“Very nice,” Bill Cronin said. He looked at the rest of Luke’s crew.

“Did you guys enjoy your first Baghdad special?”

“I was one of the people who puked,” Trudy said.

“So was I,” Swann said.

Cronin smiled. “It’s a rite of passage. I’ve done it a couple of times myself.” He looked at big Ed Newsam.

“You?”

Newsam shook his head and smiled. “I don’t puke, man.”

Cronin shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re missing, buddy.”

Bill Cronin wore khaki slacks, shiny black shoes, and an open-throated dress shirt, which at this time of the morning was beginning to soak through with sweat. There was no air conditioning in Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace.

He walked briskly, leading them down a series of wide marble hallways, all of them teeming with people. Crowds of people zigged and zagged, squeezing past each other in each direction. People sat in wheeled office chairs at makeshift desks pushed up against the stone walls, typing into computer keyboards or jabbering into telephones, their voices echoing off the twenty-foot-high rounded and tiled ceilings. Wires snaked across the floors, or ran along the walls, bundled with heavy black duct tape. People in various stages of sweaty undress tried to catch a few minutes or hours of sleep on military-issue cots, the cots lining stretches of hallway in single file like ants.

Here and there, areas were sectioned off with plywood, some hung with canvas drapes or tarps, making instant offices or maybe bedrooms. The plywood boards were spray painted with series of letters and numbers. Luke was tired from the trip, but he figured the designations would make sense to him if he stopped for a moment to think about them. A couple of the plywood walls were adorned with American flags.

“The old place is looking good,” Luke said. “Like Calcutta.”

He had spent several days here in an earlier time, soon after the building had been abandoned, and then looted. In those days, barely anyone was here, there was no electricity, and a handful of international troops held the approaches against all comers.

The area that had coalesced into the Green Zone had once been the wealthiest neighborhood in Baghdad. Saddam had lived here in the Republican Palace, of course. But the whole district had been filled with mansions of varying sizes, upscale apartment houses, fashionable restaurants and shops. When the American invasion came and the bombing started, the residents all left with whatever they could carry.

When Luke first arrived in Baghdad in 2003, few people understood that all these places were up for grabs. You could move right in, on a first-come first-served basis, if you had the right mindset and the firepower to protect yourself. Combat units on patrol took over several of the mansions.