The Saint Of Baghdad

by Michael Woodman

  “I’m meeting a guy from the Foreign Office next week,” he said.

  She snapped her head around. “A spook?”

  “I’ll get their report. All the details.”

  “Suitably redacted, no doubt.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You tell me. You’re the conspiracy theorist. Treating me like I’m some kind of Mata Hari. You want a conspiracy? Then ask him how one hundred Shia militia moonlighting as police knew exactly where you were and when you’d be there.”

  That stopped him in his tracks. It was like hearing an echo of his thoughts.

  “I had a different question in mind,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like finding out who in the Iraqi administration had the most to lose from Declan plugging the leaks in their accounting software.”

  “So you knew what he was doing?”

  “He told us. More or less. Millions of dollars a week were draining out between the zeros and ones. So he was installing some kind of fix.”

  “And you think the Americans would be stupid enough to tell the Iraqis what he was doing?”

  “They had to know. Surely. It was their ministry.”

  “They were expecting a routine upgrade. That’s all. They were purposely kept out of the loop. The allies had gone down that road already. They’d sent a team of Iraqi accountants to the UK to train them in forensic auditing. After that, the thieving went up exponentially. They had effectively trained them to steal better. Besides, it was impossible for anyone in the Iraqi government to know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Declan was planning to fly back here to the UK from Afghanistan the day you picked him up in Iraq. He only agreed to take the Iraq job while he was waiting in the departure lounge in Kabul. I know it for a fact because I was planning to pick him up at the airport, and he called me to cancel. Tratfors switched him from that commercial flight to London to a military charter to Baghdad.”

  CJ thought back to the sequence of events that day. They’d picked Declan up from a military flight. That was true. And the next day they’d gone to the ministry, which was closed for some religious holiday. It was last-minute for them. It always was. But he’d assumed it had been all planned in advance for Declan.

  “When you picked him up that afternoon,” she said, “did you know that you were headed to the ministry the next day?”

  CJ shook his head.

  “So you didn’t know, Declan didn’t know, and no one in the Iraqi administration knew. But one hundred militia knew. You want a conspiracy, forget me. Smoke that one.”

  She was right. That changed everything. That list of Iraqi politicians he had so carefully compiled was a worthless sheet of paper. It had always seemed like everyone in Iraq was bent. He couldn’t count the times he’d escorted engineers to fix oil pipelines cut by the same people who were demanding compensation for losing their oil supplies. Oil scams were everywhere. But they were petty compared to the white-collar crimes. Accountants. The guys who counted the money. Who shifted it from this column to that with zeros getting dropped here and there and mysteriously reappearing who knows where. That was big money, and with Declan O’Brien plugging up the holes it was natural to assume that the tip-off had come from some local guy on the take. But now there was a new prime suspect, and it was a cardboard cutout of someone inside the UK or US defense or intelligence establishments. They both sat in silence, eyes on the still life landscape of the pond. It made no sense. Why would allied intelligence set up a player on their own team?

  Unless…

  “They found a memory card in his pocket,” CJ said.

  “Declan?”

  He nodded.

  “That’ll be it. Your spook friends. That’ll be what they’re after.”

  “It saved your brother from the knife. When they found it, they switched him for Alex.”

  “Didn’t matter much in the end, though, did it?”

  “He made a deal with them. I thought he’d seen me trying to escape and was pitching them some bullshit to buy time.”

  “What kind of bullshit?”

  “The card was encrypted. He said he’d show them how to get into it. Jahil wasn’t buying it. So Declan tried with Hussein, switching to Arabic.”

  “You speak it?”

  “Not enough.”

  “Do you remember what he said?”

  “The English bits. Washington. The CIA. Stuff like that. He said he’d give them the password.”

  “And did he?”

  “I don’t know. It was Arabic and I was working on the cuffs. Then all shit broke loose. Alex started singing the US national anthem, and Jahil went for him. I broke free. Something hit me and it all went blank. But I kept on going somehow.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “It was Arabic mixed with computer jargon.”

