Brotherhood and Others (6 page)

Uday sneered at Monarch. “Why doesn't my father come see me himself?”

The dictator's son stumbled and weaved again, looking at the girl now. Uday began to fumble with the drawstrings of the pajama bottoms he wore, as if Monarch were not even there.

“Your excellency!” Monarch shouted. “Your life depends on getting me what your father wants. Now.”

The dictator's son frowned, looked back at Monarch, and asked caustically, “What does my dear disowning bastard fuck father want for
my
life?”

Monarch said, “The three other copies have been destroyed in the bombing. He needs your copy. Now.”

For a beat, Monarch thought Uday was going to argue further, but then he appeared won over. “It's in my computer in the other house.” He glanced at the girl, looked back at Monarch, and added, “Shoot the bitch. Then we go.”

*   *   *

Robin vaulted away down the hall, back toward that narrower staircase that led to the third floor of the mansion.

“Alejandro?” the maid hissed after him. “What are you doing? You crazy?”

He heard the woman pounding up the stairs just as he ducked into the narrow staircase and sprinted toward the top. He reached the landing, heard her calling in that hiss, “Alejandro!”

She was coming all the way. There were only two bedrooms, the bathroom, and the closet. He couldn't jump from the window. It was thirty feet. She was going to find him. And the police would be summoned. And the police would question him and then talk. And soon the men who'd killed his parents would come for him and …

The dormer.

Robin raced to the closet. The maid stormed up the narrow stairs behind him, hissing, “Alejandro?”

He dropped the painting out the window, heard it slap the grass below as he climbed out backward, reached up, and grabbed at the drip edge of the dormer at the same time he heard the maid call, “Alejandro, she will fire you!”

*   *   *

“Shoot the cunt,” Uday ordered, looking excited at the prospect of watching the poor naked wretch of a girl endure further suffering, as if she were nothing more than meat for the lion's bottomless appetite.

Monarch couldn't take it anymore. Though he might have been able to carry on the charade of being a palace guard on a mission from Saddam, he just couldn't stomach the dictator's son any longer.

He swung the pistol, took a step forward, jammed the muzzle of it between Uday's eyes, and said in English, “I'd rather blow your head off, you depraved excuse for a lunatic.”

Uday's suddenly terrified eyes looked at Monarch right down the gun barrel. “I have the pow—” he began in Arabic.

“No, Uday,” Monarch replied. “You don't.”

Monarch grabbed the dictator's son and slammed him up against one of the drapes, grinding Uday's nose against the snapshots of the naked women he had defiled in the room. “You don't have anything anymore,” Monarch growled in his ear in Arabic, the gun against the back of his head now. “You have nothing but me. I am your lord and master, the only thing separating you from death. Do you understand?”

Bombs fell so close to the compound, the place shook and dust fell.

“Do you?” Monarch shouted as he slipped zip ties around the wrists of Saddam's eldest son.

Uday whimpered, nodded, and said, “Allah, have mercy on a true believer.”

“A true believer?” Monarch snorted. “If I were you, I wouldn't be counting on virgins waiting for you at the gates of paradise. More like guys with knives, fired up for a castration.”

“Let me go,” Uday pleaded. “I'll pay you. Anything you want. A fortune is yours for the asking, my friend.”

Monarch thought about that, then said, “Deal. Your life for the battle plan.”

“The battle … of course,” the dictator's son said. “Yes. That's all?”

“We'll see,” Monarch said.

Then he looked at the girl. “Get dressed. Get out of here. Now.”

The traumatized girl went for a robe. Monarch hauled Uday out into the hall. “My leg,” he complained. “I must have my cane.”

Monarch wanted to hurl him down the marble staircase, but held him by the collar of his robe and dragged him to the bottom and out through the front door into the night. The bombs fell stunningly close—just outside the greater palace compound now, no more than seven, eight hundred yards away.

Uday was crying, “We've got to get out of here.”

“Not without that final battle plan,” Monarch said. “Where is it?”

