The Fist of God (39 page)

second envelope went behind it, and the brick went back. Martin checked to see if anyone was watching, but he was completely alone; no one would want to come to this deserted place after dark.

The third and last drop was in another cemetery, but this time the British one, long abandoned, in Waziraya, near the Turkish embassy.

As in Kuwait, it was a grave, but not a scrape beneath the marble of the tomb; rather, it was the inside of a small stone jar cemented where the headstone would be, at one end of a long-abandoned plot.

“Never mind,” murmured Martin to whatever long-dead warrior of the empire lay beneath. “Just carry on, you’re doing fine.”

Because Moncada had been based at the United Nations building, miles down the Matar Sadam Airport road, he had wisely made his chalk-mark sites closer to the wider-spaced roads of Mansour, where they could be seen from a passing car. The rule was that whoever—Moncada or Jericho—saw a chalk mark, he should note which drop it referred to, then erase it with a damp cloth. The placer of the mark, passing a day or so later, would see that it was gone and know his message had been received and (presumably) the drop visited and the package retrieved.

In this way both agents had communicated with each other for two years and never met.

Martin, unlike Moncada, had no car, so he cycled the whole distance.

His first mark, a Saint Andrew’s cross in the figure of an X, was made with blue chalk on a stone post of the gate of an abandoned mansion.

The second was in white chalk, on the rusty-red sheet-iron door of a garage at the back of a house in Yarmuk. It took the form of a cross of Lorraine. The third was in red chalk—a crescent of Islam with a horizontal bar through the middle—placed on the wall of the compound building of the Union of Arab Journalists, on the edge of The Fist of God

Mutanabi district. Iraqi journalists are not encouraged to be a very investigative crowd, and a chalk mark on their wall would hardly make headlines.

Martin could not know whether Jericho, despite Moncada’s warning that he could return, was still patrolling the city, peering from his car window to see if marks had been placed on walls. All Martin could now do was check daily and wait.

It was the seventh of November when he noticed that the white chalk mark was gone. Had the garage door owner decided to clean up his sheet of rusty metal of his own accord?

Martin cycled on. The blue chalk on the mansion gatepost was missing; so was the red mark on the journalists’ wall.

That night, he serviced the three dead-letter boxes dedicated to messages from Jericho to his controller.

One was behind a loose brick in the rear of the wall enclosing the Kasra vegetable market off Saadun Street. There was a folded sheet of onionskin paper for him. The second drop, under the loose stone windowsill of a derelict house up an alley in that maze of tacky streets that make up the
soukh
on the north bank of the river near Shuhada Bridge, yielded the same offering. The third and last, under the loose flagstone of an abandoned courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, gave up a third square of thin paper.

Martin hid them under sticky tape around his left thigh and pedaled home to Mansour.

By the light of a flickering candle, he read them all. The message was the same: Jericho was alive and well. He was prepared to work again for the West, and he understood that the British and Americans were now the recipients of his information. But the risks had now increased immeasurably, and so would his fees. He awaited agreement to this The Fist of God

and an indication of what was wanted.

Martin burned all three messages and crushed the ashes to powder. He already knew the answer to both queries. Langley was prepared to be generous, really generous, if the product was good. As for the information needed, Martin had memorized a list of questions concerning Saddam’s mood, his concept of strategy, and the locations of major command centers and sites of manufacture for weapons of mass destruction.

Just before dawn, he let Riyadh know that Jericho was back in the game.

It was on November 10 that Dr. Terry Martin returned to his small and cluttered office in the School of Oriental and African Studies to find a scrap of paper from his secretary placed foursquare on his blotter:

“A Mr. Plummer called; said you had his number and would know what it was about.”

The abruptness of the text indicated that Miss Wordsworth was miffed.

She was a lady who liked to protect her academic charges with the possessive wraparound security of a mother hen. Clearly, this meant knowing what was going on at all times. Callers who declined to tell her why they were phoning or what the matter concerned did not meet with her approval.

