The Saint Of Baghdad

by Michael Woodman

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “The painkillers wore off.”

  “I’ll get you some more pills.”

  “No.” She spat in the sink and rinsed her mouth. “That thing you do to get your feeling back… does it work the other way around?”

  “I think it only works if you’re halfway crazy.”

  “Then I’m well qualified.”

  He reached out and ran his hand through her hair, feeling every strand.

  “I answered all your questions,” she said. “So now it’s my turn to ask.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Quick ones. Just two.”

  She untied her belt and let her robe fall to the floor. She stepped closer and pressed her naked body against his, scraping her breasts back and forth across his chest.

  “Can you feel this?”

  He answered her with a kiss.

  “Second question,” she said, breaking away. “I know you can be rough. But can you be gentle?”

  He picked her up and carried her back into the bedroom, cradling her in his arms. He stood by the bed, looking at her in the half-light before laying her down tenderly like a lily on a lover’s grave.

  LAS VEGAS

  Twenty

  After a long silence, Enya said, “That’s very odd.”

  “What?”

  “The whole thing. The way you met her.”

  CJ cleaned the last of his pancakes off his plate and nodded to the waitress offering him another cup of coffee from her bottomless pot. His plan was simple.

  Las Vegas.

  But Enya had other ideas. They both wanted payback. But after her brutal interrogation at West Coast Drum, Enya’s priority was survival. And not just hers. The words us and we were working their way into the conversation at every turn. They’d moved on. And now she’d told him the truth, they could both focus on recovering the password, a task they could work on anywhere. They had money and resources. They could bide their time and finish the job the smart way by exposing Tratfors and its crimes.

  All these points were duly noted by CJ. But none of them made any difference. In his mind, payback and survival were inseparable. The vault was a digital neutron bomb, and he’d already lit the fuse. Powerful people were intent on stopping that bomb’s detonation, and unless they could get to another planet they were never going to survive if they ran. Outing Tratfors by sharing the vault’s explosive contents with bloggers and journalists was the one thing they did agree on. But they split on the how of that too. To CJ, it was one more reason to get to Vegas. Leila Rose was a professional journalist with a reputation for breaking big stories. She was a valuable ally. If Enya really wanted to destroy Tratfors, then Leila had to be a part of it. He waited until the waitress had moved on to the next table before getting back to their conversation.

  “There’s no reason to be suspicious,” he said. “They were following me, and I got the drop on them. It’s not like they were planning to contact me.”

  “Maybe that was part of her plan too. Women like that can be devious.”

  “Enya… please, we’ve got to go there.”

  “And she’s got a gun.”

  “That was just bravado. In case I tried something.”

  “Like what? Steal her burger?” He ignored that and peeled off some bills for the breakfast. “And why didn’t she call you back?” He ignored that too, sipping his coffee.

  The waitress took his notes and gave him a sly wink.

  He looked at Enya and shrugged.

  “So?”

  Enya stood up. “Alright.” She tossed her napkin on the table. “But I’m telling you—it’s a mistake.”

  CJ was driving the VW on the I-15 freeway north, with Enya’s silence an unfamiliar load dragging along beside them, when his phone buzzed.

  Enya leaned across as he held it up to check the caller.

  “Talk of the devil, and here she comes,” she said.

  CJ pinned the phone to his ear. “What are you doing in Vegas?”

  “Hunting.” Leila’s voice was echoey, with a background meld of sounds like she was in a quiet corner of a hotel lobby. “There’s an oil industry convention here, so the old boys’ club is staging a few sideshows. Preston’s in town. And so is Nazar, the boss of OneOil. He lives in Monaco behind a wall of lawyers, and the place must have caught fire for him to break cover. What’s up your end?”

  “I need to drop off the grid. With a friend.”

  “Who?”

  “Enya O’Brien.”

  “Why?”

  “Tratfors snatched her at the airport. They were entertaining her at West Coast Drum when I dropped by and picked her up.”

