THE BANQUET WAS HELD AT CJTF-7 HQ, BIAP, OR Combined Joint Task Force Seven Headquarters, Baghdad International Airport, in a large room that had been the Iraqi Air Force’s officers’ club, before CJTF-7 had filled it with computers and flat-screen monitors, but all of that had been removed for the feast. Two U-shaped configurations of tables faced each other, with the Americans sitting on one side and the Iraqi bigshots on the other, the tables bedecked with white linen tablecloths, bone china, silver services, and fine crystal goblets. The guests were from the DIA’s “white list,” men of influence in Iraq, tribal leaders and sheikhs, religious leaders, doctors, mayors and governors and police chiefs (along with their entourages, aides, and servants), chauffeured to the dinner in Chinook helicopters and driven from the landing zones in limousines escorted by Humvees and Bradleys. A company of M1 tanks surrounded the building, inside a perimeter of concertina wire, manned by infantry and MP security patrols, with Apache and Cobra gunships flying watch overhead. Inside, NCOs in dress uniforms with white towels over their arms waited on the guests, refilling glasses of chai and bottled water and soda and bringing the dishes one at a time, eggplant and tomato dishes, raw vegetables, whole Tigris river catfish served on rice, beef Wellington, and carrot cake drizzled in a raspberry reduction.
DeLuca found Mack near the bar, waiting with a tray in her hand containing three empty wine glasses, a white apron tied around her waist.
“What’s this fly doing in my soup?” he asked her.
“That’s fly soup,” she told him. “It’s a local delicacy.”
“Anything interesting?” he asked her.
“Maybe,” she said. “The guy at table nine is the PUK’s director for Kirkuk. He was telling the man next to him he knows who set off the bomb outside the party offices, but he told us he had no idea. Sounds like he’s making plans to take care of it himself.” The bomb had killed five civilians, including two children, on a day when Kurdistan Patriotic Union leader Jalal Talbani had been visiting party headquarters.
“Rah yentagem. Did he say who?” DeLuca asked.
“He thinks it was Ansar al-Islam,” Mack said, referring to a group of militants, many of them foreigners with Al Qaeda ties, operating on the Iraq-Iran border. “But he thinks the KDP gave them directions.” The KDP was the Kurdistan Democratic party, currently in a struggle with the PUK for domination of Iraq’s Kurdish-dominated north.
“What’s up at table ten?” DeLuca asked. “Those guys look like they’re about to strangle each other.”
“They might,” she said. “They’ve been talking about horse racing. The old guy is one of the biggest breeders in Iraq and the sheikh across from him is trying to get him to admit the races were fixed under Saddam. Or something like that.”
“Carry on,” DeLuca said.
He extracted a bottle of tonic water from a chest full of ice and went out onto the balcony to enjoy it, leaning on the railing and watching the palm trees silhouetted against the lights of Balad in the distance. High overhead, a pair of jets streaked across the sky.
“It’s not Herr Totenbrau, but it’s cold,” a voice behind him said. He turned to see Phil LeDoux. “Mind if I join you?”
“You don’t have official duties that are more pressing?” DeLuca asked.
“I think we’re making some good headway in there,” the general said. “They can probably spare me for a few minutes. How’s your evening been so far?”
“Pretty good,” DeLuca said. “I’m working on the name of a horse in the fifth race at the Baghdad Equestrian Club. I’ll give you a call if I get it. I was going to call you anyway. Things might be developing. You got a minute?”
LeDoux took two cigars from his shirt pocket and handed one to DeLuca.
“I’ve got as long as it takes to smoke one of these,” he said, lighting his and extending his lighter to his old friend. DeLuca spat the end of the cigar off the balcony, lit his cigar, then briefed LeDoux on recent developments. He recapped his discussion with Omar Hadid and his offer to facilitate a meeting with Imam Fuaad Al-Sadreddin. DeLuca described his hospital visit, and how Mohammed Al-Tariq’s oldest son had referred to Lanatullah using the masculine pronoun, calling him a teacher, seeking vengeance, though he didn’t seem to know if his father were still alive, and finally his chase of a man he presumed to be Hassan Al-Tariq’s younger brother Ibrahim. DeLuca told LeDoux what they’d learned from the lab technician at Al Manal, and the leads they were looking into, the truck drivers they were hoping to track down, the gene IL-4, and “protocol 16.15,” whatever that was.
