The Saint Of Baghdad

by Michael Woodman

  He pulled into the parking lot of a shopping plaza, where she finally convinced him that she did not need a doctor. So he bought up the local drugstore instead, and not just first-aid supplies, but a poor man’s survival kit of energy drinks, protein bars, vitamins, painkillers and brandy. They continued to drive inland after that, towns thinning into an arid dusty landscape, their eyes skimming signs and billboards as they cruised by. The destination might be unknown, but the goal was clear.

  Anonymity.

  They needed a place to stay off the grid. No ID and no credit cards. But CJ had never checked into an American hotel. He didn’t know the routine. Most places in Europe, you need a passport to use a public toilet, never mind a hotel. But how did it work in the land of the free? If it was a movie, they could check in as Mr. and Mrs. Smith and pay cash. Enya had stayed in countless hotels in America, but he didn’t want to ask her. She was shell-shocked and in need of rest, not more anxiety. CJ pulled into a scruffy motel, a place with not much going for it except a lot more rooms than cars in the parking lot. He had a story to tell, and this was just the kind of place to tell it.

  We’ve been robbed and beaten up.

  That was the gist of it. They certainly looked the part. Foreigners. Bloodied and bruised. Welcome to America. He’d rehearsed it all, and he had two hundred dollars ready to facilitate the negotiation. But in the end, none of it was necessary. He’d barely gotten the first line out of his mouth when Enya picked up the story and ran with it. The honeymoon from hell. Her version began with the air traffic controllers strike in Paris and ended with how CJ had fought like a lion to protect her from the muggers. The desk clerk was spellbound.

  “Thank God my husband had some emergency money in his boot,” she said as CJ slid some cash across the desk in exchange for a room key. “Otherwise, we’d be on the street.”

  So there they were. Safe and off the grid. Upgraded even. They got the Honeymoon Suite at the regular rate. Although suite was more spin than reality, it turned out to be a regular room with an electric bed and a whirlpool jet in the bathtub.

  After washing down painkillers with an energy drink, Enya was wallowing in hot water, massaging aching muscles in the jets and sipping brandy. The bathroom door was open, but CJ left her in peace. He was lying on the bed, his head cupped in his hands. He was worried about Enya.

  Internal bleeding? Fractures?

  Injuries like that were not always obvious. He was irritated with her too. He kept running it all back and forth, but he always ended up at the same spot.

  What was it?

  The precious thing that she had gone back for.

  Something so important she’d risk everything.

  She was still holding out, and that had to end. He pulled himself up off the bed. One obvious shortcut to the truth was to grab her by the throat and dunk her in the suds. But that was never going to happen. He peeked around the bathroom door and looked at her—a battered head floating on bubbles, a face with a feeble smile.

  “Any better?” he said.

  “Getting there.”

  He looked around.

  The precious thing?

  It came to him in a rush. It had to be. He’d grabbed it over a coffee at the hospice when he’d asked her if she had a boyfriend, and she’d knocked his hand away. She always wore it. But now it was gone. He remembered it hanging from her neck as she’d slid out of her clothes and clambered astride him on the sofa. The locket. She had gone back for it, and now she’d hidden it. He looked around the bathroom. Her tattered clothes were discarded all over, draped over a stool, hung from a hook behind the door and dumped in a pile by the wall.

  In some pocket, maybe?

  He coasted his eyes over the washstand, trying to be casual. He didn’t want a confrontation, not with her in this state.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Sure. I’ll get some ice for those bruises.”

  She nodded, and he left her in the suds and stepped outside with an empty ice bucket. But halfway to the ice machine, he took a detour. He settled behind the wheel of the VW and patched an encrypted call through to Leila.

  No reply.

  He tried again before fetching the ice and heading back to their room. Enya was done with the suds. She was sitting on the bed in a pink bathrobe emblazoned with the word HERS. The color was back in her cheeks, and a skin closure had taped up her split lip. But she still looked like a model in a domestic violence hotline commercial. He splashed a shot of brandy over an ice cube and sat next to her.

