Honor Among Thieves Read online

  “Right then, we’d better get you home, Professor, hadn’t we?” said Cohen. “Aziz will take over while we’re in his neck of the woods.” He jumped out of the cab and the Kurd came running around to take his place behind the wheel. Once Cohen had clambered over the tailgate, he banged the roof of the truck and Aziz switched the engine on.

  They accelerated around the courtyard, drove straight through the barrier and out onto Victory Square. The only other vehicles to be seen had long since been abandoned, and there was no sign of anyone on the streets.

  “The area has been cleared for three miles in every direction, so it will be a little time before we come across anything,” Aziz said as he turned left into Kindi Street. He quickly moved the truck up to sixty miles per hour, a speed only Saddam had ever experienced before on that particular road.

  “I’m going to take the old Baquba Road out of the city, traveling through the areas where we’re least likely to see any sign of the military,” explained Aziz as he passed the fountain made famous by Ali Baba. “I’m still hoping to reach the highway out of Baghdad within the magic two hours.”

  Aziz took a sudden right, switching gears but hardly losing any speed as he continued through what gave every impression of being a ghost town. Scott looked up at the sun as they crossed a bridge over the Tigris; in an hour or so it would have disappeared behind the highest buildings, and their chances of remaining undetected would greatly improve.

  Aziz swung past Karmel Junblat University and into Jamila Street. There were still no people on the roads or sidewalks, and Scott felt that if anyone did see them now they would assume they were part of an army unit on patrol.

  It was Hannah who spotted the first person: an old man, bent double, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk as if nothing in particular had taken place. They drove past him at sixty miles per hour, but he didn’t even look up.

  Aziz swung into the next road and found himself facing a group of young looters carrying off televisions and electronic equipment. They scattered when they saw the truck. Around the next corner there were more looters, but still no sign of police or soldiers.

  When Aziz spotted the first dark-green uniforms he swerved quickly right, down a side street that on any other Wednesday would have been packed with shoppers and where a vehicle would have been lucky to average more than five miles per hour. But today Aziz managed to keep the speedometer above fifty. He turned right again, and they saw some of the first of the locals who had ventured back onto the streets. Once they had reached the end of the road, Aziz was able to join the main thoroughfare out of Baghdad. The traffic was still light.

  Aziz eased the truck across into the outside lane, checking his rearview mirror every few seconds and complying with the speed limit of fifty miles per hour. “Never get stopped for the wrong reasons,” Kratz had warned him a thousand times.

  When Aziz switched his headlights on, Scott’s hopes began to rise. Although the two hours had to be up, he doubted that anybody would be out searching for them yet, and it was well understood that with every mile out of Baghdad the citizens became less and less loyal to Saddam.

  Once Aziz had left the Baghdad boundary sign behind him he pushed the speedometer up to sixty. “Give me twenty minutes, Allah,” he said. “Please give me twenty minutes and I’ll get them to Castle Post.”

  “Castle Post?” said Scott. “We’re not on a Red Indian scouting mission.”

  Aziz laughed. “No, Professor, it’s the site of a First World War British Army post, where we can hide for the night. If I can get you there before—” All three of them spotted the first army truck coming towards them. Aziz swung off to the left, skidded into a side road and was immediately forced to drop his speed.

  “So now where are we heading?” asked Scott.

  “Khan Beni Saad,” said Aziz, “the village where I was born. It will only be possible for us to stay for one night, but no one will think of looking for us there. But tomorrow, Professor, you will have to decide which of the six borders we’re going to cross.”

  General Hamil had been pacing around his office for the past hour. The two hours had long passed, and he was starting to wonder if Kratz might have got the better of him. But he couldn’t work out how.

  He was even beginning to regret that he had killed the man. If Kratz had still been alive, at least he could have fallen back on the tried and trusted method of torture. Now he would never know how he would have responded to his particular shaving technique.

  Hamil had already ordered a reluctant lieutenant and his platoon back to the basement of the Ba’ath headquarters. The Lieutenant had returned swiftly to report that the safe door was wide open and the truck had disappeared, as had the document that had been hanging on the wall. The General smiled. He remained confident that he was in possession of the original Declaration, but he extracted the parchment from the cylinder and laid it on his desk to double-check. When he came to the word “British,” he turned first white, and then, by several degrees deeper and deeper shades of red.

  He immediately gave an order to cancel all military leave, and next commanded five divisions of the Elite Guard to mount a search for the terrorists. But he had no way of knowing how much start they had on him, how far they might have already traveled and in which direction.

  However, he did know that they couldn’t remain on the main roads in that truck for long, without being spotted. Once it was dark, they would probably retreat into the desert to rest overnight. But they would have to come out the following morning, when they must surely try to cross one of the six borders. The General had already given an order that if even one of the terrorists managed to cross any border, guards from every customs post would be arrested and jailed, whether they were on duty or not. The two soldiers who were supposed to have closed the safe door had already been shot for not carrying out his orders, and the Major detailed to supervise the moving of the safe had immediately been arrested. At least Major Saeed’s decision to take his own life had saved Hamil the trouble of a court-martial: within an hour the Major had been found hanging in his cell. Obviously leaving a coil of rope in the middle of the floor below a hook in the ceiling had proved to be a compelling enough hint. And as for the two young medical students who’d been responsible for the injections, and who had witnessed his conversation with Kratz, they were already on their way to the southern borders, to serve with a less than elite regiment. They were such nice-looking boys, the General thought; he gave them a week at the most.

  Hamil picked up the phone and dialed a private number that would connect him to the palace. He needed to be certain that he was the first person to explain to the President what had taken place that afternoon.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Scott had always considered his own countrymen to be an hospitable race, but he had never experienced such a welcome as Aziz’s family gave to the three strangers.

  Khan Beni Saad, the village in which Aziz was born, had, he told them, just over 250 inhabitants at the last count, and barely survived on the income it derived from selling its small crop of oranges, tangerines and dates to the housewives of Kirkuk and Arbil.

  The chief of the tribe, who turned out to be one of Aziz’s uncles, immediately opened his little stone home to them so that they could make use of the one bath in the village. The women of the house—there seemed to be a lot of them—kept boiling water until all of the visitors were pronounced clean.

  When Scott finally emerged from the chief’s home, he found a table had been set up under a clump of citrus trees in the Huwaider fields. It was laden with strange fish, meat, fruit and vegetables. He feared they must have gathered something from every home in the village.

  Under a clear starlit night, they devoured the fresh food and drank mountain water that, if bottled, a Californian would happily have paid a fortune for.

  But Scott’s thoughts kept returning to the fact that tomorrow they would have to leave these idyllic surroundings, and that he would somehow hav