Honour Among Thieves (46 page)

‘Just
to protect the picture,’ explained Scott as he stepped in to join him. He
pointed to the portrait of Saddam Hussein.

‘You
are a thorough man, Mr Bernstrom,’ said Hamil.

‘You
would have made an excellent colonel in one of my regiments.’ He laughed and
passed the cardboard tube over to Scott.

Hannah
listened intently to every word, and concluded that she must get out of the
building as quickly as possible and alert Kratz to what she had done.

‘Would
you like me to show you how to programme the safe?’ she heard Scott ask as she
reached the entrance of the Chamber.

‘No,
no, not me,’ said General Hamil. ‘The President will be the only one who will
be allowed to operate the safe.’ Those were the last words Hannah heard as she
walked out of the Chamber, past the guards, and continued purposefully down the
long corridor.

When
she reached the doors that led to the staircase she turned back to see the
General striding into the Chamber and, some way behind him, Scott following. He
was holding the tube.

Hannah
wanted to scream with delight.

Scott
realised he would never be given a chance to carry out the switch once Saddam
was in the building. When he reached the Chamber he allowed the General to get
a few paces ahead of him. His eyes swept the room, and he was relieved to find
the cleaner was no longer anywhere to be seen. The guards sprang to attention
as the General strode out of the Council Chamber into the far corridor.

Scott
stared at the alarm button on the wall ahead of him. ‘Don’t look round,’ he
begged under his breath as he kept his eyes on the retreating back of the
General. With a yard to go before he reached the door, Scott lunged forward and
jabbed his thumb on the red button. The doors immediately slammed closed and
clamped with a deafening noise.

Hannah
was just about to push open the door that led to the back stairs when the alarm
gave out a piercing sound and all the exits were immediately bolted. She turned
to discover she was alone in the corridor with General Hamil and four of his
republican guards.

The
General smiled at her. ‘Miss Kopec, I believe. I’m delighted to make your
acquaintance. I fear it will be a couple of minutes before Professor Bradley is
able to join us.’

The
guards surrounded Hannah as the General looked up at a television screen above
the door. He watched as Scott, inside the Chamber, pressed a button on the side
of his watch. Scott then ran over to the wall, quickly extracted the copy of
the document from the tube, and checked it against the original. He felt he had
done a fair job back in the cab of the truck, but he spat on Lewis Morris and
John Witherspoon for good measure, then spent a few seconds rubbing the
parchment on the stone floor before comparing it once again to the one on the
wall. He looked at his watch: forty-five seconds. He began to pull the nails
out of the wall, but was unable to get the top right-hand one to budge, so he
eased the Declaration over its head. Sixty seconds.

Hannah
stared up at the television screen in horror, watching Simon undo all her work,
while the General made a phone call.

Once
Scott had removed the document from the wall he placed it on the table. He then
fastened the copy that he had taken out of the cardboard cylinder back on the
wall, easing the parchment over the nail in the top right-hand corner, which
still stubbornly refused to budge. Ninety seconds. He picked up Dollar Bill’s
copy from the table, rolled it up and dropped it into the cylinder. One hundred
and ten seconds. He walked over to the door that led to the lifts and stood
inhaling deeply for a moment before the alarm stopped and the doors swung open.

Scott
knew that it would take them a few minutes before the source of the alarm could
be checked, so when he saw the General, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

Kratz
sat on the front seat of the truck, keeping a wary eye on Major Saeed. There
was a ringing sound: Saeed pressed a button and placed his phone to his ear.
Suddenly, without warning, he turned, whipped out his pistol and looked
anxiously towards the cab. He barked out an order, and within seconds every
soldier in sight surrounded the truck, their rifles pointing directly at Kratz.

The
Major rushed up. ‘Where are the other two?’ he demanded. Kratz shrugged his
shoulders. Saeed turned on his heels and ran into the building, shouting
another order as he went.

