that.”
“So you have no money, without customers.”
“Of course we have money, but in deposit accounts.”
“Never had one of those,” admitted Karim. “Just a small current account. I prefer cash anyway.”
“You can’t have cash when you are talking of millions, People would steal it. So you put it in a bank and invest it.”
“You mean old Gemutlich handles millions? Of other people’s money?”
“Yes, millions and millions.”
“Schillings or dollars?”
“Dollars, pounds, millions and millions.”
“Well, I wouldn’t trust him with
She sat up, genuinely shocked.
“Herr Gemutlich is completely honest. He would never dream of doing that.”
“Maybe not, but somebody else might. Look—say, I know a man who has an account at Winkler. His name is Schmitt. One day I go in and say: Good morning, Herr Gemutlich, my name is Schmitt, and I have an account here. He looks in his book, and he says: Yes, you do. So I say: I’d like to withdraw it all. Then when the real Schmitt turns up, there’s nothing left. That’s why cash is better for me.”
She laughed at his naivete and pulled him down, nibbling his ear.
“It wouldn’t work. Herr Gemutlich would probably know your precious Schmitt. Anyway, he’d have to identify himself.”
“Passports can be forged. Those damned Palestinians do it all the time.”
“And he’d need a signature, of which he would have a specimen copy.”
“So, I’d practice forging Schmitt’s signature.”
“Karim, I think you might turn out to be a criminal one day. You’re bad.”
They both giggled at the idea.
“Anyway, if you were a foreigner and living abroad, you’d probably have a numbered account. They are completely impregnable.”
He looked down at her from one elbow, brow furrowed.
“What’s that?”
“A numbered account?”
“Mmmmmm.”
She explained how they worked.
“That’s madness,” he exploded when she had finished. “Anybody could turn up and claim ownership. If Gemutlich has never even seen the owner—”
“There are identity procedures, idiot. Very complex codes, methods of writing letters, certain ways the signatures have to be placed—all sorts of things to verify that the person is really the account owner. Unless they are all complied with—to the letter—Herr Gemutlich will not cooperate. So impersonation is impossible.”
“He must have a hell of a memory.”
“Oh, you are too stupid for words. It is all written down. Are you taking me out to dinner?”
“Do you deserve it?”
“You know I do.”
“Oh, all right. But I want an hors d’oeuvre.”
She was puzzled. “All right, order one.”
“I mean you.”
He reached out and grabbed the waist of her skimpy panties, pulling her with a hooked finger back onto the bed. She was giggling with delight. He rolled over on top of her and began to kiss. Suddenly he stopped. She looked alarmed.
“I know what I’d do,” he breathed. “I’d hire a safecracker, break into old Gemutlich’s safe, and look at the codes. Then I could get away with it.”
She laughed in relief that he had not changed his mind about making love.
“Wouldn’t work. Mmmmmm. Do that again.”
“Would so.”
“Aaaaaah. Wouldn’t.”
“Would. Safes are broken all the time. See it in the papers every day.”
She ran her exploring hand below, and her eyes opened wide.
“Ooooh, is that all for me? You’re a lovely, big, strong man, Karim, and I love you. But old Gemutlich, as you call him, is a bit smarter than you. ...”
A minute later, she no longer cared how smart Gemutlich was.
While the Mossad agent made love in Vienna, Mike Martin was setting up his satellite dish as midnight approached and the eleventh of the month gave way to the twelfth.
Iraq was then just eight days away from the scheduled invasion of February 20. South of the border, the northern slice of the desert of Saudi Arabia bristled with the biggest single concentration of men and arms, guns, tanks, and stores crammed into such a relatively small piece of land since the Second World War.
The relentless pounding from the air went on, though most of the targets on General Horner’s original list had been visited, sometimes twice or more. Despite the insertion of fresh targets caused by the short-
lived Scud barrage on Israel, the air master plan was back on track.
Every
As a functioning weapon, the Iraqi Air Force had virtually ceased to exist. Rarely had her interceptor fighters, if they chose to tangle with the Eagles, Hornets, Tomcats, Falcons, Phantoms, and Jaguars of the Allies, returned to their bases, and by mid-February they were not even bothering to try. Some of the cream of the fighter and fighter-bomber force had deliberately been sent to Iran, where they had at once been impounded. Others still had been destroyed inside their hardened shelters or ripped apart if caught out in the open.
At the highest level, the Allied commanders could not understand why Saddam had chosen to send the cream of his warplanes to his old enemy. The reason was that after a certain date he firmly expected every nation in the region to have no choice but to bow the knee to him; at that point he would recover his war fleet.
There was by then hardly a bridge left intact in the entire country or a functioning power-generating station.
By mid-February, an increasing Allied air effort was being directed at the Iraqi Army in south Kuwait and over the Kuwaiti border into Iraq itself.
From the east-west Saudi northern border up to the Baghdad-Basra highway, the Buffs were pounding the artillery, tank, rocket-battery, and infantry positions. American A-10 Thunderbolts, nicknamed for their grace in the sky “the flying warthog,” were roaming at will doing what they did best—destroying tanks. Eagles and Tornados were also allocated the task of “tank-plinking.”
What the Allied generals in Riyadh did not know was that forty major facilities dedicated to weapons of mass destruction still remained hidden beneath the deserts and the mountains, or that the Sixco air bases were still intact.
Since the burial of the Al Qubai factory, the mood was lighter both among the four generals who knew what it had really contained, as it was among the men of the CIA and the SIS stationed in Riyadh.
It was a mood mirrored in the brief message Mike Martin received that night. His controllers in Riyadh began by informing him of the success of the Tornado mission despite the loss of one airplane. The transmission went on to congratulate him for staying in Baghdad after being allowed to leave, and on the entire mission. Finally, he was told there was little more to do. Jericho should be sent one final message, to the effect the Allies were grateful, that all his money had been paid, and that contact would be reestablished after the war. Then, Martin was told, he really should escape to safety in Saudi Arabia before it became impossible.
Martin closed down his set, packed it away beneath the floor, and lay on his bed before sleeping. Interesting, he thought. The armies are not coming to Baghdad. What about Saddam—wasn’t that the object of the exercise?
