‘You buy light bulbs, too? I didn’t know,’ said Natalya.
‘Fuck you. I’m not negotiating, I’m telling you, this is the absolute limit of what is possible. You want to practise your bargaining skills, go sell dead chickens in the souk.’
‘OK, I’ll take thirty-one, but it has to be up front. I’m not handing you a duzy – why would I when I have the real thing?’
‘You say, but since I don’t trust you further than I can spit—’
‘You’re in a foul mood, considering what a favour I’m doing you.’
There was a pause. Nat stayed silent.
‘Twenty-six,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how the fuck I can say that, but twenty-six. That’s it.’
‘Thirty. Up front. No verification.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Give me Alakhine’s cell.’
Grey Tony reeled off a number.
‘I’ll tell him when the IPD400 is ready to ship, then you can transfer the funds. Congratulations, Tony. What a coup to have the IPD400 sitting in the labs at Langley. Stay cool and practise the line you’ll spin when your NSA cronies ask how you got hold of it.’
‘You have some fucking nerve.’
‘Goodbye, Tony. I won’t call again unless I have to.’
‘Just don’t.’
He’d hung up. ‘Thirty million US dollars,’ Natalya said out loud, arranging blobs of foam on her nipples. She reckoned she could get the thing back for twenty-six, including enough of a cut for Zender to feel he’d bested her. That left four million dollars for her. Oh boy. There was an awful lot still to do, but Oh boy!
In order to keep her optimism in check, she toyed with the idea that this had all gone too easily. Grey Tony hadn’t exactly bitten her hand off, until she’d threatened him with Magda’s file; and without his eagerness to acquire the IPD400, the deal looked a bit less like business and a bit more like crime. Still, Nat shared with her brother a view that the distinction between the two was a nicety – and this wasn’t so different from ploys she’d used before, in the normal course of the arms trade. Besides, everyone would benefit from the deal – apart from Grosvenor, and they didn’t deserve to.
She decided the blobs of foam made her look like a cabaret dancer preparing to emerge from a giant birthday cake. An unusually rich cabaret dancer. She giggled again.
Grosvenor. . . If she didn’t keep up the flow of communication, they’d get restive. She’d emailed Sir Peter daily from LA, and had replies from Clive Silk as well. The tone was admonitory and impatient, but she knew that if she told them Zender was stalling, they wouldn’t be able to call her bluff. Nor would they be much surprised. She picked her cellphone out of the soap dish and dialled Sir Peter’s private line.
‘He’s not answering my calls,’ she said, splashing warm water over her breasts and watching the turrets of foam slide down her belly. ‘To be honest with you, I’m not sure he’s still in Marrakech.’
‘Keep trying, Natalya. What was that noise?’
‘Oh, sorry, I’m sitting next to a fountain. Clive’s putting so much pressure on me, Peter. . . I’m just not used to this sort of thing. What am I going to do if Zender says no deal and refuses to even talk about it?’
‘I’ll talk to Clive. I do appreciate that this isn’t easy for you.’
She allowed the Grosvenor chairman to carry on in this reassuring vein while she entertained herself by creating fountain-like noises in her bathwater. Eventually he ended the call and she got out and dried herself.
The only thing now spoiling her pleasure was that she couldn’t get hold of Nikolai. It was unlike him not to be around on the day of her return to Marrakech. He wasn’t answering his phone, nor had he picked up the messages she’d left at reception; and no one at the Riad could remember seeing him since Tuesday afternoon, when apparently he’d ordered a taxi for the airport – to pick up his superfluous sidekicks and take them to the Holiday Inn, she supposed.
She went down to reception and got a list of hospitals and medical centres, phoned them one by one. None of them had taken in a Monsieur Kocharian, nor any anonymous East European gentlemen who matched his description.
James heard a commotion. He got to the gap above the door and saw a big man staggering around in the yard bellowing in what sounded like Russian. His face was a swollen mess and there was a sideways kink in his left knee. New guest, same warm welcome, thought James, feeling a trickle of fluid from the stinging hole in his side. His two guards stood either side of the wounded man, watching him warily. Salif grabbed the Kalashnikov and shouted at Younes, who ran off towards the passage that led out of the yard. The Russian made a hopeless lunge for the rifle, then thumped down on his backside, legs stretched out in front of him, panting hoarsely.
