Betrayal by John Lescroart

hostile territory. He’s one of the security guys for Allstrong, which, you may remember from my last letter, if you’re reading them, is the contracting firm that we’ve somehow gotten semipermanently attached to. I find it ironic, to say the least, that I’m supposed to be out protecting him. This guy needs protection like a duck needs a raincoat.
    It was too surreal. He’s there to collect the company’s payroll for this month. So I’m thinking we’re going to go in someplace like a bank and get a check from Bremer’s people that Allstrong can then go deposit in their bank. Wrong. They’ve got barbed wire and cement blocks set up in the hallway in front of this door. Nolan shows his ID to the Marine sergeant on duty with his whole platoon. The place is a fortress.
    Anyway, we pass the ID check—everybody knows Nolan—and they walk us into this tiny internal room—no windows out to the hall, even. Stucco is still all over the floors from when the building was bombed in April. No drywall either. After Saddam left town, the looters came in and took everything, and I mean everything. Rebar out of the walls. Internal wiring. You wouldn’t believe it. There’s not a desk in the whole ministry building—everybody uses folding tables like you get at Wal-Mart. I wouldn’t be surprised if we bought ’em from Wal-Mart and had ’em shipped over.
    Anyway, so we’re in this small, dim, dirty room. Four lightbulbs. It’s roughly a hundred and fifty degrees in there. And there’s these two guys who take Nolan’s papers, check ’em over, then disappear into what looks like a warehouse behind them. Ten minutes later, they’re back with a shopping cart full of packages of hundred-dollar bills.
    I’m standing there thinking, They’re kidding me, right? But they count out these forty wrapped bags of fifty thousand dollars each and—you won’t believe this—Nolan signs off on the amount and together, counting them a second time, we load ’em all up into his backpack!
    Picture this. Nolan’s got two million American dollars in cash in a backpack he’s wearing, and we’re walking out through this mob of not very friendly people in the lobby of the Republican Palace, and then we’re back outside the Green Zone, strolling through the impoverished Baghdad streets that are crawling with citizens who make less than a hundred dollars a month and who really don’t like us. Was I a little nervous? Is this guy out of his mind, or what? And I got the sense he was loving it.
    Long story short, a couple of blocks along through this really really crowded marketplace and finally we hooked back up with my guys in the convoy and made it out of town and back to the base here, where Jack Allstrong has supposedly got a huge safe—flown in from America, of course—bolted into the cement foundation under his office.
    Anyway, lots more to tell about some of the other insane elements of the economics of this place—all the cooks here at the base are Filipinos, and the actual guards out at the airport are from Nepal. We met a guy named Kuvan today who evidently supplies Allstrong with all these workers. Nolan tells me none of them make more than a hundred and fifty bucks a month, where he makes twenty thousand! He tells me that when I get done with my service here, I should volunteer to come back and work for Allstrong. Ex–American military guys make out like bandits here. You’d love it if I went that way, huh?
    Okay, enough about this place. You hear about Iraq enough anyway, I’m sure. What I’d really like to know is if you’re reading any of these, if I’m at least communicating with you a little. It’s hard you not answering, Tara. If you’ve gotten this far on this letter, and you don’t want me to write to you anymore, just tell me somehow and I promise I’ll stop. If you’ve made up your mind and it’s completely over. But some part of me holds on to the hope that you might be willing to give us another try