“Unfortunately, both Hassan and Seeliyeh are dead,” DeLuca finished. “Hassan more or less from natural causes, but Seeliyeh was murdered in his sleep. Which in this country almost qualifies as natural causes. I’m worried that he was killed to keep him from talking to us.”
“Any other reasons why somebody might want to kill him?” LeDoux inquired.
“In Iraq?” DeLuca said. “Are you serious?”
“Forget I asked.” LeDoux blew a cloud of smoke out into the night. “Is this pretty much confirming what you’ve been thinking?”
“A lot of it is heading that way,” DeLuca said.
“What about the rest of Al-Tariq’s family?” LeDoux wanted to know.
“Four wives but just the two sons,” DeLuca said. “I was thinking I might want to talk to them.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Unknown. But not unknowable.”
The general tapped the end of his cigar on the railing, knocking the ashes off. The ashes drifted slowly to the sand below.
“Captain Martin told me today you asked for a generator,” LeDoux said. “I’m afraid I might have barked at him a bit, but I told him if you asked for something, not to bother me, short of you wanting your own personal tank battalion.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Tell your friend Omar Hadid that I’d like to meet him,” LeDoux said. “Purely on a social basis. We invited him tonight but he declined.” As he spoke, a fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties came out onto the balcony alone, a wine glass filled with club soda in her right hand. She raised an eyebrow briefly at something LeDoux said, then took a position at the balcony railing far enough away to indicate she had no desire to eavesdrop.
“I’m not surprised,” DeLuca said. “I’ll tell him.”
LeDoux crushed his cigar out in a nearby ashtray.
“You finish yours,” he told his old friend. “I’ve got to go back in and hobnob a bit more.”
DeLuca found himself at the railing, staring off at the city lights and at the stars shining in the black sky above. The night air had cooled. The woman down from him had a pale lavender shawl around her shoulders. She was wearing an off-white linen dress that was simultaneously modest and stylish, hemmed at midcalf, sleeveless with a collar that turned up against her neck. She was wearing pearls, though there was nothing old-ladyish about them. He watched as she opened her purse, removed a pack of cigarettes, then searched the rest of her purse, apparently in vain, before putting the cigarettes back. She laughed to herself as she closed the purse with a snap.
“I do have a light,” he said to her. “If that’s what you need.”
She looked straight ahead a moment before turning to him with a polite smile.
“Thank you, but I’m all right,” she said.
She was British. He felt uncomfortable, afraid he’d given her the impression he was trying to pick her up. Apparently she felt uncomfortable too. She turned on a heel to leave.
“What was so funny?” he asked her.
She stopped.
“Woman on balcony fumbles for a match,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The scenario bears a resemblance to a bad soap opera, don’t you think? Sorry about that.”
She moved again toward the door, then stopped, thinking. She turned again.
“If you don’t mind, I really would appreciate a light,” she told him. “Now that we understand each other. I really shouldn’t smoke at all, but right now I think I could chew off my own arm for a puff. Pathetic, isn’t it?”
He knocked the ashes off his cigar, drew on it once to fan the ember and then offered it to her. She leaned forward and lit her cigarette, closing her eyes as she did.
“If the smell of the cigar bothers you, I’d be happy to put it out,” he offered.
“No no no,” she said. “I rather like the smell of cigars. Perhaps not in enclosed spaces, but they remind me of weddings. Positive associations.”
“They remind me of poker games,” he said.
“Also positive associations, I hope,” she said.
“Pretty much,” he said.
“Except when you lose?” she asked.
“Even then,” he said. “Nobody ever loses much.”
She smiled.
“Old friends?” she asked. “Same faces for the last twenty years?”
“Yup,” he said. “Though nobody has the same face they had twenty years ago.”
“Sounds nice,” she said.
