The Hostage (Presidential Agent 2)

"To keep this simple, what he did was arrange-by bribing a UN official-for his oil allocations to come into the hands of these people at prices lower than the going price for crude oil. Say, fifty cents a barrel lower. Fifty cents a barrel becomes a lot of money when one is dealing in terms of, say, two million barrels of oil-one tanker full of oil.

"All these people had to do to turn a quick profit of a million dollars was sign over their allocation of two million barrels of oil-for-food oil to someone else. Saddam also let it be known that if he were permitted to export more oil, there would be more millions-many more millions-of dollars coming into the hands of those who caused the UN to relax the embargo.

"He also made friends by not complaining when the medicine shipped into Iraq for the poor Iraqi children and women had a high price. Aspirin at five dollars a pill, for example. Flour at twenty dollars a kilo. Und so weiter.

"Now to do this, of course, he had to have friends among the UN officials who were checking to see that he didn't get anything he wasn't supposed to have. How to make these friends? Give them something. What did he have to give? This black stuff that was worthless to him anyway. How was he going to get it to them? Bribe the UN official checking the outgoing oil. If he happened to be looking the other way when, say, a hundred thousand barrels of oil was mistakenly pumped into a tanker hauling off the legitimate oil-for-food allocation, he could expect to have party or parties unknown drop off a package of crisp brand-new U.S. one-hundred-dollar bills at his grandmother's apartment."

He picked up the water bucket and poured from it into four of the water glasses. Then he picked up one of the water-filled glasses and moved it down the tile coping.

"This one goes to the UN official who happened to be looking the other way when the tanker was overloaded," he said.

He picked up a second of the water-filled glasses, moved it down the tile coping, and explained, "And this one goes to the UN official who sees nothing suspicious about five-dollar-a-pill aspirin, or twenty-dollar-a-kilo flour, and authorizes the bill therefore to be paid."

He picked up the two remaining water-filled glasses and moved them to a narrow shelf on the pool side of the tile coping. "And these two, now converted to packages of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, go back across the border to Saddam, where they are thus available to build palaces for his sons and to bribe other people.

"You will notice, again, that filling the glasses did not appreciably lower the level of water in the bucket."

He paused, looked at everybody for a moment, and then filled the remaining water glasses.

"There are many refineries in Iraq," Kocian went on, "capable of producing far more gasoline, for example, than Iraq needs. What to do with this?"

He picked up two of the glasses and leaned forward to where Torine was lying on the tiles, and set them down by one of Torine's elbows.

"You are now Jordan," Kocian said. "Jordanians don't hate Americans as much as most other Arab countries,possibly because the widow of the late king was the daughter of an American general. And America tends to look less critically at Jordan than it does at other Arab countries. In any event, Jordan has a need for gasoline. There is no pipeline or port, but Iraq has many twenty-thousand-gallon tanker trucks. How to get it across the border? Bribe somebody."

He slid the water glasses from Torine's elbow to his waist, and picked up one of them. He moved it inside the tile coping. "This one, now miraculously converted to dollars, goes back to Iraq."

"Jesus!" Castillo said.

"Now, there were certain logistical problems to be solved, as well," Kocian went on. "Saddam wanted certain things-his sons, for example, liked Mercedes sports cars and Hustler magazine-which he could not legally import into Iraq. You may notice I am not even talking about war materiel, aircraft parts, etcetera, which is another story in itself. So, how to do this?

"Bribe a UN inspector into finding nothing suspicious, say, that an X-ray machine intended for an Iraqi hospital came from the Mercedes-Benz plant in Stuttgart. Or that a crate labeled 'Medical Publications' actually was full of pornographic videotapes.

"Saddam Hussein International Airport in Baghdad saw a lot of cargo airplanes-many of them owned by a Russian by the name of Aleksandr Pevsner-flying in things like hospital X-ray machines from the Mercedes-Benz plant-"

"Tell me about Pevsner, please, Herr Kocian," Castillo said.

"Tell you what about him?"

"How deep was he in the oil-for-food business?"

"He made a lot of money."

"He was one of those bribed?"

"We're playing s

emantic games here," Kocian said. "Did somebody hand him some money and say, 'Please defy the UN sanctions and airlift this Mercedes in an X-ray crate to Baghdad?' No. Did he carry an X-ray machine to Baghdad without looking to see what the crate really held? Yes. Did he charge twice or three times-five times-the standard rate for flying X-ray machines to Baghdad? Yes. Did he look to see if a case of ten million aspirin pills really contained aspirin instead of, for example, ten million dollars in U.S. currency? No. Was he bribed? That would be an opinion. Was he paid in cash? Yes. Was the cash he got from Saddam Hussein cash that had come into Saddam's hands for oil that he exported that he wasn't supposed to export? Almost certainly; where else would Saddam have gotten it? Can I prove any of this? No."

"Interesting," Torine said.

"What's your interest in Aleksandr Pevsner, Karl?" Kocian asked.

"The name has come up in conversation," Castillo said. "How were all these bribes paid, Herr Kocian, do you know?"

"In oil or cash, I told you."

"No. I mean, for example, you mentioned that a party or parties unknown would hand somebody's grandmother a stack of cash. Who was that party unknown? Who actually made the payoffs?"