The Saint Of Baghdad

by Michael Woodman

  “Is the UK’s SFO investigation into OneOil killing your business?”

  Nazar’s no comment was barely audible as he faded away behind Preston, who reared up filling the screen.

  “Please, if you could just…” Preston swept his arm as if to make a way past her, but it was more like a shove.

  The camera jumped and Jerry yelped from off mic. He looked back at them. “Knuckle in the ribs,” he said, making a one-knuckle fist. He tapped his chest and winked at CJ. “Martial arts vest. Been there. Done that.”

  The camera was bouncing and Preston’s hand lurched up to grab it, but Leila pushed it aside as she thrust her mic in his face.

  “The incident at West Coast Drum yesterday. How is that linked to Iraq?” Preston stopped—no more shoving and evading—even an old warhorse has to blink when the ground explodes under his feet. “And why was a warrant issued in London for a former Tratfors employee? Brink was a war hero. What was he doing there?”

  The camera skewed off to the side, and the screen blanked out before settling on a close-up of the red and yellow stripes of the awning. More jostling. Bodies in motion. Then a hand covered the lens. Scuffling and shouts.

  When the picture resumed, it was from way back, a few yards off the awning. The security detail was center screen, two guys big enough to fill up most of it. Preston and Nazar were back under the awning conferring. Preston was bent over, whispering, his hand on the other man’s shoulder. Secrets done. He strode out onto the sidewalk towards the camera as Nazar bolted for the limo. Preston spoke to the security detail, and the men stepped aside but kept their arms outstretched to make sure no one got any closer than Preston wanted.

  “Hijacking businessmen on the sidewalk.” Preston pointed at Leila. “You call this professionalism? I call it cheap soundbite crap, typical of your fake news network. You want answers? Try the truth. Tomorrow. Eight a.m. My suite. You know where. I’ll give you fifteen minutes on camera. But don’t expect an easy ride.”

  The security detail blocked the screen after that, smirking like their team had hit a home run. The camera backed off and caught the limo as it peeled off into traffic.

  Jerry poked his trackpad and the picture froze.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “We got him mad at least,” Leila said. “But mad enough to drop the ball? I don’t know.”

  “That warrant question,” Jerry said. “It was like you shoved the mic up his ass.”

  CJ was thinking the same thing and wondering how smart it was. If the flipside of hanging out with Leila was being a stick to poke at Tratfors, he might need a new partner.

  They left Jerry packing up his kit and joined Enya in the office. She was sitting behind a laptop screen with a download bar showing ten percent, but she wasn’t looking at that. She wasn’t looking at anything. She was slumped forward, lying across the desktop, her head resting on folded arms. CJ touched her shoulders with his fingertips. Her eyelids were still, her breath a slow cycle. Forty-eight hours from Paris to Las Vegas via the bumpy route. The bill had finally arrived, and it had hit her like a strip of Ambien tabs.

  “I guess the rest will have to wait,” Leila said.

  They both stared at the storage drive wired to the laptop. It was blinking frantically as bits and bytes streamed through its innards.

  “The download has to complete anyway,” CJ said. “Why don’t you come by tomorrow after your interview with Preston?” She turned to go, but he caught her shoulder and eased her back around. “Now you’ve told Preston that we’re in touch with each other, you’d better use plenty of street savvy on your way back here tomorrow.”

  That hit her with a jolt. He was telling her that she’d been dumb, too greedy to get a soundbite.

  She nodded. “I’ll be careful.”

  CJ steered her out of the room and they collected Jerry, and he walked them both to the car. When they were gone, he checked the house—every room, every closet and drawer, every door and lock. Then he took the range bucket out of the Honda’s trunk, checked his pistols and loaded the spare magazines. He made a pot of coffee and took it into the office with two cups. But one was wasted. Enya was out for the count. He carried her upstairs, stripped off her pants and shirt and tucked her under a sheet. Back in the office, he drank the coffee and settled back on the couch with his phone and studied maps and satellite photos of the surrounding streets and deserts and the mountains beyond. It was after midnight when he signed off on that and stepped out into the garden. It was the low-maintenance type, a sea of pebbles with islands of cactus and desert blooms. Their colors were bright and their forms soft in the warm light from the house. But as he walked away from the house and down to the end of the yard, their colors faded into black and white in the cold light of the moon. He stood by the wall and let his eyes adjust to it until the landscape was floodlit all the way to the mountains and his ears had fine-tuned into an empty desert teeming with the sound of life.

  Twenty-One

  Dawn was peeking through the blinds.

  Somewhere out there, the sun was oozing over a mountain ridge and the night chorus of desert life was taking a bow and leaving the stage. CJ rolled onto his side. Enya was facing the other way, curled into a ball. He reached out and touched her hair. Feeling. No need to pop the magic pill. It had lasted a whole day and night. The more he worked on it, the better it got as neural pathways opened up and learned new habits. He soaked in it like a weary body in a hot bath, stroking her head with all the tenderness he could muster.

  Don’t wake. Not yet.

