The Wreckage: A Thriller (17 page)

“It can be a down-payment for services rendered.”

Ruiz turns ful circle, surveying the street. Something tel s him he’s stil being watched.

“Pardon me for saying this, but you’re making as much sense as a kosher pork chop.”

The American chuckles. The guy won’t be laughing when he gets bounced off a few wal s, thinks Ruiz. He has memorized the number plate of the Audi. He’s going to find him and they’l talk properly, face to fist.

“The girl has the key.”

“What key?”

“I would like to talk to her personal y.”

“My person wil cal your person. We’l do lunch.”

“You’re not taking me seriously, Mr. Ruiz.”

“Did you kil Zac Osborne?”

The question warrants a pause. “We’re not animals, Mr. Ruiz. Your young lady friend is in danger. I can protect her.”

“That’s very gal ant of you. The price is twenty-five thousand.”

“That’s more expensive than I expected.”

“Inflation.”

“I’m sure we can agree on a price when we meet. I’l give you an address. You can bring the girl.”

Ruiz can hear a barge horn sounding in the background. He’s heard it before on the river, closer to home. The American is keeping Ruiz on the phone. Trying to drag out the conversation. The question is why?

“Cal me when you have the money,” says Ruiz, hanging up.

Hol y is watching television,
Wife Swap USA
. It’s about a woman who raises pigs in Arkansas swapping with a bel y-dancing Bohemian who has the fashion sense of Tinkerbel .

The phone rings. She presses the TV mute button and waits for the answering machine to pick it up. Ruiz’s voice: “…
leave a message after the tone…”
The beep.

“Get out now, Hol y! Not the front door. The back. Over the fence. Mrs. McAl ister lives in the house behind. Tel her you know me. Don’t frighten her. Go now. They’re coming for you.” Hol y doesn’t ask questions. She’s up, grabbing the leather satchel, her shoes, she can’t find her coat… it must be upstairs. She turns to the front door. A shadow darkens the frosted glass. Another at the window, crouching but not crouching low enough.

She runs to the kitchen and flings open the back door, jumps down the low stairs and sprints across the garden. Behind her comes the sound of glass breaking.

Hurry, says her inner voice, fearful and strangled. Throwing the satchel over the fence, she scrambles up and over. Her jeans catch on a climbing rose. She fal s backwards, bracing herself. Soft earth. A dog barking. They’l know where she’s gone.

On her feet, she turns and glimpses a figure in the second-floor window. Looking at her. Dressed in black. The dog is stil barking. Smal and white, it bounces behind the patio doors. Hol y hammers on the glass. An old lady appears with blue-rinsed hair. Overweight. Shuffling on a walking frame.

“I’m a friend of Vincent’s,” she cal s. “Somebody has broken into his house. Help me!”

Mrs. McAl ister has to find the key. She’s flustered. Forgetful. Her dog won’t shut up. The man has gone from the window.

Key found, the glass slides open. Mrs. McAl ister doesn’t step back quickly enough and Hol y almost knocks her over. She apologizes and runs through the house to the front door.

Mrs. McAl ister is a hoarder. The house is ful of boxes, crates and excess furniture. Hol y had a grandmother who was like that. Kept every margarine container, every empty jar, every magazine and brochure.

“Cal the police. Don’t open the door.”

“Where are you going?”

“I can’t stay.”

Hol y pauses in the shelter of the doorway. Looks out. Left or right? The inner voice tel s her to get her bearings, but there isn’t time. A car swings into the street, dark blue, heavily tinted windows, travel ing at speed. Decision made. She turns and runs, her bag bouncing against her spine. A footpath appears, too narrow for a car. It leads to the river.

Putting her head down, she pushes hard, hoping that nobody appears at the far end. Car doors slam behind her. Who are these people? Not the police. No warnings. Unmarked cars. She doesn’t want to go through this again. Too many bad things already, the bloody mess of her childhood, Albie, her mother, her father, now Zac—why can’t they leave her alone?

