An Israeli helicopter, fitted with long-range tanks and in the livery of the Jordanian Army, came out of the Negev and skimmed across the Jordanian desert to deposit the man just inside Iraq, south of the Ruweishid crossing point.
When it had left him, it turned and flew back across Jordan and into Israel, unspotted.
Like Martin, the soldier had a lightweight, rugged motorcycle with heavy-duty desert tires. Although disguised to look old, battered, dirty, rusted, and dented, its engine was in superb condition, and it carried extra fuel in two panniers astride the back wheel.
The soldier followed the main road eastward and at sundown entered Baghdad.
The concerns of his superiors for his security had been overcautious. By that amazing bush telegraph that seems able to outstrip even electronics, the people of Baghdad already knew their army was being crushed in the deserts of southern Iraq and Kuwait. By the evening of the first day, the AMAM had taken to its barracks and stayed there.
Now that the bombing had stopped—for all the Allied airplanes were needed over the battlefield—the people of Baghdad circulated freely, talking openly of the imminent arrival of the Americans and British to sweep away Saddam Hussein.
It was a euphoria that would last a week, until it became plain the Allies were not coming, and the rule of the AMAM closed over them again.
The central bus station was a seething mass of soldiers, most stripped down to singlets and shorts, having thrown away their uniforms in the desert. These were the deserters who had evaded the execution squads waiting behind the front line. They were selling their Kalashnikovs for the price of a ticket home to their villages. At the start of the week, these rifles were fetching thirty-five dinars each; four days later, the price was down to seventeen.
The Israeli infiltrator had one job, which he accomplished during the night. The Mossad knew only of the three dead-letter boxes for getting a message to Jericho that had been left behind by Alfonso Benz Moncada in August. As it happened, Martin had discontinued two of them for security reasons, but the third still operated.
The Israeli deposited identical messages in all three drops, made the three appropriate chalk marks, took his motorcycle, and rode west again, joining the throng of refugees heading that way.
It took him another day to reach the border. Here he cut south of the main road into empty desert, crossed into Jordan, recovered his hidden directional beacon, and used it. The bleep-bleep beam was picked up at once by an Israeli aircraft circling over the Negev, and the helicopter returned to the rendezvous to recover the infiltrator.
He did not sleep for those fifty hours and ate little, but he fulfilled his mission and returned home safely.
* * *
On the third day of the ground war, Edith Hardenberg returned to her desk at the Winkler Bank, both puzzled and angry. On the previous morning, just as she had been about to leave for work, she had received a telephone call.
The speaker, in faultless German with a Salzburg accent, introduced himself as the neighbor of her mother. He told her that Frau Hardenberg had had a bad fall down the stairs after slipping on an icy patch and was in a bad way.
She at once tried to call her mother but repeatedly got a busy signal. Finally frantic, she had called the Salzburg exchange, who informed her the phone must be out of order.
Telephoning the bank that she would not be in for work, she had driven to Salzburg through the snow and slush, arriving in the late morning. Her mother, perfectly fit and well, was surprised to see her. There had been no fall, no injury. Worse, some vandal had cut her telephone line outside the flat.
By the time Edith Hardenberg returned to Vienna, it was too late to go in for work.
When she appeared at her desk the next morning, she found Wolfgang Gemütlich in an even worse mood than she. He reproached her bitterly for her absence the previous day and listened to her explanation in a bad humor.
The reason for his own misery was not long in coming. In the midmorning of the previous day, a young man had appeared at the bank and insisted on seeing him.
The visitor explained that his name was Aziz and that he was the son of the owner of a substantial numbered account. His father, explained the Arab, was indisposed but wished his son to act in his place.
At this, Aziz Junior had produced documentation that fully and perfectly authenticated him as his father’s ambassador, with complete authority to operate the numbered account. Herr Gemütlich had examined the documents of authority for the slightest flaw, but there was none. He had been left with no alternative but to concede.
The young wretch had insisted that his father’s wishes were to close down the entire account and transfer the contents elsewhere. This, mind you, Fräulein Hardenberg, just two days after the arrival in the account of a further $3 million credit, bringing the aggregate total to over $10 million.
Edith Hardenberg listened to Gemütlich’s tale of woe very quietly, then asked about the visitor. Yes, she was told, his first name had been Karim. Now that she mentioned it, there had been a signet ring with a pink opal on the small finger of one hand and, indeed, a scar along the chin. Had he been less consumed by his own sense of outrage, the banker might have wondered at such precise questioning by his secretary about a man she could not have seen.
He had known, of course, Gemütlich admitted, that the account-holder must be some sort of Arab, but he had had no idea that the man was from Iraq or had a son.
After work, Edith Hardenberg went home and began to clean her little flat. She scrubbed and scoured it for hours. There were two cardboard boxes that she took to the large rubbish bin a few hundred yards away and dumped. One contained a number of items of makeup, perfumes, lotions, and bath salts; the other, a variety of women’s underwear. Then she returned to her cleaning.
Neighbors said later she played music through the evening and late into the night—not her usual Mozart and Strauss but Verdi, especially something from Nabucco . A particularly keen-eared neighbor identified the piece as the “Slaves’ Chorus,” which she played over and over again.
In the small hours of the morning the music stopped, and she left in her car with two items from her kitchen.
It was a retired accountant, walking his dog in the Prater Park at seven the next morning, who found her.