The Saint Of Baghdad

by Michael Woodman

  The phone?

  He’d been suspicious when she’d given it to him. That was serious money. But he’d checked it out for sneaky apps and adjusted all the privacy settings. It was clean. He was sure of it. But what else could explain Enya’s amazing sixth sense? He sat back at the table and used the laptop to research his phone’s operating system, ending up at a geek’s forum, where he found a list of the processes running on his phone when it was brand-new. Then he logged into his phone and downloaded a techie app that listed all active processes. So he ended up with two lists, the new phone list and his actual phone list. He swung his head back and forth between the laptop and the phone comparing the lists and looking for discrepancies. His phone had seven additional processes. He fetched a notepad from the kitchen drawer and scribbled their names with a pencil. Some were obvious. He’d installed a few apps, and some of the processes were named accordingly. He struck them off the list. There was just one process left and it didn’t take long to hunt down its origin. It belonged to a geolocation app that parents used to keep tabs on their kids. But that was puzzling. There was no such app on his phone. Enya must have stripped it down to its core functionality, then buried the code in his phone so that it was masquerading as something else or piggy-backing on some legitimate process.

  He left the table and stood at the window, looking down on the street. He’d always been wary of Enya. Too many questions. And too many convenient excuses. But now that wariness had a bedfellow. Respect. She was crafty and clever. But what did that make her? A useful ally or a grievous enemy?

  The darkness beyond the window had turned it into a mirror, and he could see his smiling face in it. A while ago, that might have been Alex’s face. But he hadn’t seen his old friend since that night in the cafeteria when he’d teetered on the edge of madness. Maybe Doctor Sam was right and some synapse had self-repaired, burying Alex’s ghost under scar tissue. Or maybe CJ had accepted the truth. He’d invited Alex to Iraq. There was no way around that. Had he purged his guilt that night by choosing the path of redemption through revenge? Or was all that medical stuff nonsense and the parapsychic theories he’d so readily dismissed closer to the truth? CJ had no answers and he didn’t need any. He had a certainty. Alex was still there. He could feel his presence. He was just invisible now, switched to stealth mode to keep CJ on the right side of insanity and avoid another Hollywood stunt like that coin fiasco. Death had transformed him into an ethereal wingman, feeding CJ with counsel and strength as he’d always done in life. CJ turned back from the window and looked at the empty armchair across the room.

  “We can do this, mate,” he said. “You and me. We’re going to find every last son of a bitch. And you know exactly what we’re going to do to them.”

  Nine

  He took a taxi. An old-fashioned black one. No Uber. No phone. And he got it the old-fashioned way, strutting along the street and flagging it with a screeching whistle. He wanted to chuck the phone. Chuck it at Enya, ideally. But he’d reined all that back. The phone was in his pocket. But it was off. And it was going to stay that way.

  He paid off the driver a few blocks from Sami’s place and walked the rest of the way, running a routine reconnaissance on the High Street and its neighborhood.

  Sami’s Kebab House.

  CJ slid under the scaffolding outside and tried the door.

  Locked.

  He peeked through the boarded windows and checked his watch. It was almost six. He was early. Stores were closing and sidewalks bustling. He meandered up the street and back along the other side, peering into shop windows, a tourist in his own country, comparing it all to the archived snapshot in his head. A betting shop, assorted franchises including a McDonald’s and a Starbucks, a dry cleaners, half a dozen charity shops and a convenience store. CJ idled inside the latter, reading the headlines on newspapers and magazines before picking out a bottle of red wine.

  Shopping done, CJ walked the street again and took a turn at the end of the block, finding an alleyway parallel to the High Street running behind the stores. He walked down it, checking the parking and loading areas behind each store. On the other side of the alley were the fences and walls of private homes. He stopped behind Sami’s place and looked up at the three-story brick building. The floors above the restaurant had windows with curtains and lights popping on behind them. Flats. Residential apartments with their own access door at the edge of the property. There was only one car parked in the parking area, a beat-up Volvo. CJ walked around it and approached the restaurant’s back door. It was half-open, like someone had just popped out to fetch supplies.

