by Zoe Sharp
Not that I thought for a second they’d hand me a loaded weapon, I opened the bolt to check, keeping my finger off the trigger. I unclipped the magazine and, sensing this was some kind of test, fieldstripped the AK, laying the receiver, recoil-spring assembly, and bolt carrier neatly side by side on the rug.
As I added more components, I surreptitiously checked their condition, trying not to be obvious about it. No point in insulting the man in his own house. Not when he had so much firepower at his disposal.
The weapon was in remarkably good nick, compared to some I’d seen. Not that it mattered too much. It was simple and robust, designed to be operated by just about anyone, just about anywhere, from broiling jungle to ice-cold tundra. I recalled once being told that they’d trialed the originals by dragging them through sand behind a pickup truck. Afterward, technicians had roughly shaken loose the dirt and immediately test-fired the weapons. None had failed.
This was an AKM, with the stamped sheet-metal receiver. Less weighty than the older models, the AKM had the advantage of a mechanism that prevented the gun firing when the bolt was not fully closed. I’d seen the disadvantages of not having such a safety mech on the body of a would-be kidnapper using a cheap AK copy in South America. The results of a breech explosion in close proximity to the man’s face had not been pretty.
When I finished stripping the weapon, I put it straight back together again. I had just reseated the receiver when the curtain was pulled aside a second time and a woman came through with a tray of black chai in small glass cups. It might have been the same woman I’d seen earlier, but in light of visitors she’d put on a burqa.
I slotted the magazine home and let the bolt run forward to close the breech, then put the weapon down carefully on the rug in front of me.
“It’s good,” I said.
Moe was grinning so widely now it was like he had a flip-top head. He switched the beam of it across onto his uncle.
“I told you! I told you. Miss Charlie is a professional, yes?”
For an elongated moment, the old man showed no expression, then he allowed the faintest smile to curl one corner of his mouth. Blink and you would have missed it. He reached out and ruffled the top of Moe’s head as if he’d been a child.
The chai was handed round. I took a cautious sip. It was hot as hell, the tannin furring my tongue like iron filings on a magnet.
Then the old man looked directly at me for the first time and said in cultured, BBC English, “You are ex–British Army, I presume?”
TWENTY-TWO
ALONGSIDE ME, DAWSON INHALED A MOUTHFUL OF SCALDING TEA and ended up choking. I had to thump her on the back. It gave me time to gather my own thoughts.
“Yes sir, I was in the army,” I agreed sedately. “And you—I’ll take a wild guess and say . . . Oxford?”
It seemed to be my day for speculation. There was just something about him that hinted not only of intelligence but also the privilege such intelligence must always have afforded him. He reeked of education among the highest echelons of the social elite. The kind undertaken in an atmosphere where knowledge can be absorbed almost through the pores.
And then there were those shoes.
Now the old man smiled more fully, showing teeth as straight and as white as his nephew’s.
“I studied law at Magdalen College,” he said, pronouncing it ‘maudlin’ as one should if one has been properly brung up. As, indeed, my father would have said it. “Probably before you were born, young lady.”
I glanced again at the assault rifle lying on the carpet in front of me, shook my head. “So, tell me—how does a distinguished Oxford scholar get from the proverbial dreaming spires to dealing weaponry out of a fortified compound in Iraq?”
“By having one’s homeland devastated by war, civil war, and chaos,” he said simply. “What Saddam Hussein did not plunder for himself, your coalition forces destroyed with ground attacks and air strikes, and now it would seem Daesh intends to obliterate what little remains to clear the way for their accursed caliphate.” He shrugged, a delicately weary gesture. “What use is a lawyer in a land with no rule of law except that imposed by . . . barbarians, in the name of all that is holy?”
“But you are a Muslim, sir?”
“So? If you were a good Catholic, would you long for a return to the days of the Inquisition?”
“That wasn’t my point. But I am curious how it fits with your beliefs that you sell guns to whoever comes to your door.”
“My door, as you have seen, is not easy to find for those who do not have an . . . introduction.”
“And for those who do?”
His hand, with those long pianist’s fingers, twitched into a “maybe yes, maybe no” motion.
“I sell to those I believe are willing to fight to defend their homeland. Not to those who wish to add to its state of . . . perdition.”
He chose the word deliberately, I judged, for its Christian overtones. If he hoped to get a rise out of me that way, he was disappointed.
“If I might ask, sir, why did you agree to sell to Sean? This is not his homeland and, whatever his reason for being in Iraq, it was not to become a freedom fighter. And Moe would not have brought us here without your agreement. Why did you give it?”
For a time the old man sipped his chai and didn’t speak. It was as if the Oxford academic had disappeared beneath the surface of the elderly warlord, like a whale slipping beneath the waves. So smooth and so seamless was the transition that you could begin to doubt you saw it in the first place.
“I spoke to . . . Sean, at some length,” he said at last. “We discovered that we had a certain . . . commonality of purpose. Before he left here I provided him with various . . . items of merchandise, and the name of a man in Karbala—Jahmir Lihaibi.” He smiled faintly. “Someone whom I thought it might be educational for him to meet.”
