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under the bathroom faucet, and ground her knife on it, testing its edge on her thumbnail. When you touch the edge of a prosector’s knife to your thumbnail, you want it to stick, to grab the nail, the way a razor grabs. If the edge slides or bounces over your thumbnail, it is not sharp.
    The long knife made a whisking sound as it passed over the diamond block. Then she refined its edge on the steel rod—
zing, zing, zing
.
    West of Babylon
    IRAQ, THURSDAY, APRIL 23
                      
    APRIL IN IRAQ is normally dry and blue, but a cool front had moved down from the north, bringing an overcast sky. The United Nations Special Commission Biological Weapons Inspection Team Number 247—U NSCOM 247, it was called—was traveling along a narrow paved highway at the edge of the desert to the west of the Euphrates River, with its headlights on, moving slowly. The convoy consisted of a dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles. They were painted white, and they displayed large black letters, “UN,” stenciled on their doors. The vehicles were plastered with gluelike dust.
    The convoy arrived at a crossroads and slowed to a crawl. All the vehicles’ turn signals went on at the same time, blinking to the right. Vehicle by vehicle, the U NSCOM 247 convoy turned to the northeast. Its destination was the Habbaniyah Air Base, near the Euphrates River, where a United Nations transport aircraft waited to fly the inspectors out of the country to Bahrain. There they would split up and go their separate ways.
    A white Nissan Pathfinder 4 × 4 in the middle of the convoy slowed when it came to the crossroads. Its right turn signal came on, like the others. Then, suddenly, with a roar and a whipping whirl of tires, the Nissan broke out of line. It swung left onto a ribbon of cracked tar heading west, and departed at high speed into the desert.
    A hard voice broke over the radio: “Snap inspection!”
    It was the voice of Commander Mark Littleberry, M.D., U.S. Navy (Retired). Littleberry was in his sixties. He was a tough-looking man (“the indestructible Littleberry,” his colleagues called him), but his age showed in the gold-rimmed half-glasses perched on his nose and in the silver at his temples. Littleberry worked as a paid consultant to various U.S. government agencies, most especially to the Navy. He had top security clearances. Through his Navy connections, he had been appointed an U NSCOM biological-weapons inspector. Now he was sitting in the passenger seat of the breakaway Nissan, with a military map of Iraq draped across his knees. He was holding a small electronic screen in his hands.
    The Iraqi minders had been traveling behind the U NSCOM convoy in a rattletrap column of vehicles—beat-up Toyota pickup trucks, smoking dysfunctional Renaults, hub-capless Chevrolets, and a black Mercedes-Benz sedan with tinted windows and shiny mag wheels. Most of these vehicles had been seized in Kuwait by Iraq during the Gulf War, and they had seen constant use by the Iraqi government in the years afterward. Some of the cars had been cannibalized from junk parts, and they had body panels of differing colors.
    When the Nissan broke away and Mark Littleberry’s words “snap inspection” crackled over the radio, it created confusion among the Iraqi minders. Their vehicles came to a grinding halt, and they started yelling into hand-held radios. They were reporting the breakaway to their superiors at the National Monitoring Center in Baghdad, which is the Iraqi intelligence office that supplies minders to U.N. weapons-inspection teams. There was a pause. The minders were waiting for orders, since no minder who valued his life would do anything without orders.
    A snap inspection is a surprise weapons inspection. Inspectors suddenly change their itinerary and go somewhere without giving advance notice. But this time there was a problem. Commander Mark Littleberry did not have permission from the chief inspector, a French biologist named