United nations headquarters in Baghdad was bustling as usual late last Tuesday afternoon. Upstairs in his spacious third-floor office, Special Envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello leaned forward on his brown-leather sofa, presiding over a meeting with three top aides and a visiting research fellow from Washington. On the far side of the building, David Marshall, a Harvard-educated attorney working on Iraq's justice system, nursed a nasty case of diarrhea―"Saddam's revenge"―and prepared to call it a day. On the ground floor, just off the lobby, Aida Moses Adomian, an Armenian-Iraqi clerk in the communications department, joked with a female colleague about their mutual attempts at dieting. From their vantage points scattered across the U.N. headquarters in the Canal Hotel, none of them could see the covered flatbed truck move slowly down a road beside the brick-and-stucco building and come to a stop below Vieira de Mello's office.
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