“Why the eyebrow?” he asked. She looked puzzled. “When you walked out. The general and I were talking and I saw you raise an eyebrow. It spoke volumes.”
“None of my business,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been listening in. Didn’t intend to, really.”
“But?”
“I recognized a name,” she said. “When you see Omar Hadid, you must tell him that Evelyn Warner says hello.” She extended her hand. DeLuca shook it. She waited a moment, then said, “Now the fact that you’ve got nothing on your uniform and haven’t introduced yourself yet makes me think you must be CIA. Am I right? You don’t have to answer that, of course, but it’s all right if you do—I grew up with a father who was MI5, so I was raised to keep secrets.”
“David,” he said. “DeLuca. And I’m not CIA.”
“Counterintelligence,” she guessed next. He said nothing. “BBC, world service, in case you were wondering.”
“I was,” he said. “Television or radio?”
“A bit of both, actually,” she said. “I’ve apparently turned into the go-to girl here. Old Middle East hand and all that.” He’d thought she looked slightly familiar and realized where he must have seen her, a face on one of the television screens at the TOC where it was sometimes possible to learn more about what was going on by watching the cable news programs than by reading sitreps.
“I should have recognized you,” he said.
“Given that I dress like this about once every two or three years, I don’t see how you could,” she said.
“Are you here in a work capacity?” he asked.
“I’m a guest,” she said. “Of General Denby. Off-duty for a change, so feel free to speak your mind—you’re off the record here, David.”
He liked the way his name sounded with a British accent coloring it.
“You’re on a date?” he asked. “You’re off the record, too.”
She laughed.
“No, not a date. Not quite. Denby’s an old friend. I think I’ve been interviewing him since I was fresh out of university. Which was where I knew your associate, Mr. Hadid, by the way. One of the better batsmen the Trinity cricket team ever had, I should say.”
“You knew him from Oxford?”
“Different colleges, but yes. We were members of some of the same clubs.”
“‘Resolved that the money spent on the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer constitutes a squandering of resources better spent on the remedy of social ills,’” DeLuca said. “And you lost.”
“Very impressive,” she said, smiling. “As I recall, I argued some rubbish about the impoverished proletariat needing vicarious thrills. Did he say he won? Well, I suppose he did. He was older than me. How’s he faring?”
“I gather he’s doing all right, considering,” DeLuca said.
“He’s a good man and he’s had to deal with a terrible situation for quite some time,” Evelyn Warner said. “Been meaning to ring him up but haven’t had the chance. Busy busy.”
Something else was coming together in DeLuca’s mind, something he’d read back before he’d deployed, when he’d tried to research as much about Iraq as he could. The name “Warner.” Where had he heard it? Then he remembered.
“Any relation to Lady Anne Strevens-Warner?” he asked her.
She looked down, then up again.
“Guilty as charged,” she said. “This is her shatoosh, actually.” She spread her shawl out, then wrapped it around herself again. “A gift from old King Faisal himself. They say these are made from the belly hairs of an endangered Tibetan antelope. They say the hairs are so fine, you can tell if your shatoosh is genuine if you can pull it through a wedding band.”
“Can you?” he asked.
“If I knew where my wedding ring was, I suppose I could give it a go,” she said.
“You can use mine if you want.”
“Oh, no fair, no fair,” she said. “Men’s rings don’t count. Too much diameter. Has to be a woman’s.” She smiled again. She blinked, embarrassed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. First I ask you for a light, like some schoolgirl punting on the Cherwell, and then I manage to slip into the conversation the fact that I’m not married anymore. Let me tell you, Mr. DeLuca, I am not a flirt and I am not coy. I am simply very tired and not myself and I’ve had a terrible week.”
“Why a terrible week?” he asked.
“Oh, that dreadful David Kelly thing,” she said. “My friend Alec was the reporter. And then my mother told me Father is driving her crazy. Just retired and doesn’t know what to do with himself. She’s going to be smoking crack in a matter of weeks if it keeps up. But that’s all right. I come from a long line of solitary women.”
