by Bryce Adams
It was a nondescript cube occupying a city block, plastered with pale blow-on stucco. There were two portals along the north wall marked “loading” and “unloading” in Arabic, each of which was open despite the hour. A mixture of red and white light glowed out the door, looking like fire reflected over snow. There were no cars anywhere on the grounds except theirs, which they pulled up tight to the western edge of the warehouse. Then, wearing dark fatigues that stood out against the pale stucco, they slunk around the building into the loading gate.
They entered a world of red loading dock lights and high, bone-white fluorescent tube lighting far overhead. The place hummed with the bulbs of that soulless lighting but was otherwise quiet. The marines didn’t disturb the hush—they were cat-light on their feet even in boots. Ambrose just tried to give them a wide berth and “guard the rear,” as Malik had politely suggested when he first started training Ambrose in urban warfare tactics a few weeks beforehand.
There was a pile of boxes in the center of the space stamped with black-stenciled Farsi: “Product of Iran, store in a cool, dry place.” There were maybe twenty crates in all. The place wasn’t even one tenth full, which struck Ambrose as odd. But he snapped out of it when private Young went over to one of the crates with his knife out, ready to open to it.
“No,” Ambrose said loudly enough to be heard across half the warehouse, “We’re here for people and documents, not materiel.”
Young looked frustrated but didn’t argue. He put away his knife and unslung the AK-47 over his shoulder. All of them carried AKs. That way, if they did get into trouble, there weren’t any American bullets to tie them to the scene. Young walked over to the edge of the warehouse, mimicking Malik, Tesoro, and Laurence as they scoped the outer edges of the room for more people.
Then “more people” found Ambrose. A man’s voice behind him barked out in Arabic, “Who in the hell are you? What are you doing here?”
Ambrose thought he heard the cold click of a gun being drawn, so he pulled the .44 that Malik had given him and turned to fire. It was a middle aged man with a mustache standing in the door of the warehouse, half obscured by the shadows outside. Maybe he had a gun, maybe he didn’t.
Ambrose dropped him with two shots to his center of mass. The man dropped a metal thermos.
“Oh shit,” Ambrose said.
Malik and the others were over to him in seconds with their rifles drawn. Laurence was the best field medic, so he leaned down to check the man out.
Malik didn’t bother asking what had happened. He just looked out into the Baghdad night with a tight jaw, scanning for enemies, before saying, “We’ll check him out. There’s a file cabinet in the side office attached to this place, and nobody bothered locking it. Go take a look.”
Ambrose did as he was told. The side office was a sparse little cubby with a card table desk, a framed portrait of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric-warlord of Sadr City, and a beaten up file cabinet with two drawers, both of which turned out to be nearly empty.
The contents were either written in code or painfully banal, and they probably just described legitimate shipments that the place took on as part of its cover. Hell, if Sorcerer was working anonymously, for all Ambrose knew ninety-nine percent of the warehouse’s business might have been legitimate.
Then he noticed the dates on one of the agonizingly tedious cargo manifests: February 2002, thirteen months before the invasion. That one had an eagle-and-sword logo stamped across its letterhead. On second glance, the other documents predating the invasion had the same logo, and those post-invasion didn’t.
“New management, old management,” Ambrose whispered to himself.
He didn’t find anything with Sorcerer’s handwriting on it, so he only took a single pre-invasion cargo manifest bearing the eagle-and-sword letterhead. Then he carefully rearranged the files as best he could remember. Ambrose was confident they would look undisturbed, because he was good at this sort of thing: if you pay close attention to how things are arranged before you paw through them, it’s possible to go through a person’s things with impunity.
Unless you try to take something. Ambrose did another risk calculation, then folded up the manifest and went out into the warehouse.
Malik crouched by the loading dock, picking up Ambrose’s spent shell casings.
“Where’s the Iraqi?” Ambrose asked.
Malik answered, shoving the empty shells into his pocket, “Dead. We put him in the Peugeot trunk. We’ll dump him somewhere outside Sadr City once we’re clear of this place. Not much we can do about the blood stains, though. There’s probably cleaning supplies somewhere around here, but I’m not letting anybody screw around finding the janitor’s supply closet. C’mon, we’re leaving.”
