‘You were saying?’ he said haughtily.
‘Whenever you pretend not to be interested in something I’m selling,’ said Nat, ‘I get a warm feeling inside. I may be able to get you the IPD400, if you want it. Or I can start brushing up on my Mandarin.’
‘These technologies go stale – I guess your Dr Palatine’s work may already have been superseded. As you know, we fund a very cutting edge programme at MIT.’
‘So it’s a no.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Nine months ago you told me that if I found a way of swinging it past the legal embargo, I could write the cheque out myself. You had some story about turning the tables on the cyber-jedis of Beijing, discouraging them from holding any more all-night parties in US government servers.’
‘You couldn’t take it to Beijing, of course.’
‘They don’t seem to think it’s past its sell-by date.’
‘There are rules governing the export of sensitive technology. We in Washington take breaches very seriously indeed.’
Why doesn’t he just call me Silly Little Girl and have done with it, Nat thought venomously. ‘Let’s forget it,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d ask you, since you’ve always been such a fan of Palatine’s work. What else shall we talk about?’
Having already slipped off her shoes in readiness, Nat now gave him a playful and ever-so-slightly lingering tap on the calf with the side of her bare foot. Tony gave a start and then looked sheepish. For a man his age, he really is a wimp, Nat thought. She flashed her eyes at him and waited while he composed himself under cover of a mouthful of Montrachet.
‘Of course, you were right to put this to me, Natalya,’ he said without looking at her.
‘I thought I should.’
‘The interests of the Agency must come first, I need hardly say.’
‘Always. And then your interests next, followed by mine. But I’m thinking we can satisfy everyone here.’
‘Given guarantees from Grosvenor that the IPD400 actually works, there might be something to discuss here, I guess. We would need exclusivity on the technology for at least ten years.’
‘You won’t get either. But you do want it, then?’
‘The SigInt folk might be interested in acquiring an operational IPD400, assuming favourable terms. Yes, I think I can say that.’
‘I’m not exactly having difficulty finding a buyer, Tony. By the time you’ve put the rulebook away, I’ll be on a Caribbean beach.’
‘We’ll look at the menu,’ he said, ‘and they’ll bring their dessert wine list also, it’s quite well thought out.’
The prospect of playing the connoisseur with the wine list seemed to restore his poise. He was playing hard to get again. Of course, he was bargaining. . . But the objections and indifference seemed to be coming much too easily, and Nat felt uneasy.
‘Now, Natalya, let me get all this clear. This device of Grosvenor’s – which you appear to be hawking round with such abandon it’ll likely turn up on eBay before much longer!’ He laughed appreciatively at his own witticism. ‘The NSA, an agency of the government of your nation’s most important military ally by far, is being asked to take its place in line. So many questions occur. Why doesn’t Grosvenor turn this IPD400 into a commercial product before placing it on the market? Who sells prototypes? Why am I being offered the chance to join the fun and games over dinner with you, rather than being sent the usual stack of marketing? And lastly, why do you ask me to believe you’re on sabbatical from Grosvenor while plainly doing their business?’
He sat back and folded his arms. He’s not going to make a pass at me, Nat realised, though not because he doesn’t want to. She’d had it in mind that this could be done subtly, a mutually profitable flirtation with the menaces merely implied. It seemed not.
‘Tony, I haven’t been entirely straight with you.’
Grey Tony nodded approvingly.
‘I’m not acting for Grosvenor but as agent for a third party. I can’t tell you who, though you’ll probably find out some day – as much as we like our little secrets, we don’t mind turning them into gossip a year or so later.’
Tony was staring at her coldly.
‘I can broker the sale of the IPD400 and I want you to be the buyer.’
‘You want me to be the buyer,’ Tony repeated, his flat voice animated by an ironic inflection she hadn’t heard before and his small eyes opening wide in a calculated display of amazement. ‘Will you give it to me now, or are you going to giftwrap it and post it for my next birthday?’
‘I can have it f.o.b. Casablanca within three weeks,’ she said. ‘With or without ribbons. The price is thirty-five million dollars.’
