Kardinal (16 page)

PART FIVE. FAITH.

Baghdad – 1.07am (GMT + 3 hours), 20 May, 2011

LAWTON was in his cell. Thinking all the time.

Never stop thinking. Keep your brain fired up. Like an engine. If it stalls, you might not get it going again. Be aware all the time. Aware of everything. Of the hum of electricity. Of the insect on the windscreen. Of the beads of sweat on
the driver’s neck. Of the hint of a woman’s perfume layered beneath the stench of BO in the all-male team of security officers. Try to work out an escape route. Even if there isn’t one, make one up. Craft something. Anything. Look at every possibility.

Even suicide as a last resort.

That’s what they taught you.

But Lawton wasn’t at the last resort just yet.

When he was taken by the soldiers, they brought him to the town of Tel Isqof. His captors treated him decently enough. Gave him water, gave him food, didn’t beat him. They made him take his shirt and his belt off. They didn’t want a foreigner killing himself in their cells.

The last resort
, he thought.

After a couple of hours left stewing in a grubby cell, they led him out and drove him to Mosul.

All the while, he was thinking.

Keep thinking.

Keep planning.

Keep surviving.

He had faith in his abilities. Faith in his strength. Faith in himself.

In Mosul, they swapped vehicles.

They got into a Range Rover. Four men with him. Three to watch him, one to drive. All in black suits. All wearing sunglasses. All scowling and silent.

They drove south. He guessed they were taking him to Baghdad. The capital. They’d know what to do with a foreigner found wandering in the desert. They could decide.

Lawton thinking.

Lawton planning.

Lawton surviving.

It was nearly 250 miles from Mosul to Baghdad. Plenty of time to guess what they had planned for him.

Anyone in his position would think the best-case scenario would be to be handed over to his country’s representatives in Iraq. The British consul, in Lawton’s case. But he thought that was the worst-case scenario. He would be on the next plane home. Flown straight into Fuad’s hands.

Other options: He might be charged with illegally entering Iraq. That could mean a trial. Lots of publicity. Time in a Baghdad prison. For most people, that would be the
worst
thing that could happen. For Lawton, it was an opportunity to come up with an escape plan – and he would not be handed over to Fuad.

Staying in Iraq was the first plan. No vampires. No Nebuchadnezzars. Only Nimrod. And Nimrod had to die. He thought about Ereshkigal. He hoped they hadn’t found her. They’d not mentioned anything about a woman. Or a vampire.

No one said a thing on the journey.

They had travelled through Kirkuk. Then they drove south through Tikrit. Saddam country. Then on to Samarra, and
finally into Baghdad.

Long
, wide highways hemmed in by skyscrapers and sandstone buildings welcomed them. They passed abandoned compounds, the fencing rusted, the walls scrawled with graffiti. They weaved around craters and passed ruins, evidence of Allied bombs.

They had come to a busy metropolitan area. Lots of bustle. Plenty of people. Men in suits and men in kurtas, the loose fitting shirts worn in Middle Eastern countries. Women in skirts and women in burkhas, the oppressive garment forced on females by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Traffic raced through the streets. Horns blared. Drivers shouted at each other.

The Range Rover had stopped outside a white building, steps leading up to it. When he got out of the car, Lawton clocked the sign that said he’d been brought to the Ministry of the Interior.

They took him inside. Led him into the bowels on the building. Eyes watching him. No one saying a word. Along a corridor, his feet cold on the tiles.

Just before they shoved him through a door and locked it behind him, one of the men said, “You will tell us everything.”

And at last…

In his cell.

Thinking.

Escape strategies.

There had been the threat of interrogation.

A noise outside in the corridor made him step out of his thoughts.

Footsteps. Someone approaching. The cell door being unlocked. He stiffened, waiting for whatever was to come. Expecting the worse.

He knew that in Saddam’s day, he’d either be dead now, which would have been lucky, or he’d be being tortured.

The cell door opened. Two men in army fatigues entered. One was in his twenties. Clean shaven. Brown eyes that gawped at Lawton. He appeared to outrank the other man, who was short and squat and in his fifties.

The young man said, “You will come with us, now.”

“Where to?” asked Lawton.

“You will come with us to answer questions.”

“Ask me here,” said Lawton, delaying as far as he could.

Thinking. Planning. Surviving.

The young man frowned. “Please do not make this a hard job for us.”

Lawton got up off his bunk. The short guard handed him a kurta and nodded. Lawton put on the shirt and creased his brow, confused. He was sure he’d seen respect in the older man’s expression.

