The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [23]
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.
10
BAGHDAD
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 On the wall above the table there is a map of Baghdad, already out of date because the areas of control have changed, along with the locations of the checkpoints.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 cafés 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…
Luca’s mobile