“So did I,” said Badri.
“But things change. He has gone mad. In his madness he piles cruelty upon cruelty. He must be stopped.
You know about the Qa’ala, of course.”
Badri was surprised again, this time by the sudden change of subject.
“Of course. I built it.”
“Exactly. Do you know what now resides within it?”
“No.”
The senior officer told him.
“He cannot be serious,” said Badri.
“He is completely serious. He intends to use it against the Americans. That may not be our concern. But do you know what America will do in return? It will reply in kind. Not a brick here will stand on brick, not a stone on stone. The Rais alone will survive. Do you want to be part of this?”
Colonel Badri thought of the body in the cemetery, over which the sextons were even then still heaping the dry earth.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Tell me about Qa’ala.”
“Why?”
“The Americans will destroy it.”
“You can get this information to them?”
“Trust me, there are ways. The Qa’ala ...”
So Colonel Osman Badri, the young engineer who had once wanted to design fine buildings to last for centuries, as his ancestors had done, told the man called Jericho.
“Grid reference.”
Badri gave him that too.
“Go back to your post, Colonel. You will be safe.”
Colonel Badri left the car and walked away. His stomach was heaving, turning and turning. Within a hundred yards he began to ask himself, over and again: What have I done? Suddenly, he knew he had to talk to his brother, that older brother who had always had the cooler head, the wiser counsel.
The man the Mossad team called the spotter arrived back in Vienna that Monday, summoned from Tel Aviv. Once again he was a prestigious lawyer from New York, with all the necessary identifying paperwork to prove it.
Even though the real lawyer was no longer on vacation, the chances that Gemütlich, who hated telephones and fax machines, would telephone New York to check were regarded as minimal. It was a risk the Mossad was prepared to take.
Once again the spotter installed himself at the Sheraton and wrote a personal letter to Herr Gemütlich.
He again apologized for his unannounced arrival in the Austrian capital but explained he was accompanied by his firm’s accountant, and that the pair of them wished to make a first substantial deposit on behalf of their client.
The letter was delivered by hand in the late afternoon, and the following morning Gemütlich’s reply arrived at the hotel, offering a meeting at ten in the morning.
The spotter was indeed accompanied. The man with him was known simply as the cracksman, for that was his speciality.
If the Mossad possesses at its Tel Aviv headquarters a virtually unrivaled collection of dummy companies, false passports, letterhead stationery, and all the other paraphernalia for deception, pride of place must still go to its safecrackers and locksmiths. The Mossad’s ability to break into locked places has its own niche in the covert world. At the science of burglary, the Mossad has long been regarded simply as the best. Had a neviot team been in charge at the Watergate, no one would ever have known.
So high is the reputation of Israeli lock-pickers that when British manufacturers sent a new product to the SIS for their comments, Century House would pass it on to Tel Aviv. The Mossad, devious to a fault, would study it, find how to pick it, then return it to London as “impregnable.” The SIS found out about this.