A Twist in the Tale

by Jeffrey Archer

  Cavalli looked up at the vast portrait that dominated the wall behind the Deputy Ambassador’s desk. His first contact with Al Obaydi had been only days after the war had been concluded. At the time the American had refused to deal with the Arab, as few people were convinced that the Deputy Ambassador’s leader would still be alive by the time a preliminary meeting could be arranged.

  As the months passed, however, it began to look to Cavalli as if his potential client might survive longer than President Bush. So an exploratory meeting was arranged.

  The venue selected was the Deputy Ambassador’s office in New York, on East 79th Street. Despite being a little too public for Cavalli’s taste, it had the virtue of proving the credentials of the party claiming to be willing to invest one hundred million dollars in such a daring enterprise.

  “How would you expect the first ten million to be paid?” inquired Al Obaydi, as if he were asking a real estate agent about a down payment on a small house on the wrong side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “The entire amount must be handed over in used, unmarked hundred-dollar bills and deposited with our bankers in Newark, New Jersey,” said the American, his eyes narrowing. “And Mr. Al Obaydi,” Cavalli added, “I don’t have to remind you that we have machines that can verify—”

  “You need have no anxiety about us keeping to our side of the bargain,” interrupted Al Obaydi. “The money is, as your Western cliché suggests, a mere drop in the ocean. The only concern I have is whether you are capable of delivering your part of the agreement.”

  “You wouldn’t have pressed so hard for this meeting if you doubted we were the right people for the job,” retorted Cavalli. “But can I be as confident about you putting together such a large amount of cash at such short notice?”

  “It may interest you to know, Mr. Cavalli,” replied the Deputy Ambassador, “that the money is already lodged in a safe in the basement of the United Nations building. After all, no one would expect to find such a vast sum deposited in the vaults of a bankrupt body.”

  The smile that remained on Al Obaydi’s face indicated that the Arab was pleased with his little witticism, despite the fact that Cavalli’s lips hadn’t moved.

  “The ten million will be delivered to your bank by midday tomorrow,” continued Al Obaydi as he rose from the table to indicate that, as far as he was concerned, the meeting was concluded. The Deputy Ambassador stretched out his hand and his visitor reluctantly shook it.

  Cavalli glanced up once again at the portrait of Saddam Hussein, turned, and quickly left.

  * * *

  When Scott Bradley entered the room there was a hush of expectancy.

  He placed his notes on the table in front of him, allowing his eyes to sweep around the lecture hall. The room was packed with eager young students holding pens and pencils poised above yellow legal pads.

  “My name is Scott Bradley,” said the youngest professor in the law school, “and this is to be the first of fourteen lectures on Constitutional Law.” Seventy-four faces stared down at the tall, somewhat disheveled man who obviously couldn’t have noticed that the top button of his shirt was missing and who hadn’t made up his mind which side to part his hair on that morning.

  “I’d like to begin this first lecture with a personal statement,” he announced. Some of the pens and pencils were laid to rest. “There are many reasons to practice law in this country,” he began, “but only one which is worthy of you, and certainly only one that interests me. It applies to every facet of the law that you might be interested in pursuing, and it has never been better expressed than in the engrossed parchment of The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.

  “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ That one sentence is what distinguishes America from every other country on earth.

  “In some aspects, our nation has progressed mightily since 1776,” continued the professor, still not having referred to his notes as he walked up and down tugging the lapels of his well-worn Harris tweed jacket, “while in others, we have moved rapidly backwards. Each of you in this hall can be part of the next generation of lawmakers or lawbreakers”—he paused, surveying the silent gathering—“and you have been granted the greatest gift of all with which to help make that choice, a first-class mind. When my colleagues and I have finished with you, you can if you wish go out into the real world and ignore the Declaration of Independence as if it were worth no more than the parchment it was written on, outdated and irrelevant in this modern age. Or,” he continued, “you may choose to benefit society by upholding the law. That is the course great lawyers take. Bad lawyers, and I do not mean stupid ones, are those who begin to bend the law, which, I submit, is only a step away from breaking it. To those of you in this class who wish to pursue such a course I must advise that I have nothing to teach you, because you are beyond learning. You are still free to attend my lectures, but ‘attending’ is all you will be doing.”

  The room was so silent that Scott looked up to check they hadn’t all crept out. “Not my words,” he continued as he stared at the intent faces, “but those of Dean Thomas W. Swan, who lectured in this theater for the first twenty-seven years of this century. I see no reason not to repeat his philosophy whenever I address an incoming class of the Yale Law School.”

  The professor opened the file in front of him for the first time. “Logic,” he began, “is the science and art of reasoning correctly. No more than common sense, I hear you say. And nothing so uncommon, Voltaire reminds us. But those who cry ‘common sense’ are often the same people who are too lazy to train their minds.

  “Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote: ‘The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.’” The pens and pencils began to scratch furiously across the yellow pages, and continued to do so for the next fifty minutes.

  When Scott Bradley had come to the end of his lecture, he closed his file, picked up his notes and marched quickly out of the room. He did not care to indulge himself by remaining for the sustained applause that had followed his opening lecture for the past ten years.

  * * *

  Hannah Kopec had been considered an outsider as well as a loner from the start, although the latter was often thought by those in authority to be an advantage.

  Hannah had been told that her chances of qualifying were slim, but she had now come through the toughest part, the twelve-month physical training, and although she had never killed anyone—six of the last eight applicants had—those in authority were now convinced she was capable of doing so. Hannah knew she could.

  As the plane lifted off from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport for Heathrow, Hannah pondered once again what had caused a twenty-five-year-old woman at the height of her career as a model to want to apply to join the Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks—better known as Mossad—when she could have had her pick of a score of rich husbands in a dozen capitals.

  Thirty-nine Scuds had landed on Tel Aviv and Haifa during the Gulf War. Thirteen people had been killed. Despite much wailing and beating of breasts, no revenge had been sought by the Israeli Government because of some tough political bargaining by James Baker, who had assured them that the Coalition Forces would finish the job. The American Secretary of State had failed to fulfill his promise. But then, as Hannah often reflected, Baker had not lost his entire family in one night.

  The day she was discharged from the hospital, Hannah had immediately applied to join Mossad. They had been dismissive of her request, assuming she would, in time, find that her wound had healed. Hannah visited the Mossad headquarters every day for the next two weeks, by which time even they acknowledged that the wound remained open and, more important, was still festering.

  In the third week they reluctantly allowed her to join a course for trainees, confident that she couldn’t hope to survive for mo
re 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 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 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 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 Parisiens 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 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 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 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 round 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 sec 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 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 theater, Scott Bradley hurried across Grove Street Cemetery, hoping that he might reach his apartment on 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 to have 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 meters in 48.1 seconds when he’d anchored the Georgetown varsity relay team. Confident he was out of reach, Scott leaped 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.