The Saint Of Baghdad

by Michael Woodman

CJ kept his eyes on the road like he was too disgusted to look at her and made no reply.

  She worked the gearstick and rolled them along a little further, measuring him with constant looks.

  “It was completely wrong of me. I’m ashamed.” She waited, then said, “Are you going to tell me what happened back there?”

  “Just drive.”

  “Where?”

  “One of those hypermarkets that sells phones.”

  “And then?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t know.

  “The cops back there,” she said. “Was that to do with you?” He said nothing. “The interpreter, that’s his place, right?”

  “Drop me at the market. You can head on your way then.”

  “What am I? A taxi service? I apologized. A gentleman would accept it and move on. I made a mistake. I’m trying to make up for it. I’ve got a place no one knows about. You could stay there.”

  “Just find a market.”

  She nodded as though that was the end of the debate, but he knew it wasn’t. When they escaped the traffic, she headed south across the river and pulled into a Tesco, parking in its huge lot lit with sodium lamps. As she cut the engine, she noticed the stains on his jeans and jacket.

  “God Almighty.” They were black in the orange glow of the lights. But she didn’t need a color palette to work out what they were. “Is he dead?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  She took a while to process it all, staring out across floodlit concrete.

  “Maybe I should leave you here and go like you said.”

  “He was dead already. And there was this video playing on a computer. Alex getting beheaded.”

  Her eyes widened, whites flashing in the eerie light.

  “That’s it. It has to be Tratfors or their spook cronies. Who else would have that video? It never went out on the web. Propaganda killings like that get canned and streamed later. They would never risk streaming it live. It’s too easy to trace. And you killed all the terrorists.”

  “Unless Sami was part of it?”

  “You think he was?”

  He shook his head. “Someone put that on his computer.”

  “Tratfors could fix that in their sleep.”

  “They’re not the only ones.”

  “You mean Ashford?”

  “I was thinking more about someone else.” He turned towards her. “Someone who could hack a phone with a find-me app without leaving any trace.”

  Thwack.

  He took it on the jaw. It was that fast and no way to stop it. He parried her second shot. But she landed the third—a good one—a stabby punch to the soft ribs that she drove home with a grunt.

  “You disgusting bastard.” She reared up over him, gulping mouthfuls of air, her face contorted with rage. “Get out of my car, or I’ll call the police.”

  But CJ stayed put.

  She’d passed the test with straight As.

  He waited until she slid back down in her seat and resumed nose breathing before he continued.

  “The prosecutor will argue that Sami was implicated in the hostage taking. There’s a case for that and the video proves it. They’ll say I tortured him, and I got to the truth along with the video. I watched it and freaked out. So I stuck him with a knife a few hundred times. Exhibit A. The CCTV image of a bloodstained maniac standing over the butchered body. Exhibit B. My medical record. Early discharge from hospital. PTSD. Talking to ghosts. They won’t jail me. They’ll pity me. I’ll get sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Whoever set this up would be well pleased with that. I’ll be certified crazy. It’s better than dead. Who’s going to believe anything I say?” CJ looked around the car park. He went to get out, but she grabbed his arm and stopped him.

  “I believe you,” she said.

  They stared at each other, letting their eyes do the talking until she let go of his arm. “You better grab some new clothes at the same time,” she said. “And don’t be too long.”

  With CJ’s new wardrobe sitting on the backseat and two new phones in his pocket, they pulled out of the parking lot.

  “So where are we going?” CJ said.

  “Do you trust me?”

  That was a black-and-white question worth ducking. The answer was gray. But he’d already collected Enya’s knuckle print on one side of his face and was not anxious to decorate the other.

  “Sure I do.”

  Enya smiled and headed west to Surbiton, where she pulled into an underground parking entrance off a narrow side street and waited for an electric gate to roll up.

  “My secret hideaway,” she said. “It was my first buy-to-let, but after some tenants trashed it, I signed up for that BnB thing and made it a holiday rental.” She drove down the ramp and parked. “No one’s going to look for us here. It’s owned by my other company. The offshore one. And I’m not even a director of that. I use a nominee. Some lawyer in Belize.”