  “You need more pills?” he said.

  “I’m good. They’re working.”

  “When I was with Kowalski, I got into his phone and set up that hack you gave me. Did it work?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  He gave her his remaining unsullied phone, and she checked the motel’s Wi-Fi instructions and set up a VPN connection.

  “The information I can get is limited. Some of his messaging is encrypted, so I can’t get into that. But there should be something. If I can find a log, a trail of IP addresses, I can do a geolocation lookup.”

  CJ waited in silence, watching her.

  It took her twenty minutes.

  “Do you want to know where he is? Or where he’s going?”

  “Both.”

  “He’s somewhere east of San Bernardino. He’s not on a Wi-Fi network, so he’s probably on the road.”

  “Where to?”

  “He’s just used his weather app. Somewhere sunny. No surprises there. Las Vegas usually is.”

  CJ stood up and eased the phone out of her hands. “We’ll check again tomorrow. You need rest.”

  “I’m too hyped up. My nerves are rattling so loud I’m going deaf.”

  “You want to watch some TV?”

  She picked up the remote, switched on the TV and flicked through channels.

  “Either that,” he said, “or you could tell me about your locket.”

  “Tell you what?” She frowned, overacting.

  “Tell me what’s on the memory card inside it.”

  It was as if he’d freeze-dried her. No reaction. She just stared at him with the same fake frown. So he stared back. No way out. And she knew it. She flung the remote at the floor, bursting it in a scatter of batteries and plastic, then buried her face in her hands. He left her to it, waiting until her shamed face slid from behind its shield.

  “I didn’t lie to you about that,” she said.

  “You didn’t tell me the truth either.”

  “I didn’t know if I could trust you. You were a British soldier—”

  “Marine.”

  “Whatever. You pledged allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, not Queen Enya. You’ve got HM Government Property written all over you. I’m Irish. We’ve got twenty-twenty vision for signage like that.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I feel like shit. It makes me look insincere about us. And that’s not true.”

  “So what’s on the card?”

  “A key.”

  “To what?”

  “A digital vault.”

  “And inside the vault?”

  She clenched her jaw. “If I tell you the truth, you’ll think I’m lying anyway.”

  “Try starting at the beginning.”

  “We don’t have time. Besides, it’s the punchline that counts.”

  She got some brandy and ice, then sat in the chair by the dresser, facing him.

  “My brother started the Iraq War.” She waited for his riposte—a smirk, a peal of laughter, a theatrical groan. But none of that happened. CJ waited in silence. This was a story he’d waited a long time to hear.

  “You remember Curveball?” she said.

  CJ nodded. “The Iraqi chemical engineer. One of the Allies’ so-called credible witnesses to their WMD weapons program.”

  “He was the foundation stone they built the case on. He wanted asylum in Germany, but his pregnant wife was stuck overseas and effectively a hostage. So he went
to the BND, the German intelligence, and spun them a yarn that was a perfect match for item number one on Dubya’s Christmas list. Reasons to go to war with Saddam Hussein.”

  “I remember. Curveball made those fantasy sketches of bioweaponized trucks, and no one asked too many questions.”

  “Nobody asked any questions. It fitted the narrative. So why would they? All it took was a few bad CIA operatives—career-before-country types with a sharp eye for an opportunity like a president who wants war. But Curveball wasn’t enough. Not for war. So they had to complete the picture. And for that, they needed someone outside the intelligence community. Someone to create a fake trail to fool their own organization as well as the NSA and GCHQ. An unethical contractor with a digital black box of dirty tricks.”

  “I remember Colin Powell’s speech. There was a lot of stuff—emails, recorded phone calls, photos.”

  “The photos were bullshit. Like Rorschach inkblots. Look hard enough and you can see whatever you want. It was the emails and the recordings that nailed Saddam’s arse to the gallows. And they were all fake.”