Tesoro already had the Peugeot revving by the time Ambrose and Malik squeezed into it. They rolled out of the parking lot with their lights off, and everyone held their breaths until they were clear of Sadr City’s black labyrinth.
As they cruised back toward the Green Zone Malik asked, “Did you really hit that guy with two shots to his center of mass, after he had the drop on you? Fuck, you learn quick.”
Ambrose looked out at Baghdad, trying to imagine the city beneath the rubble and scorched billboards, the one that had inspired Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights and made Baghdad the center of the civilized world. He muttered, “No. I think this is just bringing out my mean streak.”
Laurence was sitting in the back with them. He snorted and asked, “Would you rather that guy saw what we were doing and got away? Wouldn’t that tell your Sorcerer to get the hell out of town?”
Ambrose was quiet. A couple seconds later he tapped Tesoro on the shoulder, saying, “That alley over there—that’ll be fine for the body. I’ll drag it out and do the dumping.”
Tesoro looked back towards Malik, who nodded his assent.
Chapter Nine
It was the next day, still in early 2006. Ambrose waited until the cool of the evening enveloped Baghdad, which in reality just meant that the sun went down and the humidity went up. He wasn’t just beating the sun—he knew that by 7 p.m. the bulk of the Occupation’s bureaucrats (by that point in 2006, they hated it when people still referred to “the Occupation”) would be at the al-Rasheed hotel bar or the Green Zone Café, getting drunk on corporate liquor while pretending they didn’t live in a company town. That diaspora meant that nobody would notice Ambrose as he walked over to John Carlisle’s house with a bundle of documents sticking out of his black and red messenger’s bag.
Carlisle didn’t go out in the evenings. He was too classy to sit in a hotel bar ogling the few women imprisoned in the Green Zone with a thousand horny bureaucrats who couldn’t understand why the ladies weren’t swooning over stories about their fraternity pranks at Georgetown. Hell, even though Carlisle had been in-country since 2003, he hadn’t snagged a villa all to himself when the getting was at its best. Ambrose had still been able to do that with a bit of pluck and a lot of foul language as late as 2005.
Instead, Carlisle lived in a modest bungalow close to his masters in the hulking pink marble mass of the People’s Palace, the chintzy mammoth of a faux-Versailles where Saddam, and later Bush’s Iraq viceroy Paul Bremer, had ruled Iraq like the caliphs of old. Maybe that palace, with its absurd fountains and green palm gardens kept by Latino serfs from a Houston landscape architecture firm, was the only thing in Baghdad that Ambrose could imagine being from the Arabian Nights.
Carlisle answered almost immediately when Ambrose knocked. He’d loosened his tie, but was otherwise still dressed for business, despite the fact that barely a wisp of air conditioning fell out of the door after him.
“Hi Ambrose, long time no see. Care for a drink? A new shipment of Red Label came in,” Carlisle said in a single breath.
Ambrose was surprised that John Carlisle would immediately offer anyone a drink, let alone a man like Ambrose, who everybody knew drank too much to begin with. “Hi John, I was going to apologize for
disturbing you, but I guess I’ll upgrade that too a ‘hell yeah?’” Ambrose answered cheerily.
Carlisle laughed and waved him inside. Ambrose saw a simple one room bungalow with a nice couch and a big work desk attached to a drafting table where Carlisle had been working on what looked like the schematics for some species of unassuming municipal building. The wall-mounted AC unit fanned anemically up and down. Either Carlisle didn’t feel the heat or he was too demure to demand a better AC unit.
“Nice furniture, John,” Ambrose said as Carlisle gave him a drink, “You’ve carved out something homey here.”
Carlisle snorted and sat down on the couch, inviting Ambrose to join him. “Thanks, Ambrose. It can’t match that Uday-chic villa you’ve commandeered, but then again, this place isn’t within RPG range of militants across the river, unlike your palazzo on the Tigris Riviera.”
Ambrose’s upper lip curled as he answered, “Shit, I was wondering why that place was still available.”
