The Saint Of Baghdad

by Michael Woodman

  “They think you blame me for your brother’s death,” he said.

  “They’re sick. What did they ever do for my brother? Or for you?”

  CJ took care of his own glass, swishing the wine around before lifting it to his nose and sniffing it. Strange, that. He’d never done that before. Was it in some movie?

  “I’m not going to kill you. I wouldn’t know how even if I wanted to—which I don’t. I’m a pacifist by the way.”

  She stood up unsteadily and fetched a box from the closet. She’d already drunk most of her bottle, and wine was wobbling her steps and reddening up her cheeks.

  “No time to gift-wrap,” she said as she gave it to him. “I know you were planning to check out the new models, so I jumped the gun.”

  It was a phone.

  CJ swept aside the crust of his pizza to make room on the tabletop and ripped open the box.

  “I can’t accept this. It’s too much.”

  “I’d like to say you’re worth it. But that has yet to be validated.” CJ swallowed the rest of his protest and turned his attention back to the phone. “The PIN’s 1234. You’ll have to change that.” She watched as he logged in. “I wanted to test it to make sure I wasn’t giving you a dud, so I put my number in your contacts. In your favorites, of course.”

  They nestled on the sofa and CJ played with his new phone, scanning his prints and downloading apps.

  “Get that one.” She pointed to an encrypted messaging app. “So we can chat without your suspicious government friends listening in on us.”

  “Ashford is hardly my friend.”

  “He came to see me too. Him and his American girlfriend. She’s scary. They caught me downstairs as I was coming back in. It was like, we know where you live, bitch.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Answers. About Declan and me. His work. About our company.”

  “What company?”

  “It’s just a tax dodge. Everybody has one.”

  Her phone rang and she checked the screen, then answered it with a theatrical groan. “This had better be good,” she said to the caller as she stood up and walked towards the door. “Was this before or after the database synchronization?” She swung back to CJ and signaled a timeout with five fingers before disappearing down the hallway.

  CJ set his phone on the coffee table and paced around the room, peeking in cupboards and drawers. Most of them were stuffed with the bric-a-brac of urban life, miscellaneous items not yet qualifying as trash and needing a halfway house as a staging post. One cupboard in particular was bursting, its shelves stacked with DVDs. He checked a few. They were all movies, stacked according to genre. Sci-fi on the left. Romcoms on the right. He smiled. He’d been looking for a hidden agenda, but instead he’d found the bookends of Enya’s world. Blowing kisses and blowing up aliens. He checked the bottom shelf. Cables and connectors. And something so strange he had to pull it out to verify what it was. Not a DVD player, but a VCR. And as he pulled it out, a tape slid off the top. It was another movie. But not just an old movie. This one was antique. He read the title with a jolt. The Cat and the Canary. The cover dated its vintage with the original movie poster rendered in melodramatic comic book style—an evil green man with his hands at the throat of a terrified woman. CJ opened the box and took out an invoice. It was a 1927 silent movie sent all the way from California. She’d bought it online from some store billing itself as the world’s greatest archive of the Golden Age of Cinema. The invoice was dated a week or so earlier, and she’d paid a fortune for courier delivery—more than the cost of the tape. He could hear Enya down the hallway finishing up on her call. He slipped the invoice back in the box with the tape and closed the cupboard door.

  Cat and Canary.

  It was such a random thing. He’d mentioned it in their conversation by the pond. And it wasn’t a lie. Declan had said it. Or something like that. She must have researched the phrase online and zeroed in on this Stone Age movie.

  But why?

  He was back on the sofa fiddling with his phone when Enya marched into the room, reeling off sentences peppered with obscure IT jargon and familiar Anglo-Saxon expletives.

  “Forgive me, CJ, but part of my job is to babysit men who get paid as much as me—and sometimes more—for knowing half as much. It grieves me to bail them out time and again.”

  “All forgiven,” he said, papering over his suspicious thoughts with a jolly tone.