  “Like what?”

  “Canary. Is that an IT word?” She took her time, her face wrinkling and her eyes darting from one side to another. “What does it mean?” he said.

  “It’s a detection thing. Like a canary in a mine. When the gas leaks, the bird dies first. It’s a trap to catch hackers or people sniffing around in places they shouldn’t be.”

  “Was that his job, installing canaries to catch the scammers?”

  “I have no idea. But even if it was, why would he tell them? Why would terrorists give a damn?”

  “He said it a few times too. It sounded like cat and canary. I thought it was about us. Like birds trapped in a cage.”

  “Sounds like he was delirious. Or else you were. Either way, I’d skip all that stuff when you meet the spooks. You mention the CIA, secrets, and passwords and they’ll swing you by the balls until they break off.”

  “I doubt it. Nobody gives a damn about the Iraq War these days.”

  “All the same, I’d plead brain damage and take the Fifth.”

  “You want a coffee?”

  They squeezed in one last lap of the pond, then made it back to the cafeteria before dark. Enya went to their table, the one where they always sat in the corner by the window. CJ fetched two coffees and two butter croissants from a wall of vending machines, surveying the room while he waited for his change to drop. There was just one couple seated at a table dead center. The man’s back was stiff, and the woman was reaching across to him, her hands wrapped around his. No words. Eyes intense. Another sad story unfolding in a storybook room of tea and cakes. CJ gave them a wide berth as he threaded his way back through the tables to Enya. Then they too sat in silence, pecking at their croissants and sipping their coffees. She supped hers in micro-sips, elbows on the table, the mug inches from her mouth, hands wrapped around it like an oriental cup with no handle.

  CJ felt good. Better. Talking about it had helped. That last day. The axis day. When his life had turned on a roll of dice. And the rest of their conversation had turned out better than expected too. The prickly part. She’d lied to get into the place, but the half-sister story made sense. Or half-sense at least. And she was right to challenge him for questioning her motives. How could he second-guess the love of one twin for another? The circumstances of her brother’s death were traumatic, and she wanted answers. It was natural. A woman as smart and willful as Enya was never going to accept the waffle churned out by government spin masters. CJ was her only hope of getting to the truth. Too bad that it was buried under bits of metal inside his head. So that left just one topic unresolved between them. Something they never talked about. The something that was happening between them. Every time they met now, they had a disagreement, a squall that soon blew itself out, followed by a contented silence as some odd emotional redrafting edged them closer together.

  But where was it all going?

  “Don’t you have a life?” he said. “A boyfriend?” It wasn’t meant to come out like that. Jagged and ugly. But there it was again. Sublime thoughts minted in crude coinage.

  “Does that pass as flirting in your world?”
>
  He reached across the table and tweaked the gold heart hanging from her neck. She knocked his hand away and held the locket up, her eyes swiveling down on it.

  “I was fourteen. Insanely drunk. And an uncouth pig of a boy…” She trailed off. “You know the rest. So Declan caught me crying about it the next day. He hugged me and told me jokes and made me laugh. He bought me this and told me that a man with a golden heart was waiting somewhere for me and all I had to do was find him.” She dropped the locket and gulped the rest of her coffee, suddenly in a hurry. She gathered up her satchel and gave him a sisterly kiss on both cheeks.

  “You can get back to your room okay?”

  He nodded and she turned to leave, but he snatched her hand and pulled her back.

  “Thanks for coming.”

  It took her a while, and he was ready for a sassy rejoinder. But it never came. She smiled and ruffled his hair. Then she zipped up her leather jacket and left.

  He watched her through the window as she made her way in and out of patches of lamplight, through the garden and into the car park beyond the trees. He listened as her car door shut and its engine fired. And he followed the sound of it fading into the matrix of night noise. The silent couple were still there, sharing some loss. CJ couldn’t remember what exactly and he didn’t want to. There was too much loss around this place. He desperately wanted out. To be out there amongst everyday people with everyday things to lose. Jobs, opportunities, lovers. Not arms, legs, testicles, minds.

