“That’s the one. They were at school together, you know. We all were.
Good old Mr. Hartley’s prep school. Mike and Hassan were best mates. See? That’s why he can never be seen around Baghdad.”
Paxman left the wine bar and stared at the dumpy figure of the Arabist heading down the street.
“Oh shit,” he said. “Oh bloody, bloody hell.”
Someone had just ruined his Christmas, and he was about to ruin Steve Laing’s.
Edith Hardenberg had gone to Salzburg to spend the festive season with her mother, a family tradition that went back many years.
Karim, the young Jordanian student, was able to visit Gidi Barzilai at his safe-house apartment, where the controller for Operation Joshua was dispensing drinks to the off-duty members of the yarid and neviot teams working under him. Only one unfortunate was up in Salzburg, keeping an eye on Miss Hardenberg in case she should return suddenly to the capital.
Karim’s real name was Avi Herzog, a twenty-nine-year-old who had been seconded to the Mossad several years earlier from Unit 504, a branch of Army Intelligence specializing in cross-border raids, which accounted for his fluent Arabic. Because of his good looks and the deceptively shy and diffident manner he could affect when he wished, the Mossad had twice used him for honeytrap operations.
“So how’s it going, loverboy?” asked Gidi as he passed around the drinks.
“Slowly,” said Avi.
“Don’t take too long. The old man wants a result, remember.”
“This is one very uptight lady,” replied Avi. “Only interested in a meeting of minds—yet.”
In his cover as a student from Amman, he had been set up in a small flat shared with one other Arab student, in fact a member of the neviot team, a phone-tapper by trade who also spoke Arabic. This was in case
Edith Hardenberg or anyone else took it into their head to check out where and how he lived and with whom.
The shared flat would pass any inspection—it was littered with textbooks on engineering and strewn with Jordanian newspapers and magazines. Both men had genuinely been enrolled in the Technical University in case a check were made there also. It was Herzog’s flat-mate who spoke.
“Meeting of minds? Screw that.”
“That’s the point,” said Avi. “I can’t.”
When the laughter died down, he added:
“By the way, I’m going to want danger money.”
“Why?” asked Gidi. “Think she’s going to bite it off when you drop your jeans?”
“Nope. It’s the art galleries, concerts, operas, recitals. I could die of boredom before I get that far.”
“You just carry on the way you know how, boychick. You’re only here because the Office says you’ve got something we don’t.”
“Yes,” said the woman member of the yarid tracking team. “About nine inches.”
“That’s enough of that, young Yael. You can be back on traffic duty in Hayarkon Street any time you like.”
The drink, the laughter, and the banter in Hebrew flowed. Late that evening, Yael discovered she was right. It was a good Christmas for the Mossad team in Vienna.
“So what do you think, Terry?”
Steve Laing and Simon Paxman had invited Terry Martin to join them in one of the Firm’s apartments in Kensington. They needed more privacy than they could get in a restaurant. It was two days before the New Year.
“Fascinating,” said Martin. “Absolutely fascinating. This is for real?
Saddam really said all this?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, if you’ll forgive my saying so, it’s a strange telephone tap. The narrator seems to be reporting to someone else on a meeting he attended. ... The other man on the line doesn’t seem to say a thing.”
There was simply no way the Firm was going to tell Terry Martin how they had come by the report.
“The other man’s interventions were perfunctory,” said Laing smoothly. “Just grunts and expressions of interest. There seemed no point in including them.”
“But this
“So we understand, yes.”
“Fascinating. The first time I’ve ever seen anything he said that was not destined for publication or a wider audience.”
Martin had in his hands not the handwritten report by Jericho, which had been destroyed by his own brother in Baghdad as soon as it had been read, word for word, into the tape recorder. It was a typewritten transcript in Arabic of the text that had reached Riyadh in the burst transmission before Christmas. He also had the Firm’s own English translation.
“That last phrase,” said Paxman, who would be heading back to Riyadh the same evening, “where he says ‘win and be seen to win’—does that tell you anything?”
“Of course. But you know, you’re still using the word win in its European or North American connotation. I would use the word succeed in English.”
“All right, Terry, how does he think he can succeed against America and the Coalition?” asked Laing.
“By humiliation. I told you before, he must leave America looking like a complete fool.”
“But he won’t pull out of Kuwait in the next twenty days? We really need to know, Terry.”
“Look, Saddam went in there because his claims would not be met,”
said Martin. “He demanded four things: takeover of Warba and Bubiyan Islands to have access to the sea, compensation for the excess oil he claims Kuwait snitched from the shared oil field, an end to Kuwait’s overproduction, and a writeoff of the fifteen-billion-dollar war debt. If he can get these, he can pull back with honor, leaving America hanging in the breeze. That’s winning.”
“Any hint that he thinks he might get them?”
Martin shrugged.
“He thinks the United Nations peacemongers could pull the rug. He’s gambling that time is on his side, that if he can keep spinning things out, the resolve of the UN will ebb away. He could be right.”
“The man doesn’t make sense,” snapped Laing. “He has the deadline.
January fifteenth, not twenty days away. He’s going to be crushed.”
“Unless,” suggested Paxman, “one of the permanent members of the Security Council comes up with a last- minute peace plan to put the deadline on hold.”
Laing looked gloomy.
“Paris or Moscow, or both,” he predicted.
“If it comes to war, does he still think he could win? Beg your pardon,
‘succeed’?” asked Paxman.
“Yes,” said Terry Martin. “But it’s back to what I told you before—American casualties. Don’t forget, Saddam is a back-street gunman. His constituency is not the diplomatic corridors of Cairo and Riyadh. It’s all those alleys and bazaars crammed with Palestinians and other Arabs who resent America, the backer of Israel. Any man who can leave America bleeding, whatever the damage to his own country, will be the toast of those millions.”
“But he can’t do it,” insisted Laing.
“He thinks he can,” Martin countered. “Look, he’s smart enough to have worked out that in America’s eyes, America cannot lose, must not lose. It is simply not acceptable. Look at Vietnam. The veterans came home, and they were pelted with garbage. For America, terrible casualties at the hands of a despised enemy are a form of loss.
Unacceptable loss. Saddam can waste fifty thousand men anytime, anyplace. He doesn’t care. Uncle Sam does. If America takes that kind of loss, she’ll be shaken to the core. Heads have to roll, careers to be smashed,
