The Wreckage: A Thriller (22 page)

Al-Uzri has a thin trickle of blood dripping from the end of his index finger. A nick. He slides the knife into a scabbard and adjusts his beret. Luca is dragged to his feet and pushed against the wal . Handcuffed and hooded, he is taken up the stairs, into the daylight. A gust of wind brings the familiar stink of the city beneath the fabric.

The car journey has none of the menace and uncertainty as when he was arrested. The police officers are talking about footbal and their favorite pastry shops. Anger replaces the fear. He’s alive. Resentful. Worried about Jamal.

The hood is lifted. Brightness stabs at his eyes. They’re moving through a checkpoint into the International Zone. A policeman leans across the seat and gives him a plastic bag containing his mobile phone, his wal et, but not his pistol.

He is handed over to a military attaché at the US Embassy. Two uniformed guards escort him along marbled corridors, past triumphant arches and iron busts of Saddam Hussein.

He is taken to a waiting room with a view across the sluggish brown river. Downstream, two bridges, bombed and rebuilt, are bowing under the weight of traffic. Beyond them, flat-bottomed skiffs ferry passengers between the banks.

On a table there are copies of the
Wall Street Journal
and
Newsweek,
fanned in a perfect circle. A TV monitor is playing Bloomberg, with market quotes streaming under a woman who is speaking from half a world away.

Moments later an inner door opens and a man in his mid-forties ushers Luca inside, pointing to a chair. His eyes seem to radiate earnestness and goodwil .

His name is Jennings. He doesn’t give a first one. The State Department seems to have dispensed with given names. He looks like a former col ege footbal star or a future politician, with one of those preppy hair partings that have been fashionable since John Kennedy was in the White House. Dressed in casual trousers, a shirt and tie, he has ink smudges on his fingers. He opens a briefcase and takes out a file, a stapler and a selection of pens. Props.

In a cracked-sounding voice, like he’s hoarse from shouting, he begins listing charges.

“The Iraqis have withdrawn your visa. You have forty-eight hours in which to leave the country.”

“I want to appeal.”

“There is no process of appeal.”

“You can make a request—government to government.”

Jennings laughs. “This country doesn’t
have
a government.”

“I was drugged by the Iraqi police.”

“So you say.”

“I’m a journalist.”

Jennings shrugs dismissively. “What do you think that means? Special privileges? The law doesn’t apply? You think you understand this place, Mr. Terracini, just because you speak the language, but you’re no different to the other hacks and glory hounds who turn up here wanting to put gloss on a new career or resurrect a fading one. You look at this country and think you’re going to sum it up in a thousand crisp words, but you wind up in the bar of the al-Hamra trying to make sense of the horror. Nobody understands this place.”

“They can’t just kick me out.”

“Yes they can.”

Jennings forces himself to relax, pul ing his neck from side to side until the vertebrae pop.

“What if I take my chances?” asks Luca.

“We won’t al ow that. Should you be arrested, or imprisoned or kidnapped, the American government would be expected to negotiate your release. We would prefer not to have that situation arise.”

Jennings repacks his briefcase, putting each pen in the al otted place. It closes and he spins the combination lock.

“If you’l excuse me, I have five bodies to repatriate.”

“American soldiers?”

“Civilians. Four Americans. One German. The attack on the Finance Ministry.”

“What attack?”

Jennings straightens his jacket and opens the door. “Oh, that’s right, you were in custody. There was an attack on the Finance Ministry. Four security contractors died and a UN

auditor was abducted.”

Luca croaks, “Who?”

“Their names haven’t been released.”

“The auditor?”

“They found his body this morning in the river. Tortured. Executed. I had to cal his parents in Hamburg.”

“There was a woman…?”

“Safe. The United Nations is pul ing out al non-essential staff. You should get yourself on the same flight, Luca. Nobody spends any longer in Iraq than necessary. Your time is up.”
9

LONDON

Elizabeth North sleeps on her side with one knee exposed and an arm dangling over the side of the bed. She dreams that she’s naked in a dark tunnel, breathless and blind.

The phone is ringing. She rol s over too quickly and almost topples out of bed. Her fingers find the receiver.

“Hel o?”

Silence.

“North? Is that you?”

Someone is breathing.

“What’s going on? Who is this?”

She waits.

“I’m going to hang up now… Hel o?… If you’re not going to answer you can… can… you can get lost!”

Slamming down the receiver, she traps her finger between the handset and the cradle. The pain makes her eyes water. Sucking her finger, she sits on the edge of the bed. Once she owned a lap. Now she’s ful of baby. She can’t see her pubic hair unless she looks in the mirror and she hasn’t bothered waxing since they took their summer holiday to Jordan.

It was a strange choice, but North had business in Amman and Damascus. Afterwards they went to a resort on the Red Sea with bungalows and swimming pools and a kids’ club.

Elizabeth and North had fought because he spent so much time on his BlackBerry answering emails instead of playing with Rowan. They had make-up sex afterwards. Angry.

Passionate.

Standing at the bedroom window, she watches a jet pass overhead on its way to Heathrow, flashing silver. The noise penetrates the double-glazing. Pressing her fingertips to the glass, she can feel it vibrating and the sensation seems to reach into her chest and shake something inside her like a wine glass resonating at the perfect frequency of sound. Her marriage used to be like that—resonating with a perfect frequency. Now it has the discordant ring of a dropped sword.