‘Casablanca? Thirty-five million? No, no, wait, please. Now I’m really lost. This ground-breaking system which has Grosvenor execs salivating into their afternoon tea has fallen into the clutches of some nameless third party who has it stashed in a Casablanca warehouse? Somebody has messed up big time, I’d say.’
‘You don’t want to know,’ said Nat.
‘Correction: I do want to know!’
‘You have an opportunity to get in at the ground floor of a surveillance revolution, Tony, and you’re going to pass it up because I didn’t tick all the boxes for you? You know what this thing can do. What are the big chiefs going to say when your Chinese counterparts are logging into the Pentagon every morning after breakfast?’
‘Maybe you can sell arms this way in Lagos or Delhi, but not here. Absolutely not,’ said the NSA man, lips tight with official disapproval. ‘I’ll have to call London, see if any of this checks out.’
‘Don’t do that, Tony.’
It was an order. She was looking him right in the eye as she said it, not smiling, not flinching.
‘What’s going down here, Natalya?’
‘You buy the IPD400 because you want it and because it will do you good with your NSA bosses. But at no time do you ask or answer any questions about where it came from or how you acquired it. Not here, not in London, not anywhere.’
Tony gaped. She didn’t wait for a reply.
‘You will not reveal my involvement in the deal. You bought from a broker who has to remain nameless: that’s all you will ever say.’
‘You seem to have forgotten that I’m a high-ranking officer of the US government,’ said Grey Tony. ‘I deal on my terms, or I don’t deal at all.’
‘Don’t get pious with me, Tony. You get the IPD400 and you keep quiet about how, that’s all. We can behave nicely, like friends, or I can remind you what happens to high-ranking government officers who abuse their positions for personal gain.’
He stared at her. She could almost see the shutters being pulled down.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘As you’ve being doing for the last ten years. Remember San Hui? That was my deal, Tony, I slogged at it for six months and I should have had it in the bag. It cost me lots, time, money, status – yeah, you fucked me over all right,’ Nat declared, trying to work up a head of indignation. ‘But I didn’t understand why. How naive I was! I made some good friends in Seoul and found out. You’d been insider trading like a Wall Street regular, and San Hui were applying the squeeze. I have all the evidence I need to have you crawled over like a rotten tree trunk.’
‘You duplicitous little bitch.’
‘Cheer up, Tony. Remember, you’re going to do what I tell you because you want the IPD400 – and this is the only way you’re going to get it.’
Grey Tony’s jaw muscles bulged as he struggled to maintain his composure. Nat lowered her voice. ‘Hey, you know what? If you’d said, OK, Nat, let’s play ball, I’d probably be sucking you off by now.’
It was too much for Grey Tony. He stood up stiffly, folded his napkin and placed it on the table. ‘Your behaviour is insulting and outrageous in the extreme. I won’t listen for a moment longer. Goodbye, Ms Kocharian.’
‘You have twelve hours. I’m at the Marriott.’
Grey Tony stalked out. Nat called for the check. The Montrachet was $260 a bottle. She summoned a waiter.
‘I’m afraid Mr Schliemann has been called away on Agency business. Can you email this check to him at his office, please? You can use the address he gave you when he ordered the wine.’
She sashayed out and walked down to the beach. An hour in Holworthy’s had made her long to feel sand between her toes.
Chapter Eight
When Salif and Younes turned up the following evening, they didn’t take him to Nazli’s lab but to the room by the entrance to the first-floor corridor, with the building materials and trestle table and the office chairs in their plastic shrouds. One of the chairs had been unwrapped. Laid out on the table were some things he didn’t want to look at. They turned him round and pushed him into the chair and behind them James saw Mansour – and another man, sitting on a chair tapping at a laptop. Small, close-cropped hair, pale skin: the one who had followed him into the building in Oran.
