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Before the envelope from Coutts of London was dropped through the bank’s door, the head of the neviot technical team had examined the mailbox on Franziskanerplatz and snorted with disgust. It was hardly a challenge. One of his team was a crack lockpick and had the mailbox open and reclosed inside three minutes. From what he learned the first time he did it, he could make up a key to fit, which he did.

A

fter a couple of minor adjustments, it worked as well as the postman’s key.

Further surveillance revealed that the bank guard always dropped off the bank’s outgoing mail between twenty and thirty minutes ahead of the regular sixP.M. pickup from the mailbox by the official post office van.

The day the Coutts letter went into the mail slot in the door, the yarid team and the neviot lockpick worked together. As the bank guard returned to the bank down the alley after making the dropoff that evening, the lockpick had the door of the mailbox open. The twenty-two letters going out from the Winkler Bank lay on top. It took thirty seconds to abstract the one addressed to Messrs. Coutts of London, replace the rest, and relock the box.

All five of the yarid team had been posted in the square in case anyone tried to interfere with the

“postman,” whose uniform, hurriedly purchased in a secondhand shop, bore a marked resemblance to the real uniforms of Viennese mailmen.

But the good citizens of Vienna are not accustomed to agents from the Middle East breaking the sanctity of a mailbox. There were only two people in the square at the time, and neither took any notice of what appeared to be a post office employee going about his lawful business. Twenty minutes later, the real postman did his job, but by then the passersby were gone and replaced with fresh ones.

Barzilai opened Winkler’s reply to Coutts and noted that it was a brief but courteous reply of acknowledgment, written in passable English, and signed by Wolfgang Gemütlich. The Mossad team leader now knew exactly who handled the Jericho account. All that remained was to break him or penetrate him. What Barzilai did not know was that his problems were just beginning.

It was well after dark when Mike Martin left the compound in Mansour. He saw no reason to disturb the Russians by going out through the main gate; there was a much smaller wicket gate in the rear wall, with a rusty lock to which he had been given the key. He wheeled his bicycle out into the alley, relocked the gate, and began to pedal.

It would be, he knew, a long night. The Chilean diplomat Moncada had described perfectly well to the Mossad officers who debriefed him when he came out just where he had sited the three dead-letter boxes destined for messages from him to Jericho and where to put the chalk marks to alert the invisible Jericho that a message awaited him. Martin felt he had no choice but to use all three at once, with an identical message in each.

He had written out those messages in Arabic on flimsy airmail paper and folded each one into a square glassine bag. The three bags were taped to his inner thigh. The chalk sticks resided in a side pocket.

The first drop was the Alwazia cemetery, across the river in Risafa. He knew it already, remembered from long ago and studied at length on photographs in Riyadh. Finding the loose brick in darkness was another matter.

It took ten minutes, scrabbling with fingertips in the darkness of the walled cemetery compound, before he found the right one. But it was just where Moncada had said. He eased the brick from its niche, slipped one glassine bag behind it, and replaced the brick.

His second drop was in another old and crumbling wall, this time near the ruined citadel in Aadhamiya, where a stagnant pond is all that remains of the ancient moat. Not far from the citadel is the Imam Aladham shrine, and between them a wall, as old and crumbled as the citadel itself. Martin found the wall and the single tree growing against it. He reached behind the tree and counted ten rows of bricks down from the top. The tenth brick down rocked like an old tooth. The second envelope went behind it, and the brick went back. Martin checked to see if anyone was watching, but he was completely alone; no one would want to come to this deserted place after dark.

The third and last drop was in another cemetery, but this time the British one, long abandoned, in Waziraya, near the Turkish embassy. As in Kuwait, it was a grave, but not a scrape beneath the marble of the tomb; rather, it was the inside of a small stone jar cemented where the headstone would be, at one end of a long-abandoned plot.

“Never mind,” murmured Martin to whatever long-dead warrior of the empire lay beneath. “Just carry on, you’re doing fine.”

Because Moncada had been based at the United Nations building, miles down the Matar Sadam Airport road, he had wisely made his chalk-mark sites closer to the wider-spaced roads of Mansour, where they could be seen from a passing car. The rule was that whoever—Moncada or Jericho—saw a chalk mark, he should note which drop it referred to, then erase it with a damp cloth. The placer of the mark, passing a day or so later, would see that it was gone and know his message had been received and (presumably) the drop visited and the package retrieved.

In this way both agents had communicated with each other for two years and never met.

Martin, unlike Moncada, had no car, so he cycled the whole distance. His first mark, a Saint Andrew’s cross in the figure of an X, was made with blue chalk on a stone post of the gate of an abandoned mansion.

The second was in white chalk, on the rusty-red sheet-iron door of a garage at the back of a house in Yarmuk. It took the form of a cross of Lorraine. The third was in red chalk—a crescent of Islam with a horizontal bar through the middle—placed on the wall of the compound building of the Union of Arab Journalists, on the edge of Mutanabi district. Iraqi journalists are not encouraged to be a very investigative crowd, and a chalk mark on their wall would hardly make headlines.

Martin could not know whether Jericho, despite Moncada’s warning that he could return, was still patrolling the city, peering from his car window to see if marks had been placed on walls. All Martin could now do was check daily and wait.

It was the seventh of November when he noticed that the white chalk mark was gone. Had the garage door owner decided to clean up his sheet of rusty metal of his own accord?

Martin cycled on. The blue chalk on the mansion gatepost was missing; so was the red mark on the journalists’ wall.

That night, he serviced the three dead-letter boxes dedicated to messages from Jericho to his controller.

One was behind a loose brick in the rear of the wall enclosing the Kasra vegetable market off Saadun Street. There was a folded sheet of onionskin paper for him. The second drop, under the loose stone windowsill of a derelict house up an alley in that maze of tacky streets that make up the soukh on the north bank of the river near Shuhada Bridge, yielded the same offering. The third and last, under the loose flagstone of an abandoned courtyard off Abu Nawas Street, gave up a third square of thin paper.

Martin hid them under sticky tape around his left thigh and pedaled home to Mansour.

By the light of a flickering candle, he read them all. The message was the same: Jericho was alive and well. He was prepared to work again for the West, and he understood that the British and Americans were now the recipients of his information. But the risks had now increased immeasurably, and so would his fees. He awaited agreement to this and an indication of what was wanted.

Martin burned all three messages and crushed the ashes to powder. He already knew the answer to both queries. Langley was prepared to be generous, really generous, if the product was good. As for the information needed, Martin had memorized a list of questions concerning Saddam’s mood, his concept of strategy, and the locations of major command centers and sites of manufacture for weapons of mass destruction.

Just before dawn, he let Riyadh know that Jericho was back in the game.