Her position as ITV’s Middle East correspondent was a natural fit, as she’d been born and raised in Mosul before immigrating to England at the age of seventeen, where she’d earned a BA with honors in English at Cambridge. Intellectually speaking, she knew she was too young to be burned out — she had just turned thirty-six, after all — but at the same time, she couldn’t help but feel that she might be missing out on better-paying, lessdemanding opportunities. The desire to move on to something better had grown stronger in recent months, and days like today definitely didn’t help.

The trouble had started soon after they’d arrived at the hotel. Spotting the bulky black cases in Hoffman’s hands, the manager had stopped them as soon as they’d walked in, insisting that Zaid pay for “a room” if she intended to set up camp in his lobby. What the man really wanted was glaringly obvious and not at all surprising. Anita was very familiar with the way things had worked before the American invasion, when bribes had been the rule rather than the exception.

In the months leading up to the war, Saddam’s Information Ministry had strictly controlled the movements and access of every Western journalist, and she had quickly learned to adapt, though not before enduring several heated arguments with the tightfisted accountants at ITV.

Unfortunately, the Babylon’s manager had demanded immediate payment in cash, which Anita didn’t have on hand, and the delay had given somebody time to send word up to Marshall’s room. Penny Marshall was CNN’s latest and brightest star, a twenty-something blonde from New Zealand. After hearing the news, the young woman had somehow managed to hustle downstairs in the space of three minutes, looking like she’d just stepped out of make-up. As it turned out, her presence at the hotel was pure coincidence.