She and North had met at Cambridge when she was studying politics and he was doing his masters in economics and sleeping with every impressionable undergraduate he could charm out of her knickers. His car had broken down—an old Citroën C5—and he was standing by the road with his col ar pul ed up and a sodden newspaper over his head. Elizabeth had pul ed over in her Peugeot.

“Want any help?”

“How are you with engines?”

“Terrible.”

“Can you stop the rain?”

“Afraid not.”

His hair was plastered to his forehead and he looked like a little boy.

“Get in.”

“I’m al wet.”

“It’s only water.”

North seemed too big for her car. His knees touched the dashboard and his head brushed the roof. She took him to his digs and he asked her out for a drink.

“I don’t go out with strangers.”

“You just picked me up.”

“I saved you from drowning.”

“Then let me say thank you.”

“You have.”

A week later North cal ed her. He had tracked her down, found her number and done a little research. A bunch of flowers arrived five minutes before his phone cal .

“About that drink?”

“I’m busy.”

“Did you get my flowers?”

“They’re very nice. Thank you.”

“One drink.”

“I’m seeing someone else.”

A few weeks later Elizabeth bumped into North in the university library. He smiled and said hel o, but didn’t hassle her. She felt slightly disappointed. The fol owing Saturday she went out with her girlfriends and they kicked on to a karaoke club in Cambridge Street. North arrived with six of his mates, none of them too drunk to be charming. Again North ignored her.

One of Elizabeth’s girlfriends began flirting with him and Elizabeth felt herself getting jealous. On the spur of the moment, she pul ed North on to the stage for a duet and whispered in his ear, “I don’t know what I hate most—you fol owing me or you ignoring me.”

“You’re seeing someone.”

“That was a lie.”

That Mother’s Day, Elizabeth went home to London for the weekend and found North sitting in the kitchen of the house in Hampstead, eating her mother’s fruitcake and regaling her with stories of Cambridge.

“Oh, hel o, dear,” her mother said. “Look who’s here! Richard has been tel ing me al about himself. Why didn’t you tel us you had a new boyfriend? Look at the lovely flowers he brought. My favorite. Isn’t that sweet?”

Elizabeth should have been annoyed. Instead she was amused. She didn’t even mind when North laughed uproariously through the home videos—including the one of her naked in the bath and the bal et recital that she brought to a halt by tumbling off the stage.

Later that night, her mother showed North to his room and whispered, “I’ve put you next door to Lizzie in case you get lonely.” She actual y winked.

And so that’s how it happened. North knocked. Elizabeth let him in. They made love more than once. In the morning she could barely sit down without wincing.

After they finished col ege they lived together in London before they married. Elizabeth got a job as a researcher at ITV and later was offered a presenting role on a health and lifestyle show cal ed
What’s Good For You
. The first summer after they married they took a holiday to her father’s hunting lodge outside of Aberdeen. North arranged it. It might have been quite romantic except that her father came too, along with his new girlfriend Jacinta.

North and Alistair Bach spent every day stalking deer together in the Highlands and their evenings discussing the merits of the international exchange rate mechanism and deregulation of the banking system. Elizabeth felt like a banking widow even though her new husband didn’t work for a bank.

When North was offered a job at Mersey Fidelity, she fought against it. She didn’t care about the salary package or the bonuses. She had married to escape her family and now she was being dragged back into the vortex.

Since then she’d come to accept that she would have to share North with Mersey Fidelity and her family, particularly her father.

There is a knock on the door. Rowan appears. His pajamas are stuck to his thighs.

“Someone wet the bed.”

“Who?”

“The monster.”

“But there are no such things as monsters.”

“I think I saw him climbing out the window.”

“So he’s gone now?”

“Yes.”

The kitchen has a high ceiling and a scrubbed pine table and matching chairs. Rowan is drawing with crayons, a study of concentration. Polina is loading the dryer in the laundry. She’s wearing shorts, sandals and a pretty blouse.

“You are wel this morning,” she says, making a question sound like a statement.

“I’m fine.”

“You wil have something to eat. Orange juice? We have lots of juice.”

That’s because North isn’t here to drink it, thinks Elizabeth.

“Did you see him on Friday?” she asks.

“I beg your pardon?”

“North. Did you see him on Friday? He came home from work. He must have forgotten something.”

Polina chews on the soft inside of her cheek as if she’s trying to remember.

“I must have gone to the shops.”

“He was home for more than three hours.”

“How do you know?”

Elizabeth doesn’t want to explain about the private detective.

“He mentioned it,” she lies.

Polina’s eyes seem to glitter. “I must have been in and out. Perhaps he was working upstairs.”

She makes it sound so obvious. Problem sorted.

Mid-morning, late summer hazing the air, Elizabeth drives east along the river until the glass and chrome towers of Canary Wharf come into view, gleaming in the sunlight. This view of London could grace the cover of a science fiction novel, but it’s also a reminder of the 1980s, the decade that was brash, assertive and not very British at al . Margaret Thatcher. The Miners’ Strike. Heysel. Hil sborough. The IRA. Elizabeth had been a young girl but she remembers these events because her perfect childhood had seemed so often under threat.