  “Declan?”

  “The emails were simple. Script kiddie stuff. Spearfish key government and military personnel and a few insurgents. Infect their computers with malware and set up incriminating email conversations.”

  “About what?”

  “Tenders for specialized equipment or supplies with the exact keywords needed to trigger the NSA’s snooping algorithms. Something like aluminum tubing with the precise specifications you need in a centrifuge to enrich uranium. Or maybe some chemical precursor for Sarin or VX or some other nerve agent. Or a lab kit that rings alarm bells because it’s just what you need to rustle up a batch of anthrax or botulin.”

  “What about the phone calls?”

  “Voice matching. Hollywood does it all the time. Two actors. Voice biometric authentication has come a long way since then, so it wouldn’t be so simple now. But back then it was easy. Declan had voiceprints of the military officers they were impersonating and hours of recordings. So they rehearsed until the voiceprints matched. All he had to do then was get access to the telecoms network and route the call so it looked natural enough to get snooped on.”

  “Who at the CIA?”

  “I don’t know any of that, and neither did Declan?”

  “So who’s Rumbleby in this?”

  “Sorry about that. It’s not a who. It’s a what. The operation codename. The Rumble was the Iraq War, and the Bee was the buzz they needed to kick it off.”

  CJ went back to the garden shed and Masterson’s howling confession. He must have said… to protect Rumble Bee. And CJ had heard it as one word and made an assumption.

  “So join up the dots for me,” he said. “Where does the memory card come into this?”

  “It was Declan’s insurance policy. He did what they asked and it worked like a dream. These days, faking internet data is an industry. And if the Russians could swing the US election and the Brexit vote, imagine how easy it was to fake a few emails and phone calls back in the day when nobody would even suspect a fake. Just fool the NSA and it ends up in a report that might as well have been engraved on a slab of stone by Moses. All Declan had to do was play God and dictate the message. He was the granddaddy of cyberespionage as disinformation and the Iraq War was his firstborn.”

  “If he was so useful, why did they want him dead?”

  “Because he grew a conscience. You’ve got to understand the process he went through. It wasn’t like one day Tratfors called him and said, ‘We understand you’re good with computers so we’d like you to help us start a war.’ They got his confidence with small jobs and big money. They told him that the Iraqis had WMDs, but that they were clever at hiding them, and way too smart to be talking about them in emails and phone calls. So if only he could fake a few. And it worked. And when Saddam’s statue came tumbling down and Iraqis danced in the streets, he felt good about it.”

  “But then?”

  “Torture, murder, rape. It ground away at his spirit. Drip, drip. It was driving him crazy. Turning him into some kind of Lady Macbeth, always trying to get the blood out. There were so many recriminations and he knew so much. He was afraid for his life.”

  “So he made the card. His insurance policy. Some kind of record pointing the finger.”

  “There was way too much to stick on a card. So he downloaded it from Tratfors’ servers to his own computers.”

  “In the flat? That the cops took?”

  “It’s okay. There’s a mirror in the cloud.”

  “So the card is a decryption key?”

  “You’ve heard of two-step authentication.”

  “Like a password plus a code they send to your phone.”

  “It’s similar. To unlock the vault, you need the key on the memory card. But the card itself is password-encrypted.”

  “How did you get your copy of the card?”

  “Declan sent it to me from Afghanistan before he flew to Baghdad. He was supposed to call me from Iraq and give me the password, but…”

  CJ sipped his brandy, the blurred landscape of his life these past years drifting into focus.

  No password.

  Enya had a copy of the key but no password to decrypt it. Now it all made sense. Her patience and persistence through all those years he was lying comatose. Her fascination with those final moments. Ordering that black-and-white Cat and Canary tape all the way from Hollywood. Declan was for real after all. He’d been telling the truth. He’d traded the password for his life. But then, all the players had died. All except CJ. And now that password existed in only one place—buried under piles of dross in his own head. The disinformation bomb he’d dropped on Ashford and Colby turned out to be the opposite. He’d inadvertently told them the truth, albeit an embroidered version. No wonder it got a reaction.