  “You want a coffee?”

  CJ nodded and they went into the kitchen, where he left her at an espresso machine and went in search of a bathroom.

  All the doors off the hallway were open—all except one, a door by the entrance with a key in the lock. It looked like it might be a closet or a cloakroom. CJ turned the key and peeked inside. It was a room alright. But only just. Sized like a walk-around closet. A room sitting in half-light behind shades, a room humming quietly to itself.

  CJ slipped inside.

  The source of the humming was a cabinet in the corner of the room. It was glass-fronted and temperature-controlled like the gourmet wine rack. But this one stored a different kind of treasure—industrial-strength computers, heavy-duty geek hardware, slabs of metal with winking lights, the kind of special computers they use to run the internet.

  He slunk out, securing the door at his back with the key. The next room was an office, or at least thinking about being an office. It was partially furnished in oddly contrasting styles as though someone had started with one design concept and abandoned it for another before giving up undecided. The centerpiece was an antique bureau, all dark veneers and gilt-bronze hardware, and sitting on its green leather top was a silver laptop, sleek and incongruous. The only other furniture was a steel-framed bookcase in battleship gray jammed up against the wall like a certificate of incompleteness, empty save for a seated Buddha smiling from the top shelf. Enya’s bedroom was the next stop on his tour. It was a snapshot of the other Enya, the one he hadn’t met yet. No tomboy iconography here. No gender-neutral nothing. This was a girl-cave gone crazy. Its bed was a patchwork of hand-crafted throws and rugs, its dressing-table landscaped with bottles and jars like a cosmetic Manhattan, and its nightstands stocked with Italian and French fashion magazines. It was a room apart from the rest, like a personal niche she’d carved in someone else’s apartment. Most likely Declan’s.

  When he got back to the lounge, Enya was curled up on the sofa cradling her coffee.

  “What are you going to do?” she said as he walked into the room.

  He sat a few feet away and supped his froth, wiping the excess off his upper lip with the back of his hand.

  “When?”

  “Now. After. Whenever.”

  He supped some more, wondering what he could tell her. They were bound at the hip, their fates spliced together by pain and loss. She had to be a part of his plans. No question. But how could they work through this whiff of mistrust that surrounded them?

  “You can stay here if you want,” she said casually like she was offering him another cup of coffee.

  “You’ve only got one bed.”

  “What are you—ten years old?”

  “That’s not it. I’m still a bit messed up…”

  “You mean the touch thing. We can work on that. You’ll be a bit out of practice. But all you need is a blue pill in your tank and a sympathetic woman to start your engine.”

  “Blue pill?” CJ slopped his coffee cup down on the table. “She told you about that too?”

  “Who? About what? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. A lot of young guys use Viagra these days.”

  CJ groaned. Now she thought he had ED on top of his other problems and no way to explain the misunderstanding without sounding like an idiot. He grabbed a tissue from a box on the table and mopped up the spilled coffee.

  “Not that blue pill… it’s complicated. I need time.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Let’s talk about the elephant over there.”
CJ nodded at the corner of the room.

  Enya glanced that way before looking back at him and cranking up a stare.

  “The timeline? Declan?”

  CJ nodded. “I agree with you. It couldn’t have been anyone in the Iraqi administration.”

  “Have you checked Tratfors’ website lately?”

  The answer was yes. He’d spent hours poring over it, but he’d ended up with more questions than answers. He picked up his phone and fingered his way to their site.

  “What is A Geo-Political Defense Platform?” he said.

  “It means that if you’re a megabucks corporation or some government agency and you want to screw some foreign government or maybe a competitor’s business, then type out a number and a string of zeros on their checkout page and they’ll take care of it for you.”

  “In my day, they were just a guns-for-hire outfit.”

  “They moved on. At first it was black bag stuff for government agencies that needed deniability. But my brother introduced them to the digital universe. He showed them how easy it was to compromise people online, to set them up and fake things.”

