The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [38]
Showered and dressed she meets her security detail downstairs. The man called “Edge” is doing close protection. Daniela prefers Shaun, who doesn’t look at her like he wants to do a cavity search.
There is a young woman in the security detail, Hispanic looking, with dark hair pulled into a ponytail and her fatigues tucked into heavy boots. She smiles at Daniela and opens the car door. Shaun is behind the wheel of the lead SUV. Glover is already in the back seat. Sulking.
An effete twenty-something who dresses in stovepipe jeans and blue cotton shirts, Glover is from Hamburg but looks and sounds English because of his clipped English accent and the way he stands with an arched back as though someone is pressing a gun into his spine. A computer programmer and IT specialist, he has spent his entire time in Iraq complaining about the heat and the food.
The convoy moves off. Edge leans over the front seat.
“How are my favorite geeks today?”
Glover and Daniela don’t acknowledge him.
“Did you sleep well, princess?”
“Very well.”
Maybe he knows, she thinks. Maybe he can read the signs. When she lost her virginity at seventeen she was convinced her parents could see it in her eyes.
Edge belches. “I feel rougher than hessian underpants. That’s the problem with Haji food.”
They drive in silence, weaving at high speed between traffic and sometimes crossing on to the wrong side of the road. Daniela hates these transfers—the bullying and heightened sense of fear.
At the Ministry, the bodyguard ballet is repeated, this time in reverse. Daniela goes straight to the technology center in the basement of the building. Badly ventilated and poorly lit, the rooms are at least functional and the hardware is good quality.
She checks her emails and then looks at the results from overnight. The data-mining software has been running for forty-eight hours. Every ministry has provided details of spending, savings and revenue since 2006. What contracts have been awarded. Completion dates, compliance certificates, inspections, operating budgets, invoices, planned spending, cash flow, staffing levels and security. Millions of transactions are being crosschecked and tabulated.
A stream of green numbers fills a black screen. A second computer has black type on a white screen, listing projects and spending. Running her finger down the first screen, Daniela presses a button on a small digital recorder and makes a note to herself.
Nearly eight hundred suspicious transactions have been identified overnight, more than half of them duplicate payments ranging from a few thousand dollars to $2.1 million. There could be an explanation, but she won’t know until she examines the documentation.
After noting the largest payments, she moves on. One name appears more than once—Jawad Stadium. She consults a satellite map of the city. The stadium is in south-east Baghdad, showing up as concentric rings of seating around a brown square. The image is six months old.
She looks at the clock. It’s still early in New York. Alfred Nilsen won’t be at his desk for another five hours. She sends him an email, requesting details about the stadium.
It was Nilsen who recruited her three months ago at a strange meeting in his apartment on the Upper West Side. She remembers it vividly because it was the first time anyone she knew had been invited to Nilsen’s home. The invitation had been handwritten on a small, embossed card. Saturday, 3 p.m. Afternoon tea. He had used the words “cordially invited.” Does anybody use language like that anymore?
Daniela feels a flush of embarrassment as she remembers Nilsen opening the door to her that day. She had cycled across Central Park and was wearing a fluorescent yellow windbreaker and Lycra leggings. Nilsen looked her up and down as though she had beamed down from another planet.
The softly spoken Norwegian was chairman of the United Nations Board of Auditors and a twenty-five-year veteran of the UN. He had worked in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait before spending four years