  She said nothing. So he left her to her thoughts until a while stretched into way too long.

  “Leila?”

  “I’m here. I’m checking the newsfeed. What did you pick her up with… a B-52? Cops shot at. Bodies getting trucked out of there. The FBI has a statement pending. I don’t know, CJ. I’m not even comfortable with this call. I’ll push things to the limit to get a story, but you’ve got no idea where the limit lives.”

  “What if I told you that Enya has an encrypted hard drive with a log of Tratfors’ digital black ops? Wouldn’t you like to know how they faked the intel that got us into the Iraq War?”

  Silence phase two.

  He could all but hear the scales rocking back and forth in her head. Stacked on one side was not just her reputation, but her career. CJ was potentially as toxic as the barrels at West Coast Drum. But balanced against that was a scoop to die for. And something else. He’d sensed it at that first meeting. Something that churned her up inside. Something beyond career ambition and payback for a murdered colleague. Something personal. Leila wanted heads on sticks. Preston, Nazar. Maybe others. They were all candidates for her trophy cabinet. He’d never heard of Nazar. But he knew OneOil. He’d escorted their engineers to fix sabotaged pipelines on more than one occasion. Maybe Nazar was the key to that, some personal issue with him. Another Iranian. Some family business back in Iran pumping her with venom. Whatever it was—CJ was counting on it. He needed her. He was a stranger in a strange land with few resources and an impressive inventory of powerful enemies.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll get a place. Call me in a few hours before you get to Vegas.”

  He rang off and put his attention back on the road, leaving Enya to simmer in a silence that lasted all the way to the San Bernardino Mountains. But as the urban sprawl faded behind them and the deserts opened up ahead, she came back to life.

  “Point of information,” she said. “Where are we keeping that hard drive you mentioned?”

  “I had to spice things up. She was playing hard to get. I didn’t have time to explain all that vault stuff. Anyway, we can download it by the time we meet her. You’ve got the address in the cloud, right?”

  His own words echoed back on him and gave him a jolt. UK cops had seized Enya’s computers. So what if they’d gotten to the backup?

  “Where are those cloud servers based?”

  “They’re buried under a mile of granite in a Swiss Fort Knox. Retina scans, electromagnetic blastproofing. They’ve got the works—and ice-cold glacier water to keep them cool.”

  That was comforting. It wasn’t stashed in a five-eyes country. Switzerland wasn’t even in the fourteen-eyes intelligence-sharing club that included most of Europe. Any lawful request to access would involve the Swiss police and judiciary, and they’d ask too many questions.

  “Did you check it?”

  “I hadn’t checked it for years. I set it up while Declan was in Afghanistan, and I uploaded the files from our own servers at his request. The service gets paid from our offshore company account and automatically renewed. So I had no reason to log in there again. And after everything that happened, I got suspicious that I was under surveillance and I didn’t want to lead anyone to it.”

  “But when the cops took your computers?”

  “I checked it from Paris
using a VPN and Tor. I logged in to the server okay and verified the encrypted folder was there. More or less.”

  That was an odd way of putting it, and she made it worse by screwing her face in a lopsided frown.

  “More or less?”

  “I had very little time. I could have made a mistake. It’s just that the folder is much bigger than I remember it.”

  “Maybe he added something.”

  “There wasn’t much time for that. After I set it up, he logged in and signed off on the hardening I’d done on the server. Then he sent me the key card and hopped on the plane to Iraq.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “There might be some housekeeping process logging endless petty faults and exceptions. I didn’t have time to check it out.”

  “We have to download it.”

  “For sure. We need to stop off somewhere and buy a drive, then find a Wi-Fi network. But we’ve still got no password.”

  “We can work on that.”

  “How? I had a cracker running on a GPU cluster pumping out half a million passwords a second.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Everything. Brute force at first. But when that failed, I tried dictionary and mask attacks built around the way he thinks.”

