herr Karim?""I am from Jordan."Oh, good gracious, an Arab. Well, she supposed there were a lot of them at the Technical University, two blocks across the Karntner Ring. Most of the ones she saw were street vendors, awful people selling carpets and newspapers at the pavement cafes and refusing to go away. The young man next to her looked respectable enough. Perhaps he came from a better family. But after all ... an Arab. She finished her meal and signaled for the bill. Time to leave this young man's company, even though he was remarkably polite. For an Arab."Still," he said regretfully, "I don't think I'll be able to go."Her bill came. She fumbled for some schilling notes."Go where?""To the opera. To see The Magic Flute. Not alone-I wouldn't have the nerve. So many people. Not knowing where to go, where to applaud."She smiled tolerantly."Oh, I don't think you'll go, young man, because you won't get any tickets."He looked puzzled."Oh no, it's not that."He reached into his pocket and placed two pieces of paper on the table. Her table. Beside her bill. Second row of the orchestra. Within feet of the singers. Center aisle."I have a friend in the United Nations. They get an allocation, you know. But he didn't want them, so he gave them to me."

Gave. Not sold, gave. Beyond price, and he gave them away."Would you," asked the young man pleadingly, "take me with you? Please?"It was beautifully phrased, as if she would be taking him.She thought of sitting in that great, vaulted, gilded, rococo paradise, her spirit rising with the voices of the ba.s.ses, baritones, tenors, and sopranos high into the painted ceiling above. ..."Certainly not," she said."Oh, I am sorry, Fraulein. I have offended you."He reached out and took the tickets, one half in one strong young hand, the other half in the other, and began to tear."No." Her hand came down on his own before more than half an inch of the priceless tickets had been torn in half. "You mustn't do that."She was bright pink."But they are of no use to me.""Well, I suppose ..."His face lit up."Then you will show me your Opera House? Yes?"Show him the Opera. Surely that was different. Not a date. Not the sort of dates people went on who ... accepted dates. More like a tour guide, really. A Viennese courtesy, showing a student from abroad one of the wonders of the Austrian capital. No harm in that ...They met on the steps by arrangement at seven-fifteen. She had driven in from Grinzing and parked without trouble. They joined the bustle of the moving throng alive already with antic.i.p.atory pleasure.If Edith Hardenberg, spinster of twenty loveless summers, were ever going to have an intimation of paradise, it was that night in 1990 when she sat a few feet from the stage and allowed herself to drown in the music. If she were ever to know the sensation of being drunk, it was that evening when she permitted herself to become utterly intoxicated in the torrent of the rising and falling voices. In the first half, as Papageno sang and cavorted before her, she felt a dry young hand placed on top of her own. Instinct caused her to withdraw her hand sharply. In the second half, when it happened again, she did nothing and felt, with the music, the warmth seeping into her of another person's blood-heat. When it was over, she was still intoxicated. Otherwise she would never have allowed him to walk her across the square to Freud's old haunt, the Cafe Landtmann, now restored to its former 1890 glory. There it was the superlative headwaiter Robert himself who showed them to a table, and they ate a late dinner. Afterward, he walked her back to her car. She had calmed down. Her reserve was rea.s.serting itself. "I would so like you to show me the real Vienna," said Karim quietly. "Your Vienna, the Vienna of fine museums and concerts. Otherwise, I will never understand the culture of Austria, not the way you could show it to me." "What are you saying, Karim?" They stood by her car. No, she was definitely not offering him a lift to his apartment, wherever it was, and any suggestion that he come home with her would reveal exactly what sort of a wretch he really was. "That I would like to see you again." "Why?" If he tells me I am beautiful, I will hit him, she thought. "Because you are kind," he said. "Oh." She was bright pink in the darkness. Without a further word he bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. Then he was gone, striding away across the square. She drove home alone. That night, Edith Hardenberg's dreams were troubled. She dreamed of long ago. Once there had been Horst, who had loved her through that long hot summer of 1970 when she was nineteen and a virgin. Horst, who had taken her chast.i.ty and made her love him. Horst, who had walked out in the winter without a note or an explanation or a word of farewell. At first she had thought he must have had an accident, and she called all the hospitals. Then that his employment as a traveling salesman had called him away and he would call. Later, she learned he had married the girl in Graz whom he had also been loving when his rounds took him there. She had cried until the spring. Then she took all the memories of him, all the signs of his being there, and burned them. She burned the presents and the photos they had taken as they walked in the grounds and sailed on the lakes of the Schlosspark at Laxenburg, and most of all she burned the picture of the tree under which he had loved her first, really loved her and made her his own. She had had no more men. They just betray you and leave you, her mother had said, and her mother was right. There would be no more men, ever, she vowed. That night, a week before Christmas, the dreams ebbed away before the dawn, and she slept with the program of The Magic Flute clutched to her thin little bosom. As she slept, some of the lines seemed to ease away from the corners of her eyes and the edges of her mouth. And as she slept, she smiled. Surely there was no harm in that.