With the autumn term in full swing and a whole cast of new students to cope with, Terry Martin had almost forgotten his request to the Director of the Arabic Services at Government Communications Headquarters.

When Martin called, Plummer was out at lunch; then afternoon lectures kept him busy until four. His connection with Gloucestershire The Fist of God

found its target just before he went home at five.

“Ah, yes,” said Plummer. “You recall you asked for anything odd, anything that did not make sense? We picked up something yesterday at our outstation in Cyprus that seems to be a bit of a stinker. You can listen to it, if you like.”

“Here in London?” asked Martin.

“Ah, no, afraid not. It’s on tape here, of course, but frankly you’d need to hear it on the big machine, with all the enhancement we can get. A simple tape player wouldn’t have the quality. It’s rather muffled; that’s why even my Arab staff can’t work it out.”

The rest of the week was fully booked for both of them. Martin agreed to drive over on Sunday, and Plummer offered to stand him lunch at a

“quite decent little pub about a mile from the office.”

The two men in tweed jackets caused no raised eyebrows in the beamed hostelry, and each ordered the Sunday-roast dish of the day, beef and Yorkshire pudding.

“We don’t know who is talking to whom,” said Plummer, “but clearly they are pretty senior men. For some reason the caller is using an open telephone line and appears to have returned from a visit to forward headquarters in Kuwait. Perhaps he was using his car phone; we know it wasn’t on a military net, so probably the person being spoken to was not a military man. Senior bureaucrat, perhaps.”

The beef arrived, and they ceased talking while it was served with roast potatoes and parsnips. When the waitress left their corner booth, Plummer went on.

“The caller seems to be commenting on Iraqi Air Force reports that the Americans and Brits are flying an increasing number of aggressive fighter patrols right up to the Iraqi border, then veering away at the last minute.”

The Fist of God

Martin nodded. He had heard of the tactic. It was designed to monitor Iraqi air-defense reactions to such seeming attacks on their air space, forcing them to “illuminate” their radar screens and SAM missile sights, thus revealing their exact positions to the watching AWACS

circling out over the Gulf.

“The speaker refers to the Beni el Kalb, ‘the sons of dogs,’ meaning the Americans, and the listener laughs and suggests Iraq is wrong to respond to these tactics, which are evidently meant to trap them into revealing their defensive positions.

“Then the speaker says something that we can’t work out. There’s some garbling at this point, static or something. We can enhance most of the message to clear the interference, but the speaker muffles his words at this point.

“Anyway, the listener gets very annoyed and tells him to shut up and get off the line. Indeed, the listener—who we believe to be in Baghdad—slams the phone down. It’s the last two sentences I’d like you to hear.”

After lunch, Plummer drove Martin over to the monitoring complex, which was still functioning precisely as on a weekday. GCHQ operates on a seven-days-per-week schedule. In a soundproofed room rather like a recording studio, Plummer asked one of the technicians to play the mystery tape. He and Martin sat in silence as the guttural voices from Iraq filled the room.

The conversation began as Plummer had described. Toward the end, the Iraqi who had initiated the call appeared to become excited. The voice pitch rose.

“
Not for long, Rafeek. Soon we shall
...”

Then the clutter began, and the words were garbled. But their effect on the man in Baghdad was electric. He cut in.

The Fist of God

“
Be silent, ibn-al-gahba
.”

Then he slammed the phone down, as if suddenly and horribly aware that the line was not secure.

The technician played the tape three times and at slightly different speeds.

“What do you think?” asked Plummer.

“Well, they’re both members of the Party,” said Martin. “Only Party hierarchs use the address
Rafeek
, or Comrade.”

“Right, so we have two bigwigs chatting about the American arms buildup and the U.S. Air Force provocations against the border.”

“Then the speaker gets excited, probably angry, with a hint of exultation. Uses the phrase ‘not for long.’ ”

“Indicating some changes are going to be made?” asked Plummer.

“Sounds like it,” said Martin.

“Then the garbled bit. But look at the listener’s reaction, Terry. He not only slams the phone down, he calls his colleague ‘son of a whore.’