  “What if I gave you every word of that exchange between him and Hussein?”

  “More of that cat and canary malarkey. I think we can skip all that.”

  “I couldn’t remember because I was blocking it subconsciously. Now I want to remember. We can do this.”

  She didn’t look convinced, but she said nothing. So he left it there.

  An hour from Vegas, they pulled over and CJ called Leila.

  “Turn off the I-15 before Vegas,” she said. “Take the exit for Henderson. It’s a quiet place. Pull over there and call me back. I’m in the middle of something, so you may have to wait a bit. Find some mall and get yourselves something to eat.”

  He rang off and updated Enya.

  “Henderson?” She repeated it several times with a different intonation, like a drama school student practicing a new line.

  CJ gave her his phone, and she researched the town’s retail options and directed him to an electronics store.

  “Good news and bad,” she said as they pulled into its parking lot. “On the happy side, Henderson is the second-safest town in America. Although updates on that are pending in view of your recent arrival. They also have a few halfway decent stores. Suburban chic from the look of it. But at least I won’t have to look like a bag lady anymore. Just a woman with appalling dress sense. In the sad column, Nevada is the second-most-dangerous state in America, and the smart money is on it becoming number one sometime soon.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that. If we can figure out the password, Leila will have that story global in hours. Tratfors will disintegrate, and Kowalski and company will all be on flights to some jungle.”

  “And that’s it? You’ll let it go there?”

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “What does my want have to do with it?” She waited for an answer, but CJ said nothing. “Catherine O’Brien—my mother, by the way—did not have a child stupid enough to believe that Christopher James Brink is going to let that man Kowalski live. You’re a steel-souled bastard. I know that. And Kowalski is a dead man.” She pulled down the vanity mirror and inspected her face, touching each bruise and abrasion with a fingertip as she shifted her head from side to side. “I might have had a problem with that back when I was a girl. But now I’m all grown up. So do it. Do it for Declan and Alex.” She turned towards him. “And if you’re not going to do it for them, then kill him for me.”

  He took her hand, easing it away from her battered face. He held it up to his lips and went to kiss it. But she pulled it away and kissed him full on the mouth. He had avoided kissing her mouth when they’d made love in the motel out of deference to her split lip. But pain be damned, here she was burying her mouth in his, all soft bruised skin and sharp-edged plastic closures.

  They bought a high-end laptop and a sleek portable storage drive in the electronics store, then drove to a mall, where they split up. CJ picked up some clothes and toiletries before finding a sporting goods store, where he bought four magazines for his collection of Sigs as well as the day’s special offer—a bucket of 350 bullets to fit in them. He was back with Enya eating a sandwich when Leila called. She was still on the Strip, her voice excited, skimming off traffic noise. They finished their meal, loaded up the VW and met her outside in the parking lot, where they followed her Range Rover out onto quiet suburban streets.

  The traffic petered out as they drove through neighborhoods with single-story homes set on lots with no fences and plenty of space between them. They ended up on a street like a broad ribbon on the edge of the town, bordered with the same tidy homes. Beyond it was the desert. Endless space. It was a commodity available everywhere in America and the locals didn’t even notice it. But CJ was a Brit, reared on an island where only people were endless and horizons were limited except for the beaches and the promise beyond their seas. Despite that, this land felt like home to him. Not his orphan-boy homeland. But the home he’d chosen. The horizon beyond its seas. It wasn’t Iraq either. But the desert was close enough. He felt free here. Confident. At the end of a circle. And he knew with a certainty that the oath he’d sworn in blood in a faraway desert land was about to be redeemed in this one.

