He told of the transformation of Munger. How the man’s character had blossomed from the inside. Walter was a great sceptic but the first time he had dined with them in Platres he had been struck by the intensity of their love - the completeness of it. Not that it was demonstrative. They treated each other in a relaxed, almost bantering way but during the meal Walter had seen the glances exchanged and felt the charged link which flowed between them.
At first he was worried that it might affect Munger’s work; distract him from his purpose. His doubts were soon dispelled. If anything, Munger’s efforts intensified, although he spent more time back in Cyprus. His work in Iran had been brilliant and so had his methods of gaining access to the Iraqi war front.
Walter described how, as soon as the Iranian air strike on El Tuwaitha had failed, Munger had arranged deliberately to get himself expelled from Iran. He was accused of photographing the war in Iraq’s favour. He immediately flew to Beirut and talked to Sami Asaf. Now he wanted to report the war from the Iraqi side. He wanted freedom of movement and a multiple entry visa. He knew, of course, that Sami was a senior officer in the Mukhabarat but his approach was logical for he was also a long-standing correspondent for the Middle East News Bureau and would have obvious contacts with the Iraqi Ministry of Information.
Sami Asaf made the arrangement and Munger, with his reputation and his recent conflict with the Iranian authorities, was welcomed with open arms. The only person to object had been Janine Lesage. She now hated Munger with an obsession bordering on hysteria. She even wrote an article in L’Universe criticising Munger’s photography and intimating that he only worked in black and white because the technicalities of colour were too much for him. The article had caused much hilarity in media circles.
At that point Zimmerman asked what Walter planned to do about Janine Lesage. She was, after all, a highly-skilled agent and working directly against Israel. Walter shrugged. He would deal with her in the course of time. They knew all about her and that was better than the French sending in a total unknown.
Finally Walter talked of his own dilemma. The old man sitting opposite was the only person to whom he could express such thoughts. In simple terms he faced the problem often experienced by puppeteers who became emotionally involved with their puppets. He had grown very fond of Ruth, and now of Munger. He had witnessed their happiness together, rejoiced at the prospects of their joint future. But in the coming weeks he would have to expose Munger to incredible dangers. How to reconcile his duty to his conscience? What would he do if the two came into direct conflict? He talked all around the subject with a troubled face until finally his words petered out and he looked up at the older man for some words of comfort - of reassurance.
Zimmerman sat hunched down, with his chin resting on his chest, his fingers swirling the almost empty glass in which a last, fast-melting lump of ice chinked rhythmically.
‘Walter,’ he said. ‘You chose your course because you became bored with business. You wanted excitement and intrigue. You also wanted to make a commitment. It was a way to satisfy your ego . . . and your conscience.’ He smiled to eliminate offence from his words. ‘But in doing it you made a sort of pact with the devil. Sometimes the devil demands his due. You’ve lost other agents. You may lose this one. You had better accept that possibility now.’
Walter grimaced. He hadn’t really been expecting words of comfort. At least Zimmerman was spelling it out.
‘So that’s all you’ve got to say?’
Zimmerman shook his head. ‘No. The time has come to cut down on your excesses. You’ve abused your body with over-indulgence for long enough. You’re reaching the age when your weight could be fatal to that heart which you’re not supposed to have. At least cut back a bit. Also on the drink and cigars. You do everything to excess.’
Walter glared at him and Zimmerman smiled in return and held out his empty glass.
‘In my case, though, I’m a paragon of health . . . so get me another drink, young man.’
Ruth and Munger whitewashed the wall together. It was thirty feet long - the outside of a new room that had been added to the old farmhouse. It would contain his studio and darkroom. When the mission was over he was going to make a dramatic shift in his career: no more combat photography. He would instead do portraits and maybe special assignments for news or travel magazines. Assignments on which Ruth could accompany him. He would also begin working in colour and would spend more time in the, darkroom balancing out the artistic side of his work with the technical side of developing and printing.
They had started at each end of the wall and, as they worked slowly towards each other, he told her about the meeting the previous day. He told her everything because they had a clear understanding that there would be no secrets between them. It had worked well. She needed the confidence of knowledge, no matter how frightening. He found that sharing his working problems, talking about his doubts and concerns, made them more bearable.
She laughed when he told her about Walter’s message and said that she would go down to Limassol in a week or so. Anyway, she needed to do some shopping. She also had something else to do, but she didn’t mention it to Munger.
For eighteen months now, ever since those first days at the beach house, she had been hoping, even praying, that she would conceive a child. As the months passed she became a little desperate, for she was in her middle thirties and had begun to see her child-bearing days slipping away. Her gynaecologist in Limassol had been reassuring: there was no reason why it shouldn’t happen. He had worked out a chart with her, based on her menstrual cycle, so that she could judge the times when she would be most fertile. It had been an exercise in frustration because on many of the occasions Munger had been away at his work. Her anxieties had increased as the months passed, but in the last few days her hopes had risen sharply. She was very regular in her cycle but this month her period was five days overdue. She tried to keep a lid on her expectations for fear of disappointment, and she hadn’t mentioned anything to Munger. She didn’t want him to be distracted by anything during the coming dangerous days in Iraq. She would go down to Limassol next week and have a test and, if it was positive, he would have a nice surprise with which to start his new life.
