‘Yes, but look,’ said Henry, leaning forward. ‘We’re treading on very delicate ground here. The man’s offering to write a blank cheque for us, as far as I can see. Guns, planes, missiles, bombs, bullets – you name it, he wants it, and if we aren’t prepared to sell then he’s just going to go to the French or the Germans or the Yanks or the Chinese. We can’t afford to let this opportunity slip. The export figures are terrible enough as it is – even after we’ve finished tinkering with them. But, you know, there may be a few eyebrows raised if we start getting too friendly with a chap whose idea of fun is shooting a couple of thousand volts through the odd political prisoner. Which I gather he’s not averse to doing.’
‘Malicious rumour,’ said Mark, waving his cigar smoke away airily. ‘I’ve seen nothing to substantiate it.’
‘Take a look at this, for instance,’ said Henry, producing a crumpled pamphlet from the pocket of his waistcoat. ‘We were sent this thing from’ (he looked at the name on the first page) ‘SODI, they seem to call themselves. The Supporters of Democracy in Iraq. I tell you, it makes pretty nasty reading. What do you make of it?’
Mark glanced over the pamphlet, his eyelids half-closed. Most of the details were already familiar to him. He knew all about the arbitrary arrests, the midnight raids, the trumped-up charges of dissidence or subversion, of belonging to the wrong sort of organization or attending the wrong sort of meeting, of refusing to join the Ba’ath party or agreeing to join the wrong wing of the Ba’ath party. He knew all about the unimaginable conditions in Baghdad’s ‘Department of Public Security’, where detainees would be held in solitary confinement for months at a time, or made to lie on the floor of a cell with fifty or sixty other prisoners, listening to the recorded screams of torture victims by night and the real screams by day. And he knew all about this torture, too: how men and women were flayed, burned, beaten and sodomized with truncheons and bottles; scalded with domestic irons, their eyes, ears, noses and breasts cut off, electric shocks applied to their fingers, genitals and nostrils; how the torturers would wear animal masks and play tape recordings of wild animals as they went about their business; how children were tortured in front of their mothers, and placed blindfold in sacks filled with insects or starved cats; how men and women would be made to lie on their backs on the floor, their feet supported by wooden stocks, then beaten on the soles of their feet with truncheons and forced to walk or run over floors soaked with hot salty water. Mark had heard it all before, which was why he barely glanced at the pamphlet through half-closed lids before handing it back to his cousin.
‘Wildly exaggerated, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘These fringe groups do tend to attract fanatics: you can’t take anything they say at face value.’
‘So you don’t think Hussein is involved with any of this?’
‘Well, he’s firm, there’s no denying that,’ said Mark, pursing his lips. ‘Firm but fair: that’s how I’d describe him.’
‘A bit of a rough diamond, you mean?’
‘A rough diamond. Exactly.’
‘And what does he intend to do with all these weapons, anyway?’ said Henry. ‘Once he’s put Iran in its place, that is.’
Mark laughed in exasperation. ‘Henry, what does it matter what he intends to do with them? If it starts to look as though he’s in a position to do any harm, then we find an excuse to attack him and wipe out the whole arsenal. And then we start selling again.’
Henry considered the logic of this argument and could find no flaw in it.
‘If I may say so,’ Mark continued, ‘it’s not like you to give way to fashionable squeamishness on these matters.’
‘Oh, it isn’t me,’ said Henry. ‘It’s the Foreign Office we’re worried about, and that soppy little wet blanket Howe. He’s the one who’s coming over all coy about selling any of this stuff.’
‘So what’s going to happen?’
‘Well, on the basis of what you’ve told me,’ said Henry, settling deeper into his chair, ‘I’d say that the DTI had won the battle for the time being. I’m going to suggest they send someone over to Baghdad in the next couple of months and offer the Iraqis a nice fat credit agreement. How much have the Americans given them?’
‘Several billion, I think: but that’s only for grain and so on. Officially, anyway.’
‘Hm. Well I would have thought we could run to seven or eight hundred million quid. How does that sound?’
‘Sounds good. Should come in very handy.’
‘I assume,’ said Henry, leaning forward and looking Mark in the eye, ‘that Hussein can actually lay his hands on this money, at the end of the day. I mean, credit’s one thing but we want to know that he’s going to pay up eventually.’
Mark thought carefully before saying: ‘Iraq has good natural resources. Obviously the money is going to run out if he keeps on spending at this rate: but don’t forget that he has a very wealthy neighbour. A wealthy and vulnerable neighbour.’
‘Kuwait?’
Mark nodded.
‘You think he’d invade?’
‘Wouldn’t hesitate for a moment.’ He smiled as Henry digested this information. ‘But that’s a long way off,’ he said. ‘Which lucky boy gets the job of taking the good news to Baghdad?’
Clark, probably. D’you know him?’
‘Vaguely. Seems a decent sort of chap.’
‘Bit of a live wire, to be honest,’ said Henry. ‘We’re not quite sure what to make of him. But he’s definitely with us on this one.’ He crumpled the pamphlet slowly. ‘Well, into the fire with this, I suppose,’ he said, and leaned towards the hearth.
‘Or alternatively,’ said Mark, stopping him just in time, ‘you could pass it on to Hilary. Get her to do one of her famous hatchet jobs.’
Henry thought about this for a moment.
‘Good thinking,’ he said, and replaced it in his pocket.
∗
January 20th 1988
It was getting on for six in the evening, and everybody else had gone home, but Graham was still sitting in his grey, sparsely furnished office at Midland Ironmasters, waiting for the phone to ring. A recording device was attached to the receiver. Over the last couple of years he had recorded about fifty hours’ worth of telephone conversations, but he knew there were only a few minutes that would ever be usable, and he had not yet been able to face the task of editing it all down. It would have to be done soon. He was already aware of an alarming imbalance in the material he had assembled for his film: too much sound, too many still photographs, not nearly enough video. Perhaps it was about time he started taking a few serious risks.
He was waiting for a call from a senior colleague in the machine tools industry, who had been to a meeting in London that day and had promised to phone Graham with news of the outcome. The meeting was with a minister from the Department of Trade and Industry, and concerned the granting of export licences.
Manufacturers of machine tools who wished to export to Iraq were still facing trouble from the Foreign Office. Only recently Geoffrey Howe had suggested to the cabinet that further restrictions should be imposed, and this alone was enough to send Shockwaves through the membership of the Machine Tool Technologies Association, now a powerful voice in the British pro-Iraq lobby (one of whose most influential members, Matrix Churchill, had been bought by the Iraqis in order to secure a manufacturing foothold in Britain). Formal requests had been made to the DTI for clarification, and this meeting was the reward. It promised to offer a clear indication of the direction government policy was taking.
The call could have come at any time. Graham had been sitting by the telephone all day. By now he was ravenously hungry, and he had watched a crisp blue wintry sky turn to black.
The phone rang at ten past six.
Playing the tape back on his car stereo as he drove home later that evening, he would hear:
– Graham. Sorry to keep you so long waiting.