Chapter 13.

The big gray Mercedes was having trouble with the traffic. Hammering furiously on the horn, the driver had to force a pa.s.sage through the torrent of cars, vans, market stalls, and pushcarts that create the tangle of life between the streets called Khulafa and Rashid. This was old Baghdad, where traders and merchants, sellers of cloth, gold, and spices, hawkers and vendors of most known commodities, had plied their trades for ten centuries. The car turned down Bank Street, where both sides of the road were jammed with parked cars, and finally nosed into Shurja Street. Ahead of it, the street market of spice sellers was impenetrable. The driver half-turned his head. "This is as far as I can go." Leila Al-Hilla nodded and waited for the door to be opened for her. Beside the driver sat Kemal, General Kadiri's hulking personal bodyguard, a lumbering sergeant of the Armored Corps who had been attached to Kadiri's staff for years. She hated him. After a pause, the sergeant opened his door, straightened his great frame on the sidewalk, and opened the rear pa.s.senger door. He knew she had humiliated him once again, and it showed in his eyes. She alighted from the car and gave him not a glance or word of thanks. One reason she hated the bodyguard was that he followed her everywhere. It was his job, of course, a.s.signed to him by Kadiri, but that did not make her dislike him less. When he was sober, Kadiri was a tough professional soldier; in matters s.e.xual he was also insanely jealous. Hence his rule that she should never be alone in the city.

The other reason for her dislike of the bodyguard was his evident l.u.s.t for her. A woman of long-degraded tastes, she could well understand that any man might l.u.s.t for her body, and if the price was right she would indulge any such l.u.s.t, no matter how bizarre its fulfillment. But Kemal committed the ultimate insult: As a sergeant, he was poor. How dare he entertain such thoughts? Yet he clearly did-a mixture of contempt for her and brutish desire. It showed when he knew General Kadiri was not looking. For his part he knew of her revulsion, and it amused him to insult her with his glances while verbally maintaining an att.i.tude of formality. She had complained to Kadiri about his dumb insolence, but he had merely laughed. He could suspect any man of desiring her, but Kemal was allowed many liberties because Kemal had saved his life in the marshes of Al Fao against the Iranians, and Kemal would die for him. The bodyguard slammed the door and was at her side as they continued on foot down Shurja Street. This zone is called Agid al Nasara, the Area of the Christians. Apart from St. George's Church across the river, built by the British for themselves and their Protestant faith, there are three Christian sects in Iraq, representing among them some seven percent of the population. The largest is the a.s.syrian or Syriac sect, whose cathedral lies within the Area of the Christians, off Shurja Street. A mile away stands the Armenian church, close to another tangled web of small streets and alleys whose history goes back many centuries called the Camp el Arman, the old Armenian Quarter. Cheek by jowl with the Syriac cathedral stands St. Joseph's, the church of the Chaldean Christians, the smallest sect. If the Syriac rite resembles Greek Orthodox, the Chaldeans are an offshoot of the Catholic Church.