  “Jesus…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  She cut the engine and pecked his bruised cheek. “I’m a resourceful woman.”

  CJ nodded. That was unarguable. But Colby’s word was motivated, and his was sneaky. In the end, all three of them were right, and the sum total of their wordage was dangerous.

  They left the parking lot through a PIN-locked door, took the elevator to the fifth floor and entered an apartment with rooftop views. CJ scouted its spacious living area and open-plan kitchen, adjusting the blinds and checking a locked door that led out onto a balcony running alongside the bedrooms.

  Enya went to the wine rack, a folding concertina of wood on the breakfast counter and picked a bottle.

  “I give them some starter booze. They’re on holiday after all.” She pulled the cork and found two jumbo-sized glasses in a cupboard.

  “You’ll be needing this.” She gave him the glass. “It’s not going to win any gold medals, but it’s made from grapes at least.” They touched glasses and drank. “You’d better clean yourself up before you sit anywhere. You can use the guest bathroom off the hallway. There’s a man-size bathrobe in the second bedroom. I’ll stick these things”—she waved a hand at his torn jeans and bloodied shirt—“in the trash.”

  CJ stripped down to his pants.

  “Masterson led me to Sami like a pig with a ring in its nose. You should have seen the performance he put on. And I was fool enough to get suckered.” He handed over the pile of clothes. “Find out where he lives.”

  “For what? So I can be an accessory to murder?”

  “I didn’t kill Sami. I told you.”

  “And I believe you. But I think you’ll kill Masterson.”

  “I need him alive and talking.”

  “To tell you what?”

  “Who’s pulling his chain and why.”

  “And you think he’ll tell you?”

  “One way or another.”

  CJ disappeared into the bathroom with his wine, emerging twenty minutes later wearing a blue bathrobe and carrying an empty glass. Enya was slouched against the wing of an armchair, fingering a tablet computer, her legs curled underneath her. CJ fetched the wine bottle, topped up their glasses, and lay full-length on the sofa opposite with his head propped up on cushions and the glass perched on his belly. The TV news was on, the soundtrack muted. He read the headlines scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

  Incident in North London. May be terror-related.

  “No one mentioned your name.” Enya looked up from the computer. “No mugshots. Most wanted. That kind of stuff. Just the usual. Nothing for the public to worry about, etc.”

  “Did you get the address?”

  She nodded, still looking at her tablet and swiping through pages. “It’s a beautiful property.”

  “You got pictures?”

  “I’ve got the floor plan too. It’s still up on the website of the estate agents he bought it from. Six million, they were asking.”

  She joined him on the sofa and they work
ed through the photos of Masterson’s estate until she stopped at one of its imposing facade.

  “Look at that,” she said. “The beautiful things that only blood can buy.”

  He put his arm around her and hugged her. She let him do it, her body limp in his arms, her face tender.

  “Maybe we should run away and forget it all,” she said. “I hear tell that Venezuela is a garden spot for fugitives.”

  “You’re not a fugitive.”

  “I will be if I hang around you long enough.”

  “Masterson is a bit player.” CJ waved at the luxury home. “All this is just luck. He was the right man with the right connections. In Iraq, he was running a couple of units like ours. But as Tratfors grew, they needed a British face with connections. Someone plugged into the old boy network who could get them into UK boardrooms and be a credible front for military and intelligence contacts. Someone they could trust to sell his own mother for the right price. They took one look at Masterson and said, ‘That’s our boy.’”

  “You’ll never get away with it. Turning up at this place and threatening him. You’ll end up dead or in jail.”

  “No way. I’m going to do it by the book.”

  “What book?”

  “The special forces playbook. Keep it simple. Stack advantages. And let the target dictate the weapon.”

  “So what’s your weapon?”

  “Look at the target.” He nodded at the tablet where Enya was swiping through images of Masterson’s country estate. “What does that tell you?”

  “That he’s probably got private security only a push button away and a shotgun or two locked in a gun cabinet.”

