The Wreckage: A Thriller (15 page)

He sounds the horn. Jimmy Dessai looks up from a deconstructed truck engine. Six foot plus, overweight, with a fringe of greasy black hair, Jimmy has a wide arse that causes him to waddle when he walks. Every time he sees Luca his face lights up like he’s surprised that the journalist is stil alive. Then he immediately starts working the angles, quizzing Luca on what he needs and what he’d pay to get. Jimmy is a fixer, a King Rat, a man who can source things that are hard to find.

He came to Iraq with the US Army Motor Pool, but later resigned his commission and opened up his own transport business. Now he’s the Hertz, Avis and Budget of Baghdad, al rol ed into one.

He glimpses the Skoda and walks around it slowly. Impressed.

“What happened?”

“We got shot at.”

“No shit!”

Luca glances into the lot. “I need another set of wheels.”

“I got nothing to spare.”

“What about them?” He points to the SUVs.

“They cost two grand a day.”

“I’m a freelance journalist.”

“And I’m a businessman.”

Jimmy takes him to the office where Johnny Cash is singing “Ring of Fire” from an iPod speaker and a dog is sleeping beneath his desk. Pitted with scars and eczema, the animal reacts to every visitor as though expecting a boot.

“You want a drink, Scoop?”

“No thanks.”

Jimmy hammers a soft drink machine in the corner and a can drops into the tray. The dog jumps and then slinks into a corner, looking at him with rheumy, half-closed eyes.

Vehicles aren’t Jimmy’s only business. He also provides armed bodyguards and drivers. Armor plating is extra. The ful package comes in at four thousand dol ars a day, but he stil bleats that insurance is kil ing him.

His two regular mechanics are Iraqis, half his size. Brothers. Jimmy cal s them sand niggers, camel jockeys and ragheads, but the mechanics seem total y unfazed.

“You can stil drive the Skoda,” he suggests.

“It’s rather conspicuous.”

“I could swap a few door panels.”

“It’s leaking oil.”

“Might need a new engine.”

“How much wil that cost?”

“Seven grand.”

“Three.”

“You got to be kidding. Six.”

“We’re mates.”

“Mates are going to send me broke.”

“Make it five and we’re done.”

They shake hands. “That’s how to do a deal,” says Jimmy. “These camel jockeys want to serve you tea and fondle their worry beads, tel ing you how poor they are and how you’re stealing food from their children’s mouths.”

A helicopter thumps the air overhead. Luca has to wait for the noise to pass.

“I have a question about trucking.”

“Stick to journalism.”

“If someone had a large amount of cash they wanted to smuggle out of Iraq, where would they take it?”

“So we’re talking hypothetical y?”

“Of course.”

Jimmy crushes the can and sends it arcing over Luca’s head where it rattles into a bin. “Take your pick—Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Saudi, maybe not Iran—they’re al within reach and porous as hel . I’ve never met a border guard who couldn’t be bought.”

“What about the Syrian border, by way of Mosul?”

“That’s a pretty busy crossing. On any given day maybe a thousand trucks go through carrying everything from sheep to shit-rol s.”

“Who are the drivers?”

“TCN’s mostly.” Third Country Nationals, the bottom of the food chain. Pakistanis, Indians, Filipinos, Afghans, Sri Lankans… most of them working for less than ten dol ars a day. “It’s a rat run.”

“Meaning?”

“Some of them are running passengers, six at a time in SUVs, charging about twenty bucks per person. They take people out and come back with boxes of stuff that’s hard to get in Iraq—laundry powder, dishwashing liquid, that kind of thing.

“Others are stil smuggling oil. They take old station wagons and turn them into fuel tankers carrying five hundred liters of diesel. Mad fuckers.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The TCNS travel without protection, unlike the military convoys. One stray bul et or errant spark and boom, they’re decorating the desert with body parts.”

“If I wanted to talk to some of these drivers, where would I go?”