She concentrated for a while on the wall and the whitewash. She enjoyed the labour; enjoyed watching the place develop under their own hands - a place which held out a vista of future contentment. At first she had been a little reluctant when Munger had suggested that, once married, they would live here. It made more sense for him to move into her own large villa. She recognised the mental implications though. It would always have a slight aura of Duff and, while Munger had never indicated that it would bother him, she thought the possibilities should be avoided.
Her first visit to the farmhouse and the village of Phini had convinced her. They had lunch in the taverna and the respect and friendship shown to Munger by the villagers and, through him, to her, gave her a warm feeling of belonging.
In the evening they had gone to dinner at the Papadopoulos’ and Helena had cooked kleftiko and told her the story of the fire and how she had used the dish finally to lure Munger into friendship. She had patted Androulla’s dog and listened as the girl told her of his cut paw and how frightened she had been of the ‘bad foreigner’.
So Ruth had felt at home and had directed her energies to renovating the farmhouse. She came almost every day and artisans came out from the village: masons and carpenters and plumbers, and worked with her at what she knew to be very modest wages. Vassos had helped to develop a vegetable garden behind the kitchen and had rigged up a crude but effective irrigation system from the well.
In a month everything would be ready and, from what she had just heard, the work of ORANGE BLUE would also be finished; If only the tests next week were positive her cup would be brimming over.
Her reverie was interrupted by the slap of a brush close to her shoulder and she turned, startled to see Munger’s grin. They had met almost i
n the centre of the wall.
‘You were day dreaming,’ he said.
‘Yes, it was a good dream. Give me a kiss to end it nicely.’
‘When the wall’s finished,’ he answered sternly.
She dipped her brush into the bucket and began to slap whitewash frantically on the wall, but the kiss was delayed. A black car came bouncing down the track: the same car that always brought messages from Walter.
This time it was a very brief note which read:
‘ “SS Elmsland” ETA Fao June 1st.’
Munger passed it to her and said I’ll have to leave tomorrow.’
She nodded and began to slap more whitewash on the wall.
It was four days later when Joseph Levy and David Burg took a walk in the Bois de Boulogne. Levy was the Paris in-house resident for Mossad and Burg was his London counterpart. They were old friends and had fought together in the Haganah in the battle to create Israel. They would often visit each other for weekends and talk about old times and old battles. .
They had been doing that over lunch in a nearby restaurant and, it being a sunny afternoon, they took a stroll in the park afterwards. They were two senior and veteran Intelligence officers and far too experienced to discuss Mossad business in a restaurant or any other place where their words could be overheard or picked up by a hidden microphone.
But out in the empty space of the park, and talking in the lowest of voices, they felt safe to chat about their work and some of the personalities and minor scandals. Eventually, as they turned and ambled back towards the concrete of the city, the conversation turned more serious. Levy had been intimately involved in the Mossad effort to halt the export from France of the Tammuz I reactor. Burg was curious to know what was to happen now that the reactor was installed and about to become radioactive. Of course, strictly speaking Levy should not have discussed it but, after all, Burg was a Senior Mossad official and an old friend, so Levy told him what we knew, which in itself was not very extensive.
One hundred and fifty metres away, in the back of a dark green van parked opposite the Pavilion Dauphine, a bearded man studied the two Israelis through binoculars. They were walking slowly towards him, bending in slightly as they talked. Close to the watching man’s shoulder was the long black tube of an ultra-sensitive directional microphone. He realigned it so that it pointed directly at the sauntering men, then turned to the interior of the van. A short, blond man, dressed in overalls, was sitting at a metal table which contained a battery of tape recorders and amplifiers. He was wearing headphones.
‘Try it now.’
‘What’s the distance?’ asked the blonde man.
‘About one hundred and fifty metres and closing slowly.’
The blonde shrugged negatively but he reached out and punched a button and the tapes on one of the machines started to rotate slowly. He raised his hands and pressed the ear phones tighter and listened and then shook his head.
The bearded man turned and raised the binoculars and every few seconds adjusted the aim of the microphone as the Israelis came marginally nearer. It was obvious that they would not come closer than eighty metres.
They had almost reached the point when the blonde said: ‘I’m getting something. Very faint . . . very faint . . . It’s fading . . . It’s gone.’
The other man cursed into his beard. ‘Fuck! Another ten metres - just another ten metres. What did you get?’
The blonde took off the headphones and said: ‘It was inaudible, but the lab might be able to bring something out. Let’s go.’
Two hours later, at SDECE headquarters, de Marenches was reading a transcript of what the lab had brought out:
BURG: You mean . . . (inaudible) . . . in Iraq? The whole country?
LEVY: Yes. Incredible but true. Only one top agent. BURG: Do you know him?
LEVY: No. He’s . . . (inaudible) . . . named ORANGE BLUE. We expect action any time now.
BURG: But one man, it’s . . . (inaudible) . . .