  They pulled into a driveway and stopped in front of a garage door wide enough for three cars. There were introductions. Short and sweet. Handshakes and pleasantries. Leila’s driver was called Jerry. He was her cameraman. Fifties. But working hard on looking younger, with a Mohawk hairdo and hieroglyphs tattooed on the sides of his head. The famous hard drive CJ had touted on the phone didn’t come up. He figured that Leila wanted to get Jerry out of the way before that issue was discussed. Besides, she’d had an adventure, an encounter with Preston and she was eager to see the video. Enya tucked herself under a desk in the office and went to work on her new laptop and Leila and CJ settled on a couch in the lounge while Jerry wired his tablet to the TV.

  “Preston and Nazar. I ambushed them,” Leila said. “As they were coming out of a restaurant. I nailed them both in that crack in security before the car rolls up. And did he ever squeal.”

  “What’s Nazar in this?”

  “You must know OneOil.”

  CJ nodded.

  “They provide industrial solutions to the energy sector, according to their website. But that’s pretty much a sideline. I got onto them doing a story about money laundering and bribery. FCPA ring a bell?”

  He shook his head.

  “Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”

  “Baksheesh. Kickbacks.”

  “You got it. Greasing the wheels. The US calls it bribery. But in the Middle East it’s a way of life. Thousands of years of cultural programing doesn’t get wiped out because Washington passes a law. And OneOil is the perfect vehicle. It’s a nest of offshore companies with subsidiaries all over the world. People, equipment, services—all shuffling from this jurisdiction to that. Who’s to know if thirty or forty million dollars here or there is actually delivered in services? And what about all those containers of equipment and chemicals? Do they all really get checked?”

  “So a client pays OneOil for a Service X—that never gets delivered—and that money ends up in the pocket of some politician or bureaucrat who green-lights their client’s deal.”

  “Exactly. So that was my angle at first. But then I met Phil. He’d been investigating Tratfors’ links to political corruption and election rigging, and that led him from Tratfors to OneOil. So he met me going the other way and we pooled resources.”

  “But Tratfors isn’t a OneOil client. It’s the opposite. OneOil is a client of theirs.”

  “Not just a client. An appendage. They’re two legs of the same monster. Tratfors can’t have any direct dealings with the Russians because of their links
to Western intelligence. But OneOil is a major player in Russia and Central Asia. Nazar has the Kremlin and a string of Russian oligarchs on speed dial. And he couldn’t operate in Russia without buy-in from Russian intelligence. As for Tratfors, their black book is an index of corrupt politicians, spooks, and shady companies in the West.”

  She left it there and turned to the TV as Jerry used the remote to pull up a menu and switch the source to his tablet.

  “Let’s see what we got,” he said.

  The backdrop was a regal-looking entrance to a classy restaurant with plate-glass doors and a lush interior decorated with flowers and objets d’art. A man in a tuxedo was standing under an awning shaking hands with two men. A maître d’ sucking up to VIP customers. The men were a study in contrast. One short and round, his coiffured mustache a black wax smudge at odds with his fashionably gray stubble. The other was at least a head taller and oozing military from his close-cropped head, broad shoulders and lean body right down to his polished Oxfords. The sort of guy who’d run three miles and do fifty press-ups before breakfast every day until he dropped.

  Same old Preston.

  CJ’s recollection was dated but still good. He remembered Preston turning up in Iraq to rally the troops wearing a desert brush combat outfit fresh out of the laundry. Clean. That was how CJ remembered him, his face all sharp lines and angles like it was carved out of wood. And here he was ten years later. A fresh outfit, but otherwise the same. It was hard not to draw lifelines and add up the scores. Preston, CJ, Alex. No parallel lines of fortune here. Preston was the out-and-out winner.

  There was a heavyweight minder close by. CJ recognized the tie from his run-in with Grambo, some sort of uniform. He was talking to a valet, dismissing him. Not needed. The limo was on the way. It pulled up and the minder walked to the car as Preston led Nazar out from under the awning between walls of potted plants. And there she was—zooming into frame—Leila, sticking her furry mic right in Nazar’s face. The camera was so close that Jerry had to be right on her back. They must have been hiding in bushes by the entrance.