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“Twenty-four hours?”

Kobi Dror was playing his Fiddler on the Roof role again.

“For you, boychick, my right arm. But look, this is crazy, what you are proposing.”

He rose and came from behind his desk, draping an arm around the Englishman’s shoulders.

“You know, we broke half our own rules, and we were lucky. Normally, we never have our people visit a dead-letter box. It could be a trap. For us, a dead-letter box is one-way: from the katsa to the spy. For Jericho, we broke that rule. Moncada picked up the product that way because there was no other way.

And he was lucky—for two years he was lucky. But he had diplomatic cover. Now you want ... this ?”

He held up the small photograph of a sad-looking Arab-featured man with tufted black hair and stubble, the photo the Englishman had just received from Riyadh, brought in (since there are no commercial routes between the two capitals) by General de la Billière’s personal HS-125 twin-jet communications plane.

The 125 was standing at Sde Dov military airfield, where its livery markings had been extensively photographed.

Dror shrugged.

“All right. By tomorrow morning. My life.”

The Mossad has, beyond any room for quarrel, some of the best technical services in the world. Apart from a central computer with almost two million names and their appropriate data, apart from one of the best lock-picking services on earth, there exists in the basement and subbasement of Mossad headquarters a series of rooms where the temperature is carefully controlled.

These rooms contain paper. Not just any old paper—very special paper. Originals of just about every kind of passport in the world lie there, along with myriad other identity cards, drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, and suchlike.

Then there are the blanks, the unfilled identity cards on which the penmen can work at will, using the originals as a guide to produce forgeries of superb quality.

Identity cards are not the only speciality. Banknotes of virtually foolproof likeness can be and are produced in great quantities, either to help ruin the currencies of neighboring but hostile nations, or to fund the Mossad’s black operations, the ones neither the Prime Minister nor the Knesset knows about nor wishes to.

It had only been after some soul-searching that the CIA and SIS had agreed to go to the Mossad for the favor, but they simply could not produce the identity card of a forty-five-year-old Iraqi laborer with the certainty of knowing it would pass any inspection in Iraq. No one had bothered to find and abstract an original one to copy.

Fortunately, the Sayeret Matkal, a cross-border reconnaissance group so secret that its name cannot even be printed in Israel, had made an incursion into Iraq two years earlier to drop an Arab oter who had some low-level contact to make there. While on Iraqi soil, the agents had surprised two working men in the fields, tied them up, and relieved them of their identity cards.

As promised, Dror’s forgers worked through the night and by dawn had produced an Iraqi identity card, convincingly dirty and smudged as if from long use, in the name of Mahmoud Al-Khouri, age forty-five, from a village in the hills north of Baghdad, working in the capital as a laborer.

The forgers did not know that Martin had taken the name of the Mr. Al-Khouri who had tested his Arabic in a Chelsea restaurant in early August; nor could they know that he had chosen the village from which his father’s gardener had come, the old man who, long ago beneath a tree in Baghdad, had told the little English boy of the place where he was born, of its mosque and coffee shop and the fields of alfalfa and melons that surrounded it. And there was one more thing the forgers did not know.

In the morning Kobi Dror handed the identity card to the Tel Aviv-based SIS man.

“This will not let him down. But I tell you, this”—he tapped the photo with a stubby forefinger—“this, your tame Arab, will betray you or be caught within a week.”

The SIS man could only shrug. Not even he knew that the man in the smudged photo was not an Arab at all. He had no need to know, so he had not been told. He just did what he was told—put the card on the HS-125, by which it was flown back to Riyadh.

Clothes had also been prepared, the simple dish-dash of an Iraqi working man, a dull brown keffiyeh , and tough, rope-soled canvas shoes.

A basket weaver, without knowing what he was doing or why, was creating a wicker crate of osier strands to a most unusual design. He was a poor Saudi craftsman, and the money the strange infidel was prepared to pay was very good, so he worked with a will.

Outside the city of Riyadh, at a secret army base, two rather special vehicles were being prepared. They had been brought by a Hercules of the RAF from the main SAS base farther down the Arabian Peninsula in Oman and were being stripped down and reequipped for a long and rough ride.

The essence of the conversion of the two long-base Land-Rovers was not armor and firepower but speed and range. Each vehicle would have to carry its normal complement of four SAS men, and one would carry a passenger. The other would carry a big-tired cross-country motorcycle, itself fitted with extra-long-range fuel tanks.

The American Army again loaned its power on request, this time in the form of two of its big twin-rotor Chinook workhorse helicopters. They were just told to stand by.

Mikhail Sergeivitch Gorbachev was

sitting as usual at his desk in his personal office on the seventh and top floor of the Central Committee building on Novaya Ploshad, attended by two male secretaries, when the intercom buzzed to announce the arrival of the two emissaries from London and Washington.

For twenty-four hours he had been intrigued by the requests of both the American President and the British Prime Minister that he receive a personal emissary from each of them. Not a politician, not a diplomat—just a messenger. In this day and age, he wondered, what message cannot be passed through the normal diplomatic channels? They could even use a hotline that was utterly secure from interception, although interpreters and technicians did have access.

He was intrigued and curious, and as curiosity was one of his most notable features, he was eager to solve the enigma.