‘You shit-eating motherfucker! I’ll tear your fucking face off!’
‘Get back,’ Salif ordered unnecessarily. ‘Get back now.’
Three of the blue-overalled compound guards arrived, the doctor trotting along behind them. The first of them ran in and swung a heavy kick into the base of the fallen man’s spine. He arched backwards, trying in vain to catch hold of the man’s leg. A second guard booted him in the stomach and he curled like a salted slug.
‘Stop!’
The guards fell back to watch as the doctor knelt beside the prone figure and unzipped a black cloth case.
‘Hold out his arm.’
They pulled the man onto his stomach. One of them pressed his head to the dirt and knelt between his shoulder blades; a second grabbed him by the wrist. The doctor was drawing fluid from a phial into a steel syringe. She slapped the skin sharply to bring up a vein before easing the needle under his skin and driving the plunger down. The man’s straining torso slumped.
‘You useless old woman.’ The third guard spat at Salif. ‘Get the key to another room.’ He made clucking noises and flapped his arms at Salif, who eyed him sullenly and sent Younes on the errand instead.
They dragged the Russian into the room next to the one with the broken door. There was a brief confabulation outside. ‘I advise you not to hit him again – he was brought here for a reason,’ the doctor said.
She turned and marched briskly off across the yard, her incongruous white coat flapping. One of the guards grabbed his crotch and ground his hips in her direction. But the diminutive figure had already turned down the passage leading back to the compound.
Nat went to the Holiday Inn and there was Anton in the lobby, lounging on a grubby orange sofa and leering from beneath the fronds of a plastic palm at a group of German women gathered round a tour rep.
‘Ms Kocharian, I was hoping you’d drop by.’
He was dressed in cream chinos, white deck shoes with brown tassels and a purple check shirt with the cuffs turned back. Nat ignored his outstretched hand and studied him with all the disdain he so obviously deserved.
‘Where is my brother?’
‘We don’t know. Must have gone somewhere—’
‘Gone where? I left him here, in Marrakech.’
‘We went to the casino on Tuesday night. He told us to look out for a fat guy. I took the main bar and Nikolai covered the rest. I didn’t see him for an hour, then there was some trouble and a lot of people left. I went and looked for him, but—’
‘Where was Mikhail?’
‘Keeping watch outside. He didn’t see Nikolai come out.’
‘Did you see the fat guy?’ Nat asked uneasily.
‘Couldn’t miss him.’ Anton paused, then leaned towards her and smirked. ‘We think maybe Nikolai got lucky. With a girl,’ he added.
Getting lucky with a girl wouldn’t stop Nikolai sending me a text, Nat thought. ‘What was the trouble at the casino?’
‘I don’t know, a fight or something. I didn’t see.’
‘Stop saying that for fuck’s sake. Go to the casino and find out exactly what happened while you were lurking in the bar. Use those famous good looks to soften up one of the hostesses. I’ll come and find you
later.’
She sat down on the sofa vacated by Anton and called Claude Zender.
‘Natalya, you are back in Marrakech, reinstated by those oafs at Grosvenor and here to peddle their trinkets once more?’
‘No chance, they’re still wetting themselves over the EUCs. Heard anything from your client?’
‘I hear from all of them more or less constantly, a procession of grumbles as would snap the sweetest temper clean in two.’
‘I mean about the IPD400?’
‘Oh, that. Rien du tout. You will have to be patient, my dear Natalya.’
‘Not my style – how long, do you think?’
‘Mam’selle Patience does not ask such things, she folds her hands in her lap and emits a modest sigh. But in recognition of your tremendous zest for the deal, I will do a little gentle persuading.’
‘Failing that, threats of violence can work,’ said Nat, feeling suddenly oppressed by the throng of tourists traipsing round the lobby. ‘Claude, there’s something else I need to ask you.’
‘You wish to re-purchase a further consignment of Grosvenor write-offs?’
‘I came here with my brother, Nikolai – he’s always wanted to see Marrakech and I needed some company. He was at the casino on Tuesday night and now I can’t get hold of him. I heard there was some kind of trouble. I’m sure he had nothing to do with it, but I’m worried.’
