Prime Target

by Hugh Miller

  They stood and Kretzer handed Gibson a set of Mercedes keys. ‘It’s in the west-side car park. Drive carefully.’

  They parted at the door to the concourse. Gibson went straight to the parking area, navigated the neat system of paths to the west section and stood by the first row of cars. He pressed the button on the ignition key. Halfway along the second row the lights of a blue Mercedes saloon flashed.

  He squeezed his bulk between two cars, strode to the Mercedes and put his bags in the boot. He got in, started up, and fumbled in his pocket for his cassette. He found it and popped it into the player.

  As he pulled out to the airport perimeter road Andy Williams began singing ‘Home Lovin’ Man’. Gibson turned up the volume. This was his favourite album of all time, he never went anywhere without it. He had told his wife till she was probably sick of hearing him say it, they could keep the simpering crooners they called singers nowadays. This was proper ballad singing by a man with a man’s voice, singing about a man’s emotions. And the music had a tune.

  He reached the bank at three minutes to eleven. The submanager recognized him and beckoned him to a side room. Without a word Gibson was seated at a table and given a pen. He signed three identical withdrawal documents, declined a cup of coffee, and stood again to receive a black leather attaché case, brought by the sub-manager from the secure area at the rear of the banking hall.

  ‘A pleasure, as always, Herr Gibson,’ the submanager said.

  ‘Nice to see you again.’

  Gibson slapped the little man’s shoulder and left.

  The car was parked across the street. He skipped through the traffic, panting with the effort, and got in. As he pulled the seatbelt across his chest he saw a young man at the corner watching him.

  Or it looked as if he was watching.

  Gibson sat still for a minute. The watcher had gone now, vanished round the corner. But he had been watching, Gibson was sure of it now. Maybe he should make different arrangements for receiving the cash next time.

  Gibson fumbled the ignition key into the lock. He did not see there was something extra on the dashboard now, a small metal prong attached to a stick-on circuit board the size of a shirt button.

  He turned the key. The surge of ignition put micro-power through the tiny device on the dashboard. It transmitted a signal a distance of 90 centimetres to a receiver in a plastic bottle under the front passenger seat. In response to the signal, the receiver was configured to produce a spark. The spark ignited 2 litres of aircraft fuel, also in the bottle. The chain of events, from transmission of the signal to ignition of the fuel, took a two-hundredth of a second.

  The car exploded. Windows and glass doors along the street shattered. Burning debris and showering flames set fire to two shops and a telephone kiosk. For five minutes the heat from the burning car was too intense to allow any approach.

  When firemen were finally able to get close and douse the wreck with foam, a charred body was seen arched backwards across the driver’s seat. Beside it lay the blackened remains of an attaché case.

  13

  Sabrina had been warned she should go to the tourist office at Avenue Mohammed V, where a few dollars would buy her the services of a guide to show her round the old town.

  ‘You will become lost if you go alone,’ the man at the hotel reception warned her. He was a tall stooping Indian, with a look of bottomless grievance, as if some wrong had been done to him for which there was no remedy. He held up a finger as Sabrina moved away from the desk. ‘Even if you do not become lost,’ he said, ‘you may see only a small proportion of what might have been revealed to you with the help of a guide.’ He made that possibility sound like a tragedy.

  Sabrina promised him she would be fine on her own, and left the hotel. At the end of the road she hailed a battered replica of a Yellow Cab and showed the driver the scribbled address she had for Lucy Dow. The man screwed up his eyes at the paper, as if it caused him pain.

  ‘Is small place,’ he said, holding up his hands, the palms an inch apart. ‘I drive you near, is all.’

  ‘Do what you can,’ Sabrina told him.

  It took twenty minutes through narrower and narrower streets, until finally they were in a passage-way only a couple of metres wider than the car. The driver stopped and pointed up ahead to a narrow gap between two tall buildings.

  ‘Is place,’ he said, and held out his hand for the fare.

  When he drove off Sabrina walked slowly towards the alley. She had expected a populated spot, but this place was deserted. The stillness was weird. It was the kind of silence that made her imagine dozens of people holding their breath. The houses around looked empty, but she could imagine people were there, tucked back into the shadows, watching.

