The Wreckage: A Thriller Read online

  She gazes at the ceiling. Sighs.

  “I thought you’d been in some terrible accident. I started calling hospitals… the police…” Her eyes narrow. “Did you report the robbery?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you sleep last night? I came round here looking for…”

  Claire stops in mid-sentence. Holly is standing in the doorway, slightly pigeon-toed, holding a plastic bag against her chest. Claire looks at her as if unsure of the protocol and who should speak first.

  “Holly, this is Claire, my daughter. Claire, this is Holly.”

  Neither woman speaks.

  Ruiz turns to Holly. “There’s a bath upstairs and you’ll find some of Claire’s old clothes in a wardrobe in the spare room. She’s about your size. I’m sure she won’t mind.”

  Claire looks bewildered. Holly steps past her and climbs the stairs.

  “Who is she?”

  “The girl who robbed me.”

  The look of confusion on Claire’s face changes to one of disbelief.

  “She doesn’t have anywhere else to stay,” says Ruiz, aware of how little sense he’s making. “She took your mother’s jewelry. I’m trying to get it back.”

  Claire shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter, Dad. I don’t know why I expect anything different from you. You didn’t turn up at parent–teacher nights or at ballet recitals or Eisteddfods. When I auditioned for the Academy, when I had my car stolen, when Michael got himself arrested…”

  “When did Michael get arrested?”

  “He brought that bag of coca tea back from Peru.”

  Ruiz nods, remembering.

  Claire hasn’t finished. “You were always too busy or too selfish or too self-absorbed in your police work or rugby or your womanizing. Michael and I raised ourselves.”

  “And look how you turned out.”

  “This isn’t funny, Dad. The only smart thing you ever did was marry Miranda, and then you went and divorced her.”

  “She divorced me.”

  “And whose fault was that? You keep spouting the same tired old crap, Dad. Same excuses. Same jokes.”

  She pushes past him, pulling on a cardigan, ignoring his apologies. Ruiz can imagine her talking to a therapist ten years from now, recounting how her father was only a shadowy presence in her life. He didn’t bake cakes on cake day. He couldn’t put her hair in a bun. He didn’t take photographs or home movies. He didn’t understand ballet.

  For a brief moment he contemplates telling her about Laura’s letter to her and the importance of the hair-comb, but if he can’t get the items back maybe it’s best that Claire doesn’t know.

  Ruiz turns to Phillip. “Tell your parents I’m sorry. Maybe we can reschedule the dinner.”

  “Absolutely,” he says, saying no without using the word no.

  Claire is on the doorstep. She turns suddenly, kissing Ruiz on the cheek.

  “Daddy.”

  “Yes, Claire?”

  “Sometimes you make it very hard to love you.”

  19

  BAGHDAD

  Daniela Garner opens her eyes and finds herself alone. She listens for a time, thinking he might be in the bathroom. The digital clock reads 7:15. His semen has dried on her thighs and she can still feel his weight pressing her into the mattress.

  She had seduced him. He hadn’t objected. He had held her like a drowning man clinging to the wreckage. She should be full of regret. She should be cursing her stupidity. Instead, she feels a sense of empowerment.

  Out of bed, she opens the curtains. A haze hangs over the city, softening the light.

  Why had she let him come to her room, this troubled man, this good man? Is he a good man? She thought so last night. Maybe all men change when they get what they want. They put on a persona to attract a woman but after the sex it peels off like a bad paint job.

  So what if he’s gone? They would only have woken and made meaningless small talk, each being ultra-polite while wishing they were somewhere else.

  Luca Terracini might call her later. He might not. The slight bruising between her labia will act as a reminder all day of last night’s events. It will make her ovaries shiver and something soft and ripe inside her want to see him again.

  Showered and dressed she meets her security detail downstairs. The man called “Edge” is doing close protection. Daniela prefers Shaun, who doesn’t look at her like he wants to do a cavity search.

  There is a young woman in the security detail, Hispanic looking, with dark hair pulled into a ponytail and her fatigues tucked into heavy boots. She smiles at Daniela and opens the car door. Shaun is behind the wheel of the lead SUV. Glover is already in the back seat. Sulking.

  An effete twenty-something who dresses in stovepipe jeans and blue cotton shirts, Glover is from Hamburg but looks and sounds English because of his clipped English accent and the way he stands with an arched back as though someone is pressing a gun into his spine. A computer programmer and IT specialist, he has spent his entire time in Iraq complaining about the heat and the food.

  The convoy moves off. Edge leans over the front seat.

  “How are my favorite geeks today?”

  Glover and Daniela don’t acknowledge him.

  “Did you sleep well, princess?”

  “Very well.”

  Maybe he knows, she thinks. Maybe he can read the signs. When she lost her virginity at seventeen she was convinced her parents could see it in her eyes.

  Edge belches. “I feel rougher than hessian underpants. That’s the problem with Haji food.”

  They drive in silence, weaving at high speed between traffic and sometimes crossing on to the wrong side of the road. Daniela hates these transfers—the bullying and heightened sense of fear.

