Khomeini's Boy: The Shadow War with Iran (5 page)

Chapter Nine

It was the next day, still in early 2006. Ambrose waited until the cool of the evening enveloped Baghdad, which in reality just meant that the sun went down and the humidity went up. He wasn’t just beating the sun—he knew that by 7 p.m. the bulk of the Occupation’s bureaucrats (by that point in 2006, they
hated
it when people still referred to “the Occupation”) would be at the al-Rasheed hotel bar or the Green Zone Café, getting drunk on corporate liquor while pretending they didn’t live in a company town. That diaspora meant that nobody would notice Ambrose as he walked over to John Carlisle’s house with a bundle of documents sticking out of his black and red messenger’s bag.

Carlisle didn’t go out in the evenings. He was too classy to sit in a hotel bar ogling the few women imprisoned in the Green Zone with a thousand horny bureaucrats who couldn’t understand why the ladies weren’t swooning over stories about their fraternity pranks at Georgetown. Hell, even though Carlisle had been in-country since 2003, he hadn’t snagged a villa all to himself when the getting was at its best. Ambrose had still been able to do that with a bit of pluck and a lot of foul language as late as 2005.

Instead, Carlisle lived in a modest bungalow close to his masters in the hulking pink marble mass of the People’s Palace, the chintzy mammoth of a faux-Versailles where Saddam, and later Bush’s Iraq viceroy Paul Bremer, had ruled Iraq like the caliphs of old. Maybe that palace, with its absurd fountains and green palm gardens kept by Latino serfs from a Houston landscape architecture firm, was the only thing in Baghdad that Ambrose
could
imagine being from the Arabian Nights.

Carlisle answered almost immediately when Ambrose knocked. He’d loosened his tie, but was otherwise still dressed for business, despite the fact that barely a wisp of air conditioning fell out of the door after him.

“Hi Ambrose, long time no see. Care for a drink? A new shipment of Red Label came in,” Carlisle said in a single breath.

Ambrose was surprised that John Carlisle would immediately offer anyone a drink, let alone a man like Ambrose, who everybody knew drank too much to begin with. “Hi John, I was going to apologize for disturbing you, but I guess I’ll upgrade that too a ‘hell yeah?’” Ambrose answered cheerily.

Carlisle laughed and waved him inside. Ambrose saw a simple one room bungalow with a nice couch and a big work desk attached to a drafting table where Carlisle had been working on what looked like the schematics for some species of unassuming municipal building. The wall-mounted AC unit fanned anemically up and down. Either Carlisle didn’t feel the heat or he was too demure to demand a better AC unit.

“Nice furniture, John,” Ambrose said as Carlisle gave him a drink, “You’ve carved out something homey here.”

Carlisle snorted and sat down on the couch, inviting Ambrose to join him. “Thanks, Ambrose. It can’t match that Uday-chic villa you’ve commandeered, but then again, this place isn’t within RPG range of militants across the river, unlike your palazzo on the Tigris Riviera.”

Ambrose’s upper lip curled as he answered, “Shit, I was
wondering
why that place was still available.”

Carlisle toasted as he said, “Yep, there you go. Is it true that looters got all the furniture from your place before you even found it? How’ve you managed?”

Ambrose returned the cheers and drank before saying, “They couldn’t figure out how to get the king-sized featherbed down the spiral staircase, and they missed some paintings along the main staircase. The rest of the furniture is…a work in progress.”

“Christ, Ambrose. You’ve got a five thousand square foot tropical villa with no furniture?”

“Tell USAID to get the Green Zone an Ikea.”

Carlisle smiled, showing bonded white teeth that gleamed past his dark skin. “Not likely—the Swedes protested Operation Iraqi Freedom.” He sipped until his glass matched the level of Ambrose’s drink. Some people did that, although Ambrose had never seen the point. “You mentioned my outfit. Is there something professional you needed?” He asked, looking at Ambrose’s tote bag with a raised eyebrow as he tumbled his scotch.

Ambrose picked up the bag and said, “Maybe. I need to get some Saddam-era real estate information, and I couldn’t think who else would be compiling that stuff other than USAID or the Corps of Engineers.”

“So you want official real estate documents from the previous regime?”

“Yeah, who would’ve managed that? Did Iraq have a ministry of urban affairs or something?”