“The trucking camps,” says Jimmy. “That’s where they live when they’re not driving. They get food and water; live behind barbed wire; compare bul et holes.” Luca asks Jimmy if he can make a few enquiries—ask about drivers who might be prepared to make a border run carrying cash.

“And if I find someone?”

“Let me know.”

Luca hitches a ride to the Republican Palace, which has been renamed the Freedom Building. Within the wal s it is like a smal city with tree-lined boulevards, shops and offices—a smal corner of Iraq that wil be forever American.

After changing some money, he gets a haircut. Then he cal s Daniela Garner. This time she picks up.

“It’s me,” he says.

“Hel o.”

“About last night—”

“I’ve never done that before.”

“No you haven’t, I would have remembered.”

“It was a random act.”

“Of kindness?”

“Of lust.”

“Which you now regret?”

“I always regret things. It’s my automatic response to almost every decision I make.”

“You’ve come to the right place. This is a country ful of regrets.”

Silence. He should say something.

“Wel , I don’t regret a single moment of it. I was sort of hoping it might happen again some time… in the future… which could mean tonight.”

“
That
soon?”

“Strike while the iron is hot.”

“Is it that hard.”

“Like a crowbar.”

“Now you’re just boasting.”

She feels her face flush and blood rush to other places.

“I have a question and it’s not about the thing you do with your pelvic floor muscles.”

“The thing?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your question?”

“You remember the story I was fol owing up.”

“The bank robberies.”

“There was another one a couple of days ago in the financial district of Baghdad. Seven people are dead including six bank guards. They took US dol ars in aluminum boxes, larger than briefcases.”

“How many cases?”

“At least sixteen.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Cases like that can hold up to four mil ion US dol ars each, depending on the denominations.”

There is a pause. Both of them have done the calculation.

“No bank branch should hold that sort of cash. There’s no need,” she says.

“Iraq is stil a cash economy.”

“Even so.”

“It was the eighteenth bank robbery this year.”

“You’re going to ask me to do something.”

“The cash must have been provided by the Central Bank. There must be a record of the transfers.”

“I don’t know if I can help,” says Daniela, typing as she speaks. She cal s up information on cash deliveries to banks. The list runs to six pages. She narrows the search by including only US dol ar deliveries.

“What were the dates of the robberies?”

“I can text them to you.”

“No promises.”

“I understand. I stil want to see you later.”

“You want my body.”

“We could eat first… or not.”

She laughs. “You know that second dates are trickier.”

“How so?”

“Traditional y, they’re about getting to know each other better. You might discover I’m a selfish, control ing, overbearing and difficult woman.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. And I think you’ve seen enough of me already.”

“There are places I haven’t seen yet.”

“Now you’re just being dirty.”

22

LONDON

Ruiz walks alongside the river, smeling the briny stink of low tide. Fat-belied boats, canted drunkenly to starboard, are stuck fast in the mud. When he first came down to London from Lancashire he was posted with the Thames River Police. On average they pul ed two bodies a week from the river, mostly suicides. Rivers seem to draw people to them, cleansing souls, christening them, or dragging them to the bottom.

Hol y Knight fascinates and appal s him. Ful of fuck-you apathy and repressed anger, she lies almost compulsively yet recognizes when people are deceiving her. An actress.

Intense. Volatile. Disconcerting. She trusts nobody and treats every question like it’s wired to go off.

Taking out his mobile, he searches for a familiar name in the directory. Cal s. Waits. Joe O’Loughlin answers.

“Hey, Professor, how does a cow know it’s not a butterfly dreaming of being a cow?”

“It can’t fly.”

“Makes sense.”

The professor is a clinical psychologist who spends too much time in other people’s heads. He looks exactly like you’d expect an academic to look—slightly disheveled, unkempt, undernourished—only he has Parkinson’s which means he shakes it like Shakira when he’s not medicated.

