The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (3 page)

Ten minutes later, Howell came to the door alone and asked if Ford had set up a junk account. ‘You’ve done this already?’ The man could not remember. ‘And the other accounts, is everything set up?’

‘Yes,’ Ford appeared surprised.

‘You have the details?’

Ford searched through his documents and found the handwritten list of numbers.

‘Have you spoken with Paul Geezler about the accounts? You know the restrictions on the operation accounts? I can make the transfers but anything above over twenty-five is automatically flagged to Central-CIPA. Payments or transfers.’

Ford nodded, although he appeared uncertain.

Howell held out his hand for the list of account numbers and transfer amounts. ‘One moment.’ His mouth tightened in thought. ‘Four operations, one junk. How much did Paul agree for the junk account? Two? Or two-five?’

Howell retreated back through the door saying he would make it two-five. Two, or two-five? All a little freakish to be speaking in single numbers and mean not two dollars, but two hundred thousand dollars; not two dollars and fifty cents, but two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A tidy two-five. Handsome payment for six weeks’ work.

Ten minutes later, at exactly eleven-fifteen, Howell returned smiling, pleased with himself. ‘I’ve written the default access codes next to the account numbers. Don’t keep the account numbers and the pass codes together. Have you set the security level before? Do you rotate your pass codes?’

Ford said he didn’t understand, and Howell winced.

‘Unless you set the security your accounts will be vulnerable. This is all the information you need to access them, unless you set an additional line of security.’

Ford thought there was some mischief in Howell’s tone. He looked blankly at the numbers. Howell drew his laptop round to show him, and asked Ford to open the HOSCO website and sign in. ‘To stop anyone else from gaining access you need to set the security to an appropriate level.’

Ford opened the site, checked into Finance. Howell pointed at the screen.

‘Click there
– Privacy
. Enter. Type in the number that starts HOS/JA. That’s your junk account. There at the top. Click
Hide
. Only you can see the account now. Click there for security.’

The screen turned black, then the account number reappeared, and then the balance.

‘See. In a minute that zero will change.’ They watched the screen, but the figure didn’t change. ‘Give it a moment.’

Howell checked the account number against Ford’s note. ‘While we’re waiting you can set the security level. You can set up to eight sets of codes to access the account, anything between four and twelve characters.’ Howell straightened up. ‘I’ll leave you to it. If you take too long it will lock you out.’

Ford stared at the screen. Kiprowski waited behind him, and he sensed a hostility toward Howell. At the bottom of the screen a clock ticked down from ninety. Anxious to complete this, Ford set the security at level four, which opened four screens, demanding one new code per screen. Struggling for an idea, Ford used the numbers for the new operational accounts.

Once the codes were entered the screen again turned black, and Ford closed the laptop.

While he waited for Howell, he began to wonder if the money was transferred. If Geezler was as good as his word. He opened the computer again, entered Finance, and checked the Accounts tab. He clicked on the junk account and the first screen appeared. 1 of 4. When he mistyped the site immediately shut down and the screen went blank.

Nervous now, he went to try again, but Howell returned.

‘Did you manage?’ Howell looked at the laptop screen. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I set the security level. I typed in a wrong number.’

‘How many times?’

‘Just the once.’

‘You only have three attempts before it locks you out.’ Howell straightened up. ‘They used to call these hostage accounts. They’re designed to be secure. If it locks you out you won’t have access. The transfer’s been made, so the money will show in the account soon. It’s supposed to be instant, but the connections aren’t as fast as we’d like – like everything else around here.’

Howell again excused himself and Ford shut the computer down, then folded the paper back into his pocket, aware that if he was going to leave the opportunity was right before him. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars came close to the fee that Geezler had promised. Dollars not sterling, but close enough to be good enough. He began to sense a design behind Geezler’s call, a design which looked to his best interests.

