The Fist of God

belonging to the embassy of the USSR. He pulled on the chain beside the gate and waited.

After several minutes the gate opened to reveal a burly, crop-haired Russian in the white tunic of a steward.

“Da?” he said.

Martin replied in Arabic, the wheedling whine of a supplicant who speaks to a superior. The Russian scowled. Martin fumbled inside his robe and produced his identity card. This made sense to the steward; in his country they knew about internal passports. He took the card, said,

“Wait,” in Arabic, and closed the gate.

He was back in five minutes, beckoning the Iraqi in the soiled dish-dash through the gate into the forecourt. He led Martin toward the steps leading to the main door of the villa. As they reached the bottom of the steps a man appeared at the top.

“That will do. I will handle this,” he said in Russian to the manservant, who glowered at the Arab one last time and went back into the house.

Yuri Kulikov, First Secretary to the Soviet embassy, was a wholly professional diplomat who had found the order he received from Moscow outrageous but unavoidable. He had evidently been caught at dinner, for he clutched a napkin with which he dabbed his lips as he descended the steps.

“So here you are,” he said in Russian. “Now listen, if we have to go through with this charade, so be it. But I personally will have nothing to do with it. Panimayesh?”

Martin, who did not speak Russian, shrugged helplessly and said in Arabic:

“Please, bey?”

Kulikov took the change of language as dumb insolence. Martin realized with a delicious irony that the Soviet diplomat really thought his unwelcome new staff member was a fellow-Russian who had been sicced onto him by those wretched spooks up at the Lubyanka in Moscow.

“Oh, very well then, Arabic if you wish,” he said testily. He too had trained in Arabic, which he spoke well with a harsh Russian accent. He was damned if he was going to be shown up by this agent of the KGB.

So he continued in Arabic.

“Here is your card. Here is the letter I was ordered to prepare for you.

Now, you will live in the shack at the far end of the garden, keep the grounds in order, and do the shopping as the chef instructs. Apart from that, I do not want to know. If you are caught, I know nothing except that I took you on in good faith. Now, go about your business and get rid of those damned hens. I will not have chickens ruining the garden.”

Some chance, he thought bitterly as he turned back to resume his interrupted dinner. If the oaf is caught up to some mischief, the AMAM will soon know he is a Russian, and the idea that he is on the First Secretary’s personal staff by accident will be as likely as a skating party on the Tigris. Yuri Kulikov was privately furious with Moscow.

Mike Martin found his quarters up against the rear wall of the quarter-acre garden, a one-room bungalow with a cot, a table, two chairs, a row of hooks on one wall, and a washbasin set in a shelf in a corner.

Further examination revealed an earth-closet close by and a cold-water tap in the garden wall. Hygiene would clearly be pretty basic and food presumably served from the kitchen door at the rear of the villa. He sighed. The house outside Riyadh seemed a long way away.

He found a number of candles and some matches. By their dim light, he slung blankets across the windows and went to work on the rough tiles of the floor with his penknife. An hour of scratching at the moldy mortar brought four of the tiles up, and a further hour of digging with a. trowel from the nearby potting shed produced a hole to take his radio transmitter, batteries, tape recorder, and satellite dish. A mixture of mud and spittle rubbed into the cracks between the tiles hid the last traces of his excavation.

Just before midnight, he used his knife to cut away the false bottom of the chicken cage and set the litter into the real base, so that no trace remained of the four-inch cavity. While he worked the chickens scratched around the floor, looking hopefully for a nonexistent grain of wheat but finding and consuming several bugs.

Martin finished off the last of his olives and cheese and shared the remaining fragments of pita bread with his traveling companions, along with a bowl of water drawn from the outside tap.

The hens went back into their cage, and if they found their home now four inches deeper than it used to be, they made no complaint. It had been a long day, and they went to sleep.

In a last gesture, Martin peed all over Kulikov’s roses in the darkness before blowing out the candles, wrapping himself in his blanket, and doing the same.

His body clock caused him to wake up at four A.M. Extracting the transmitting gear in its plastic bags, he recorded a brief message for Riyadh, speeded it up by two hundred times, connected the tape recorder to the transmitter, and erected the satellite dish, which occupied much of the center of the shack but pointed out the open door.

At four forty-five A.M. he sent a single-burst transmission on the channel of the day, then dismantled it all and put it back under the floor.

The sky was still pitch-black over Riyadh when a similar dish on the roof of the SIS residence caught the one-second signal and fed it down to the communications room. The transmitting time “window” was from four- thirty until five A.M., and the listening watch was awake.

Two spinning tapes caught the burst from Baghdad, and a warning light flashed to alert the technicians. They slowed the message down by two hundred times until it came over the headphones in clear. One noted it down in shorthand, typed it up, and left the room.

Julian Gray, the Head of Station, was shaken awake at five fifteen.

“It’s Black Bear, sir. He’s in.”

Gray read the transcript with mounting excitement and went to wake Simon Paxman. The head of the Iraq Desk was now on extended assignment to Riyadh, his duties in London having been taken over by his subordinate. He too sat up, wide awake, and read it.

“Bloody hell, so far so good.”

“The problem could start,” said Gray, “when he tries to raise Jericho.”

It was a sobering thought. The former Mossad asset in Baghdad had been switched off for three full months. He might have been compromised or caught, or simply changed his mind. He could have been posted far away, especially if he turned out to be a general now commanding troops in Kuwait. Anything could have happened.

Paxman stood up.

“Better tell London. Any chance of coffee?”

“I’ll tell Mohammed to get it together,” said Gray.

Mike Martin was watering the flowerbeds at five-thirty, when the house began to stir. The cook, a bosomy Russian woman, saw him from her window and, when water was hot, called him over to the kitchen window.

“Kak mazyvaetes?” she asked, then thought for a moment and used the Arabic word: “Name?”

“Mahmoud,” said Martin.

“Well, here’s a cup of coffee, Mahmoud.”

Martin bobbed his head several times in delighted acceptance, muttering “shukran” and taking the hot mug in two hands. He was not joking; it was delicious real coffee and his first hot drink since the tea on the Saudi side of the border.

Breakfast was at seven, a bowl of lentils and pita bread, which he devoured. It appeared that the houseman of the previous evening and his wife, the cook, looked after First Secretary Kulikov, who seemed to be single. By eight, Martin had met the chauffeur, an Iraqi who spoke a smattering of Russian and would be useful translating simple messages to the Russians.

Martin decided not to get too close to the chauffeur, who might be a plant by the AMAM Secret Police or even Rahmani’s counterintelligence people. That turned out to be no problem; agent or not, the chauffeur was a snob and treated the new gardener with contempt. He agreed, however, to explain to the cook that Martin had to leave for a while because their employer had ordered him to get rid of his chickens.