  He stopped.

  Something.

  He edged closer. It was Arabic music. A call to prayer. It was coming from inside. Strict Muslims pray five times a day. But that wasn’t Sami. Besides, if he was praying, he was spoiling dinner, because the smell of scorched lamb was unmissable. CJ looked through the doorway, where a hallway led to the kitchen. There was an office on one side and a storeroom with refrigerators on the other.

  “Sami?”

  CJ stepped inside and peeked into the office—a cluttered desk, a filing cabinet topped with a fan and a pile of papers. All that was there. But CJ saw none of it. All he saw was Alex. Not his ghost. Not a shimmering reflection in half-light. But the real thing. Alex alive. But not well. The star of the show. On his knees. A knife at his throat. It was a video playing on a computer screen. It was the video he had searched for and thankfully never found. He froze, unable to move his eyes from the screen, watching as Alex’s life hosed out of his throat with every beat of his heart. Then the picture danced. Walls, blackness, bursting light. CJ’s hands like claws. Hussein’s dead eyes as he keeled over. Bodies. Flashes of gunfire and smoke. Then Jahil rearing up, and his own ragged body charging him down.

  CJ stumbled back, twisting like a coil, arms curled in front of him, fists at his face, stifling his scream. He whirled around and punched the door, poking his fist clean through the plywood on both sides.

  He strode into the kitchen.

  Sami.

  It could only be him. He was sprawled on the floor, head and shoulders stuffed in an oven. CJ dragged him out. There were deep cuts all over him. Blood everywhere. He rolled him over. His throat was cut, but bloodless, the wound already sealed by the heat of the oven, his face a grid of black stripes branded by heat rings. CJ surveyed his own blood-strewn arms before looking up and catching the blinking light of a camera in the restaurant beyond the kitchen. Someone had swiveled it around to record the kitchen instead of the cash desk. He turned and ran out the back door.

  Here they come.

  No sirens. But the whine of turbo-diesels in a hurry was unmistakable above the background hum of dawdling traffic.

  Rapid response. Armed police.

  Whoever had set this up had made sure of that. They were just seconds away. He ran to the door leading up to the flats above. It was locked and stoutly made. He stepped back and came at it with a kick that blew out the lock and the hinges. Shards of wood poked out of the frame and the door rested like a ramp on the flight of stairs directly behind it. CJ scrambled over it onto the steps. He heaved the door back up and wedged it in the doorway. It wasn’t going to fool anyone for long. It might pass cursory inspection from a distance. But anyone closer than a few yards would see the trailing bits of wood. He skipped up the stairs to the top floor. There was just one door. It was flimsy, and he busted through it with a body check.

  Hallway, bathroom, bedroom, kitchen.

  They were all empty.

  In the living room, an old woman was sitting in an armchair watching TV. Her eyes flicked up at him and her hand jerked up protectively, its veins thick as bones.

  “Don’t worry. I’m harmless,” CJ said.

  Her eyes took him in, then went back to the TV, where a naked couple in a medieval room were having sex doggy style on a four-poster bed. CJ darted across the room to the window just as a BMW X5 skidded into the loading zone below an
d armed police poured out of it. He was planning to open the window and climb up on the roof. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the only one he could think of that didn’t involve jail time. It might work. He might get lucky. But the first part was tricky. Getting out of the window and up onto the roof. No way to do it without being totally exposed. And there had to be more cops. One car wasn’t enough. Overwhelming force. That was their motto. His instincts were telling him to wait. They’d find the busted door and be streaming up the steps soon enough, but first they’d get bogged down in the restaurant.

  He looked back at the old lady. She was draining a glass of sherry, her knobby hands shaking, her eyes still on the screen.

  “Sorry about the door, luv.” CJ pulled four fifties from his pocket and dropped them on the table next to her half-empty bottle.

