He found a number of candles and some matches. By their dim light, he slung blankets across the windows and went to work on the rough tiles of the floor with his penknife. An hour of scratching at the moldy mortar brought four of the tiles up, and a further hour of digging with a. trowel from the nearby potting shed produced a hole to take his radio transmitter, batteries, tape recorder, and satellite dish. A mixture of mud and spittle rubbed into the cracks between the tiles hid the last traces of his excavation.
Just before midnight, he used his knife to cut away the false bottom of the chicken cage and set the litter into the real base, so that no trace remained of the four-inch cavity. While he worked the chickens scratched around the floor, looking hopefully for a nonexistent grain of wheat but finding and consuming several bugs.
Martin finished off the last of his olives and cheese and shared the remaining fragments of pita bread with his traveling companions, along with a bowl of water drawn from the outside tap.
The hens went back into their cage, and if they found their home now four inches deeper than it used to be, they made no complaint. It had been a long day, and they went to sleep.
In a last gesture, Martin peed all over Kulikov’s roses in the darkness before blowing out the candles, wrapping himself in his blanket, and doing the same.
His body clock caused him to wake up at fourA.M. Extracting the transmitting gear in its plastic bags, he recorded a brief message for Riyadh, speeded it up by two hundred times, connected the tape recorder to the transmitter, and erected the satellite dish, which occupied much of the center of the shack but pointed out the open door.
At four forty-fiveA.M. he sent a single-burst transmission on the channel of the day, then dismantled it all and put it back under the floor.
The sky was still pitch-black over Riyadh when a similar dish on the roof of the SIS residence caught the one-second signal and fed it down to the communications room. The transmitting time “window” was from four-thirty until fiveA.M. , and the listening watch was awake.
Two spinning tapes caught the burst from Baghdad, and a warning light flashed to alert the technicians.
They slowed the message down by two hundred times until it came over the headphones in clear. One noted it down in shorthand, typed it up, and left the room.
Julian Gray, the Head of Station, was shaken awake at five fifteen.
“It’s Black Bear, sir. He’s in.”
Gray read the transcript with mounting excitement and went to wake Simon Paxman. The head of the Iraq Desk was now on extended assignment to Riyadh, his duties in London having been taken over by his subordinate. He too sat up, wide awake, and read it.
“Bloody hell, so far so good.”
“The problem could start,” said Gray, “when he tries to raise Jericho.”
It was a sobering thought. The former Mossad asset in Baghdad had been switched off for three full months. He might have been compromised or caught, or simply changed his mind. He could have been posted far away, especially if he turned out to be a general now commanding troops in Kuwait. Anything could have happened. Paxman stood up.
“Better tell London. Any chance of coffee?”
“I’ll tell Mohammed to get it together,” said Gray.
Mike Martin was watering the flowerbeds at five-thirty, when the house began to stir. The cook, a bosomy Russian woman, saw him from her window and, when water was hot, called him over to the kitchen window.
“Kak mazyvaetes?” she asked, then thought for a moment and used the Ar
abic word: “Name?”
“Mahmoud,” said Martin.
“Well, here’s a cup of coffee, Mahmoud.”
Martin bobbed his head several times in delighted acceptance, muttering “shukran” and taking the hot mug in two hands. He was not joking; it was delicious real coffee and his first hot drink since the tea on the Saudi side of the border.
Breakfast was at seven, a bowl of lentils and pita bread, which he devoured. It appeared that the houseman of the previous evening and his wife, the cook, looked after First Secretary Kulikov, who seemed to be single. By eight, Martin had met the chauffeur, an Iraqi who spoke a smattering of Russian and would be useful translating simple messages to the Russians.
Martin decided not to get too close to the chauffeur, who might be a plant by the AMAM Secret Police or even Rahmani’s counterintelligence people. That turned out to be no problem; agent or not, the chauffeur was a snob and treated the new gardener with contempt. He agreed, however, to explain to the cook that Martin had to leave for a while because their employer had ordered him to get rid of his chickens.
Back on the street, Martin headed for the bus station, liberating his hens onto a patch of waste ground on the way.
As in so many Arab cities, the bus station in Baghdad is not simply a place for boarding vehicles leaving for the provinces. It is a seething maelstrom of working-class humanity where people have things to buy and sell. Running along the south wall is a useful flea market. It was here that Martin, after the appropriate haggle, bought a rickety bicycle that squeaked piteously when he rode it but was soon grateful for a shot of oil.
He had known he could not get around in a car, and even a motorcycle would be too grand for a humble gardener. He recalled his father’s houseman pedaling through the city from market to market, buying the daily provisions, and from what he could see, a bicycle was still a perfectly normal way for working people to get around.
A little work with the penknife sawed off the top of the chicken cage, converting it into an open-topped square basket, which he secured to the rear pillion of the bicycle with two stout rubber cords, former car fan belts, that he bought from a back-street garage.