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Inside his car he might be untouchable. But the streets did not belong to Kulikov.

“I want it surrounded,” Rahmani told his best surveillance team, when he returned to his office. “Keep it quiet, discreet, low-profile. But I want total surveillance of that building. When visitors come and go—and there must be visitors—I want them tailed.”

By noon, the watcher teams were in place. They sat in parked cars beneath the trees covering all four walls of the Kulikov compound and monitored both ends of the only street that led to it. Others, farther away but linked by radio, would report on anyone approaching and follow anyone who left.

The younger son sat in the dining room of his parents’ house and looked at the long canvas bag that contained his father. He let the tears run down his face to make damp marks on the jacket of his uniform, and he thought of the good days long ago. His father had been a prosperous doctor then, with a large practice, even tending to the families of some of the British community after being introduced to them by his friend Nigel Martin.

He thought of the times he and his brother had played in the Martins’ garden with Mike and Terry, and he wondered what had ever happened to those two.

After an hour he noticed some stains on the canvas that seemed to be larger than they had been. He rose and went to the door.

“Talat.”

“Master?”

“Bring scissors and a kitchen knife.”

Alone in the room, Colonel Osman Badri cut open the canvas bag, along the top, down one side and along the bottom. Then he pulled the top of the sack away and rolled it back. His father’s body was still quite naked.

According to tradition, it was supposed to be woman’s work, but this was no task for his mother. He called for water and bandages, bathed and cleaned the ravaged body, bound up the broken feet, straightened and swaddled the shattered legs, and covered the blackened genitalia. As he worked, he cried; and as he cried, he changed.

At dusk he called the Imam at the Alwazia cemetery in Risafa and made arrangements for a funeral the next morning.

Mike Martin had in fact been into the city on his bicycle that Sunday morning, February 17, but he had returned after buying his groceries and checking the three walls for any chalk marks, arriving back at the villa just before midday. During the afternoon he was kept busy tending the garden. Mr. Kulikov, while neither Christian nor Moslem and celebrating neither the Moslem holy day on Friday nor the Christian sabbath on Sunday, was at home with a cold, complaining about the state of his roses.

While Martin worked over the flower beds, the Mukhabarat watcher teams were quietly sliding into place beyond the wall. Jericho, he reasoned, could not possibly have news in less than two days; Martin would patrol his chalk marks again the following evening.

The burial of Dr. Badri took place at Alwazia shortly after nine o’clock. The cemeteries of Baghdad were busy in those times, and the Imam had much to do. Only a few days earlier, the Americans had bombed a public air raid shelter, causing more than three hundred deaths. Feelings were running high.

Several mourners at another funeral close by asked the silent colonel if his relative had died from American bombs. He replied shortly that death had been by natural causes.

In Moslem custom, burial takes place quickly, with no long period of waiting between death and interment. And mere was no wooden coffin in the manner of Christians; the body was wrapp

ed in cloth.

The pharmacist came, supporting Mrs. Badri, and they left in a group when the brief ceremony was over.

Colonel Badri was barely yards from the gate of Alwazia when he heard his name called. Standing a few yards away was a limousine with blackened windows. One at the rear was half open. The voice called him again.

Colonel Badri asked the pharmacist to take his mother home to Qadisiyah; he would join them later.

When they had gone, he walked over to the car.

The voice said: “Please join me, Colonel. We need to talk.” He opened the car door and peered inside.

The sole occupant had moved to the far side to make space. Badri thought he knew the face, but vaguely. He had seen it somewhere. He climbed in and closed the door. The man in the dark gray suit pressed a button, and the window rose, shutting out the sounds from outside.

“You have just buried your father.”

“Yes.” Who was this man? Why could he not place the face?

“It was foul, what was done to him. If I had learned in time, I might have stopped it. I learned too late.”

Osman Badri felt something like a punch in the stomach. He realized to whom he was talking—a man who had been pointed out to him at a military reception two years earlier. “I am going to say something to you, Colonel, that, if you were to report it, would cause me to die more terribly than your father.”

There was only one such thing, thought Badri. Treason.

“Once,” said the man quietly, “I loved the Rais.”