virtually sealed off from the rest of the villa.
Simon Paxman listened to the voice on the big tape machine in the radio shack, which was in fact a converted bedroom. Martin spoke in Arabic first, giving the literal handwritten message from Jericho twice, then his own translation twice.
As he listened, Paxman felt a great cold hand moving deep in his stomach. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong. What he was hearing simply could not be. The other two men stood in silence beside him.
“Is it him?” asked Paxman urgently as soon as the message had finished. His first thought was that Martin had been taken and the voice was that of an impostor.
“It’s him—I checked the ossy. There’s no doubt it’s him.”
Speech patterns have varying tones and rhythms, highs and lows, cadences that can be recorded on an oscilloscope that reduces them to a series of lines on a screen, like a heart monitor in a cardiac unit.
Every human voice is slightly different, no matter how good the mimic. Before leaving for Baghdad, Mike Martin’s voice had been recorded on such a machine. Later transmissions out of Baghdad had endured the same fate, in case the slowing-down and speeding-up, together with any distortion by tape machine or satellite transmission, caused distortions.
The voice that came from Baghdad that night checked with the recorded voice. It was Martin speaking and no one else.
Paxman’s second fear was that Martin had been caught, tortured, and turned, that he was now broadcasting under duress. He rejected the idea as very unlikely.
There were preagreed words, a pause, a hesitation, a cough, that would warn the listeners in Riyadh if ever he were not transmitting as a free agent. Besides, his previous broadcast had been only three days earlier.
Brutal the Iraqi Secret Police might be, but they were not quick. And Martin was tough. A man broken and turned at such speed would be shattered, a tortured wreck, and it would show in the speech delivery.
That meant Martin was on the level—the message he had read was precisely what he had received that night from Jericho. Which left more imponderables. Either Jericho was right, mistaken, or lying.
“Get Julian,” Paxman told one of the radio men.
While the man went to fetch the British Head of Station from his bed upstairs, Paxman rang the private line of his American counterpart, Chip Barber.
“Chip, better get your backside over here—fast,” he said.
The CIA man came awake fast. Something in the Englishman’s voice told him this was no time for sleepy banter.
“Problem, ol’ buddy?”
“That’s the way it looks from here,” admitted Paxman.
Barber was across the city and into the SIS house in thirty minutes, sweater and trousers over his pajamas. It was one A.M.
By then, Paxman had the tape in English and Arabic, plus a transcript in both languages. The two radio men, who had worked for years in the Middle East, were fluent and confirmed Martin’s translation was quite accurate.
“He has to be joking,” breathed Barber when he heard the tape.
Paxman ran through the checks he had already made for authenticity of Martin’s speaking voice.
“Look, Simon,” said Barber, “this is just Jericho reporting what he
Chances are, Saddam’s lying. Let’s face it, he lies like he breathes.”
Lie or not, this was no matter to be dealt with in Riyadh. The local SIS
and CIA stations might supply their generals with tactical and even strategic military information from Jericho, but politics went to London and Washington. Barber checked his watch: seven P.M. in Washington.
“They’ll be mixing their cocktails by now,” he said. “Better make ’em strong, boys. I’ll get this to Langley right away.”
“Cocoa and biscuits in London,” said Paxman. “I’ll have this to Century. Let them sort it out.”
Barber left to send his copy of the transmission in heavily encrypted code to Bill Stewart, with an urgency rating of “flash,” the highest known. That would mean that wherever he was, the cipher people would find him and tell him to go to a secure line.
Paxman did the same for Steve Laing, who would be awakened in the middle of the night and told to leave his warm bed to step into a freezing night and head back to London.
There was one last thing Paxman could do, which he did. Martin had a transmission window for listening only, and it was at four A.M. Paxman waited up and sent his man in Baghdad a very short but very explicit message. It said Martin should make no attempt until further notice to approach any of his six dead-letter boxes. Just in case.
Karim, the Jordanian student, was making slow but steady progress in his courtship of Fraulein Edith Hardenberg. She allowed him to hold her hand when they walked through the streets of Old Vienna, the sidewalks crackling with frost beneath their feet. She even admitted to herself that she found the hand-holding pleasant.
In the second week of January she obtained tickets at the Burgtheater—Karim paid. The performance was of a play by Grillparzer,
She explained excitedly before they went in that it was about an old king with several sons, and the one to whom he bequeathed his ring would be the successor. Karim sat through the performance entranced and asked for several explanations in the text, to which he referred constantly during the play.
During the intermission Edith was happy to answer them. Later, Avi Herzog would tell Barzilai it was all as exciting as watching paint dry.
“You’re a philistine,” said the Mossad man. “You have no culture.”
“I’m not here for my culture,” said Avi.
“Then get on with it, boy.”
On Sunday Edith, a devout Catholic, went to morning mass at the Votivkirche. Karim explained that as a Moslem he could not accompany her but would wait at a cafe across the square.
Afterward, over coffee that he deliberately laced with a slug of schnapps that brought a pink flush to her cheeks, he explained the differences and similarities between Christianity and Islam—the common worship of the one true God, the line of patriarchs and prophets, the teachings of the holy books and the moral codes. Edith was fearful but fascinated. She wondered if listening to all this might imperil her immortal soul, but she was amazed to learn that she had been wrong in thinking Moslems bowed down to idols.
“I would like dinner,” said Karim three days later.
“Well, yes, but you spend too much on me,” said Edith. She found she could gaze into his young face and his soft brown eyes with pleasure, while constantly warning herself that the ten-year age gap between them made anything more than a platonic friendship quite ridiculous.
“Not in a restaurant.”
“Where then?”
“Will you cook a meal for me, Edith? You can cook? Real Viennese food?”
She went bright red at the thought. Each evening, unless she was going alone to a concert, she prepared herself a modest snack that she ate in the small alcove of her flat that served as a dining area. But yes, she thought, she
Besides, she argued with herself, he had taken her to several expensive meals in restaurants ... and he was an extremely well-brought-up and courteous young man. Surely there could be no harm in it.
To say that the Jericho report of the night of January 12-13 caused consternation in certain covert circles in London and Washington would be an understatement. Controlled panic would be nearer the mark.
One of the problems was the tiny circle of people who knew of Jericho’s existence, let alone the details. The