  CJ nodded. She was most likely right about all that, but none of it mattered.

  “The weapon is fear. Look what he has to lose. Would you risk losing that—along with your trophy wife and daughter?”

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “You flatter me. Compared to him, I’m an amateur.”

  CJ left it there, stretching out on the sofa as Enya shut down the tablet. Minutes later they were snuggled up against each other, limbs entangled, fast asleep.

  Eleven

  Virginia Water it wasn’t. Or maybe just in the wishful thinking of Philip Masterson. But it was close enough and still way upmarket, a neighborhood with estates big enough to have sidebar houses for the live-in staff and swimming pools and tennis courts. It was part of that swath of rolling green flecked with cute villages and quaint towns that hung off South London like a fancy scarf. Masterson’s house was on its rural edge, where orderly roads and manicured hedgerows gave way to winding lanes edged with brambles, ditches and high walls. That was a gift. There was no neighborhood management with private security.

  They pulled up onto a grassy verge and cut the engine.

  “Recon.” CJ waited for her to nod before getting out of the car. He stood a moment, scanning the wall and the trees above it. No cameras. The front gate was festooned with them and so was the house. But with so many trees and bushes, they’d be useless on the perimeter wall.

  He jumped the ditch and cleared his way through the hedgerow. There was a gap between the hedges and the wall big enough to squeeze through. So he made his way along it, brushing aside branches that closed out the gap. He was looking for a way over the wall. It was ten feet high or better, and he wanted a leg up from one of the hedges at a spot where his entrance would be hidden by trees. But then he got lucky. A disused door. It must have been a side entrance a long time ago. It was boarded up, invisible from the street behind the hedgerow. He checked the boards. Rotten. And the nails were all rusted. He leaned against it, pinning his ear to its peeling paint and closing his eyes to concentrate on sound.

  Cars on nearby streets. Birds, insects. A distant train. A jet biding its time waiting for a runway at Heathrow. He channeled them all, sifting. Then he had it. Muffled voices. Not far away. He focused tighter, closing out sound channels one by one. And as he did so, the voices got louder. Masterson and a child. A girl. Ophelia. The birthday girl. They were playing croquet. Ophelia was angry because the ball wasn’t going where she wanted it to go. Masterson was calming her down.

  Another voice.

  A woman. Strident. Distant. On the terrace, perhaps, with the wings of the house gathering the sound up and projecting it out across the lawns. Mrs. Masterson was calling time. Ophelia had a cello lesson and her mother planned to drop her off on her way to the manicurist. Fifteen minutes. That was all they had left to play. There was mostly silence after that. Father and daughter. Happy days. The dull thud of wood on wood. And that special sound. A young girl’s laughter. Warm and innocent. CJ was running the scene in his mind’s eye, intercut with another movie. His movie. Iraq. The blood, the death. The stink of it. Enya was right. This was the flip side of his movie. The innocence of Ophelia. Private school. A gap year doing something worthy before heading to Oxford. A career? Take your pick. Then she’d meet someone called Piers or Sebastian who did something in the city and buy a house like this.

  CJ charged back along the wall to the car. He jerked open the door and fell into the seat beside Enya.

  “You look like shit,” she said. “What happened?”

  CJ wiped his face and dusted the leaves off his clothes.

  “We’re good.” He took out his two phones. “I’m going to record a call—one side of it. And when I text you, you have to call Masterson and play it back to him. Got it?”

  She nodded, and he set to work, staging the dialog with suitable pauses.

  Relaxed, like it was a routine call.

  “Hello, Phillip.”

  Tight and tense.

  “You set me up.”

  Angry, vengeful.

  “Sami was cut to pieces. Burned like a steak.”

  Loud, losing it.

  “I know it was you, Phillip. You set me up just like you did in Iraq.”

  Cold and resolute.

  “I’m going to find you. And peel your skin.”

  He gave Enya the phone.

  “Note to self,” she said as she took it. “Don’t piss him off.”