Two blue-overalled guards came in. Salif and Younes stepped back, and the guards were on him, a thick forearm clamped around his throat and a fist rammed into his gut. He swung the point of his elbow back hard, felt it crack a rib. The man grunted but his forearm only tightened. James got both heels into the groin of the guard in front of him and unleashed all the power coiled in his thighs. The guard catapulted backwards and the chair collapsed beneath him. James swung a punch over his shoulder, felt it hammer against the skull of the man who had him by the neck. He found an eye socket with his thumb and drove in deep, feeling the eyeball slide away from his thumbnail. The guard screamed and his grip slackened. James took hold of his forearm and twisted his trunk until he felt the man’s weight shift to defend himself against the throw, then snapped the back of his head into the guard’s nose and ran him backwards until he slammed against the wall. He heard the whump as the air rushed from the guard’s lungs, felt his body slide down behind him, saw the other guard down on all fours, retching.
‘They have much to learn. And so do you.’
Beady, weasel eyes perfectly still in the pale face. Not a tremor in the hand that held the Taser. James stood helpless, panting like a dog as the barb snickered from its perch.
Back in the chair. Ankles gaffer-taped to its legs. Wrists behind his neck, roped down tight to the back of the chair. Shirt torn off. Still twitching like a toy with a dying battery. This was it. Electricity, needles, knives. Think of something. Something good.
‘The Taser is a good weapon, no?’
The man with close-cropped hair was sitting in a chair beside him, inspecting his torso. Mansour stood a little way off. His eyes shone with excitement, and the perfume from his oiled beard gave a sickly sweetness to the reek of the fight that still lingered in the room.
‘I cannot ask questions about IPD400,’ said the man beside him. ‘Nazli cannot make you answer. So I make you answer Nazli questions. I am logical, you think?’
‘Etienne, isn’t it?’ said James, dredging the name up from his flickering memory of the fight on the landing in Oran. ‘And Mansour. What’s up, Mansour, you look sick.’
‘You look sick,’ said Mansour, ‘when we finish.’
Etienne pulled the laptop across the table, opened the lid. ‘See. Some things we do.’
The first frame of a video. A man’s forearm strapped to a wooden table, his fist hanging over the edge, clenched so tight it was white around the joints. Etienne pressed play. The man was pleading in a language James didn’t recognise. Trying to sound reasonable when really he was terrified. Hands reached into the frame and unclenched his fist. They bound his first and index fingers together with cloth tape, then the other two. The hands grasped the pairs of taped fingers, one from each side. A kitchen knife came into view and sawed the webbed skin between them. Then they tore his hand apart down to the wrist bone while their victim’s screams wheezed through the laptop’s speakers.
‘And for the ladies.’
A woman with her mouth clamped between two steel rods, the lips protruding like fat worms. James didn’t turn away fast enough to miss the scalpel darting into shot. He sat with his eyes shut while the woman’s grunts and moans conjured in his head the images he could not see.
‘You get off on that, Etienne? Ça te fait jouir, hein?’
Etienne ignored him. Mansour grinned.
‘How happen?’
Etienne poked a finger into an area of ribcage beneath James’s left armpit. Despair pooled inside him.
‘Funny. Like paper!’
Like paper. Papery thin. Drawn tight over the bones. Funny. Easily torn or pierced, ha ha. It will always lack the thickness and elasticity of normal skin, the consultant had said. It lacked the sensation of normal skin, too. And it had memories. It remembered the day when the bullet lashed along the groove between two ribs. Ripping, scorching. It remembered the raki-sodden doctor who slapped on a cotton pad and bound it with a single length of bandage. It remembered the infection, bulging, suppurating. . . The damaged flesh, now thin and crinkled like the skin on cooling milk, carried a record of every day in its over-stretched cells.
Etienne had found it. He had a pair of cheap, red-handled pliers in his hand. Blue for nice things, red for nasty things. Big jaws for bad jobs. Etienne pressed the blunt iron teeth in either side of the rib.
‘Let’s see.’
He squeezed the handles shut, clamping the papery skin. A sigh of misery emptied James’s lungs. Etienne gripped the pliers tight and pulled the flesh away from his ribs. James’s head rocked back. Now it will tear. . .
‘Clack clack.’
