But two years after the invasion, nothing had been found. Perhaps a few rockets tipped with mustard gas left over from the Iran–Iraq War, twenty years earlier. Maybe a few tins of sarin poison gas, just enough to foul a small village’s water supply. But that was all. No centrifuges. No enriched uranium. No sophisticated laboratories. Nada.
A report had been written—“The Duelfer Report,” it was called—and presented to Congress. Depending on which side of the aisle one sat, the report was viewed either as a humiliating admission of failure on the part of the teams searching the country or evidence of gross misrepresentation on the part of the administration. In the end, however, pretty much everyone agreed. The government had flat-out lied to the American people.
Eliza had traveled six thousand miles across the globe to rewrite that narrative. Her trip was a last-ditch effort to repair the president’s reputation; a personal mission on his behalf, made at the request of Eliza’s father, Senator Davis Porter Elkins, ranking member of Congress and chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
“What is this place?” asked Eliza, staring up a tall, ugly concrete wall topped with concertina wire.
“Abu Ghraib,” said her official escort and bodyguard, Mackenzie “Call me Mac” Dekker, a retired marine major, now with the Central Intelligence Agency.
“I thought it was bigger,” she said.
“Big enough, I guess,” said Dekker.
By then, everyone knew about Abu Ghraib and the serial mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners of war. Even so, the place was worse than she expected. The smell, the confines, the creepy feeling of paranoia once inside the complex. It was as if the evil of Saddam’s regime had seeped into the prison walls and possessed everyone who set foot inside.
Eliza and Dekker were shown to an interrogation room. The man she had flown six thousand miles to see was seventy, frail after a month in prison, his skin grayer than the few strands of his hair that remained. Officially, he was Dr. Mahmoud Shah, by his own account a professor of physics at Baghdad University. Back in DC, the senator and his minions called him “the Savior.”
“It is a container for radioactive materials,” said Dr. Shah fervently, recognizing Eliza for what she was. His last chance. “From Hussein’s most advanced government laboratory.”
The so-called container sat on the table between them. It resembled a cocktail shaker, stainless steel with a bulky cap, maybe twenty-five inches tall, and more than anything else, amateurish.
“What do you think?” she asked Dekker, who’d shepherded teams from the ISG a year earlier.
“Who found this?” said Dekker. He was tall and broad, tan as a saddle and as weathered. Those blue eyes, the dark, close-cropped hair, the way he sat, owning the table. He wore a gray short-sleeved shirt over his Kevlar vest, and dark trousers and mesh desert boots. He had a pistol strapped to a web belt, and he wore it low on his thigh like a gunslinger.
“He tried to sell it to an undersecretary at the embassy,” said Eliza.
“For real?” said Dekker. “This?”
Eliza nodded, not meeting his gaze. It was imperative to maintain a professional distance. It was imperative not to acknowledge the slipshodcontraption on the desk. It was imperative not to betray a hint of desperation. It was imperative that “the savior” be believed.
“Why was he arrested?” asked Dekker.
“Suspicion of involvement in a government program to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.”
“He’s your smoking gun,” said Dekker, not quite loudly enough for public consumption.
“Excuse me,” said Eliza, angered by his impudence. Dekker was her escort, a newly minted field grade, barely more than a flunky. She was Eliza Porter Elkins, emissary of the president of the United States.
“I don’t believe that this came from a government lab,” said Dekker.
“We have no way of knowing where it came from,” said Eliza. “It might have been an early prototype.”
“So there might be more where this came from,” suggested Dekker.
“That would not be an unreasonable conclusion,” said Eliza.
Dekker laughed derisively. “I call bullshit,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“On this,” said Dekker. “Whatever it is.” He reached out and tapped the metal container with his fingernail. “I used to take apart engines with my dad. He had a sixty-eight Camaro SS. Red with a white racing stripe down the hood. Three hundred fifty cubic inches. V8. This feels like it’s made from the carburetor. And this from a radiator ... or something like that. Go ahead. See for yourself.”
“We have to take every possibility seriously,” said Eliza.
“What happens to him?” asked Dekker, nodding at the old Iraqi.
“What do you mean?”
