Contract With God (22 page)

‘Nothing. Just vague stuff, a couple of intercepted e-mails. None of the files escaped the fire. Hard disks are very delicate.’

‘You have to find Watson. He’s the key to everything. It’s urgent.’

‘I’m on it.’

Marla Jackson wasn’t used to reading newspapers, and that was why she ended up in jail. Of course, Marla didn’t see it that way. She thought she had gone to jail for being a good mother.

The truth about Marla’s life lay somewhere between these two extremes. She had had a poor but relatively normal childhood - as normal as a person could have in Lorton, Virginia, whose own citizens referred to it as the armpit of America. Marla was born into a lower-class black family. She played with dolls and a skipping rope, went to school, and fell pregnant at the age of fifteen and a half.

Marla had, in fact, tried to prevent the pregnancy. But she had no way of knowing that Curtis had put a pinhole in the condom. She had no choice. She had heard about the crazy practice among some teenage boys who tried to make themselves look big by getting girls pregnant before they were out of high school. But that was something that happened to other girls. Curtis loved her.

Curtis disappeared.

Marla left high school and entered the not very select club of teenage mothers. Little Mae became the centre of her mother’s life, for better or worse. Left behind were Marla’s dreams of saving enough money to study meteorological photography. Marla took a job at a local factory, which in addition to her responsibilities as a mother, gave her little time for reading newspapers. Which in turn caused her to make a regrettable decision.

One afternoon her boss announced that he wanted to increase her hours. The young mother had already seen women emerging from the factory exhausted, their heads down, carrying their uniforms in supermarket bags; women whose sons had been left alone and had ended up either in reform school or shot up in a gang fight.

To prevent this, Marla signed up for the Army reserves. That way the factory couldn’t increase her hours because it would conflict with her instruction at the army base. This would allow her to spend more time with little Mae.

Marla made the decision to join one day after the Military Police Company was notified of its next destination: Iraq. The news item had appeared on page 6 of the
Lorton Chronicle
. In September 2003, Marla waved goodbye to Mae and climbed aboard a truck at the base. The girl, hugging her grandmother, cried at the top of her lungs with all the grief a six-year-old can muster. Both would die four weeks later when Mrs Jackson, who wasn’t as good a mother as Marla, pushed her luck by smoking in bed for the last time.

When she was given the news, Marla found she was incapable of returning home and begged her astonished sister to make all the arrangements for the wake and burial. She then requested that her tour of duty in Iraq be extended, and went on to devote herself wholeheartedly to her next stint - as an MP in a prison called Abu Ghraib.

A year later, a few unfortunate photos turned up on a national television programme. They demonstrated that something inside Marla had finally cracked. The good mother from Lorton, Virginia, had become a torturer of Iraqi prisoners.

Of course, Marla wasn’t the only one. In her head, losing her daughter and her mother somehow became the fault of ‘Saddam’s dirty dogs’. Marla was given a dishonourable discharge and sentenced to four years in prison. She served six months. After she got out of jail she went straight to the security firm DX5 and asked for work. She wanted to return to Iraq.

They gave her work, but she didn’t return to Iraq straight away. Instead she fell into Mogens Dekker’s hands. Literally.

It had been eighteen months and Marla had learned a great deal. She could shoot much better, knew more philosophy, and had experienced making love with a white man. Colonel Dekker had been turned on almost instantly by the woman with the big strong legs and the face of an angel. Marla had found him somewhat comforting, and the remainder of her comfort derived from the smell of gunpowder. She had killed for the first time and she liked it.

A lot.

She also liked her crew . . . sometimes. Dekker had chosen them well: a handful of assassins with no conscience who enjoyed killing under the impunity of a government contract. While they were on the battlefield, they were blood brothers. But on a hot sticky afternoon like this, when they had ignored Dekker’s orders to get some sleep and instead were playing cards, things took a different turn. They became as irritated and dangerous as a gorilla at a cocktail party. The worst one was Torres.

‘You’re messing me around, Jackson. And you haven’t even given me a little kiss,’ said the small Colombian. It made Marla especially uneasy when he played with his small rusty razor. Like him, it was apparently harmless but capable of slitting a man’s throat as if it were butter. The Colombian was slicing small white strips off the edge of the plastic table where they were sitting. There was a smile on his lips.

‘
Du scheiβt’ mich an
, Torres. Jackson has a full house and you’re full with shit,’ said Alryk Gottlieb, who was constantly battling with English prepositions. The taller of the twins had hated Torres with a vengeance ever since they had watched a World Cup match between their two countries. They had said things to each other, fists had flown. In spite of his six foot two frame, Alryk didn’t sleep well at night. If he was still alive, it may only have been because Torres wasn’t sure he could take down both twins.

‘All I’m saying is that her cards are a little too good,’ Torres shot back, smiling even more.

‘Well, are you going to deal or what?’ said Marla, who had cheated but wanted to remain cool. She had already won almost two hundred from him.

This streak can’t last much longer. I’ll have to start letting him win, or one night I’m going to end up with that blade in my neck
, she thought.

Slowly Torres began to deal making all sorts of faces to distract them.

At that moment the frequency scanner, which sat on a table six feet from where they were playing, started to beep.

‘What the hell?’ said Marla.

‘It’s the
verdammt
scanner, Jackson.’

‘Torres, go look at it.’

‘The fuck I will. I bet five bucks.’

Marla got up and looked at the screen on the scanner, a machine the size of a small video recorder that nobody used any more, except that this one had an LCD screen and cost a hundred times more.

‘Seems OK; it’s restarting,’ Marla said, returning to the table. ‘I’ll see your five and raise you five.’

‘I’m out,’ said Alryk, leaning back in his chair.

‘Chickenshit. Doesn’t even have a pair,’ said Marla.