  ‘I’m only paranoid because the whole world is out to get me…’

  At the mouth of the alley she stopped and looked at her piece of paper again. The single word KABILA was pencilled above the street address. She looked up and saw it again, painted on a piece of lath pointing along the alley.

  She moved into the gloom, smelling dampness and cats. On her right, 10 metres along, there was a solitary doorway. She went in and saw thin beams of daylight from high up, dappling a splintered staircase.

  ‘Nice little pied-à-terre, Lucy.’

  She climbed the stairs, feeling them move with her weight. At the top was a room with no door. A heavy curtain was slung across the gap. She pushed it aside. The room beyond was clean and bright. The floor was tiled and shiny, with a rug at the centre. And Lucy was there, sitting in a winged cane armchair facing the window.

  ‘Surprise, surprise!’

  Sabrina took three steps into the room and knew everything was wrong. Lucy continued to stare out of the window. No living person was ever that still.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, my poor Lucy…’

  They had not known each other well, but they had got on. That was closeness enough to put a pang through Sabrina’s heart. She stepped close to the chair. Lucy’s hands were tied in front of her. Her throat had been opened. Flies clustered on the edge of the wound and across the caked blood in her lap.

  Sabrina looked around the room. If there had been anything there belonging to Lucy it had been taken. Her body was all they had left.

  Sabrina looked at the filmed, half-lidded eyes. Lucy had died some hours ago. Already the tan of her skin was turning deeper brown at the hairline; the sweetish smell of early decay hung in the room. She put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder briefly, as a farewell gesture, then slipped out of the room. If whoever had done this was coming back, she didn’t want to be there when they did.

  Sabrina went quickly back down to the alley. She walked to the far end and found a quiet, private space. She fished out her mobile and tapped three digits. C.W. Whitlock came on the line. She told him what had happened in a calm voice that didn’t betray her churning emotions.

  ‘Go back to your hotel and have a strong drink,’ he told her. ‘The proper authorities will be alerted. They’ll deal with it.’

  ‘Do you think this had anything to do with Yaqub Hisham and my investigation? This would be a fairly strong signal that they don’t want anyone poking around.’

  ‘No. This was the boys from Peru, I’d say. She believed they were on to her. She also believed she could handle it. She obviously got it wrong.’

  ‘Are they holed up in this area?’

  ‘Never you mind, Sabrina. This isn’t your turf. It’s a matter for Task Force Six.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Sabrina? You listening?’

  ‘It’s all right, I got the message. You can’t blame me for feeling enraged.’

  ‘Don’t you mean vengeful? That particular itch will be scratched. We’ll bring them to justice, I promise. Now listen, Sabrina, wait for back-up if the situation heats up too much. I would rather have you slow and alive, than quick and dead. Take care out there, OK?’

  ‘If I don’t, it won’t be for want of warnings.’

&nb
sp; ‘Keep in touch.’

  ‘Right.’

  It had happened before and - God help me, she thought - it would happen again. At the hotel she bathed, changed her clothes and put Lucy Dow firmly from her mind. Then she set out to find Yaqub Hisham’s cronies on her own.

  She took the map that had been provided with the briefing docket. Her destination, the place where Mossad believed Emily Selby’s killer had lived, was called Rouelle Nador. She memorized the name and pictured the words in her head, ready and waiting for a match. But after two hours of tramping the narrow streets, retracing her steps at several points, she admitted that she was lost.

  Part of the problem was that only some of the streets had names, so there was no logical way to progress from one to the other, in spite of what the map appeared to suggest. Another snag was that some names were duplicated, because little signs with pointers had been tacked up to help tourists find certain locations, and in many cases the pointers had fallen off and now only the names remained, misleading anybody trying to use names as a guide.

  On top of that, she was making people curious about her. Once again she had tried to dress down, in a dark bronze-and-mustard ankle-length skirt and a matching peasant top, but she was American and she was blonde and that undid most of the effort. People were watching as she passed, and they were muttering.

