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battlefield it was now an unearthly, hellish landscape. Around the excavated brigade post were gun positions, and trench patterns, and mud. As a scientist, Dr Tariq despised the waste and confusion of the place. His back was to the waterway. He had no wish to look out over the Shatt al-Arab, the narrow glistening strip that divided his country from the Islamic Republic of Iran, He did not care to look beyond the semi-sunken hulks of the bombed merchantmen towards the clear flames rising from the refinery tower of Abadan He waited. He paced close to his car.

    As far as he could see back up the Basra road were the headless date palms, lopped by the shrapnel.
    As soon as he had received news of the death of Professor Khan he had requested a meeting with the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, at the Chairman's earliest convenience. As Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr Tariq was familiar with the dark undercurrents of Iraq's body politic. He knew of the coup attempt of seven weeks earlier and he had heard the rumour that nine Air Force officers had been put to death. It did not surprise him at all that the Chairman's answer should come, hand-delivered, to his villa at four o'clock in the morning, and that the rendezvous would be away from Baghdad. He knew that the routine and itinerary of the Chairman were a closely guarded secret. Dr Tariq would not have said that he liked the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, but he admired him. Nothing was possible, not any movement, without the clearance of the Chairman. He admired in particular the durability of the man, and his capacity to absorb succinctly presented detail, and his ability for work. So he awaited his summons without impatience.
    Dr Tariq had rehearsed what he wished to say. When, eventually, he was admitted to the presence of the Chairman he would have perhaps fifteen minutes to explain himself. It was well known amongst that elite of which he was a part that the Chairman detested news of crisis. But the killing of Professor Khan, no doubt at the hands of Zionist agents, and a letter bomb to one of his scientists at Tuwaithah, that was crisis and had to be confronted. The defection of foreign personnel from his programme, that too was crisis. Like every man who had direct contact with the Chairman, Dr Tariq had a most sincere fear of his master.
    He knew of the disappearances, the torturings, the hangings. He had been told that the Chairman had with a handgun shot dead a general who had dared to argue with his strategy during the dark days of the war. So he had prepared his words with care.
    The officer approached him.

    Dr Tariq, five foot two inches in height, thin as a willow wand, stood erect. He raised his arms, to permit the officer to frisk him.
    Then, without fuss, Dr Tariq opened his briefcase for inspection.
    He followed the officer, stepping through the churned mud, towards the concrete steps down into the brigade post, and the presence of the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council.
    Not yet past the lunch hour, and Erlich had had his first argument of the day.
    It could have been the second, but he had swallowed his pride when they had shown him the room that was allocated him. It was scarcely a box. Just a table and a chair and a telephone that wouldn't be secure, and the room was two floors and the length of a ministry corridor away from the Operations Co-ordination Centre of the Counter-Terrorism section at police headquarters. He had accepted that. What he would not accept was the refusal to make available to him, face to face, the eyewitness. It was not suitable that he should meet the eyewitness, he had been told. He didn't know how much of his fury had been translated by the interpreter.
    The guys who had been up at Lockerbie, after Pan Am 103, working alongside the British police, they didn't know how lucky they'd been . . . Same language, same culture, same team . . .
    But they had given him photographs.
    He