Masterson’s chest was heaving, and pink foam was oozing out of his mouth. “It’s not…” More chest heaving, still not ready for whole sentences.
“What it looks like?” CJ finished for him. “This bit, you mean? I told you to fix the bastard while he was out on his back.”
“It was a trust fund. I was supposed to set it up for you. But I didn’t. That’s why I offered you the job.”
CJ shook his head, incredulous. “If that’s your best lie, you are way up the creek. So who did Sami?”
“God knows. That must have been some robbery gone wrong. The kids are all on drugs now. Crazies.”
CJ went back to the phone, but he was locked out already.
“What’s the PIN?”
“CJ, this has gone far enough. Cut these ropes. We’ll shake hands. No real harm done. Nothing a glass of malt won’t sort out.”
“Come on, Phillip. This thumb stuff is a drag.”
“Don’t push your luck, CJ. I know you’ve got problems. But this situation is recoverable. I owe you that.”
CJ stared at him. No more heaving chest. Now it was all puffed up with indignation, his red face shining with it. That was Phillip Masterson. He was tied in a chair with the shit kicked out of him, but he was still giving orders. CJ slid off the sawhorse and poked around the gardening tools.
“This takes me back.” He picked up a chainsaw and yanked on the starter cord. The motor spun but didn’t fire. He tried again. Nothing. “I saw a guy get his arm cut off with one of these.” He shook it next to his ear to check for fuel. Then he pulled on the cord again, harder this time, and it fired. But as he eased it next to Masterson’s arm, it stopped. “Damn.” He put it on the bench and hunted in cupboards. “Say, Phillip, can you help a guy out here? I’m looking for some fuel.”
“Screw it up your arse.”
CJ turned back towards him. The conversation had evidently moved on. Masterson had shifted gears. No more whining and cajoling, pleading and persuading. He’d done a racing change and zoomed up into threatening.
“I take it the spokesperson job is off the table?”
“You are so going to regret this.”
CJ went back to the cupboards and pulled out a fuel container.
“Found it.” He shook the can. “Not too much, though.” He poured it into the chainsaw tank. “He was a friend of mine too. That guy whose arm they cut off. Columbian bastards.” He yanked the starter, but it didn’t fire. “We were in Florida. Some goddamn motel bathroom.” He grabbed the cord again, then stopped. “No. Wait. That wasn’t me. That was Scarface. I’ve never even been to Florida.” Masterson looked up at him, terror draining his hubris, his puffed-up chest a thing of the past. “I must be getting better. Months ago I’d never have figured that out. It’s one of my issues. Like inappropriate behavior.” He pulled the cord and it fired. “The truth is that I have no personal experience of cutting off arms with a chainsaw. I’m just an amateur. But I watched that movie so many times, I feel like I’m fully trained.”
He lowered the screaming chainsaw halfway down Masterson’s upper arm and eased it closer, with Masterson skewing his head like a barn owl to track the action. Contact. But not too much. Blood sprayed in a fine mist and Masterson howled. Then the chainsaw stopped and so did the howling. CJ shook it again against his ear. There was plenty of fuel in it.
“Must be some kind of blockage.” He tried again, but it wouldn’t start. “I’m crap with machines. Alex was magic. The engine whisperer, we used to call him. Anything that ate fuel loved that guy.” He dropped the chainsaw back with the other gardening tools and searched a wall of blades and shears.
“You cut me.” Masterson bawled it out, catching up on recent events in a single horrified moment. “Look at this blood.”
“We could have done this nicely. I asked you for the PIN.”
“You’d have done it anyway.”
“You set us up in Iraq.”
“I just passed on the damn message.”
“Just following orders. The old Nuremberg defense. It didn’t work for the Nazis and it’s not going to work for you.”