The most notable Iraqi of the Chaldean Christians was then Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, although his doglike devotion to Saddam Hussein and his policies of genocide might indicate that Mr. Aziz had somehow gone adrift from the teachings of the Prince of Peace. Leila Al-Hilla had also been born a Chaldean, and now the link was proving useful. The ill-a.s.sorted couple reached the wrought-iron gate giving onto the cobbled yard in front of the arched door of the Chaldean church. Kemal stopped. As a Moslem, he would not go a step farther. She nodded to him and walked through the gate. Kemal watched her as she bought a small candle from a stall by the door, drew her heavy black lace shawl over her head, and entered the dark, incense-heavy interior. The bodyguard shrugged and sauntered away a few yards to buy a can of c.o.ke and find a place to sit and watch the doorway. He wondered why his master permitted this nonsense. The woman was a wh.o.r.e; the general would tire of her one day, and he, Kemal, had been promised that he could have his pleasure before she was dismissed. He smiled at the prospect, and a dribble of cola ran down his chin. Inside the church Leila paused to light her candle from one of the hundreds that burned adjacent to the door, then, head bowed, made her way to the confessional boxes on the far side of the nave. A black-robed priest pa.s.sed but paid her no attention. It was always the same confessional box. She entered at the precise hour, dodging ahead of a woman in black who also sought a priest to listen to her litany of sins, probably more ba.n.a.l than those of the younger woman who pushed her aside and took her place. Leila closed the door behind her, turned, and sat on the penitent's seat. To her right was a fretted grille. She heard a rustle behind it. He would be there; he was always there at the appointed hour.

Who was he? she wondered. Why did he pay so handsomely for the information she brought him? He was not a foreigner-his Arabic was too good for that, the Arabic of one born and raised in Baghdad. And his money was good, very good. "Leila?" The voice was a murmur, low and even. She always had to arrive after him and leave before him. He had warned her not to loiter outside in the hopes of seeing him, but how could she have done that anyway, with Kemal lurking at her shoulder? The oaf would see something and report to his master. It was more than her life was worth. "Identify yourself, please." "Father, I have sinned in matters of the flesh and am not worthy of your absolution." It was he who had invented the phrase, because no one else would say that. "What have you for me?" She reached between her legs, pulled aside the crotch of her panties, and abstracted the phony tampon he had given her weeks ago. One end unscrewed. From the hollow interior she withdrew a thin roll of paper formed into a tube no larger than a pencil. This she pa.s.sed through the fret of the grille. "Wait." She heard the rustle of the onionskin paper as the man ran a skilled eye over the notes she had made-a report on the deliberations and conclusions of the previous day's planning council chaired by Saddam Hussein himself, at which General Abdullah Kadiri had been present. "Good, Leila. Very good." Today the money was in Swiss francs, very high-denomination notes, pa.s.sed through the grille from him to her. She secreted them all in the place she had stored her information, a place she knew most Moslem men deemed unclean at a certain time. Only a doctor or the dreaded AMAM would find them there. "How long must this go on?" she asked the grille. "Not long now. War is coming soon. By the end of it, the Rais will fall. Others will take the power. I shall be one of them. Then you will be truly rewarded, Leila. Stay calm, do your job, and be patient." She smiled. Really rewarded. Money, lots of money, enough