  Towards noon Sabrina considered giving up and going back to the hotel to rethink her tactics. She had assumed that Lucy would take her to within spitting distance of the place she wanted to go. Bereft of that guidance, she had trudged through streets crammed with mosques and townhouses - some of them highly elegant -and had bowed her head to pass through countless arches and follow the alleys beyond. Around the walled perimeter of the old town were dozens of gates, some of them locked, most of them imposingly built from oak with iron and copper banding. They seemed not to lead outside of the old town, but into other shadowy areas not shown on her map. As an experience, that part of Tetuán was unforgettable. But trying to find an address was hell.

  She asked no one the way. An American woman visiting that area with a destination in mind would go beyond being a curiosity and become an object of suspicion. She simply kept wandering, sure that by now she looked lost and faintly dazed without having to strain for the effect.

  Outside a café she stopped, took a deep breath of the coffee aroma and dropped into a chair. The street was no more than 3 metres wide and an overhanging balcony cast an oblong of shade where she sat. The scent of coffee was delicious but she ordered iced tea. For the moment it was sheer pleasure just to sit there dabbing her face and neck with a handkerchief, feeling a gentle draught from a passageway opposite.

  She looked up as the tea was brought. Over the waiter’s shoulder she saw a sign: Rouelle Nador.

  ‘Goddamn it!’

  ‘Mam’selle?’ The waiter looked startled.

  ‘That looks wonderful,’ she said, switching on a bright smile. She picked up the tall glass in its silver holder. ‘Really wonderful.’

  The waiter went away, confused.

  Sabrina took her time over the tea, watching the pedestrian traffic to and from Rouelle Nador. It was a long street, narrower than most of the others and very drab. Raucous Arab music blared from a couple of upstairs windows, and that was unusual. Most of the music playing from shops and from the open doorways of houses was subdued and melodious, western in tone with a distinct French bias.

  The people going down Rouelle Nador and those coming out were unmistakably a ghetto breed, she decided. They had the look of the community’s bad guys. They displayed a sullen, automatic dislike of the scene around them, just like the thugs of the esquadrones muertes, the death-squad men she had seen hanging around the beach bars of La Libertad in EL Salvador.

  There was no sense in trying to kid herself; the people around Rouelle Nador made her nervous. She took a deep breath and silently admitted it. She knew why it was happening, too: she associated these characters with what had happened to Lucy Dow.

  Abruptly, like a dose of the right medicine at precisely the right moment, she had a sudden recollection of Mike Graham offering to take this job and let her go to Germany.

  That shifted her focus. She straightened her shoulders, threw back her head and drained the glass. She put a handful of Moroccan francs on the table, got up and made her way into Rouelle Nador.

  There were no shops or cafés, no mosques or elegant houses. None of the odours escaping on to the street inspired exotic sensations. Mostly it was staleness and decay she smelled, with the occasional whiff of hashish. Definitely a ghetto, a concentration of self-segregated nastiness at the centre of other people’s domestic lives.

  A man standing in a doorway stared at her as she went past. He was dressed in flip-flops, cutoff jeans and a green Day-Glo undershirt. His eyes followed her and as she turned to stare back at him he stopped chewing the matchstick jutting from the side of his mouth.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ she said.

  He hesitated, then nodded.

  ‘I’m trying to find the family or the friends of Yaqub Hisham,’ she said.

  The man shook his head.

  ‘You don’t know him?’

  He shook his head again and resumed chewing the match.

  Sabrina walked on. She counted to ten, then turned and looked back. He had gone from the doorway. Word would now be travelling. She wiggled her shoulders to dispel a sudden tingling along her back. She began walking again.

  After a minute she heard someone running behind her, the sound getting rapidly closer. The feet sounded light, not at all threatening, and when she turned she saw a small boy no more than five or six years old.

  ‘Missy go that place,’ he said breathlessly, pointing. ‘Go Maruf-al-Hakim.’

  ‘Whoa, there.’ Sabrina knelt by the boy and put her hand on his skinny shoulder. ‘Say it again, slowly.’

