Abdul had other ideas.
‘You wait here, please,’ he told them, indicating that his honoured guests should take a seat at one of the tables outside the patisserie. There were customers eating pastries and drinking coffee in the late morning light.
‘Why?’ Carradine asked.
‘I get car.’
They looked at one another. It was inconceivable that Abdul was anything other than the man he appeared to be, but neither of them wanted to hang around in such a public place.
‘Be quick,’ Carradine told him. ‘We’d really like to have some rest.’
‘Of course, monsieur.’ The Moroccan gave a low bow before hurrying off around the corner.
‘Is it always like this?’ Carradine asked.
‘Not always.’
‘We might as well have a coffee,’ he suggested.
‘Yes,’ Bartok replied. ‘And text the boat.’
She took out the phone. Carradine passed her the sheet of paper. She typed Patrick and Eleanor’s number into the contacts.
‘Do you want to text or shall I speak to them?’ Carradine asked.
‘Text. Always,’ she said.
He knew that intelligence services could identify a person using voice recognition, just as he knew that a spy satellite, orbiting Morocco five hundred miles up, boasted cameras powerful enough to read a headline on the newspaper at the next table. Yet Carradine had never had cause to think that these technologies might be brought to bear on himself or on somebody he knew; they were just gimmicks in his books, details in a hundred Hollywood TV shows and movies. There was an awning over their table, providing both shade from the sun and protection from the all-seeing sky. Bartok was still wearing the long black wig, Carradine a pair of sunglasses and a Panama hat he had bought in the souk.
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ Bartok told him, standing up and going inside.
Carradine assumed that she was off to the bathroom. A waiter stopped at their table. Carradine ordered a café au lait for Bartok and an espresso for himself. He yearned for his phone and laptop and felt an umbilical severing from his old life: what he would have given to check his emails, his WhatsApp messages, just to read that morning’s edition of The Times. Instead he had only a prehistoric Nokia with which to send Patrick and Eleanor a simple text message painstakingly typed out on an antediluvian keyboard.
Hi. We have made it to Rabat. Having a lovely time and really looking forward to seeing you tomorrow morning. Stupidly lost my phone so using this temporary number. Is 8am still OK? Lilia very excited to see Atalanta – as am I!
Carradine pressed send and put the phone on the table. The waiter returned with the coffees. The espresso was served, as was the custom in Morocco, with a small bottle of water. Carradine opened it and drank the entire contents without bothering to pour it out. The trumpeter was now playing the theme from The Godfather as children ran among the carob trees in front of the patisserie. Carradine’s table was positioned on a busy corner section of the square. Pedestrians were passing all the time. One of them, a frail, elderly beggar, was moving from table to table, holding out an arthritic hand as he pleaded for money. He was ignored by each of the customers in turn. Carradine leaned down to fetch his wallet, which was zipped into a side pocket of his case. He had some worn ten and twenty dirham notes – the equivalent of a couple of euros – which he could give to the elderly man. He retrieved the money and sat up as the beggar shuffled towards him. Bartok came back to the table just as he was pressing the money into the man’s emaciated hand. She said nothing but smiled at the beggar who thanked Carradine effusively before shuffling off.
‘Got the phone?’ she asked.
Carradine looked at the table. He knew instantly that it had been stolen.
‘Fuck.’
‘What is it?’ Bartok knew it too. He could tell by her reaction.
‘The mobile. The cellphone. Did you pick it up?’
She shook her head, very slowly, coming to terms with what had happened.
‘I leaned down for ten seconds to get my wallet …’
Had the beggar taken it? Surely not. An accomplice? More likely an opportunistic thief had swiped it while moving in the flow of pedestrians passing the table.
‘Jesus, Kit …’
They searched the ground beneath the table. Carradine frisked himself. He asked a young mother at the next table if she had seen anyone taking the phone. She shook her head in the manner of one who did not wish to become involved in somebody else’s misfortune.
‘What was on the SIM?’