I frowned. I had no idea what goal Sean could possibly have had in common with the cagey old man before me. Surely he hadn’t gone to join the fight against the militants overrunning northern Iraq and Syria? What did Clay’s death have to do with that? Or this curious contact in Karbala?
“Why would Sean want to meet this man?”
“It is not my place to explain. That would be breaking a confidence. Perhaps when you next see Sean, you might ask him yourself.”
“Your . . . acquaintance,” I said carefully. “Where do I find him, exactly?”
His gaze rested on me for a moment. I felt the weight of it.
“I would not claim his acquaintance. In fact, mention of my name would gain you nothing, I fear. He is someone I know of merely by . . . reputation.” He motioned casually to Moe. “My nephew can take you to him, but first I think it might be wise to ascertain the . . . purpose of your own undertaking.”
I took a breath. “I don’t know exactly what you and Sean discussed, but I suspect his reason for being here might be to extract a kind of . . . vengeance.”
In my peripheral vision, I caught Dawson’s head snap in my direction. Cursing inwardly, I realized that maybe this conversation was telling her rather more than she needed to know. Ah well, too late to worry about that now.
I kept my eyes resolutely on the old man.
“Vengeance?” He pursed his lips. “Some might refer to it by another name: justice.”
I was suddenly tired of this verbal fencing with someone whose vocabulary was probably substantially larger than my own and held at least twice as many long words.
“Justice restores a balance,” I said flatly. “Vengeance just tips you further into the void.”
“There are some who would argue the extraction of that justice has to be commensurate with the original wrong, or where is the balance of which you speak?”
“In this case, I’m more concerned with the effects on the extractor than with justice itself.”
“Little of value can be achieved without sacrifice.”
“Of value to whom?”
“One might hypo
thesize that . . . justice should hold some purgative value for the victim of the original wrong.”
“And what if it doesn’t? What if the ‘victim’ believes that two wrongs do not make a right? What then?”
“Then one has to postulate that perhaps the seeker of justice has . . . their own agenda?”
“Indeed.”
The old man finished his chai in silence, set down his glass, and spoke briefly to the child who’d brought the AK. The boy slid quickly behind the curtain. When he ducked back into the room, his arms were filled with a stack of cardboard ammo boxes, a spare standard AK magazine perched on top. He put them down carefully next to the old man’s chair. Each box contained fifteen 7.62 x 39mm cartridges, made in Yugoslavia—back when Yugoslavia was still a unified country.
Until the boy returned, I wasn’t entirely sure if my argument—such as it was—had succeeded or failed.
The old man glanced across at me. “How many rounds do you think will be sufficient,” he asked, “to prevent this second wrong being committed?”
TWENTY-THREE
WE REACHED KARBALA JUST BEFORE THE SUN WENT DOWN. THE SKY started to turn burnt orange as the imams called the faithful to prayer.
The journey itself passed without incident. At our first fuel stop, we came across a convoy heading north for Baghdad—fuel tankers with well-equipped private contractors riding shotgun.
Although I was aware that the tankers made a tempting target, I reckoned the firepower the contractors were wielding should prove a reasonable deterrent. And they didn’t seem too full of themselves, which was always a plus. There’s a type who joins the PMC circuit just for the chance to shoot a live human target and get away with it. These guys were older, had the air of people who’d served their time with the military and seen enough of the pink mist to last a lifetime.
We told them we were journalists, hinted that we’d mention their outfit in a favorable light if they watched our backs on the road. Fortunately, they didn’t ask to see our press credentials. They just warned us that another convoy of tankers had been hit a week or so before, and to be ready in case it all went bad.
Dawson and I rode in the back seat of Moe’s Land Cruiser. It fit better with local custom regarding separation of the sexes. It allowed us to divvy up the ammo and load the AK magazines between us as well. With the pair from Moe’s uncle we now had two each, holding the standard thirty rounds apiece. I’d asked for—and got—two hundred rounds, still in their original packaging. If we didn’t blow it all on full-auto bursts, it should be enough to get us out of immediate trouble.
Or get us deeper into it.
Dawson reckoned she’d be up to firing the AK I bought in Zubayr. Not to any kind of sniper standard, but enough to keep the bad guys’ heads down if it came to that. Moe just grinned at me and pulled out an Uzi machine pistol with an extended magazine, which he kept hidden under his seat. “For emergency, yes?”
Unfortunately, sitting alongside Dawson for the seven-hour journey gave her plenty of opportunity to quiz me about Sean Meyer and his real reasons for being in Iraq.
“I’m putting my neck on the line here,” she said quietly. “The least you can do is level with me.”
We had stopped for Moe to complete his midday prayers. He had parked in the shade of a building by the roadside, but we sat with the rear doors propped open to allow what little breeze there was to blow through.
“No, the least I could do would be to keep my mouth shut.”
“You know what I mean, so stop stalling!”
I sighed. “OK. What do you want to know?”
That threw her. She floundered for a moment, then said, “I don’t know! Why not start with why this Meyer guy might be out for vengeance on your behalf?”
“We were in a relationship,” I admitted. “Back when we were both in the army. Bit like you and your ex, I suppose, except Sean outranked me, not the other way around. Plus, he was one of my training instructors.”
