by Zoe Sharp
She held out her hand, and, after a pause not quite long enough to be outright insulting, I slipped my unchained hand out from under the bedclothes and we shook. It seemed somewhat incongruous, considering the circumstances. She had a grip that could have turned golf balls—or any other kind of balls, for that matter—to powder, and probably did on a regular basis.
“Just Hamilton?”
“Oh, we don’t know each other nearly well enough for anything more than that, so just be happy with what you got.”
“You mind if I call you ‘Hammy’?”
“Oh, for—!” She gave a sigh that was more weary than exasperated. “Take things seriously for just one damn minute, will you? The only reason you’re not in jail right now is because your boss has called in some favors with my boss. That, and we don’t know what effect the stunts you’ve pulled over the last week will have long term. Sometimes you only find out you’ve blown your chances when the next meeting doesn’t happen or turns into a full-on shitstorm. You would not believe the amount of ass-kissing and ass-kicking I’m gonna have to do.”
She rose, began to stalk away down the ward.
“Tell me,” I called after her, “do you really have enough pull to get him a job at the Smithsonian?”
She jerked to a halt, half turned. “Who?”
“Professor Lihaibi. He’s got to be one of yours.”
“How d’you work that one out?”
“A few of the things he said. His threats of having friends in high places, the fact you picked us up as soon as we left our meeting with him. The fact he’s still in business. But I suppose it’s mostly because it’s not just my run-in with him that pisses you off but Sean’s as well. ‘Over the past week’ you just said. You want more?”
She paced back toward me, braced her hands on the rail at the foot of my bed. “This is a classified operation,” she said on a growl. “Any mention of it outside of these walls will win you deportation and some serious jail time.”
“I’ll take that as a yes, then, shall I?”
“You can take that any way you damn well please.”
“Look, I need to find Sean—”
“Oh, I think you can leave that to us from here on in.”
Something in her tone prodded me. “What do you want him for? Not simply for hassling your tame professor, surely, so what else has he done . . . ?”
Her face ticked, cheekbones taut under the skin, but just when I thought she was going to tell me to go to hell, she said, “We had someone under surveillance—someone we thought might be part of the smuggling supply chain. He died under I guess what you’d call suspicious circumstances, even for here. Meyer had contact with the guy. We want to talk to him about that.”
“Michael Clay,” I said immediately, watching her eyebrows rise and knowing I’d hit on the right name, surprised she’d given me that much. “I want to talk to him about that, too.”
“Yeah, well, I’m afraid you’ll just have to get in line.” She paused, as if taking her last look at me. “There’s a Royal Jordanian flight out of Baghdad at nine tomorrow morning. With a couple of layovers it’ll get you into Newark sometime tomorrow evening.”
“Hang on, you can’t just pack me off—”
“Wanna bet? That flight leaves tomorrow and you will be on it.” The lack of emphasis was, in itself, emphatic.
“And Dawson?”
“She’ll be joining you—at least as far as London Heathrow. You realize, I guess, that you and your pal are lucky you didn’t end up coming out of this the same way as your driver?”
“Define ‘lucky.’ I still have to go and tell his family what happened to him.” Or a version of it, at any rate.
She made a noise that might have been a snort, or a sigh. It was hard to tell. When she spoke, the dry tone was almost enough for me to miss the haunted look that passed briefly across her features.
“Yeah, that always sucks.” She hesitated then, as if about to say something she wasn’t sure was altogether wise. “I guess I should thank you—for not killing my guy. I thought it was just luck, at first—until I read your file . . . So, why didn’t you kill him?”
I shrugged, washed over with weariness. “I didn’t know who I was dealing with. It seemed prudent not to do anything I might regret later.”
“Prudent, huh?” She gave a tight smile. “My guess is you were evening up the odds some, too.”
I shifted in the narrow bed, feeling the tight spasm in my thigh where the pickup driver, Woźniak, had kicked me. I kept my voice even.