  He checked back at the window. A Range Rover had joined the BMW, and more cops were disappearing into the restaurant. He slid open the window and crawled out onto the ledge. Both of the response vehicles were parked too close to the building for anyone inside them to be able to see him. Even so, he had seconds to get this right. He braced himself with his arms stretched out on the brickwork on either side as he figured out how to do this. His options were few in number and all of them bad, especially the most likely—ending up in a pile of busted bones on top of a cop car. He eyed the gutter above. It looked out of reach. And would it hold two hundred pounds? His guess was no. But there was only one way to find out. He turned around, shuffled his heels off the ledge and launched himself upwards. His fingers grabbed the gutter, but they slipped, and as he fell, they caught the ledge he’d been standing on.

  He looked down. Cop arms. Cop legs. He could see them right there in the car. He could hear their voices too. Some sort of report going down over a blessedly noisy radio link. He walked his legs one way on the wall, then kicked off and swung back the other way, casting himself loose and falling at an angle that gave him a shot at a drainpipe. He caught it with one hand, his knee cracking the wall beyond it and skidding down it until his fingers jammed against a flange bolt pegging it to the wall. He was feet from the cop car with more voices coming from inside the kitchen. He looped his hands behind the pipe and walked up the wall. The pipe held. And so did the gutter at the top as he levered himself up onto the tiled roof.

  He lay flat against it and peeked down at the yard below as two more cop cars pulled up. Patrol cars. The cop in the Range Rover went to each of them in turn and they headed off to block the alleyway at each end. But as he headed back to his vehicle, he noticed the busted door to the flats above. He went over for a closer look. They’d be inside in minutes and up in the old lady’s apartment. They’d check the roof for sure. But they’d need ladders, or a chopper or a drone. Or else they’d get access to a building with line of sight to the roof. It would take time. But not much. He crept on all fours, heading back to the side street he’d walked down to get to the alleyway. He lay flat when he got there, peeking over the edge, looking for a way down, but there was nothing. Not even a drainpipe. Just three stories of pure brick.

  Darkness was closing in and men and women were hurrying home on the nearby High Street. He scooted up the roof and hid between a chimney and a dish antenna, a big one. Most likely it was a community feed shared by all the flats in the block. It was a good spot to hide, invisible from all but close inspection. But neither the darkness nor his newfound hidey-hole was going to save him. He had to get off that roof. He was crouched with one hand on the dish, his eyes following the cable that ran from its base. It was molded to the roof in a rubber channel, then tacked to the end wall, where it disappeared into a hole in the brickwork.

  But where did it go from there?

  It had to run through the cavity wall and get terminated in some sort of single-cable distribution system. It looked like a regular coax cable. If so, there was nothing anchoring it except a few tacks and a bit of crimping at the other end. It might work as a buffer, like a poorly tethered rope, breaking his fall as he dropped down the side of the building. He shuffled back to the edge and surveyed the side road below. It was residential, parked cars and plane trees with an occasional pedestrian on their way home. CJ disconnected the cable and wrenched it free of the studs tacking it to the roof and down as far as the hole where it disappeared into the wall. Then he measured the distance from the hole to the ground with his eyeball ruler. The stretch of cable he’d pulled out looked good for some of it. He wrapped the end of the cable around his forearm and rolled off the edge. It all worked. Up to a point. But his eyeball ruler was spot-on. That point was not far enough down the wall. He checked the drop. He’d only made it about ten feet below the hole and that left a long way to go. He might not suffer the pain of the fall, but no one runs with broken legs. His eyes darted towards the pulsing cop lights at the end of the alley. The car was tucked around the corner and out of sight, but not by much. His only hope was the winter-bare branches of a nearby plane tree. If he could swing out far enough, he might be able to grab one of those on his way down. He kicked himself off the wall.

  Once. Twice.

  Then it happened.

  What exactly? He didn’t know. Something inside the building. Something breaking. Or something spectacular like a wired-up box whizzing across the room and slamming into a wall. On CJ’s end, it was a lot less dramatic. He just dropped fifteen feet in an instant.

