Reconstruction (38 page)

He remembered that one time he’d been in Miro’s flat. ‘I don’t have many friends,’ Miro had said. With a lot of people, the cue would have been obvious.
Come on, man.
All the guys think you’re cool
. But Miro had no interest in hearing that, any more than Ben was tempted to say it. What he was thinking now was, there’d been no sign of Jaime in Miro’s flat – not just of the boy himself, but of any boy: Miro’s flat had been pure Miro, as if the place had been decorated to match him: boxed sets of operas; Everyman hardbacks; Klimt reproduction in the hall. But Ben had visited the bathroom, and while washing his hands had opened the cabinet over the sink. Not because he was a spy: just because it was what he did right then. He found an electric razor; a bar of soap still in its wrapper. Aspirin. Spare toothpaste. And a used tooth-brush, lying on its side. He’d closed the cabinet, dried his hands, went back through to the living room, where Miro was pouring another drink.

‘I’ve been thinking about those numbers,’ Miro said as he entered, as if continuing a conversation long since started.

‘Which numbers?’ Ben had said. He didn’t even know what he was doing here, except Miro had asked if he were free that evening, and he hadn’t been quick enough to say No.

‘The ones that pass across our desks,’ Miro had said. ‘On their way out of Iraq.’

Ben remembered an evening in the pub, months previously. ‘We’re not supposed to discuss this outside work,’ he’d said.

‘I know we’re not,’ Miro had said. ‘But I had an idea.’

The tube came to another halt, and Ben stepped off. He stood for a moment in front of a poster advertising one of those Brit-flicks that vanish from cinemas before the hoardings are changed. Rush hour: people thronging the platform, making connections. Nobody looked at him twice.

‘You’ve been thinking about the numbers,’ he’d repeated.

‘It’s numbers when we see it. Somewhere, it’s money.’

‘And what have you been thinking?’

‘I’ve been thinking we should take it,’ Miro had said.

‘Judy?’

‘That’s who he meant.’

‘Judy
Ainsworth
?’

‘Her husband died in Iraq. You must have known that.’

She must have. But did she? Louise thought back on what she knew and what she’d assumed, and wondered: had she even known Judy’s husband was dead? She’d thought he’d left her. The information had come as no surprise. If she’d been married to Judy, she’d have left her too. ‘He was a soldier?’

‘Christ, no. His age?’

‘So what was he doing there? And how did he die?’

Bad Sam Chapman said, ‘He was an engineer.’

Contract work
, Deirdre Walker had told him.
Rebuilding
stuff. All that damage, it’s not like they could fix it themselves.

‘He was working on a power station south-west of Baghdad.’ This had come from the queens of the database. Deirdre Walker hadn’t been big on specifics. ‘A big project, obviously. It’s not finished yet.’

‘But it’s proved expensive so far,’ Louise guessed.

He said, ‘This part isn’t news to you, is it?’

She moved a quarter step away, and felt the wall at her back. Soon, the intercom would squawk back into life; soon he’d have to shift his foot from the door, and they’d be on the move once more. She’d be back in the world.

‘What do you know about the money?’ he went on.

‘The missing money?’ she said. ‘That’s where it came from. Iraq.’

‘Jaime told you that?’

‘Whistler did. Jaime didn’t know anything, except that his boyfriend had gone missing. And that you tried to kill him.’

Chapman said, ‘But Whistler knew. That’s interesting. Did he know about Derek Ainsworth?’

‘He wasn’t mentioned.’

‘Miro met him. In Iraq. Derek must have had a pretty good idea of how much money could be made over there, because he bought his way into a sub-contract.’

‘Bought his way in?’

‘It was an American company. They were contracted to build four power stations, which must have made for a multi-billion dollar contract, but as they hadn’t actually been involved in building power stations before, they had to subcontract the work.’

‘But . . .’

Chapman waited.

‘If they’d never done it before, how come they won the contract?’

He raised his eyes to where heaven might have been, if they hadn’t been in a lift. Then said: ‘Derek tendered for a piece of the sub, and no doubt threw in a bribe. He took out a big loan the same time he won the work. Cashed in his pension. Put up his house as security.’ He was fiddling with his unlit cigarette again. ‘The work was probably geared to take years. He must have assumed the outlay was worth it, that in the long run he’d be raking it in. But something happened which I don’t suppose he was expecting.’