“Killing a member of a tight-knit team brings on a certain bloodlust in the others. At the time, I didn’t want them to do anything I might regret later, either.”
THIRTY-THREE
THE DOCTOR RELEASED ME—BOTH IN MEDICAL AND PHYSICAL terms—early the next morning. They told me I’d picked up only a mild infection and packed me off with antibiotics, painkillers, and advice to wear my left arm in a sling for a couple of days.
I dutifully accepted the sling but decided to ditch the painkillers at the first opportunity, too wary of their addictive lure. Besides, the wounds I’d sustained prior to this assignment were not bad enough to have slowed me down much as yet, and a little pain was a useful reminder not to take things too far, too fast.
I shook the doctor’s hand and thanked him for patching me up. The smile he gave me in return was a little weary, as if he’d sent too many injured soldiers back to the battlefield to believe his repairs would be allowed the time they needed to take hold.
An unsmiling squaddie knocked and entered, then stood by the doorway, waiting.
I picked my bag off the chair Hamilton had used, next to the bed. They’d left me my sat-phone, but by my reckoning the bag was light by one Kalashnikov and several boxes of ammunition. He still took it from me as I neared. Maybe it was the sling doing the talking.
“Are you really just here to help, or to make sure I leave the building?”
He didn’t reply. No surprises there.
As we stepped into the corridor someone called my name, and I turned to see Dawson hurrying toward me. She, too, had her arm in a sling and a minder in tow.
“Snap,” I said. I indicated my own sling. “And isn’t it embarrassing that we’ve both turned up at the same party wearing the same dress?”
She barely cracked a smile. “Charlie, about—”
“I know,” I said, cutting her off before she could mention Moe’s name, not sure I’d hold it together if she did. “We’ll talk later. There’s nothing we can do right now.”
She shut up, nodded, but didn’t look appeased. I couldn’t blame her for that. I wasn’t exactly ecstatic about it myself.
The two men didn’t quite march us to the main entranceway, but it wasn’t a morning stroll, either. The sun was barely thinking about rising, and the air was bitter with the dry cold of the desert. I shivered in my thin shirt, wondering briefly what happened to the bloodied one I was wearing when I passed out. Incinerated, probably.
“Wait here,” said the guy who’d collected me, dumping my bag at my feet. I took the opportunity to fish inside for my jacket, then had to dispense with the sling to put it on.
I straightened when I heard Dawson swear under her breath. Following her gaze, I saw the same big Mercedes that had been involved in our ambush pull up. The driver climbed out. The compound was floodlit like a football stadium, so he wasn’t hard to recognize, even in civilian guise of jeans and a lightweight shirt. That recognition made me want to curse, too.
Woźniak.
Had he volunteered to drive us, I wondered, or did Hamilton have a perverse sense of humor? It was about a hundred and twenty klicks to Baghdad—a good two hours’ journey in the company of a man whose face I’d never get tired of kicking.
He left the engine running, twin wisps rising from the exhausts, and moved around the car, opening one of the rear doors with a mocking bow.
“Ladies.”
“Last time you tried to ge
t me into a vehicle with you, you had to beat me up and cuff me first,” I said. “What makes you think I’ll do it willingly this time?” And as I spoke I was suddenly reminded of a similar conversation I’d had with the ex-Spetsnaz Russian after the Kuwaiti cops picked me up.
“Either you ride in the back seat, or you ride in the trunk.” He shrugged. “Makes no difference to me.”
I glanced at Dawson. Her jaw was set tense enough to crack teeth, but she passed me a resigned look and slid in quickly, leaving me to walk around and climb in on the driver’s side.
I didn’t think anything of it until the doors closed behind us. She gave me a hard stare, shifting her eyes meaningfully to the back of Woźniak’s neck as he got behind the wheel. I blanked for a moment, then realized she was remembering the way I’d taken Bailey’s Glock away from him and jammed it under Garton-Jones’s ear, that first day.