‘You think you’re the one running the show, Mrs Dekker?’ Torres said.

Marla didn’t mind the words as much as his tone. Suddenly she forgot about letting him win.

‘No way, Torres. I live in coloured land, bro.’

‘What colour? Shit brown?’

‘Any colour except yellow. Funny . . . the coward’s colour, same as on the top of your flag.’

Marla was sorry as soon as she said it. Torres might be a filthy degenerate rat from Medellín, but for a Colombian his country and his flag were as sacred as Jesus. Her opponent pressed his lips together so tightly they almost disappeared and his cheeks turned slightly purple. Marla felt both scared and excited; she enjoyed putting Torres down and drinking in his rage.

Alryk looked at them, more than a little worried. Marla knew how to take care of herself, but at that moment she felt as if she were crossing a mine field.

‘Come on, Torres, raise Jackson. She’s bluffing.’

‘Leave him alone. I don’t think he plans to shave any new customers today, right, fucker?’

‘What are you talking about, Jackson?’

‘Don’t tell me it wasn’t you who did the white prof last night?’

Torres looked very serious.

‘It wasn’t me.’

‘It had your signature all over it: a small, sharp instrument, low in the back.’

‘I’m telling you, it wasn’t me.’

‘And I’m saying that I saw you arguing with the ponytailed white dude on the ship.’

‘Come off it, I argue with a lot of people. Nobody understands me.’

‘Then who was it? The simoon? Or maybe the priest?’

‘Sure, it could have been the old crow.’

‘You’re not serious, Torres,’ Alryk cut in. ‘That priest is only a
warmer bruder
.’

‘Hasn’t he told you? This big-time hit man is scared shitless of the priest.’

‘I’m not scared of anything. I’m just telling you, he’s dangerous,’ Torres said, pulling a face.

‘I think you swallowed the story that he’s from the CIA. For Christ’s sake, he’s an old man.’

‘Only three or four years older than your senile boyfriend. And as far as I know, the boss can break a donkey’s neck with his bare hands.’

‘Damn right, fucker,’ said Marla, who loved bragging about her man.

‘He’s much more dangerous than you think, Jackson. If you’d taken your head out of your ass for one moment you’d have read the report. That guy is Special Ops pararescue. There’s nobody better. A few months before the boss picked you up as the group’s mascot, we did an operation in Tikrit. There was a Special Forces para in our unit. You wouldn’t believe the things I saw that guy do . . . they’re not normal. Those dudes have death stuck all over them.’

‘Paras are bad news. Hard like hammers,’ Alryk said.

‘Go to hell, the two of you, fucking Catholic babies,’ Marla said. ‘What do you think he carries in that black briefcase? C4? A gun? You both patrol that canyon with an M4 that can spit out nine hundred bullets a minute. What’s he going to do, smack you with his Bible? Maybe he’ll ask the doctor for a scalpel to cut off your nuts.’

‘I’m not worried about the doc,’ Torres said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘She’s just some Mossad dyke. I can handle her. But Fowler—’

‘Forget the old crow. Hey, if all this is an excuse for not admitting that you took care of the white prof—’

‘Jackson, I’m telling you it wasn’t me. But trust me: nobody here is who they say they are.’

‘Then thank God we have an Ypsilon protocol on this mission,’ Jackson said, displaying her perfectly white teeth, which had cost her mother eighty double shifts in the diner where she worked.

‘As soon as your boyfriend says
sarsaparilla
it’s time for heads to roll. The first one I’m going after is the priest.’

‘Don’t mention the code, fucker. Go ahead and raise.’

‘Nobody’s going to raise,’ Alryk said, motioning to Torres. The Colombian held back his chips. ‘The frequency scanner isn’t working. It keeps trying to start.’

‘Fuck. Something’s wrong with the electricity. Leave it alone.’

‘
Halt die klappe Affe
. We can’t have that thing turned off or Dekker will kick our ass. I’m going to check out the electrical panel. You two go on playing.’

Torres looked as if he was about to continue the game, but then he gave Jackson a cold stare and got up.

‘Wait up, white man. I want to stretch my legs.’

Marla realised that she had gone too far in messing with Torres’s manhood, and the Colombian had placed her high up on his list of potential hits. She was only a little sorry. Torres hated everybody, so why not give him a good reason?

‘I’m going too,’ she said.

The three went out into the boiling heat. Alryk squatted near the platform.

‘Everything looks OK here. I’m going to check out the generator.’

Shaking her head, Marla went back inside the tent, wanting to lie down for a while. But before going inside she noticed the Colombian kneeling at the end of the platform and digging around in the sand. He picked up an object and looked at it with a weird smile on his lips.

Marla didn’t understand the significance of the red lighter decorated with the flowers.

AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN

 

 

Andrea’s afternoon had been a series of close calls.

She had barely managed to escape from under the platform when she heard the soldiers getting up from the table. And not a moment too soon. A few more seconds of the hot air from the generator and she would have passed out for good. She crawled out through the side of the tent opposite the door, stood up, and walked very slowly towards the infirmary, doing her best not to keel over. What she really needed was a shower, but that was out of the question, since she didn’t want to go in that direction and run into Fowler. She grabbed two bottles of water and her camera and left the infirmary tent again, looking for a quiet spot on the rocks in the index finger.

She found a hiding place on a small slope above the canyon floor and sat there watching the archaeologists’ activities. She didn’t know what stage their grief had reached now. At some point Fowler and Dr Harel went by, probably looking for her. Andrea ducked her head behind the rocks and tried to piece together what she had heard.

The first conclusion she came to was that she couldn’t trust Fowler - which was something she already knew - and she couldn’t trust Doc - which was something that made her even more uncomfortable. Her thoughts about Harel hadn’t gone much beyond the tremendous physical attraction