‘Good gracious, Natalya, how very sisterly of you. Quite charming!’
‘Yes, all right, Claude – but have you heard anything?’
‘I am sure you flatter me by supposing I see much of what goes on in this city. You know how I shun the limelight.’
‘You weren’t at the casino?’
‘Let me make one or two enquiries.’
‘Thanks, Claude, it’s kind of you.’
‘I can think of many enchanting ways in which the favour can be returned. Shall I find you at the Riad this evening? At seven o’clock?’
Later in the day James saw them bearing the unconscious Russian away on a stretcher. He couldn’t stop himself hoping that Mansour and Etienne would now turn their pliers and shears on their new captive. The most I have seen is six, the doctor had reported, as if counting doughnuts in a bag.
Salif and Younes turned up. Younes was excited, and there was extra force behind his prods and shoves – as if the events of the day had awoken an interest in discovering how much damage the human body can endure. After a minute of telling him to leave the prisoner alone, Salif rounded on his fellow guard with a ferocity James hadn’t seen before. Younes fell back, chastened. James caught Salif’s eye, and the older man gave a shrug that seemed like an apology. That was odd. Salif’s mood was usually bitter, and James had assumed it was directed at him. But perhaps Salif just didn’t like what he was being asked to do. It was obvious that there was bad blood between him and the blue-overalled guards: when they’d arrived to deal with the wounded Russian in the yard, they’d treated him with contempt. Salif was not the kind to forget an insult.
He arrived at Nazli’s den to find his host coiling back his hair and pinching his nose with more than usual vigour.
‘I’ve been looking through the settings files and these notes—’
‘You told your friends Mansour and Etienne that I refused to give you the password,’ said James. He spoke quietly, in order to suppress the cold rage inside him.
‘No, no. . . I simply said—’
‘They are cutting lumps out of me with sheep shears.’
A film of sweat started from Nazli’s face. He’s finally beginning to understand how much danger he’s in, thought James.
‘We’ll do a trial run. I need you to write a piece of code while I finish the satellite-over-IP configs.’
He gave Nazli a few curt instructions, then sat down at the Sun, logged into his administrator account and found the software that managed the satellite dish on the roof. He looked through the settings tab until he found its co-ordinates, then launched a utility that would locate them on a map. The top quarter appeared, then the rest inched down the screen. There wasn’t much to look at: a featureless landscape crossed by a single road. He zoomed out until letters appeared: FREE ZONE. Perfect, he thought, I’ll tell the guards at the gate. Nearest towns: Bir Lehlou to the east, and a larger place to the west, Smara. He’d never heard of either of them. He reduced the scale and more words appeared. WESTERN SAHARA. Now it was starting to make sense. A desperate place, from what he could recall, passed around colonial rulers like a desirable trinket, and eventually bequeathed to Morocco by General Franco on his deathbed. There was a guerrilla army here, fighting for independence. He scoured his memory for the name. . . Polisario. Their cause had been championed by US Secretary of State James Baker for a heady year or two; but eventually they’d been handed over to the care of the United Nations and left to fester in a swamp of international apathy.
So what did he have to do with all this?
James reduced the scale again. Now there were borders: Mauritania to the south and east, Algeria to the north-east, then Morocco; and finally, maybe a hundred and fifty miles to the west, the Atlantic coast. For a moment he felt dislocated, unable to reconcile this pinprick on the map he was staring at with the ugly compound and its ill-assorted residents. Needless to say, it wasn’t marked. He shut the map and logged out.
‘Finish that later,’ he told Nazli, powering up the IPD400. ‘We’ll run a test. Something soft – a university intranet. You drive.’
Nazli navigated to the login page for staff at Princeton, then brought up the command line console and keyed in the command Unlock.
‘Leave out the -r and -f switches – they’ll slow it down. We don’t have to be completely invisible.’
Nazli re-keyed the command and they waited.
ANALYSING TRAFFIC. . .
AWAITING CARRIERS. . .
FOUND 4 CARRIERS, ANALYSING PACKETS. . .
RUNNING TRACE. . .