Lawton was led along the corridor. His kept his breathing and his heartbeat under control. He was cool. He was calm. He was controlled. He was getting ready for what was to come. He was preparing for the worst.

SHE carried the spear made from her husband’s bones. She carried the only weapon that could kill him.

The desert was cold at night. But she felt nothing of its icy fingers. Nothing apart from the burning need for blood.

Ereshkigal walked south. Strapped to her back was the sack the man Lawton had brought with him. It contained the spear of Abraham. Her husband’s bones. Her husband’s doom.

The men who had taken Lawton had not searched the truck. And she had remained huddled inside until night came. She knew that Lawton had protected her as any faithful servant would have done, as any Nebuchadnezzar would have done.

Only he wasn’t a Nebuchadnezzar. He was their enemy. He was a vampire killer. And he was hunting her Lord Husband. He was going to kill the Great Hunter.

But still, he’d kept her safe when the soldiers came by day.

This played on her mind.

Her enemy protecting her.

It stayed with her while she buried herself under rocks during the day. It stayed with her when she crawled out at sunset to keep walking, keep moving. It tapped into something that she had once been.

Human.

There was no human left, of course. Nothing tangible. But maybe there was a stain of it. A trace left somewhere of what she had been.

She felt none of what a human felt. No love, no hate, no jealousy. She believed only in blood. Only hunger and the raw, brutal need to survive compelled her to go on. And survival meant being in Irkalla with Nimrod. It meant stalking Babylon at night and feeding off her citizens.

The desert became pasture.

Trees flourished. Rivers flowed. Cities passed.

She walked.

Did she know where she was going? Something told her she was headed in the right direction. Not for Irkalla. But for Lawton. She would go to him. It was that unquantifiable thing ticking inside her, insisting she go to him.

She dismissed any hints of emotion she felt.

It was impossible, anyway.

She only thought of Lawton as useful, that had to be it. He was human, and humans were always beneficial. Simeon had been valuable until his death as a ninety-seven year old. Vlad had been useful with his power, his greed, and his eventual madness and murderous lusts. King Richard of England, the one they called Lion-heart or Melek-Ric, had been a mighty lover and a cowering servant.

Like Vlad, he had come to fight the vampire plague. To crush the Nebuchadnezzars’ plans. But her flesh had weakened their resolve. It had made them mad. They had fucked her cold dead body that felt so young and warm as they writhed with her. They hated themselves for loving her. But she was irresistible. She was their weakness. And because of it, she was able to destroy them both. Stop them from wiping out the vampire race.

Both Richard and Vlad had similar strategies in their wars against the undead and their human allies.

They were secret campaigns. They had both pretended to be fighting a religious enemy – the Saracens and the Ottomans.

But they were not fighting the Muslims. Neither conflict had been holy. They had been wars of survival. The survival of humans.

Now Lawton was fighting that battle.

And she would do the same to him. Take him into her bed. Become his lover. Destroy his campaign against the Nebuchadnezzars. It was what she did. It was her instinct.

But now that other feeling was rearing its head.

That stain that she couldn’t wash away.

The trace of what she had been and how she was supposed to feel.

Headlights glowed in the distance. She smelled diesel on the air. An engine’s growl grew louder. The car approached.

She stopped and waited. Her white dress fluttered on the breeze.

Her skin rippled with the excitement of a blood feast.

She licked her lips. She looked vulnerable on that lonely road in the night.

She was there to be ravished, surely.

The car slowed down.

It stopped in the middle of the road.

Three young men leapt out. They wore denim and white T-shirts. They had black hair. They were in their twenties, young, confident. One of them wore glasses.

They spoke in Arabic.

She smiled at them.

They gaped, excited at her response.

She smelled their lust. She smelled their blood.

They circled her.

She smiled wider, opening her lips.

Showing her fangs.

One of them saw, and fear flared in his eyes.

Another reached out to touch her, but before his fingers brushed her arm, he was dead, his jugular vein spouting blood.

In a split second, the second was dead.

Ereshkigal turned on the third. He was frozen to the spot. She glared at him. Then she kicked him hard in the belly, sending him crashing into the car.

Before the dead men’s blood ran cold, she drank it from their open veins. After she was done, the third man was coming round. She picked him up and slammed him on the bonnet of the car. She bared her bloody fangs and hissed in his face: “
Yakhedney ala Beghedad
.”

