“We want to reestablish contact,” said Laing smoothly. “How?”
Sharon laid out all six of the locations of the dead-letter boxes. During his two years Moncada had changed two of them; in one case because a location was bulldozed for redevelopment, in another because a derelict shop was refurbished and reoccupied. But the six functioning drops and the six places where the alerting chalk marks had to be placed were the up-to-date ones that had come from his final briefing after his expulsion.
The exact location of these drops and of the sites for the chalk marks were noted to the inch.
“Maybe we could get a friendly diplomat to approach him at a function, tell him he’s back in action and the money’s better,” suggested Barber. “Get around all this crap under bricks and flagstones.”
“No,” said Sharon. “It’s the drops, or you can’t contact him.”
“Why?” asked Stewart.
“You’re going to find this hard to believe, but I swear it’s true. We never found out who he is.”
The four Western agents stared at Sharon for several minutes.
“You never identified him?” asked Stewart slowly.
“No. We tried. We asked him to identify himself for his own protection. He refused, threatened to shut off if we persisted. We did handwriting analyses, psychoportraits. We cross-indexed the information he could produce and the stuff he couldn’t get at. We ended up with a list of thirty, maybe forty men, all around Saddam Hussein, all within the Revolutionary Command Council, the Army High Command, or the senior ranks of the Ba’ath Party.
“Never could get closer than that. Twice we slipped a technical term in English into our demands. Each time they came back with a query. It seems he only speaks no or very limited English. But that could be a blind. He could be fluent, but if we knew that, it would narrow the field to two or three. So he always writes in script, in Arabic.”
Stewart grunted, convinced. “Sounds like Deep Throat.”
“Surely Woodward and Bernstein identified Deep Throat?” suggested Paxman.
“So they claim, but I doubt it,” said Stewart. “I figure the guy stayed in deep shadow, like Jericho.”
Darkness had long fallen by the time the four of them finally let an exhausted David Sharon go back to his embassy. If there was anything more he could have told them, they were not going to get it out of him.
But Steve Laing was certain that this time the Mossad had come clean. Bill Stewart had told him of the level of the pressure that had been exercised in Washington.
The two British and two American intelligence officers, tired of sandwiches and coffee, adjourned to a restaurant half a mile away. Bill Stewart, who had an ulcer that twelve hours of sandwiches and high stress had not improved, toyed with a plate of smoked salmon.
“It’s a bastard, Steve. It’s a real four-eyed bastard. Like the Mossad, we’ll have to try and find an accredited diplomat already trained in all the tradecraft and get him to work for us. Pay him if we have to.
Langley’s prepared to spend a lot of money on this. Jericho’s information could save us a lot of lives when the fighting starts.”
“So who does that leave us?” said Barber. “Half the embassies in Baghdad are closed down already.
The rest must be under heavy surveillance. The Irish, Swiss, Swedes, Finns?”
“The neutrals won’t play ball,” said Laing. “And I doubt they’ve got a trained agent posted to Baghdad on their own account. Forget Third World embassies—it means starting a whole recruiting and training program.”
“We don’t have the time, Steve. This is urgent. We can’t go down the same road the Israelis went.
Three weeks is crazy. It might have worked then, but Baghdad is on a war footing now. Things have to be much tighter in there. Starting cold, I’d want a minimum three months to give a diplomat the tradecraft.”
Stewart nodded agreement.
“Failing that, someone with legitimate access. Some businessmen are still going in and out, especially the Germans. We could produce a convincing German, or a Japanese.”
“The trouble is, they’re short-stay chappies. Ideally, one wants someone to mother-hen this Jericho for the next—what? Four months. What about a journalist?” suggested Laing.
Paxman shook his head. “I’ve been talking with them all when they come out; being journalists, they get total surveillance. Snooping around back alleys won’t work for a foreign correspondent—they all have a minder from the AMAM with them, all the time. Besides, don’t forget that outside an accredited diplomat, we’re talking about a black operation. Anyone want to dwell on what happens to an agent falling into Omar Khatib’s hands?”
The four men at the table had heard of the brutal reputation of Khatib, head of the AMAM, nicknamed Al-Mu’azib, “the Tormentor.”
“Risks just may have to be taken,” observed Barber.