  “I thought he was Mr. Nice Guy.”

  “It’s not like it sounds. It was an adventure for him, a challenge. But then it became an addiction.”

  “I don’t get it. NSA, GCHQ. They don’t need Tratfors for that stuff. They’ve got plenty of hackers on the payroll.”

  “They do now. Weaponized digital tradecraft is a career path in the intelligence community. But back then it was different. The geeks knew their place. They were snoops and codebreakers. Declan was way ahead of them all. He was brilliant. They all wanted him. I had to bang down the door to get into Trinity College. But he got an invitation from MIT and a plane ticket.”

  “So how did he tie up with Tratfors?”

  “He wanted travel and adventure. They offered him both. No rule book. And money? George Bush wrote a check for eighty-five billion dollars for the new Iraq. And that was just the down payment. There were suitcases stuffed with it.”

  “I know. I delivered plenty of them.”

  “Then you’ll understand how they seduced him. Armed guards. Private planes. Luxury hotels. Secret missions. Two-thousand-dollar-a-night hookers. Is two enough for you, Mr. O’Brien? It was the ultimate video game. Spooks and warriors. Heroes and villains. And real bodies to keep the score.”

  “You make him sound like a monster.”

  “He was never evil, just naive.”

  “If he was so useful, then why set him up and get him killed?”

  “I was hoping you could help me find out.”

  “How?”

  “Why don’t you ask Tratfors for a desk job? Something where you get a computer on their network.”

  “So you can hack their servers?”

  She shrugged. “Can you think of something better?”

  “What I think is that you lied to me about that memory card they found.”

  “I did not.”

  “Come on. You were twins. When he started a sentence, I’d finish it. That’s what you said.”

  “You think I’m lying?”

  He thought back to their conversation by the pond. She had been so interested in what her brother had to say about that card. If she knew what was on it, then that didn’t make sense.

  “Maybe not,” he said.

  “Then what about my plan?”

  “We’ll see. I fixed up a lunch date with my old pal Masterson tomorrow. He was running our unit back then.”

  “So ask him for a job.”

  “I want to hear what he has to say first.”

  “That’s a pathetic plan.”

  “What do you expect? He’s going to confess over a pint of beer and a plowman’s lunch? So what happens then? I kill him with the cheese knife?”

  “I didn’t say anything about killing anybody.”

  “But you agree that there’s something dirty here, and someone at Tratfors or one of their clients knows what. And you’re asking me to find out who and why. But what do we do then? That’s a question that needs an answer, or there’s no point in looking.”

  “So you agree to help me at least?”

  She was skipping his question, so he ignored hers.

  “We could always rate them on a guiltometer,” he said. “Eight to ten, we kill them. Four to seven, a maiming. Two or three, a beating. One or less, we show mercy and let them off with some harsh rhetoric.”

  “You’re just taking the piss now. I can help you. Don’t you see that? Like tomorrow. I can fix you up with a wire and a hidden camera.”

  “Jesus.” He did a double take. “A wire? It’s old chums having a chat. A nice pub lunch. No maiming. No killing. And no wires. Just a few loaded questions slipped in amongst all that fuzzy warmth.”

  “Well, good luck with that, darling.” She grabbed her keys and stood up. “We’d better go and clean up that flat of yours. I’ve got work tomorrow.”

  Seven

  It had all the makings of a good day. The sun was out, and two old comrades were in Canbury Gardens on the south bank of the River Thames downstream from Kingston Bridge. They were sitting at a table on the pub terrace overlooking the river with two pints of ale in front of them. There were war stories to tell, tales of battles won and brothers and sisters lost. There’d be truth to bend and lies to paper over. But here at least, in this oh-so-British setting, it could all be done in a civilized fashion. That was the plan anyway, and CJ needed to act his part. He had to find out who and where their fateful-day assignment had come from. But something about Masterson was all wrong, and it was grinding him up the wrong way. He’d always been a condescending prick, but now he was creepy too. CJ could feel his crafty sidelong glances measuring him like calipers whenever he looked aside. Here was a guy with something on his mind, and it wasn’t the pie and mash on the lunch menu.

