The Moroccan Girl

by Charles Cumming

  Bartok buried a smile.

  “So nothing has changed,” she said. “Everybody is still playing catch-up with the Kremlin.”

  Hulse began to respond but Somerville silenced him again, this time with a raised hand.

  “Were you aware of Russian surveillance in Morocco? What did Stephen Graham tell you about their objectives? Did you think Carradine was working for Moscow? Were you immediately suspicious of the Langs?”

  “So many questions all at once.”

  “Then take your time.” Somerville tucked the cigarettes into the hip pocket of his trousers and sat down. “You have the stage, Lara. We’re all ears.”

  SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

  EYES ONLY / STRAP 1

  STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (“LASZLO”)

  CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H.—CHAPEL STREET

  REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE

  FILE: RE2768X

  PART 4 OF 5

  Why did the Russians want me dead? Why was it so important for them to find me? Was it just because of my activities with Resurrection—or was there something more? To this day, I cannot answer that question. Why did they come for me when they did? Ivan was dead. I had left the movement. I was no longer a threat to them.

  I realize that I was extremely fortunate. If I hadn’t risked going to the festival, if I hadn’t spoken to Michael McKenna, if Kit hadn’t spotted me outside the event, I would now be dead. That’s certain. Kit Carradine saved my life. Yes, Mantis knew there was every chance I would show myself in Marrakech. He knew I loved McKenna’s writing and had always wanted to meet him. He put Kit in my path for just this reason. Mohammed Oubakir also. But I was still very, very lucky.

  I trusted Kit immediately. I felt safe with him. It was obvious that he had been manipulated, that he was embarrassed and ashamed to have fallen for Mantis’s trick, but I knew he had done it for noble reasons. Many others would have made the same mistake. Every man wants to be a spy, doesn’t he? Every child dreams of being a secret agent. How do you turn down an opportunity like that when it comes about, especially given what happened to his father? Kit had a resourcefulness and a courage, mixed with a kind of romantic naïveté—which I suppose is necessary for any writer—which was very endearing and attractive to me.

  He was brave to go to my apartment. He wanted to help me and this was the only way he could think of. I don’t know how the Russians knew where I was living. If you can find that out I’ll be fascinated to know. My suspicion is that one of my neighbors informed on me. He was a creep with a big mouth.

  I suppose this would be the best time to talk about Patrick and Eleanor [JWS: Patrick and Eleanor Lang]. Yes, I was very concerned about them. You can choose to believe me about that or you can choose not to believe me. Kit had taken them on trust, just as he had taken Robert Mantis at face value. It was Ivan who taught me a long time ago that when a stranger strikes up conversation in a bar, in a restaurant, on a plane, that stranger may be interested in more than some light conversation. Kit knew that, too. But we had to get out of Morocco. At that very difficult moment, their boat seemed to be the best way.

  29

  They ran low through the shadows of the maintenance area. The young driver popped the boot of a Renault Mégane and threw the bags inside. Carradine opened the back door to find Bartok asleep. He was amazed that she was capable of relaxing under such intense pressure.

  She sat up abruptly as he moved in beside her.

  “You made it,” she said.

  “We go?” the driver asked in French.

  “Oui,” Bartok replied groggily. “Allez.”

  Carradine felt a vertiginous elation, a belief that he had landed in a life that did not belong to him but to which he was ideally suited. He was certain that the car would not be stopped. He was sure that they would make it to Rabat. He was risking his future to help a wanted criminal but knew that the cause was just. He had not fully thought through what he was doing, nor what he was leaving behind. Looking at Bartok as she stared at the road ahead, he felt like a man walking out of church on his wedding day beside a woman he barely knows.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  Bartok touched Carradine’s knuckles. Her fingers were cool and soft. She caressed his wrist and looked into his eyes with such care that the last of his concerns vanished.

  “I got into a fight,” he said. He saw that there was a patch of skin on the back of her wrist where the tattoo of the swallows had been removed. “Does your driver speak English?”

