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      Post-Liberation Iraq, August 2004

      Danny Lowenstein had a premonition he would die that day. It wasn’t unusual for him to foresee his own death: such thoughts went with the territory. The main thing was not to take them too seriously, otherwise he’d never get out of bed in the morning.

      He cursed the sun, which had barely been born into Iraq’s morning sky. Already a sapping heat was rising from the tarmac and soon the temperature would hit a grotesque 50 degrees Celsius. He daren’t translate it into Fahrenheit. As he stood at the petrol station, the road to Iskandariya shimmered ahead of him. Danny wondered if the surface might evaporate before his eyes.

      For now he was still fresh. He had sprayed himself with so much deodorant it almost choked him, but his skin felt good beneath the linen shirt he’d bought at Heathrow and his favourite pair of chinos. They were the pseudo-military sort, with extra pockets on the thighs which bulged with a notepad, assorted pens, a small Dictaphone—another terminal purchase—his US passport and press accreditation, some scrunched-up dollar bills and chewing gum for when the day started to drag him under.

      Danny knew that, before long, the same skin that was now so pleasantly clean and dry would be soaked in sweat. Little streams would crawl down the valley between his shoulder blades towards his waist, where they’d meet his tightly buckled belt and form an irritating reservoir. The fresh clothes would start to cling to him like cloying dishcloths. His rigorous dawn shower back at the hotel would be redundant and he’d wonder why he’d bothered to make the effort at all: he might as well have just put back on what he’d worn the day before. By dusk, he’d be drained of whatever energy he’d woken up with.

      ‘God, sometimes I hate this country,’ he told Mohammed, who was only half listening.

      ‘Don’t say bad things, Mr Daniel. I think you would miss us.’

      ‘I’d miss you, Mohammed, of course I would, but not a whole lot else.’

      ‘There is not another story like it, not anywhere in the world. You told me so yourself.’

      ‘Yeah, I know, our Vietnam and all that. But Heaven help your country if that’s all you’ve become—a story. The thing is, I’m just so…’

      ‘Tired?’

      ‘No, not tired. Exhausted. Sorry if I’m kind of grumpy.’

      ‘Woman trouble?’

      ‘You could say. And this heat, and this war and this…I mean, just take a look around us.’

      He waved towards the sprawling strip of charmless shops just beyond them, many selling satellite dishes, fridges and all the other consumer electricals that had flooded in after liberation. Snapped power cables drooped down around them mockingly. On the road ahead, battered cars jostled one another amid a cacophony of horns, most of