  He frowned at her, not understanding. She realized he had been told exactly what to say. He didn’t speak English.

  ‘I go there?’ Sabrina pointed to a door on the corner of two alleys, dead ahead. ‘That place?’

  The boy nodded rapidly. ‘Missy go that place. Go Maruf-al-Hakim.’

  ‘Maruf-al-Hakim.’

  He nodded again. Sabrina fumbled in her pocket for change to give him, but he turned and ran back the way he had come.

  Sabrina went to the door and knocked. Where so much was unknown it was best to improvise her story, because a fresh ad hoc lie worked better than the stale, all-purpose variety. With no certainty of what she would find, she had no concrete plan to execute after she delivered her opener. But she was ready for the worst.

  The door opened a crack. A girl of fifteen or sixteen put her face in the opening.

  ‘Can I speak to Maruf-al-Hakim?’

  The girl shut the door. It opened again a moment later, wide this time. A man stood there, tall and bearded, barrel-chested, dressed in US Army fatigue pants and a dirty green polo shirt. He was barefoot.

  ‘Are you Maruf-al-Hakim?’

  ‘That is my name.’

  No toothbrush, Sabrina would swear, had ever been near the mouth that lurked behind the fringes of Maruf-al-Hakim’s moustache. She recalled Philpott’s description of teeth like that: If one of them was white he’d have a snooker set.

  ‘Could I talk to you about Yaqub Hisham?’ Sabrina said.

  Maruf shrugged. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Mary Smith. Is Yaqub a friend of yours?’

  ‘We are brothers.’

  ‘Oh, I see -’

  ‘We are all brothers.’

  She saw a poster on the wall behind him. It depicted a bunch of incredibly healthy-looking Arabs brandishing guns above their heads, the sun blazing behind them as they marched forward with a scarlet-lettered Arabic slogan at their feet.

  ‘That’s your brotherhood?’ Sabrina said, pointing.

  ‘What business do you have with us?’ Maruf demanded. He folded his arms, suggesting a st
and-off.

  ‘I know about Yaqub’s business in London,’ she said.

  Maruf shook his head firmly. ‘Not possible. Yaqub is in Palestine.’

  ‘No, he was in London all right. He didn’t use his real name. He was calling himself Kamul Haidar.’

  Maruf’s eyes went down to slits. He tilted his head one way then the other. ‘I ask again, what is your business here?’

  ‘I need to know why Yaqub went to London.’

  She was sure these people knew Yaqub Hisham was dead. If they ran true to type, they would have plans for her already. Which was fine. She wanted that. She wanted their full belligerent attention, for that way she would get to know things. Quickly.

  ‘I see,’ Maruf said.

  The hair around his mouth was so dense it was hard to see how he was responding, but as he stepped back now he seemed to smile.

  ‘You will take mint tea with us.’

  ‘Thank you, but I don’t feel it’s proper to enter a stranger’s house without a chaperone.’ She watched him scowl. They just hated a woman to show any determination. ‘Can I invite you perhaps to join me for tea or a soft drink at a café?’

  Maruf appeared to think about it. ‘One moment,’ he said, and disappeared, pushing the door almost shut.

  Sabrina waited, watching the gap in the door. She thought she heard music. Then she heard footsteps and turned sharply because they were behind her suddenly. She felt pain and saw a flash of bright, blinding light as something hard struck the side of her head. She fell back into churning darkness.

  She came round with a stink like rotting fish in her nostrils. The pain in her head was so bad she was sure her skull was fractured. When she tried to touch her head something kept her hand from moving.

  It was a long time before she opened her eyes. When she did the faint light penetrated like knives, sending a shaft of pain across the back of her head. She shut her eyes, waited a while, then slowly opened them again. This time the pain was only a throb.

  She was lying in a filthy little room with broken floorboards and cracked, pock-marked plaster on the walls. It was intensely hot. Beams of light poked through gaps in the boards across the window, illuminating floating particles of dust. When she moved her head even a fraction it hurt, so she took several minutes to understand her position in the room.