  Bartok shook her head. “Hardly any. Nothing.”

  “Somebody was waiting for you in the apartment,” he said. “A Russian. He knew who I was.”

  “How?” She was bewildered. “This is the man you fought? You punched him?”

  She was still holding his wrist. He played down his feat, as though he got into fights two or three times a week and always emerged victorious.

  “You are brave!” she said and cheerfully kissed him on the cheek. “Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine.” Carradine was watching the pavements on both sides of the road. “He was knocked out. I hope he’s all right.”

  “So do I,” she muttered, and just as quickly the thrill of what he had done evaporated. The fact that nobody had come to the riad in the past hour indicated that the Russian was possibly still unconscious. What if Carradine had seriously injured him? He would be no different to Bartok. Another criminal on the run.

  “Get down!” Carradine shouted.

  The Russian and two other men were walking in the direction of the hotel on the opposite side of the street, no more than thirty meters from the car. He grabbed Bartok, pushing her behind the passenger seat, his head resting on the small of her back as they bent down beneath the windows.

  “What’s going on?” the driver asked in French.

  “That was him. The Russian.”

  Bartok swore in what he assumed was her native Hungarian. The driver made a sharp left-hand turn. Carradine held onto the door handle, his weight pushing against her.

  “You saw him?” She tried to sit up. Carradine made room for her on the seat. “The man from my apartment?”

  “Right there,” he replied, turning and indicating where he had seen the men. The stretch of road where the Russians had been walking was now obscured by a section of the old city wall.

  “So he is fine. And so are you. Did you get everything?”

  Carradine looked at the driver. Bartok again reassured him that he would not be able to understand anything they said.

  “Yeah. I found the passport. Your place was a mess. Clothes, books, shoes everywhere. I think he’d been looking for it.”

  She smiled, rubbing her neck. “No. This is just me. I am not a tidy person, Kit.”

  Carradine laughed. “Ah, OK.” He wound down the window, looking out on the deserted streets of Gueliz. “I packed whatever I could. Found the bookmark, the SIM card…”

  “You were amazing to do this. I do not know how to thank you.”

  “You don’t need to thank me.”

  For a few minutes they were silent, the car moving steadily along wide, empty boulevards toward the outskirts of the city. Carradine was still hungry and hoped that they could stop on the road once they were clear of Marrakech. It would take about four or five hours to reach Rabat on the dual carriageway. Bartok introduced him formally to the driver, whose name was Rafiq. She explained that Rafiq’s uncle had found her the apartment in Gueliz. Carradine asked if it was possible that he was the man who had betrayed her to the Russians. She was adamant that this was not the case and thought it more likely that a neighbor had grown suspicious of her and had spoken to the local police; informers were everywhere in Morocco. If the Russians had their ear to the ground, it would only have been a case of putting two and two together. At the same time, she could not be certain that the men who were looking for her might not now question the uncle and connect the dots to Rafiq. For that reason, she had asked him to le
ave his cellphone at home so that their journey up to Rabat could not be traced.

  “Whose car is this?” Carradine asked. He was worried about number plate recognition.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s his friend’s car. It won’t flag.”

  They reached a péage at the start of the highway. It was still the middle of the night and there was only one lane open. Two large cameras faced the car on either side of a narrow channel. Rafiq moved forward, stopping at a tollbooth. Bartok had climbed over into the passenger seat. Carradine remained in the back, scanning either side of the highway for police patrols. He saw the headlights of a tailing vehicle reflected in the rearview mirror. There were so few cars on the road that every one of them was a threat. Rafiq opened the window, greeted the guard and paid the toll. The barrier opened and they continued onto the highway. Carradine lit a cigarette to calm his nerves.

  “We will be fine,” Bartok reassured him, again giving the impression of reading his mind as she turned in her seat to speak to him. “Got one of those for me?”

