The Fist of God

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nbsp; Gidi Barzilai, when he read the report, swore long and loud. Old Man Winkler might know nothing of the latest techniques of phone-tapping and computer-hacking, but his gut instincts were right on target.

During the years of Iraq’s buildup of her poison gas technology, every one of the purchases from Germany had been cleared through one of three Swiss banks. The Mossad knew that the CIA had hacked into the computers of all three banks—originally the search had been for laundered drug money—and it was this inside information that had enabled Washington to file its endless succession of protests to the German government about the exports. It was hardly the CIA’s fault that Chancellor Helmut Kohl had contemptuously rejected every one of the protests; the information had been perfectly accurate.

If Gidi Barzilai thought he was going to hack into the Winkler Bank central computer, he was mistaken; there wasn’t one. That left room-bugging, mail-interception, and phone-tapping. The chances were, none of these would solve his problem.

Many bank accounts need a Losungswort , a coded password, to operate them, to effect withdrawals and transfers. But account holders can usually use such a password to identify themselves in a phone call or a fax, as well as in a letter. The way the Winkler Bank seemed to operate, a high-value numbered account owned by a foreign client such as Jericho would have had a much more complicated system for its operation; either a formal appearance with ample identification by the account holder, or a written mandate prepared in a precise form and manner, with precise coded words and symbols appearing at precisely the preagreed places.

Clearly, the Winkler Bank would accept an in-payment from anyone, anytime, anywhere. The Mossad knew that because it had been paying Jericho his blood money by transfers to an account inside Winkler that was identified to them by a single number. Persuading the Winkler Bank to make a transfer out would be a whole different affair.

Somehow, from inside the dressing gown where he spent most of his life listening to church music, Old Man Winkler seemed to have guessed that illegal information-interception technology would outpace normal information-transfer techniques. Damn and blast the man.

The only other thing the sayan could vouchsafe was that such high-value numbered accounts would certainly be handled personally by one of the three vice-presidents and no one else. The Old Man had chosen his subordinates well: The reputation of all three was that they were humorless, tough, and well-paid. In a word, impregnable. Israel, the sayan had added, need have no worries about the Winkler Bank. He had, of course, missed the point. Gidi Barzilai, that first week of November, was already getting extremely fed up with the Winkler Bank.

There was a bus an hour after dawn, and it slowed for the single passenger sitting on a rock by the road three miles short of Ar-Rutba when he got up and waved. He handed over two grubby dinar notes, took a seat in the back, balanced his basket of chickens on his lap, and fell asleep.

There was a police patrol in the center of the town, where the bus jolted to a halt on its old springs and a number of passengers got off to go to work or to the market, while others got on. But while the police checked the ID cards of those getting on, they contented themselves with glancing through the dusty windows at the few who remained inside and ignored the peasant with his chickens in back. They were looking for subversives, suspicious characters.

After a further hour, the bus rumbled on to the east, rocking and swaying, occasionally pulling onto the hard shoulder as a column of Army vehicles roared past, their stubbled conscripts sitting morosely in the back, staring at the swirling dust clouds they raised.

With his eyes closed, Mike Martin listened to the chatter around him, latching on to an unaccustomed word or a hint of accent that he might have forgotten. The Arabic of this part of Iraq was markedly different from that of Kuwait. If he were to pass for an ill-educated and harmless fellagha in Baghdad, these out-of-town provincial accents and phrases would prove useful. Few things disarm a city cop more quickly than a hayseed accent.

The hens in their cage on his lap had had a rough ride, even though he had scattered corn from his pocket and shared the water from his flask, now inside a Land-Rover baking under netting in the desert behind him. With each lurch the birds clucked in protest or squatted and crapped into the litter beneath them.

It would have taken a keen eye to observe that the base of the cage on its external measurement was four inches more than on the inside. The deep litter around the hens’ feet hid the difference. The litter was only an inch deep. Inside the four-inch-deep cavity beneath the twenty-by-twenty-inch cage were a number of items that those police at Ar-Rutba would have found puzzling but interesting.

One was a fold-away satellite dish, turned into a stumpy rod like a collapsible umbrella. Another was a transceiver, more powerful than that Martin had used in Kuwait. Baghdad would not offer the facility of being able to broadcast while wandering around the desert. Lengthy transmissions would be out, which accounted, apart from the rechargeable cadmium-silver battery, for the last item in the cavity. It was a tape recorder, but a rather special one.

New technology tends to start large, cumbersome, and difficult to use. As it develops, two things happen. The innards become more and more complicated, although smaller and smaller, and the operation becomes simpler.

The radio sets hauled into France by agents for the British Special Operations Executive during the Second World War were a nightmare by modern standards. Occupying a suitcase, they needed an aerial strung for yards up a drainpipe, had cumbersome valves the size of light bulbs, and could only transmit messages on a Morse-sender. This kept the operator tapping for ages, while German detector units could triangulate on the source and close in.

Martin’s tape recorder was simple to operate but also carried some useful features inside. A ten-minute message could be read slowly and clearly into the mouthpiece. Before it was recorded on the spool, a silicon chip would encrypt it into a garble that, even if intercepted, the Iraqis could probably not decode.

At the push of a button, the tape would rewind. Another button would cause it to rerecord, but at one two-hundredth of the speed, reducing the message to a three-second burst that would be just about impossible to trace.

It was this burst that the transmitter would send out when linked to the satellite dish, the battery, and the tape recorder. In Riyadh the message would be caught, slowed down, decrypted, and replayed in clear.

Martin left the bus at Ramadi, where it stopped, and took another one on past Lake Habbaniyah and the old Royal Air Force base, now converted to a modern Iraqi fighter station. The bus was stopped at the outskirts of Baghdad, and all identity cards were checked.

Martin stood humbly in the line, clutching his chickens, as the passengers approached the table where the police sergeant sat. When it was his turn, he set the wicker basket on the floor and produced his ID

card. The sergeant glanced at it. He was hot and thirsty. It had been a long day. He gestured to the place of origin of the card-bearer.

“Where is this?”

“It is a small village north of Baji. Well known for its melons, bey .”

The sergeant’s mouth twitched. Bey was a respectful form of address that dated back to the Turkish empire, only occasionally heard, and then only from people out of the real backwoods. He flicked a dismissive hand; Martin picked up his chickens and went back to the bus.

Shortly before seven, the bus rolled to a stop and Major Martin stepped out into the main bus station in Kadhimiya, Baghdad.

Chapter 11

It was a long walk through the early evening from the bus station in the north of the city to the house of the Soviet First Secretary in the district of Mansour, but Martin welcomed it.

For one thing, he had been cooped up in two separate buses for twelve hours, covering the 240 miles from Ar-Rutba to the capital, and they had not been luxury coaches. For another, the walk gave him the chance to inhale once again the feel of the city he had not seen since leaving on an airliner for London as a very nervous schoolboy of thirteen, and that had been twenty-four years earlier.