It was eight in the morning and it was already hot, dizzyingly hot, and there was only so much that the air-conditioning in the car could do. Beatrix was sweating by the time she reached the al-Mina prison. It had been built by the Americans after the capacity in the nearby al-Ma’aqal had been exceeded. It was small by Western standards, with just four hundred inmates, and it was already overcrowded. It didn’t look particularly substantial. Beatrix thought of the great Victorian edifices in London and Manchester, their vaulting brick walls and their sense of impregnability, and this collection of prefabricated buildings seemed wispy by comparison. The facility was encircled by razor-topped fences, twelve feet high, and those were protected by concrete baulks. The main entrance was a slab of concrete with a gate cut in the middle. The buildings beyond looked like warehouses. An Iraqi flag flew from a building that Beatrix guessed was used for administration.

She knew all about the reputations of Iraqi jails. Saddam had used them as depositories for anyone who had the nerve to challenge the regime, and once you were inside, there was no coming out. There were stories of what had happened in Basra’s prisons during the time the British were here, too.

She was a hundred feet away from the gates. She didn’t want to get any closer.

She looked around. The surrounding area had a collection of buildings that had been damaged during the war. Repairs had started on some of them but had since been paused. The insurgency had forced foreign contractors away, and they had still to return.

That suited Beatrix very well.

She was able to approach a nearby three-storey building without arousing suspicion. A metal door, chained and bolted, prevented access to the front, but the ground-floor windows were protected only by plasterboard, and Beatrix was able to force her way inside. It looked as if the place was being refitted as an office. The exterior cladding was missing in places, and the interior consisted of barren concrete surfaces and open apertures where doors and windows would eventually be fitted. Beatrix found the central stairwell and climbed to the second floor.

She made her way across the dusty, unfinished floor to the side of the building that overlooked the prison. The windows this high were open and unguarded, and she edged ahead while crouched low until she was confident that she wouldn’t be observed from the street below.

She stood to the side of the window, took out her binoculars and quickly scouted the prison.

There were guards on foot in front of the main entrance and another two in a thirty-foot-high watchtower that looked over it. She focussed on them: they were toting rifles, probably Tabuks, the modified version of the Zastava M70 that the Iraqi army used. They were reliable weapons, chambered for 7.62x39mm rounds, meaning the rifle had a maximum effective range of six hundred metres. Even then, it was hopeless unless you were no more than two hundred metres away from the target. It was only good for “spray and pray,” and Beatrix was not concerned about the threat that it posed. In any event, they would neutralise them first of all.