to go far away and be wealthy for the rest of her days. "Go now." She rose and left the booth. The old woman in black had found someone else to hear her confession. Leila recrossed the nave and emerged into the sunshine. The oaf Kemal was beyond the wrought-iron gate, crumpling a tin can in one great fist, sweating in the heat. Good, let him sweat. He would sweat much more if only he knew. ... Without glancing at him, she turned down Shurja Street, through the teeming market, toward the parked car. Kemal, furious but helpless, lumbered behind her. She took not the slightest bit of notice of a poor fellagha pushing a bicycle with an open wicker basket on the pillion, and he took not the slightest notice of her. The man was only in the market at the behest of the cook in the household where he worked, buying mace, coriander, and saffron. Alone in his confessional, the man in the black ca.s.sock of a Chaldean priest sat awhile longer to ensure that his agent was clear of the street. It was extremely unlikely that she would recognize him, but in this game even outside chances were excessive. He had meant what he said to her. War was coming. The Americans had the bit between their teeth and would not now back off. So long as that fool in the palace by the river at the Tamuz Bridge did not spoil it all and pull back unilaterally from Kuwait. Fortunately, he seemed h.e.l.l-bent on his own destruction. The Americans would win the war, and then they would come to Baghdad to finish the job. Surely they would not just win Kuwait and think that was the end of it? No people could be so powerful and so stupid. When they came, they would need a new regime. Being Americans, they would gravitate toward someone who spoke fluent English, someone who understood their ways, their thoughts, and their speech, and who would know what to say to please them and become their choice. The very education, the very cosmopolitan urbanity that now militated against him, would be in his favor. For the moment, he was excluded from the highest counsels and innermost decisions of the Rais-because he was not of the oafish Al-Tikriti tribe, or a lifetime fanatic of the Ba'ath Party, or a full general, or a half-brother of Saddam. But Kadiri was Tikrit-and trusted. Only a mediocre general of tanks and with the tastes of a rutting camel, he had once played in the dust of the alleys of Tikrit with Saddam and his clan, and that was enough. Kadiri was present at every decision-making meeting and knew all the secrets. The man in the confessional needed to know these things in order to make his preparations. When he was satisfied that the coast was clear, the man rose and left. Instead of crossing the nave, he slipped through a side door into the vestry, nodded at a real priest who was robing for a service, and left the church by a back door. The man with the bicycle was only twenty feet away. He happened to glance up as the priest emerged in his black ca.s.sock into the sunlight and whirled away just in time. The man in the ca.s.sock glanced about him, noticed but thought nothing of the fellagha bent over his bicycle adjusting the chain, and walked quickly down the alley toward a small unmarked car. The spice-shopper had sweat running down his face and his heart pounded. Close, too d.a.m.n close. He had deliberately avoided going anywhere near the Mukhabarat headquarters in Mansour just in case he ran into that face. What the h.e.l.l was the man doing as a priest in the Christian quarter? G.o.d, it had been years-years since they played together on the lawn of Mr. Hartley's Tasisiya prep school, since he had punched the boy on the jaw for insulting his kid brother, since they had recited poetry in cla.s.s, always excelled by Abdelkarim Badri. It had been a long time since he had seen his old friend Ha.s.san Rahmani, now head of Counterintelligence for the Republic of Iraq.

