The Fist of God

“No, Rais. They have been ... persuaded to cooperate completely.”

“Then that is the end of the matter?” asked the Rais quietly. “The raid was just an unfortunate chance?”

Heads nodded round the room. The scream when it came paralyzed them all.

“Wrong! You are all wrong!”

In a second the voice dropped back to a calm whisper, but the fear had been instilled. They all knew that the softness of the voice could precede the most terrible of revelations, the most savage of penalties.

“There have been no trucks, no Army trucks. An excuse given to the pilots in case they were caught. There is something more, is there not?”

Most of them were sweating despite the air conditioning. It had always been thus, since the dawn of history, when the tyrant of a tribe called in the witch-finder and the tribe sat and trembled lest he should be the one at whom the juju-stick pointed.

“There is a conspiracy,” whispered the Rais. “There is a traitor.

Someone is a traitor, who conspires against me.”

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?”

“Gemutlich’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 Gemutlich 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 Gemutlich 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 Gemutlich 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.

“What can I say, Sayid Rais?” The head of the Secret Police raised his hands and let them drop in a gesture of helplessness. It was a masterpiece in the acting of self-deprecation.

“The Rais was, as ever, right, and we were all wrong. The bombing of

Al Qubai was indeed no accident. There was a traitor, and he has been found.”

There was a buzz of sycophantic amazement around the room. The man in the upright padded chair with his back to the windowless wall beamed and held up his hands for such unnecessary applause to cease.

It did, but not too quickly.

Was I not right? the smile said. Am I not always right?

“How did you discover this, Rafeek?” asked the Rais.

“A combination of good luck and detective work,” admitted Khatib modestly. “As for the good fortune, this as we know is the gift of Allah, who smiles upon our Rais.”

There was an assenting rumble around the room.

“Two days before the attack by the bombers of the Beni Naji, a traffic control point was established on a road nearby. It was a routine spot check by my men on movements by possible deserters, contraband goods. ... The vehicle numbers were noted.

“Two days ago I checked these and found that most of the vehicles were local—vans and trucks. But one was an expensive car, registered here in Baghdad. The owner was traced, a man who might have had reason to visit Al Qubai. But a telephone call ascertained that he had not visited the facility. Why, I wondered, had he been in the area, then?”