tabulated.
A stream of green numbers fills a black screen. A second computer has black type on a white screen, listing projects and spending. Running her finger down the first screen, Daniela presses a button on a small digital recorder and makes a note to herself.
Nearly eight hundred suspicious transactions have been identified overnight, more than half of them duplicate payments ranging from a few thousand dollars to $2.1 million. There could be an explanation, but she won’t know until she examines the documentation.
After noting the largest payments, she moves on. One name appears more than once-Jawad Stadium. She consults a satellite map of the city. The stadium is in south-east Baghdad, showing up as concentric rings of seating around a brown square. The image is six months old.
She looks at the clock. It’s still early in New York. Alfred Nilsen won’t be at his desk for another five hours. She sends him an email, requesting details about the stadium.
It was Nilsen who recruited her three months ago at a strange meeting in his apartment on the Upper West Side. She remembers it vividly because it was the first time anyone she knew had been invited to Nilsen’s home. The invitation had been handwritten on a small, embossed card. Saturday, 3 p.m. Afternoon tea. He had used the words “cordially invited.” Does anybody use language like that anymore?
Daniela feels a flush of embarrassment as she remembers Nilsen opening the door to her that day. She had cycled across Central Park and was wearing a fluorescent yellow windbreaker and Lycra leggings. Nilsen looked her up and down as though she had beamed down from another planet.
The softly spoken Norwegian was chairman of the United Nations Board of Auditors and a twenty-five-year veteran of the UN. He had worked in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait before spending four years in Iraq, where he headed the International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), overseeing the Development Fund of Iraq.
Tall and heavily built, he had suffered some sort of palsy in his fifties that had paralyzed one side of his face. It meant that his left profile was smiling and jovial, while the right side could appear almost cruel.
He had invited Daniela into a sitting room furnished in leather and dark wood and they sat at a small lamp-lit table. She was nervous about being alone with him. Not fearful, but wary of his intellect. Nilsen offered her tea. He had a special thermometer measuring the exact temperature of the water.
“Are you a connoisseur?” she asked.
“I’m a pedant.”
The tiny china cups looked as though they belonged in a dolls house. “You are probably wondering why I invited you here?”
“Yes.”
“I have a request-something that would require you changing your future plans. An audit must be done… a difficult one. Sensitive. After what happened with the Oil for Food program, nobody wants to be embarrassed again.”
“Iraq?”
“Is that a problem? Normally I wouldn’t bother to ask. I know you’re leaving us, but I thought I might be able to convince you to stay on for another few months.”
He smiled at her. A torn shred of tissue paper clung to his neck. It must be hard for him to shave, she thought. Strange seeing two faces in the mirror.
“I’m sure you’ve read some of the reports of waste in Iraq. I wish I could tell you that they are exaggerated. Nobody is sure of the true losses, but it will run into tens of billions.”
He had paused, letting the figure wash over Daniela.
“I find it quite ironic when people get worked up over Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. What he stole was chicken seed compared to what’s happened in Iraq.” He meant to say chicken feed, but she didn’t correct him.
“I met Madoff once or twice,” Nilsen said. “He used to have an apartment in this building where he kept his mistress. I always thought if he could cheat on his wife, he could cheat investors.”
Nilsen poured another cup of tea, using a silver strainer to capture the leaves.
“I was in Iraq a month after the invasion. George Bush had just declared mission accomplished and the US began airlifting planeloads of cash into Baghdad. That first payload was mainly small bills-fives and tens and ones- twenty million dollars in total, loaded on to a C-130 at Andrews Air Force Base and flown to Baghdad.
“Later airlifts had larger denominations-stacks of hundred-dollar bills packed into bricks and loaded on to pallets, forty in total, weighing thirty tons-the largest one-day shipment of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve. Twelve billion dollars in US banknotes were delivered to Iraq that first year. The aim was to hold the country together. Pay for basic services. Stop the country descending into chaos. The banks had been looted and the infrastructure destroyed. But once that money arrived, there was no oversight or control. I saw pay-offs in paper bags, pizza boxes and duffel bags. Cash was ferried around the city in private cars and funneled through middlemen, fixers, clerics and politicians. Fraud became another word for “business as usual.” At one point more than eight thousand security guards were drawing paychecks but only six hundred “warm bodies” could be found. Halliburton charged for forty-two thousand daily meals for soldiers but served only fourteen thousand of them.
“I was heading the UN team of auditors trying to keep track of the spending. We were supposed to be looking over the Americans’ shoulders, but they didn’t let us anywhere near the accounts. I remember a BBC reporter asking the Coalition Provisional Authority’s director of management and budget what had happened to all the cash airlifted to Baghdad. Do you know what he said?”
Daniela shook her head.
“He said he had no idea and didn’t think it was important. The journalist said, “But billions of dollars have disappeared without a trace.”
“Yes, but it is their billions-Iraqi money frozen in western bank accounts-so what difference does it make?”
Nilsen leaned back in his armchair, tired all of a sudden.
“Iraqis voted in elections in March but there still isn’t a government. When the politicians stop posturing they will need to know the state of the country’s finances. The UN wants to undertake an audit. That’s why I’m offering you a job.”
Cooling down after her ride, Daniela felt her nipples swell against the thinness of the nylon. The apartment was colder than she first imagined.
“Why me?” she asked.
“You understand the nature of the work… the sensitivities.”
“Is there opposition?”
Nilsen hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “The audit must be conducted within certain parameters.”
“What parameters?”
“The government of Iraq and the reconstruction agencies are not interested in the mistakes of the past. The audit will only cover the term of the previous government, from May twentieth 2006 up until the present,” explained Nilsen. “Any projects commenced prior to that date will be excluded.”
“Whom would I be answerable to?”
“Me.”
“Staff?”
“As many as you need-within reason.”
Daniela had felt a sense of displacement that shifted and separated inside her.
“I’m not really interested.”
“I can offer you five thousand a day or a guaranteed hundred thousand dollars if the job takes less than three weeks.”
Daniela tried not to react. People who tell you that money doesn’t matter are invariably the ones without large mortgages and credit card debts. Daniela liked nice things. Clothes. Art. Theatre. This was a month’s work for a year’s wages. Nilsen gave her two days to decide. She took two hours.
There is a knock. Glover slouches against the doorframe with his shirttail hanging out.
“Have I told you how much I hate this country?”
“Yes.”
“We need to replace one of the computers. A power surge fried the hard drive.”