Bartok did not answer him. She withdrew into silence. Carradine could not tell if she was irritated solely by his lapse in concentration or if the SIM contained vital information on which she had relied for months. Every useful number, every precious message: gone in the blink of an eye.
Abdul soon returned to the patisserie. Carradine told him about the theft. The young Moroccan expressed his sympathy but offered nothing in the way of practical solutions; he was keen only that his guests should accompany him to the apartment which had now been prepared for them.
Shouldering his bag, Carradine walked behind Bartok and Abdul as they made their way towards the car. He was furious with himself. The irritation and embarrassment he had felt when Bartok had told him about Mantis returned in full flood. Perhaps he wasn’t cut out for the role in which he had cast himself. For the first time since he had arrived in Morocco, Carradine thought nostalgically of home, of the simple writer’s life that had so frustrated him. He was not a man prone to self-pity; nor did he wish that he could click his fingers and somehow remove himself from the complications of Rabat and Lara Bartok. Nevertheless, he was tired of living so much on the edge of his wits. He wondered how Bartok had coped for so long and could only assume that she had enjoyed periods of time in which she had been secure and safely anonymous. He presumed that she had lost contact with old friends from Hungary or New York, but perhaps this was not the case. Did she have boyfriends? Carradine could not imagine how she would be able to build or sustain a relationship with another man, living as she did. He assumed that she took her pick of men, whenever desire took hold of her, then moved on before love had a chance to take hold. But what could he possibly know? All that was clear to him was that his own life, as problematic and dangerous as it had become, was as nothing in comparison to the complexity of her own.
Watching Bartok as she spoke to Abdul, he felt a great sympathy for her, a surge of feeling for which he was rewarded with a smile as she opened the passenger door of the waiting car and climbed in. His sins had apparently been forgotten. The stolen phone was yesterday’s news. Carradine was revived and joined her in the car with a strong desire to prove to Bartok, as well as to himself, that he could get them safely to Gibraltar. He had come this far, suffering only a bruised ego and a swollen right hand along the way. If Abdul came through for them and they could lay low in the apartment, there was every chance of leaving Rabat safely in the morning.
33
The bearded man standing on the crowded rush-hour platform at Oxford Circus was carrying a worn leather briefcase and a furled umbrella. It had been raining hard as he entered the station and his thinning hair was pasted to his scalp. Stephen Graham was a man with a lot on his mind. LASZLO had been found, yes, but nobody had seen hide nor hair of her for twenty-four hours. Ramón Basora had got sloppy, fallen in with the Americans – and paid with his life. Kit Carradine had vanished. Graham’s hastily assembled house of cards had come crashing down. He had an ominous feeling that he would be next.
Graham had come from a meeting with Petrenko. Not so much a meeting as an interrogation. Moscow wanted to know what ‘Robert Mantis’ knew about the search for Lara Bartok. Did he realise that she had been sighted in Morocco? Had he had any dealings with one ‘C.K. Carradine’, a British writer attending a literary conference in Marrakech? Graham had denied all knowledge, fending off Petrenko’s questions – Is Kit Carradine working for the Service
? Is he romantically involved with Bartok? – as best he could. If Moscow knew that he had been trying to protect LASZLO, they would have him killed. If Petrenko came away from the meeting believing that Graham had deliberately tried to undermine a Kremlin-sanctioned operation to find Lara Bartok, he was finished.
What could he tell them? That he was in love with the estranged girlfriend of Ivan Simakov? That no woman had ever made him feel the way Lara had made him feel? That their brief relationship had been the most sublime and fulfilling of his life? They would think he was a fool who had lost his mind.
The discussion had taken place at the Langham Hotel. Petrenko, the master interrogator, playing the trusted confidant, the old friend, the world-weary spy. Masking his suspicion of Graham in light-hearted asides, posing questions that were not quite questions, levelling accusations that were never far from threats. Graham had felt that he had survived it all until the moment Petrenko mentioned Ramón. That was when he realised that he was cornered. If he was going to escape with his life, he knew that he would have to give something up.