Emerging from the path, she crosses Rainvil e Road, ignoring a “don’t walk” sign. A car brakes hard. Sounds the horn. Hol y slips and fal s. Grazes her knee. Scrambles up.

Turns right into Crabtree Lane, then left, her breath rasping in her throat. Adam Walk is ahead of her, leading to the river. She swings on one of the metal poles to change direction.

In front of her, two women pushing prams, a toddler on a tricycle, a man reading a newspaper on a long bench; so normal. Something moves from behind the screen of foliage to her left, dressed in black, an object in his hand.

She kicks harder, dodging through the prams, hearing a cry of alarm from one of the mothers. The man on the bench seat has dropped his paper and found his feet, set himself to catch her. Confident. She has nowhere to go.

Hol y swings her bag. It’s heavy. A half brick wil do that. Zac’s idea. Always have a weapon. She has al the momentum. The bag hits him in the side of the head and he goes down, the newspaper fluttering across the concrete like an injured swan.

It’s low tide, the muddy bank exposed, gul s fighting over scraps. Hol y is growing tired. Lactic acid building in her muscles, slowing her down. Ahead she sees a smal wooden boat moving slowly. Two fishermen.

The jetty is ten feet below the path, supported by pylons buried deep in the mud. She doesn’t wait. Slinging the satchel around her neck, she goes over the side, face to the wal , holding on to the edge and then dropping, fal ing, landing hard. Her knees buckle. Bones jar. She’s up, running along the pier, waving her arms at the fishermen.

One of them nudges the other. Points. A brief discussion and he pul s on the til er. The boat swings towards her, bouncing on the swel . Hol y turns. She sees the silhouettes of three men on the path above the jetty. One of them scrambles over. The others grip his arms and let him down.

The boat is coming in straight, spinning at the last moment, the engine in neutral. The man at the til er has a battered cloth cap and a khaki vest. He’s about to speak. Hol y jumps, clattering into the wooden shel , landing amid tackle boxes and fishing rods. The boat lurches. The propel er leaves the water and whines.

The other fisherman catches Hol y before she goes over the side, pul s her back, and she col apses between his knees. Her satchel swings loose. She tries to catch it but it lands in the water; floats for a moment before the brick takes it under.

The man on the jetty is twenty yards away. His forearm bent. A gun held upright.

Hol y pleads, “Help me, please!”

So many questions, too little time. The first fisherman opens the throttle. It responds with a high-pitched roar, slow at first, picking up speed. The bow rises. The jetty sways in the wake.

Fifty yards… seventy… ninety…

Away.

Safe.

25

BAGHDAD

Daniela can tel something is wrong long before they arrive. Black smoke rises above the rooftops like a genie being released from a bottle. Five hundred yards from the Finance Ministry and the traffic is at a standstil . Sirens are competing to destroy the silence. Police. Fire engines. Ambulances.

The first blast destroyed the concrete safety barrier to the right of the outer checkpoint. A second vehicle tried to drive through the hole but crashed into the crater. It didn’t reach the Ministry, but the blast has shattered some of the windows on the northern side. Curtains are flapping from the gaping holes and torn scraps of paper swirl across the ground.

Edge is out of the car and running. Daniela can’t keep up. She can only watch him.

Avoiding the first security cordon, he uses a fire engine as cover and fol ows two paramedics who are carrying a stretcher. There are bodies in the foyer. One of the security guards is lying across the counter with a bul et hole in his forehead. Another is beside the X-ray machine, having dragged his body across the marble floor leaving a red smear like a snail trail.

The cleaner is face down beside his polishing machine, a pool of blood beneath his chest.

Edge leaps the metal barrier, ignoring the shouts of two policemen, who draw their guns. He shoulders them aside and reaches the stairwel , taking the stairs two at a time. Already he can see what happened. The scene is played out in his mind like moving pictures behind his eyelids: a film with a soundtrack of gunfire and screaming.