All DeLuca knew, and this incompletely, was that Evelyn Warner’s great-grandmother, Lady Anne, had been dubbed “The Female Lawrence of Arabia” for the work she’d done in what was then Mesopotamia in the first part of the twentieth century. She’d been an explorer and an archaeologist traveling alone throughout the region at the turn of the century. It had been her maps, and more important her personal connections, that helped British colonial interests secure Iraq’s oil wealth to fuel their ships during the First World War. Afterward, she was named Chief Counsel to the British High Commission for Oriental Affairs, serving as principal advisor to British-installed King Faisal I. Some called Lady Anne “The Uncrowned Queen of Iraq.” She finished her years establishing what would become the Iraq Historical Museum, the same museum that was ransacked during and after the recent American bombing.
“I’m surprised, given all that she did, that your great-grandmother found the time to raise children,” he said.
“Bear them, yes,” Evelyn Warner said. “Raise them, no. That task fell to the governesses and private boarding schools. Another British tradition to which I am heir. Do you have any children, Mr. DeLuca?”
“One,” he said. “A son. Scott.”
“And where is he?”
“He’s at Kirkuk,” DeLuca said. “Though I can’t say I’ve seen much of him. We’ve both been a bit busy.”
“Now that’s fascinating,” she said. “Do you think I might interview the two of you? I’ve been thinking of doing a story on all the father-son pairings in this war. There are so many in this war. What does he do?”
“Intelligence,” DeLuca said. “Image analysis.” He liked this woman, but he felt that he’d disclosed more personal information than he was comfortable with. “I thought you said you weren’t working tonight.”
“You’re right, you’re absolutely right,” she said. “Forget I asked. But I want you to know that if you ever want to tell your story, I can be quite useful to you. I speak fluent unaccented Arabic and I do know a great many people in addition to Omar Hadid. I treat my sources right and I keep my word.”
She crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray after smoking only the first half of it and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders again.
“Ever run across a character named Mohammed Al-Tariq?” he asked. He was fishing, but he suspected he was fishing in promising waters.
“Oh, dear,” she said, her voice turning serious. “Now you’ve put me off my party mood. What have you got to do with that hideous man?”
“I’m looking for his people,” DeLuca said. “His aides. His family. I interviewed his son yesterday in a hospital.”
“Hassan or Ibrahim?”
“Hassan,” DeLuca said. “Unfortunately, he died last night. Septic shock.”
“Good,” she said. “Not unfortunate at all. Ibrahim is worse. I could tell you stories, but I suspect I don’t have to.”
“Unfortunate because I had some more questions to ask him,” DeLuca said.
“The father is purely evil,” she said. “The sons, hardly less. If the father’s gone, the world is better off by half.”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?” DeLuca asked. “We have proof that he’s dead. One hundred percent confidence. That’s what the file says.”
“Do you now?” she said. “Well, that’s a relief. American intelligence can’t be wrong ever, can it?”
“Point taken,” he said. “Why doubt it, though? Suppose I’m curious.”
She stared him down, trying to read his expression. She looked sad, and a bit fearful.
“You’re going to think me very strange, and you don’t even know me. I don’t believe in ghosts, David DeLuca,” she told him. “But sometimes a feeling comes over me when I walk through a cemetery. That something that wants to be laid to rest hasn’t been. Maybe it’s because I’m English and we have so many very old cemeteries. Yesterday I visited a mass grave site. Outside Shorish. The number of the dead was over five hundred when we left. They’re still counting. And there are 263 other mass burial sites being investigated. This was Al-Tariq’s work. And I felt those souls. You’re probably going to think I’ve lost my senses, but I felt them. I couldn’t help it. And they’re not at rest. Not at all. They’re not at rest because the man responsible has not been brought to justice. That was the feeling I got. I wouldn’t pretend to have any special abilities, David. I truly don’t believe in psychics. It’s just a feeling I have, but yesterday it was overwhelming. That’s why I was taken aback when you asked me if I knew him. If your proof is conclusive, then I want to believe it. But then I can’t explain the feeling I had. Al-Tariq is evil. Personified. And the souls he killed are not at rest.”
“Do you think he had weapons of mass destruction?” DeLuca asked.