Carlisle toasted as he said, “Yep, there you go. Is it true that looters got all the furniture from your place before you even found it? How’ve you managed?”
Ambrose returned the cheers and drank before saying, “They couldn’t figure out how to get the king-sized featherbed down the spiral staircase, and they missed some paintings along the main staircase. The rest of the furniture is…a work in progress.”
“Christ, Ambrose. You’ve got a five thousand square foot tropical villa with no furniture?”
“Tell USAID to get the Green Zone an Ikea.”
Carlisle smiled, showing bonded white teeth that gleamed past his dark skin. “Not likely—the Swedes protested Operation Iraqi Freedom.” He sipped until his glass matched the level of Ambrose’s drink. Some people did that, although Ambrose had never seen the point. “You mentioned my outfit. Is there something professional you needed?” He asked, looking at Ambrose’s tote bag with a raised eyebrow as he tumbled his scotch.
Ambrose picked up the bag and said, “Maybe. I need to get some Saddam-era real estate information, and I couldn’t think who else would be compiling that stuff other than USAID or the Corps of Engineers.”
“So you want official real estate documents from the previous regime?”
“Yeah, who would’ve managed that? Did Iraq have a ministry of urban affairs or something?”
“For the construction itself, the Ministry of Planning. For tax purposes, the Ministry of Finance. For compliance with ongoing urban design codes, the Ministry of Housing and Construction. You get the idea.”
“How in the hell do you run a government with that much overlap?”
Carlisle shrugged. “Ask Washington—they make Iraq look simple. In Iraq’s case, you manage that kind of overlap by funneling all of your real money into the Ministry of the Interior to fund secret police, then gut every other ministry that could be a threat to your power, until you’re left with functionaries whose only job is keeping absurdly specific records that mean nothing to nobody.”
Ambrose noticed that Carlisle’s work desk couldn’t actually fit a chair under it, due to ream upon ream of stained manila filing folders in five separate piles that were each three feet high. Ambrose’s eyes opened wide as he asked, “We’re not going to look through those folders, right? Can’t we just go to Abu Ghraib and torture one of these captured functionaries you talked about?”
Carlisle leaned in towards Ambrose and said, “It’s not good to be so sarcastic that people can never tell when you’re serious. But as for Abu Ghraib, we might not need to, if you show me what you’re looking for.”
Ambrose licked his lips and felt sweat beading on his forehead. How in the hell wasn’t Carlisle sweating yet? He reached into his tote bag and pulled out the captured Saddam-era document he’d just pilfered from warehouse four. Carlisle took the document readily and started scanning it with his bright eyes.
Carlisle asked, “I don’t speak Arabic half as well as you do. I’m assuming you’d tell me if there was anything interesting in the document itself?”
Ambrose nodded. “Yeah. It’s just a warehouse delivery manifest. I know about the warehouse, but I think it has counterparts, and I think the key to finding them might be in that letterhead. I was hoping you had some kind of corporate directory I could consult.”
“Not the way you mean. Unless…” he looked at the sword-and-eagle insignia so hard that Ambrose thought Carlisle’s eyes might burn through the paper. “I have an idea.” He walked over to his hoard of documents and began rifling through them.
Ambrose looked over his shoulder, wondering whether he should hold a flashlight over Carlisle’s shoulder. Ambrose asked, “Fuck, Carlisle. I’m sorry to put you through this. Which ministry are you starting with? Planning? Finance?”
“The Interior.” Carlisle pulled out a fat folder and tossed it onto the desk, where it thudded like a prize marlin hitting the deck of a trophy fisherman’s boat.
Ambrose needed a cigarette, but figured Carlisle would beat him to death with one of those folders if he lit up indoors. He asked, “John, I thought you said the Interior Ministry just meant the secret police?”
Carlisle nodded but didn’t look up from the folder while saying, “It does. They also handle security for property of the state.”
“What does that mean? The government owned the warehouse?”
Carlisle pulled out a document that bore the same eagle-and-sword insignia as the warehouse manifest. “Not the government. Qusay Hussein.”