  At the Ministry, the bodyguard ballet is repeated, this time in reverse. Daniela goes straight to the technology center in the basement of the building. Badly ventilated and poorly lit, the rooms are at least functional and the hardware is good quality.

  She checks her emails and then looks at the results from overnight. The data-mining software has been running for forty-eight hours. Every ministry has provided details of spending, savings and revenue since 2006. What contracts have been awarded. Completion dates, compliance certificates, inspections, operating budgets, invoices, planned spending, cash flow, staffing levels and security. Millions of transactions are being crosschecked and tabulated.

  A stream of green numbers fills a black screen. A second computer has black type on a white screen, listing projects and spending. Running her finger down the first screen, Daniela presses a button on a small digital recorder and makes a note to herself.

  Nearly eight hundred suspicious transactions have been identified overnight, more than half of them duplicate payments ranging from a few thousand dollars to $2.1 million. There could be an explanation, but she won’t know until she examines the documentation.

  After noting the largest payments, she moves on. One name appears more than once—Jawad Stadium. She consults a satellite map of the city. The stadium is in south-east Baghdad, showing up as concentric rings of seating around a brown square. The image is six months old.

  She looks at the clock. It’s still early in New York. Alfred Nilsen won’t be at his desk for another five hours. She sends him an email, requesting details about the stadium.

  It was Nilsen who recruited her three months ago at a strange meeting in his apartment on the Upper West Side. She remembers it vividly because it was the first time anyone she knew had been invited to Nilsen’s home. The invitation had been handwritten on a small, embossed card. Saturday, 3 p.m. Afternoon tea. He had used the words “cordially invited.” Does anybody use language like that anymore?

  Daniela feels a flush of embarrassment as she remembers Nilsen opening the door to her that day. She had cycled across Central Park and was wearing a fluorescent yellow windbreaker and Lycra leggings. Nilsen looked her up and down as though she had beamed down from another planet.

/>   The softly spoken Norwegian was chairman of the United Nations Board of Auditors and a twenty-five-year veteran of the UN. He had worked in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait before spending four years in Iraq, where he headed the International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), overseeing the Development Fund of Iraq.

  Tall and heavily built, he had suffered some sort of palsy in his fifties that had paralyzed one side of his face. It meant that his left profile was smiling and jovial, while the right side could appear almost cruel.

  He had invited Daniela into a sitting room furnished in leather and dark wood and they sat at a small lamp-lit table. She was nervous about being alone with him. Not fearful, but wary of his intellect. Nilsen offered her tea. He had a special thermometer measuring the exact temperature of the water.

  “Are you a connoisseur?” she asked.

  “I’m a pedant.”

  The tiny china cups looked as though they belonged in a dolls house. “You are probably wondering why I invited you here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a request—something that would require you changing your future plans. An audit must be done… a difficult one. Sensitive. After what happened with the Oil for Food program, nobody wants to be embarrassed again.”

  “Iraq?”

  “Is that a problem? Normally I wouldn’t bother to ask. I know you’re leaving us, but I thought I might be able to convince you to stay on for another few months.”

  He smiled at her. A torn shred of tissue paper clung to his neck. It must be hard for him to shave, she thought. Strange seeing two faces in the mirror.

  “I’m sure you’ve read some of the reports of waste in Iraq. I wish I could tell you that they are exaggerated. Nobody is sure of the true losses, but it will run into tens of billions.”

  He had paused, letting the figure wash over Daniela.

  “I find it quite ironic when people get worked up over Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. What he stole was chicken seed compared to what’s happened in Iraq.” He meant to say chicken feed, but she didn’t correct him.

  “I met Madoff once or twice,” Nilsen said. “He used to have an apartment in this building where he kept his mistress. I always thought if he could cheat on his wife, he could cheat investors.”

  Nilsen poured another cup of tea, using a silver strainer to capture the leaves.

  “I was in Iraq a month after the invasion. George Bush had just declared mission accomplished and the US began airlifting planeloads of cash into Baghdad. That first payload was mainly small bills—fives and tens and ones—twenty million dollars in total, loaded on to a C-130 at Andrews Air Force Base and flown to Baghdad.

  “Later airlifts had larger denominations—stacks of hundred-dollar bills packed into bricks and loaded on to pallets, forty in total, weighing thirty tons—the largest one-day shipment of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve. Twelve billion dollars in US banknotes were delivered to Iraq that first year. The aim was to hold the country together. Pay for basic services. Stop the country descending into chaos. The banks had been looted and the infrastructure destroyed. But once that money arrived, there was no oversight or control. I saw pay-offs in paper bags, pizza boxes and duffel bags. Cash was ferried around the city in private cars and funneled through middlemen, fixers, clerics and politicians. Fraud became another word for “business as usual.” At one point more than eight thousand security guards were drawing paychecks but only six hundred “warm bodies” could be found. Halliburton charged for forty-two thousand daily meals for soldiers but served only fourteen thousand of them.

  “I was heading the UN team of auditors trying to keep track of the spending. We were supposed to be looking over the Americans’ shoulders, but they didn’t let us anywhere near the accounts. I remember a BBC reporter asking the Coalition Provisional Authority’s director of management and budget what had happened to all the cash airlifted to Baghdad. Do you know what he said?”