That’s pretty strong stuff, eh?”

“Very strong. Only the senior man of the two could use that phrase and get away with it,” said Martin. “What the hell provoked it?”

“It’s the garbled phrase. Listen again.”

The technician played the single phrase again.

“Something about Allah?” suggested Plummer. “ ‘Soon we shall be with Allah? Be in the hands of Allah?’ ”

“It sounds to me like: ‘Soon we shall have ... something ... something

... Allah.’

“All right, Terry. I’ll go along with that. ‘Have the help of Allah,’

perhaps?”

“Then why would the other man explode in rage?” asked Martin.

“Attributing the goodwill of the Almighty to one’s own cause is The Fist of God

nothing new. Nor particularly offensive. I don’t know. Can you let me have a duplicate tape to take home with me?”

“Sure.”

“Have you asked our American cousins about it?”

“Of course. Fort Meade caught the same conversation, off a satellite.

They can’t work it out, either. In fact, they don’t rate it highly. For them it’s on the back burner.”

Terry Martin drove home with the small cassette tape in his pocket. To Hilary’s considerable annoyance, he insisted on playing and replaying the brief conversation over and over again on their bedside cassette player. When he protested, Terry pointed out that Hilary sometimes worried and worried over a single missing answer in the
Times
crossword puzzle. Hilary was outraged at the comparison.

“At least I get the answer the following morning,” he snapped, and rolled over and went to sleep.

Terry Martin did not get the answer the following morning, or the next. He played his tape during breaks between lectures, and at other times when he had a few spare moments, jotting down possible alternatives for the jumbled words. But always the sense eluded him.

Why had the other man in that conversation been so angry about a harmless reference to Allah?

It was not until five days later that the two gutturals and the sibilant contained in the garbled phrase made sense.

When they did, he tried to get hold of Simon Paxman at Century House, but he was told his contact was away until further notice. He asked to be put through to Steve Laing, but the head of Ops for the Mid-East was also not available.

Though he could not know it, Paxman was on an extended stay at the SIS headquarters in Riyadh, and Laing was visiting the same city for a The Fist of God

major conference with Chip Barber of the CIA.

The man they called the “spotter” flew into Vienna from Tel Aviv via London and Frankfurt, was met by no one, and took a taxi from Schwechat Airport to the Sheraton Hotel, where he had a reservation.

The spotter was rubicund and jovial, an all-American lawyer from New York with documents to prove it. His American-accented English was flawless—not surprising, as he had spent years in the United States—and his German passable.

Within hours of arriving in Vienna, he had employed the secretarial services of the Sheraton to compose and draft a courteous letter on his law firm’s letterhead to a certain Wolfgang Gemütlich, vice-president of the Winkler Bank.

The stationery was perfectly genuine, and should a phone check be made, the signatory really was a senior partner at that most prestigious New York law firm, although he was away on vacation (something the Mossad had checked out in New York) and was certainly not the same man as the visitor to Vienna.

The letter was both apologetic and intriguing, as it was meant to be.

The writer represented a client of great wealth and standing who now wished to make substantial lodgements of his fortune in Europe.

It was the client who had personally insisted, apparently after hearing from a friend, that the Winkler Bank be approached in the matter, and specifically the person of the good Herr Gemütlich.

The writer would have made a prior appointment, but both his client and the law firm placed immense importance upon utter discretion, avoiding open phone lines and faxes to discuss client business, so the writer had taken advantage of a European visit to divert to Vienna The Fist of God

personally.

His schedule, alas, only permitted him three days in Vienna, but if Herr Gemütlich would be gracious enough to spare him an interview, he—the American—would be delighted to come to the bank.

The letter was dropped by the American personally through the bank’s mail slot during the night, and by noon of the next day, the bank’s messenger had deposited the reply at the Sheraton. Herr Gemütlich would be delighted to see the American lawyer at ten the following morning.

From the moment the spotter was shown in, his eyes missed nothing.