  But she did, with a sigh that wrapped itself around his touch. She rolled over and he folded himself around her and held her, feeling the warmth of her belly against his, her nipples hard up against his ribs. He slid her on top to protect her bruised body from his weight and they made love. But before it was done, she stopped and reared up, looking down into his eyes, her face lighting up as if she’d found something special there, as if something she’d been waiting for a long time had finally showed up.

  After loving, Enya took a shower and he lay back, listening to her sing Edith Piaf with a smile on his face. She might not have the chops to make it in music, but she did have world-class hacking skills, and that brought him to the day’s main event.

  The password.

  Somehow he had to find the Forgotten Password link buried in his head. He had to find a way to play it all back, everything that Declan had said that day, including the Arabic. With luck, they’d hit the jackpot before Leila showed up, and if not, she could help. It was going to be tough, but he did have an ace card.

  Self-hypnosis.

  It had worked for his sense of touch, his rewired brain proving to be uniquely receptive to autosuggestion. If the technique could work for that, then why not his memory too? If they could get that password and access the vault, the plan would write itself. Leila belonged to some international consortium of investigative journalists. As soon as she plugged the data into that network, it was game over for Tratfors. It was a great plan. And with luck it was doable. But CJ was wary. It was all too easy. Las Vegas was the home of Mike Tyson, and fittingly his oft-quoted wisdom was echoing in CJ’s head. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” That was the problem. There was a punch coming. It was winding up right now, somewhere out there beyond those blinds.

  Enya finished up in the shower and went down to the office to check on the download while CJ cleaned up in the bathroom before joining her.

  “The download is done,” she said as he stepped through the door. “But look at the size of it! It’s huge.”

  He left her, muttering about logs and processes, and went to the kitchen, where he made coffee and eggs and toast. He brought it all back on a crowded tray and they ate in front of the computer, with Enya pointing at the screen and making technical points.

  After they’d cleared away breakfast, CJ found a notepad and a pencil and he gave them to Enya.

  “What’s this?
” she said. “You’re the one who’s got to remember.”

  “I’m going to put myself in a trance.” He wanted it to sound like a breakthrough idea, but Enya looked far from convinced. She frowned, lopsided, bent out of shape by a fresh set of Band-Aids. “It’s like I have switches in my head,” he said. “Don’t ask me how it works. Something to do with my cross-wired brain and how it processes information.”

  “That sounds like all hope is lost to me.”

  “It’ll work. All you have to do is write it down.” He checked his watch. “Leila will be here soon. So let’s do it. Make two columns. English on one side. Arabic on the other.”

  “I can’t write Arabic.”

  “Just write down how it sounds in English letters. Leila speaks Arabic. If there’s something there, maybe she can find it.”

  “It won’t be anything in Arabic. We used password conventions. The usual stuff. Upper and lowercase. Alphanumeric and special characters. At least twenty. But it wouldn’t be random. That would make it impossible to remember. He hated password safes, so all his passwords were memorable—based on a thing, a place, an object, a something—and jazzed up with numbers and special characters.”

  “Just write it down. We’ll figure all that out later.”

  He closed his eyes and ran the script he’d prepared in his head, soundtracking it with Doctor Sam’s voice. The minutes on either side of Alex’s death had been the most intense of his life, his world playing out frame by frame in Technicolor with stereophonic sound. The detail might be buried, but it had to be inside him somewhere, and if anything could dig it out, it was Doctor Sam’s sudsy voice dragging him back through time and into the darkness inside him.

  Deep breaths.

  He hit the Play button and the virtual video flooded his inner screen. Declan screaming. Hussein pleading. Jahil lusting for blood.

  CJ was shaking, veins bulging and blood trickling from his nose. Enya went to stop him, to shake him. But as she reached out, he jerked back, hands all knuckles crushing the armrests. Inside his head, the focus was tightening on Declan and his broken stream of verbiage. CJ barked it out, a staccato stream, and Enya scribbled it down. It was all English at first. Declan’s promises. Discrediting the government. Shaming the CIA with a truth big enough to turn the entire world against America. He had the password and offered a simple trade. Jahil ignored him. Declan was screeching, calling out to Hussein and switching to pidgin Arabic mixed with English.

  CJ sat motionless when he was done, staring at the wall. Enya wiped the blood dribbling from his nose with a tissue, and his eyes flashed up at her.

  “Thank God,” she said. “I thought you’d gone catatonic on me again.”

  She left him the tissue and fetched more coffee, and by the time she got back, CJ was studying her notes. She put two cups on the desk and pulled her chair up next to his. CJ was shaking his head in a slow denial, unable to accept what his eyes were telling him.

  “This is useless,” he said.

  “You did your best.”

  Enya squeezed her head into the frame and they checked it together. She pointed at cat and canary.

  “I felt so stupid writing this down again.”

  CJ shrugged. “That’s what I heard.”

  They continued to study the list.

  “You said that Declan never used random characters because it had to be memorable.”

  She nodded. “It was always something you could remember, or tell someone. Like he planned to tell me.”

  “For example?”

  “The Battle of Waterloo. That’s a word with numbers attached. It happened on June 18, 1815. So that would give us Waterloo18061815. But that would be guessable. So we always added our own string of special characters.”