He pulled a curved blade from the top shelf. “Beautiful.” He passed the kukri from one hand to the other, checking its balance. “Your average wanker would treat a blade like this as something special and mount it on the wall in his house. But in Nepal, these are just garden tools. So you keep it in the garden shed where it belongs. That’s real classy.”
He went back to Masterson and sat astride the sawhorse.
“Last chance saloon.” He grabbed Masterson’s hand, catching the thumb over the arm of the chair. “I need your PIN. Or your thumb.”
“Enough damn theater. I get it. You’re angry. A lot of bad things happened to you, and now Sami is dead. But think of it. That video. It’s got to be MI6. Who else would have that?”
“I didn’t mention the video.”
“You did. You’re getting mixed up again. Like that movie thing.” CJ wondered about that. But no. His mind had glitches, certain cogs that wobbled and turned out random results. But simple recall wasn’t an issue. He could remember every word that had passed between them, and none of them was video. In his desperation, Masterson had blundered. He’d confessed by implication, and explaining it away by blaming CJ’s mental state was a weasel hole he was never going to escape through. “It wasn’t me in Iraq. I was just running a few units. I never got down in the weeds on all that stuff. It was Kowalski and Preston. They made all the deals.”
“PIN or thumb?” CJ lifted the kukri.
“CJ, I’m worried about you. I truly am. Just back off. We can sort this arm with a few stitches. No real harm done. But you need help, my friend.”
“Isn’t that just like old comrades? Your situation is not rosy. That chainsaw rip in your arm could get infected, and you’re tied in a chair being terrorized by an individual of dubious sanity. But you’re not worried about that. You don’t give a damn about yourself. Your only thought is about me. Your old mate. That’s real goose bumps stuff. And it’s the same for me. Some of my brain scans break the machine, and I talk to the dead. But I don’t give a damn about that. About myself. All I can think about is you, and how the hell you’re going to play croquet with Ophelia with only one thumb.”
It hung there. The image.
Then it dropped. The kukri.
And Phillip Masterson’s thumb popped off and fell in his lap. He opened his mouth. But no scream came out. That was because he was sucking instead of blowing, and vocal cords don’t work backwards. His eyes were getting it all wrong too. They were looking at CJ instead of the bizarrely inappropriate thumbs-up signal he was getting from his thumb which was caught in the ruck of his pants zipper.
“Two options.” CJ leaned forward, getting in his face. “I walk out of here and your wife finds you like this. Not a happy moment. Or even worse, Ophelia comes looking for you. Now that’s a thought that makes me sad. On the other hand, you could tell me the PIN. I’ll cut you loose. You grab your thumb and stick it in your pocket, then scurry on back to the house. You call an ambulance on the landline. Better use your other hand for that. Thirty minutes from now, you’re in hospital and surgeons are sewing your thumb back on. You get to tell your wife you’re a klutz and you’re never going to touch another gardening tool. Next summer you’ll be back on the croquet lawn. Ophelia’s hero.”
“Eight-five-six-two.”
CJ input the numbers. They worked. Only one thing left. Masterson. How to finish this?
CJ crouched in front of him.
“CJ, please…”
CJ pointed the kukri at him. “We were eyeball to eyeball. Alex and me. Right up to the end. You sent us into that. You knew. And now there’s Sami. What are you guys protecting?”
“Rumbleby.”
“Who’s he?”
“I don’t know. I swear.” His head rolled and he wailed.
CJ watched him, his eyes tracking down from his tears to the stream of b
lood pooling on the floor.
“What should we do with him, Alex?” CJ called it back over his shoulder. Masterson snapped to attention, gawking down at the thumb in his lap, then back at CJ. “That’s right, pal. Alex is here with us right now. He’s always with me. He’s deciding if you’re going to live or die. I’m waiting to deliver the sentence. I know I said you could live. Have your thumb sewn back on. But I’m a goddamn liar. Ophelia can survive without croquet. And without a dad. I never had one, and look how well I turned out.”