  Daniela shook her head.

  “He said he had no idea and didn’t think it was important. The journalist said, “But billions of dollars have disappeared without a trace.”

  “Yes, but it is their billions—Iraqi money frozen in western bank accounts—so what difference does it make?”

  Nilsen leaned back in his armchair, tired all of a sudden.

  “Iraqis voted in elections in March but there still isn’t a government. When the politicians stop posturing they will need to know the state of the country’s finances. The UN wants to undertake an audit. That’s why I’m offering you a job.”

  Cooling down after her ride, Daniela felt her nipples swell against the thinness of the nylon. The apartment was colder than she first imagined.

  “Why me?” she asked.

  “You understand the nature of the work… the sensitivities.”

  “Is there opposition?”

  Nilsen hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “The audit must be conducted within certain parameters.”

  “What parameters?”

  “The government of Iraq and the reconstruction agencies are not interested in the mistakes of the past. The audit will only cover the term of the previous government, from May twentieth 2006 up until the present,” explained Nilsen. “Any projects commenced prior to that date will be excluded.”

  “Whom would I be answerable to?”

  “Me.”

  “Staff?”

  “As many as you need—within reason.”

  Daniela had felt a sense of displacement that shifted and separated inside her.

  “I’m not really interested.”

  “I can offer you five thousand a day or a guaranteed hundred thousand dollars if the job takes less than three weeks.”

  Daniela tried not to react. People who tell you that money doesn’t matter are invariably the ones without large mortgages and credit card debts. Daniela liked nice things. Clothes. Art. Theatre. This was a month’s work for a year’s wages. Nilsen gave her two days to decide. She took two hours.

  There is a knock. Glover slouches against the doorframe with his shirttail hanging out.

  “Have I told you how much I hate this country?”

  “Yes.”

  “We need to replace one of the computers. A power surge fried the hard drive.”

  “What about the surge protectors?”

  “Toasted.”

  “Did we lose anything?”

  “No.”

  Daniela motions him to her desk. “Have you ever heard of Jawad Stadium?”

  “Nope.”

  “It was rebuilt. The work was finished two years ago.” She points to the list of numbers on the black screen. New drainage. Covered stands. Changing rooms. Seating for forty-five thousand. Turf imported from Sweden.”

  “Duplicate payments,” says Glover.

  “Nearly forty-two million dollars.”

  “Who was the contractor?”

  “Bellwether Construction. Bahamas registered. It subcontracted the work to various Iraqi companies.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Put a call in to the US Embassy. Find out which of the Provisional Reconstruction Teams approved the rebuild.”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to go back any further than May twentieth 2006.”

  “The dates aren’t clear on this one.”

  Glover gives her a youthful grin, knowing she’s overstepping her authority.

  “You want me to mention this to Jennings?”

  “Not just yet.”

  Jennings is the State Department’s “man on the ground” who has been complaining about the audit since day one. He calls Daniela regularly, offering to answer her questions and reminding her that “this is a war zone” and to “ignore the random,” whatever that means. He also seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that she works for the US and not the UN.

  Glover pauses at the door.

  “Hey, your friend called.”

  “What friend?”

  “He l
eft his name.”

  There is a pause. “Presumably you wrote it down.”

  “It was Italian sounding.”

  “Luca?”

  “That may have been it. He said he’d call back.”

  “Did he leave a number?”

  “No.”

  He disappears down the corridor and she can hear his Converse trainers squeaking on the tiles like blind kittens.

  20

  LONDON

  The small attic room has a sloping ceiling, a window and a skylight. It reminds Holly of her last foster home, where she had slept on a bed between steamer trunks full of old paintings and boxes of self-help books. The house is gone now. She burnt it down. The flames were fifty feet high. Old books and oil paints are good fuel. Holly had stood on the far side of the road and watched the great arcs of water being poured on the burning house, marveling at how the moisture evaporated in the heat, creating clouds of steam.

  Some people put out fires, other people start them and the rest watch blissfully from the perimeter with flames dancing in their eyes. That’s the power of the match. Struck against the side of a box, balanced between two fingers, given the right fuel, it can raze a house or fell a forest. Rome burned. So did Dresden. Holly’s world burned that night.

  She was sent to a psych ward and then to a children’s home where she spent two years. When she turned eighteen she no longer had to answer to judges and social workers. She was free, but freedom didn’t come with a safety net. That’s why Zac was so important. Darling Zac.

  Holly grips the edge of the mattress and feels her throat begin to close. Maybe this is what grief feels like. Suffocating. Paralyzing.

  If Zac were here, he would tell her to cup her hands over her mouth and breathe deeply. Count slowly. Relax. After a time the anxiety passes. She pushes back the bedclothes and begins searching through the wardrobe, choosing clothes: jeans, a plaid shirt, a scarf, a leather satchel…

  Ruiz is downstairs, sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper.

  “You found some clothes.”

  Holly nods. “Is it OK if I take this?” She holds up the satchel.