The Wreckage: A Thriller Page 7

  “Maybe you’re not asking her nicely enough.”

  “Did you see anyone else leaving the flat?”

  “There might have been someone on the far stairs. It was dark.”

  “Convenient.”

  “I’ve told you all I know. She set me up, stole my stuff and I went looking for her. Then I followed her home and found her boyfriend dead. That’s the blood, guts and feathers of it. Maybe if you told me who this guy was, I could actually help you.”

  Thompson weighs up his options.

  “Zac Osborne. War vet. Iraq and Afghanistan. Wounded twice, won the Queen’s Gallantry Medal. After his second spell in hospital he became addicted to painkillers and the military discharged him. He was arrested eighteen months ago for breaking into a pharmacy in Kew. Given a good behavior bond because of his military record.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “Holly Knight. Nineteen. In and out of foster care since the age of seven. She has two convictions for shoplifting and others for criminal damage, resisting arrest and anti-social behavior.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Broke a shop window, threw fireworks at a police horse and wrestled with a police constable.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Next door.”

  “You keeping her in?”

  “For as long as we can.”

  There is a knock. A familiar figure fills the doorframe. Commander Campbell Smith looks like he’s been stitched into his uniform. Every button polished. Shoe leather gleaming. Ruiz has known him for forty years—ever since they did their training together at the Police Staff College, Bramshill. He also introduced Campbell to his wife Maureen at a barbecue—having slept with her first, a fact that didn’t enamor him to either of them.

  It’s been four years since Ruiz last saw him. Campbell has been promoted. He was always on the fast track. Not so much nose to the grindstone as nose between the cheeks.

  “Vincent.”

  “Campbell. You’re a commander now. Congratulations.”

  They shake hands. Campbell smiles. He has a great smile. You can see the child in it before the wear and tear of a thirty-year marriage and a longer sentence with the Metropolitan Police.

  “When they told me they had Vincent Ruiz in the interview room, I thought it must be a mistake. Had to come and see it for myself.”

  Ruiz opens his arms and does a slow turn.

  “You’ve put on weight.”

  “Living the good life. How’s Maureen?”

  “She’s gone on a cruise.”

  “Mediterranean?”

  “Canada.”

  Campbell Smith leans closer. Motions him to do the same.

  “How did you get mixed up in this?”

  “I’m an accidental tourist.”

  The commander nods. His hat is tucked under the crook of his left arm. “You know why this guy was killed?”

  “Nope.”

  He gives Ruiz a wry half smile and maybe a twitch of the eyebrow. Then he tosses his head towards the door.

  “Do you know what I learned first day in this job, Vincent?”

  How to brown nose, thinks Ruiz.

  “I learned that the simple answer is nearly always the right one. The explanation is never that complicated. There’s no mystery. The guy was a junkie. It’s a drug deal gone wrong.”

  “So that’s the official version?”

  “You think there’s more than one version?”

  “There’s always more than one version.”

  Campbell stares at him with his head cocked to one side. Turning to leave, he adds, “I’ve told the SOCOs you won’t mind having your fingernails scraped and giving them some swabs.”

  “Anything to help.”

  “Maybe you could also do us another favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Make a statement and press charges against Holly Knight.”

  Ruiz can see where he’s going with this. The police need a reason to hold her.

  “Can I speak to her?”

  “No.”

  “She stole something from me—pieces of jewelry that belonged to my first wife. My daughter is getting married next weekend. The jewelry was going to be a present.”

  Campbell sucks in his cheeks and puckers his lips reflectively. “If you lodged a complaint against Holly Knight, those items would be regarded as evidence.”

  “And I wouldn’t get them back for months.”

  The faintest trace of a smile enters Campbell’s eyes. “Sorry, old chap, I can’t get involved. No hard feelings.”

  Ruiz isn’t going to forget the feelings.

  Campbell wants the final word. “Listen to me, Vincent, this whole ‘don’t fuck with me’ act might have worked when you were still on the job, but you’re a civilian now.”

