The Fist of God

its lights dimly in the distance.

The Magellan confirmed they were where they wanted to be, just south of the town, a five-mile hike to the road.

Four of the men scouted around until one found a wadi with a soft, sandy bottom. Here they dug their hole, silently, using the trenching tools slung on the sides of the Land-Rovers for digging them out of drifts. They buried the cross-country motorcycle with its reinforced tires, and the jerrycans of spare fuel to get it to the border, should the need arise. All were wrapped in tough polyethylene bags to protect against sand and water, for the rains had still to come.

To protect the cache from being washed away, they erected a cairn of rocks to prevent water erosion.

The navigator climbed to the hill above the wadi and took an exact bearing from the spot to the radio mast above Ar-Rutba, whose red warning light could be seen in the distance.

While they worked, Mike Martin stripped to the buff and from his kitbag took the robe, headdress, and sandals of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, the Iraqi laborer and gardener-handyman. With a cloth tote bag containing bread, oil, cheese, and olives for breakfast, a tattered wallet with identity card and pictures of Mahmoud’s elderly parents, and a battered tin box with some money and a penknife, he was ready to go.

The Land-Rovers needed an hour to get clear of the site before turning in for the day.

“Break a leg,” said the captain,

“Good hunting, boss,” said the navigator.

“At least you’ll have a fresh egg for breakfast,” said another, and there was a subdued rumble of laughter. Mike Martin waved a hand and began to hike across the desert to the road. Minutes later, the Land-Rovers had gone, and the wadi was empty again.

The Head of Station in Vienna had on his books a sayan who was himself in banking, a senior executive with one of the nation’s leading clearing banks. It was he who was asked to prepare a report, as full as he could make it, upon the Winkler Bank. The sayan was told only that certain Israeli enterprises had entered into a relationship with Winkler and wished to be reassured as to its solidity, antecedents, and banking practices. There was, he was told regretfully, so much fraud going on these days.

The sayan accepted the reason for the inquiry and did his best, which was pretty good considering that the first thing he discovered was that Winkler operated along lines of almost obsessive secrecy.

The bank had been founded almost a hundred years earlier by the father of the present sole owner and president. The Winkler of 1990 was himself ninety-one and known in Viennese banking circles as der Alte, “the Old Man.” Despite his age, he refused to relinquish the presidency or sole controlling interest. Being widowed but childless, there was no natural family successor, so the eventual disposal of the controlling interest would have to await the reading of his will.

Nevertheless, day-to-day running of the bank rested with three vice-presidents. Meetings with Old Man Winkler took place about once a month at his private house, during which his principal concern seemed to be to ensure that his own stringent standards were being maintained.

Executive decisions were with the vice-presidents, Kessler, Gemutlich, and Blei. It was not a clearing bank, of course, had no current account holders, and issued no checkbooks. Its business was as a depository for clients’ funds, which would be placed in rock-solid, safe investments, mainly on the European market.

If interest yields from such investments were never going to enter the top ten performers league, that was not the point. Winkler’s clients did not seek rapid growth or sky-high interest earnings. They sought safety and absolute anonymity. This Winkler guaranteed them, and his bank delivered.

The standards on which Old Man Winkler placed such stress included utter discretion as to the identity of the owners of its numbered accounts, coupled with a complete avoidance of what the Old Man termed “new-fangled nonsense.”

It was this distaste for modern gimmickry that banned computers for the storage of sensitive information or account control, fax machines, and where possible, telephones. The Winkler Bank would accept instructions and information by telephone, but it would never divulge it over a phone line. Where possible, the Winkler Bank liked to use old-fashioned letter-writing on its expensive cream linenfold stationery, or personal meetings within the bank itself.

Within Vienna the bank messenger would deliver all letters and statements in wax-sealed envelopes, and only for national and international letters would the bank trust the public mailing system.

As for numbered accounts owned by foreign clients—the sayan had been asked to touch upon these—no one knew quite how many there were, but rumor hinted at deposits of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Clearly, if this was so, and given that a percentage of the secretive clients would occasionally die without telling anyone else how to operate the account, the Winkler Bank was doing quite nicely, thank you.

Gidi Barzilai, when he read the report, swore long and loud. Old Man

Winkler might know nothing of the latest techniques of phone-tapping and computer-hacking, but his gut instincts were right on target.

During the years of Iraq’s buildup of her poison gas technology, every one of the purchases from Germany had been cleared through one of three Swiss banks. The Mossad knew that the CIA had hacked into the computers of all three banks—originally the search had been for laundered drug money—and it was this inside information that had enabled Washington to file its endless succession of protests to the German government about the exports. It was hardly the CIA’s fault that Chancellor Helmut Kohl had contemptuously rejected every one of the protests; the information had been perfectly accurate.

If Gidi Barzilai thought he was going to hack into the Winkler Bank central computer, he was mistaken; there wasn’t one. That left room-bugging, mail-interception, and phone-tapping. The chances were, none of these would solve his problem.

Many bank accounts need a Losungswort, a coded password, to operate them, to effect withdrawals and transfers. But account holders can usually use such a password to identify themselves in a phone call or a fax, as well as in a letter. The way the Winkler Bank seemed to operate, a high-value numbered account owned by a foreign client such as Jericho would have had a much more complicated system for its operation; either a formal appearance with ample identification by the account holder, or a written mandate prepared in a precise form and manner, with precise coded words and symbols appearing at precisely the preagreed places.

Clearly, the Winkler Bank would accept an in-payment from anyone, anytime, anywhere. The Mossad knew that because it had been paying Jericho his blood money by transfers to an account inside Winkler that was identified to them by a single number. Persuading the Winkler

Bank to make a transfer out would be a whole different affair.

Somehow, from inside the dressing gown where he spent most of his life listening to church music, Old Man Winkler seemed to have guessed that illegal information-interception technology would outpace normal information-transfer techniques. Damn and blast the man.

The only other thing the sayan could vouchsafe was that such high-value numbered accounts would certainly be handled personally by one of the three vice-presidents and no one else. The Old Man had chosen his subordinates well: The reputation of all three was that they were humorless, tough, and well-paid. In a word, impregnable. Israel, the sayan had added, need have no worries about the Winkler Bank.

He had, of course, missed the point. Gidi Barzilai, that first week of November, was already getting extremely fed up with the Winkler Bank.

There was a bus an hour after dawn, and it slowed for the single passenger sitting on a rock by the road three miles short of Ar-Rutba when he got up and waved. He handed over two grubby dinar notes, took a seat in the back, balanced his basket of chickens on his lap, and fell asleep.

There was a police patrol in the center of the town, where the bus jolted to a halt on its old springs and a number of passengers got off to go to work or to the market, while others got on. But while the police checked the ID cards of those getting on, they contented themselves with glancing through the dusty windows at the few who