Riyadh was not the only radio mast that caught the burst. Outside Baghdad, another satellite dish, sweeping the VHF band relentlessly, caught part of it. The message was so long that, even shortened, it lasted four seconds. The Iraqi listeners caught the last two and got a fix.
As soon as he had sent, Martin closed down and packed away his equipment beneath the tiles of his floor. Hardly had he done so than he heard footsteps on the gravel. It was the Russian houseman who, in a fit of generosity, had crossed the yard to offer him a Balkan cigarette. Martin accepted it with much bobbing and bowing and mutterings of “Shukran.”
The Russian, proud of his good nature, walked back to the house. “Poor bastard,” he thought. “What a life.”
When he was alone again, the poor bastard began to write in closely scripted Arabic on the pad of airmail paper he kept under his pallet. As he did so, the radio genius called Major Zayeed pored over a very-large-scale map of the city, particularly of the district of Mansour. When he had finished his calculations, he double-checked them and called Brigadier Hassan Rahmani at the Mukhabarat headquarters, barely five hundred yards from the diamond-shaped lozenge of Mansour that had been traced out in green ink. His appointment was fixed for four o’clock.
In Riyadh, Chip Barber was stomping around the main sitting room of the villa with a print-out in his hand, swearing in a manner he had not done since leaving the Marines thirty years earlier.
“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” he demanded of the two British intelligence officers in the room with him.
“Easy, Chip,” said Laing. “He’s had a hell of a long run. He’s under massive strain. The bad guys are closing in. All our tradecraft tells us we should get him out of there—now.”
“Yeah, I know, he’s a great guy. But he has no right to do this. We’re the people picking up the tab, remember?”
“We do remember,” said Paxman, “but he’s our man, and he’s miles out in the cold. If he chooses to stay on, it’s to finish the job, as much for you as for us.”
Barber calmed down.
“Three million dollars. How the hell am I to tell Langley he has offered Jericho a further three million greenbacks to get it right this time? That Iraqi asshole should have gotten it right the first time. For all we know, he could be dealing from the bottom of the deck, just to make more money.”
“Chip,” said Laing, “we’re talking about a nuke here.”
“Maybe,” growled Barber, “maybe we’re talking about a nuke. Maybe Saddam got enough uranium in time, maybe he put it all together in time. All we really have are the calculations of some scientists and Saddam’s claim—if indeed he ever made the claim at all. Dammit, Jericho is a mercenary, he could be lying in his teeth. Scientists can be wrong, Saddam lies as he breathes. What have we actually gotten for all this money?”
“You want to take the risk?” asked Laing.
Barber slumped in a chair.
“No,” he said at length, “no, I don’t. Okay, I’ll clear it with Washington. Then we tell the generals. They have to know this. But I tell you guys one thing: One day I’m going to meet this Jericho, and if he’s putting us on, I’m going to pull his arms off and beat him to death with the soggy end.”
At four that afternoon, Major Zayeed brought his maps and his calculations to Hassan Rahmani’s office.
Carefully he explained that he had that day secured his third triangulation and narrowed the area down to the lozenge shown on the map of Mansour. Rahmani gazed at it dubiously.
“It’s a hundred yards by a hundred yards,” he said. “I thought modern technology could get these emission sources down to a square yard.”
“If I get a long transmission, yes, I can,” explained the young major patiently. “I can get a beam from the intercepting receiver no wider than a yard. Cross that with another intercept from a different point, and you get your square yard. But these are terribly short transmissions. They’re on the air and off within two seconds. The best I can get is a very narrow cone, its point on the receiver, running out across country and getting wider as it goes. Maybe an angle of one second of one degree on the compass. But a couple of miles away, that becomes a hundred yards. Look, it’s still a small area.”
Rahmani peered at the map. The marked lozenge had four buildings in it.
“Let’s get down there and look at it,” he suggested.
The two men prowled Mansour with the map until they had traced the area shown. It was residential and very prosperous. The four residences were all detached, walled, and standing in their own grounds. It was getting dark by the time they finished.
“Raid them in the morning,” said Rahmani. “I’ll seal the area with troops, quietly. You know what you’re looking for. You go in with your specialists and take all four places apart. You find it, we have the spy.”
“One problem,” said the major. “See that brass plaque over there? That’s a Soviet embassy residence.”
Rahmani thought it over. He would get no thanks for starting an international incident.
“Do the other three first,” he ordered. “If you get nothing, I’ll clear the Soviet building with the Foreign Ministry.”
While they talked, one of the staff of that Soviet villa was three miles away. The gardener Mahmoud Al-Khouri was in the old British cemetery, placing a slim envelope in a stone jar by a long-untended gravestone. Later, he made a chalk mark on the wall of the Union of Journalists building. On a late-night tour of the district, he noticed just before midnight that the chalk mark had been expunged.
That evening, there was a conference in Riyadh, a very private conference in a sealed office two floors below the Saudi Defense Ministry building. There were four generals present, one of them seated at the head of the table, and two civilians, Barber and Laing. When the civilians had finished speaking, the four military men sat in gloomy silence.
“Is this for real?” asked one of the Americans.