The bearded man was sitting nervously in front of the desk. He said:
‘I’m sorry, sir. That’s all we could lift off the tapes. The distance was over a hundred metres.’
De Marenches smiled and waved away the apology. ‘You did well. Very well. It’s rare to catch Mossad with their pants down.’
He pressed a button on his intercom and said: ‘I want to send an urgent signal to Janine Lesage.’
Chapter 16
Ahmed Nassir was an avaricious man and he was a coward. The critical question for Munger was whether the avarice would conquer the cowardice. He was the liaison man and interpreter assigned to Munger by the Iraqi Ministry of Information and an obligatory companion even though Munger spoke passable Arabic. It was inevitable that he would also be a member of the lower echelons of the Mukhabarat. He was a short, plump man in his early thirties and he spoke English with an American accent, for he had spent two years at the American University of Beirut. This was the third occasion that he had been assigned to Munger and it was no accident for, after the first time, Munger had dropped a word to Sami Asaf over lunch at the Sinbad Hotel. He had already recognised the uses that could be made of Ahmed Nassir. The avarice was written on his face and the way he constantly fingered his large gold ring. It was confirmed by the way he fiddled his expenses. Even when Munger paid for a meal in a restaurant - and he usually paid - Nassir would ask for the receipt with a conspiratorial smile.
His cowardice was beyond question. His job was to accompany Munger at all times and that included incursions into the war zone. However, whenever Munger went to a dangerous area, Nassir would invent an excuse to stay behind at the hotel. Either he was sick, or he had to wait for an important phone call or an important official. It suited Munger perfectly. He had quickly built up a good rapport with senior officers in the field. He brought them cigarettes and liquor but, more important, he photographed them and sent them prints and sometimes newspapers and magazines in which their faces appeared. They were also impressed with the courage he showed under fire and the fact that he had been expelled from Iran because of bias in Iraq’s favour.
So he moved around the war zone with relative freedom and was the envy of other photographers who were restricted to the occasional stage-managed media excursion.
Right now, though, Munger was up against a problem. He was sitting with Nassir, eating dinner in the restaurant of the El Jamhorya Hotel in Basrah, and as he watched him devour the last shreds of a scrawny chicken he had to decide just how much money would be needed to counterbalance his cowardice.
The problem was that Munger was not going to be able to get any snaps of the ‘SS Elmsland’ unloading its cargo. That afternoon, after a quick sortie to visit a Brigadier commanding part of the defence garrison at Khorramshahr, Munger had driven down alongside the Shatt al-Arab waterway to Fao. Nassir had stayed at the hotel complaining of a slight tummy upset, a malady which had now obviously corrected itself.
Munger had passed through three roadblocks with ease, his papers and connections working well. But at the fourth roadblock it had been a different story. It was only a mile from the port and was part of a heavy barbed-wire barrier which stretched right across the narrow peninsula. Prominently displayed along its length were skull and crossbones signs indicating a mine field.
The Captain in charge of the roadblock was unimpressed with his papers. This was a totally restricted area. Munger tried dropping the names of a Brigadier and two Colonels, but the Captain had smiled and said that even they were not allowed in.
It was very frustrating. In the distance he could see several ships alongside the single wharf and more lying out to sea waiting their turn. The ‘Elmsland’ was due in two days and presumably would come straight alongside. Munger’s instinct told him that no amount of arguing was going to change the Captain’s mind. It could even arouse suspicions. So he chatted pleasantly for a few minutes and watched as two trucks full of labourers were let through the barrier after their papers had been scrutinis
ed. He then gave the Captain a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and headed back to Basrah. It was now vital to find out the final destination of the yellowcake.
Nassir gnawed the last morsel of flesh from the last bone and wiped the oil from his face and fingers with a paper napkin. As he reached for a toothpick Munger said:
‘Ahmed, I have a problem. Maybe you can help me.’
‘What is it, Mr Munger?’
From his pocket Munger took a small square of folded white paper and passed it over. ‘I need to get a valuation on these - quickly.’
Nassir placed the paper on the tablecloth and carefully unfolded it. As soon as he saw the four small diamonds his pudgy hand moved quickly to shield them from any other eyes but his own.
‘Diamonds!’
‘Yes.’ Munger spoke casually. ‘Frankly, I don’t know much about diamonds. It just happened that they came into my possession.’
‘You want me to sell them?’ Sweat and greed had broken out of Nassir’s face.
‘I might. But first I want a valuation.’
Nassir refolded the paper but left it on the table in front of him.
‘Maybe I can help you, Mr Munger. I know a man here in Basrah. He is in the gem business and he is a friend of my uncle’s. He is an honest man. If you want to sell, he will give you the best price. I guarantee it.’
‘Good. When can you let me know?’
Nassir looked at his watch. ‘He will be at his home now. I could go and see him.’ A thought struck him. ‘It is better that you do not come. A foreigner would make him suspicious and you know that dealing in precious stones is illegal.’
‘Of course. Anyway, I have to wait here for an important phone call.’ He winked and Nassir smiled a little uncertainly. Then he picked up the diamonds and asked:
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