With no sign of Howell returning, Ford turned to Kiprowski and noticed that the boy was sweating, looked ill-at-ease, unwell, his hand to his stomach. Every occupant of Camp Liberty succumbed at some point to flu-like symptoms, chills and shivers and night-sweats, a stomach that cramped and couldn’t hold water. Each one of them suffered skin irritations and nose bleeds. Ford blamed the fumes from the burn pits. The men blamed toxic agents, biochemical compounds. He told Kiprowski to sit down, but the boy signalled that he wanted to remain standing, he just needed a moment.

The boy’s anxiety increased his own. Still, Howell did not return. Would they arrest him now? Was this all some elaborate delay? Howell appeared to have no awareness of the impending arrest.

Kiprowski leaned back against the second safe and clutched a kitbag to his stomach, his face white and damp.

Ford hooked his backpack over his shoulder – there would be no better opportunity – and walked to the door. A corridor cut between the offices, at one end a wall, at the other an emergency exit. He thought to say something to Kiprowski, but found himself walking before he’d properly considered what to do, knowing that if he used the door an alarm would sound. The pressure of time, a desire to be out, gone from Southern-CIPA, away from smarmy Howell, the baby-sick stink of the offices, from Kiprowski’s sweating – everything compounded the fact that he was running out of time. Thirty minutes, less perhaps, now twenty-eight minutes: no time at all. Almost at the door, ready to push the bar, he turned to see Kiprowski running toward him full-pelt, arms beginning to rise to shield his head. And then chaos.

The blast came as a pulse, a punch that knocked Ford off his feet and battered him through the door, throwing him out so fast that he did not know what this was: inside and upright one moment, and in another rolled and shoved, flung pell-mell – the air about him a soup, a welter of heat, of collapsing walls, of plasterboard and ceiling tiles, of powdered glass. The atmosphere, even as it blackened, sparked about him.

He landed on his back, his boots stripped from his feet, his hands and face bloody, his ears raw with shrieks, his body numb, clothes ripped and pecked. With chaos descending he scrambled out of the smoke, deaf to the rapid crack of gunfire.

Listen. There’s a problem and it can’t be solved.

Ford came across the refugee camp in the late afternoon.

In pursuit of a lone mountain goat he stumbled to the peak of a steep embankment with a rock in each hand – breathless, sweaty, light-headed, and above all hungry. Directly under his feet the land swooped down to a city of grey-green tents curved to the crater’s smooth incline.

Startled by the view, he stopped at the edge. Two boys with rifles attended a loose herd of goats on the opposite slope. In the camp, bearded men congregated in front of their tents. Women scooped water from the edge of a cloud-bright lake. Black dogs ran feckless along the shore. Smoke rose in wayward strands. For two days he’d been certain he could smell food, and here in rising threads hung the tasty scents of braised meat and some kind of bread. All of this detail, tiny, toy-like, distinct, protected by a natural stone bowl.

He made a divot for himself in the shale at the crater’s crest and hunkered down to watch the camp. He couldn’t guess how many people the camp housed nor for how long the settlement had been established (the tracks between the tents could be weeks or years old). A dumpsite of barrels and plastic crates, an area set apart for fuel canisters, a separate corral with a water cistern and hand pumps, were evidence of organization, not longevity. After an hour watching armed men and half-wild dogs he decided to avoid the camp. If he came across strangers on the open road it would be another matter, but here in the mountain desert, two days from any village, he looked nothing but suspicious.

He’d slept in the afternoons to avoid the heat, and walked through the night in worn boots and slack clothes across a rising landscape of scree and scrub, a full moon cold on the rock. While he walked he fretted, conflating the bare facts of his flight with notions that did not make sense – so he lost himself to his discomfort, to the alternating heat and cold, to the certain fact of one footfall set before another. He told himself that he was in shock, although he knew this not to be true. In two or three days he would reach Kuzey and the Turkish border, but more immediately he needed water and he needed food.