Etienne, nodding at Mansour, making a scissor shape with his free hand. James was shuddering, grinding his jaws. Mansour went to the table. Something clattered as he picked it up. Shears. Mansour tried them. The blades rasped.
‘Please,’ said Etienne. He pointed at the tent of skin. ‘Remind Dr Palatine that he must answer the questions of Rakesh Nazli.’
The blades crunched and the pain was nothing, nothing, nothing, but the memories jolted into life like black goblins given a scrap of meat to chew, and the scrap of meat was there, dripping a little blood over the pliers’ fat jaws.
The doctor came and looked at the wound.
‘Just one hole? You are lucky. The most I have seen is six. They are so difficult to treat.’
Younes watched from the door. Salif had his back turned. The doctor applied a gauze soaked in something that stank like ammonia, then left.
Clamp, pull, cut. A sharp, sticky ache in his side. The grainy rasp of the sliding shear-blades sawing in his ears. He lay awake for hours, trying to get some perspective on the horrors that churned in his head, but he could find no comfort. His point of greatest vulnerability had been pounced on by men whose viciousness knew no ordinary human bounds. Men who meant to harm him. Who had harmed others. Who would harm him again.
At last he stood up and raised his arms above his head, felt the hole beneath his armpit gape. This is not a serious wound, he told himself, but stick around here and the next one will be. He went up on to the roof, collected the broken vent, and crawled slowly round until he came to the cowling above the room furthest from the guardpost. He rocked the plastic dome gently back and forth, and soon the steel latches were loose enough to swing aside, separating the cowling from the vent in the ceiling below. He lowered himself down and removed the plastic hose from the shower, took it back up and re-fitted the cowling, using the damaged vent from his shower room. It was fiddly work. He broke into two more rooms until he had three two-metre lengths of plastic hose, which he laid out on the roof above his room, along with the undamaged vent. A little pale grey light was slipping into the sky – the job had taken him most of the night. He lowered himself into the shower room, braced himself between the walls and fitted the replacement vent. He’d managed to blank out the memory of what Mansour and Etienne had done to him – but it came back to him now. He lowered himself gingerly to the floor and
studied the vent. It looked lopsided. The hole in his side screamed that it didn’t want to be stretched open again, but he inched back up and straightened the plastic frame. Every little detail mattered now.
Chapter Nine
Natalya Kocharian, taking her ease in her capacious bathtub at the Riad des Ombres, balanced two towers of bath foam on her knees and giggled at herself. The terracotta plaster was deliciously soft beneath her bottom. From her recumbent position deep in the tub, she could see reflected in the mirror opposite a print of an elephant placidly hoisting a laughing child onto its back. The elephant’s elegantly curved trunk seemed to sway in the drifts of steamy air. She’d flown back overnight, enjoying the pleasant sleep of someone with satisfying thoughts to wake to, and arrived in Marrakech at nine. The way she’d handled Grey Tony had been brilliant: lured, hooked, pinned in forty-eight hours flat – no room to wriggle and no chance to bite back. He’d called her precisely four minutes before the deadline she’d set, his voice about as friendly as a lump of wet rock.
‘I’ll buy. Eighteen million. You’ll deal with Pete Alakhine in Rabat from here on. Provide him with co-ordinates for a US bank account. The transfer will be made when the goods have been authenticated by my team in Washington. This is the final conversation we will have on this or any other subject. It ends here, or your life is going to take a turn for the worse. I hope I make myself clear.’
‘The price is thirty-five million US, Tony, and the account is in a location of my choosing. Please don’t threaten me when you call back,’ said Natalya. She put the phone down.
He rang back two minutes later. This time, there was a whiney edge to his voice. ‘Don’t dick me around, Kocharian. This junk you’re selling is worth nothing to me. I’ll go to twenty-two. This had better be on the level, or—’
‘This isn’t a negotiation, Tony. What you’re buying can’t be priced. I’ll do thirty-three.’
‘Thirty-three million!’ Tony hissed. ‘I can’t just shuffle that kind of money through accounts like I’m buying a pack of light bulbs.’
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 12