‘What was that?’ she asked.

‘Our Derek fell in love,’ he said.

Light was fading, and there was a hint of rain in the air, which had the effect of hurrying people up. If anyone was following him, Ben thought he’d notice.

It was less than thirty minutes since he’d clobbered Moody: more than enough time for a full alert to have been sounded. Ben didn’t do operations, but knew the theory. There was enough CCTV coverage around to track a pigeon through the capital – but they had to pinpoint him first.

He crossed the main road. Loitered by a shop window: anyone following would have to break stride; or walk on, then look back. But Ben saw no one. He’d just left the Edgware Road. Now he turned down a sidestreet, and let himself into the back door of an apartment block by tap-ping a code on a keypad. When the door, hydraulically sprung, closed in his wake, he felt as if a safety net had dropped over him. An illusion but a comforting one, which was all you could ask of illusions.

The flat was third floor. He took the lift, and wondered as he rose if the entire block was made up of boltholes: adulterers’ pads and smugglers’ roosts, only ever visited by the furtive. The lift was mirrored, and it was clear Ben would pass for furtive. It was as if another Ben Whistler hid inside his familiar skin; had been hiding there for weeks, but was only now letting himself show.

Had Miro seen that other Ben, even before Ben knew it was there? Was that why he’d made his overture?

Miro had said, ‘You don’t think I can do it?’

‘I hadn’t pictured you as a thief.’

‘Disappointed?’

Ben shrugged. ‘This is playtime, right? We can talk about whatever we want.’

‘Or are you worried that it is a test? That I wait for you to agree to help steal a million pounds, and then I report it to Ashton. And you are out of a job in the morning.’

It was interesting that he’d specified Neil Ashton, rather than Bad Sam.

Ben had said, ‘I can picture you as a thief more easily than I can picture you working with Ashton.’

Miro laughed. ‘That is what I like about you, Ben. You are very honest in your responses.’

‘Nice to know. But you’re not being entirely straight, are you?’

‘I have just asked if you want to help me steal a fortune. How straight do you want me to be?’

Ben had said, ‘A million pounds? That would be like robbing a safe and just taking the spare change. Or do you think no one will notice a measly million?’

‘A figure of speech, Ben. I wasn’t asking if you wanted to be rich. I was asking if you wanted to steal some money.’

‘And do what with it?’ Ben had asked.

Miro had said: ‘Return it to its rightful owners.’

‘What’s love got to do with it?’

Jesus: as soon as the words were out of her mouth . . .

Sam Chapman didn’t pick it up. ‘Man of his age, having spent a couple of decades outliving his welcome at home? Nothing more dangerous. Trust me.’

A faint draught wafted through the lift’s wedged-open door. Noises off, too: footsteps, voices; whether from above or below, she couldn’t tell.

‘So he was feeling guilty. And spilled his guts to Miro Weiss.’

Chapman made a short noise that was probably a laugh. ‘No, he was feeling happy. Far more dangerous. And this woman was working for Medecins Sans Frontières, so that must have pushed him further along. Poor sod was ripe for confession. I’m not certain how he bumped into Weiss, but the company he’d subcontracted to was one Weiss was, ah, looking at.’

‘So Derek told him what was happening.’

Chapman said, ‘It wouldn’t have come as news. It wasn’t like Weiss was checking on who was nicking office supplies. Derek Ainsworth would have told him the same old story, about payments made for work never done, kickbacks from companies supposed to be supplying equipment. About everyone jumping on the money-go-round instead of getting the power back on.’

‘To make something happen when you turned on the tap,’ Louise remembered.

‘Whatever. Anyway, he spills what he knows to Miro Weiss. Probably nothing new, but it must have fattened Miro’s files. And then something else happened.’

‘He died,’ Louise said.

‘Jeep went over a landmine, or that’s the official story.’

(
Some kind of landmine thing. Place is full of them, isn’t it?
Deirdre Walker had said. Raising her eyebrows: what could you do? The places foreigners chose to live . . .)

‘The woman died too. I wonder if that helped Miro decide to do what he did?’

