The Wreckage - Michael Robotham [39]
Tall and heavily built, he had suffered some sort of palsy in his fifties that had paralyzed one side of his face. It meant that his left profile was smiling and jovial, while the right side could appear almost cruel.
He had invited Daniela into a sitting room furnished in leather and dark wood and they sat at a small lamp-lit table. She was nervous about being alone with him. Not fearful, but wary of his intellect. Nilsen offered her tea. He had a special thermometer measuring the exact temperature of the water.
“Are you a connoisseur?” she asked.
“I’m a pedant.”
The tiny china cups looked as though they belonged in a dolls house. “You are probably wondering why I invited you here?”
“Yes.”
“I have a request—something that would require you changing your future plans. An audit must be done… a difficult one. Sensitive. After what happened with the Oil for Food program, nobody wants to be embarrassed again.”
“Iraq?”
“Is that a problem? Normally I wouldn’t bother to ask. I know you’re leaving us, but I thought I might be able to convince you to stay on for another few months.”
He smiled at her. A torn shred of tissue paper clung to his neck. It must be hard for him to shave, she thought. Strange seeing two faces in the mirror.
“I’m sure you’ve read some of the reports of waste in Iraq. I wish I could tell you that they are exaggerated. Nobody is sure of the true losses, but it will run into tens of billions.”
He had paused, letting the figure wash over Daniela.
“I find it quite ironic when people get worked up over Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. What he stole was chicken seed compared to what’s happened in Iraq.” He meant to say chicken feed, but she didn’t correct him.
“I met Madoff once or twice,” Nilsen said. “He used to have an apartment in this building where he kept his mistress. I always thought if he could cheat on his wife, he could cheat investors.”
Nilsen poured another cup of tea, using a silver strainer to capture the leaves.
“I was in Iraq a month after the invasion. George Bush had just declared mission accomplished and the US began airlifting planeloads of cash into Baghdad. That first payload was mainly small bills—fives and tens and ones—twenty million dollars in total, loaded on to a C-130 at Andrews Air Force Base and flown to Baghdad.
“Later airlifts had larger denominations—stacks of hundred-dollar bills packed into bricks and loaded on to pallets, forty in total, weighing thirty tons—the largest one-day shipment of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve. Twelve billion dollars in US banknotes were delivered to Iraq that first year. The aim was to hold the country together. Pay for basic services. Stop the country descending into chaos. The banks had been looted and the infrastructure destroyed. But once that money arrived, there was no oversight or control. I saw pay-offs in paper bags, pizza boxes and duffel bags. Cash was ferried around the city in private cars and funneled through middlemen, fixers, clerics and politicians. Fraud became another word for “business as usual.” At one point more than eight thousand security guards were drawing paychecks but only six hundred “warm bodies” could be found. Halliburton charged for forty-two thousand daily meals for soldiers but served only fourteen thousand of them.
“I was heading the UN team of auditors trying to keep track of the spending. We were supposed to be looking over the Americans’ shoulders, but they didn’t let us anywhere near the accounts. I remember a BBC reporter asking the Coalition Provisional Authority’s director of management and budget what had happened to all the cash airlifted to Baghdad. Do you know what he said?”
Daniela shook her head.
“He said he had no idea and didn’t think it was important. The journalist said, “But billions of dollars have disappeared without a trace.”
“Yes, but it is their billions—Iraqi money frozen in western bank accounts—so what difference does it make?”
Nilsen