So, yes, he admitted that he had sent Basora to Casablanca. No, that had nothing to do with LASZLO. Yes, he had heard that Basora had been found dead in his hotel room from a suspected drugs overdose. No, he did not have any idea if third parties were involved in the death. Graham explained that he had an agent in Morocco – one Abdullah Aziz – whom he had instructed Ramón to meet at the Sheraton Hotel. Graham himself had not travelled to Casablanca in person because he had been too busy with other projects in London.
It had been hot in the hotel room. Graham had asked if he could open a window. As he did so, Petrenko picked up a black and white surveillance photograph from a table beside the bed. He showed it to Graham.
‘Do you know this man?’
The man in the photograph was Sebastian Hulse. Graham could not remember how much, or how little, Moscow knew about the American. He tried to maintain a poker face. Should he feign ignorance? Should he say that he recognised Hulse as the Agency’s man in Morocco? In the end, he settled on a version of the truth.
‘I do. His name is Hulse. He works for the Americans. He was staying at the Sheraton. He befriended Ramón in the bar, took him to dinner, pretended he was a businessman from New York.’
Petrenko seemed surprised by the candour of this answer. His wistful smile gave Graham hope.
‘You mean Hulse suspected that Ramón was working for us?’
‘I can’t say. I assumed as much. I told him to break off contact. Next thing I knew, Ramón was being taken to a morgue in Casablanca.’
He remembered receiving the text from Carradine, the photographs of Hulse and Ramón in Blaine’s. He had wanted to simplify things, to fire Carradine so that he would no longer be in play.
‘And you still cannot say who or what may have required him to pay this visit to the mortuary?’
Petrenko’s expression betrayed the ghost of a smile. Graham hesitated. It was a toss-up between Hulse and Moscow. He could hardly accuse his own people of murder; better to lay the blame elsewhere.
‘My money’s on the Agency,’ he said. ‘But Ramón was always a maverick. Too much of a taste for fast women, for high-living. Didn’t they say there were traces of cocaine in his room?’
‘They did,’ Petrenko replied. ‘There were.’
The distant rumble of an approaching train. Stephen Graham moved forward, pushing through the crowds. He hoped to secure a seat. He was worn out after the long conversation and his thighs were aching after an early morning run.
Two men were standing directly behind him. As the train came crashing through the tunnel, one of them placed a hand in the small of his back. The other put a grip on Graham’s right arm.
He knew what they intended to do. He had been through the same training course; he had sanctioned the same hits. To give them credit, they had timed their movements to perfection. Turning around, Graham saw that the closest of the two men was wearing a baseball cap and what appeared to be a false beard. He had been given no time to react, no chance to duck or to move to one side.
He was finished.
34
The apartment was a large, two-bedroom conversion on the first floor of a house overlooking the ocean. With a firm throw from the roof, Carradine could have landed a rock in the Atlantic.
They had the place to themselves. The building was owned by a middle-aged woman who lived across the landing with her mother and two teenage daughters. The family greeted Carradine and Bartok like long-lost relatives, showing them around with the passion and enthusiasm of vendors trying to sell carpets in the souk. They were offered hot food and laundry, sightseeing tips, even a lift to the airport in the morning. Carradine explained that they would be leaving at dawn and had already booked a taxi with a friend. When asked by the landlady if they would be sharing the same room, Bartok took Carradine’s hand and smiled beatifically in the direction of her elderly mother.
‘Thank you, but we are not married,’ she said in perfect French. ‘Until then, we prefer to sleep in separate beds.’
‘Of course, mademoiselle,’ the landlady replied, her face a picture of admiration for such old-fashioned sexual mores. The teenage girls looked stunned.
‘If we could just have some food this evening, that would be wonderful,’ Bartok continued. Carradine’s cheeks were flushed with embarrassment. ‘Perhaps a couscous? Some salad?’
