“Do you know who she is?”
“No.”
“Are there any more?”
Elizabeth retrieves the rest of the photographs. Bach pauses when he sees the images of the outdoor meeting in Maida Vale.
“Do you recognize anyone?” asks Elizabeth.
Bach doesn’t answer.
“I thought it might have something to do with the bank.”
“I don’t think so. I could be wrong. Ex-chairmen are like former prime ministers—we retire gracefully, never comment on company business and enjoy the benefits of a generous pension scheme.”
“I don’t know how you can be so flippant.”
Bach looks hurt. “I’m sorry if I gave that impression.”
He goes back to the photograph of the girl. “Are you sure you don’t know her?”
“I’m sure.” Elizabeth sighs. “I should be angry. I should want to kick his sorry arse out the door, but I just want to find him.”
“Men do foolish things sometimes.”
“Were you ever unfaithful?”
“That’s not a fair question.”
“Does that mean yes?”
“It means I’m not going to answer you.”
Elizabeth apologizes. She has no right to ask. And she has no right to blame her father for the sins of her husband.
Her mobile is ringing. She looks at the screen but doesn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?… Is anyone there?… Hello?”
There is no sound at all except for a faint pulse that might be the blood in her ears. She exhales and squeezes her eyes shut, ending the call.
12
WASHINGTON
Artie Chalcott sits in his home office, feeling his skin prickle and sweat on his forehead. His ulcer is also acting up and his bowel movements are all over the place. Stress-related. Shit-related. Things are also going south in London. First the banker gets robbed, then he goes missing and now they can’t find the girl who robbed him.
During the afternoon he’d tried to take out his frustration on the driving range, hitting balls. Smacking them with a club head the size of a Christmas ham. Made no difference to his mood.
Now he’s home and the kids are asleep upstairs and his wife is outside on a pool lounger, wrapped in a silk kimono, smoking a cigarette and getting drunk. She smokes in the same hungry way that she has sex. Not with him. He doesn’t know what gym instructor or pool boy or realtor she’s screwing now.
Chalcott can’t punch a turd, but he can punch a number. He calls Sobel in London. Apologizes for the hour.
“Don’t worry about it, Artie, sleep was so last century.”
Chalcott feels a flash of annoyance. Sobel sounds too cheerful and he should be calling him “sir.”
“What news on our banker?”
“He’ll turn up.”
“That’s the issue, isn’t it, Brendan? Where will he turn up? You should have pulled him in before he went AWOL. The list would be safe by now.”
“The robbery was a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences. Someone killed the boyfriend.”
“Maybe it was North?”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Who then?”
“Ibrahim.”
“Ibrahim doesn’t do his own dirty work.”
“Maybe he hired someone. North was getting nervous and making threats. He made a phone call on Friday from a call box to a journalist.”
“Who?”
“Keith Gooding on the Financial Herald. He left a message.”
“Had they ever met?”
“We’re going back over his phone records.”
Chalcott has the television muted. Pictures of a building in Baghdad with shattered windows and curtains flapping through the holes. The Finance Ministry. A crowd outside being kept back by soldiers. A rolling banner on the screen: Missing UN auditor found dead in Iraq.
“What about the wife?”
“North hasn’t been in touch with her.”
“And the girl?”
“MI6 are looking.”
“Six couldn’t find their ass-cheeks with both hands.” Chalcott belches. “While we’re on the subject of Ibrahim?”
“He’s dropped out of sight.”
“Christ almighty! This is a clusterfuck, Brendan. You know how much time and money have gone into this. Remember Afghanistan? Khost? We lost seven agents in one day. They trusted al-Balawi—they made him a fucking birthday cake—and the prick was playing them all along. He walked right into a secure base wearing a suicide vest and blew them all to pieces.”
“The Jordanians vouched for al-Balawi.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t trust any of these cunts. We control that list and we’re two years ahead of the game. We’ll nail every last one of the murdering scumbags.”
13
LONDON
Joe O’Loughlin is slowly crossing the concourse at Paddington Station. Ruiz recognizes the professor’s distinctive stoop and stiff-legged gait. He looks like a scientist or a doctor, more Einstein than Freud, with unkempt hair and a tweed jacket. Some weeks he forgets to shave and a salt-and-pepper stubble covers his chin and cheeks.
Ruiz takes his suitcase. Judges the weight. “You bought me a present?”
“It’s a bottle of something.”
“If I were a religious man I’d bless you.”
“If you were a religious man the bells would be ringing at Westminster Abbey.”
The two men weave through the crowds. Ruiz has to wait for the professor to catch up.
“Can you move any slower?”
“We’re all slow in the West Country.”
Through the automatic doors, they reach the cab rank where Ruiz has double-parked and displayed a disabled sign in his windscreen.
“Does that still work?”
“I got shot in the leg—there have to be some perks.”
Joe looks around. “So where is the young lady?”
“Now that’s a good question.”
Ruiz drives and talks—telling him about Zac Osborne’s death, the bribe and Holly running away. The professor interrupts occasionally to ask a question, focusing on the murder scene and the injuries inflicted.
