bottom. Then he pulled the top of the sack away and rolled it back. His father’s body was still quite naked.
According to tradition, it was supposed to be woman’s work, but this was no task for his mother. He called for water and bandages, bathed and cleaned the ravaged body, bound up the broken feet, straightened and swaddled the shattered legs, and covered the blackened genitalia.
As he worked, he cried; and as he cried, he changed.
At dusk he called the Imam at the Alwazia cemetery in Risafa and made arrangements for a funeral the next morning.
Mike Martin had in fact been into the city on his bicycle that Sunday morning, February 17, but he had returned after buying his groceries and checking the three walls for any chalk marks, arriving back at the villa just before midday. During the afternoon he was kept busy tending the garden. Mr. Kulikov, while neither Christian nor Moslem and celebrating neither the Moslem holy day on Friday nor the Christian sabbath on Sunday, was at home with a cold, complaining about the state of his roses.
While Martin worked over the flower beds, the Mukhabarat watcher teams were quietly sliding into place beyond the wall. Jericho, he reasoned, could not possibly have news in less than two days; Martin would patrol his chalk marks again the following evening.
The burial of Dr. Badri took place at Alwazia shortly after nine o’clock. The cemeteries of Baghdad were busy in those times, and the Imam had much to do. Only a few days earlier, the Americans had bombed a public air raid shelter, causing more than three hundred deaths. Feelings were running high. Several mourners at another funeral close by asked the silent colonel if his relative had died from American bombs. He replied shortly that death had been by natural causes.
In Moslem custom, burial takes place quickly, with no long period of waiting between death and interment. And mere was no wooden coffin in the manner of Christians; the body was wrapped in cloth. The pharmacist came, supporting Mrs. Badri, and they left in a group when the brief ceremony was over. Colonel Badri was barely yards from the gate of Alwazia when he heard his name called. Standing a few yards away was a limousine with blackened windows. One at the rear was half open. The voice called him again.
Colonel Badri asked the pharmacist to take his mother home to Qadisiyah; he would join them later. When they had gone, he walked over to the car.
The voice said: “Please join me, Colonel. We need to talk.” He opened the car door and peered inside. The sole occupant had moved to the far side to make space. Badri thought he knew the face, but vaguely. He had seen it somewhere. He climbed in and closed the door. The man in the dark gray suit pressed a button, and the window rose, shutting out the sounds from outside.
“You have just buried your father.”
“Yes.” Who was this man? Why could he not place the face?
“It was foul, what was done to him. If I had learned in time, I might have stopped it. I learned too late.”
Osman Badri felt something like a punch in the stomach. He realized to whom he was talking—a man who had been pointed out to him at a military reception two years earlier. “I am going to say something to you, Colonel, that, if you were to report it, would cause me to die more terribly than your father.”
There was only one such thing, thought Badri. Treason.
“Once,” said the man quietly, “I loved the Rais.”
“So did I,” said Badri.
“But things change. He has gone mad. In his madness he piles cruelty upon cruelty. He must be stopped. You know about the Qa’ala, of course.”
Badri was surprised again, this time by the sudden change of subject.
“Of course. I built it.”
“Exactly. Do you know what now resides within it?”
“No.”
The senior officer told him.
“He cannot be serious,” said Badri.
“He is completely serious. He intends to use it against the Americans.
That may not be our concern. But do you know what America will do in return? It will reply in kind. Not a brick here will stand on brick, not a stone on stone. The Rais alone will survive. Do you want to be part of this?”
Colonel Badri thought of the body in the cemetery, over which the sextons were even then still heaping the dry earth.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Tell me about Qa’ala.”
“Why?”
“The Americans will destroy it.”
“You can get this information to them?”
“Trust me, there are ways. The Qa’ala ...”
So Colonel Osman Badri, the young engineer who had once wanted to design fine buildings to last for centuries, as his ancestors had done, told the man called Jericho.
“Grid reference.”
Badri gave him that too.
“Go back to your post, Colonel. You will be safe.”
Colonel Badri left the car and walked away. His stomach was heaving, turning and turning. Within a hundred yards he began to ask himself, over and again: What have I done? Suddenly, he knew he had to talk to his brother, that older brother who had always had the cooler head, the wiser counsel.
The man the Mossad team called the spotter arrived back in Vienna that Monday, summoned from Tel Aviv. Once again he was a prestigious lawyer from New York, with all the necessary identifying paperwork to prove it.
Even though the real lawyer was no longer on vacation, the chances that Gemutlich, who hated telephones and fax machines, would telephone New York to check were regarded as minimal. It was a risk the Mossad was prepared to take.
Once again the spotter installed himself at the Sheraton and wrote a personal letter to Herr Gemutlich. He again apologized for his unannounced arrival in the Austrian capital but explained he was accompanied by his firm’s accountant, and that the pair of them wished to make a first substantial deposit on behalf of their client.
The letter was delivered by hand in the late afternoon, and the following morning Gemutlich’s reply arrived at the hotel, offering a meeting at ten in the morning.
The spotter was indeed accompanied. The man with him was known simply as the cracksman, for that was his speciality.
If the Mossad possesses at its Tel Aviv headquarters a virtually unrivaled collection of dummy companies, false passports, letterhead stationery, and all the other paraphernalia for deception, pride of place must still go to its safecrackers and locksmiths. The Mossad’s ability to break into locked places has its own niche in the covert world. At the science of burglary, the Mossad has long been regarded simply as the best. Had a neviot team been in charge at the Watergate, no one would ever have known.
So high is the reputation of Israeli lock-pickers that when British manufacturers sent a new product to the SIS for their comments, Century House would pass it on to Tel Aviv. The Mossad, devious to a fault, would study it, find how to pick it, then return it to London as
“impregnable.” The SIS found out about this.
The next time a British lock company came up with a particularly brilliant new lock, Century House asked them to take it back, keep it, but provide a slightly easier one for analysis. It was the easier one that was sent to Tel Aviv. There it was studied and finally picked, then returned to London as “unbreakable.” But it was the original lock that the SIS advised the manufacturer to market.
This led to an embarrassing incident a year later, when a Mossad locksmith spent three sweaty and
