Michael Robotham - The Wreckage

“I don’t like hurting a woman, but I have made exceptions,” says the shadow.

Holly tries to scream. No sound comes out.

“Where is it?”

“What?”

“You took something that wasn’t yours.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He grabs her by the hair with both his hands and begins to spin, forcing Holly to run in circles. She grabs at his wrists to take pressure off her scalp. Faster and faster he spins, finally letting go, flinging her across the room where she ricochets off a wall and crumples. She tries to crawl away. He keeps coming. Amid the debris her fingers close around something cold and heavy. A saucepan. Cast-iron.

He grips her ankle and tries to drag her back to the bedroom. She kicks. He has her hair again. Lifting her. She swings the saucepan into his face. Blood sprays from his mouth. The man picks a broken tooth from inside his cheek and stares at it like he’s found a penny in a Christmas pudding.

Twisting her wrist he forces Holly to her knees and the saucepan drops from her fingers. Holly bunches her fist and swings, driving her knuckles into his groin. He doubles over and groans. It’s an animalist sound. Picking up the saucepan she hits him again across the side of the head. He staggers and raises his gun hand. Tries to focus. Pulls the trigger. The bullet hits the wall behind her.

Holly runs. She’s small and agile. Four years of gymnastics. Seven years of running from her father. At the door, along the walkway, at the top of the stairs, letting gravity carry her down. Almost out of control. Zac’s face in her mind, his body broken.

Reaching the ground floor, she hurls herself at the fire door, which bangs open. She’s almost to the road. There are cars. Lights. People. Somebody steps in front of her. She can’t stop. Her arms fold across her head, bracing for a collision.

“Gotcha!”

The girl is screaming hysterically, fighting at his arms, scratching at his face; her cheeks streaked with tears and snot.

Nothing Ruiz says seems to make any difference. Holding her firmly, he tells her to settle down. Getting rougher. He slaps her hard across the face and then holds her tightly, his arms around her chest, her feet off the ground.

“What’s wrong? What are you so frightened of?”

Her eyes shoot behind him, looking over his shoulder.

“He’s got a gun! Run!”

“Who’s got a gun?”

She sucks in a breath. “Him. Upstairs. Please, let me go.”

“Your boyfriend?”

She shakes her head and tries to pull away from him again. This is not another performance. She’s terrified. Shaking.

Ruiz takes her to his car and puts her in the front seat.

“OK. Stay here.”

“Don’t leave me!”

“You’re safe.”

Ruiz crosses the road at a jog and pushes through the fire doors. Looks at the lift. It’s on the third floor. He peers up the central staircase. Concrete. Cold. It’s hard to move quietly. He climbs slowly. Counting the floors.

There is a long walkway, open at one side, overlooking a quadrangle. More concrete. Another set of stairs is at the far end. The flats are numbered, all beginning with “3.”

Glancing over the railing, he peers into the darkness. The lights in the quadrangle float like yellow balls suspended from above. Something moves in the shadows, a hooded figure, head down, walking quickly. It could be anyone.

The flat is fifteen yards along the walkway. Edging along the wall, Ruiz stoops in a crouch and looks through the splintered door. He can only see one half of the entrance hall. Keeping his back to the wall, he steps inside. A darkened bedroom is off to the right. The place has been searched. Ransacked. Drawers pried open, yanked out, emptied. Wardrobes pillaged, clothes ripped from hangers and tossed on the floor.

The sitting room is another disaster. The sofa slashed, a bookcase overturned, the back smashed in. Dishes and cups have been raked from kitchen shelves and lie broken on the linoleum.

The boyfriend is sitting in a chair in the main bedroom. Naked. Rail thin. Covered in wounds. His forearms and wrists are thick and corded with muscles and veins; his thighs are slick with blood.

Ruiz tilts Zac’s head, looking for signs of life. His eyes are open. The neat hole punched through his forehead is like a red bindi on an Indian bride.

Standing frozen for a moment, Ruiz drops his hands to his sides, his senses dulled, his mind deafened by the sound in his head like pounding surf. He backs out the door, not touching anything.

Luca works late. His body has an internal clock that will not let him sleep before the early hours. He sits at the kitchen table working on his laptop, answering emails and making notes for a story. On the wall above the table there is a map of Baghdad, already out of date because the areas of control have changed, along with the locations of the checkpoints.

Nothing about his apartment really belongs to Luca or couldn’t be left behind if he had to evacuate, except for the photographs. Only one of them is of Nicola. The rest he gave to her family with her clothes and mementos.

Eight months have passed, yet he still imagines seeing her face in crowds or in cafes as he drives by. Once or twice he’s caught a glimpse of someone with the same dark eyes or feminine walk and has wanted to shout out and wave and run to her. Luca doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he understands how the dead haunt the living.

He looks at his emails. There are messages from commissioning editors and his publisher. The latest chapters of his book are due. He’s also late delivering a feature for The Economist.

His mother has left six messages, most of them indecipherable. When Luca was last home he installed voice recognition software on her computer because she couldn’t type. Now she just yells at the screen and the words get jumbled.

Her latest missive could be about his great-aunt Sophia or about his mother’s cat Sophocles. One of them is dead. Run over. There’s mention of a funeral. He’s none the wiser.

Opening the paper cartridge on his printer, he takes out the sheets of blank paper and pinches one corner, flicking through the pages. Several printed sheets flash amid the white. Hidden notes. Retrieving them, he looks at the first page.

050707

Bank of Baghdad:

US$1.6m

062207

Rasheed Bank:

US$3.8m

070107

Dar Al-Salam Bank:

US$28.2m

081107

Middle East Investment Bank:

US$1.32m

030208

al-Warka Bank:

US$1.2m

061808

Industry Bank (ransom payment):

US$6m

072909

al-Rafidain Bank:

US$6.9m

092709

Bank of Iraq:

US$5.3m

020710

Rasheed Bank:

US$15.6m

021210

Iraqi Trade Bank:

US$1.8m

Luca adds another robbery to the list:

082310

al-Rafidain Bank:

Amount Unknown

Half a billion US dollars stolen in four years. This is on top of dozens of smaller robberies that netted Iraqi dinars. The amounts seem almost inconceivable, but so many things in Iraq defy belief. Billions have washed through the country since the invasion, funding reconstruction, repairing infrastructure, paying for security. The robberies have become so commonplace that banks have stopped using armored vans because they draw too much attention. Instead they use private couriers in ordinary cars loaded with sacks of cash, making high-speed dashes across the city.

Opening a file on the laptop, Luca continues writing a story, using two fingers to type.

IRAQ: Three bank employees are dead and four are missing after the latest armed robbery to rock Baghdad-the eighteenth this year in a city that has become the bank robbery capital of the world. The robberies and ransom demands in Iraq are escalating but nobody can say if this is the work of insurgents, criminal gangs or sections of the Iraqi security services…