“Do I think Iraq had massive stockpiles of them? No,” she said. “I think your president and my prime minister quite cooked the books on that. But they had some. Do I think Mohammed Al-Tariq was trying to obtain them, for his own personal uses? I’d heard that. They used a variety of things in 1988, during the Anfal. I tried to get a camera crew in there when I heard, but I’d just started at the Beeb and I lacked the wherewithal. By the time we got there, all we found were dead birds. Thousands of them. They found traces of sarin. It seemed fairly clear though that they used different substances in different villages. Field-testing them. VX. Anthrax. And Al-Tariq controlled these things. But who am I to judge? The first country to use poison gas in Iraq was England, suppressing a Kurdish revolt in Sulaymaniyah in 1919.”
“After World War I ended?”
“Yup. I’ve been going over this in my head since before this idiotic war began—since I realized your president has failed to grasp, as the British empire failed to grasp, the most fundamental element of the Arab mind. I’ve never known more loyal or more hospitable friends than the Arabs I’ve known, but the dark side of that is, I can’t think of anyone more apt to make an enemy out of the outsider who comes uninvited. And the Arab remembers who his enemy is for a very long time. You just can’t invade and befriend a country at the same time, even if you do get rid of men like Saddam or Al-Tariq. If you really didn’t want to deal with terrorist threats, you might have wanted to think twice before you created a million new terrorists. And those million new terrorists, Al Qaeda or whatever they want to call themselves, are self-motivated, but they’re going to need three things to be effective: money, arms, and leadership. And that’s precisely what Mohammed Al-Tariq was arranging for before the war began. Did anybody really think they didn’t know how defenseless they were going to be against the initial invasion? They weren’t planning for that—why try? They barely resisted. They were planning to take the blow, suffer the casualties, let the troops in, and then destroy the coalition over the next ten or fifteen years. I think Al-Tariq has been planning for years what he’d do, once Saddam was removed. The coalition could hardly have done him a bigger favor. If he’s still alive . . .”
“What?” DeLuca said.
“It’s something I would pray to stop, but it’s not something I would know how to pray for,” she said. “You don’t pray to God to stop the Devil. Only men can stop the Devil.”
She was quiet, gazing out at the night landscape one more time. Then she reached into her purse and withdrew a card.
“There’s my sat phone number, and this is my number in London where you can leave messages,” she said. “Do call if you need anything. I think Al-Tariq’s family may be in Iran. Somewhere between Sanandaj and the border. That’s what I’ve heard. Unsubstantiated. Possibly entirely erroneous. I’m working on developing contacts in that area, so I’ll let you know if I’m successful. If you do get there, his first three wives are going to be too scared to talk to anybody, but the fourth one might be approachable. The others won’t be.”
“Why?” DeLuca said. “What did they do?”
“They bore him daughters,” Warner said.
“I thought he only had the two sons.”
“He does,” Warner said.
DeLuca didn’t have to ask what might have happened to the daughters.
He didn’t know exactly how much stock he put in the concept of “woman’s intuition.” Probably not enough. The Englishwoman’s apprehension at the burial site didn’t interest him nearly as much as her expertise and the things her sources had told her. He realized he was going to need a bigger team.
He checked the battery on his sat phone. He hoped he had enough juice to make one more call before recharging. He dialed.
“Image analysis,” the voice on the phone said.
“Lieutenant Scott DeLuca, please.”
He waited. A moment later, his son came on the line.
“Hey, Pops,” Scott said. “What are you doing at BIAP? Oh, wait—that’s the big banquet thing, right? How’s the food?”
“How’d you know I was at BIAP?”
“GPS on your signal,” his son said.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” DeLuca said. “I thought I had to carry a transponder.”
“We just got it in,” Scott said. “Still testing it. Are you on the balcony?”
“Yes, I am. And the food is excellent,” DeLuca said. “I’ll save you some leftovers. I need to talk to you, if you’ve got time for your old man. Not on the phone. In person.”
“About Mom?”
“Not your mother. Business. You free tomorrow?”
“I can make myself free. What time?”
“How ’bout lunch? I’ll bring the MREs.”