  They all smoked as the light gradually strengthened and the suburbs of Marrakech gave way to a flat, featureless desert stretching out to the horizon. To the east, Carradine could make out the faint outline of the High Atlas Mountains. Bartok spoke in French with Rafiq about his uncle’s marriage to a woman who was not permitted to leave the house alone, did not drive a car and had never—to Rafiq’s knowledge—drank alcohol nor smoked a cigarette. This, he insisted, was perfectly normal in Moroccan culture. Carradine enjoyed the way she teased him into confessing that he hoped for a similar marital arrangement of his own.

  About an hour into the journey Carradine fell asleep, waking to find that Rafiq had stopped at a Shell garage close to the town of Settat on the A7 highway. He sat up and rubbed his face, adjusting to the bright sunlight flooding into the car. Rafiq was filling up with fuel; Bartok was nowhere to be seen.

  The interior of the petrol station was no different to a thousand others just like it, from Inverness to Naples: strip-lit aisles displaying crisps and biscuits, fridges stocked with sports drinks and Red Bull. Carradine tried on a pair of sunglasses and looked around for Bartok. There were tables at the back of the shop in front of a cafeteria staffed by two young women wearing aprons and veils. He queued up and bought several pastries and what he assumed was a cheese bun. One of the girls smiled at him and he realized he was still wearing the sunglasses. He took them off and set them on the counter.

  Turning from the till, Carradine saw a woman with long dark hair seated at a table overlooking the highway. It was only when she turned around that he realized the woman was Bartok.

  “What did you do to your hair?” he said, absorbing the transformation in her appearance.

  She invited him to sit beside her.

  “Rafiq brought it to me,” she replied. “They might work out that we left Marrakech by car. Either we took the road south to Agadir or, more likely, the road to Casablanca. Those were our only options—unless we wanted to get stuck in Essaouira. They might look at CCTV, they might not. But they are searching for a woman with short blond hair traveling with a man who looks a lot like C. K. Carradine.” She smiled and sipped her coffee. “You were asleep when I left the car. So I was just another woman in Morocco with long black hair getting out of the passenger seat while her boyfriend filled up with petrol.”

  “And now?” Carradine asked, gesturing toward the ceiling where he had earlier spotted two CCTV cameras.

  “Now you’ve ruined it!” she said, as if their escape was all just a game and she had not a care in the world. “You shouldn’t have bought your food and your drinks. You shouldn’t have talked to the woman with the long black wig.”

  He was stumped for a response, still half-asleep but understanding with each passing moment why Mantis had been so bewitched by Lara Bartok. They hurried back to the car. She took the bag Carradine had packed from the boot and placed it at her feet in the front seat. Carradine shared his food with Rafiq and soon fell asleep again. Seventy miles from Rabat he woke to find that Bartok had removed the SIM card from the copy of Anna Karenina and was busy slotting it into what appeared to be a brand-new handset.

  “Where’d you get the phone?” he asked.

  “Rafiq, too.”

  “He bought it just now?”

  “No. Before. In Marrakech.”

  He took out the list of numbers he had written down from his phone, explaining that it was important that his father should be able to reach him in an emergency. As he said this, he realized that of course it would be impossible to telephone home. Any intelligence service worth its salt would be covering his father’s number.

  “Will he worry about you?” she asked.

  “It’s not that.” Carradine did not want to make too much of the situation. He was very close to his father and felt responsible for his happiness and well-being. But William Carradine was a tough old bird with a circle of good friends who kept an eye on him. “It’s just for emergencies. I’m his only family in the UK. He doesn’t have brothers or sisters. Neither of us do. My mother died a long time ago.”

  “I am sorry to hear that.”

  “He won’t notice I’m gone for a few days. I’ll call him when we get to Gibraltar.”

  It was then that Carradine saw the cloud of dust ahead of them, about four hundred meters from the car. Rafiq slowed down as other cars in front of him hit the brakes. Bartok asked what was happening and he replied “Crash” in French as the Renault passed the scene. Two vehicles had come off the highway at speed and careered across the desert floor, one landing on its roof, the other folded almost in half at the base of a pylon. Two other cars had come to a halt at the side of the road.

