‘I know.’
‘Three years?’ she repeated. ‘Thirty-six months?’
‘Or thereabouts.’
‘You must really have loved her.’
‘I did. I do. I always will. Just because she died doesn’t mean I stopped loving her.’
Bosch looked into his eyes, her hand still between his legs. ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ she said. ‘This isn’t about love. It’s lust. That’s all.’
‘Got it,’ said Shepherd.
‘And you’re okay?’
Despite himself, Shepherd laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m okay.’
Bosch kissed him, then pushed him back on to the bed, holding the towel. She tossed it aside and took off her dress. ‘Three years,’ she said, in wonder. ‘Fasten your seat-belt. This is going to be one hell of a ride.’
Mitchell lifted up his shirt and examined his damaged ribs. It hurt if he took a deep breath but he was sure that they weren’t broken. He thought a couple were cracked, but other than that he hadn’t been badly hurt. He had urinated into the plastic bucket and there had been no sign of blood so at least his kidneys were unscathed.
He sat down slowly, then lay back. He took a couple of deep breaths and tried to do a sit-up. The muscles in his side burned but he forced himself up.
He didn’t care about the pain. It meant nothing. For the first time since he’d been snatched he didn’t feel alone. Somewhere out there his friends were on the case. Mitchell was sure that Spider Shepherd would have been behind the kidnapping, probably with Billy Armstrong, Martin O’Brien and Jimbo Shortt. And, if he’d been able to get himself away from the Increment, Major Gannon would be running the show. Mitchell grunted and lowered his shoulders back to the floor. It hurt a lot more going down than it did coming up. It had been worth the beating for Mitchell to discover that his friends were fighting to free him and, from what Kamil had said, they were fighting dirty. They had kidnapped the brother of a man who was holding him hostage. That meant they knew the identity of at least one of his captors. And if they knew one they might be able to identify the rest and there was a chance they would locate the basement. It was an outside chance, but it was a chance. He took a deep breath and did a second sit-up, faster this time. It still hurt, but not as much.
When Shepherd woke up he was alone in the bed. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. The last thing he remembered was curling up with Carol in his arms and kissing her shoulder. She had been right. It had been one hell of a ride. She was passionate and aggressive in a way that Sue had never been, and vocal with it, at times screaming his name, at others cursing him, alternating between kissing and biting. Afterwards, as she had lain in his arms, Shepherd was surprised at the lack of guilt he felt. As he stared up at the ceiling he realised it was because he loved Sue, and knew he always would. What had happened between him and Carol had been purely physical.
He got out of bed, shaved and showered, then dressed and went downstairs. O’Brien was in the kitchen, frying eggs. The middle-aged Iraqi woman who normally cooked for the occupants of the house was hovering at his shoulder. ‘Fry-up, Spider?’ asked O’Brien.
Shepherd didn’t know when he’d be eating again so he nodded. ‘Please.’ He poured himself a large mug of coffee and added a splash of milk.
‘They can’t fry eggs out here,’ said O’Brien. ‘They just heat them from below so the yolks don’t cook.’ He used a spatula to splash hot fat on to them. ‘It’s not going to be a full fry-up. They haven’t got any bacon and the sausages are lamb.’
‘She’s a Muslim,’ said Shepherd, nodding at the cook. ‘She can’t touch pork.’
‘She doesn’t have to touch it, just cook it,’ said O’Brien.
‘You’re missing the point,’ said Shepherd. He sat at the kitchen table and sipped his coffee.
‘You okay?’ asked O’Brien.
‘Sure,’ said Shepherd.
‘Sleep well?’
‘Like a log.’
‘Was it my imagination or did I see Carol creeping out of your room this morning?’
‘Screw you, Martin.’
‘Okay, I get it. None of my business. But you are one jammy bastard. She’s fit.’
Shepherd took another sip of his coffee. Carol Bosch appeared at the doorway. She had changed into clean fatigues and was carrying her flak-jacket, helmet and shotgun. A holstered automatic hung on her hip, and a large hunting knife was strapped to her right leg.
‘Speak of the devil,’ said O’Brien.
‘What’s that?’ asked Bosch, as she sat down at the table and winked at Shepherd.
‘I just asked if Spider thought you’d want breakfast in bed,’ said O’Brien.
‘I’d be careful how I talked to a woman wielding a shotgun,’ said Bosch.
‘How do you like your eggs?’ asked O’Brien, with a grin.
‘As they come,’ she said. She put her gun on the table. ‘How’s it going, Spider?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘Butterflies?’
Shepherd shrugged. ‘With you guys watching my back, I’ll be fine.’
O’Brien put plates of food in front of them. Fried eggs, tomatoes, lamb sausages and fried bread. He put his own plate on the table and sat down. ‘How long have you been in Baghdad?’ he asked Bosch.
‘Almost two years,’ she said. ‘I’ve been with John for the past eighteen months.’
‘Good money?’
Bosch grinned. ‘Bloody good,’ she said. ‘A thousand dollars a day basic, plus overtime, plus lots of paid time off and flights home. And there’s nothing to spend your money on here so everything you earn goes straight into the bank.’
‘How’s it going to end?’ asked Shepherd. ‘Everyone I talk to says we’re wasting our time in Iraq.’
‘Everyone’s right,’ said Bosch. ‘You can’t force these people to live together. The only guy who could do that was Saddam and now he’s out of the equation.’
‘You’re saying democracy won’t work here?’ asked O’Brien, through a mouthful of egg and sausage.
‘I’m saying these people don’t understand democracy,’ said Bosch. ‘Look what happened to Yugoslavia. So long as you have a hard man forcing people to live together, they get on with it. Take away the hard man and they kill each other.’ She sliced her sausage into neat sections, popped a piece into her mouth and swallowed it without chewing. ‘When Saddam was in power, the Sunnis ran Iraq. They account for barely a fifth of the population. Once we have elections, power transfers to the majority Shias. Which leaves them with scores to settle.’ She put down her knife and held up her index finger. ‘Possible scenarios down the line,’ she said. ‘Number one. All-out civil war, with the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions fighting it out to the death.’ She held up two fingers. ‘Two. The Shias take over Iraq, override the wishes of the Sunnis and the Kurds and align the country with Syria, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.’ She grinned. ‘How stable would the Middle East be then?’
‘Not very,’ said Shepherd.
‘I was being rhetorical,’ she said. She held up three fingers. ‘Three. Through some miracle, democracy holds, but with the three factions infighting all the way. To keep the masses happy they’re constantly picking fights with their neighbours. The Iraqi Kurds hate Turkey, the Iraqi Sunnis hate Shia-dominated Iran and the Shias in Iraq hate the Sunnis in Jordan. To make it worse, there are three factions within the Shias, all jostling for power. Saddam was a bastard, but a weak government barely holding together three warring factions would be just as destabilising to the region.’
‘So it’s a nightmare all round?’
‘It’s worse than that,’ said Bosch, picking up her knife again. ‘The fundamentalists are using the place as a training ground. They’re coming here in their thousands. More than half the suicide-bombers in Iraq are Saudis. Less than a quarter of the insurgents killed here are Iraqi, the rest are all foreign fighters. Terrorists come here from around the world to cut their teeth and once they move on they’ll be taking the jihad to the West, big-time. What you’ve had so far in Europe is just a taste of what’s coming. You know your history, right? What happened in Afghanistan?’
Shepherd knew what had happened in Afghanistan, all right: he’d taken a bullet in the shoulder and almost