It was approaching Christmas, and in the deserts of northern Saudi Arabia, three hundred thousand Americans and Europeans turned their thoughts to home as they prepared to sit out the festival in a deeply Moslem land. But despite the approaching celebration of the birth of Christ, the buildup of the greatest invasion force since Normandy rolled on. The portion of desert in which the Coalition forces lay was still due south of Kuwait. No hint had been given that eventually half those forces would sweep much farther west. At the coastal ports the new divisions were still pouring in. The British Fourth Armoured Brigade had joined the Desert Rats, the Seventh, to form the First Armoured Division. The French were boosting their contribution up to ten thousand men, including the Foreign Legion.

The Americans had imported, or were about to, the First Cavalry Division, Second and Third Armored Cavalry Regiments, the First Mechanized Infantry Division and First and Third Armored, two divisions of Marines, and the 82nd and 101st Airborne. Right up on the border, where they wanted to be, were the Saudi Task Force and Special Forces, aided by Egyptian and Syrian divisions and other units drawn from a variety of smaller Arab nations. The northern waters of the Arabian Gulf were almost plated with warships from the Coalition navies. Either in the Gulf or the Red Sea on the other side of Saudi Arabia, the United States had positioned five carrier groups, headed by the Eisenhower, Independence, John F. Kennedy, Midway, and Saratoga, with the America, Ranger, and Theodore Roosevelt still to come. The air power of these alone, with their Tomcats, Hornets, Intruders, Prowlers, Avengers, and Hawkeyes, was impressive to behold. In the Gulf the American battleship Wisconsin was on station, to be joined by the Missouri in January. Throughout the Gulf States and across Saudi Arabia, every airfield worth the name was crammed with fighter, bomber, tanker, freighter, and early-warning aircraft, all of which were already flying around the clock, though not yet invading Iraqi air s.p.a.ce, with the exception of the spy planes that cruised overhead unseen. In several cases the United States Air Force was sharing airfield s.p.a.ce with squadrons of the British Royal Air Force. As the aircrews shared a common language, communication was easy, informal, and friendly. Occasionally, however, misunderstandings did occur. A notable one concerned a secret British location known only as MMFD. On an early training mission, a British Tornado had been asked by the air traffic controller whether it had reached a certain turning point. The pilot replied that he had not, he was still over MMFD. As time went by, many American pilots heard of this place and scoured their maps to find it. It was a puzzle for two reasons: The British apparently spent a lot of time over it, and it was not located on any American air map. The theory was floated that it might be a mishearing of KKMC, which stood for King Khaled Military City, a large Saudi base. This was discounted, and the search went on. Finally the Americans gave up. Wherever MMFD was located, it was simply not to be found on the war maps supplied to USAF squadrons by their planners in Riyadh. Eventually the Tornado pilots admitted the secret of MMFD. It stood for "miles and miles of f.u.c.king desert." On the ground, the soldiers were living in the heart of MMFD. For many, sleeping under their tanks, mobile guns, and armored cars, life was hard and, worse, boring. There were distractions, however, and one was visiting neighboring units as the time dragged by. The Americans were equipped with particularly good cots, for which the British l.u.s.ted. By chance, the Americans were also issued singularly revolting prepacked meals, probably devised by a Pentagon civil servant who would have died rather than eat them three times a day. They were called MREs, meaning Meals-Ready-to-Eat. The U.S. soldiery denied this quality in them and decided that MRE really stood for Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. By contrast, the Brits were eating much better, so true to the capitalist ethic, a brisk trade was soon established between American beds and British rations. Another piece of news from the British lines that bemused the Americans was the order placed by London's Ministry of Defence for half a million condoms for the soldiers in the Gulf. In the bleak deserts of Arabia such a purchase was deemed to indicate the Brits must know something the GIs did not. The mystery was resolved the day before the ground war started. The Americans had spent a hundred days cleaning their rifles over and over again to purge them of the all-pervasive sand, dust, grit, and gravel that endlessly blew into the ends of the barrels. The Brits whipped off their condoms to reveal nice shiny barrels gleaming with gun oil. The other princ.i.p.al development that occurred just before Christmas was the reintegration of the French contingency into the heart of Allied planning. In the early days, France had had a disaster of a Defense Minister called Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who appeared to enjoy a keen sympathy with Iraq and ordered the French commander to pa.s.s all Allied planning decisions on to Paris. When this was made plain to General Schwarzkopf, he and Sir Peter de la Billiere almost burst out laughing. Monsieur Chevenement was at that time also a leading light of the France-Iraq Friendship Society. Although the French contingent was commanded by a fine soldier in the form of General Michel Roquejoffre, France had to be excluded from all planning councils. At the end of the year, Pierre Joxe was appointed French Defense Minister and at once rescinded the order. From then on, General Roquejoffre could be taken into the confidence of the Americans and British.

Two days before Christmas, Mike Martin received from Jericho the answer to a question posed a week earlier. Jericho was adamant: There had been within the previous few days a crisis cabinet meeting containing only the inner core of Saddam Hussein's cabinet, the Revolutionary Command Council, and the top generals. At the meeting the question of Iraq leaving Kuwait voluntarily had been raised. Obviously it had not been raised as a proposal by anyone at the meeting-no one was that stupid. All recalled too well the earlier occasion when, during the Iran-Iraq war, an Iranian suggestion that if Saddam Hussein stepped down there could be peace had been broached. Saddam had asked for opinions. The Health Minister had suggested such a move might be wise-as a purely temporary ploy, of course. Saddam invited the minister into a side room, pulled out his sidearm, shot him dead, and returned to resume the cabinet meeting. The matter of Kuwait had been raised in the form of a denunciation of the United Nations for even daring to suggest the idea. All had waited for Saddam to give a lead. He declined, sitting as he so often did at the head of the table like a watching cobra, eyes moving from man to man in an attempt to smoke out some hint of disloyalty. Not unnaturally, without a lead from the Rais, the conversation had petered out. Then Saddam had begun to speak very quietly, which was when he was at his most dangerous. Anyone, he said, who let the thought of admitting to such a catastrophic humiliation of Iraq in the face of the Americans cross his mind was a man prepared to play the role of lickspittle to America for the rest of his life. For such a man there could be no place at this table. That had been the end of it. Everyone present bent over backward to explain that such a thought would never, under any circ.u.mstances, occur to any of them. Then the Iraqi dictator had added something else: Only if Iraq could win and be seen to win would it be possible to withdraw from Iraq's nineteenth province, he said.