If I get the chance, don’t worry—I will . . .
She nodded as if I’d spoken the words out loud.
But just before we left, the front passenger door opened and another man in civvies got in. He didn’t bother with an introduction and sat twisted in his seat to keep an eye on us in the rear.
Damn.
Woźniak took off at speed, peeling out through the compound’s gates and powering along the street beyond. The Merc’s engine was a barely audible background purr compared to the more agricultural vehicles I’d been traveling in recently.
“You OK?” I asked Dawson.
She eased the sling from under her seat belt. “Yeah, I s’pose so.”
“What happened?”
That earned me a slightly wan smile. “I split in the opposite direction to Moe when we all bailed out,” she said. “Took off down a service road behind one of those warehouses. Next thing I know, a car—this fucking car—pulls straight across me and I run full tilt into the front wing.”
“You haven’t done any more damage to your shoulder?”
She shook her head, then grabbed at the door pull as Woźniak made a hard right without slowing.
“Just a mild concussion and banged myself about a bit, nothing more—as yet, anyway. You should see the dent I put in the bodywork, though.”
“Good—to both.”
“I wouldn’t be none too happy ’bout that if I were you,” Woźniak said over his shoulder. “Uncle Sam has been known to charge for damage to government property.”
“Oh yes?” I said mildly. “I would have thought that was the squad leader’s responsibility.”
He gave a twitch, hands tightening momentarily on the wheel, then said abruptly, “Hamilton tried to tell me you wounded my guy on purpose, ’stead of just plain killin’ him. Told her that was bullshit. No such thing as ‘shoot to wound.’ In the field it’s kill or die, no question.”
“Your prerogative to believe what you want. Of course, if I’d intended to kill him, I would have aimed center mass and kept firing until he went down. As it was, I fired . . . how many shots, was it?”
It took him a while to answer, and when he did it was with great reluctance and, in response, my knee thudding into the back of his seat.
“OK, OK. It was one. One shot.”
“Of course, if I’d known you were going to slaughter my driver, maybe I would have played things differently.”
“Your driver attacked my guys with an Uzi, yelling a war cry as he did so.”
I shook my head. “Oh no, don’t you fucking dare try to paint him as some kind of insurgent radical. Moe was just a good kid who believed in his God. He also believed he had a duty to protect those in his care.”
Beside me, I heard a soft intake of breath from Dawson.
“‘Allahu akbar’ is not a war cry,” she said, sounding surprisingly calm. “It simply means ‘Allah is greater.’”
“Greater than what?” Woźniak demanded. “Us?”
“Greater than everything. Greater than fear. It’s like a Christian saying ‘Praise the Lord.’ Not, in itself, a battle cry.”
“It damn well is if the kid shouting it is charging you with a machine pistol.”
“So that’s why you shot him into enough pieces that his own mother wouldn’t recognize him?” I demanded. “Get off on that kind of thing, do you?”
He paused, then lifted his chin and met my eyes in the rearview mirror, smiling the way a shark might show its teeth to the divers in the cage.
“If you’ve seen your buddies blown into enough pieces that their mothers wouldn’t recognize them, either, by a teenage kid with a Koran in one hand and a remote detonator in the other, you’d keep shooting till the little bastard wasn’t getting up again, too.”
There was nothing I could say that was going to change either the outcome or the big man’s small mind, so I said nothing.
Instead, I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes. It was going to be a long trip.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE AMERICANS HAD BOOKED DAWSON AND ME INTO ADJOINING seats in coach for the first of our westward flights from Baghdad to Amman in neighboring Jordan. There, I was due to board my connecting flight for Newark via Tel Aviv, and she was on another for Heathrow. Needless to say, Dawson would be home quite some time before I was.
As we reached Baghdad International and climbed out of the Merc, Woźniak ducked his head in our direction and said dismissively to his mate, “The one with the sling goes to London, the one without goes to Newark. Make sure they don’t miss their flights.” He pinned me with a vicious glare. “Especially that one.”