  “Good to be back, eh?” Masterson proposed a toast, raising his tall glass. CJ nudged it with his cheery-looking tankard before chugging away. “So what’s next? That place you bought in Acton must be worth a fortune now.”

  “Yeah… turned out to be hell of an investment strategy. Buy a flat in London. Then get banged up by terrorists and spend the best part of the decade as a vegetable.”

  Masterson chortled. “Same old CJ, eh? Still got your sense of humor. That’s wonderful.”

  CJ’s eyes drifted down to the river, where a crew of schoolgirls was sculling past the island at its center, but his mind was on Masterson and those sidelong glances licking his face like a snake’s tongue.

  “By the way…” Masterson leaned across the table, something confidential coming. “I made damn sure they kept paying your salary every day you were taken. Five hundred a day. The bastards wanted to put it in escrow in case you came back in a bag. I went to bat for you on that one. It’s all in your account.”

  “Thanks, Phillip.”

  “No need for thanks. There’s more to watching a guy’s back than taking care of him in the field.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “And you got a clean bill of health from the hospital, I take it?”

  “Squeaky clean. As my old buddy Alex would say.”

  “God. Alex. I’m so sorry about that. We were all close. But you two were like brothers.”

  CJ swung his chair around and read the daily specials scribbled up on a board.

  Masterson said, “What are you planning to do with your life now?”

  CJ shrugged. “I was thinking about going to California. Alex has family there. He died like a hero. They need to know that.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I heard Tratfors moved their HQ there. Maybe I could look in on them.”

  “They’d be delighted. I called Preston yesterday and told him we were meeting. We were wondering if you’d consider coming back into the firm.”

  That was an offer right out of Enya’s dream scenario, but CJ had other plans.

  “I don’t know…”


  “Hear me out. We’re not talking about picking up a gun. Alex is not the only hero. You ripped apart a room of Al-Qaeda thugs with your bare hands. And what about that incredible video? It was all over the web. You must have seen it already. Running through bombed-out streets with Alex’s head in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other. It scared the shit out of the locals. They even made a poster. It was all over the world. Artists. Graffiti. The Yanks loved it. Alex was in the Corps. You know what those boys are like. Semper fidelis and all that crap. Believe me, you’ll never need beer money anywhere close to a US Marine.”

  “So that qualifies me for a job with Tratfors?”

  “You’re the bionic man. You came back from the dead. You’re courage, loyalty, strength. In a word—make that three—Tratfors’ new spokesperson.”

  CJ stared at him.

  “Me?”

  “When I say spokesperson, I don’t mean in ads on the telly. I mean you’ll be our closer. We’ll wheel you in to shake hands with the big shots. They’ll love it. You can tell them a few war stories. Drop a few buzzwords. We can teach you all that. Anomaly protection. Kill chain. Threat intelligence. Crap like that. They eat it up. And the money? I’m not talking about five hundred a day. I bought a bloody house in Virginia Water. Indoor swimming pool. Tennis court. A croquet lawn. I’ve got footballers next door and Silicon Valley types up the road. We grossed over a billion last year. And most of that ends up in our pockets.”

  “Who’s our?”

  “The big dogs… ruff, ruff.”

  “Kowalski?”

  “Sean, of course. He’s strategic director now. We’ve all got these fancy monikers. I’m director of operations, EMEA. How about that?”

  “Congratulations. And thanks for the offer.”

  “Promise me you’ll think about it. I don’t need an answer now. But it’s there…” He slapped the table. “You just pick it up when you’re ready.”

  CJ double-checked the chalked-up menu like he was a lot more interested in getting lunch on the table than picking up the offer.

  “What do you reckon?” he said. “Shepherd’s pie or steak and kidney?”