“For the construction itself, the Ministry of Planning. For tax purposes, the Ministry of Finance. For compliance with ongoing urban design codes, the Ministry of Housing and Construction. You get the idea.”

“How in the hell do you run a government with that much overlap?”

Carlisle shrugged. “Ask Washington—they make Iraq look simple. In Iraq’s case, you manage that kind of overlap by funneling all of your real money into the Ministry of the Interior to fund secret police, then gut every other ministry that could be a threat to your power, until you’re left with functionaries whose
only
job is keeping absurdly specific records that mean nothing to nobody.”

Ambrose noticed that Carlisle’s work desk couldn’t actually fit a chair under it, due to ream upon ream of stained manila filing folders in five separate piles that were each three feet high. Ambrose’s eyes opened wide as he asked, “We’re not going to look through those folders, right? Can’t we just go to Abu Ghraib and torture one of these captured functionaries you talked about?”

Carlisle leaned in towards Ambrose and said, “It’s not good to be so sarcastic that people can never tell when you’re serious. But as for Abu Ghraib, we might not need to, if you show me what you’re looking for.”

Ambrose licked his lips and felt sweat beading on his forehead. How in the hell wasn’t Carlisle sweating yet? He reached into his tote bag and pulled out the captured Saddam-era document he’d just pilfered from warehouse four. Carlisle took the document readily and started scanning it with his bright eyes.

Carlisle asked, “I don’t speak Arabic half as well as you do. I’m assuming you’d tell me if there was anything interesting in the document itself?”

Ambrose nodded. “Yeah. It’s just a warehouse delivery manifest. I know about the warehouse, but I think it has counterparts, and I think the key to finding them might be in that letterhead. I was hoping you had some kind of corporate directory I could consult.”

“Not the way you mean. Unless…” he looked at the sword-and-eagle insignia so hard that Ambrose thought Carlisle’s eyes might burn through the paper. “I have an idea.” He walked over to his hoard of documents and began rifling through them.

Ambrose looked over his shoulder, wondering whether he should hold a flashlight over Carlisle’s shoulder. Ambrose asked, “Fuck, Carlisle. I’m sorry to put you through this. Which ministry are you starting with? Planning? Finance?”

“The Interior.” Carlisle pulled out a fat folder and tossed it onto the desk, where it thudded like a prize marlin hitting the deck of a trophy fisherman’s boat.

Ambrose needed a cigarette, but figured Carlisle would beat him to death with one of those folders if he lit up indoors. He asked, “John, I thought you said the Interior Ministry just meant the secret police?”

Carlisle nodded but didn’t look up from the folder while saying, “It does. They also handle security for property of the state.”

“What does that mean? The government owned the warehouse?”

Carlisle pulled out a document that bore the same eagle-and-sword insignia as the warehouse manifest. “Not the government. Qusay Hussein.”

Ambrose grabbed the sheet from Carlisle’s hand and pored over it. It was the cover page of articles of incorporation for an Iraqi company translating to “Two Rivers.” Date of incorporation: 1998. Sole shareholder and chief executive officer: Qusay Hussein al-Tikriti, Saddam’s second son, also known as “Qusay the Snake.”

Ambrose asked, “Do you have a list of the company’s holdings?”

Carlisle thumbed slowly through the remaining portions of the Two Rivers file, looking side-eyed at Ambrose. He said, “Twenty warehouses, all in Sadr City.” He reached into the file and then gave Ambrose an oversized urban schematic of Sadr City. “Why are you going into Sadr City, Ambrose? Didn’t the Man talk to you about this kind of thing?” Carlisle asked.

Ambrose trembled as he held the map. He ignored Carlisle’s question and replied, “This is it, John. This is what I’ve needed.”

“Ambrose, Jesus: everyone knows you’re about to be kicked stateside if you pull this kind of crap. What are you thinking?”

“This is how I get him, John. This is how I kill him.”

John Carlisle walked over and poured himself another drink. He made it disappear before responding. “What in the hell did I just do here? What’re you going to do with that map?” He asked.

Ambrose smiled, then walked over to pour himself another drink. Unlike Carlisle, he nursed his, and said, “I’ll tell you in a sec, John. First, let me ask you this: you said I speak twice the Arabic you do, so how is it that you found a business’s articles of incorporation in three minutes and could tell me that it belonged to Qusay Hussein?”

