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friend, in his mind was without bullshit, but tonight there was no warmth, no smile even.
    "Were you seen?"
    "Seen? What do you mean, seen'"
    "Were there any eyewitnesses to the shooting?''

    " N o . "
    " I s there any possibility you could be identified?"
    "Nobody saw me."
    "Think hard. Could anybody have seen you to associate you with the car even?"
    " T h e road was empty."
    " Y o u were seen by nobody?"
    "Only by the target, and whoever was with him . . . "
    "Whoever . . . ?"
    "They're both dead."
    " D o you know who it was who was with the target?"
    "I did not ask his name before I shot him, no."
    He stood very still. He knew that the target was a writer, an exile. He had been told what the writer wrote about the regime and the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. He had been told also, in whispered confidence, that two attempts against the target had failed. He was the Colonel's card . . .
    Below him he could hear the passing wail of sirens, a familiar sound after dark had fallen over the city. The squads from the Department of Public Security always did their work at night, taking into custody those they claimed were a threat to the regime.
    And the sirens escorted their prisoners from the Department to the Abu Ghraib gaol, and those who had not survived interrogation from the Abu Ghraib gaol to the Medical City Mortuary on the other side of the Al Sarafiyah Bridge.
    " Y o u shot an American, Colt . . ."
    "I killed the target."
    "A C.I.A. American . . ."
    The boy laughed out loud. He laughed in the face of the Colonel, and at the watcher standing against the door.
    " S o what , . . ?" he said.
    "He was an intelligence officer."
    "It was a good street, got me? It was great. It was dead, there was no one No nannies, maids, deliveries, really good. The target, he was already fidgety, I couldn't follow him all day, not a target who was that sharp. The street was right. If the American hadn't gone then he had my face, and he had the car. He had to go . . . and he should have chosen his friends more carefully."
    At last the Colonel smiled, and there was the gravel growl of his chuckle. "And you did nothing stupid in Athens . . . ?"
    " Y o u taught me what to d o . "
    ". . . Nothing Colt-like, nothing wild? What did you do, Colt?
    No girls, no boasting?"
    " Y o u taught me. I'm clean. It was a good street, Colonel.
    There was an opportunity and I took it."
    " Y o u could not be identified?"
    " I ' d go back, to Europe, because I know that I cannot be traced."
    The Colonel laid his broad hands on the young man's shoulders.
    He looked into the calm of the face, into the clear eyes.
    "It was well done, Colt."
    Amongst those few who knew Zulfiqar Khan, and what work he did, news of his killing spread fast. And with the news, fear.
    In Paris, an engineering specialist in deep tunnelling in heavy rock strata, home on leave, made up his mind there and then to turn his back on the remaining two and a half years of his contract.
    The tunnelling that the Frenchman was paid - and handsomely
    - to supervise was off the road to Arbil, close to the village of Salahuddin, due north of Baghdad. The area so far excavated was the size of a football pitch, and deep enough for three levels of laboratories and workshops that would be concrete-lined. One more floor was required. The cavern was eminently suitable for the work intended for it. It was safe from air attack and shielded by the Karochooq mountain mass from satellite photography that would tell the siory of the purpose for which this rock cave was fashioned, News ol Dr Khan's murder had eddied amongst the foreign specialists on the project. By midday word had reached all the hard hat staffers. By late that night, two of those staffers were at Baghdad International airport. They had driven the two hundred miles from their Portacabin compound in the village of Salahuddin at high speed. They waited for the first flight out of Iraq on which there were seats. It might be to Jeddah,