“Look,” said Baxter, nodding toward the lobby. “Our escorts.”
Tyrwhitt looked up. In the lobby, wearing their ubiquitous brown safari suits, sat a couple of unsmiling hotel guests. Tyrwhitt knew who they were. Agents of the Bazrum — the Iraqi secret service — were easy to spot. They didn’t even bother trying to conceal themselves anymore. These days the agents were as common as the street vendors who sold fake watches and jewelry. They were there to observe the activities of each foreign correspondent stationed in Baghdad.
Darkness settled over the city. No one was left in the bar when the two reporters paid their bill. They wobbled unsteadily through the lobby and out to the street. Baxter spotted a lone taxi, a decrepit Trabent that looked like it had been through a sand storm. “Let’s go to dinner over at the Jinnah.”
“I’m not riding in that thing,” said Tyrwhitt. “You’re on your own, Baxter.”
Baxter climbed into the Trabent. “I know what you’re up to, mate. Be careful. Don’t catch a disease.”
As the taxi clattered off with Baxter inside, Tyrwhitt saw a black Fiat pull out of a street-side parking area and fall in trail. That was another standard fixture in Baghdad: a shadow. Wherever you went, either in a vehicle or afoot, you could expect to be followed. You got used to it.
Tyrwhitt started off down the street, then stopped and glanced over his shoulder. One of the safari suits from the lobby was peering at him through the glass door of the hotel. Tyrwhitt gave him a wave, then continued down the sidewalk.
“Were you followed?”
“Of course,” said Tyrwhitt. “He was an idiot. He’s still looking for me in the Al-Faisah district, back at the whore house.”
“Are you certain?”
“Don’t worry. I’ve done this before.”
Tyrwhitt didn’t know the man’s name. He only knew that he was an officer assigned to a senior position somewhere in the Iraqi military. This was their second meeting.
“You stink of whiskey. Can you remember what I tell you?”
“I’m okay. I remember everything.”
Tyrwhitt hadn’t seen the man’s face, at least not close up and in the light. By his voice and his manner he seemed to be in his late thirties, maybe early forties. With Iraqis, it was hard to tell. He had the demeanor of a man accustomed to command. Tyrwhitt guessed that he was a colonel, perhaps a brigadier.
The souk — the open-air market — was the perfect meeting place. It was easy to lose yourself after dark in the teeming throng that swarmed through the yellow-lighted stalls. Baghdad’s economy was in tatters, and almost all the essential commerce of daily life took place here. There were money changers and black marketers and merchants hawking used appliances and dried fruits and live chickens. A hubbub swelled over the market place like the rumble of a distant storm.
Inside the Al-Faisah brothel, Tyrwhitt had replaced his blue denim shirt with the standard Iraqi beige safari shirt. Wearing a kaffiyeh, he was able to slip out the back of the brothel, then wind his way through the ancient streets to the souk. In his costume, even with his ruddy, red-haired features, Tyrwhitt could blend into the throng. After a fair amount of meandering among the vendors, he stopped at a stall near the exit of the souk where a toothless old merchant was peddling cheap carpets.
Stooped over, inspecting one of the carpets, was a nondescript man in a long kaffiyeh that shielded most of his face. Tyrwhitt glimpsed a hawk-like nose, a black mustache tinged with gray. He stood with his back to the man. They alternated speaking in broken English, then Arabic.
“Your Arabic has improved.”
“I’ve been studying,” said Tyrwhitt.
“In the whorehouse?”
Tyrwhitt couldn’t tell if the man was joking. He didn’t know, for that matter, if he even possessed a sense of humor. It would be difficult, he thought, for anyone to make jokes in a situation so filled with danger. Tyrwhitt wondered again what motivated the man to take such a risk. Did he despise the country’s leadership so much he was willing to betray them? Did he expect some reward? Did he have a personal vendetta against Saddam? Was he a patriot? Or a scoundrel?
The officer spoke in short, staccato sentences. Tyrwhitt listened, startled at what he was hearing. The information was so explosive, so unbelievable, that at first he thought that he had misunderstood.
He asked the officer to repeat the information. He hadn’t misunderstood.
Tyrwhitt felt compelled to ask, “You know this to be absolutely true?”
“Do you think me a liar?”
“I mean, is it verifiable?”
“I have seen it myself.”
It had to be true, Tyrwhitt thought. The man couldn’t be making it up. Not if he wanted to maintain any credibility.
They made an arrangement for their next meeting, this one at another souk, the one near the B’aath building downtown. The officer lingered a few more minutes, examining another carpet. Then he lay it aside and wandered away from the stall.
Tyrwhitt took his usual route back through the souk, out the southerly exit onto a narrow, winding street. After several blocks he entered a darkened alley. He waited several minutes, making sure he wasn’t followed. Then he shed the safari shirt, replacing it again with the denim. He removed the kaffiyeh and stuffed it into his tote bag.
The agent — the same one who had followed him to the brothel — fell into trail when Tyrwhitt was within a block of the Rasheed. Tyrwhitt nodded cordially to him. No hard feelings, mate. I’m just better at my job than you are at yours.
Once he’d let himself into his room on the sixth floor, Tyrwhitt wasted no time. What he had to do now was too important to wait. In any case, he was sure that the Iraqis did not yet feel the need to prevent or intercept or even understand what he was doing.
The Cyfonika was still in its satchel in the closet. Tyrwhitt knew that Bazrum agents had already searched his room, several times probably. They had seen the Cyfonika and figured out what it was: a hand held satellite communications device. It was a commercially marketed tool, manufactured in the United States, that anyone, including the Iraqis, could purchase. With the Cyfonika phone you could speak real-time with anyone anywhere on the planet. Using a constellation of dedicated satellites, devices like the Cyfonika were becoming the chosen communications medium for global businesses, news services, shipping companies, government bureaus.
And spies.
Already Tyrwhitt had been hauled in for violating the strict Iraqi censorship laws. He had managed to convince the Bazrum interrogators that what he transmitted via his satellite phone was already being monitored by them and consisted, in fact, of dispatches that had been cleared by their own censors. Because Tyrwhitt and his news agency were not affiliated with the devil-allied Americans, and because his dispatches usually portrayed the Iraqis in a sympathetic light, they allowed him to keep the Cyfonika. So long as he transmitted only pre-cleared dispatches, he could continue what he was doing.
What the Iraqis did not yet understand was the rest of the technology. Tyrwhitt himself had only a vague notion of how the thing worked. As it had been explained to him, the SatComm device contained a micro-router that bundled compressed packets of encrypted data. The data, when delivered by voice to the mouthpiece of the Cyfonika, could be encrypted and transmitted simultaneously within a parent stream of uncoded data — and it was virtually undetectable. On electronic surveillance screens and passive monitoring devices, the appearance of the Cyfonika transmissions had an almost normal wave length pattern, with just a few, odd-shaped squiggles that suggested poor antenna stabilization. Or perhaps imprecise wave propagation. Or just some peculiar atmospheric anomaly.