  The commander turns and marches down the corridor, an ordered man with a disordered heart.

  12

  LONDON

  The Courier watches a skinny black-haired girl in a G-string and high heels undulate around a pole, moving like there’s an itch in her groin that she can’t quite reach. He pulls a twenty from his wallet and tucks it into her G-string, brushing his fingertips along the fabric. She dances away, waggling her finger at him.

  She has a pageboy haircut. Black. Straight. A wig. Painted eyes. Red lips. The red reminds him of his first hit, the schoolgirl, the blood that seeped from the corner of her mouth as she lay in the dust, one leg folded under her, her schoolbag still in her hand.

  He can’t remember if she was on her way to school or coming home, or if she was just visiting someone at another settlement. She was killed because she was there and not somewhere else. It was a test. His initiation. That was fifteen years ago on the West Bank near the city of Nablus.

  He was told that the first killing would be the hardest—a leap of faith across a blood-soaked divide—but in that moment between the recoil and the bullet hitting the target, the blink of an eye, he felt nothing. Each killing since has been an exercise in trying to feel something, some sense of horror or satisfaction or completion.

  The second person he killed was an Iraqi dissident, found hanging in a townhouse in San Francisco. Next came an Iranian defector who fell beneath a train in Amsterdam and a Syrian politician who died in a hit-and-run accident in Cairo. The most recent—an Iranian nuclear scientist—was killed by a booby-trapped motorbike, triggered by remote control outside his house in Tehran. State TV blamed “Zionist and American agents.” A smokescreen. Masoud Ali Mohammadi had been leaking details of Iran’s nuclear program to the US.

  How many in total? More than a dozen but less than his enemies suspect. Defectors. Dissidents. Spies. Sympathizers. Rivals. Enemies. He does not judge—he carries out the judgment of others.

  The girl on the pole has finished her dance. She clomps off stage, retrieving a wad of chewing gum from the edge of a glass. As she moves through the tables, a bouncer steps in to protect her. Later she emerges from her dressing room wearing a midriff top and low-slung jeans. A tattoo ripples across her lower back—the tramp stamp. Forty years from now there’ll be tens of thousands of old ladies trying to hide the ink-pricked follies of their youth.

  The Courier sends her a note. Offers to buy her a drink. She signals her interest. Five minutes. He waits.

  Yesterday hadn’t gone to plan. The soldier hadn’t capitulated. The Courier had shown him the long-nosed pliers, drawn attention to them, demonstrated, but it made no difference. The soldier had simply smiled at him, a mad grin—that’s what war does to a man, puts spiders in his head.

  “I have no desire to kill you,” the Courier told him, “but you took information that didn’t belong to you. Now I must collect it. Just tell me what you did with the notebook.”

  The soldier grinned. Died that way.

  Now it’s up to the girl. He should never have let her get away. That was careless. He had underestimated her. Most women meekly surrender or go rigid with fear. This one
knew how to fight. Survive. Now he can’t get her face out of his mind—her smoky blue eyes and her nice white teeth, slightly overcrowded at the bottom. He remembers the heat of her skin and the smear of her saliva across the back of his hand.

  They took her to the police station. There was someone with her, a much older man, solid, but quick on his feet. It didn’t look like he lived on the estate. He was driving an old Mercedes. Should be easy to trace.

  13

  BAGHDAD

  The new day is a bright orange line on the horizon but already the trees are sagging in the heat and the landscape has blurred to a shimmer. Driving at speed past barricaded shops and bawling vendors, Luca and Jamal cross the Greater Zaab River, withered and brown, into the province of Nineveh. Abu is in the vehicle behind them, never more than a car length away.

  Soon the desert stretches out on every side with flat expanses of hardpan between brush-covered ridges and dry creek beds that look like old scars in the earth. Rural Iraq is like something from a Biblical story with men in dishdashas, boys herding sheep and simple mud-brick houses the color of sand.

