He returned to his living suite, where a barber waited to trim his beard, eyebrows, nose, and ears. The valet had laid out clothing chosen for the interview, a dark gray suit from London, an off-white dress shirt with a muted silk tie, and highly polished Italian shoes. The trousers were tailored to help offset the fact that his left leg was an inch shorter than his right, a reminder of the year and a half he had spent in Abu Ghraib prison for the crime of defending his beautiful girlfriend when Uday Hussein’s thugs had come for her. Uday himself, laughing, had wielded the long steel crowbar that smashed Rassad’s bones while telling in great detail how the girl, a virgin, had been fucked and how she screamed and how when Uday tired of her, he tossed her to the guards in a rape room, where she died. Rassad would be allowed to heal for a while after one of the torture sessions, only to undergo a repeat performance with the crowbar when he had recovered enough. He was not beaten to get a confession, for he had nothing to confess. Uday just enjoyed beating him. In the end, when the Americans had released him, Rassad could not walk on the mutilated leg.
The limp became a badge of honor for his new life as it healed, an unspoken reminder that he had paid dearly for opposing the dictator Saddam Hussein. When he was taken to prison, he had been just another bureaucrat in the Ministry of the Interior, but he emerged as a new political force, for he had channeled his powerful mind away from the pain and into how he could capitalize on his experiences. There were days now when he could almost thank Uday for the cruelty, because no one ever questioned Rassad’s loyalty to his country. It was a wonderful political bargaining chip. In the end, Rassad had the final laugh on Uday by directing the Americans to the location of the Hussein brothers, where they were killed. He kept a picture of Uday’s misshapen dead body in a folder in a desk drawer, and he looked at it often.
Today, Rassad would wear the fine suit instead of the comfortable robes in order to appear as a reasonable, moderate, westernized Iraqi leader. He did not want the American television audience to equate him with some ordinary Koran-thumping radical mullah. He had graduated from MIT, for Christ’s sake.
A sleek Bell helicopter, ornate in its coat of glistening midnight blue with gold trim, skimmed in to land at the palace after a smooth trip from the big American base in Doha, Kuwait. Jack Shepherd unfolded his lanky frame from the comfortable seat and stepped out, shielding his eyes against the rotor blast. He was disoriented. Something was missing. Something was wrong, a sense of incompleteness. It wasn’t until an escort shook his hand and helped his television crew load their gear into an air-conditioned limo that Shepherd could put his finger on what was different. It was quiet! He had heard others speak about the eerie feeling in the broad neighborhoods around the Rebel Sheikh’s palace, but he had not been here for at least a year. In Iraq, he usually came in tense and expecting danger, with bomb blasts echoing throughout the countryside, something somewhere always blowing up with the erratic constancy of a popcorn machine, but this area of Basra was an oasis of calm.
The escort gave them a quick tour before going to the palace. Shops were open, private cars jammed the clean streets, children played soccer on neat green fields, and women walked freely in the street markets, some with heads uncovered, with bags of goods on their arms. Police without sidearms directed traffic, and men in robes or open-necked shirts and trousers sat around the tables of sidewalk cafés. There was laughter.
Shepherd saw a sign giving directions to the new Toyota plant, and passed other signs of German, French, British, Japanese, and Russian companies. Foreign investment was flowing in. The new buildings being erected were not slapdash brick-and-mortar jobs, but well-engineered concrete and steel. Shepherd flipped through his mental index cards until he found the comparison-Beirut, and how the older correspondents described it back when it was a pearl of a city and not a terrorist hellhole. Military units stayed outside Basra, and some of the Rebel Sheikh’s feared private militia had been transformed into civilian police. This area of the city had been good last year when he visited, and was better today. Whatever the sheikh was doing was working.
“Jack Shepherd! It is good to see you again.” Ali Shalal Rassad stepped from the shade of an arbor of trees beside a fountain in the courtyard of the palace and extended his hand. “Thank you for coming on such short notice.”
“Thank you for the invitation,” Shepherd replied. “This is a big story and I appreciate getting your comment.”
Rassad nodded and led the correspondent into the coolness of the palace. “Indeed. Please have your crew set up right away. I fear that time is not on our side. After the interview, you can use my press office to feed your story back to your editors. My technicians will help in any way they can.”
As they took their places and were miked up, and lights were arranged and tested and the camera was prepared, Rassad steered the off-camera conversation toward what Shepherd had observed on the way in.
“I must say I was quite impressed,” the reporter answered. “Everywhere else this country is torn by violence, but your zone shows none of those signs. Why is that?”
“Many reasons, my friend, and I will be happy to discuss them when we have lunch after the interview. The easy answer is that we just want to live in peace, and the Prophet, may his name be praised, is leading us in that direction. Foreign armies have invaded our country over the centuries, and we know how to rebuild,” he said as a technician adjusted his suit and tie and a makeup artist applied a little powder to a bright spot on his forehead. “The problem this time was that the Americans wanted to do everything their way, and not our way. Luckily, we drew the British as occupiers, and they were more understanding. Once we endured the violent time and proved we could provide our own security and were no danger to others, London was glad to allow us room to grow and so withdraw some of their troops.”
Rassad suddenly looked grim. “No American contractors are allowed to come in and pay fantastic sums to their U.S. employees while giving our people slave wages, and making decisions in Dallas that should have been made in Iraq. We wanted equal pay for equal work. If they didn’t want to oblige, they would learn that they were not the only outside nation on this earth that had contractors wanting to help us. The hubris of the American administrators was their downfall. We were building an entire nation, not some shopping mall. The result was that we were able to establish security, clean water, adequate food, electricity, and a civil government that is quite secular and that emphasizes fairness and tolerance. There is no reason that the rest of our nation cannot be the same way, if the foreigners-all of them, including our fellow Muslims from other countries-will simply go home.”
He did not mention his personal militia, the feared Holy Scimitar of Allah. They were kept out of sight at distant bases and trained daily with the deadly specialists from Gates Global, one of the world’s best private security companies. One reason things were so quiet in Basra was that everyone in town knew that stepping out of line would result in a quick trip into the desert, never to be seen again.
Shepherd made notes. “That sounds rather like a threat,” he observed.
“Not at all. They will leave sometime anyway, for they have done so throughout our history. The sooner the better. Let us get on with our lives.”
Shepherd got a nod from his cameraman. “Okay, we’re ready to roll if you are.”