The Fist of God

own affair. He’ll keep his mouth shut if he wants to keep his job and his career. That’s if the order comes from high enough.”

“The British embassy’s out,” said Paxman. “The Iraqis would go out of their way to offend our people.”

“Same with us,” said Barber. “Who do you have in mind, Mike?”

When Martin told them, they stared at him in disbelief.

“You cannot be serious,” said the American.

“But I am,” said Martin calmly.

“Hell, Mike, a request like that would have to go up to—well, the Prime Minister.”

“And the President,” said Barber.

“Well, we’re all supposed to be such pals nowadays, why not? I mean, if Jericho’s product ends up saving Allied lives, is a phone call too much to ask?”

Chip Barber glanced at his watch. The time in Washington was still seven hours earlier than that in the Gulf. Langley would be finishing its lunch. In London it was only two hours earlier, but senior officers might still be at their desks.

Barber went hotfoot back to the U.S. embassy and sent a blitz message in code to the Deputy Director (Operations), Bill Stewart, who, when he had read it, took it to the Director, William Webster. He in turn called the White House and asked for a meeting with his President.

Simon Paxman was lucky. His encrypted phone call caught Steve Laing at his desk at Century House, and after listening, the head of Ops for Mid-East called the Chief at his home.

Sir Colin thought it over and placed a call to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler.

It is accepted that the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service has a right, in cases he deems to be an emergency, to ask for and secure a personal meeting with his Prime Minister, and Margaret Thatcher had always been notable for her accessibility to the men who ran the intelligence services and the Special Forces. She agreed to meet the Chief in her private office in 10 Downing Street the following morning at eight.

She was, as always, at work before dawn and had almost cleared her desk when the Chief was shown in. She listened to his bizarre request with a rather puzzled frown, demanded several explanations, thought it over, and then, in her usual way, made her mind up without delay.

“I’ll confer with President Bush as soon as he rises, and we’ll see what we can do. This, um, man—is he really going to do that?”

“That is his intention. Prime Minister.”

“One of your people, Sir Colin?”

“No, he’s a major in the SAS.”

She brightened perceptibly.

“Remarkable fellow.”

“So I believe, ma’am.”

“When this is over, I would rather like to meet him.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged, Prime Minister.”

When the Chief was gone, the Downing Street staff placed the call to the White House, even though it was still the middle of the night, and set up the hotline connection for eight A.M. Washington, one P.M.

London. The Prime Minister’s lunch was rescheduled by thirty minutes.

President George Bush, like his predecessor Ronald Reagan, had always found it hard to refuse the British Prime Minister something she wanted when she was firing on all cylinders.

“All right, Margaret,” said the President after five minutes, “I’ll make the call.”

“He can only say no,” Mrs. Thatcher pointed out, “and he shouldn’t.

After all, we’ve jolly well done a lot for him.”

“Yes, we jolly well have,” said the President.

The two heads of government made their calls within an hour of each other, and the reply from the puzzled man at the other end of the line was affirmative. He would see their representatives, in privacy, as soon as they arrived.

That evening Bill Stewart headed out of Washington, and Steve Laing caught the last connection of the day from Heathrow.

If Mike Martin had any idea of the flurry of activity his demand had started, he gave no sign of it. He spent October 26 and 27 resting, eating, and sleeping. But he stopped shaving, allowing the dark stubble to come through again. Work on his behalf, however, was being carried out in a number of different places.

The SIS Station Head in Tel Aviv had visited General Kobi Dror with a final request. The Mossad chief had stared at the Englishman in amazement.

“You really are going to go ahead with this, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I only know what I’ve been told to ask you, Kobi.”

“Bloody hell, on the black? You know he’ll be caught, don’t you?”

“Can you do it, Kobi?”

“Of course we can do it.”

“Twenty-four hours?”

Kobi Dror was playing his Fiddler on the Roof role again.

“For you, boychick, my right arm. But look, this is crazy, what you are proposing.”

He rose and came from behind his desk, draping an arm around the Englishman’s shoulders.

“You know, we broke half our own rules, and we were lucky.

Normally, we never have our people visit a dead-letter box. It could be a trap. For us, a dead-letter box is one-way: from the katsa to the spy.

For Jericho, we broke that rule. Moncada picked up the product that way because there was no other way. And he was lucky—for two years he was lucky. But he had diplomatic cover. Now you want ...

this?”

He held up the small photograph of a sad-looking Arab-featured man with tufted black hair and stubble, the photo the Englishman had just received from Riyadh, brought in (since there are no commercial routes between the two capitals) by General de la Billiere’s personal HS-125 twin-jet communications plane. The 125 was standing at Sde Dov military airfield, where its livery markings had been extensively photographed.

Dror shrugged.

“All right. By tomorrow morning. My life.”

The Mossad has, beyond any room for quarrel, some of the best technical services in the world. Apart from a central computer with almost two million names and their appropriate data, apart from one of the best lock-picking services on earth, there exists in the basement and subbasement of Mossad headquarters a series of rooms where the temperature is carefully controlled.

These rooms contain paper. Not just any old paper—very special paper. Originals of just about every kind of passport in the world lie there, along with myriad other identity cards, drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, and suchlike.

Then there are the blanks, the unfilled identity cards on which the penmen can work at will, using the originals as a guide to produce forgeries of superb quality.

Identity cards are not the only speciality. Banknotes of virtually foolproof likeness can be and are produced in great quantities, either to help ruin the currencies of neighboring but hostile nations, or to fund the Mossad’s black operations, the ones neither the Prime Minister nor the Knesset knows about nor wishes to.

It had only been after some soul-searching that the CIA and SIS had agreed to go to the Mossad for the favor, but they simply could not produce the identity card of a forty-five-year-old Iraqi laborer with the certainty of knowing it would pass any inspection in Iraq. No one had bothered to find and abstract an original one to copy.

Fortunately, the Sayeret Matkal, a cross-border reconnaissance group so secret that its name cannot even be printed in Israel, had made an incursion into Iraq two years earlier to drop an Arab oter who had some low-level contact to make there. While on Iraqi soil, the agents had surprised two working men in the fields, tied them up, and relieved them of their identity cards.

As promised, Dror’s forgers worked through the night and by dawn had produced an Iraqi identity card, convincingly dirty and smudged as if from long use, in the name of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, age forty-five, from a village