“It had to be personal,” he says. “Very few people can torture someone so directly, hands-on, inflicting injuries over a long period, ignoring their pain… you’re dealing with a sadist who was very comfortable in a strange environment. He wasn’t panicked. He didn’t rush. He took his time, looking for information or waiting for the girl. What do the police say?”
“They’re calling it a drug turf war.”
“You don’t agree?”
“They found no drug paraphernalia in the flat.”
“Which doesn’t prove anything.”
“I talked to the pathologist this morning. Osborne had no drugs in his system. The tox screen came back negative.”
Joe leans over the seat and unzips a pocket on his suitcase.
“I had to call in some favors at Social Services. It’s not easy getting someone’s juvenile files.”
“What did you find?”
“Both of Holly Knight’s parents are dead. A murder suicide.”
“Domestic?”
“Her father strangled her mother and then hung himself. Holly’s brother died the same year. Brain aneurism. Holly must have been seven, maybe eight. She was made a ward of the court and fostered to six different families before she was fifteen. That’s when she ran away. She was found living with a man twice her age and was sent to another foster home, which she burnt down.”
“Did she give a reason?”
“Wouldn’t talk about it.”
Ruiz has seen how Holly reacts to authority figures. Her resentment borders on hatred.
“At seventeen she spent a year as a kitchen hand. Then she took a job waitressing. She was arrested in April 2009 during a G20 protest in London and a couple of months later she made a rape allegation that wasn�
�t pursued by the CPS.”
Joe continues to précis the file, aware of how brutally casual he sounds, giving a banal rendering of a terrible life. What does it do to someone, an upbringing like that? They grow up scared of the dark, scared of being alone, scared of their own dreams.
Ruiz rubs his thumb over his lips. They’re nearing the house. He makes a point of parking three blocks away.
“Forgotten where you live?”
“I like the walk.”
The professor senses another reason.
“Are you being followed?”
“Not sure.”
They go through a break in the buildings, past an upholstery shop, a plumbing store and a new childcare centre. Ruiz is watching the cross-streets, noting the cars.
Joe has a question. “You mentioned that Holly Knight could tell when you were lying.”
“Yeah. Is that possible?”
“You’re a former detective. You were pretty good at telling when you were being fed bullshit.”
“Not like she can. Some people sweat too much, or look to the left or start shaking, or mumbling their answers. This girl just knows.”
“Highly unlikely.”
“But not impossible?”
Joe falls silent, unwilling to make such a leap of the imagination.
“What is it?” asks Ruiz.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“I remember once reading about a police officer in Los Angeles who pulled over a sports car late one night in a rough area of the city. As he walked towards the vehicle with his gun drawn, a teenager jumped from the passenger seat and pointed a semi-automatic directly at him. They were yards apart. The officer held fire. For some reason, in that instant, he knew the teenager wasn’t a threat. He called it a hunch. The teenager surrendered.”
“So the guy got lucky?”
“A while later, a team of psychologists tested the officer; showed him a series of videotapes of people who were either lying or telling the truth. One tape showed people talking about their views on the death penalty or smoking in public. The same test had been given to hundreds of judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, police sharpshooters and Customs officers. On average they scored fifty per cent.”
“Which means they could have been guessing?”
“Exactly, but this police officer—the same one who had the gun pulled on him—he had a success rate of over ninety per cent.”
“So you’re saying some people are good at spotting liars.”
“Not just good, he was a virtuoso.”
“How did he do it?”
“Nobody knows for certain. I mean, there are studies on face-reading. Some people train themselves to look for micro-expressions, tiny telltale indicators of stress or deceit. There is a university professor in America, Paul Ekman, who has spent his whole career studying face-reading.”
“But you’re not convinced?”
Joe doesn’t respond. There are things about the human brain that he can’t explain: freakish feats of memory, or people with the ability to calculate prime numbers into the trillions. Autistic savants. Geniuses. Brain-injured patients with unique abilities… Neuropsychology is one of the last great frontiers of science.
Inside the house, Ruiz dumps Joe’s suitcase and pulls a tray of ice-cubes from the freezer.
“You going to join me?”
“No.”
The professor’s thumb and forefinger are rubbing together as if rolling a pill between them. He threads his fingers together as if in prayer and the twitching stops. He’s not embarrassed or disappointed. He long ago made his peace with the “other” that inhabits his body. Mr. Parkinson.
“So what do we do now?” he asks.
“We wait.”
“You think she’ll call?”
“Somebody will.”
14
BAGHDAD
Luca steps gingerly over the debris in his apartment, trying not to break the unbroken. Bottles and plates are shattered on the floor, amid the contents of his pantry. His furniture lies in pieces and water leaks from a toilet cistern, torn from the wall.
On the floor of the bedroom he finds the photograph of Nicola. He picks it up and brushes the broken glass away. Removing it from the frame, he folds the photo and slips it into his shirt pocket.
In the kitchen, he picks up a chair and sits down. Dirty, unshaven and two days without sleep, he drinks bottled water and takes a moment to feel sorry for himself.
