Honour Among Thieves (2 page)

In
the third week they reluctantly allowed her to join a course for trainees,
confident that she couldn’t hope to survive for more than a few days, and would
then return to her career as a model. They were wrong a second time. Revenge
for Hannah Kopec was a far more potent drug than ambition. For the next twelve
months she worked hours that began before the sun rose and ended long after it
had set. She ate food that would have been rejected by a tramp and forgot what
it was like to sleep on a mattress. They tried everything to break her, and
they failed. To begin with the instructors had treated her gently, fooled by
her graceful body and captivating looks, until one of them ended up with a
broken leg. He simply didn’t believe Hannah could move that fast. In the
classroom the sharpness of her mind was less of a surprise to her instructors,
though once again she gave them little time to rest.

But
now they’d come onto her own ground.

Hannah
had always, from a young age, taken it for granted that she could speak several
languages. She had been born in Leningrad in 1968, and when fourteen years
later her father died, her mother immediately applied for an emigration permit
to Israel. The new liberal wind that was blowing across the Baltics made it
possible for her request to be granted.

Hannah’s
family did not remain in a kibbutz for long: her mother, still an attractive,
sparkling woman, received several proposals of marriage, one of which came from
a wealthy widower. She accepted.

When
Hannah, her sister Ruth and brother David took up their new residence in the fashionable
district of Haifa, their whole world changed. Their new stepfather doted on
Hannah’s mother and lavished gifts on the family he had never had.

After
Hannah had completed her schooling she applied to universities in America and
England to study languages. Mama didn’t approve, and had often suggested that
with such a figure, glorious long black hair and looks that turned the heads of
men from seventeen to seventy, she should consider a career in modelling.
Hannah laughed and explained that she had better things to do with her life.

A
few weeks later, after Hannah had returned from an interview at Vasser, she
joined her family in Paris for their summer holiday. She also planned to visit
Rome and London, but she received so many invitations from attentive Parisians
that when the three weeks were over she found she hadn’t once left the French
capital. It was on the last Thursday of their holiday that the Mode Rivoli
Agency offered her a contract that no amount of university degrees could have
obtained for her. She handed her return ticket to Tel Aviv back to her mother
and remained in Paris for her first job. While she settled down in Paris her
sister Ruth was sent to finishing school in Zurich, and her brother David took
up a place at the London School of Economics.

In
January 1991, the children all returned to Israel to celebrate their mother’s
fiftieth birthday. Ruth was now a student at the Slade School of Art; David was
completing his studies for a PhD; and Hannah was appearing once again on the cover
of Elle.

At
the same time the Americans were massing on the Kuwaiti border, and many
Israelis were becoming anxious about a war, but Hannah’s stepfather assured
them that Israel would not get involved. In any case, their home was on the
north side of the city and therefore immune to any attack.

A
week later, on the night of their mother’s fiftieth birthday, they all ate and
drank a little too much, and then slept a little too soundly. When Hannah
eventually woke, she found herself strapped down in a hospital bed. It was to
be days before they told her that her mother, brother and sister had been
killed instantly by a stray Scud, and only her stepfather had survived.

For
weeks Hannah lay in that hospital bed planning her revenge. When she was
eventually discharged her stepfather told her that he hoped she would return to
modelling, but that he would support her in whatever she wanted to do.

Hannah
informed him that she was going to join Mossad.

It
was ironic that she now found herself on a plane to London that, under
different circumstances, her brother might have been taking to complete his
studies at the LSE. She was one of eight trainee agents being despatched to the
British capital for an advanced course in Arabic. Hannah had already completed
a year of night classes in Tel Aviv. Another six months and the Iraqis would
believe she’d been born in Baghdad. She could now think in Arabic, even if she
didn’t always think like an Arab.

Once
the 757 had broken through the clouds, Hannah stared down at the winding River
Thames through the little porthole window. When she had lived in Paris she had
often flown over to spend her mornings working in Bond Street or Chelsea, her
afternoons at Ascot or Wimbledon, her evenings at Covent Garden or the
Barbican. But on this occasion she felt no joy at returning to a city she had
come to know so well.

Now,
she was only interested in an obscure sub-faculty of London University and a
terraced house in a place called Chalk Farm.

O
N THE JOURNEY
BACK to his office on Wall Street, Antonio Cavalli began to think more
seriously about Al Obaydi and how they had come to meet. The file on his new
client supplied by their London office, and updated by his secretary Debbie,
revealed that although the Deputy Ambassador had been born in Baghdad, he had
been educated in England.

When
Cavalli leaned back, closed his eyes and recalled the clipped accent and
staccato delivery, he felt he might have been in the presence of a British Army
officer. The explanation could be found in Al Obaydi’s file under Education:
The King’s School, Wimbledon, followed by three years at London University
reading law. Al Obaydi had also eaten his dinners at Lincoln’s Inn, whatever
that meant.

On
returning to Baghdad, Al Obaydi had been recruited by the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. He had risen rapidly, despite the self-appointment of Saddam Hussein
as President and the regular placement of Ba’ath Party apparatchiks in posts
they were patently unqualified to fill.

As
Cavalli turned another page of the file, it became obvious that Al Obaydi was a
man well capable of adapting himself to unusual circumstances. To be fair, that
was something Cavalli also prided himself on. Like Al Obaydi he had studied
law, but in his case at Columbia University in New York. When that time of the
year came round for graduates to 611 out their applications to join leading law
firms, Cavalli was always shortlisted when the partners saw his grades, but
once they realised who his father was, he was never interviewed.