Uncertain if he was nine or ten days away from Amrah City, he began to draw his route in the dirt. Day one, the flight from the southern desert, Amrah City to Baghdad. Day two, military transport to Balad Ruz, to be taken to a small field hospital where his hands and face were treated for burns and cuts, then back almost the entire way before curving up to Khanaqin and driving east toward Iran to see the faint spill of fire along the horizon. On day three, a free ride on a school bus with steel plates welded to its sides packed with Sorani Kurds shipping to Halabja for work. Then private transport the next morning, by-passing Sulaymaniyah, to Fort Suse with an American engineer – a sturdy man from Butte, Montana, convinced that the Iranians were poisoning their own people and that nothing could contain the toxins, because borders and frontiers, when you think about it, offer no real protection. Ford couldn’t disagree, the bandages on his hands and his wandering confirmed it. He managed ad hoc, day by day, progressing from this place to that with the rising doubt that he had made the journey unnecessarily complicated. From here, days four and five, he travelled by taxi to a military checkpoint, then on to Arbil, continuing his northern zigzag with a Jordanian driver who took pity and gave him names of other contacts: a man with a car to sell (although the car turned out to be a ’53 trail bike pilfered from an American contractor), and a man at Kuzey who could see him across the border. The days now became confused and Ford scratched out the route: days six and seven, or seven and eight, by motorbike, a painful ride along a dry riverbed toward Sarsil, toward Amedi, where he finally removed the bandages although his hands were still blistered and numb. From here he wasted two whole days heading west instead of north and lost the last of his food to rain. The same rain clogged the bike with mud which later hardened to stone, and forced him to walk through the scrub, complaining at his pure bad luck.

His ambition remained the same. Once he hit Turkey he would head for Cukurca, a small town fifteen miles north of the border. He would find a hotel, a hostel, wait out until he was sure he was secure, then find a bank and transfer the money out of the junk account. He would return to Bonn, give up his apartment, pay his debts, sell what he owned, send the money back to England. Living in a small cabin for six weeks had taught him what he did and did not need. His life would become simple, lived day to day with modest self-sufficiency. He would almost certainly leave Europe. The moment this money was secured he’d leave the Middle East and never return. The attack on Southern-CIPA was a hard lesson, separate from his arrangement with Geezler, that life could change in one instant. In his backpack: two hundred and fifty-three American dollars, one litre of water. Not much of a plan, but a plan nevertheless. Among the flecks of sand Ford found a piece of seashell. He took the shell in one hand and tested his fingers, pressed the shard into the skin to gauge the loss of sensation, and thought that this was improving now the blisters were gone and the cuts were largely healed; although he could not yet feel heat or wetness, he could sense pressure. And while he considered how far he was from any ocean, he fell asleep, slipped from one world to another as a man falling backward through a window. In his dream debris flew about him as a tranquil sky turned black. Among the scattering dust: a window joist, paper, his boots flung hard and far, a man diving in a perfect arc, his clothes on fire.

He woke to the sound of approaching aircraft, with pins and needles running from his fingers through his forearm. Above him the sky sang with the drone of engines, a busy vibration of many unseen craft. Too exhausted to walk, he slept curled about a boulder. An hour later he woke again, as a single fighter tore over, and so it continued through the night with troop carriers, bombers, jets laden with menace, passing above the low-lying clouds. In the distance the blistering sound of gunfire, too regular to signal combat. At night these nations spoke in coded rumbles, one to the other, in whispers and threats.

He cowered until daylight and woke sensing that he was alone – the goat, and his ridiculous idea to kill it, gone. Unable to escape the mist that settled about the slope he headed downhill but never seemed free of the mountain or the cloud salted with grit. When the ground levelled he followed a track of compacted stone out of a ravine to emerge in a lowland fen of grasses and marsh and open blue sky. Beside the road, in ditches and clearings, lay abandoned hideouts with military camouflage, stacked sandbags slopped with mud. Above him, strung across the mouth of the gulley, hung a Turkish flag, blood-red, immense.

2.2

A message to call the London office of Gibson & Baker arrived in the early morning, as an email with an attachment, which he picked up on his phone; the subject line marked
URGENT: Call Gibson ASAP
. Parson ignored the request. The word
urgent
worked an irritation in him. A little insulted that the message showed no sensitivity, to how busy he might be, Parson pocketed the phone and started his day. Gibson’s desire to have his staff available at any hour needed disciplining, and he wouldn’t call. Not immediately.