The Fist of God

Gershon thought it over and grinned.

“What’s so funny?” asked Dror.

“Just this. We can’t contact Jericho anymore. Just let them try. We still don’t know who the bastard is. Let them find out. With any luck, they’ll make a camel’s ass out of it.”

Dror thought it over, and eventually a sly smile spread across his face.

“Send Sharon tonight,” he said. “Then we launch another project. I’ve had it in my mind for some time. We’ll call it Operation Joshua.”

“Why?” asked Gershon, perplexed.

“Don’t you remember exactly what Joshua did to Jericho?”

The London meeting was deemed important enough for Bill Stewart, Langley’s Deputy Director (Operations) to cross the Atlantic personally, accompanied by Chip Barber of the Middle East Division.

They stayed at one of the Company’s safe houses, an apartment not far from the embassy in Grosvenor Square, and had dinner with a Deputy Director of the SIS and Steve Laing. The Deputy Director was for protocol, given Stewart’s rank; he would be replaced at the debriefing of David Sharon by Simon Paxman, who was in charge of Iraq.

David Sharon flew in from Tel Aviv under another name and was met by a katsa from the Israeli embassy in Palace Green. The British counterintelligence service MI-5—which does not like foreign agents, even friendly ones, playing games at the port of entry—had been alerted by SIS and spotted the waiting katsa from the embassy. As soon as he greeted the new arrival, “Mr. Eliyahu,” off the Tel Aviv flight, the MI-S group moved in, warmly welcoming Mr. Sharon to London, and offering every facility to make his stay pleasant.

The two angry Israelis were escorted to their car, waved away from the concourse entrance, and then followed sedately into central London.

The massed bands of the Brigade of Guards could not have done a better job.

The debriefing of David Sharon began the following morning, and it took the whole day and half the night. The SIS elected to use one of their own safe houses, a well-protected and efficiently “wired” apartment in South Kensington.

It was (and still is) a large and spacious place, of which the dining room served as the site for the conference. One of the bedrooms housed the banks of tape recorders, and two technicians who recorded every word spoken. A trim young woman brought over from Century commandeered the kitchen and masterminded a convoy of trays of coffee and sandwiches to the six men grouped around the dining table.

Two fit-looking men in the lobby downstairs spent the day pretending to mend the perfectly functioning elevator, while in fact ensuring that none but the other known inhabitants of the building got above the ground-floor level.

At the dining table were David Sharon and the katsa from the London embassy, who was a declared agent anyway; the two Americans, Stewart and Barber from Langley; and the two SIS men, Laing and Paxman.

At the Americans’ bidding, Sharon started at the beginning of the tale and told it the way it had happened.

“A mercenary? A walk-in mercenary?” queried Stewart at one point.

“You’re not putting me on?”

“My instructions are to be absolutely frank,” said Sharon. “That was the way it happened.”

The Americans had nothing against a mercenary. Indeed, it was an advantage. Among all the motives for betraying one’s country, money is the simplest and easiest for the recruiter agency. With a mercenary one knows where one is. There are no tortured feelings of regret, no angst of self-disgust, no fragile ego to be massaged and flattered, no ruffled feathers to be smoothed. A mercenary in the intelligence world is like a whore. No tiresome candle-lit dinners and sweet nothings are necessary. A fistful of dollars on the dressing table will do nicely.

Sharon described the frantic search for someone who could live inside Baghdad under diplomatic cover on extended stay, and the Hobson’s-choice selection of Alfonso Benz Moncada, his intensive training in Santiago, and his reinfiltration to run Jericho for two years.

“Hang on,” said Stewart. “This amateur ran Jericho for two years?

Made seventy collections from the drops and got away with it?”

“Yep. On my life,” said Sharon.

“What do you figure, Steve?”

Laing shrugged. “Beginner’s luck. Wouldn’t have liked to try it in East Berlin or Moscow.”

“Right,” said Stewart. “And he never got tailed to a drop? Never compromised?”

“No,” said Sharon. “He was tailed a few times, but always in a sporadic and clumsy way. Going from his home to the Economic Commission building or back, and once when he was heading for a drop. But he saw them and aborted.”

“Just supposing,” said Laing, “he actually was tailed to a drop by a real team of watchers. Rahmani’s Counterintelligence boys stake out the drop and roll up Jericho himself. Under persuasion, Jericho has to cooperate. ...”

“Then the product would have gone down in value,” said Sharon. “But Jericho really was doing a lot of damage. Rahmani wouldn’t have allowed that to go on. We’d have seen a public trial and hanging of Jericho, and Moncada would have been expelled, if lucky.

“It seems the trackers were AMAM people, even though foreigners are supposed to be Rahmani’s turf. Whatever, they were as clumsy as usual. Moncada spotted them without trouble. You know how the AMAM is always trying to move into counterintelligence work.”

The listeners nodded. Interdepartmental rivalry was nothing new—it happened in their own countries.

When Sharon reached the point where Moncada was abruptly withdrawn from Iraq, Bill Stewart let out an expletive.

“You mean he’s switched off, out of contact? Are you telling us Jericho is on the loose with no controller?”

“That’s the point,” said Sharon patiently. He turned to Chip Barber.

“When General Dror said he was running no agent in Baghdad, he meant it. The Mossad was convinced that Jericho, as an ongoing operation, was belly-up.”

Barber shot the young katsa a look that said, “Pull the other leg, son.

It’s got bells on.”

“We want to reestablish contact,” said Laing smoothly. “How?”

Sharon laid out all six of the locations of the dead-letter boxes. During his two years Moncada had changed two of them; in one case because a location was bulldozed for redevelopment, in another because a derelict shop was refurbished and reoccupied. But the six functioning drops and the six places where the alerting chalk marks had to be placed were the up-to-date ones that had come from his final briefing after his expulsion.

The exact location of these drops and of the sites for the chalk marks were noted to the inch.

“Maybe we could get a friendly diplomat to approach him at a function, tell him he’s back in action and the money’s better,”

suggested Barber. “Get around all this crap under bricks and flagstones.”

“No,” said Sharon. “It’s the drops, or you can’t contact him.”

“Why?” asked Stewart.

“You’re going to find this hard to believe, but I swear it’s true. We never found out who he is.”

The four Western agents stared at Sharon for several minutes.

“You never identified him?” asked Stewart slowly.

“No. We tried. We asked him to identify himself for his own protection. He refused, threatened to shut off if we persisted. We did handwriting analyses, psychoportraits. We cross-indexed the information he could produce and the stuff he couldn’t get at. We ended up with a list of thirty, maybe forty men, all around Saddam Hussein, all within the Revolutionary Command Council, the Army High Command, or the senior ranks of the Ba’ath Party.

“Never could get closer than that. Twice we slipped a technical term in English into our demands. Each time they came back with a query. It seems he only speaks no or very limited English. But that could be a blind. He could be fluent, but if we knew that, it would narrow the field to two or three. So he always writes in script, in