None of it was too much trouble. The landlady requested only that they enjoy themselves and then closed the door so that the young couple could have some privacy. Minutes later, however, she came back into the apartment, asking if one of them could provide her with a passport.
Carradine fetched his own, as they had agreed, and watched as the landlady painstakingly transcribed his details – in Arabic – onto a registration form. Meanwhile, Bartok settled into what she described as the ‘more feminine’ of the two bedrooms – a large room upholstered in pink and decorated with floral-patterned cushions – closing the door while she unpacked and took a shower. Carradine accepted the landlady’s offer of tea and drank it on a small, enclosed balcony in his room while smoking a cigarette out of the window. Traffic was constant in both directions and the room was noisy, but he was glad to be in a place that both of them considered secure and relatively anonymous. By sheer good fortune, they had ended up in an apartment which was not overlooked by neighbouring buildings. A man was selling pomegranates from a stall beneath Carradine’s window. Across the Corniche, on a stretch of waste ground separating the shoreline from the road, a family was living out of a tent surrounded by oil drums and buffeted by the Atlantic wind. They were otherwise out of sight of strangers. Everything was damp to the touch: the sheets on Carradine’s bed; the towels in the bathroom; even the sugar in the tiny packets the landlady placed beside the teapot. He thought again of the riad, of the festival organisers wondering what had become of him, but reckoned it would be at least forty-eight hours before anyone raised the alarm. There was no television nor radio in the apartment and therefore no means of keeping tabs on the developing story in Warsaw. Carradine laid a private bet with himself that the siege would already have been brought to an end. It was just a question of the death toll.
After finishing his tea, he took a shower. The ceiling was so low that he had to sit on a plastic stool while dousing himself with lukewarm water. He shaved and changed into some clean clothes, risked a blast of aftershave, then knocked on Bartok’s door.
‘Come in!’ she said.
She was lying on the double bed wearing a pair of denim shorts and a T-shirt. Her blonde hair was damp and tousled from the shower. The room smelled of perfume and the warm sea air.
‘You packed my bag well,’ she said, kicking a leg in the air. He saw that she was reading a book.
‘Lots of practice,’ Carradine replied.
He wished they were together, that they could spend the rest of the day and night in bed, passing the long hours until it was time to leave f
or the boat. In any other situation, with any other woman, he would have tried his luck.
‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked.
‘Nothing much.’ He walked towards the window, saw the same view he had been looking at while drinking his tea. ‘We have a lot of time to kill.’
‘Lots,’ she said.
‘Good book?’
‘I’ve read it before.’
She flung it across the room. Carradine caught it like a fly-half as it passed behind his waist. It was a French translation of The Sheltering Sky.
‘Ah, doomed love,’ he said, trying to sound sophisticated.
‘The wife is called Kit.’
He pretended to be furious. ‘Really?’ He flicked through the pages, searching for the name.
‘Really,’ Bartok replied.
‘Don’t they end up dying in Morocco?’ There was a picture on the back of Debra Winger in the arms of John Malkovich. ‘She gets sick. Or he gets sick. I can’t remember.’
‘Don’t spoil it.’
‘I thought you said you’d read it before?’
‘Years ago.’
Carradine threw it back. This time the book bounced off the side of the mattress and landed on the floor. Bartok leaned over the bed to fetch it. Her T-shirt rode up on her back. Carradine stole a glance at her waist, tanned and lithe, blonde hairs at the base of her spine. She looked up and caught him staring and for an instant the time stopped between them.
The doorbell rang. They continued to stare at one another. Carradine walked to the door. The landlady walked in carrying a tray covered in plates and cutlery. She apologised for interrupting and said that the food was almost ready. One of the teenage daughters followed her in, holding a bowl of salad and some fruit. Carradine noticed how respectful they were towards Bartok, staring at her as though she were a visiting dignitary. Within a few minutes the family had left them in a traditional, tiled reception room at the back of the apartment, plates of chicken couscous, cheese and pasta salad spread out in front of them.
The Man Between Page 21
