The Wreckage: A Thriller (13 page)

Hooking her ankles around his waist, she presses him closer, sighing into his shoulder, and he begins moving, pul ing the world forward beneath them.

18

LONDON

There are lights on inside the house. Ruiz doesn’t remember leaving them on. He makes Holy wait in the car. Unlocks the door. Pushes it open with one foot.

Claire is standing in the hal way. She looks like her mother—not her hair or her build but her eyes and her high forehead. Unfortunately, she inherited Ruiz’s temper. She’s talking on her mobile.

“He’s not dead—not yet anyway… I haven’t asked him. I’l cal you later.”

Ruiz looks past her into the lounge. Phil ip, her fiancé, is sitting on the sofa, resting his feet on the coffee table. Blond and blue-eyed, he has a touch of Boris Johnson about him, including the foppish hair. Acknowledging Ruiz with a nod, he almost looks sorry for him.

Claire picks up her coat. “We can go now, Phil ip.”

“Is something wrong?” asks Ruiz.

“Oh, nothing much,” she replies, sarcastical y. “You missed the dinner last night with Phil ip’s parents. We waited for over an hour.”

“Shit!”

“I spent al night trying to cal you. Phil ip’s parents caught the train back to Brighton this morning.” She holds up her hand like she’s a traffic cop. “Come on, Phil ip. We’re leaving.” Ruiz intercepts her at the front door.

“I was robbed. They took a lot of stuff. Personal things. Some belonged to your mum. I was trying to get them back before the wedding.” Claire studies his face.

“When was this?”

“The night before last.”

“Did they steal your phone?”

“No.”

“What about al your phone numbers?”

“No.”

“So you could have cal ed me?”

Ruiz hesitates. Claire keeps landing verbal blows. “You forgot, that’s the truth of it. You missed dinner because you forgot.”

“I didn’t forget… I mean, I would have come. I was planning to, but they stole important things…”

She gazes at the ceiling. Sighs.

“I thought you’d been in some terrible accident. I started cal ing 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. Hol y 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.

“Hol y, this is Claire, my daughter. Claire, this is Hol y.”

Neither woman speaks.

Ruiz turns to Hol y. “There’s a bath upstairs and you’l 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. Hol y 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 bal et 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, pul ing 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 bal et.

For a brief moment he contemplates tel ing 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 Phil ip. “Tel 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 stil 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 ful 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 al 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 smal talk, each being ultra-polite while wishing they were somewhere else.

Luca Terracini might cal her later. He might not. The slight bruising between her labia wil act as a reminder al day of last night’s events. It wil 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 cal ed “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 pul ed 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 wel , princess?”

“Very wel .”

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 bul ying and heightened sense of fear.

At the Ministry, the bodyguard bal et 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. Mil ions of transactions are being crosschecked and tabulated.

A stream of green numbers fil s 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 smal 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 dol ars to $2.1 mil ion. 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 satel ite 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 stil 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 smal , embossed card.
Saturday, 3 p.m. Afternoon tea.
He had used the words “cordial y 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 yel ow 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.

Tal 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 smal lamp-lit table. She was nervous about being alone with him. Not fearful, but wary of his intel ect. 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 dol s 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? Normal y 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 tel you that they are exaggerated. Nobody is sure of the true losses, but it wil run into tens of bil ions.” 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 smal bil s—fives and tens and ones—twenty mil ion dol ars 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-dol ar bil s packed into bricks and loaded on to pal ets, forty in total, weighing thirty tons—the largest one-day shipment of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve. Twelve bil ion dol ars 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. Hal iburton 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 al 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 bil ions of dol ars have disappeared without a trace.”

“Yes, but it is
their
bil ions—Iraqi money frozen in western bank accounts—so what difference does it make?” Nilsen leaned back in his armchair, tired al of a sudden.