THEY took Lawton into an interview room. It was better than the cell. It had a carpet and a table and chairs. He sat and they gave him coffee – black and strong.

The younger man said, “An officer from the Department of Border Enforcement will be coming to ask you questions.”

“My favourite categories are films, sport, and travel.”

The young man furrowed his brow.

Lawton drank the coffee. He stared into the dark, thick liquid. The smell was overpowering. He started to think about Ereshkigal. He wondered if she’d got out of the vehicle. His own objective concerned him. His quest to kill Nimrod. Without the Spear of Abraham, he didn’t think it could be done. He hoped that somehow Ereshkigal had escaped the soldiers and taken the spear with her. He focused on her. He tried to dream her, like he had dreamed her before. His head had started to throb again. The false eye smarting. It had swollen on the journey from Mosul and was bruised. He could feel the tentacles of red flesh encased in the glass eye seeping out and coiling around his nerves. But he couldn’t pull the object out. It hurt too much, and he felt he would tear part of his brain out with it.

“I don’t understand completely,” said the young man.

“Don’t worry, you understand mostly – and your English is good.”

“I learn from the British soldiers. I was seventeen when they came. They saved us from Saddam.”

Lawton looked at the man. An ally, he thought. Someone who thought the action in Iraq was worthwhile. Many of the young man’s compatriots did think that. Or at least the ones Lawton had met. He had been thanked hundreds of times when he’d walked the streets of Basra with his squadron. But times had changed. He didn’t know what Iraqis thought of it all now. So he would be grateful of any support he could find.

The young man said, “You had wounds on your body – bullet wounds.”

“How do you know they were bullets?”

“My father has them. He was shot by Saddam’s men in 2000. They shoot him through here,” he said, pointing to the back of his knee.

“Kneecapping,” said Lawton.

“Shooting,” said the man.

“Yes, that’s what they call it – shooting from behind the knee… kneecapping.”

“Kneecapping,” the man said, as if he were tasting the word.

“Why did they do that?” asked Lawton, feeling he was forging a relationship with the man.

“We are Shia. From the Tigris-Euphrates Marshlands originally. Marsh Arabs. My father was in the uprising of 1991. My people rose up after the Americans promised to help us defeat Saddam – but they left. The British, too. Everyone left. We were alone, and we had no chance. Many of my people were killed. The wetlands were drained. My family escaped. But they hunted down my father. Kneecapping.”

“Where did you escape to?” asked Lawton.

He eyed the other man, the squat frog-like fellow. He’d been standing quietly in the corner of the room. He was watching Lawton, trying to follow the conversation. But maybe his English wasn’t as good as his colleague’s.

“Basra,” the young man answered.

Lawton’s spine tingled. He kept his eyes narrow. He kept his bearing cool.

“Do you know Basra?” asked the young man.

Lawton hesitated. Then he said, “I was there in 2003, with the British Army.”

Big risk. But he’d evaluated the odds. He took a punt.

Although they had welcomed Western intervention, many Iraqis had become disillusioned, particularly when the insurgency began and foreign fighters flooded the country to cause carnage.

Basra had been relatively peaceful – relative in Iraqi terms. So there was a chance the young officer may not hold any grievances. However, it could have all been a ploy to get information out of Lawton. The man might be a former Saddam loyalist. There were many still in positions of authority. But that was part of the gamble Lawton took. He held the young man’s eyes. They glittered.

“British soldier?” he said.

Lawton nodded.

“Will you tell me your name?” asked the Iraqi.

Lawton said nothing.

“You will have to,” said the man.

“Maybe.”

“No maybe. You will have to. And you are not an enemy here. We are not your enemy.”

“Maybe.”

“The British saved my life.”

“I’m glad.”

“I was going to worship.”

Every nerve in Lawton’s body tightened.

“Hundreds of us going to the mosque.”

Memories flooded back.

“Al Qaeda bombers with explosives on their backs came, and they were going to kill us. Butcher us while we prayed. British soldiers killed them. They saved our lives. One soldier. One man.”

Lawton’s skin goose fleshed.

“I am Fadoul Khoury,” said the young man. “Lieutenant Fadoul Khoury of the Federal Police.”

Lawton nodded, knowing.

“I know your face,” said Khoury. “I knew from when you walked in. I know the shape of your body. The way you move. I know your – your eye, the one you have left. Steel grey. I know you. One soldier.”

Lawton said nothing.

“Allah has worked a miracle,” said Khoury.

The man’s lip trembled, and a tear ran down his face.