  “You said he grew a conscience, but that’s hardly something he would share with Tratfors.”

  “Of course not. He wasn’t stupid.”

  “So what made them pull the trigger?”

  She looked into her drink and swirled the ice cubes and brandy around like it was some mystical divination technique.

  “He talked about blowing the whistle more than once. He had an idea that if it was public, Tratfors would be finished. They’d all be running scared and he’d be safe. I told him it was a pipe dream. The dawn of the whistleblower was still on the horizon back then. There was no WikiLeaks. No Snowden or Manning. My guess is, he reached out and they got wind of it.”

  “So you need the password. But what then?”

  “I follow through. The world’s a different place now. If I blow the whistle, I won’t bring him back. But at least I’ll destroy his killers.”

  “I know people who’d pay you a fortune for that data.”

  “I know even more who’d cut my throat for it. And on that topic, I’m hoping I didn’t make a mistake about you.”

  “So it’s revenge—as simple as that?”

  “I never hid that.”

  “And us? Is that what keeps us together?”

  “Who knows? Holy vows sworn in the church of payback may work as good as any other.”

  “You don’t believe that. You’re not so cynical.”

  “You want the same thing I do. So we ended up in the same bed. All sorts of things grow out of beds, but never anything you can plan for.”

  She got up off the chair and put down her glass. “I’m woozy. Brandy and pills.” She picked up the bottle and checked the label. “And not exactly Cordon Bleu.”

  CJ patted the pillow. “Get some rest.”

  She was crawling back on the bed when CJ’s phone vibrated on the nightstand. It was a message from Leila.

  In Vegas. Just arrived. Call tomorrow AM.

  “And that is?” Enya said as soon as he put down the phone.

  “Tomorrow’s plan,” he said, tucking the sheet around her neck. “We’ll go through it all in the morning.”

  �
�Tell me now.”

  He went to put his fingertip on her lips, but she was already asleep.

  It was dark when CJ woke up. There was some sound. Or was it a dream? He checked Enya—sleeping soundly—and eased his head back on the pillow. It was just the sound of a wheel knocking. A wheel inside his head. He spun it around, over and over. He had the truth at last. But not all of it. He rolled his head to the side to look at Enya, her face little more than an outline in the glow of some LED.

  Had she told him everything?

  He worked through it all logically, then summed his conclusions and his gut instincts onto a single bottom line. She’d left something out. He was sure of it. But not something big enough to matter. He tried to get back to sleep but failed. Another wheel was squeaking, and this one had to be fixed.

  The scale of what was going on now was all wrong. Iraq was old news. There had to be something else. Bush and Blair were yesterday’s men. Colin Powell had done his mea culpa. History had already written it off as the world’s biggest-ever intelligence cock-up. So what if a few overzealous patriots had faked bits of it? Who would care enough about it to stick Sami with a knife, then barbecue his face on a stove? Or send the night nurse with his fatal shot? Or snatch Enya at the airport and beat who knew what out of her? Or fly Ashford and Colby halfway around the planet?

  Enya murmured and rolled over. He stroked her hair. No texture. No real feeling in his fingertips. Just enough to let him know he’d made contact. He shut his eyes and wandered inside his head, looking for the levers of his mind. He’d been doing self-hypnosis so consistently that the results were less variable now. Not guaranteed, but getting close. He no longer had to walk by the river and go through the forest. He just had to find the oak tree with the door, and as he walked down the spiral staircase inside it, his mind shifted gears. So when he got to the bottom and sat in the chair, he was ready for his pill. He worked through his routine a few times, then drifted off, and when he woke up it was still dark. But there was light from the bathroom, and he could hear Enya cleaning her teeth. She turned towards him when he stood in the open doorway.