Page 119

Her handbag had been found next to the body, and it contained a powder compact, lipstick, and her identity cards. Having established that one Leila Al-Hilla was undoubtedly a civilian victim of a bomb blast, the harassed pathologist had her taken away for hasty burial.

The more elaborate post-mortem for which he did not have time that January 17 would have shown the woman had been repeatedly and savagely raped before being systematically beaten to death. The dumping in the crater had come several hours later.

General Abdullah Kadiri had moved from his sumptuous office in the Defense Ministry two days earlier.

There was no point in staying to be blown to bits by an American bomb, and he was sure the Ministry would be hit and destroyed before the air war was many days old. He was right.

He had established himself in his villa, which he was reasonably certain was anonymous enough—albeit luxurious—not to be on any American target map. In this too he was right.

The villa had long since been provided with its own communications room, which staff from the Ministry were now manning. All his communications to the various command headquarters of the Armored Corps around Baghdad were by buried fiber-optic cable, which was also out of reach of the bombers.

Only the farther units had to be contacted by radio, with a threat of intercept—plus, of course, those in Kuwait.

His problem, as darkness fell over Baghdad that night, was not how to contact his Armored Corps commanders or what orders to give them. They could take no part in the air war, being tasked to disperse their tanks as widely as possible among the rows of dummies or bury them in the subterranean bunkers and wait.

His problem, rather, was his personal security, and it was not the Americans he feared.

Two nights earlier, rising from his bed with a bursting bladder, bleary with arak as usual, he had stumbled to the bathroom. Finding the door, as he thought, stuck, he had pushed hard. His two hundred pounds of body weight had torn the inner bolt from its screws, and the door flew open.

Bleary he might have been, but Abdullah Kadiri had not come from a back street near Tikrit to command all Iraq’s tanks outside the Republican Guard, had not climbed the slippery ladder of Ba’ath Party internal feuding, and had not sustained a trusted place on the Revolutionary Command Council without ample reserves of animal cunning.

He had stared in silence at his mistress, sitting wrapped in a robe on the toilet seat, her paper sustained by the back of a Kleenex box, her mouth in a round O of horror and surprise, her pen still poised in midair. Then he had hauled her to her feet and hit her on the point of the jaw.

When she came to, with a jug of water dashed in the face, he had had time to read the report she was preparing and to summon the trusty Kemal from his quarters across the yard. It was Kemal who had taken the whore

down to the basement.

Kadiri had read and reread the report she had almost finished. Had it concerned his personal habits and preferences, a lever for future blackmail, he would have dismissed it and simply had her killed. In any case, no blackmail would ever have worked. The personal baseness of some of the entourage of the Rais was greater than his own, he knew. He also knew that the Rais did not care.

This was worse. Apparently he had talked of things that had happened within the government and the Army. That she was spying was obvious. He needed to know for how long and what she had reported already, but most of all, for whom.

Kemal took his long-awaited pleasures first, with his master’s permission. No man would lust after what remained when Kemal had finished the interrogation. It had taken several hours. Then, Kadiri knew, Kemal had gotten it all—at least, all the courtesan knew.

After that, Kemal had continued for his own amusement until she was dead.

Kadiri was convinced that she had not known the real identity of the man who had recruited and ran her to spy on him, but the picture had to fit Hassan Rahmani.

The description of the information-against-money exchanges in the confessional of St. Joseph’s showed the man was professional, and Rahmani was certainly that.

That he should be watched did not worry Kadiri. All those around the Rais were watched; indeed, they watched each other. The rules of the Rais were simple and clear. Every figure of high rank was watched and reported on by three of his peers. A denunciation for treachery could and probably would lead to ruin. Thus, few conspiracies could get very far. One of those confided in would report the matter, and it would come to the ears of the Rais.

To complicate matters, each member of the entourage was occasionally provoked, to see what his reaction would be. A colleague, briefed to do so, would take his friend aside and propose treason.

If the friend agreed, he was finished. If he failed to report the proposer, he was finished. So any approach could be a provocation—it was simply too unsafe to assume otherwise. Thus, each reported on the others.

But this was different. Rahmani was head of Counterintelligence. Had he taken the initiative on his own, and if so, why? Was it an operation with the knowledge and approval of the Rais himself, and if so, why?

What had he said? the general wondered. Things indiscreet, no doubt. But traitorous?

The body had stayed in the basement until the bombs fell, then Kemal had found a crater on a patch of waste ground to dump it. The general had insisted the handbag be placed nearby. Let that bastard Rahmani know what had happened to his slut.

As midnight passed, General Abdullah Kadiri sweated alone, tipping a few drops of water into his tenth tumbler of arak. If it was Rahmani alone, he would finish the bastard. But how could he know how far up the ladder he was distrusted? He would have to be careful henceforth, more careful than he had ever been before. Those late-night trips into the city would end. In any case, with the air war started, it was time to cease.

Simon Paxman had flown back again to London. There was no point in staying in Riyadh. Jericho had been kicked firmly into touch by the CIA, although the unseen renegade in Baghdad would not know it yet, and Mike Martin was confined to quarters until he could escape to the desert and find his way to safety across the border.

Later, Paxman could swear with his hand on his heart the meeting on the evening of the eighteenth with Dr. Terry Martin had been a true coincidence. He knew Martin lived in Bayswater, as he did himself, but it is a large borough with many shops.

With his wife away at the bedside of her sick mother and his own return unforeseen, Paxman had come home to an empty flat and an empty fridge, so he went shopping at an open-late supermarket on Westbourne Grove.