The Fist of God

He stayed silent for several minutes, letting them tremble. When he spoke again, it was to the three men who faced him across the room.

“Find him. Find him and bring him to me. He shall learn the punishment for such crimes. He and all his family.”

Then he swept from the room followed by his personal bodyguard. The sixteen men left behind did not even look at each other, could not meet another’s gaze. There would be a sacrifice. No one knew who it would be. Each feared for himself, for some chance remark, perhaps not even that.

Fifteen of the men kept distance from the last, the witch-finder, the one they called Al-Mu’azib, the Tormentor. He would produce the sacrifice.

Hassan Rahmani too kept silent. This was no time to mention radio intercepts. His operations were delicate, subtle, based on detection and real intelligence. The last thing he needed was to find the thumping boots of the AMAM trampling all over his investigations.

In a mood of terror the ministers and generals departed back into the night and to their duties.

“He doesn’t keep them in his office safe,” said Avi Herzog, alias Karim, to his controller Gidi Barzilai over a late breakfast the next morning.

The meeting was safe, in Barzilai’s own apartment. Herzog had not made the phone call, from a public booth, until Edith Hardenberg was safely in the bank. Shortly after, the yarid team had arrived, boxing in their colleague as they escorted him to the rendezvous to ensure there was no chance he was being followed. Had he grown a tail, they would have seen it. It was their speciality.

Gidi Barzilai leaned forward across the food-strewn table, eyes alight.

“Well done, boychick. So now I know where he doesn’t keep the codes. The point is, where?”

“In his desk.”

“The desk? You’re mad. Anyone can open a desk.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Gemütlich’s desk? No.”

“Apparently it is very big, very ornate, and very old. A real antique. Also, it has a compartment, created by the original cabinetmaker, so secret, so hard to find, that Gemütlich thinks it is safer than any safe. He believes a burglar might go for the safe but would never think of the desk. Even if a burglar went through the desk, he would never find the compartment.”

“And she doesn’t know where it is?”

“Nope. Never seen it opened. He always locks himself in the office when he has to refer to it.”

Barzilai thought it over.

“Cunning bastard. I wouldn’t have given him credit for it. You know, he’s probably right.”

“Can I break it off now—the affair?”

“No, Avi, not yet. If you’re right, you’ve done brilliantly. But stick around, keep play-acting. If you vanish now, she will think back to your last conversation, put two and two together, have a fit of remorse, whatever. Stay with her, talk, but never again about banking.”

Barzilai thought over his problem. No one of his team in Vienna had ever seen the safe, but there was one man who had.

Barzilai sent a heavily coded message to Kobi Dror in Tel Aviv. The spotter was brought in and sat in a room with an artist.

The spotter was not multitalented, but he had one amazing skill: He had a photographic memory. For over five hours he sat with his eyes closed and cast his mind back to the interview he had had with Gemütlich while posing as a lawyer from New York. His principal task had been to look for alarm catches on windows and doors, for a wall safe, wires indicating pressure pads—all the tricks for keeping a room secure. These he had noted and reported. The desk had not interested him too much. But sitting in a room beneath King Saul Boulevard weeks later, he could close his eyes and see it all again.

Line by line, he described the desk to the artist. Sometimes the spotter would look at the drawing, make a correction, and resume. The artist worked in India ink with a fine pen and colored the desk with watercolors. After five hours the artist had a sheet of the finest cartridge paper on which was an exact colored picture of the desk then sitting in the office of Herr Wolfgang Gemütlich at the Winkler Bank in the Ballgasse, Vienna.

The drawing went to Gidi Barzilai in the diplomatic pouch from Tel Aviv to the Israeli embassy in Austria. He had it within two days.

Before then a check on the list of sayanim across all Europe had revealed the existence of Monsieur Michel Levy, an antiquarian on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, noted as one of the leading experts on classical furniture on the continent.

It was not until the night of the fourteenth, the same day Barzilai received his watercolor painting in Vienna, that Saddam Hussein reconvened his meeting of ministers, generals, and intelligence chiefs.

Again the meeting was called at the behest of AMAM chief Omar Khatib, who had passed news of his success via the son-in-law Hussein Kamil, and again it was in a villa in the dead of night.

The Rais simply entered the room and gestured to Khatib to report upon his findings.