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“Father, I have sinned in matters of the flesh and am not worthy of your absolution.”

It was he who had invented the phrase, because no one else would say that.

“What have you for me?”

She reached between her legs, pulled aside the crotch of her panties, and abstracted the phony tampon he had given her weeks ago. One end unscrewed. From the hollow interior she withdrew a thin roll of paper formed into a tube no larger than a pencil. This she passed through the fret of the grille.

“Wait.”

She heard the rustle of the onionskin paper as the man ran a skilled eye over the notes she had made—a report on the deliberations and conclusions of the previous day’s planning council chaired by Saddam Hussein himself, at which General Abdullah Kadiri had been present.

“Good, Leila. Very good.”

Today the money was in Swiss francs, very high-denomination notes, passed through the grille from him to her. She secreted them all in the place she had stored her information, a place she knew most Moslem men deemed unclean at a certain time. Only a doctor or the dreaded AMAM would find them there.

“How long must this go on?” she asked the grille.

“Not long now. War is coming soon. By the end of it, the Rais will fall. Others will take the power. I shall be one of them. Then you will be truly rewarded, Leila. Stay calm, do your job, and be patient.”

She smiled. Really rewarded. Money, lots of money, enough to go far away and be wealthy for the rest of her days.

“Go now.”

She rose and left the booth. The old woman in black had found someone else to hear her confession.

Leila recrossed the nave and emerged into the sunshine. The oaf Kemal was beyond the wrought-iron gate, crumpling a tin can in one great fist, sweating in the heat. Good, let him sweat. He would sweat much more if only he knew. ...

Without glancing at him, she turned down Shurja Street, through the teeming market, toward the parked car. Kemal, furious but helpless, lumbered behind her. She took not the slightest bit of notice of a poor fellagha pushing a bicycle with an open wicker basket on the pillion, and he took not the slightest notice of her. The man was only in the market at the behest of the cook in the household where he worked, buying mace, coriander, and saffron.

Alone in his confessional, the man in the black cassock of a Chaldean priest sat awhile longer to ensure that his agent was clear of the street. It was extremely unlikely that she would recognize him, but in this game even outside chances were excessive.

He had meant what he said to her. War was coming. The Americans had the bit between their teeth and would not now back off.

So long as that fool in the palace by the river at the Tamuz Bridge did not spoil it all and pull back unilaterally from Kuwait. Fortunately, he seemed hell-bent on his own destruction. The Americans would win the war, and then they would come to Baghdad to finish the job. Surely they would not just win Kuwait and think that was the end of it? No people could be so powerful and so stupid.

When they came, they would need a new regime. Being Americans, they would gravitate toward someone who spoke fluent English, someone who understood their ways, their thoughts, and their speech, and who would know what to say to please them and become their choice.

The very education, the very cosmopolitan urbanity that now mili

tated against him, would be in his favor.

For the moment, he was excluded from the highest counsels and innermost decisions of the Rais—because he was not of the oafish Al-Tikriti tribe, or a lifetime fanatic of the Ba’ath Party, or a full general, or a half-brother of Saddam.

But Kadiri was Tikrit—and trusted. Only a mediocre general of tanks and with the tastes of a rutting camel, he had once played in the dust of the alleys of Tikrit with Saddam and his clan, and that was enough. Kadiri was present at every decision-making meeting and knew all the secrets. The man in the confessional needed to know these things in order to make his preparations.

When he was satisfied that the coast was clear, the man rose and left. Instead of crossing the nave, he slipped through a side door into the vestry, nodded at a real priest who was robing for a service, and left the church by a back door.

The man with the bicycle was only twenty feet away. He happened to glance up as the priest emerged in his black cassock into the sunlight and whirled away just in time. The man in the cassock glanced about him, noticed but thought nothing of the fellagha bent over his bicycle adjusting the chain, and walked quickly down the alley toward a small unmarked car.

The spice-shopper had sweat running down his face and his heart pounded. Close, too damn close. He had deliberately avoided going anywhere near the Mukhabarat headquarters in Mansour just in case he ran into that face. What the hell was the man doing as a priest in the Christian quarter?

God, it had been years—years since they played together on the lawn of Mr. Hartley’s Tasisiya prep school, since he had punched the boy on the jaw for insulting his kid brother, since they had recited poetry in class, always excelled by Abdelkarim Badri. It had been a long time since he had seen his old friend Hassan Rahmani, now head of Counterintelligence for the Republic of Iraq.

It was approaching Christmas, and in the deserts of northern Saudi Arabia, three hundred thousand Americans and Europeans turned their thoughts to home as they prepared to sit out the festival in a deeply Moslem land. But despite the approaching celebration of the birth of Christ, the buildup of the greatest invasion force since Normandy rolled on.

The portion of desert in which the Coalition forces lay was still due south of Kuwait. No hint had been given that eventually half those forces would sweep much farther west.

At the coastal ports the new divisions were still pouring in. The British Fourth Armoured Brigade had joined the Desert Rats, the Seventh, to form the First Armoured Division. The French were boosting their contribution up to ten thousand men, including the Foreign Legion.