  The traffic is heavier than Luca remembers. Good news. Business is being done. Jobs created. Families fed.

  Jamal’s eyes dart back and forth to see if any vehicle has “picked them up.” “Dickers” can be anywhere; sympathizers who punch a number into a mobile phone and summon insurgents to a “soft target.”

  Below them at the base of a ravine the remnants of a US Humvee lie twisted and blackened. Fresh tar covers the bomb crater at the edge of the road.

  When they reach the outskirts of Mosul they turn east and cross the Tigris. After stopping twice to ask for directions they reach a village too poor to pave its stretch of road. It has one dusty street and a broken line of mud buildings. Four or five men sit outside a café, playing poker and drinking tea. Their faces are like the desert—old, worn and craggy. Watching.

  Jamal asks about the bodies that were found. One of the men raises a weathered hand and summons a young boy from the kitchen. Barefoot and dressed in rags, the boy sprints ahead, his pink heels flashing in the dust. Jamal and Luca follow, while Abu stays with the cars. Their young guide waits for them to catch up. He runs again, zigzagging through a dusty yard full of half bricks and broken concrete.

  Then he stops. Waits. He points at a collapsed house, rubble instead of walls, the roof in pieces; some sort of explosion or implosion. Luca moves closer, stepping gingerly into the debris. He pulls aside a twisted rectangle of tin, stained with rust. Not rust. Blood. Flies lift off and settle again.

  Luca retreats, wiping his hands on his shirt. He questions the young boy in Arabic. There were four men inside the house. They were wearing uniforms. The police took their bodies away.

  The nearest dwelling is across the street. Luca notices a young girl on the rooftop, sitting beneath a tarpaulin slung from three poles. She’s wearing a scarf drawn across her mouth, peering from beneath the edge of the fabric, not quite looking directly at him.

  “Did anyone see what happened?” he asks the boy.

  “We were sleeping. My house is there,” he points further along the street. There is a woman hanging washing on a clothesline. The wet clothes are piled in an aluminum case just like the one he saw in the bank vault. On the opposite side of the road an old woman is selling onions and peppers from another case.

  “Where did you get this?” he asks her.

  “It was not stolen.”

  “Where?”

  The boy answers, “We found them.”

  “Show me.”

  Luca follows the boy again, walking between buildings that radiate heat, yet trap the cool behind thick walls. Goats bleat from the shade of a lone tree. Stopping at the edge of a ravine, Luca’s feet have disturbed loose stones that bounce and slide down the steep slope, rattling against bags of household rubbish, discarded clothing, furniture and broken pottery. Scattered on top are more than a dozen aluminum cases. Luca counts them. Including those he saw in the village it makes sixteen. How much money did they contain?

  Walking back to the destroyed dwelling, he begins taking photographs. Through the lens he notices the girl again, still watching him from the rooftop. Luca waves. She doesn’t respond.

  Crossing the road, he knocks. For a long while nobody comes. An old man opens the door, a yellowed bandage around his head. His eyes disappear in dark holes like burrowing animals afraid of the light.

  Luca greets him with respect. He can smell the rotting flesh beneath the bandage. Infection.

  “What happened to your head?”

  The old man shrugs.

  “Do you have antibiotics?”

  “I cannot afford them.”

  Luca sends Jamal for the first-aid box in the car. The room has rugs on the floor and a few simple pieces of furniture. The old man sits down on a wooden stool.

  “Did you see anything last night?”

  “No.”

  “What about your granddaughter—did she see?”

  “I don’t have a granddaughter.”

  “The girl on the roof.”

  “That is where she sleeps.” The old man blinks at him. “You are not an Arab.”

  “No.”

  “What is your religion?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Who is your God?”

  “I have no God.”

  “What sort of man has no God? What does he believe in? Why does he live?”

  He lives because he is a man.

  “You are American?”

  “I was born there. My mother is Iraqi.”

