The Dove Page 16
"You'll have to memorize them before you leave here," I said. "No way you should carry them around."
His hand was trembling again, and he looked from the paper to me. "I guess it can do no harm. I've come this far," he said. "But understand I’m not promising anything."
"OK. Like I've been telling you, it's up to you. No pressure."
He committed the instructions to memory. He paused at the door before leaving and said, "Harry, I have one gift for you. They know it was you."
"Who knows I was what?"
"They know it was you in Moscow with Barsikov."
"Why would they think a thing like that?"
"Despite what some may think, we do have technology in the Soviet Union. Barsikov described you when he was interrogated, and they captured some good images from airport cameras. It wasn't difficult to match them to old photos of you. We have quite a lot of them, you know."
"Maybe they're right and maybe they're wrong, Nikolay. What difference does it make?"
He gave me a long stare. "It means that you should be very careful." With that he disappeared out the door.
I finished my cigar and tidied things up, before catching a cab back to the Embassy. I didn't bother with being dropped off a distance away. I'd done what I could, and whatever happened now, it would be months before we knew Kozlov's final decision. As for his warning, I'd been careful for years, whenever possible, of course.
In view of what happened in the following few years, maybe I should have paid more heed, but no one can read the future with 100% clarity.
Chapter 41
Things got interesting the two days later when a Soviet Embassy press release accused the French government of attempting to kidnap the wife of Nikolay Kozlov, Novosti correspondent in Paris. They claimed she had been snatched off the street and taken to an undisclosed location where French intelligence agents falsely accused her of shoplifting and pressured her to lure her husband into a trap. This bizarre action, declared the Soviets, was a further escalation of the provocations represented by the recent mass expulsion of innocent Soviet diplomats. A formal complaint was conveyed through diplomatic channels to the French Foreign Ministry.
No one believed it, of course, but it put the DST under a cloud. Picard remained suspicious, but he couldn't figure out what had happened. The Soviets bundled Kozlov and his wife onto the first flight to Moscow. That meant no more contact with him and left the French scratching their heads.
They stopped following me, and for that I was grateful.
There was no way of knowing how Kozlov fared with his superiors. He and Svetlana appeared on Moscow television to confirm the kidnap story and add further embellishments. They answered some cooked questions from tame reporters. Svetlana managed to look authentically indignant. I hoped her influential father could pull enough strings to keep her out of the gulag. I hoped even more that Kozlov was still in the KGB.
Maybe he'd managed to pull off the deception with his superiors and keep his job; maybe he hadn't. There was a reasonable chance we would hear from him. Whether his purpose would be to begin cooperation with us or to ambush some poor case officer in Moscow was unknown. Patience and taking risks are virtues for intelligence officers.
As often as not it's the poor sods who agree to cooperate with foreign intelligence services who pay the price in the end.
Chapter 42
Chop-Chop
There are no appeals in Riyadh, where justice is swift and administered with the sharp edge of the executioner’s sword.
Mohammed Attar sought no appeal. He just wished they would get on with it. His body ached from the mahabith beatings, but he knew there would be no more pain in Paradise. He ached more for death, for an end to the sorry confusion his life had been – a twisted path from callow youth to cynical adulthood. Thank God he had met the Sheik who had put meaning back into his existence.
His “trial” had been a matter of a few minutes in a closed room with three Imams. Saudi justice strongly preferred confession over evidence, and confessions did not necessarily have to be voluntary. But Mohammed had been only too happy to comply, roundly condemning the Saudi regime for the money-grubbing, debauched apostates that they were. His vehemence had shocked the judges who had quickly concluded the “trial” with a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death.
In an act of routine cruelty, they did not inform him of the date set for his execution, and he waited in his cell, hoping every morning that this would be the day. If the time passed nine A.M., he knew he would have to wait a day longer. All executions in Riyadh took place in “Chop Chop Square” at precisely nine A.M. They were no longer announced publicly, so that if you were having your morning tea at a café on the small, nondescript square you could well become witness to a beheading.
After morning prayers on the fifth day following his trial they came for him at last. Two uniformed guards entered his cell and instructed him to put on a long white garment, a sort of dishdasha, and then cuffed his hands behind his back. He was led into the courtyard where a yellow van was waiting to transport them. When the van finally drew to a stop and the doors opened, he recognized the place. Curiosity had drawn him there in his youth. It was just a small, drab square surrounded by shops, with a large metal grate at its center. There were not many people there, and it seemed almost a casual affair to chop off someone’s head. It occurred to Mohammed that the quotidian setting served to emphasize how acceptable and commonplace such a death was in The Kingdom.
The two guards helped him step out of the van, one on each side holding his arm. They were surprised that he did not resist, did not collapse in fear, but rather walked steadily between them the few steps to the spot of execution.
Ignoring the guards and the small crowd that had gathered, Mohammed concentrated his attention on the executioner, a hulking black man at least six and a half feet tall dressed in a long white dishdasha and checkered iqal. He stood waiting with feet planted apart, hands resting on the hilt of a long, curved sword.
The guards pushed Mohammed to a kneeling position in front of the executioner. He did not resist. The executioner asked if he would like to recite the Shahada, the declaration of faith that sets Muslims apart from the rest of the world, and Mohammed was grateful for the opportunity. “Ash-hadu an laa ilaaha illallah. I bear witness that there is no god but Allah. Wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasullah. And I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”
As soon as he was finished someone jabbed his side with a stick, and Mohammed’s body went taught as he stretched his neck and the razor sharp blade flashed downward in a swift arc.
Before the darkness claimed him Mohammed’s last thought was that he would have some interesting questions for God.
The Author
Michael R. Davidson was raised in the Mid-West. Heeding President Kennedy’s call for more young Americans to learn Russian he studied the language, and military service took him to the White House where he served as translator for the Moscow-Washington “Hotline.” His language abilities attracted the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency, and following his military service Mr. Davidson spent the next 28 years as a Clandestine Services officer. Seventeen of those years were spent abroad in a variety of sensitive posts working against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. In the private sector he worked as a business owner and security and economic development consultant before devoting full time to his writing.
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