The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [103]
“Oh, glorious prophet and vanquisher of the infidels, bless me now as I prepare for holy Jihad against the unbelievers…”
“What’s wrong?”
“I forgot what I was going to say next.”
Syd pulls a slip of paper from his pocket and begins memorizing.
“Just read it.”
“I don’t want to read it. I want to know it off by heart.”
“We’re wasting memory.”
“I got it now. Was I speaking too fast? Sometimes when I get excited I speak too fast.”
“You were fine.”
“Could you hear the words?”
“Yeah.”
“So it was OK?”
“You should say something about being a martyr.”
“But we’re not going to be martyrs. That’s what the Courier said. I’m not going to even pretend. I’m not interested in virgins in Heaven. I’ll be happy if Jenny Cruikshank lets me feel her tits.”
“Don’t let the Courier hear you say shit like that.”
“I’m not scared of him.”
“Bollocks!”
“I’m not.”
Syd looks up and his bowels seem to liquefy. The Courier is standing in the doorway as if he has suddenly materialized from thin air. Syd scrambles to his feet. Bows his head. Palms together. Salaam.
“Where is Taj?” asks the visitor.
“He’s running late,” says Rafiq. “His wife wanted him to mind their baby.”
“I can go look for him,” suggests Syd, who likes being around Aisha, Taj’s wife, even though she makes him nervous. Pretty girls do that to him and Aisha is so beautiful he finds her painful to look at. How did Taj manage to get a wife like that? Honey-colored eyes. Perfect skin. Glo-white teeth. When Syd’s time comes, his parents are likely to choose some fat cow with a stutter.
The Courier has moved into the room and taken a seat on a plastic chair. He motions them to sit down. He has a job for them.
“We have to dump the banker’s car.”
“What about his body?” asks Rafiq.
“That too.”
26
BAGHDAD
Daniela’s bags are packed and waiting on a luggage trolley by the door. Her flight leaves in four hours, the first leg to Istanbul and then on to New York. By this time tomorrow she’ll be back in her one-bedroom apartment with its dodgy plumbing and her weird neighbor who works all night in a basement under strange flickering lights.
“Have you decided?” she asks Luca.
“Decided?”
“Are you coming with me?”
“New York in the fall.”
“It’s lovely. Not too hot. Not too cold.”
“You sound like Goldilocks.”
Forty-eight hours. That’s how long Jennings gave Luca to leave Iraq. He can picture his visa smoking and then self-destructing like a Mission Impossible tape.
“I have three questions,” asks Daniela. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Not exactly.”
She purses her lips. “What if I begged you to leave?”
“Don’t.”
“Do you think Glover was killed because of this?”
“Yes.”
She sighs and leans back on the bed. The motion tightens her sweater, molding it against her body. It hurts Luca to look at her. It hurts him to think of her leaving. He should go with her to New York and shag her into next year. It would mean admitting defeat—the leaving, not the shagging—but what’s one more humiliation after being arrested, drugged and interrogated by the Iraqi police?
The satellite phone interrupts. Keith Gooding on the line from London:
“You wanted to know about Ibrahim? I found someone at the Foreign Office who pulled his file. Nothing new. This stuff dates back to the invasion.”
“What stuff?”
“I’ll tell you the story the way it was told to me.”
Gooding talks in a type of journalistic shorthand, full of half sentences and abbreviations.
“Twenty-first March 2003, Shock and Awe. Forty Tomahawk missiles began the assault, launched by navy vessels in the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Then came the precision-guided bombs dropped on Baghdad from stealth jets. Three hours after the raids began Saddam Hussein appeared on state television calling on Iraqis to defend their country. By then Baghdad was burning.
“Saddam knew the attack was coming, so three days before the air assault he sent his son Qusay to the al-Rafidain Bank in central Baghdad. He had a handwritten note from the President, written in Arabic, authorizing the withdrawal of nine hundred and twenty