“In my office upstairs,” Uday said, pointing at the big palace. “The computer, it is—”

The bomb went off just outside Uday's compound with a flash that blinded Monarch, threw him off balance, and made him release his hold. He ducked, arm raised overhead to ward off debris, then realized that Uday was trying to flee. Monarch sprinted after him, hit him across the center of his back, forced him to his knees, and then jerked the now sniveling dictator's son to his feet.

“I told you I am your lord and master, Uday,” Monarch yelled, stuffing the barrel of the pistol into the man's mouth. “Get me that plan or you will die and face the cosmic castrators right now.”

*   *   *

Robin pulled, kicked, and hoisted himself up onto the roof of the dormer not five seconds before he heard the door to the closet open and the maid call yet again, “Alejandro?”

The boy stayed frozen, but looked over the edge of the dormer, hearing her cross to the open window and pause. After several beats, her hand reached out and pulled closed the shutters.

Robin took two deep breaths after hearing the closet door shut. Then he willed himself off the roof of the dormer and clung to the thick ivy vines. He started to drop down the wall, every muscle in his body shaking and then screaming in pain as he fought his way down, stopping twice when waitresses returned from the party and entered the kitchen.

Ten feet from the ground, his grip slipped and he fell, hit with a jarring landing that shook his teeth.

But his brain whirled. Why wasn't he laying there too cracked up to move? How had he gotten down that wall? He thought of his parents the way he'd last seen them, Billy's arm around Francesca, exiting the cinema, both of them smiling at him from down the block.

They had to be watching over him. There was no other explanation.

Fortified by that belief, Robin got to his feet, spotted the painting lying in the grass in the shadowed yard.
Quick now. You're not done yet.
He grabbed it and headed for the front of the mansion. Behind him and around the back, a woman was singing for the party, which had fallen quiet except for the piano that accompanied her.

His feet crunched onto a gravel pathway. Ten feet from the corner where the pathway met the front yard and twenty feet from where it met the circular driveway, the older boy who'd been parking cars came around the corner, face to face with young Robin Monarch.

*   *   *

Uday Hussein sat propped against a gilt-framed couch, wrists still in restraints, watching Monarch the way a trapped hyena might, sidelong and twisted with impotent menace.

They were up on the second floor of the main palace in an office decorated with lewd paintings of women. Monarch sat at a black lacquer desk, watching the screen of a laptop and an upload icon blinking to tell him that the data transfer had been a success.

There was a lull in the bombing again. But Monarch had less than twelve minutes now to get out before the entire presidential palace compound became a hard target.

Monarch picked up the satellite radio and said, “Barren Wolf, you should have it now, Saddam's most up-to-date battle plan, position of all planes, tanks, bunkers, missiles. Everything.”

“That's an affirmative, Rogue,” General Barrens said. “You've just saved thousands of allied lives. Extraction?”

Monarch thought about that. “I'll stay in Baghdad until U.S. troops arrive, maybe at that hotel where all the journalists stay. The Al-Rasheed?”

A pause, then, bristling, the general shot back, “No, that is completely unacceptable, and—”

“I don't follow your orders anymore,” Monarch said. “Deal's a deal, and I'm done.”

“Wait, wait,” Barrens replied. “Uday? Have you seen any sign of him?”

Monarch looked at the dictator's son, who stared at him, pleading-eyed.

*   *   *

“Alejandro!” Robin said as if he and the valet were the best of friends, and went straight at the older boy, right hand extended, offering him the rolled-up painting. “Look what I've found for you!”

It was dim there in the side yard, dim enough that the older boy looked confused, his focus jumping from Robin's face to whatever he had in his hand, distracted enough that he did not see the punch coming. Robin connected with a perfect left hook to the valet's jaw, which broke his middle and ring fingers, but crumpled the boy in a heap. Grunting in pain, Robin nevertheless jumped over Alejandro and walked around the front of the house, seeing a white Mercedes-Benz sedan at the gate, which began to open.

The Mercedes pulled through and up to the front walk, where Robin stood at attention, acting like a pro, broken hand and painting held behind him. Biting his inner lip against the pain, he reached around with his good hand and opened the door for a middle-aged woman who once must have been beautiful.

