“This world is full of people who are already as good as dead,” Saddam Hussein said. “I could find you a woman like that, a beautiful woman. There’d be nothing for you to feel bad about.”

“No thank you.”

“Or we could keep her here as your guest. Someone to play Xbox with, how would that be?”

The prisoner considered it. “No,” he finally said. “Trapping a woman in this place wouldn’t be much better than killing her.” Thinking of Uday: “Maybe worse, in some ways.”

“Very well,” Saddam said. “But if you change your mind . . .” He freshened his drink, then took a seat in the comfy chair. “And now I would like some entertainment. You have a story for me?” His eyes narrowed. “A good story, this time?”

The prisoner smiled. “You didn’t like that last one, huh?”

“No I did not.”

“What part didn’t work for you? It was the ending, right? Where the Mahdis stretched your fucking n—uuhhhhhhhh!”

Saddam kept his thumb on the button of the remote while he took a long sip of whiskey. When he finally let up on the current, the prisoner sagged forward, gasping.

“That was four,” Saddam said, indicating the remote’s numbered dial. “Would you like me to remind you what ten feels like?”

The prisoner was too busy catching his breath to answer.

“Now I want to hear a story,” Saddam continued. “It doesn’t have to be perfect—I know you’re not a professional—but it needs to be inspirational, something that acknowledges my manhood. No more of these ridiculous fantasies about military defeats, or spider-holes, or . . . guilty verdicts. I want a tale I can believe in. Are you ready to give me that?”

The prisoner had recovered enough to fix his captor with a look of absolute hatred. For a moment it seemed as though he might spit, but Saddam held up the remote, turning it to show the numbers on the dial. The prisoner held out a moment more, then lowered his eyes and capitulated.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll tell you what you want to hear.”

“You’ll tell me what I want to hear, what?”

“I’ll tell you what you want to hear . . . Mr. President.”

The call to dawn prayer had just ceased when Saddam came back up out of the cellar. His son Qusay was waiting for him.

“What is it?”

“Mustafa al Baghdadi,” Qusay told him. “He’s inside. He has the object.”

Saddam smiled. The day was starting off well: He’d enjoyed the prisoner’s story very much, and now this.

“The senator’s daughter is with him,” Qusay continued. “And the other agent, Samir, the one the Mukhabarat say is reporting to Al Qaeda.”

Better and better. “So Bin Laden will hear about anything we say.” Saddam nodded. “We’ll have to make sure he gets an earful, then . . . You had them all searched?”

“Yes.” Qusay hesitated. “There was a problem with the senator’s daughter. Uday tried to pat her down himself, instead of calling a woman from the house to do it. She reacted violently to the insult.”

“Tell me that idiot didn’t hurt her.”

“She is fine. Uday I think is very lucky she’d already surrendered her weapon.”

Saddam reddened. “Where is your brother now?”

“Out. I told him to go for a long drive.”

“When he gets back, I want to speak to him . . . What about the object? Where is it?”

“The Guard are taking it to your office.”

“Bring Mustafa and the others there, too.”

“Do you want me to exclude the senator’s daughter?”

“You are sure she’s not armed?”

“Positive. Still, she has reason to wish you dead, so perhaps to be absolutely safe—”

“No, that’s fine. Let her in. She’s welcome to stare daggers at me all she likes.” Saddam rubbed his hands together. “But the only one getting his wishes granted today, is me.”

Amal did stare daggers at him. But the sharpness of her gaze was tempered by a small smile, the latter inspired by knowledge of the .22 pistol, hidden in a fold of her abaya, that both Uday’s clumsy pat-down and the more thorough search that followed had failed to discover. The gun was single-shot and not very accurate, but Amal was confident of her ability, if she chose, to put a bullet in Saddam Hussein’s brain.

Of course she would die too, then. On another day she might have at least considered making the trade, but now, like Mustafa, she had other priorities. It was enough to know that she could have done it—that Saddam was vulnerable. She could always come back and shoot him later.

Though his face didn’t show it, Samir was also thinking about shooting Saddam. But he didn’t have a hidden weapon and he definitely didn’t want to die. That was the problem: Idris had been very insistent about acquiring Saddam’s prize for himself, and while the botched commando raid wasn’t Samir’s fault, he knew Idris would hold him responsible anyway. So while Amal stared at Saddam, Samir cast side glances at the submachine gun slung over the shoulder of Saddam’s nearest bodyguard. He thought: Grab the gun, take down both guards, take down Saddam, take down Qusay, grab the battery, and run, run, run . . .

Yes, and if he were super-spy Jafar Bashir he might have pulled it off, might even have made it out of the mansion before being cut down by the rest of the Republican Guard. Samir Nadim would be lucky to get out of the room alive . . . assuming he had the heart to try, which he did not.

Mustafa, the only one of them not contemplating murder, focused his attention on the brass bottle. He’d examined it as carefully as he could in the moving taxi. It contained nothing but a few grains of sand and a faint odor of incense: Sniffing at the bottle’s opening, Mustafa detected an undertone of sulfur. The smell sparked no special memories, but the weight of the bottle in his hands was weirdly familiar.

Mustafa had offered Iyad a chance to examine the bottle as well, but Iyad was no longer interested. As soon as they were clear of Sadr City, he pulled the taxi over and told Mustafa and the others to get out. “And next time you need a favor, cousin, try calling the Mukhabarat.” Mustafa didn’t argue with him, only nodded solemnly and said, “Peace be unto you, Iyad.”

As Iyad drove off, Samir suggested with forced casualness that they return the bottle to headquarters and “have it checked out.”

“Checked out for what?” Amal asked. “It’s empty.”

“Well, yeah, there’s nothing in it, but what if the thing itself is . . . I don’t know, radioactive or something.”

Amal laughed. “If it’s radioactive, I say we get it into Saddam’s hands as soon as possible.”

Mustafa had sided with Amal, so they’d hailed another cab and gone directly to the Republic. And now they stood waiting while Saddam’s antiquities expert verified the authenticity of the “battery.” The expert, a diminutive Kurd whom Saddam had introduced as Mr. Rammal, acted more like a fortune-teller than an archaeologist: He laid both hands on the bottle, closed his eyes, and muttered under his breath. When this incantation, or whatever it was, was completed, he looked over at Saddam and nodded.

“Excellent!” Saddam said.

“Are you sure?” said Mustafa, who’d found himself hoping incongruously that the bottle would fail the test.

“Of course we are sure,” said Saddam. He glanced at the Kurd, who repeated his nod. “If Mr. Rammal is satisfied, so am I. And so should you be.”

“It’s just that this object isn’t what I was expecting. There’s no iron bar inside, no copper cylinder . . .”

“Copper cylinder?”

“To generate the electric current. If it’s really a battery, it’s a broken battery.”

“Mustafa al Baghdadi, you think too hard,” Saddam Hussein said. For a moment his good humor lifted like a veil, exposing a more dangerous emotion underneath.

Then he was smiling again. “Come! Let me give you your reward!” Saddam turned to the wall map of Samarra and pulled it down to reveal a hidden safe. He opened the safe and took out an index card which he handed to Mustafa.