Ambrose grabbed the sheet from Carlisle’s hand and pored over it. It was the cover page of articles of incorporation for an Iraqi company translating to “Two Rivers.” Date of incorporation: 1998. Sole shareholder and chief executive officer: Qusay Hussein al-Tikriti, Saddam’s second son, also known as “Qusay the Snake.”
Ambrose asked, “Do you have a list of the company’s holdings?”
Carlisle thumbed slowly through the remaining portions of the Two Rivers file, looking side-eyed at Ambrose. He said, “Twenty warehouses, all in Sadr City.” He reached into the file and then gave Ambrose an oversized urban schematic of Sadr City. “Why are you going into Sadr City, Ambrose? Didn’t the Man talk to you about this kind of thing?” Carlisle asked.
Ambrose trembled as he held the map. He ignored Carlisle’s question and replied, “This is it, John. This is what I’ve needed.”
“Ambrose, Jesus: everyone knows you’re about to be kicked stateside if you pull this kind of crap. What are you thinking?”
“This is how I get him, John. This is how I kill him.”
John Carlisle walked over and poured himself another drink. He made it disappear before responding. “What in the hell did I just do here? What’re you going to do with that map?” He asked.
Ambrose smiled, then walked over to pour himself another drink. Unlike Carlisle, he nursed his, and said, “I’ll tell you in a sec, John. First, let me ask you this: you said I speak twice the Arabic you do, so how is it that you found a business’s articles of incorporation in three minutes and could tell me that it belonged to Qusay Hussein?”
Carlisle made hard eye contact. “I matched the business logos. Qusay’s name was at the top, and it was the first thing I saw.”
Ambrose took a big sip, baring his teeth before he responded, “Do you speak good enough Arabic to distinguish between Arabic and Farsi, John?”
Carlisle smirked unsympathetically. “Enough to know that you were the right person to read that first document I sent your way. Enough to help other documents of the same sort keep flowing your way. Of course, that had to stop when you told the Man what you were up to. What in the world would make you show your hand like that? Did you actually ask for a strike team, the way they say? Who do you think you are?”
Ambrose folded up the map and then walked over to Carlisle’s desk, where he took back the manifest from warehouse 4. Then he slid them both into his tote bag and walked towards the door. Carlisle didn’t stop him. He just stood at his desk, drummin
g his fingers along its edge in consternation.
Ambrose turned in the doorway and said, “I’m nobody, John. We’re all nobodies. When I started looking into this stuff I was just bored.” He gave his bag a loving pat. “I’m not bored anymore. Are you going to tell anyone about this?”
Carlisle shook his head. “No. I get boredom. Don’t come here again.”
Ambrose nodded formally, then snuck back to his villa by hugging the riverside wall that separated the southern Green Zone from the banks of the Tigris. The final call to prayer blasted from a dozen mosques in the immediate vicinity alone, creating a tinny angels’ choir reminding him that he was a stranger in a strange land, a nobody with aspirations to personhood.
Once he’d gotten back to his villa he went into the bathroom and turned on the light. Then he sat naked and cross-legged on the floor, enjoying the only cool surface in the whole house. He poured out his tote bag and began comparing its contents with the map of “Two Rivers” warehouses he’d gotten from Carlisle. He looked at the addresses of warehouses 1 and 4, and then circled their locations with a red marker. Then he found the location of warehouse 20, the third location Sorcerer had bothered to list with an address, and did likewise. Then he looked at the map, which had in its margins a complete address list of the twenty warehouses that Two Rivers owned in Sadr City. All three of his warehouses were on there, as he’d suspected. Sorcerer had gotten his locations right.
He took his red pen and marked in the remaining seventeen warehouse locations across Sadr City.
When it was over, he reached for a cigarette. He made himself look away from the map, because he needed to make sure that he hadn’t concocted his own findings. Part of him assumed that he’d turn back and see nothing but a tessellated mess of red spots worthy of Jackson Pollack. It wasn’t the case.
He drew a cold bath, then made a call on his cell phone. He hadn’t been wrong. Malik needed to know what he’d found at once.