The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [11]
4
BAGHDAD
The queue outside the Ministry of Finance stretches more than a hundred yards, snaking between concrete blast walls that are decorated with political posters and daubed with anti-American graffiti.
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.