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Rahmani had been in contact with friends in the Army who had talked to” their gunners, and the reports were adamant on one thing: The British raid had involved two airplanes. There had been two more higher up, hut it was assumed these were fighters giving cover; certainly they had not dropped any bombs.

From the Army, Rahmani had talked to Air Force Opera-lions Planning. Their view—and several of their officers were Western-trained—was that no target of great military significance would ever merit only a two-plane strike. No way.

So, reasoned Rahmani, if the British did not think the car junkyard was a scrap metal dump, what did they think it was? The answer probably lay with the two downed British airmen. Personally, he would have loved to conduct the interrogations, convinced that with certain hallucinogenic drugs he could have them talking within hours, and truthfully.

The Army had confirmed they had caught the pilot and navigator within three hours of the raid, out in the desert, one limping from a broken ankle. Unfortunately, a detail from the AMAM had turned up with remarkable speed and taken the fliers with them. No one argued with the AMAM. So the two Britishers were now with Omar Khatib, and Allah have mercy on them.

Cheated of his chance to shine by producing the information supplied by the fliers, Rahmani realized he would have to contribute something. The question was—what? The only thing that would suffice was what the Rais wanted. And what would he want? Why, a conspiracy. Then a conspiracy he would have.

The key would be the transmitter.

He reached for his phone and called Major Mohsen Zayeed, the head of his unit’s sigint section, the people charged with intercepting radio transmissions. It was time they talked again.

* * *

Twenty miles west of Baghdad lies the small town of Abu Ghraib, a most unremarkable place and yet a name known if rarely mentioned throughout Iraq. For in Abu Ghraib stood the great prison, confined almost exclusively to use in the interrogation and confinement of political detainees. As such, it was staffed and run not by the national prison service but by the Secret Police, the AMAM.

At the time Hassan Rahmani was calling his sigint expert, a long black Mercedes approached the double wooden doors of the prison. Two guards, recognizing the occupant of the car, hurled themselves at the gates and dragged them open. Just in time; the man in the car could respond with icy brutality to those causing him a momentary delay through slackness on the job.

The car went through, the gates closed. The figure in the back acknowledged the efforts of the guards with neither nod nor gesture. They were irrelevant.

At the steps to the main office building, the car stopped, and another guard ran to open the rear passenger door. Brigadier Omar Khatib alighted, trim in a tailored barathea uniform, and stalked up the steps. Doors were hastily opened for him all the way. A junior officer, an aide, brought his attaché case.

To reach his office, Khatib took the elevator to the fifth and top floor, and when he was alone, he ordered Turkish coffee and began to study his papers. The reports of the day detailed progress in the extraction of needed information from those in the basement.

Behind his facade, Omar Khatib was as worried as his colleague across Baghdad—a man whom he loathed with the same venom as the feeling was returned.

Unlike Rahmani, who with his part-English education, grasp of languages, and cosmopolitan airs was bound to be inherently suspect, Khatib could count on the fundamental advantage of being from Tikrit.

So long as he did the job with which he had been tasked by the Rais, and did it well, keeping the confessions of treachery flowing to assuage the unappeasable paranoia, he was safe.

But the last twenty-four hours had been troubling. He too had received a telephone call the previous day, but from the son-in-law, Hussein Kamil. Like Ibrahim to Rahmani, Kamil had brought news of the Rais’s unbounded rage over the bombing of Al Qubai and was demanding results.

Unlike Rahmani, Khatib actually had the British fliers in his hands. That was an advantage on the one hand, a snare on the other. The Rais would want to know, and fast, just how the fliers had been briefed before the mission—just how much did the Allies know about Al Qubai, and how had they learned it?

It was up to him, Khatib, to produce that information. His men had been working on the fliers for fifteen hours, since seven the previous evening, when they had arrived at Abu Ghraib. So far, the fools had held out.

From the courtyard below his window came the sound of a hiss, a thwack, and a low whimper. Khatib’s brow furrowed in puzzlement, then cleared as he recalled.

In the inner yard below his window an Iraqi hung by his wrists from a crossbeam, his pointed toes just four inches above the dust. Nearby stood a ewer brimming with brine, once clear, now darkly pink.

Every guard and soldier crossing the yard was under standing orders to pause, take one of the two rattan canes from the jar, and administer a single stroke to the back of the hanging man, between the neck and the knees. A corporal under an awning nearby kept the tally.

The stupid fellow was a market trader who had been heard to refer to the President as the son of a whore and was now learning, albeit a trifle late, the true measure of respect that citizens should maintain at all times in reference to the Rais.

The intriguing thing was that he was still there. It just showed what stamina some of these working-class people had. The trader had sustained more than five hundred strokes already, an impressive record. He would be dead before the thousandth—no one had ever sustained a thousand—but it was interesting all the same. The other interesting thing was that the man had been denounced by his ten-year-old son.

Omar Khatib sipped his coffee, unscrewed his rolled-gold fountain pen, and bent over his papers.

Half an hour later, there was a discreet tap at his door.

“Enter,” he called, and looked up in expectation. He needed good news, and only one man could knock without being announced by the junior officer outside.

The man who entered was burly, and his own mother would have been hard put to call him handsome.

The face was deeply pitted by boyhood smallpox, and two circular scars gleamed where cysts had been removed. He closed the door and stood, waiting to be addressed.

Though he was only a sergeant, his stained coveralls carried not even that rank, yet he was one of the few men with whom the brigadier felt any fellow feeling. Alone among the staff of the prison, Sergeant Ali was permitted to sit in his presence, when invited.