The Wreckage: A Thriller by Michael Robotham

with this. The police need a reason to hold her.
    “Can I speak to her?”
    “No.”
    “She stole something from me—pieces of jewelry that belonged to my first wife. My daughter is getting married next weekend. The jewelry was going to be a present.” Campbel sucks in his cheeks and puckers his lips reflectively. “If you lodged a complaint against Hol y Knight, those items would be regarded as evidence.”
    “And I wouldn’t get them back for months.”
    The faintest trace of a smile enters Campbel ’s eyes. “Sorry, old chap, I can’t get involved. No hard feelings.” Ruiz isn’t going to forget the feelings.
    Campbel wants the final word. “Listen to me, Vincent, this whole ‘don’t fuck with me’ act might have worked when you were stil on the job, but you’re a civilian now.” The commander turns and marches down the corridor, an ordered man with a disordered heart.

    12

    LONDON

    The Courier watches a skinny black-haired girl in a G-string and high heels undulate around a pole, moving like there’s an itch in her groin that she can’t quite reach. He puls a twenty from his wal et and tucks it into her G-string, brushing his fingertips along the fabric. She dances away, waggling her finger at him.
    She has a pageboy haircut. Black. Straight. A wig. Painted eyes. Red lips. The red reminds him of his first hit, the schoolgirl, the blood that seeped from the corner of her mouth as she lay in the dust, one leg folded under her, her schoolbag stil in her hand.
    He can’t remember if she was on her way to school or coming home, or if she was just visiting someone at another settlement. She was kil ed because she was there and not somewhere else. It was a test. His initiation. That was fifteen years ago on the West Bank near the city of Nablus.
    He was told that the first kil ing would be the hardest—a leap of faith across a blood-soaked divide—but in that moment between the recoil and the bul et hitting the target, the blink of an eye, he felt nothing. Each kil ing since has been an exercise in trying to feel something, some sense of horror or satisfaction or completion.
    The second person he kil ed was an Iraqi dissident, found hanging in a townhouse in San Francisco. Next came an Iranian defector who fel beneath a train in Amsterdam and a Syrian politician who died in a hit-and-run accident in Cairo. The most recent—an Iranian nuclear scientist—was kil ed by a booby-trapped motorbike, triggered by remote control outside his house in Tehran. State TV blamed “Zionist and American agents.” A smokescreen. Masoud Ali Mohammadi had been leaking details of Iran’s nuclear program to the US.
    How many in total? More than a dozen but less than his enemies suspect. Defectors. Dissidents. Spies. Sympathizers. Rivals. Enemies. He does not judge—he carries out the judgment of others.
    The girl on the pole has finished her dance. She clomps off stage, retrieving a wad of chewing gum from the edge of a glass. As she moves through the tables, a bouncer steps in to protect her. Later she emerges from her dressing room wearing a midriff top and low-slung jeans. A tattoo ripples across her lower back—the tramp stamp. Forty years from now there’l be tens of thousands of old ladies trying to hide the ink-pricked fol ies of their youth.
    The Courier sends her a note. Offers to buy her a drink. She signals her interest. Five minutes. He waits.
    Yesterday hadn’t gone to plan. The soldier hadn’t capitulated. The Courier had shown him the long-nosed pliers, drawn attention to them, demonstrated, but it made no difference.
    The soldier had simply smiled at him, a mad grin—that’s what war does to a man, puts spiders in his head.
    “I have no desire to kil you,” the Courier told him, “but you took information that didn’t belong to you. Now I must col ect it. Just tel me what you did with the notebook.” The soldier grinned. Died that way.
    Now it’s up to the girl. He should never have let her