6

       Baghdad, Central Iraq

      Dry dust clung to the evening air of Sadr City market, mixing with the smell of raw meat, ripe fruit and decay. Hyde sat across from the main market in the shade of a covered café, an imported American newspaper lying open on the table in front of him next to the sludgy remains of a small glass of coffee. Two flies were chasing each other round the saucer. In his head he placed a bet on which would take off first. He got it wrong. Story of his life.

      He picked up the glass and sipped at the muddy contents, scanning the market from behind his scratched marine-issue Oakleys. He hated the coffee in Iraq. It was boiled and cooled nine times to remove all impurities and rendered almost undrinkable in the process. At least all the boiling meant there’d be no germs in it. Most Iraqis drank it with cream and a ton of sugar to mask the taste. Hyde drank it black to remind him of home, the bitter taste fuelling his hatred of the country he didn’t seem able to escape. Black was also his favourite colour. Whenever life got too complicated and things started getting him down he would find a casino with a roulette table and bet everything he had on black, reducing his troubles to the single spin of a wheel. If he won, he would walk away with enough money to buy some peace of mind, never risking his doubled pot on another spin. If he lost, he literally had nothing left to lose. Either way, he would leave the table changed somehow. He liked the simplicity of that.

      He checked his watch. His contact was late so he waved the waiter over and watched him fill a fresh glass with the hated black liquid. He couldn’t just sit with nothing to drink, he felt exposed enough as it was. His six-foot frame and white skin made him stand out, as did the redness of his beard, so he assumed he was being watched, though he couldn’t see anyone. He picked up his paper and pretended to read, all the while surveying the crowd from behind his shades.

      Sadr City was in the eastern suburbs. Before the invasion it had been called Saddam City and before that, Revolution. But none of that changed its inherent nature: Sadr City was a slum, quickly and cheaply built at the end of the 1950s to house the urban poor. These days there were even more people here, packed into houses and apartment blocks that had already been crowded when the concrete was still wet on the walls. And the market was where they all came to do their shopping. Right now was the busiest time, with everyone stopping by on the way home from work to buy fresh food, refrigerated through the heat of the day at someone else’s expense. So many civilians crammed into one space made it an operational nightmare.

      A few years ago someone had ridden a motorcycle packed with explosives straight through a sloppy evening checkpoint and blown himself up by the main entrance, taking seventy-eight other people with him. By the looks of the rickety buildings, they had simply dragged the bodies away, hosed the blood off the streets and carried on. You could still see craters in the walls where chunks of shrapnel had torn holes. But the thing that made this a suicide bomber’s paradise also made it a preferred meeting place for his ultra-cautious contact: there was no better place to hide than in a crowd.

      Hyde was cautious too. He had arrived early and claimed the best seat in the café for surveillance. It offered a one-eighty degree view of the street, with a solid wall behind making it impossible to approach without being seen. He’d bet himself that he could spot his man before he got to him. It was a game he liked to play every time he was sent on this particular detail. The contact was known for his ability to appear and disappear with ease. It was why he’d never been caught, despite the best efforts of several agencies on both sides of the political street. But Hyde had something of a reputation too. Back when he was in 8th Recon he had been the sharpest scout in his platoon. He’d prided himself on never letting anyone creep up on him, though his buddies had constantly tried; they’d even had a name for the game – Hyde and Go Seek. Now he was in civilian life, he had to work harder to keep those skills honed. He’d seen what working for the private companies could do to you; men who had been out of the army just two, three years, their muscle turned to flab, still trading on reputations they’d long since lost. That wasn’t going to happen to him. Get sloppy in a place like this and pretty soon you’d get dead. So he pushed himself, treating every assignment as if it was a hot mission, just in case it turned out to be.

      He started another sweep of the market, left to right, comfortable in his tactics. He had just reached the furthest point where the wall blocked his view when the scrape of a chair made him whip his head round.

      ‘You have the money?’ the Ghost said, settling into the chair on his blind side, his strangled voice barely audible above the noise of the street.

      Goddamn – he did it again.

      Hyde folded the newspaper and placed it on the table, trying not to appear rattled. ‘What, no chit-chat? No “Hi, how’s it goin’? How are the wife and kids?”’

      The Ghost stared at him, his pale grey eyes cold despite the trapped heat of the day. ‘You don’t have a wife.’

      ‘And how would you know that?’

      ‘Nobody in your line of work has a wife – at least not for very long.’

      Hyde felt anger catch light inside him. His fists clenched. He’d got the divorce papers from Wanda in the mail six weeks ago, after she’d hacked his Facebook page and found some messages she was not supposed to see. But this guy couldn’t know that. He was just trying to push his buttons with a lucky guess. And it had worked. Right now he wanted to drive his fist straight through the middle of those freaky grey eyes.

      The Ghost smiled, as if he was reading Hyde’s thoughts and feeding off his anger. Hyde looked away and reached for his coffee, draining it to the thick gritty dregs before he’d even realized what he was doing. He’d met some hard characters in his time, but this guy was something else. He was taller than the average Iraqi and wiry with it. He also carried about him a sense of danger and physical threat, like a grenade with its pin pulled. The local crew said he was a desert spirit and refused to have anything to do with him. That’s why Hyde always got these gigs. He didn’t believe in spirits, he just did what he was told; old army habits died hard.

      ‘It’s in the bag under the table,’ he said, staring out at the market crowds rather than engaging with the grey eyes again. ‘Got my boot stamped down on the handle. You give me the package, I lift my foot.’

      Something clunked down on the tabletop and a scrap of sacking was pushed towards him.

      Hyde shook his head in exaggerated disappointment. ‘Zero points for presentation.’ He flipped open the sacking and examined the object inside. The stone looked incredibly ordinary. It could almost have been one of the chunks of masonry you found lining the streets in piles all over the city. He turned it over and saw the faint marks on its surface, just lines and swirls. ‘Hell of a price to pay for a chunk of old rock,’ he said, wrapping it up and lifting his foot off the bag containing fifty million Iraqi dinars, worth around forty thousand American dollars.

      The Ghost stood up, the bag already in his hand. ‘Make the most of it,’ Hyde said, relaxing a little now the money wasn’t his responsibility. ‘Looks like the cash cow’s about to get slaughtered.’

      The Ghost hesitated then sat back down. ‘Explain.’

      Hyde savoured the look of confusion on his face. Now it was the freak’s turn to be caught out. ‘You really should stay more in touch with the burning issues of the day.’ He slid his newspaper across the table.