  “I like George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger. How come Americans don’t like football? Everybody in the world likes football.”

  “We have our own sort of football.”

  The old man grunts, unimpressed. The girl appears on the narrow stairs. Barely sixteen, her face still covered. She feels her way, pressing her palm against the wall. The old man calls her closer. She raises her chin. Her eyes are a dull and sightless white.

  “She heard them,” he says.

  “What did she hear?”

  The girl speaks softly in Arabic. “There was a truck and two cars. Men were arguing.”

  “How many men?”

  “Seven or eight.”

  “What were they saying?”

  “Some of them were told to go into the house. They were beating at the door, trying to get out. The other men loaded the truck.”

  “Did you hear any names?”

  She shakes her head. “They were driving Land Cruisers.”

  “How do you know?”

  The old man answers for her. “She can recognize different engines.”

  “Did they say where they were going?”

  She hesitates. The old man barks, “Tell him, wife.”

  Not her grandfather!

  “I heard them say Al Yarubiyah,” she says.

  It’s a crossing on the Syrian border, eighty miles to the west.

  “The men in the building were yelling and screaming,” she says, covering her ears. “There was a big noise and then they stopped.”

  Luca leaves a bottle of antibiotics on the table and tells the old man how many to take. He steps into the brightness of the afternoon. A dozen men are watching him, their faces wrapped in kaffiyehs. Eyes empty.

  Jamal and Abu are waiting at the vehicles. Abu is eating a homemade sandwich of bread and meat. He has a weapon slung across his chest.

  “Time to go,” says Jamal, glancing over his shoulder.

  They leave the village in a cloud of dust but even before it settles Abu spots a vehicle tracking them, a battered pickup about two hundred yards away, travelling in the same direction, bouncing over ruts.

  The driver is dressed all in white. He’s not alone.

  Jamal puts his foot down, swerving around potholes, his knuckles white on the wheel.

  “How far to the dual carriageway?”

  “A mile and a half.”

&n
bsp; Luca pulls a Kevlar vest from his bag. “Put this on.”

  Jamal shakes his head. “I’m fine. You wear it.”

  “We both wear one.”

  Jamal takes one hand off the steering wheel and puts it through the sleeve, then the other one.

  Reaching beneath the seat, Luca pulls out a machine pistol. He cracks the car door, holding it partially open, keeping his weapon out of sight.

  The pickup is still with them, the distance closing.

  “They could be farmers,” says Luca, not believing it. He raises the machine pistol and fires a warning shot. The pickup doesn’t slow down or change course.

  Ahead, lying discarded beside the road is a hessian sack. Jamal swerves violently, bouncing through a gutter and sending the Skoda rearing like a rodeo bull. At the same moment the sack explodes, blowing out the side windows and lifting the Skoda on to two wheels where it balances for what seems like the longest time, trying to decide whether to roll over or right itself.

  Gravity is kind to them. Four wheels kiss the earth. Luca’s ears are ringing. Jamal is yelling.

  “He’s coming in! He’s coming in!”

  The pickup has closed to within thirty yards. The passenger is firing on them, sending bullets pinging off the side of the Skoda.

  Luca leans over the back seat and shoots through the rear window. Ejected cartridges, brass, red-hot, rattle on to the floor. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Abu in the Toyota HiLux, rearing over the dunes and the undulations. He has pointed the vehicle directly at the pickup, closing at speed.

  The gunman in the passenger seat recognizes the danger and changes his aim but it’s too late. The force of the collision sends the pickup spearing into an embankment. Its nearside bumper digs into the earth and the entire vehicle lifts off the ground and rolls once… twice… three times in slow motion before exploding. Black smoke rises and billows like a mushroom cloud, perfect in the heat and stillness of the afternoon.

  Jamal and Abu pull up at a safe distance.

  The cousins look at each other, breathing hard, wordlessly taking stock. Uninjured. Jamal runs his hand along the side of the Skoda, putting his finger through one of the many bullet holes.