way forward to just behind the front seats. A young man with the wisp of a beard on his chin nimbly hopped out, a big grin on his face, his dark eyes large and round.
“Good evening, Mr. Tony,” he said, his English passable. “I am Saddam.” Like his father he wore a dark robe and headdress, sandals on his feet.
Hadid reached inside the dark space and helped a slightly built figure out and over the lip of the rear bumper. For a moment McGarvey thought it was another, much younger son, until he realized it was a woman.
“My wife, Miriam,” Hadid said proudly.
Her face was perfectly round, her complexion smoky, her smile as bright as her son’s. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Tony,” she said, her accent British. She, too, was dressed in a dark robe, her hair covered.
McGarvey suddenly had a very bad feeling. Inside the hidden compartment he could make out at least three AK-47s, and a couple of canvas bags that almost certainly held spare magazines. “I appreciate the help, but I don’t think this is such a good idea,” he said.
“Is it my son, or are you a chauvinist American?” the woman asked.
McGarvey nodded toward the weapons. “I don’t want to be the cause of a woman going into harm’s way. I’ll get to Baghdad on my own.”
“Then you are merely a sad American. We heard of your loss. It must be terrible.”
“We will present less of a threat, a family traveling with an American journalist,” Hadid said.
“People are expecting me in Baghdad. There’ll be trouble.”
“Once we get you there you’ll be on your own until it’s time to return,” Hadid said. “You’ll stay at the Baghdad Hotel, while we’ll stay with my wife’s uncle. When it’s time for you to leave we’ll come back in the same fashion, but you will cross the border with a new identification, and appearance.”
McGarvey looked over his shoulder the way they had come, and he could see the glow of al-Kuwait on the horizon. Getting back to the city would be a problem, but he’d faced worse. Once back at the Crowne Plaza Otto could arrange for something else. Anything else.
“What explanation will you give when you are picked up by a military patrol, unless of course you are murdered first?”
“We’ll take your wife back to the city, and start over,” McGarvey said.
“Have you been to Baghdad before?” Miriam asked.
“Once, a long time ago.”
“But not since the war, and the chaos left behind when Uncle Saddam was caught and executed. You don’t know the full extent of the troubles between the Sunnis and Shi’ites.”
“Believe me, Mr. Tony, my wife and I have worked together ever since our marriage sixteen years ago,” Hadid said. “She is an unusual woman for an Iraqi. She was educated in England, and her father was a general in Saddam’s army. She knows her way around. In the beginning it was I who was learning from her. She worked on the outside of the palace while I worked on the inside. We are a team.”
“It will be better for you if we do this together,” Miriam said. “And if I thought the danger would have the possibility of becoming overwhelming, do you think I would allow my son to ride with us?”
“Be sensible,” Hadid said.
The situation sounded anything but sensible to McGarvey, but it was far too late for him to back down. Sandberger was the tie to Foster and the Friday Club. Almost nothing else mattered.
“Do you have a weapon for me?” he asked after another hesitation, and Hadid looked relieved.
“You may have your sat phone now, you will have your weapon once we cross the border.”
The last thirty miles up to the border was heavy with traffic, only one vehicle out of fifty a civilian car. The Baghdad road wasn’t exactly the gateway to the country. But it was bandits who gave civilians trouble, while it was the Sunni and Shi’ite radicals who targeted the military and Iraqi police.
“Saddam and I are actually quite good marksmen in our own right,” Miriam said conversationally at one point.
“Unusual for an Iraqi woman,” McGarvey said.
“Not as unusual as you might expect, but we don’t parade in the streets firing into the air like the men. When we shoot it’s from concealed positions at a specific target.”
A conglomerate of lights in addition to the red taillights of the trucks heading north, and the headlights of vehicles heading south, straddled the highway. Northbound traffic was backed up