James felt more intrigued by the test than he wanted Nazli to see. It should be impossible to hack even a low-security network over a satellite connection. If it worked, the prototype was much more robust than he’d expected.
FAILED 3 TRACES. . .
FOUND 2 CARRIERS, ANALYSING PACKETS. . .
They watched Little Sister snap away at the gateway to the intranet, unable to make the decisive intercept.
‘Too much latency,’ said James. ‘Try somewhere else – we used museums when we first got it running.’
Nazli went to the Metropolitan in New York and sent Little Sister after its new prey. They watched the same sequence of procedures: carriers found and traces started, but no break-in.
‘It doesn’t get any easier than this,’ said James.
TRACE COMPLETE, DECRYPTING. . .
‘There,’ said Nazli. ‘It’s latched on.’
ADAPTING CARRIER. . .
The main screen changed: ‘Welcome to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Staff Intranet’.
UNLOCK COMPLETE.
‘Result!’ said Nazli. ‘That is so impressive, Dr Palatine.’
‘What, hacking the Met? A twelve-year-old could do it. I’d keep this out of your progress report. We’ll try another site.’
He leaned over Nazli’s shoulder and keyed in the IP address that he’d found in the Centuries Deep logfiles the previous day, in the header of the message referring to the mysterious Anemone. The cursor blinked for a few seconds, then a dialog box appeared:
UNABLE TO INITIATE TRACE. ERROR 16017.
That was wrong. He must have mis-keyed. He repeated the command.
UNABLE TO INITIATE TRACE. ERROR 16017.
‘What does the 16017 error signify?’
What does the 16017 error signify? The words rattled in his head. He was too stunned to answer.
‘James?’
‘A flaw in the heuristics,’ he muttered. ‘I thought I’d got rid of it.’
‘How often do you see it?’ Nazli leaned forward eagerly, as i
f sensing an opportunity to earn his spurs by hunting down a bug in the IPD400 codebase.
‘Too often.’
‘Perhaps we can replicate it on another site?’
‘I don’t think we’ll see it again,’ said James, feeling as if he were shaking himself out of a dream. ‘I need to show you how to integrate updated network stats. We’ll start on that tomorrow.’
Nazli was fiddling with a personal attack alarm he’d found in his desk. He’s been given it in case I turn nasty, thought James. Which I might.
‘Put that thing down or you’ll set it off.’
‘You seem upset by this error. I guess it’s more significant than you’re saying.’
By seven o’clock the heat of the day had unwound. The courtyard of the Riad des Ombres was tranquil: the fountain of marble lilies puttered, and the man smoking a cigar in the shelter of the loggia opposite Natalya rustled his copy of Le Monde. The boy serving the tables padded round in well-worn leather slippers, a cream linen kaftan and woven cotton cap, lighting citronella candles with a box of wooden spills. The man with Le Monde had him hold a spill to his cigar, while he sucked and blew. Grandiose puffs of smoke issued from the side of his mouth, turning steely blue as they drifted up into the sunlight slinking over the stone balustrade three storeys above. Nat ordered a gin and tonic and it came with little silver dishes of pistachio nuts and green olives. She found herself stroking the mahogany arm of the sofa, just to feel in her palms the luxurious warmth it had absorbed from the silky, burnished air.
He’s not a teenager on his first all-nighter, she told herself. If anyone can look after himself, it’s Nikolai Kocharian.
He’d looked after her, too. He’d bought her books with the money he earned bullying people on behalf of the local gang chief – shopkeepers, debtors, anyone who got mixed up with them one way or another, which was difficult to avoid if you had any ambitions in the new world of opportunity that was ushered in by that old soak Yeltsin lurching around on top of his tank one day in Moscow. And he’d told their stepfather Dmitri that he wasn’t to make a skivvy of her, or to keep her out of school so she could go into town to queue for eggs or tins of fish, or to slap her if she didn’t clean up the mess he made when he got drunk. Aged seventeen, when Nat was ten and soon after Dmitri had moved in, Nikolai caught him by the throat, rammed him up against the wall of their living room so that her mother’s collection of national monuments rendered in badly glazed porcelain rattled on the side table, and told him he would tear his fucking face off if he ever did such things to her, or any other things which he didn’t care to mention.
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 13