  “Alex.” He jerked back, his chair screeching on the tiled floor. Alex was right there, sitting in Enya’s chair with his head resting on her empty plate, his blood soaking into the crumbs of her croissant.

  CJ glanced at the silent couple. They were still holding hands across the table, but now they were staring at him. CJ coughed and adjusted his chair like that was what he’d meant to do all along. But then he gave up the charade. It was all too important to worry about what anyone else thought. He hadn’t seen Alex for weeks, and Enya’s explosive revelations had shaken him. In Iraq, Alex had been his wingman, and now he needed him more than ever.

  “The militia? Who told them?” he said, his voice a hard-edged whisper. “MI6? The CIA?” He waited, but there was no answer. No sonorous voice booming from the grave. Alex just knitted his eyebrows and shrugged. CJ balled his fists and squeezed them against his face. There had to be a way to communicate with Alex. If he could see him, then why couldn’t he hear him?

  A solution came to him suddenly like an epiphany.

  Or was it a memory?

  Yes… it was a memory.

  They’d done it before. They had actually communicated. They’d used a coin. The more he thought about it, the more the details flooded into his head. CJ had stuck the coin up against a door and Alex had held it there, suspended as if by magic. They could do the same thing against the glass. They could work out a system. Affirmative and negative. CJ could pose questions and Alex could move the coin accordingly. He dived into his pocket and took out a coin, jamming it against the glass.

  “Ready,” he said. “Just hold it steady when I take my finger away.” Alex’s head floated up off the plate, his brow furrowed, his mouth agape. “One, two, three. Go.”

  CJ took his hand away and the coin fell and bounced off the windowsill. CJ and Alex both watched it roll across the table and drop onto the floor, where it weaved around checkerboard tiles and scribed a wobbly circle before falling flat at the feet of the silent man. He looked down at it, but he didn’t move. CJ looked back at Alex, but he was gone. Of course he was. Doctor Sam was right. He had never been there. He was just a 3-D image cast by a projector in CJ’s mind. And there was worse. He’d never used a coin to communicate with Alex before. That was nonsense. It was a scene in some movie. It took him a moment to remember. Ghost. With Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore.

  His stomach heaved and the room swirled, with the silent couple staring crazily at him as he danced around them on a carousel horse. He closed his eyes, hiding behind squeezed-shut lids until the worst of it passed. He levered himself up off the table, stumbled out into the corridor and leaned against the wall, his arms shaking. The corridor was empty. Not just empty. Void. No people. No ghosts. Just CJ Brink. Survivor. A loneliness engulfed him, stealing his breath, its strangling fingers reaching for the root of his sanity.

  Knock, knock.

  The door was right there. All he had to do was open it and step through and he’d be home free, comforted in the blessed arms of madness.

  He cracked his head on the wall. Hard, loud. Its echo reverberating in the empty corridor. The movie thing had happened before. Scenes from movies showing up in his head like memories of a personal experience. The root cause was dreaming, according to Doctor Sam. The brain consolidated memories while dreaming, and CJ had binding and linking issues that resulted in his dreams and memories getting mixed up. The movie thing was a side effect of that. In Iraq, they’d had no internet at first, just a DVD player and a limited number of DVDs. So they’d played the same twenty movies over and over. Doctor Sam’s theory was that scenes from those movies had showed up in his dreams during his prolonged vegetative state and gotten hard-coded as personal experiences.

  He pulled himself off the wall and dragged his mind back on track. He had the truth now. It was someone on our side. But who and why?

  CJ strode down the corridor, taking bold, confident steps. He didn’t know who had tipped off the militia, and he had no idea how to find that out. But he did know what was coming their way. Something to sweep away the cold loneliness that had pinned his back to the wall. Something to keep him alive and sane. Something warm.

  Payback.