Everyone around the table then nodded sagely, though none could see what he was talking about. It was a long report, and Mike Martin transmitted it to the villa outside Riyadh that same night. Chip Barber and Simon Paxman pored over it for hours. Each had decided to take a brief break from Saudi Arabia and fly home for several days, leaving the running of Mike Martin and Jericho from the Riyadh end in the hands of Julian Gray for the British and the local CIA Head of Station for the Americans. There were only twenty-four days to go until the expiration of the United Nations deadline and the start of General Chuck Horner's air war against Iraq. Both men wanted a short home leave, and Jericho's powerful report gave them the chance. They could take it with them. "What do you think he means, 'win and be seen to win'?" asked Barber. "No idea," said Paxman. "We'll have to get some a.n.a.lysts who are better than we are to have a look at it." "We too. I guess n.o.body will be around for the next few days except the shop-minders. I'll give it the way it is to Bill Stewart, and he'll probably have some eggheads try to add an in-depth a.n.a.lysis before it goes on to the Director and the State Department." "I know an egghead I'd like to have a look at it," said Paxman, and on that note they left for the airport to catch their respective flights home. On Christmas Eve, seated in a discreet wine bar in London's West End with Simon Paxman, Dr. Terry Martin was shown the whole text of the Jericho message and asked if he would try to work out what, if anything, Saddam Hussein could mean by winning against America as a price for leaving Kuwait. "By the way," he asked Paxman, "I know it breaks the rules of need-to know, but I really am worried. I do these favors for you-give me one in return. How is my brother Mike doing in Kuwait? Is he still safe?"

Paxman stared at the doctor of Arabic studies for several seconds.

"I can only tell you that he is no longer in Kuwait," he said. "And that's more than my job is worth."

Terry Martin flushed with relief.

"It's the best Christmas present I could have. Thank you, Simon." He looked up and waved a waggish finger. "Just one thing-don't even think of sending him into Baghdad."

Paxman had been in the business fifteen years. He kept his face immobile, his tone light. The scholar was clearly just joking.

"Really? Why not?"

Martin was finishing his gla.s.s of wine and failed to notice the flicker of alarm in the intelligence officer's eyes.

"My dear Simon, Baghdad's the one city in the world he mustn't set foot in. You remember those tapes of Iraqi radio intercepts Sean Plummer let me have? Some of the voices have been identified. I recognized one of the names. A h.e.l.l of a fluke, but I know I'm right."

"Really?" said Paxman smoothly. "Tell me more."

"It's been a long time, of course, but I know it was the same man. And guess what? He's now head of Counterintelligence in Baghdad, Saddam's number-one spy-hunter."

"Ha.s.san Rahmani," murmured Paxman. Terry Martin should stay off booze, even before Christmas. He can't carry it. His tongue's running away with him.

"That's the one. They were at school together, you know. We all were.

Good old Mr. Hartley's prep school. Mike and Ha.s.san were best mates. See? That's why he can never be seen around Baghdad."

Paxman left the wine bar and stared at the dumpy figure of the Arabist

heading down the street.

"Oh s.h.i.t," he said. "Oh b.l.o.o.d.y, b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l."

Someone had just ruined his Christmas, and he was about to ruin Steve Laing's.

Edith Hardenberg had gone to Salzburg to spend the festive season with her mother, a family tradition that went back many years.

Karim, the young Jordanian student, was able to visit Gidi Barzilai at his safe-house apartment, where the controller for Operation Joshua was dispensing drinks to the off-duty members of the yarid and neviot teams working under him. Only one unfortunate was up in Salzburg, keeping an eye on Miss Hardenberg in case she should return suddenly to the capital.

Karim's real name was Avi Herzog, a twenty-nine-year-old who had been seconded to the Mossad several years earlier from Unit 504, a branch of Army Intelligence specializing in cross-border raids, which accounted for his fluent Arabic. Because of his good looks and the deceptively shy and diffident manner he could affect when he wished, the Mossad had twice used him for honeytrap operations.

"So how's it going, loverboy?" asked Gidi as he pa.s.sed around the drinks.

"Slowly," said Avi.

"Don't take too long. The old man wants a result, remember."

"This is one very uptight lady," replied Avi. "Only interested in a meeting of minds-yet."