The man—who I mentally tagged as Lurch—nodded briefly and dogged our footsteps into the airport terminal. Even so, I expected him to leave us at Security, but he showed some kind of official ID to the staff there and was ushered through.
The airport was crowded and modern, with gleaming white tiles everywhere underfoot, and a complicated lighting array that produced the effect of a vaulted ceiling overhead. There were all the usual luxury shops you’d find anywhere, and most of the necessary signage was in English as well as Arabic script.
“I’m sure we can find our own way,” I said to Lurch. “Or is it that you don’t trust us to actually board the plane?”
“I have my orders,” he said. “And you will be met at Amman.”
“What about on the flight? How will we find the toilet without you there to guide us?”
He didn’t respond to that jibe but waited with us, expressionless, until we shuffled in line to the gate and handed our tickets to the Royal Jordanian crew there. For a moment I thought he was even going to walk us along the jet bridge. He drew the line at that.
As I pulled the strap of my bag onto my shoulder I glanced behind me, found him stationary amid the flow of other passengers, eyes not leaving us. Any thoughts I had of sneaking back off the plane before the doors were closed and locked faded right about that point.
Catching my gaze, Dawson murmured, “I guess this means we really are going home, eh?”
“Looks that way.”
But as soon as we were out of sight, I fished for the sat-phone and hit the power button. The cabin crew greeting us at the aircraft door frowned at the sight of it but didn’t insist I switch it off right away.
As soon as the phone had gone through its start-up routine and acquired a fix, I scrolled through the contacts to Parker’s number, but my thumb hovered over actually dialing.
I’d called Parker before Karbala, and the last thing he’d told me was that he was calling in favors with one of the cloak-and-dagger agencies—like the one Hamilton worked for. So, why had he told them Sean was missing and I was searching for him? Surely, dropping any kind of hint that Sean had gone rogue would not put his agency in the best light. Had Hamilton dug deep enough to find out anyway and dropped it into our conversation to unsettle me, to make me doubt? For what reason, I wasn’t clear, but it was enough to stay my hand a little longer.
We reached our assigned seats. A male flight attendant smiled at Dawson and offered to put her bag
in the overhead locker. He didn’t offer to do the same with mine. Maybe he didn’t approve of the phone, either. Or maybe I should have put my damn sling back on. I dumped it on my seat instead, still holding the phone.
“What’s up?” Dawson asked.
“I was going to call Parker, but the more I think about it, the more I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure, to be honest. Just a feeling.”
She glanced forward along the plane. The flow of passengers hadn’t lessened, and the flight was starting to fill. The flight attendants were shoving bags up to make space in the overhead bins, latching them when no more could be squeezed inside.
“Well, make your mind up, because they’ll be taking that off you shortly if you don’t.”
I canceled Parker’s number and began to key in another, one that wasn’t in my regular contacts but which I could still remember by heart.
It had once belonged to Sean.
As soon as the call was picked up, I said quickly, “I need to speak to Madeleine, right now. It’s—”
“Yes, I know,” said Madeleine’s calm, cultured tones. “Hello, Charlie. How are you?”
“Listen, I don’t have much time. I’m about forty-eight hours behind Sean, and I’m being more or less thrown out of Iraq. I need to know where he is, and I need to know now!”
She hesitated. In front, the cabin crew hustled the last few passengers on board and pulled the aircraft door into place. I heard the mechanical clunk of the jet bridge being disengaged.
“Madeleine, if I’m going to fake a medical emergency to get off the plane, I’ve got about sixty seconds to do it, so—”
“He’s not in Iraq any longer.”
“He . . . ? Where did he go?”
Again, I was met with agonizing silence. The female flight attendant who’d frowned at my phone was walking down the aisle toward us, checking to see that the passengers were belted in. I turned away from her approach, ducked into my seat, and made like I was bending over my bag, speaking low and fast.