Kratz
placed his right hand over his left wrist and slowly began to unpeel the
plaster, a second skin, secreted beneath his watch. He delicately removed the
tiny green pill, stuck to the plaster and transferred it to the palm of his
hand. Sixty or seventy eyes were staring at him. He began coughing, and slowly
put his hand up to his mouth, lowered his head and swallowed the pill.

Saeed
came rushing back out of the building and began barking new orders. Within
seconds, a car pulled up beside the truck.

‘Out!’
the Major screamed at Kratz, who stepped down onto the tarmac and allowed a
dozen fixed bayonets to guide him towards the back door of the car. He was
pushed onto the seat, and two men in dark suits took a place on each side of
him. One quickly turned him and tied his hands behind his back, while the other
blindfolded him.

Cohen
and Aziz watched from the other side of the square as the car sped away from
them.

T
HE GENERAL
RETURNED Scott’s smile.

‘I
won’t introduce you to Miss Saib,’ he said, ‘as I believe you’ve already met.’

Scott
looked blank as he stared at the woman dressed in a black abaya and a pushi
that covered her face. She was surrounded by four soldiers, their bayonets
drawn.

‘We
have a lot to thank Miss Saib for, because of course it was she who led us to
you in the first place, not to mention her postcard to Mrs Rubin that helped
you find the Declaration so quickly. We did try to make it as easy as possible
for you.’

‘I
don’t know Miss Saib,’ said Scott.

‘Oh,
come, Professor – or should I call you Agent Bradley? I admire your gallantry,
but while you may claim not to know Miss Saib, you certainly know Hannah Kopec,’
the General said as he ripped off Hannah’s pushi.

Scott
stared at Hannah, but still said nothing.

‘Ah,
I see you do remember her. But then, it would be hard to forget someone who
tried to kill you, wouldn’t it?’

Hannah’s
eyes pleaded with Scott.

‘How
touching, my dear, he’s forgiven you. But I fear I don’t share his forgiving
nature.’ The General turned to see Major Saeed running towards him. He listened
carefully to what the Major whispered to him, then began banging his swagger
stick rapidly against his long leather boots.

‘You’re
a fool!’ he shouted at the top of his voice, and suddenly struck the Major
across the face with his swagger stick.

He
turned back to face Scott. ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that the reunion I had planned
for you and your friends will have to wait a little longer, because although we
have Colonel Kratz safely locked up, the Jew and the Kurdish traitor have
escaped. But it can only be a matter of time before we catch them.’

‘How
long have you known?’ asked Hannah quietly.

‘You
made the mistake so many of our enemies make, Miss Kopec, of underestimating
our great President,’ replied the General. ‘He dominates the affairs of the
Middle East to a far greater extent than Gorbachev did the Russians, Thatcher
the British, or Bush the American people. I ask myself, how many citizens in
the West any longer believe the Allies won the Gulf War? But then, you were
also stupid enough to underrate his cousin, Abdul Kanuk, our newly appointed
Ambassador to Paris. Perhaps he wasn’t quite that stupid when he followed you
all the way to your lover’s flat and stood in a doorway the rest of the night
before following you back to the embassy. It was he who informed our Ambassador
in Geneva what “Miss Saib” was up to.

‘Of
course, we needed to be sure, not least because our Deputy Foreign Minister
found it so hard to accept such a tale about one of his most loyal members of
staff. Such a naive man. So, when you came to Baghdad, the Ambassador’s wife
invited Miss Saib’s brother to dinner. But, sadly, he didn’t recognise you.
Your cover, as the more vulgar American papers would describe it, was blown.
Those same papers keep asking pathetically, “Why doesn’t Mossad assassinate
President Saddam?” If only they knew how many times Mossad has tried and
failed. What Colonel Kratz didn’t tell you at your training school in
Herzliyah, Miss Kopec, was that you are the seventeenth Mossad agent who has
attempted to infiltrate our ranks during the past five years, and all of them
have experienced the same tragic end as your Colonel is about to. And the real
beauty of the whole exercise is that we don’t have to admit we killed any of
you in the first place. You see, the Jewish people are unwilling to accept,
after Entebbe and Eichmann, that such a thing could possibly happen. I feel
sure you will appreciate the logic of that, Professor.’