Their conversation had slipped a track . . . This bastard had hurt her – not hard to guess where his nickname came from – but maybe Ben Whistler was wrong. Whatever else was happening, this man certainly believed Miro had taken the money.

She said, ‘There were already people dying. Thousands of them. Children, babies . . . Why should one middle-aged man make a difference? He was only there to make money in the first place.’

‘Depends how you look at it. Derek spilled his guts to Weiss, because he wanted to make a clean breast or saw a chance to make a difference. Then he died. That might have tipped a balance for Miro. There’s a difference between scavenging the bodies on the battlefield, and murdering the stragglers.’

‘You think Derek was murdered?’

Chapman shrugged. ‘Maybe Miro did. The company Derek was subcontracted to took a big hit when the money went missing. Might have been coincidence.’

‘You’re guessing about a lot of this, aren’t you?’

He said, ‘If I wasn’t, you think I’d be here?’

On the third floor, Ben Whistler let himself into 32; a one-bedroom misery pit with a view of the neighbouring block. He drew the blinds and flipped the lights on, bringing the room into stark focus: sofa, table, empty shelves; the doorway into a kitchen barely wide enough to swing a Manx cat.
Adulterers’ pads
needed revision. If the other flats resembled this, they were nowhere you’d look for romance.

‘It’s not supposed to be
pretty
. It’s supposed to be anonymous.’

Neil Ashton had said this, giving Ben the key.

He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, which held a bottle of vodka and nothing else. An upside-down glass rested on the draining board. He rinsed it, half-filled it with vodka. He’d had nothing to eat since the Middle Ages, and needed a clear head, but needed alcohol more; needed the jolt as it scorched its way clear to his stomach. He wasn’t a big vodka drinker, but it had been a long day.

‘Every joe needs a safe house,’ Ashton had said.

‘That’s what I am now? A joe?’

‘It’s an operation. You might need a bolthole.’

Ben had said: ‘If things go wrong, you mean.’

‘Nothing’s going to go wrong.’

Words uttered more than a month ago, but would do for famous last ones: spoken by a man now tethered to a hospital bed.

Things could change in a month, sure, and also in less than a second. Ashton had been himself one moment, and smeared across tarmac the next. And Jaime Segura had been as good as bolted to Ben just a few short hours ago; close enough for Ben to feel Jaime’s heat through his cloth-ing as well as Jaime’s empty gun at his head. And then the world had changed: Ben had hit the ground. Abulletspace later, Jaime had joined him.

And then, of course, there was Miro . . .

I wasn’t asking if you wanted to be rich. I was asking if you
wanted to steal some money.

‘And do what with it?’ Ben had asked.

Return it to its rightful owners . . .

The vodka had completed its burning journey; he was waiting for its soothing effects to begin. They were slow in coming.
Return it to its rightful owners . . .
Who would have thought it: Miro the Mouse had come back from Iraq blazing with righteous fury. Fury he hid because he intended acting on it. But in the end had to share, because he couldn’t do it all on his own.

‘It is not just theft they are committing. It’s murder. People are dying, children are dying, because of what they’re doing.’

‘I understand that, Miro.’

‘I met a man – he went out there to make money. No, let us face facts. He went there to get rich. And even he couldn’t stomach it. He went to make as much money as he could, and he did not like what he saw.’

‘Enough to give the money back?’

‘He did not get the chance. He died.’

Another of those split-second moments that change everything.

But there were things it was best not to dwell on right now. Not if he was to put together the last shattered remnants of what had once been a plan.

Margaritas, se?oritas,
hasta la vista
s . . .

Ben re-rinsed the vodka glass, and replaced it on the draining board. Then went into the similarly grim bed-room, with its stripped-to-the-mattress single bed, and opened the fitted cupboard against one wall, where a strongbox was built into the ground-level shelf of the fitted cupboard.

Sinking to one knee, Ben keyed its combination.

‘Ben would have known about this, wouldn’t he?’

‘About Derek Ainsworth?’

‘Yes.’

Bad Sam shrugged. ‘I’d assume Miro told him.’

‘So he’d have known Judy was the reason Jaime was there. That that was the connection he was making.’

Ben,
she’d said.
If Chapman did have someone helping him,
someone who knew how to shift money around – I think I know
who it was.