Carlisle made hard eye contact. “I matched the business logos. Qusay’s name was at the top, and it was the first thing I saw.”

Ambrose took a big sip, baring his teeth before he responded, “Do you speak good enough Arabic to distinguish between Arabic and Farsi, John?”

Carlisle smirked unsympathetically. “Enough to know that you were the right person to read that first document I sent your way. Enough to help other documents of the same sort keep flowing your way. Of course, that had to stop when you told the Man what you were up to. What in the world would make you show your hand like that? Did you
actually
ask for a strike team, the way they say? Who do you think you are?”

Ambrose folded up the map and then walked over to Carlisle’s desk, where he took back the manifest from warehouse 4. Then he slid them both into his tote bag and walked towards the door. Carlisle didn’t stop him. He just stood at his desk, drumming his fingers along its edge in consternation.

Ambrose turned in the doorway and said, “I’m nobody, John. We’re all nobodies. When I started looking into this stuff I was just bored.” He gave his bag a loving pat. “I’m not bored anymore. Are you going to tell anyone about this?”

Carlisle shook his head. “No. I get boredom. Don’t come here again.”

Ambrose nodded formally, then snuck back to his villa by hugging the riverside wall that separated the southern Green Zone from the banks of the Tigris. The final call to prayer blasted from a dozen mosques in the immediate vicinity alone, creating a tinny angels’ choir reminding him that he was a stranger in a strange land, a nobody with aspirations to personhood.

Once he’d gotten back to his villa he went into the bathroom and turned on the light. Then he sat naked and cross-legged on the floor, enjoying the only cool surface in the whole house. He poured out his tote bag and began comparing its contents with the map of “Two Rivers” warehouses he’d gotten from Carlisle. He looked at the addresses of warehouses 1 and 4, and then circled their locations with a red marker. Then he found the location of warehouse 20, the third location Sorcerer had bothered to list with an address, and did likewise. Then he looked at the map, which had in its margins a complete address list of the twenty warehouses that Two Rivers owned in Sadr City. All three of his warehouses were on there, as he’d suspected. Sorcerer had gotten his locations right.

He took his red pen and marked in the remaining seventeen warehouse locations across Sadr City.

When it was over, he reached for a cigarette. He made himself look away from the map, because he needed to make sure that he hadn’t concocted his own findings. Part of him assumed that he’d turn back and see nothing but a tessellated mess of red spots worthy of Jackson Pollack. It wasn’t the case.

He drew a cold bath, then made a call on his cell phone. He hadn’t been wrong. Malik needed to know what he’d found at once.

“Adam, I have it. Our warehouses were all owned by the same company, and now I have them all on a map. Get this: there’s barely any ‘code’ to his numbering system at all.”

“No kidding, that’s great,” Adam Malik responded cautiously, like a man out in public.

“Yeah, just listen: ‘Mr. S’ chose these warehouses because they all belonged to the same company, and you can guess whose. Now that the original tenants are gone, he and his allies have moved in. I marked up every location and they’re all in Sadr City; if you put a bullet in the center of Sadr City, warehouse 1 is located almost at 1 o’clock. Warehouse 4 is close to 3 o’clock. Warehouse 20 is close to 11 o’clock. See the pattern?”

Malik paused. Ambrose imagined him walking out of whatever throng of drinkers he’d been sucked into. Funny how the bastard had managed to keep a life while Ambrose had become a virtual shut-in. Malik whispered, “The numbering just goes clockwise.”

“You’ve fucking got it. Some of the sites don’t fit into the circle format, so it’s a toss-up for some numbers, but most of them do. But now the numbers really don’t matter; now I can find
all
of them, and sooner or later we’ll get ‘Mr. S’ himself,” Ambrose said quickly.

“No kidding, that’s great.”

“Motherfucker, stop playing social butterfly and call me back.”

“
Mister H
, calm down. Get some sleep, or go out in public for a while. Just do whatever you’re not doing right now,” Malik said, in a voice meant for public consumption.

“Fuck you, Malik.”

“No kidding, that’s great. Talk to you soon.”

Ambrose dropped his cell phone and heard it crack on the tile floor. He’d go dig out the sim card later and buy a new disposable Nokia at the Green Zone shopping mall. Everything was disposable in Iraq.

He slid into the cool bathtub with half a cigarette left in his mouth. Ambrose finally realized he’d killed a man the previous night.