  “Like question marks?”

  “We called it our family sauce, and we had a few recipes.”

  “So the password isn’t here explicitly. It’s described here. Something on this list is like a password hint.”

  “That’d be my guess. He planned to tell it me in a phone call. So it had to be something he could say once and I’d remember without having to write it down. But it wouldn’t be something simple like the battle of Waterloo. It would be something super clever. And immensely difficult to crack.”

  Their eyes went back to the notes, but there was still nothing jumping out at them.

  “Let’s eliminate the unlikely,” CJ suggested. “This stuff at the beginning. The sales pitch to Jahil. It’s got to be here in this end part with Hussein.”

  CJ underlined the Arablish—the Arabic mashed up in the English alphabet—and started making a new list.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Certain words he repeated over and over. That’s why I remember them so clearly. I’m making a list of them. Plus the Arabic words. They have to be special. How well did he speak it?”

  “That depends. I doubt he could discuss philosophy. But computer science, that’s another thing.”

  CJ’s shortlist had eight lines. Three English and five Arabic.

  salmon

  cat and canary

  GPS

  mushfira

  moussadaka

  kalamah alsiru

  tassy fon

  muhadila

  Enya read it, then closed her eyes. But it didn’t look like she was thinking. It looked like she was giving up.

  “Hey…” He slipped his arm around her waist and hugged her. “We can do this. Let’s drink some more coffee and get our heads into it.”

  She bucked up and took a slug of coffee.

  “The only thing that gives me hope here is GPS,” she said. “But GPS coordinates is too simple and obvious. Plus, I used GPS in rule-based attacks on the password and got nowhere. As for this Arabic, who are we kidding? This is an Irishman’s Arabic transliterated by a brain-damaged Englishman, then written down by a nonspeaker in an alien alphabet.”

  “Leila speaks Arabic. And by the way, my brain is properly described as reconditioned, not damaged.”

  They shared a smile before going back to work. Enya set up the password cracker and tuned it with scripts and rulesets. CJ let her get on with it. He didn’t have much faith in the cracker. The key here was not so much brute force as blinding inspiration. But they’d gotten no closer either way when he heard the distinctive growl of Leila’s diesel a block away. He slipped a Sig in his belt and went outside, checking the street as she pulled into the driveway.

  “I was careful,” she said as she stepped out of the car. “Besides, they were all gone. That asshole was messing with me. They checked out overnight.”

  That didn’t sound right. Preston’s take on messing with people was more like burying them in concrete than standing them up for an interview. He checked the empty street again before breaking the rest of the day’s bad news to her.

  No password.

  Leila grabbed his arm and jerked him around.

  “You’re kidding me?” A hangdog face was all the answer CJ could muster. “That’s all you’ve got for me? Password Sudoku?”

  “Enya’s an expert. She’s got special tools. And you can help with the Arabic. The biggest jackpot Vegas ever saw is right here in this house. We just need to roll the right dice.”

  He was pretty pleased with that Vegas metaphor, but Leila was inconsolable. Her day had gone wrong from the get-go. Pumped up and ready to rip into Preston, she was still in attack mode and CJ was a handy new target. He steered her into the kitchen and made her coffee while she thrashed away at him. Half a cup later, her pressure valves vented, he told her about Rumble Bee, and as the bonanza lying in wait on the far side of twenty-odd characters came into focus, her eyes lit up and CJ knew they had a new recruit on their team.

  “Do I have to do this myself?” Enya said, sticking her head through the kitchen doorway.

  They followed her back into the office, where they settled down, each with a copy of the shortlist, which Enya had transcribed into the laptop and printed o
ut. CJ started by giving Leila the background, describing the scene that day and its players and how they’d drilled it all down to this list. Enya talked technical and security, helping her understand Declan’s approach to passwords and what she’d already tested and tried.

  “Tell us about the Arabic,” CJ said as Leila studied the list.

  “I suppose you both know that Arabic has its own alphabet. So when you write it in the Latin alphabet, it has as many possibilities as there are people with ears. Also, they usually omit vowels when they transliterate. So this is something else yet again. It’s phonetic and—”

  “I know. I know,” Enya said. “But let’s skip the obvious and take this forward. Can you see anything meaningful? I need to make a mask and a set of rules to crack this.”

  CJ looked from Enya to Leila. Nothing to add. That was right on song. Enya started to drum her fingers.

  Leila took the hint and put her eyes back on the list.

  “As a matter of fact, they do. I speak Arabic, but I don’t read or write it.” She glanced up before getting back to the list. Enya eased up on the drumming. “So I think in phonetic terms. And since we know the topic is computers, some of this jumps off the page. Mushfira, for example, means encrypted. But you know that had to be part of the conversation already.”

  “And the rest?” CJ said.

  “The same computer words he said in English repeated in Arabic. This one”—she pointed at muhadila—“is something like recipe or formula, and kalamah alsiru means password.”

  “What about tassy fon?”

  “No idea.” She continued to study the list. “These English words are so weird.” Leila pointed them out. “Salmon, cat, canary? Are you sure that’s salmon and not Salman, or Suleiman? They’re common names.”