Michael Robotham - The Wreckage

Checkpoints are always dangerous. Anyone can approach-beggars, vendors, teenagers selling soft drinks or newspapers; fuel sellers carrying jerrycans and rubber hoses that are swung through the air making a whooshing sound. Any one of them could be carrying a grenade or wearing a suicide vest.

Luca produces his accreditation. The Iraqi soldier looks at both sides of the media pass, studying the English and Arabic versions. Then he consults a visitor’s book in the plasterboard kiosk.

“Your name is not on the list.”

“I made the appointment only an hour ago.”

The soldier taps the pass against his cheek and slowly circles the Skoda, as one of his colleagues checks the boot and passes a mirror beneath the chassis.

They are waved through. Jamal pulls up outside the Ministry. Engine running. Luca opens the door.

“Are you going to wait?”

Jamal taps the dashboard. “I have to get petrol. The queues are long today.”

“I’ll give you money for black market fuel.”

“I should queue like everyone else.”

Luca smiles. “You’re the only person in Iraq who doesn’t buy on the black.”

Jamal looks a little sad. “It won’t always be this way.”

The two men slap their palms together and their shoulders touch.

“Give my love to Nadia and the boys.”

Luca jogs up the stairs, zipping up his jacket. There are more checkpoints inside, along with metal detectors and bag searches. He surrenders his pistol, which is placed in a strongbox, and asks for Judge Ahmed Kuther, the Commissioner of Public Integrity. The receptionist points to a row of a dozen plastic chairs, all of them taken.

Luca waits.

A cleaner is polishing the marble floor, running an ancient machine across the smooth slabs. Elsewhere workmen are peeling blast tape from the windows. Wishful thinking.

It has been more than a year since the Coalition Provisional Authority handed over control of Iraq to the Iraqis, but independence is still mostly a state of mind. The parliamentary elections were five months ago but no single party emerged with a clear majority. The level of violence has increased since then as various groups have tried to influence the outcome or scupper the talks completely. Uncertainty is the only constant in Iraq apart from the petrol queues and power outages.

One of the security guards begins telling a joke. Luca has heard it before. A young boy runs to his mother, sobbing, because his father has touched a live wire and been electrocuted. Throwing up her hands, she says, “Allah be praised-there is electricity!”

A convoy of four SUVs has pulled up outside, doors opening in unison. Six men in black body armor emerge from the vehicles, setting up a perimeter guard. Two others jog quickly up the stairs and scan the foyer before giving the signal.

Four passengers climb from the SUVs and are ushered up the stairs. Heads down. Moving quickly. The guards are civilian contractors. The passengers are westerners, dressed casually apart from the Kevlar vests.

One of them is a woman with a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. Pretty. Hair bunched up in a ponytail, poking through the back of the cap. Dressed in a loose white shirt and cargo pants, she’s wheeling a pull-along bag, looking like an off-duty airline hostess or a film star checking into the Betty Ford clinic.

Half the security team escorts her across the foyer, while the rest stay behind, making sure they’re not being followed. Luca recognizes one of them. Shaun Porter runs one of the smaller American security companies. Big and bulked up, he looks like a surfer with his sun-bleached hair and brightly colored Hawaiian shirt beneath a Kevlar vest, but he was born and raised in New Jersey.

Shaun slings his weapon over his shoulder and gives Luca a high-five.

“Yo, my man, my man! Long time no see. How’s it hanging?”

“I’m good. I’m good. How about you?”

“Same old shit-babysitting some IT geeks.”

“Americans?”

“UN auditors-they’re installing new software.”

Luca watches the woman enter the lift. She turns and peers between the shoulders of her bodyguards. Their eyes meet for a moment and she glances away, taking in everything.

Shaun punches his shoulder. “Hey! What you doing tonight? It’s my birthday. We’re having a few drinks at the al-Hamra. Come along.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“You were thirty-nine last year.”

“Fuck off!”

Shaun punches him harder. Luca tries not to grimace.

Most of the contractors are good old boys, former soldiers with shaved heads and softening bodies, who couldn’t cut it in civvies. They have nicknames like “Spider,” “Whopper” and “Coyote.” Luca met Shaun when the latter was still a Marine and came walking into the bar of the al-Hamra one night asking journalists if they had any books they wanted to exchange. He and Shaun had been swapping novels ever since-mainly crime stories: McDermid, Connelly and James Lee Burke.

“You still living outside the wire?”

“Yeah.”

“And you think I’m crazy!”

“Maybe just a little.”

Shaun scratches his unshaven chin. “I lost money on you.”

“How so?”

“Some of your colleagues in the pool ran a book on how long you’d survive outside the wire.”

“I heard about that.”

“Some guy had you down for six days. I gave you six weeks. Thought I was being generous.”

“Bummer.”

“You’re one lucky SOB.” Shaun looks at his wristwatch, which is big and silver with lots of buttons. “I got an airport run. Some new blood coming in.”

“Don’t let them shoot anyone on their first day.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“How is the Irish route?”

“Safer than it used to be, but I miss the old days-we could fire first and ask questions later.”

Luca shakes his head and Shaun laughs. “Got a mate coming in. Dave Edgar. ‘Edge.’ You’ll like him. Edge was Third Infantry Division Armour, first into Baghdad in ’03. Toppled Saddam all on his own.”

“And he wants to come back?”

Shaun rubs his thumb and forefinger together. “It’s all about the folding stuff.”

The SUVs are ready. He nods to his colleague.

“Come to my drinks. You can meet him.”

After Shaun has gone, Luca goes back to waiting. Iraqi bureaucrats operate on their own timetables and the idea of an independent media acting as a guardian of the public interest is a complete anathema to the culture.

Minutes pass slowly. Closing his eyes, his mind floods with images from the bank-the burnt corpses and empty vault; the manager’s body, a macabre Venus de Milo dipped in tar, locked in a silent scream.

He opens them again. A secretary is standing in front of him; her body garbed in black and her head covered in a white scarf. She does not make eye contact with him in the mirrored walls of the lift or as she holds open the doors. Falling into step behind her, Luca is taken along wood-paneled corridors hung with tapestries.

Judge Ahmed Kuther isn’t alone. Five of his colleagues are leaning over his desk, looking at photographs.

“Come in, Luca, come in,” he says, waving him closer. “I’m just back from Moscow. I have pictures.”

Someone passes him a photograph. It shows Kuther in Red Square, grinning widely, with his arm around a blonde wearing a short skirt and a slash of red lipstick.

“She had a younger sister. Another blonde.”

“Double the fun,” says one of his friends.

“For double the price?” jokes another.

Luca puts the photograph on the desk. “It’s a nice souvenir. Not one for your wife to see.”

Everyone laughs, including the judge. Kuther is wearing a well-cut suit and a blue tie rather than the traditional loose-fitting shirts and long cloaks. His only concession to his heritage is a kaffiyeh, a square scarf folded and placed over a white cap, which he wears on those rare occasions he risks appearing in public.