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 is the language Saddam used?”
“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, lea