He followed Parr to the far end of the chamber. Here was something amazing to see. Pyramids of gold bars, half a dozen of them, all of them four or five feet high.

“We found these underneath a country estate,” Parr said. “Cemented behind a false wall down in the wine cellar. Most of the wine was skunked, but some of it was still pretty good. Sorry. We drank it. These people aren’t even supposed to have wine. It’s against their religion.”

“Who lived there?” Luke said.

Parr shrugged. “Rich folks, I guess, maybe friends of Saddam. Must have run off when the bombs started dropping.”

The man Roger giggled at that statement. Parr’s eyes flashed a warning to him.

“It gets messy out there, kids.”

“We’ve seen it,” Ed said.

Parr nodded. “Yeah. I imagine you have. But have you done it? Have you made the mess?”

He turned to face the gold bars again. He waved a hand at them.

“I don’t know what to tell you. Five-pound bars, solid gold… at what? Eight hundred, nine hundred dollars an ounce? A couple thousand of them here.”

“How are you planning to get all this stuff out of here?” Luke said.

Parr sighed. “Son, you ain’t seen nothing yet. We got about thirty-five vintage, cherry luxury cars parked inside this complex. Rolls Royces, Lambos, old race cars from the Monaco days, old James Bond kind of cars… I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve got millions of dollars in old Soviet weaponry. We could take jet airliners down from here. We got rooms full of old pottery and statues, and I mean thousands of years old. Who knows what that stuff is worth? We got paintings—a guy told me he thinks we have a real Pablo Picasso in one of these rooms. Looks like it to him. Me, I couldn’t say.”

“And you’re totally surrounded by enemies,” Luke said.

“Yeah,” Parr said. “We are. But we do have one card up our sleeve.”

They followed Parr through another doorway and down another long, narrow hall. At the end was a metal door.

“Saddam and his people always kept prisoners in these palaces,” Parr said. “I guess for when they got bored and decided they wanted to have a little fun.”

He opened the door.

Immediately there came a small scream—the sound a startled animal might make—followed by low, muted crying and moaning.

Behind the door was a chamber. It was dim in there. There were no windows, and only one pale yellow light on the ceiling. On both sides of the chamber were several cells—rounded doors hung with vertical iron bars. Luke quickly counted them. There were seven on each side, fourteen in total.