Where to now? America seems like a foreign country he visited a long time ago, like a childhood book he remembers reading. Over the years, moving from war to war, from coups to independence struggles, he has come to realize the arbitrary nature of nationality. There are places in Europe where four or five different countries are separated by just a few miles. One man’s country is another man’s prison. One man’s coup is another man’s dispossession. The dead always look the same.
He unhooks a gas cylinder beneath the stove; the lower half twists off to reveal a hidden compartment. A satellite phone is tucked inside. He calls the news desk of the Financial Herald in London and asks for Keith Gooding, the chief reporter.
The two men met in Afghanistan in 2002, which seems like a lifetime ago. They both traveled to Kabul via the Khyber Pass, escorted by forty Afghan fighters, men and boys, crowded into pickup trucks, clutching grenade launchers and belts of ammunition.
Four years later Luca was best man at Gooding’s wedding in Surrey when he married his childhood sweetheart Lucy, whose father worked in the Foreign Office.
Gooding answers the phone abruptly.
“How’s Lucy?”
“She’s still beautiful.”
“Tell me something—how did a man like you get a woman like that to touch your dick?”
“She grabbed it with both hands.”
Luca laughs. His chest hurts. He’s out of practice.
“So tell me, Mr. Terracini, how are things with you?”
“Been better.”
“What have you done this time?”
“I upset the chief of police.”
“Other people fish for minnows, you harpoon whales.”
Luca can hear phones ringing in the background and can picture Gooding at his desk, spinning in his chair, feet off the ground like a child on a roundabout. Luca has never been comfortable in an office environment. Never lingered. Gooding is different, a political animal with eyes on the editorship.
“They’re kicking me out of the country, revoking my visa.”
“Maybe it’s not a bad thing.”
“I’m getting close to something.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Stolen cash smuggled out of Iraq into Syria and possibly Jordan.”
“How much?”
“Tens, maybe hundreds of millions.”
“Reconstruction funds?”
“And banking assets. Mostly US dollars.”
“What can I do?”
“Find out who monitors international currency transfers. There must be some international body that investigates big movements of cash.”
Luca is about to go on, but stops. Someone is at the door. He glances at the intercom. Bare wires hang from a hole in the wall.
“I have to go.”
“Stay in touch.”
Walking to the window, he peers through a crack in the curtains. An SUV is parked out front along with the Skoda, which is now a muddy green color. One of Jimmy Dessai’s mechanics is leaning on the hood.
Jimmy is sweating from the stairs. He’s wearing a cut-off Levi’s jacket, showing off his tattoos. “I got your wheels.”
“I saw. What’s with the color?”
“I had a job lot of green paint. Bought it from a company that paints oil pipelines.”
“I’m not paying extra.”
“I know.”
Jimmy looks at the state of the apartment.
“Some housewarming.”
“I wasn’t even here.”
>
“Shame.”
Jimmy lifts his stubbly chin. The light from the window shines through the jug-ears, turning them pale pink.
“Hey, that thing you wanted to know about truck driving, I might have found someone. His name is Hamada al-Hayak. He’s been smuggling petrol over the border since the end of the Iraq–Iran war in the late eighties. A few months back he got shot up on a run to Jordan. Lost his arm. Now he works as a cook at a trucking camp outside of Baghdad. He’ll want payment… talking of which, you owe me five grand.”
“You’ll get your money.”
“Sooner rather than later.”
“What’s the rush?”
“That bull’s-eye painted on your back.”
Luca returns to the gas cylinder and pulls out a wad of US dollars, counting out five grand. Jimmy pockets the money without recounting.
He looks around the apartment again. “So who did this?”
“The Iraqi police.”
“Was it something you said?”
“I looked at them the wrong way.”
Jimmy chuckles and cracks his knuckles. At the door, he turns. “Are you leaving town?”
“Looks like it.”
“People are gonna miss you.”
“You trying to tell me something?”
“I just did.”
A pine-scented air freshener shaped like a Christmas tree swings from the rear-vision mirror of the Skoda but it still reeks of fresh paint. Luca drives to the al-Hamra Hotel and gives the keys to the concierge. He tries to call Daniela’s room from downstairs. She doesn’t pick up. She hasn’t checked out. One of the housekeepers opens the door for him.
Daniela is lying in darkness, curled up on the bed. Luca reaches for the light switch but she tells him to go away, anguish in her voice, a soft wet sound.
The housekeeper leaves quickly, pocketing a banknote. Luca moves into the room. Sits on the edge of the bed. Catches a glimpse of her face.
“I’m sorry to hear about your German friend.”
“He wasn’t my friend.”
She rolls on to her back, pulling the sheet up to her stomach. Her hair is matted into greasy clumps, her eyes dull and listless. Luca takes her hand and pulls her up. Groaning softly in protest, she’s like a refugee being told what to do and following automatically. He leads her to the bathroom where he turns on the shower, letting steam billow and the air grow humid.
The Wreckage: A Thriller Page 19