Masterson howled as CJ raised the kukri and slammed it down, slicing the rope and shaving the hairs from Masterson’s wrist. The army man swallowed his howls with a gasp and snatched his thumb from his lap. CJ snipped the rope on the other side and was at the door when he turned around.
“Phillip…”
Masterson looked up. He was holding his injured hand under his chin and putting his thumb into his pocket with his other hand.
CJ hurled the kukri, its curved blade scything past Masterson as he dived for the floor. It nailed into the back of the chair and sent it rolling back to the wall.
“Tell Kowalski. We’re coming.”
Twelve
“No blood.” CJ held out the pry bar, but Enya ignored it. She was looking at his jacket, his face, his arms and his legs. There was plenty of blood there. He slipped the pry bar back in the Harrods bag.
“Is he dead?” She started the car as he buckled up.
“Only on the inside.”
She glowered at him and took off, gunning the Mini through empty lanes. When they reached the main road, she eased back and they drove in silence, Enya drilling him with an impatient glare every time the car rolled to a halt in the Saturday-morning traffic.
“I got this.” He pulled Masterson’s phone out of his pocket.
“Great.” She glanced at it. “Why don’t you just send them a route map of where we’re going?”
“I’ll shut down the networking.” He hit a few keys. “We’re off the grid now.”
“If you’d trusted me more, we could have done this a lot smarter. If you’d infected the phone with malware and left it with him, we could have spied on them. All you had to do was click a link on his phone. It’s that easy.”
He’d never thought of that. And why not? She’d fooled him easily enough. If it hadn’t been for her blundering big mouth, he’d still be toting around the bug she’d put on his phone.
“What if I send Kowalski a message from Masterson phone? Would that work?”
“If he’s dumb enough to click the link.”
CJ thought about that. Masterson would be at the hospital already, or on his way there at least. But had he sent Tratfors a news bulletin after he’d called the paramedics? CJ was doubtful. That was not going to be an easy conversation. Masterson had failed three times. The night nurse, Sami, and now this. Setting him up for Sami’s murder was the perfect solution, effectively fitting him up for a tight jacket in a high-security clinic. That would have made up for the night nurse fiasco. Masterson would be back on Tratfors’ A-team. But none of that had happened. Three strikes. CJ had never seen a baseball game, but he’d hung out with Americans long enough to know the rules. And Masterson’s strike three was particularly egregious. He’d been humiliated. He’d lost his phone. And his thumb. Not that Tratfors would be bothered about his lost appendage. If they found out he’d given up Kowalski and Rumbleby, he’d lose a lot more than that. CJ combed back through his memory, searching for the name Rumbleby, but he drew a blank. He was sure he’d remember. It was such an odd name.
“Pull over.” CJ pointed to a supermarket and Enya swung off the road and parked in its lot.
They huddled over the phone and CJ typed in a reply to Kowalski’s fix him message. Does this guy look fixed or what? Then he gave the phone to Enya and she typed in the booby-trapped link. She tapped it in without hesitation, pulling it out of her head like it was her birthdate. A short URL wired to malware that would turn Kowalski’s phone into a pocket spy. CJ wondered about that. What kind of person has stuff like that hanging off her fingertips?
They sent the message, then switched off the phone’s networking and eased back into the traffic.
“So if he clicks on it, what will that give us?” CJ said.
“It’ll open a port to let me in. Firewalls block connections from the outside. But replies made to calls from inside out are permitted. It’s the Trojan Horse thing. That’s the basis of it. But I can’t tell you what I can get to until I get inside.”
CJ continued to check Masterson’s messages.
“You were right,” he said. “We were set up in Iraq. He admitted it. He killed Sami too. Or he was part of it. And I’m pretty sure he sent the night nurse.”
“The who?”
“Never mind. We were set up to protect some guy called Rumbleby.”
Enya turned into the entrance of her rental flat’s underground parking and stopped. She pointed at the phone.