  He looked down.

  That’s more like it.

  He let go of the cable, landing in a crouch and tumbling forward onto his hands. He pulled himself up and hurried away from the flashing lights and buzzing radio in the alleyway and stepped out onto the High Street. He’d made it. And no one even stopped to stare or shoot a video. A man hanging by a cable off the side of a building. But passersby on the High Street never glanced his way as they crossed the quiet side street. They were all wearing blinders and had more important things on their minds. Home, the pub, the kids. Some important him or her. London was changing shifts and CJ walked invisible through the crack between work-hell and home-sanctuary.

  He crossed the High Street, slipped into McDonald’s and went to the bathroom. He washed Sami’s blood from his hands and arms and his own blood from his knee where he’d cracked it against the wall, cleaning it all up through the hole in his now-fashionably-ripped jeans. He looked in the mirror to inspect his handiwork. Awful. He looked like the loser of a gang fight in an abattoir. He hid in one of the cubicles and locked the door. He had started the day looking for a murderer. Now he was one, according to the police—or at least he soon would be. So where was he going to go? He was trapped in a McDonald’s toilet, his Acton flat a no-go zone, totally out of options.

  Except…

  Wonder Woman.

  He pulled out his phone and turned it on. He had to contact Enya and explain the seriousness of the situation. He needed rescuing. No questions. No debate. She had to drop everything and fly. Beyond that, he wanted to tell her the truth. That he’d found the bug on his phone and that he was pissed off about it. That was a lot of explaining and he couldn’t risk a long conversation sitting on a McDonald’s toilet with needy diners popping in and out to relieve themselves. Besides, CJ was into cryptic. He gave it a moment’s thought, then squeezed it all into three words.

  Find me. Bitch!

  There was no way she could resist an intriguing summons like that, and he could count on her overactive intelligence to fill in all the necessary blanks. He dropped the phone in the trash on his way out, then crossed the road and picked up a newspaper. Time to kill. He bought a latte and a croissant in Starbucks and hid behind his newspaper, dunking his croissant and chewing on it thoughtfully, his eyes on the Golden Arches across the street.

  Ten

  She was outside McDonald’s, pretending to read a poster promoting their specials. But what she was really doing was checking out the diners inside. CJ scooped her off the window, kissed her, and marched her away from the patrol car sitting across the street
in front of Sami’s restaurant. It was theatrical, over the top. That was the way he planned it. She had to get the message. They were a couple meeting after work and heading for the pub.

  “Where’s the car?”

  She picked up the urgency in his voice and flicked her head, and they turned into a side street, his arm around her sweeping her onward. It would all be on CCTV and it would all get sifted out in the days ahead. But the cops wouldn’t know who they were looking for yet. Not unless they’d been told by whoever had tipped them off, and that was unlikely as it would stink of a setup. So he was still a person or persons unknown for the next twenty-four hours at least, maybe forty-eight. CSI technicians in white suits would already be hoovering up his DNA. And the restaurant’s CCTV system would soon be coughing out his likeness. If that recording was complete, it would show his entry into the kitchen and his discovery of the body and it would exonerate him. But whoever had set this up would have accounted for that. No doubt the footage would be damaged, with only a few grainy images surviving, like a shot of him standing over Sami’s body, dripping with his blood. Add that to his DNA, his medical record, and Masterson’s lying through his teeth under oath in his best officer-and-gentleman accent, and he’d be convicted in a blink.

  He waited until Enya was inside the car before slipping into the passenger seat. The side street was empty. Rows of cars parked curbside in front of two-story houses. They drove off in silence, Enya punctuating her gear shifts and wheel turns with sidelong glances at CJ. She drove south and picked up the Westway, where they got snarled in traffic, shunting along, their silence weightier by the minute until Enya burst it with an avalanche of words.

  “It’s not like you think. I apologize. I shouldn’t have done it. I know that. But it was for your own good. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”