“The picture on the wall. He looks like you. Your son?”
“Yes,” the man replied with a sadness which had never left him, promises of Paradise or not. “He was killed in the war.”
“Many lost sons in that conflict. Was he a religious boy?”
“Does it matter now?” the merchant asked, blinking hard.
“It always matters,” Raman said, in a voice that was totally casual.
With that, both men went over to the nearer of two rug piles. The dealer flipped a few corners.
“I am in position. I require instructions on timing.” Raman didn’t have a code name, and the code phrase he’d just exchanged was only known to three men. The dealer didn’t know anything beyond that, except to repeat the nine words he’d just heard to someone else, then wait for a reply, and pass that along.
“Would you mind filling out a card for my client list?”
That Raman did, putting down the name and address of a real person. He’d picked the name in the phone book–actually a crisscross directory right in the White
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House, which had made it easy to select a number that was one digit off his own. A tick mark over the sixth digit told the dealer where to add 1 to 3 to get 4 and so complete the call. It was excellent tradecraft, taught to his Savak instructor by an Israeli more than two decades earlier and not forgotten, just as neither man from the holy city of Qom had forgotten much of anything.
22
TIME ZONES
THE SIZE OF THE EARTH and the location of the trouble spots made for great inconvenience. America was going to sleep when other parts of the world were just waking up to a new day, a situation made even more difficult by the fact that the people eight or nine hours ahead were also the ones making decisions to which the rest of the world had to react. Added to that was the fact that America’s vaunted CIA had little in the way of agents or officers to predict what was happening. That left to STORM TRACK and PALM BOWL the duty of reporting mainly what the local press and TV were saying. And so while the U.S. President slept, people struggled to collect and analyze information which, when he saw it, would be late by a working day, and the analysis of which might or might not be accurate. Even then, the best of the spooks in Washington were in the main too senior to be stuck with night duty–they had families, after all–and so they also had to be brought up to speed before they could make their own pronouncements, which involved discussion and debate, further delaying presentation of vital national-security information. In military terms it was called “having the initiative”–making the first move, physical, political, or psychological. How much the better if the other side in the race started off a third of a day behind.
Things were slightly better in Moscow, which was only an hour off Tehran time, and in the same time zone with Baghdad, but here for once the RVS, successor to the KGB, was in the same unhappy position as CIA, with nearly all of its networks wiped out in both countries. But for Moscow the problems were also somewhat closer to home, as Sergey Golovko would find out when his aircraft landed at Sheremetyevo.
The largest problem at the moment would be reconciliation. Morning TV in Iraq announced that the new gov-
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ernment in Baghdad had informed the United Nations that all international inspection teams were to be given full freedom to visit any facility in the country, entirely without interference–in fact, Iraq requested that the inspections be carried out as rapidly as possible–that full cooperation with any requests would be instantly provided; that the new Baghdad government was desirous of removing any obstacle to full restoration of their country’s international trade. For the moment, the neighboring country of Iran, the announcement said, would begin trucking in foodstuffs in accordance with Islamic ancient guidelines on charity for those in need; this in anticipation of the former nation’s willingness to reenter the community of nations. Video copied at PALM BOWL from Basra TV showed the first convoy of trucks carrying wheat down the twisting Shahabad Highway and crossing into Iraqi territory at the foot of the mountains which separated the two countries. Further pictures showed Iraqi border guards removing their obstacles and waving the trucks through, while their Iranian counterparts stood peacefully aside on their side of the border, no weapons in evidence. At Langley, people ran calculations on the number of trucks, the tonnage of their cargo, and the number of loaves of bread which would result. They concluded that shiploads of wheat would have to be delivered to make more than a symbolic difference. But symbols were important, and the ships were even now being loaded, a set of satellite overheads determined. United Nations officials in Geneva, only three hours behind the time, received the Baghdad requests with pleasure and sent immediate orders to their inspection teams, which found Mercedes automobiles waiting for them, to be escorted to the first entries on their inspection lists by wailing police cars. Here they also found TV crews to follow them around, and friendly installation staffs, who professed delight at their newfound ability to tell all they knew and to offer suggestions on how to dismantle, first, a chemical-weapons facility disguised as an insecticide plant. Finally, Iran requested a special meeting of the Security Council to consider the lifting of the remaining trade sanctions, something as certain as the rising of the sun, even late, over the
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American East Coast. Within two weeks, the average Iraqi’s diet would increase by at least five hundred calories. The psychological impact wasn’t difficult to figure, and the lead country in restoring normality to the oil-rich but isolated nation was its former enemy, Iran–as always, citing religion as the motivating factor in offering aid.
“Tomorrow we will see pictures of bread being distributed for free from mosques,” Major Sabah predicted. He could have added the passages from the Koran which would accompany the event, but his American colleagues were not Islamic scholars and would not have grasped the irony terribly well.
“Your estimate, sir?” the senior American officer asked.
“The two countries will unite,” Sabah replied soberly. “And soon.”
There was no particular need to ask why the surviving Iraqi weapons plants were being exposed. Iran had all it needed.
THERE IS NO such thing as magic. That was merely the word people used to explain something so cleverly done that there was no ready explanation for it, and the simplest technique employed by its practitioners was to distract the audience with one moving and obvious hand (usually in a white glove) while the other was doing something else. So it was with nations as well. While the trucks rolled, and the ships were loaded, and the diplomats were summoned, and America was waking up to figure out what was going on, it was, after all, evening in Tehran.
Badrayn’s contacts were as useful as ever, and what he could not do, Daryaei could. The civilian-marked business jet lifted off from Mehrabad and turned east, heading first over Afghanistan, then Pakistan, in a two-hour flight that ended at the obscure city of Rutog near the Pakistani-Indian-Kashmiri border. The city was in the former country’s Kunlun Mountains, and home to some of China’s Muslim population. The border town had an air force base with some locally manufactured MiG fighters, and a
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single landing strip, all separate from the city’s small regional airport. The location was ideal for everyone’s purpose, as it was a bare 600 miles from New Delhi, though perversely the longest flight came from Beijing, nearly two thousand miles away, even though the real estate was Chinese-owned. The three aircraft landed a few minutes apart, soon after local sunset, taxied to the far end of the ramp, and parked. Military vehicles took their occupants to the ready room for the local MiG contingent. The Ay-atollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei was accustomed to cleaner accommodations and, worse, he could smell the odor of cooked pork, always a part of the Chinese diet but quite nauseating to him. This he put aside. He wasn’t the first of the faithful who’d had to treat with pagans and unbelievers.
The Indian Prime Minister was cordial. She’d met Daryaei before at a regional trade conference and found him withdrawn and misanthropic. That, she saw, had not changed very much.
Last to arrive was Zhang Han San, whom the Indian had met as well. He was a rotund, seemingly jolly man– until one watched his eyes closely. Even his jokes were told with an aim to learn something of his companions. Of the three, he was the only one whose job was not really known to the others. It was clear, however, that he spoke with authority, and since his country was the most powerful of the three, it was not regarded as an insult that a mere minister-without-portfolio was treating with chiefs of state. The meeting was conducted in English, except for Zhang’s dismissal of the general officer who’d handled the greetings.