  He opened the car door. “I need to get the jack handle.” He was halfway out when she said, “Run-flat tires. No spare. No jack handle.”

  He slumped back on the seat.

  “Maybe this’ll help?” She took a plastic bag from the pocket in the door and handed it to him. It was green, with the word Harrods written on it in gold letters, and it was furled around something heavy. He unrolled the bag and took out a cheap ballpoint, a scrap of paper, and a roughneck bar with a curved chisel on one end and a pointed hammer on the other. He looked at her, waiting for an explanation.

  “In case I have an accident and need a pen and paper to note down the other driver’s details.”

  “And this?” He hefted the roughneck bar.

  “Other drivers can be disagreeable at such moments.”

  He nodded—not much else to say about that—and got out of the car.

  “What’s it for?” she called after him.

  He closed the door and leaned on it, talking to her through the open window.

  “It’s for breaking and entering.”

  “So long as it’s not for breaking his skull. It’s got my prints and DNA all over it.”

  CJ reassured her with a nod and made his way back along the wall to the door, where he levered the rusty nails out with no difficulty. He jammed the point of the pry bar between the door and its frame and levered against it. He wasn’t expecting it to be difficult, but it was even easier than he’d hoped. The door splintered around the lock. He stamped down the overgrowth of grass and forced the door open wide enough to squeeze through. He cleared a way through the shrubs beyond it and peered at the house, where Masterson’s wife was walking on the terrace. She was holding the hand of Ophelia, whose blond hair bounced and trailed behind her as she hopped and skipped to keep up with her mother. They stopped at a set of French doors and turned back to Masterson. He wa
s standing on the lawn with two croquet sticks held in one hand. The mother bent down and spoke to the girl, who waved to her father and blew him a kiss. Then they were gone.

  CJ watched Masterson as he walked around the lawn, straightening croquet stumps, and he heard a car start and the clang of electric gates. Masterson disappeared into a white shed at the end of the lawn with the croquet sticks and ball and emerged empty-handed. CJ tracked his progress back to the house, working his way along the wall hidden by bushes and picking an ambush spot behind a utility shed next to the path. He sent Enya the text. Masterson stopped a few moments later and pulled a phone out of his pocket.

  “CJ! … What? I did no such thing. … Oh my God, poor Sami. I saw something on the news, but… Steady on. You have no right to… Shit…”

  He stood looking at the phone before setting off back to the house and stopping midstride.

  CJ was standing right in front of him.

  No words. No dear-old-chum stuff. Just a single hop and CJ’s sidekick hit Masterson in the chest. He flew back, his phone skittering off into the rose garden and his foot catching on the curb lining the path. He tumbled, rolling back onto the lawn. CJ fetched the phone from the rose garden before attending to Masterson, who was on his back, his mouth opening and closing like a feeding fish.

  CJ bent over him.

  “Can’t breathe, eh? Try thinking about something else.”

  CJ grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him across the lawn, scraping him over the curb so his head crunched on the path. That got him breathing again—a starter shriek followed by gasping and groaning.

  CJ dragged him into the shed and slammed the door.

  On one side, it was a gardener’s world—mowers, clippers and blades, and cupboards stocked with herbicides and pesticides. On the other, it was a DIY shop with jars hanging underneath shelves full of screws and nails and carpentry tools arrayed on the wall above a workbench. CJ sat Masterson on a chair and tied his wrists to its arms with gardener’s rope—thin plastic stuff with a braided metal core.

  “Lovely workshop.” CJ poked around. “Premium tools.” He picked up a chisel and checked its edge. “German. Very nice.” He set it aside, dragged a sawhorse in front of Masterson’s chair, straddled it and pulled out his captive’s phone. “PINs and passwords. You can’t do anything these days without a bloody PIN.” He grabbed Masterson’s thumb, stuck it on the Start button and logged in. “I see you’ve got one of those encrypted messaging apps. Me too.” He looked up. “But you really should put an expiration date on the messages. That way, incriminating stuff disappears. For example, this exchange between you and Kowalski after we had that chummy lunch by the river.”