“When you first joined?”
I shook my head. “I made it through Selection into Special Forces. I was in the middle of training for that role when I got . . . chucked out.”
Her eyebrows shot up, then flattened into an angry line. “Because of Clay?”
“He was . . . one of the reasons, yes.”
She shook her head, made a noise of disgust through her teeth. “Wait a minute, how long ago was all this?”
I had to think. Some days it seemed like ancient history. Other days it might have been just a few weeks ago. “Seven years, I think—maybe eight? It’s not something I try to remember.”
“I know revenge is supposed to be a dish best served cold and all that crap, but why on earth has he waited all this time to go after the guy? I mean, has he only just found out or something?”
How to answer that? There was only so much soul baring I was prepared to do with a comparative stranger. Besides, officially Dawson worked for Parker, not me. And I’ve found people’s loyalty tends to rest, however temporarily, with whoever signs the paychecks. If my boss took it into his head to ask her some pointed questions about what had happened in the field with this job, who knew how much information she’d volunteer.
“Something like that, yes,” I murmured. I wasn’t entirely lying. Sean had indeed only recently found out what I’d done for him, unrequested and without seeking his consent. Rather than offering reasoned explanation, I’d told him in a fit of temper. I hadn’t had the chance to lay out how the thing had gone down. How I’d never set out with the intention of killing the guy who’d shot him. But the way the game had unfolded, at the time it had seemed the right—the only—thing to do. And even though it might have sent Sean down the path he was now following, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the act itself.
“So he might have been the one who did . . . all that to Clay?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sean can be ruthless, but he’s never been a psychopath. What was done to Clay was downright evil. And I speak as someone who had more motive than most for wanting him dead, but even so . . .”
“One thing I have to ask, Charlie,” Dawson said, thumbing a final round into her second magazine, “is why didn’t you go after the bastard yourself? I think I would have been more than tempted, given the circumstances.”
“Because for the first few years after I was booted out, I didn’t want to think about what I’d lost, about what they’d taken away. And, if I’m honest, I was afraid of getting caught. One of them getting bumped off might have passed unnoticed, but all four and the cops would have been banging on my door before the bodies had time to cool.”
I didn’t tell her that what I’d been afraid of most was what it might do to me. Killing because your life—or that of another—is in immediate danger is one thing. I’d been trained to accept that possibility right from the start of my army career. But appointing yourself judge, jury, and executioner is quite another. As is doing it anyway, only to discover that it doesn’t trouble your conscience nearly as much as it should.
“Aren’t you worried they still might—come after you, I mean?”
“Depends on how fast we catch up with Sean. And what he has to say about Clay’s death when we do.”
Whatever she might have said to that was curtailed by Moe’s return. He was smiling as he climbed back behind the wheel, his prayer mat neatly rolled, and we hit the road again. We passed the hulks of burned-out vehicles that had been shunted off the side of the highway and abandoned to the mercy of the desert. Stripped of anything of value, they were now being slowly eroded by the wind-driven sand. I wondered if they were left there as a lesson to the others.
We must have gone another three or four klicks before Dawson sat back and swore under her breath. “Nothing like changing the rules on me halfway through the game, is there, Charlie?”
I glanced across, met her gaze and held it. “If you want to call it a day, I won’t think any less of you, Luisa. Moe will be going straight back to Basra
tomorrow morning. Nothing to stop him taking you back with him.”
Her chin came out, mulish. “I said I’d do this, and I don’t go back on my word. But if you lie to me again, I’ll punch your lights out.”
“Try it,” I said dryly, “and you may find you need the other shoulder pinning back together as well.”
I spoke lightly, but she studied me without expression for a moment. “You would, too, wouldn’t you?” She gave a rueful smile. “I’d say Sean Meyer is not the only one who can be ruthless . . .”
TWENTY-FOUR
IN KARBALA, MOE TOOK US TO THE HOUSE OF YET ANOTHER “UNCLE.” I was beginning to wonder if he claimed kinship with anyone who was either a good contact or had connections he thought we might need.
The man lived in a compound slightly less fortified than that of Moe’s arms-dealing relative in Zubayr, but the layout was roughly the same. An outer, walled courtyard surrounded a squat, flat-roofed building within. Once again, the state of the blockwork had me speculating that any half-decent builder would never be out of work in this country.
The uncle who greeted us was younger. There were no gray threads among his hair or luxurious mustache. He was short and rather stout, in baggy khaki trousers and an open-neck shirt, and bore a remarkable resemblance to the deposed former president, Saddam Hussein. Any celebrity-double work must have dried up over recent years.
He introduced himself simply as “Yusuf” and greeted us with every appearance of warmth and an apparent lack of curiosity. That could simply have been down to his almost nonexistent grasp of English. Or, Dawson told me, it was traditional to offer hospitality for three days before asking when guests were likely to leave, or even why they were here. I couldn’t see it taking very long, what we had to do.
There were several other men who could have been friends or more relatives. It was hard to tell. They were clearly curious about the pair of us but didn’t feel able to ask who we were or what we were doing.