‘I’ll
make a bargain with you,’ said Scott.

‘I’m
touched, Professor, by your Western ethics, but I fear you have nothing to
bargain with.’

‘We’ll
trade Miss Saib if you release Hannah.’

The
General burst out laughing. ‘Professor, you have a keen sense of the
ridiculous, but I won’t insult you by suggesting that you don’t understand the
Arab mind. Do allow me to explain. You will be killed, and no one will comment
because, as I have already explained, the West is too proud to admit that you
even exist. Whereas we in the East will throw our hands in the air and ask why
Mossad has kidnapped a gentle, blameless secretary on her way to Paris, and is
now holding her in Tel Aviv against her will. We even know the house where she
is captive. We have already arranged for sentimental pictures of her to be
released to every paper in the Western world, and a distraught mother and son
have been coached for weeks by one of your own public relations companies to
face the Western press. We’ll even have Amnesty International protesting
outside Israeli embassies across the world on her behalf.’

Scott
stared at the General.

‘Poor
Miss Saib will be released within days. Both of you, on the other hand, will
die an unannounced, unheralded and unmourned death. To think that all you
sacrificed your lives for was a scrap of paper. And while we are on that
subject, Professor, I will relieve you of the Declaration.’

The
four soldiers stepped forward and thrust their bayonets at Scott’s throat as
the General snatched the cardboard tube from his grasp.

‘You
did well to switch the documents in two minutes, Professor,’ said the General,
glancing up at the television screen above him. ‘But you can be assured that it
remains our intention to burn the original very publicly on the fourth of July,
and I feel confident that we will destroy President Clinton’s flimsy reputation
along with it.’ The General laughed. ‘You know, Professor, I have for many years
enjoyed killing people, but I shall gain a particular pleasure from your
deaths, because of the appropriate way you will be departing this world.’

The
soldiers surrounded Hannah and Scott and forced them back into the Chamber and
on towards the short corridor. The General followed them down the passage. They
all came to a halt in front of the open safe.

‘Allow
me,’ said General Hamil, ‘to inform you of one statistic you failed to mention,
Professor, when you briefed me on this amazing feat of engineering. Perhaps you
simply didn’t know, although I am bound to admit that you have done your
homework thoroughly. But did you realise that one person locked in a safe of
this size, with a capacity of 504 cubic feet, can only hope to survive for six
hours? I do not yet know the exact length of time two people can hope to
survive while sharing the same amount of oxygen. But I will very shortly.’ He
removed a stopwatch from his pocket, waved his swagger stick, and the soldiers
hurled first Hannah and then Scott into the safe. The smile remained on the
General’s face as two of the soldiers pushed the massive door closed. The
lights all began flashing red.

The
General clicked his stopwatch.

When
the car came to a halt, Kratz reckoned that the distance they had travelled was
under a mile. He heard the door open and felt a shove on his arm to indicate he
should get out of the car. He was pushed up three stone steps before entering a
building and walking into a long corridor. His footsteps echoed on the wooden
floor. Then he was guided into a room on his left, where he was pushed down
onto a chair, tied and gagged. His shoes and socks were removed. When he heard
the door close, he sensed he was alone.

It
was a long time – he couldn’t be sure just how long -before the door opened
again. The first voice he heard was General Hamil’s. ‘Remove the gag,’ was all
he said.

Kratz
could hear him pacing round the chair, but at first the General said nothing.
Kratz began to concentrate. He knew the pill was good for two hours, no more,
and he suspected that it was already forty or fifty minutes since they had
driven him away from Ba’ath headquarters.