“Switching on airplane mode and even turning it off does not necessarily mean that the phone can’t be tracked. It depends on how it was set up. We should stick it in the fridge when we get upstairs. I’ll set up my computer. Then we can download it all and dump the phone somewhere.”
The fridge?
He didn’t even bother to ask.
The gate rolled up, and Enya drove down the ramp and parked the car. They went up to the apartment and CJ washed off Masterson’s blood in the shower, finding numerous cuts and bruises on his arms where he’d squeezed through the brush by the wall. He cleaned them up, then put on a fresh set of clothes. Back in the living room, Enya had already set up her laptop and was downloading data from the phone. She swung her chair around as he walked into the room, an ultimatum etched in frown lines on her face.
“Are you going to tell me or not?”
“What?”
“The blood. You killed him, didn’t you?”
CJ relaxed. This he could handle. “Do you have a beer?”
“Is that supposed to be an answer?”
He fetched one from the fridge and settled on the sofa, looking up at her.
“I need to know,” she said. “Or this is the end of the line for us. I will not be an accessory to murder.”
“These bastards killed your brother. So what do you want me to do with them? I asked you before, but I got no answer.”
“I want to hurt them. Expose them. Ruin their business. Their lives. Humiliate them. Look at that house. All that money. Status. I want to take it all away from them. That’s the way to destroy them. Have their wives leave them and their brat kids mobbed on Facebook. That’s the smart way. Not like a Neanderthal. Climbing walls and bashing heads in. I can’t be a party to that.”
“Are you finished?”
She turned away and stared out the window, but made no reply.
“Did you ever play games with your dad on a Saturday morning?” he said. “Not croquet, of course. Maybe football.”
She spun back towards him. “What the hell has that got to do with anything?”
“I was wondering what it must feel like to have a memory like that.”
“Did you kill him? Yes or no.”
CJ stood up, put his beer down and ran his hand through her hair, tilting her head up to look into his eyes. “I did not kill Masterson.”
“You swear it.”
“I didn’t kill him.” He let go of her head and picked up his beer. “That was the hardest part of it all.”
He waited, sipping his beer and staring into her eyes.
She nodded. “Let’s get some food.”
He followed her into the kitchen, where they microwaved a ready-meal. A curry. Then they ate it in silence, lounging on the sofa, watching the news. Sami—so big in the morning—had already been swept off the front page by a mass shooting in the US. They watched the scene. Wall-to-wall coverage on all news channels.
“Did you ever go to California?” CJ said.
“I worke
d there.”
“You know a place called Simi Valley?”
“I was more of a Silicon Valley type.”
“Alex has family there.”
“You plan to visit?”
CJ pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the couch.
“We had a geography book in school with a quote from some famous writer. “‘The spring is beautiful in California’—that’s how it started.”
“The Grapes of Wrath.”
“It went on about flowers, grapes and old vines. And hills… round and soft as breasts. I was about thirteen at the time. So that was an image I could work with.”
“I’m guessing your California dreaming is not just about literary nostalgia and family visits. Is Tratfors HQ on your sightseeing list?”
“I knew I’d end up in California as soon as I read that. Hills like soft breasts.”
“Point of information. California has the death penalty.”
He nodded, his eyes following the aftermath of the mass shooting.
“So do I?” he said.
He left her and made tea in the kitchen, and when he walked back into the living room with two mugs of steaming brew, she was at the table, arms cradling the laptop, eyes inches from its screen.
“I’m decrypting it,” she said. “The keys are on the phone. That way we can search it better.”
“Find Rumbleby.”
“I wouldn’t hold out much hope. People say seriously weird things when their life’s on the line.”
“Like Cat and Canary?”
She looked up. Sharp. But not surprised.
“For what it’s worth, I know you searched my cupboard and found that tape. You think I’d leave a strange man alone in my flat without a camera to keep an eye on him?”
The Saint Of Baghdad Page 11