“Welcome to the party,” he said. “You haven't yet missed the cake.”

“Cake?” she said dismissively, getting out, eyes on the front door. “I just hope they haven't drunk all that fine wine Louis loves to bray on and on about.”

She weaved ever so slightly on her feet heading toward the front door. Robin realized the car was still running, keys in the ignition. He climbed in, tossed the painting on the passenger seat, and threw it in gear. He'd never driven a car before and promptly plowed over a flowerbed in the front circle and clipped off the driver's side mirror exiting the gate.

*   *   *

Monarch smiled at the dictator's son and said, “No Uday here, General. That rat's fled the ship.”

Then he twisted the radio off and tucked it back in its holster.

“So,” Uday said, brightening. “We have deal?”

Monarch came around the desk and said, “We do.” He pushed the man onto his side, knelt over him, caught the horrible goat smell he gave off, but then used a knife to cut free the restraints.

Uday looked at him and said in stilted English, “Why you no kill me?”

“Because I'm a thief, not an assassin,” Monarch said, and headed toward the door to the office. “Not so nice doing business with you.”

“What about me?” Uday demanded in English.

“What about you?” Monarch said, not turning.

“Take me with you,” Uday called. “I have much to tell.”

Monarch looked over his shoulder, saw that the dictator's son was back on his feet, right hand down the front of his pajamas.

“Take me with you,” Uday said again, more insistent. “Get me some whiskey and girl, maybe two. Virgin like this last one, the cunt, and yes, I have much, much to tell you American. You will see.”

It was as if some power far greater than his own seized hold of Monarch then. He raised the pistol and said, “I don't think anyone wants to hear about it, Uday. I really don't.”

Uday threw up his hands. Monarch shot the dictator's son in the groin, left Uday on the floor of his palace office, screaming, writhing, and holding his bloody crotch.

*   *   *

“You didn't get the bracelet,” Claudio said two days later.

“I got a Mercedes,” Robin shot back indignantly.

“Busted side-view mirror,” Claudio sniffed. “Hard to fence.”

“Take it apart, then,” Robin said. “Sell it for parts.”

Claudio said nothing.

Robin couldn't stand it. “I got the painting.”

The older boy pursed his lips, glanced at Xul Solar's twisted painting laid out on a table beside him, and smiled. “You did.” Then he nodded to the tattoo artist poised with the needle above Robin's right inner forearm.

“Ink him, Raoul,” Claudio said. “He's one of us now.”

Robin smiled fiercely at Claudio and the fire of the electric needle that penetrated his skin. It was the best feeling he'd had in almost a year.

*   *   *

Monarch came out of the bathroom inside a room on an upper floor of the Al-Rasheed Hotel and flopped on the king-size bed. The television was on, showing CNN's coverage of the fall of Baghdad, of tanks rolling into the city, of citizens tearing down statues of Saddam, and of the widespread looting and chaos.

Monarch turned and looked at Ellen Wolfe. The CIA officer lay beneath cotton sheets, watching him.

He smiled and said, “Glad you tracked me down.”

She grinned back. “I was just thinking that I should hook up with men just out of prison and in a war zone more often.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Wolfe said.

“Happy to be of service.”

“Me too,” she said, as CNN began to describe the hunt for Saddam and his two sons.

Monarch was surprised to hear that Uday's bombed palace had been searched, but his body had not been found. He flashed on the brilliant explosions that had rocked the palace as he helped the poor girl escape.
Could Uday have lived through that?
In any case, Monarch was positive that the dictator's son wouldn't go far or long before being caught. And he sure wouldn't be using his favorite tool ever again.

“A lion?” said Wolfe. “Did you hear that? Uday kept lions?”

“Did he?” Monarch asked. “I don't recall seeing any.”

The CIA officer studied Monarch for a moment, ran a finger down his chest. “Why do I get the feeling that you haven't told me the entire story?”

“Some ingrained insecurity on your part?” Monarch asked.