In his cover as a student from Amman, he had been set up in a small flat shared with one other Arab student, in fact a member of the neviot team, a phone-tapper by trade who also spoke Arabic. This was in case

Edith Hardenberg or anyone else took it into their head to check out where and how he lived and with whom.

The shared flat would pa.s.s any inspection-it was littered with textbooks on engineering and strewn with Jordanian newspapers and magazines. Both men had genuinely been enrolled in the Technical University in case a check were made there also. It was Herzog's flat- mate who spoke.

"Meeting of minds? Screw that."

"That's the point," said Avi. "I can't."

When the laughter died down, he added: "By the way, I'm going to want danger money."

"Why?" asked Gidi. "Think she's going to bite it off when you drop your jeans?"

"Nope. It's the art galleries, concerts, operas, recitals. I could die of boredom before I get that far."

"You just carry on the way you know how, boychick. You're only here because the Office says you've got something we don't."

"Yes," said the woman member of the yarid tracking team. "About nine inches."

"That's enough of that, young Yael. You can be back on traffic duty in Hayarkon Street any time you like."

The drink, the laughter, and the banter in Hebrew flowed. Late that evening, Yael discovered she was right. It was a good Christmas for the Mossad team in Vienna.

* * * "So what do you think, Terry?" Steve Laing and Simon Paxman had invited Terry Martin to join them in one of the Firm's apartments in Kensington. They needed more privacy than they could get in a restaurant. It was two days before the New Year. "Fascinating," said Martin. "Absolutely fascinating. This is for real? Saddam really said all this?" "Why do you ask?" "Well, if you'll forgive my saying so, it's a strange telephone tap. The narrator seems to be reporting to someone else on a meeting he attended. ... The other man on the line doesn't seem to say a thing." There was simply no way the Firm was going to tell Terry Martin how they had come by the report. "The other man's interventions were perfunctory," said Laing smoothly. "Just grunts and expressions of interest. There seemed no point in including them." "But this is the language Saddam used?" "So we understand, yes." "Fascinating. The first time I've ever seen anything he said that was not destined for publication or a wider audience." Martin had in his hands not the handwritten report by Jericho, which had been destroyed by his own brother in Baghdad as soon as it had been read, word for word, into the tape recorder. It was a typewritten transcript in Arabic of the text that had reached Riyadh in the burst transmission before Christmas. He also had the Firm's own English translation. "That last phrase," said Paxman, who would be heading back to Riyadh the same evening, "where he says 'win and be seen to win'-does that tell you anything?" "Of course. But you know, you're still using the word win in its European or North American connotation. I would use the word succeed in English."

"All right, Terry, how does he think he can succeed against America and the Coalition?" asked Laing.

"By humiliation. I told you before, he must leave America looking like a complete fool."

"But he won't pull out of Kuwait in the next twenty days? We really need to know, Terry."

"Look, Saddam went in there because his claims would not be met,"

said Martin. "He demanded four things: takeover of Warba and Bubiyan Islands to have access to the sea, compensation for the excess oil he claims Kuwait snitched from the shared oil field, an end to Kuwait's overproduction, and a writeoff of the fifteen-billion-dollar war debt. If he can get these, he can pull back with honor, leaving America hanging in the breeze. That's winning."

"Any hint that he thinks he might get them?"

Martin shrugged.

"He thinks the United Nations peacemongers could pull the rug. He's gambling that time is on his side, that if he can keep spinning things out, the resolve of the UN will ebb away. He could be right."

"The man doesn't make sense," snapped Laing. "He has the deadline.

January fifteenth, not twenty days away. He's going to be crushed."

"Unless," suggested Paxman, "one of the permanent members of the Security Council comes up with a last-minute peace plan to put the deadline on hold."

Laing looked gloomy.

"Paris or Moscow, or both," he predicted.

"If it comes to war, does he still think he could win? Beg your pardon, 'succeed'?" asked Paxman.

"Yes," said Terry Martin. "But it's back to what I told you before-American casualties. Don't forget, Saddam is a back-street

gunman. His const.i.tuency is not the diplomatic corridors of Cairo and Riyadh. It's all those alleys and bazaars crammed with Palestinians and other Arabs who resent America, the backer of Israel. An