  Four

  The conversation was on the terrace. Not heated, but intense. Bodies forward. Elbows on the tabletop, hands almost touching. A man and a woman. A couple. But a long way from lovers. More like a well-drilled team.

  The man sprang up as CJ approached, all smile and bonhomie. He had pouchy jowls and a sharp nose, so the smile was quite an event. A smile with a power switch. Full on, or total blackout. They shook hands and he introduced himself as Julian Ashford. Then he presented the woman.

  “Alicia Colby.”

  “Hi.”

  One word was enough. American.

  She stayed put. Almost. Lifting her butt an inch or two as she offered him her hand. The way she did it made it seem like a concession, a negotiated settlement in a decorum debate. She was younger than Ashford. Thirties. With soft features and a measured smile, and she took her time about that handshake, stony eyes never leaving his.

  CJ sat between them, taking the seat with a view, looking out over the lawn towards the pond and up at a feeble sun skulking in clouds. Ashford followed his gaze, taking in the parklike grounds.

  “Charming place,” he said.

  CJ gave him a look. Charming was not his first choice of words. His eyes drifted back to the path by the pond where an orderly was walking a paraplegic soldier in a chair.

  “I guess we should talk about the weather next,” Colby said, perking her smile up and nodding at Ashford.

  He turned to CJ and winked. “She’s taking the mick out of us locals. It’s her first month at the US embassy in London and she’s still getting used to our ways.” They both chuckled about it like their exchange was part of an ongoing joke. It was all very awkward. And it didn’t get any better. They spent the next five minutes asking him about his health as if they didn’t have access to his confidential medical records. It was all theater, a performance calculated to put him at ease, all part of a plan. But that was okay. He had a plan too and putting up with their bullshit was part of it. Make nice. That was the first-act plan. He needed two things, and the first was information. Later, in Act Two, there’d be plenty of time for the second—confrontation. And Ashford was setting the stage for that perfectly with all this fake bonhomie coming across like broken fingernails scraping on a chalkboard. He was saying something about CJ’s heroism a
nd exemplary service record when CJ raised his hand, palm out like he was stopping traffic.

  “Who are you people?” He wanted it to sound friendly, but from the look on Ashford’s face, it must have come out more like a challenge to visiting aliens. “MI6?”

  “Gosh, that makes me sound so important,” Ashford said. “I was in Iraq when you were taken, so they thought I might be useful in helping you get back on your feet.”

  That was all the answer he was likely to get, so he took it as a yes.

  “And you?” He snapped his head at Colby.

  “I was in Iraq too. An MP in Baghdad. I was there at the hospital when the surgeons sawed open your skull.” She waited. CJ leaned back in his chair. This was more like it. “They cut out a piece of bone about yay big.” She measured it with her index finger and thumb. “They did that because your brain swelled so much it was sticking out of your head. They figured you for a Humpty Dumpty. I guess you know what that is. But they took their best shot. They cleaned as much junk as they could out of your head. Pulled bits of lead out of your belly and chest. Shot you up with God knows what, then sewed you up.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to believe that you’re the same guy.”

  “We’re lucky to have Alicia,” Ashford said. “When she left the military police, she got a liaison role at the US embassy in London. She was part of the forensic team, one of the first on the scene.”

  CJ took a closer look at her. An MP. He should have picked that out. Those watchful eyes, hoovering up every detail, and that athlete’s body hidden discreetly in a loose-fitting pantsuit.

  “Where did they find me?” He aimed the question at the American.

  “A ditch. You were unconscious.” She looked over at Ashford and he nodded some sort of approval. “You had both arms wrapped around the head of Alex Solo.” CJ’s eyes dropped to the table, reaching into the gap but finding nothing. He remembered Alex on his knees with the knife at his throat. All he had after that was the video he’d found online. He had no recollection of a ditch. But it wasn’t difficult to connect the dots from the crazed and bloodied runner with a Kalashnikov and a severed head to a half-dead body in a ditch.