Liv drank, forcing herself not to gulp it all down at once, savoring the saltiness on her tongue. “So tell me how you ended up here,” she said as Kyle poured the rest of the water into a second glass.
“We were all working way down in the south in Dhi Qar province as part of a project run by an international aid organization.”
“ORTUS,” Liv said.
“That’s right. How did you—”
“—I recognized the logo on the side of your jeep. I know one of the people who runs it, Gabriel Mann.”
Kyle smiled in a way that suggested he both knew and liked him. “You know Gabriel?”
She nodded.
“Ah, he’s a good guy. When we first set up the project here he came and helped us out a lot. I heard he was in some kind of trouble with the law.”
“He was. He is.”
“Well, I hope he’s okay.”
“So do I… You said you were working down south.”
“Yeah, way down in the southeast, the other side of Baghdad in the Mesopotamian marshlands, or what’s left of them. The people there were pretty badly persecuted by Saddam and his mob after they rebelled against him in ’91. As part of his system of punishment he built huge canals to redirect the Tigris and Euphrates away from the marshes to drive the tribes out. He was pretty successful too. There’s only about ten percent of them left. Then the war came. As soon as Saddam started losing, the locals blew holes in the dams and dykes and let the water flow back in again. We were sent to help monitor the water quality and manage the restocking of the wetlands with reed beds. There were sixteen of us.”
“What happened to the others?”
“Gone.” He took a drink then carefully placed the glass down on the counter. “We’d been working together for six months. It was good work. The people were returning, the reeds were growing, we were even seeing some of the wildlife coming back. The marshes used to be a major staging post for millions of migratory birds until Saddam buggered it all up. Every day more life returned — both man and bird. Then all of a sudden the plug got pulled on us. It had something to do with what happened to Gabriel. Our headquarters are in Ruin and he was arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist or something, trying to blow up the Citadel using ORTUS resources. The upshot was that all of ORTUS’s bank accounts were frozen while the charges were being investigated. Which meant we could no longer pay for anything and weren’t getting paid ourselves.
“We kept going as long as we could, hoping the money would get unfrozen but pretty soon we started running out of food, fuel, you name it. So we pulled out and headed back toward the border.” He rolled the water around in the glass, staring at the liquid, deep in thought.
“So how come you ended up here? Did you get lost?”
“No, nothing like that.’ He continued to stare at the glass, as if the answer might lie in it somewhere. ‘I’m still not really a hundred percent sure what happened. We were traveling north, heading for the Turkish border in a four-vehicle convoy, which is the only safe way to travel on these roads. We were making pretty good time, considering all the roadblocks on Highway 8, had made it as far as Al-Hillah and we were getting ready to push on as far as Baghdad when I got a feeling that we were going in the wrong direction. I can’t really explain it. It was like I knew that the maps, the GPS were wrong. I wasn’t alone, Eric and Mike felt it too.
“The rest of the guys thought we’d gone crazy. They told us to shut up and keep driving but we couldn’t do it, none of us could. It was such a strong feeling. For me it was like a magnet pulling at some kind of metal core inside me.” He looked up and smiled. “I’ve always been a bit of a nomad, never really stayed in one place for too long. No matter where I ended up and how good a time I was having there would always come a morning when I’d wake up with an overwhelming urge to be somewhere else. And this was exactly like that, only instead of wanting to head off into the unknown it felt like I was returning somewhere. Like I was coming home.
“It’s like — for the last six months or so, ever since I’ve been working on the marshes, I’ve been watching the birds: flamingos, pelicans, hooded crows, teals. Some of these guys fly halfway around the world from as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as Africa and India to end up in the exact same place where they hatched. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years, hundreds of thousands probably, and we still don’t really know how they do it. It’s just an instinct in them, a natural urge. Then a few years back the marshes vanished, I mean there was nothing there at all but cracked earth and the odd abandoned boat. But as soon as the water came back, they knew. Somehow they just knew that’s where they needed to be. That’s what it felt like for me. I felt such a strong pull to be here, though I didn’t know what this place was, or even if it was here. I’ve never been here before in my life, but I felt like I was coming home. Explain that.”
Liv shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “But I felt something like it too.”
Behind her the door opened and she smiled when she saw Tariq standing there looking better than she’d seen him for a while. Her smile faded quickly when she saw the look of concern on his face. “What is it?” she asked.
“You better come see for yourself.”
57
Liv saw why Tariq had fetched her the moment she stepped out of the main building. A thick column of dust was rising in the eastern sky, heralding new arrivals.
“Soldiers,” a voice shouted down from the guard tower.
“How many?” Tariq called back.
“Difficult to tell. There’s one Humvee and one truck. The truck could be empty or it could have twenty men inside.”
Tariq looked over beyond the perimeter fence to where a group of workers were hurrying back to the compound. He waited until the last of the grave-digging detail had slipped through then shouted, “Close the gate and man the guns.”
“No,” Liv said. “We’ve been through this. We cannot meet everyone who comes here with suspicion and loaded weapons.”
“We tried it your way last time,” Tariq replied. “First we talk, then we let them in. I cannot risk all our lives again.” Then he walked away before she had time to argue.
The Humvee and the truck pulled to a halt about fifty yards short of the gate and sat there for a while, engines running, shrouded in a cloud of their own dust.
“American,” Tariq said, reading the markings on the side of the vehicles.
Liv was standing next to him, inside the perimeter gate waiting to greet them. “What are they doing?” she asked.