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Paxman told him. Martin put down his fork and wiped his face, which was bright pink beneath the ginger thatch of his hair.

“Can it—could it, under any circumstances, be true?” asked Paxman.

“I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. The brass has given it a no-no?”

“Absolutely. The nuclear scientists all agree it simply cannot be true. So Saddam was lying.”

Privately, Martin thought it was a very odd radio intercept. It sounded more like information from inside a closed meeting.

“Saddam lies,” Martin said, “all the time. But usually for public consumption. This was to his own inner core of confidants? I wonder why? Morale booster on the threshold of war?”

“That’s what the powers think,” said Paxman.

“Have the generals been told?”

“No. The reasoning is, they are extremely busy right now and do not need to be bothered by something that simply has to be rubbish.”

“So what do you want from me, Simon?”

“Saddam’s mind. No one can figure it out. Nothing he does makes sense in the West. Is he certifiably insane or crazy like a fox?”

“In his world, the latter. In his world, what he does makes sense. The terror that revolts us has no moral downside for him, and it makes sense. The threats and the bluster make sense to him. Only when he tries to enter our world—with those ghastly PR exercises in Baghdad, ruffling that little English boy’s hair, playing the benign uncle, that sort of thing—only when he tries that does he look a complete fool. In his own world he is not a fool. He survives, he stays in power, he keeps Iraq united, his enemies fail and perish.”

“Terry, as we sit here, his country is being pulverized.”

“It doesn’t matter, Simon. It’s all replaceable.”

“But why did he say what he is supposed to have said?”

“What do the powers think?”

“That he lied.”

“No,” said Martin, “he lies for public consumption. To his inner core, he doesn’t have to. They are his, anyway. Either the source of the information lied and Saddam never said that; or he said it because he believed it was true.”

“Then he was himself lied to?”

“Possibly. Whoever did that will pay dearly when he finds out. But then, the intercept could be phony. A deliberate bluff, designed to be intercepted.”

Paxman could not say what he knew: that it was not an intercept. It came from Jericho. And in two years under the Israelis and three months under the Anglo-Americans, Jericho had never been wrong.

“You’ve got doubts, haven’t you?” said Martin.

“I suppose I have,” admi

tted Paxman.

Martin sighed.

“Straws in the wind, Simon. A phrase in an intercept, a man told to shut up and called a son of a whore, a phrase from Saddam about succeeding and being seen to succeed—in the hurting of America—and now this. We need a piece of string.”

“String?”

“Straw only makes up a bale when you can wrap it around with string. There has to be something else as to what he really has in mind. Otherwise, the powers are right, and he will go for the gas weapon he already has.”

“All right. I’ll look for a piece of string.”

“And I,” said Martin, “did not meet you this evening, and we have not spoken.”