Honor Among Thieves Read online

  But now they’d come to an area in which she excelled.

  Hannah had always, from a young age, taken for granted that she could speak several languages. She had been born in Leningrad in 1968, and when her father died, fourteen years later, 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 on 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 modeling. Hannah laughed and explained that she had better things to do with her life.

  A few weeks later, after Hannah returned from an interview at Vassar, she joined her family in Paris for their summer vacation. 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 vacation 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 enrolled 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 Ph.D.; 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 become 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 modeling, 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 dispatched 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.

  Chapter Two

  On 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 studying 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 around for graduates to fill out their applications to join leading law firms, Cavalli was always shortlisted when the partners saw his grades, but once they realized 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 realize 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 15, 1992, the company had 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 each year, could not be checked up on by phoning Dun and Bradstreet and requesting a complete VIP business report. This subsidiary was known to a small group of insiders as “Skills”—a company that specialized 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 a famous singer and a former first lady 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 more “imaginative” propositions. 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 Elvi