Ruiz met him eight years ago, when he was investigating the murder of a young woman in London, one of O’Loughlin’s former patients. The professor was a prime suspect until he proved that another patient was setting him up. That’s what happens when you deal with psychopaths and sociopaths; it’s like trying to hand-feed sharks.

“How are things?”

“Good.”

“The girls?”

“Fine.”

“Julianne?”

“We’re talking.”

A posse of thin androgynous cyclists sweeps past him in a blur of latex and brightly colored helmets.

“Claire is getting married at the weekend.”

“Congratulations.”

“You want to come to the wedding?”

“Why?”

“I can bring someone.”

“Don’t you want to bring a date?”

“I’m too old to bring dates.”

“What’s the real reason?”

“There’s someone I want you to meet. She’s nineteen. Damaged. Angry. Her boyfriend was kil ed two nights ago but she won’t talk to the police. Doesn’t trust them.”

“What’s her name?”

“Hol y Knight. D.O.B. twelfth December 1992. You stil got any contacts in the DHSS?”

“One or two. Where is she now?”

“Staying with me. I’l explain when you get here.”

“You’re assuming I’l come.”

“Of course.”

The conversation hits an air pocket and lurches into silence. The professor is an expert at reading the pauses. “Something else on your mind?”

“She says she can tel when people are lying.”

“Why does that bother you?”

“I think maybe she can.”

Ruiz walks back to his Merc and pauses for a moment, considering how he got into this. The stolen jewelry. Hol y said she dropped the hair-comb when she was attacked in the flat.

Maybe it’s stil there.

Crossing the river, he drives east through streets that are dotted with “For Sale” and “To Let” signs. People sel ing up, sel ing out, downsizing, belt-tightening, admitting defeat. The atmosphere in London has changed in the past two years. People are postponing retirement, driving older cars, eating out less; they’re less conspicuous in their spending, less confident in the future. The city is circumspect rather than diminished.

Ruiz parks the Merc and squints through the windscreen at the Hogarth Estate. It looks different in daylight. Dirtier. Poorer. Some balconies are being used to dry clothes, others to store broken furniture.

Ruiz crosses the road and climbs the stairs to Hol y’s flat. Blue-and-white crime-scene tape is threaded in a zigzag pattern across a makeshift wooden door, bolted shut. Rocking back six inches, he shoulders it open.

Crossing the threshold, he eases the door shut and steps further into the flat. The broken furniture, shredded pil ows and emptied drawers are just as before, although now there is fingerprint powder on every smooth surface. SOCO have dusted, hoovered, scraped and swabbed.

The place has a haunted quality that comes after death. It’s like seeing the twisted shel of a car being hauled on to a tow-truck and wondering if anyone survived or was badly injured.

Ruiz goes into the bedroom, opens a wardrobe and col ects some of Hol y’s clothes. Jeans. Blouses. Knickers. What else might she need? In the bathroom he fil s a make-up bag with smal jars, lipsticks, eyeliner and a toothbrush. Everything fits in two plastic shopping bags. He sets them down near the splintered front door and goes through the flat again, searching systematical y, looking for letters, bil s, bank statements, photographs, anything that might give him a sense of Hol y and Zac.

There is a postcard from Ireland and a bundle of letters from Afghanistan in military-issued envelopes. The only picture of them is a shot taken on a ferry during a wild crossing to somewhere. They’re laughing and holding each other as the swel pitches them backwards and forwards across the deck.

Standing in the living room, Ruiz tries to recreate the confrontation as Hol y had described it. He pictures bodies in motion. She hit the wal . Scrambled up. Used the saucepan.

Dropped it.

Beneath a side table he spies the shoulder bag that Hol y was carrying when she left the audition and visited the jewelers in Hatton Garden. The contents have spil ed. The hair-comb is half hidden by lipstick tubes, tissues and a half packet of mints. He lifts it careful y. Scared it might break. Then he wraps it in tissue paper and places it inside a smal wooden box, which he puts in his pocket.