  “We should help,” said Carradine.

  “Kit, we can’t,” Bartok told him.

  He turned and saw two people emerge from the parked cars. She was right. Others would be there to call for an ambulance. If they went back, the police would come and they would run the risk of being identified. Rafiq gradually accelerated away and the crash was soon forgotten. Yet Carradine’s nerves had been frayed by the incident—the plumes of dust; the inverted, smashed cars. He tried to wipe what he had seen from his mind. He knew that there had been serious injuries, perhaps even that someone had died, and the knowledge of this acted on him like a portent of things to come.

  “Are you OK?” Bartok asked, turning and putting a hand on his leg.

  “I’m great,” he said and took back the piece of paper on which he had written down the numbers. “How much longer to Rabat?”

  “Less than an hour now.”

  It was past seven o’clock. The other guests at the riad would be awake and eating breakfast by the pool. Had the Russians forced their way in and demanded to see him? Perhaps they had bribed the night manager to let them search Carradine’s room. Had they done so, they would now be in possession of his laptop and phone, giving them access to his WhatsApp messages with Mantis.

  “You think Stephen Graham was working behind Moscow’s back?”

  Bartok did not hear the question clearly and asked Carradine to repeat it. He did so.

  “I told you already,” she replied. “I think he knew they were coming for me. He wanted to save me.” Carradine looked out at the dusty road. “Why do you ask this?” she said.

  “My phone is in my room. If the Russians see that Mantis was in touch with me, they’ll know he’s betrayed them.”

  Rafiq was driving past the suburbs of Casablanca, on the edge of the speed limit. Bartok took off her seat belt and climbed over into the backseat in order to continue the conversation.

  “There’s nothing we can do about that,” she said. Her perfume pushed toward him, a smell he adored. “He made his choice. He probably saved my life by sending you. But I can’t protect him.”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to warn him after what he did to you?”

  Carradine found that his bitterness toward Mantis had
abated. He was not one to hold a grudge. He understood why “Stephen Graham” had pretended to be a British spy in order to recruit him. Sending him to Morocco to look for “Maria” had been an act of love.

  “What will happen to Mantis if they find out?”

  Bartok bowed her head.

  “He will certainly lose his job,” she said. She looked up and met Carradine’s eyes. “Worse, perhaps.”

  He took out the list of telephone numbers. As well as the contact details for his father, he had written down numbers for his editor, his literary agent and two of his oldest friends from school days. The last number on the piece of paper had RM scrawled beside it.

  “That’s him?” Bartok asked.

  “That’s him.”

  Then she did something completely unexpected. Taking the piece of paper, she tore off the bottom section on which Carradine had written Mantis’s number, screwed it up into a ball, opened the window and let it fly out of the car.

  “There you go,” she said. “Now you don’t have to feel responsible for him anymore.”

  30

  Less than an hour later they had reached the outskirts of Rabat.

  “We’re going to need somewhere to stay,” said Carradine.

  He had blithely assumed that Bartok and Rafiq had already made arrangements. This was not the case.

  “Any ideas?” she asked.

  “I don’t know anybody in Rabat,” he replied. “Do you want to pop into the British Embassy?”

  “Very funny,” she said.

  Though he had intended the remark as a joke, the idea took on a certain logic. If Carradine could make contact with the local Service Station chief and tell them about the threat against Bartok, the Embassy might offer them sanctuary.

  “Wait,” he said. He wondered how to pitch it. He did not want to seem rash. “What if the Service has no idea what the Russians and Americans are up to?”

  “Do you think this is likely?”

  There was an edge of facetiousness to Bartok’s voice which he had not heard before. The patriot in Carradine, that part of him which had believed in his country sufficiently to want to work for Mantis, could not countenance the idea that his own nation’s intelligence officers were involved in the murky business of murder. It may have been because of his father’s brief career in the Service, but he had always believed that the British adhered to moral values loftier than those in Washington and Moscow.