The car bombs were a decoy. The gunmen were already inside the cordon, men in Iraqi military uniforms. Two of them are lying dead in the basement corridor. Shaun’s body is ahead of them. He had lunged for the door, but was a fraction of a second too late. The muzzle of the weapon came through the opening. The first bul ets hit his Kevlar vest, rocking him backwards. They expected him to be dead, but Shaun shot both of them. As one of them fel he kept firing, spraying the wal with bul ets and Shaun’s brain matter.

The rest of the security team had barricaded the door to the IT room. That same door is now hanging off its hinges. The Hispanic girl—Edge can’t recal her name—is lying with one leg twisted beneath her. A shard of wood is sticking from her left eye. Ventura… he remembers her name.

They must have had heavy weaponry—a mortar or maybe an RPG. The shel came through the door and exploded against the opposite wal , where it blew a gaping hole and took Anderson through it. His body is lying in the next room.

Otis is sitting against the desk, the last to die. The legs of the chair next to him have been sheared off. They shot high and low, the vest-free zones, aiming for the groin and neck. He double-kil ed before he went. He also had time to get a morphine shot from the medical kit and find a vein. No pain.

Otis was first Gulf War, big and black, from somewhere down south. Edge had never asked where. The south was a different America. Otis was a different American.

Glover is missing. He was the target. Daniela Garner was meant to be with him.

Shaun. Vanessa. Anderson. Otis. Weigh it, dice it, julienne it— makes no difference—they were carved up and cooked. Outnumbered. Outgunned. How many of the shifty cocksuckers did it take?

Edge should feel like crying. Instead he feels like getting even. He wants to tear down the world until he finds them. Then he’l bury them under the rubble of whatever’s left.

As the taxi turns into his street, Luca senses something is wrong. The checkpoint is deserted. Normal y the guards would be playing cards or tossing coins against the wal .

He tel s the driver to stop. Pays. Walks forward, crouching behind a blast barrier. There are three police cars parked in front of his apartment block. Two officers stand outside the vehicles in green uniforms with berets and sunglasses. They light cigarettes and lean on the Land Cruiser, heavy boots resting on the tarmac.

Police are often not police. Not real. Imposters in stolen uniforms. He glances to his right and left, considering his options.

Cutting through a pathway between buildings and then along an al ey, he tries to get closer without being seen. The pistol pressed against his spine feels as though it’s wrapped in barbed wire.

Creeping along the backs of houses, he cuts the distance. Faces become clearer. He recognizes one of them—the flunky who was with General al-Uzri at the burnt-out bank.

Decision time. Fight, flee or stay.

A policeman steps on to Luca’s balcony. He glances over the railing and takes a moment to realize that the journalist is below him. He yel s to his col eagues and guns are drawn.

Luca steps from his hiding place. His eyes go to the open car door, darkness inside.

“You must come with us,” says the senior officer.

“Why?”

“The Commander of Police wishes to speak with you.”

“Did General al-Uzri give a reason?”

“He gives orders, not reasons.”

Luca is listening to an internal dialogue. He should run. Let them shoot. Better to fight than surrender. Better to die on the street than in some stage-managed execution. He glances up at his apartment. The barrel of an Uzi is pointed at him, the hole gaping blackly.

“I have an American passport. I want to cal the US Embassy.”

The policeman gives a rumbling chuckle.

“Why do people like you criticize America until you’re in trouble and then al of a sudden you become patriots?”
BOOK TWO

A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.

ALFRED LORD TENNYSON

1

LONDON

For the past five days Elizabeth North has woken early and reached across the sheets to the space where her husband used to be. Each time her fingers have relayed the message and her eyes have stayed closed. Missing. Lost. Misplaced. She won’t go any darker in her thoughts than this. Instead she picks up her mobile phone from the bedside table and checks it again.

North has never been away this long—not since Rowan was born, not since they married. Five days. No cal s or notes or text messages. No warning.