The Wreckage: A Thriller (9 page)

Luca’s mobile rattles on the tabletop. He catches it before it topples off the edge. It’s Jamal.

“They found the missing bank guards in a vil age outside of Mosul.”

“Are they under arrest?”

“Their bodies are in custody.”

Luca takes a moment to consider the news. He closes his laptop. “I want to go there.”

“Mosul is dangerous. The Kurds and Sunnis are kil ing each other.”

“I can ask Shaun for security.”

“No, it’s best we use our own cars.”

They make a plan. Jamal wil cal Abu. Civilian clothes. Concealed weapons. First light.

11

LONDON

Ruiz has been five hours at the police station. Five hours with another man’s blood on his shoes. When he closes his eyes he can picture the scene in miniature, precisely detailed like a scaled down model built by a stage designer. A trashed apartment. A torture scene. A distraught girlfriend. Images he thought he’d left behind in a past life when he stil worked for the Met and was being paid to care.

Someone flushes a toilet. The cistern empties and fil s. Water rushes through pipes within the wal s. The interview room doesn’t offer a view or ventilation or natural light. Incumbents aren’t supposed to be comfortable.

Ruiz looks at his shoes again, wanting to clean them.

The door opens and a detective enters. Tal and stoop-shouldered, Warwick Thompson has a beak-like nose and breath as stale as vase water. Their paths crossed once or twice when Ruiz was with the Serious Crime Squad, but they were never friends. Thompson was a churchgoer, one of the Christian mafia in the Met, who married a vicar’s daughter. Her name was Jackie, a very charitable woman who spent her Sundays in church and the rest of the week delivering comfort to the needy, including two of her husband’s col eagues in the drug squad.

Thompson survived the humiliation and the jokes. He even forgave Jackie and the marriage survived. Not long afterwards he busted a string of minor celebrities for drug possession. The tabloids had a field day. Unfortunately, during the subsequent trials it emerged that Thompson’s snitch was supplying most of the stuff in the first place. The cases col apsed. Red faces al round. Thompson was transferred out of the drug squad. His career flushed. This is where he washed up.

“Tel me again how you know this girl?”

“I met her last night.”

“And took her home?”

“I tried to help her.”

“Did you give her one?”

Ruiz rol s his eyes. Was he ever this predictable when he was interviewing people?

Thompson hasn’t changed much over the years—put on a few pounds, lost some hair, but his wardrobe is the same. He has a habit of tilting his head as though he’s deaf in one ear.

Maybe he is, thinks Ruiz. He’s certainly not listening.

Going over the story again, he describes the argument in the pub, the sting, the robbery. Thompson doesn’t seem any more convinced than the first time.

“Why didn’t you report any of this to the police?”

“I decided to recover the property myself.”

“By taking the law into your own hands?”

“I fol owed a lead.”

“Did you kil Zac Osborne?”

“I didn’t even know his name.”

“Why is his blood al over you?”

“I checked to see if he was breathing.”

“Was that before or after you put a bul et between his eyes?”

Ruiz holds out his hands. “You want to test me for gunshot residue?”

Thompson doesn’t appreciate the sarcasm. “You see how it looks? They robbed your house. Took personal stuff. You were pissed off. So you fol owed this girl home…”

“You think I tortured this poor sod because he took some of my dead wife’s things?”

“I think you know more than you’re saying. What did you say to the girl? Why won’t she talk to us?”

“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 al I know. She set me up, stole my stuff and I went looking for her. Then I fol owed 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 actual y help you.”

Thompson weighs up his options.

“Zac Osborne. War vet. Iraq and Afghanistan. Wounded twice, won the Queen’s Gal antry Medal. After his second spel in hospital he became addicted to painkil ers 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?”

“Hol y 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 fil s the doorframe. Commander Campbel 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 Col ege, Bramshil . He also introduced Campbel 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. Campbel has been promoted. He was always on the fast track. Not so much nose to the grindstone as nose between the cheeks.

“Vincent.”

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

They shake hands. Campbel 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.”

Campbel 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 kil ed?”

“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.”

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

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

The faintest trace of a smile enters Campbel ’s eyes. “Sorry, old chap, I can’t get involved. No hard feelings.” Ruiz isn’t going to forget the feelings.

Campbel wants the final word. “Listen to me, Vincent, this whole ‘don’t fuck with me’ act might have worked when you were stil 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 puls a twenty from his wal et 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 stil 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 kil ed 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 kil ing would be the hardest—a leap of faith across a blood-soaked divide—but in that moment between the recoil and the bul et hitting the target, the blink of an eye, he felt nothing. Each kil ing since has been an exercise in trying to
feel
something, some sense of horror or satisfaction or completion.

The second person he kil ed was an Iraqi dissident, found hanging in a townhouse in San Francisco. Next came an Iranian defector who fel 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 kil ed 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’l be tens of thousands of old ladies trying to hide the ink-pricked fol ies 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 kil you,” the Courier told him, “but you took information that didn’t belong to you. Now I must col ect it. Just tel 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 vil age 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 fol ow, while Abu stays with the cars. Their young guide waits for them to catch up. He runs again, zigzagging through a dusty yard ful of half bricks and broken concrete.

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