After
working fourteen hours a day for five years in one of Manhattan’s less
prestigious legal establishments, the young Cavalli began to realise that it
would be at least another ten years before he could hope to see his name
embossed on the firm’s masthead, despite having married one of the senior
partners’ daughters. Tony Cavalli didn’t have ten years to waste, so he decided
to set up his own law practice and divorce his wife.

In
January 1982 Cavalli and Co. was incorporated, and ten years later, on April
15th 1992, the company declared a profit of $157,000, paying its tax demand in
full. What the company books did not reveal was that a subsidiary had also been
formed in 1982, but not incorporated. A firm that showed no tax returns, and
despite its profits mounting year on year, could not be checked up on by
phoning Dun & Bradstreet and requesting a complete VIP business report.
This subsidiary was known to a small group of insiders as ‘Skills’ – a company
that specialised in solving problems that could not be taken care of by
thumbing through the Yellow Pages.

With
his father’s contacts, and Cavalli’s driving ambition, the unlisted company
soon made a reputation for handling problems that their unnamed clients had
previously considered insoluble. Among Cavalli’s latest assignments had been
the recovery of taped conversations between Sinatra and Nancy Reagan that were
due to be published in Rolling Stone and the theft of a Vermeer from Ireland
for an eccentric South American collector. These coups were discreetly referred
to in the company of potential clients.

The
clients themselves were vetted as carefully as if they were applying to be
members of the New York Yacht Club because, as Tony’s father had often pointed
out, it would only take one mistake to ensure that he would spend the rest of
his life in less pleasing surroundings than 23 East 75th Street, or their villa
in Lyford Cay.

Over
the past decade, Tony had built up a small network of representatives across
the globe who supplied him with clients requiring a little help with a more
‘imaginative’ proposition. It was his Lebanese contact who had been responsible
for introducing the man from Baghdad, whose proposal unquestionably fell into
this category.

When
Tony’s father was first briefed on the outline of Operation ‘Desert Calm’ he
recommended that his son demand a fee of one hundred million dollars to
compensate for the fact that the whole of Washington would be at liberty to
observe him going about his business.

‘One
mistake,’ the old man warned him, licking his lips, ‘and you’ll make more front
pages than the second coming of Elvis.’

Once
he had left the lecture theatre, Scott Bradley hurried across Grove Street
Cemetery, hoping that he might reach his apartment in St Ronan Street before
being accosted by a pursuing student. He loved them all – well, almost all -and
he was sure that in time he would allow the more serious among them to stroll
back to his rooms in the evenings for a drink and to talk long into the night.
But not until they were well into their second year.

Scott
managed to reach the staircase before a single would-be lawyer had caught up
with him. But then, few of them knew that he had once covered four hundred
metres in 48.1 seconds when he’d anchored the Georgetown varsity relay team.
Confident he had escaped, Scott leapt up the staircase, not stopping until he
reached his apartment on the third floor.

He
pushed open the unlocked door. It was always unlocked. There was nothing in his
apartment worth stealing – even the television didn’t work. The one file that
would have revealed that the law was not the only field in which he was an
expert had been carefully secreted on his bookshelf between Tax and Torts. He
failed to notice the books that were piled up everywhere or the fact that he
could have written his name in the dust on the sideboard.

Scott
closed the door behind him and glanced, as he always did, at the picture of his
mother on the sideboard. He dumped the pile of notes he was carrying by her
side and retrieved the mail poking out from under the door. Scott walked across
the room and sank into an old leather chair, wondering how many of those
bright, attentive faces would still be attending his lectures in two years’
time. Forty per cent would be good – thirty per cent more likely. Those would be
the ones for whom fourteen hours’ work a day became the norm, and not just for
the last month before exams. And of them, how many would live up to the
standards of the late Dean Thomas W. Swan? Five per cent, if he was lucky.

The
Professor of Constitutional Law turned his attention to the bundle of mail he
held in his lap. One from American Express – a bill with the inevitable hundred
free offers which would cost him even more money if he took any of them up; an
invitation from Brown to give the Charles Evans Hughes Lecture on the
Constitution; a letter from Carol reminding him she hadn’t seen him for some
time; a circular from a firm of stockbrokers who didn’t promise to double his
money but...; and finally a plain buff envelope postmarked Virginia, with a
typeface he recognised immediately.

He
tore open the buff envelope and extracted the single sheet of paper which gave
him his latest instructions.

Al
Obaydi strolled onto the floor of the General Assembly and slipped into a chair
directly behind his Head of Mission. The Ambassador had his earphones on and
was pretending to be deeply interested in a speech being delivered by the Head
of the Brazilian Mission. Al Obaydi’s boss always preferred to have
confidential talks on the floor of the General Assembly: he suspected it was
the only room in the United Nations building that wasn’t bugged by the CIA.

Al
Obaydi waited patiently until the older man flicked one of the earpieces aside
and leaned slightly back.

‘They’ve
agreed to our terms,’ murmured Al Obaydi, as if it was he who had suggested the
figure. The Ambassador’s upper lip protruded over his lower lip, the recognised
sign among his colleagues that he required more details.

‘One
hundred million,’ Al Obaydi whispered. ‘Ten million to be paid immediately. The
final ninety on delivery.’

‘“Immediately”?’
said the Ambassador. ‘What does “immediately” mean?’

‘By
midday tomorrow,’ whispered Al Obaydi.

‘At
least Sayedi anticipated that eventuality,’ said the Ambassador thoughtfully.

Al
Obaydi admired the way his superior could always make the term ‘my master’
sound both deferential and insolent at the same time.

‘I
must send a message to Baghdad to acquaint the Foreign Minister with the
details of your triumph,’ added the Ambassador with a smile.