Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  All he’d seen were grande taxis, which went everywhere, petite taxis that seemed to be local, small flatbed trucks grafted to scooters and more donkeys and mopeds than he knew existed.

  Colonel Borgenicht’s plan, created in conjunction with the Brigadier, with Charlie Bilberg assisting, was that the decoy took the flak should there be an angry crowd, while an AH-64 overhead ostensibly kept an eye on the black van but actually protected the petite taxi in which the man was held.

  Charlie still found it hard to think of the silent figure shackled to his ankle as Prisoner Zero, although this was how news stations across the world were now referring to him, so Charlie thought of him as “him.” The man who slotted a fifty-year-old bullet into a hundred-year-old rifle and tried to put a quarter-ounce of copper-jacked lead through the head of the President of the United States over a distance that even a fully trained sniper would have found near impossible.

  There had been incumbents of the White House who Charlie Bilberg could understand complete strangers wanting to kill, some of them quite recent, but Gene Newman was different. For a start, this President was honest, intelligent and able to walk, chew gum and talk foreign policy at the same time.

  Add a PhD in physics and an MBA from some fancy economics school in London and three languages, two of them fluent, and the guy was a dream ticket. So why, given that President Newman was currently demanding that Tel Aviv get its tanks off the new Palestinian premier’s lawn, should some deadbeat Arab want him dead?

  Charlie Bilberg was damned if he knew.

  “If this gets ugly, you die,” said Charlie, wincing at the banality of his words. It was catching, talking like this. A fact his girlfriend had taken to pointing out on a slightly too regular basis.

  A new-issue Colt automatic lay in Charlie’s lap, its make and model unrecognized by the Brigadier and completely unknown to Prisoner Zero, who sat blank eyed, watching jellaba-clad boys run towards the van up ahead. A split to his lip had opened again, where he’d worried an old scab with his teeth, and dark blood now trickled into his beard.

  “You got that?”

  “Yes,” said the Brigadier, “he’s got that. And he’s not going to answer, believe me. If he was going to say anything useful he’d have said it already. Now put the gun away before someone sees it.”

  Charlie Bilberg sighed. A Pentagon official was on record as insisting the prisoner spoke English, French and Berber, as well as Arabic, but so far there was no sign that this shell of a man retained the ability to speak any languages at all.

  Mind you, the same Pentagon official also had him down as a brilliant strategist, terrorist banker and crack shot. Slightly begging the question why, if he was so brilliant, he’d tried to shoot the President from too far away with a broken-down antique.

  “We could still cut a deal, you know,” said Charlie. “You give us the Chosen of Heaven network and the CIA will do what it can do to get your sentence commuted. Maybe you could serve your time here, in Morocco.”

  “Agent Bilberg…”

  The gaze of the man in front flicked towards the driving mirror, frown lines blossoming around his dark eyes. Silence was in order and no one was to speak, behave oddly or draw attention to themselves. All this had already been agreed. In fact, Rabat had insisted on it.

  But escorting Prisoner Zero from a Marrakech jail to an already secured landing site beyond Jardin Aguedal, while the van headed for a duplicate site in the huge groves of Oliveraie de Bab Jedid, was Charlie’s first really big job. Getting information on the network which ran Prisoner Zero would make Charlie with the Agency for life.

  “Talk to me,” Charlie insisted, ignoring the scowl in the mirror. “Let’s see if we can’t work something out…” Beside him the prisoner nodded, the movement so slight as to be instinctive. And just as Charlie got ready to feel elated, he realized that Prisoner Zero was actually nodding to a small dirt bike which drew alongside and then surged past the petite taxis in a trail of oily smoke, horn blasting.

  Weaving round a donkey cart, the rider dodged between a grande taxi and a younger boy on a bike, slid himself between two old men frozen in the act of trying to cross the road, accelerating right up to the point he slammed his bike straight into the back of the prison van.

  Thirty-two pounds of Soviet C4 ripped apart the bike, finishing off not just its thirteen-year-old rider but a dozen of those who’d been hammering angrily on the sides and rear of the van.

  The van itself was flipped over and tossed onto a police outrider, crushing man and bike utterly. Unable to escape from his buckled cab, the van’s driver burned up in front of a suddenly frozen crowd. Those in the back were already dead, flame withering their corpses as surely as it stripped paint from the twisted carcass of the prison van.

  “Merde,” said the Brigadier.

  Charlie glanced from the burning van to his driver, then realized the Brigadier was actually watching vapour trails rip towards the Apache helicopter overhead. The Peugeot’s roof stopped Charlie seeing which one connected with the AH-64’s tail but he felt the impact, the whole of the Medina felt the impact, and then the combat helicopter was tumbling over itself on the way down.

  Given that the Apache had been hovering almost directly over the prison van, it was perhaps inevitable that it should hit one of the palm trees lining the route, about a hundred paces from the site of the bomb.

  “We leave,” said the Brigadier, and spun his wheel, the petite taxi splintering a donkey cart as the Peugeot slammed into reverse, executed a quick turn and raced away from the screaming crowd. A loud thud said that a pedestrian hadn’t got out of the way in time. After that, everyone stepped well back.

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “Back to the prison.”

  “No.” Charlie Bilberg was adamant. “We take him to the landing site. The area’s already secure. There’s a ’copter waiting.”

  “If that’s what you want.” The Brigadier had just seen a $17.5 million AH-64 attack helicopter brought down by a handful of ex-Soviet ground-to-airs. If the young CIA man couldn’t see the flaw in his own logic, then too bad. Anything that got Prisoner Zero out of Morocco was fine with the Moroccan authorities.

  Plus, and this was what mattered, anyone watching would believe Prisoner Zero dead, ripped apart by the bomb, and within an hour most of the world would have joined them.

  All the Brigadier had to do was drive his vehicle into the Medina, out through the gate at Bab Agnaou, run it round a short section of Marrakech’s famous red walls and drive calmly to the Jardin Aguedal.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it your way.”

  Caid Hammou flicked shut his Nokia and frowned. What the immaculately suited old man wanted to do was stand up, stamp over to a small group eyeing him anxiously through the doorway of his shop and slap them silly for unbelievable stupidity. Instead he sipped slowly at a glass of mint tea and smiled at a tourist couple sitting opposite, revealing one gold tooth.

  The English were pink and wide eyed. Slightly anxious to find themselves sat on a bench discussing prices when they’d only intended to browse.

  “My wife,” said Hammou, putting down his cell phone, “always wants to talk. Now. You like this one? Very beautiful. Made in Switzerland. It says so on the back.” The replica Rolex was assembled in mainland China, had a dial printed directly onto white metal and used a cheap quartz movement held in place by a white plastic ring.

  Hammou watched the Englishman scowl, then peer at a narrow second hand which jerked forward, second by second, instead of sweeping cleanly as it would if the watch were really automatic.

  “That’s quartz,” the Englishman said.

  “Or maybe this?” said Hammou smoothly, pulling out a watch at random to find himself holding a garish copy of a small Cartier dress watch, the bezel decorated with twelve “diamonds” too cheap even to be cubic zircon. “For your beautiful wife…Buy two watches and I can give you a better price.”

  Sipping again at hi
s tea, which he’d sweetened with a block of sugar the size of his thumb, the elderly man smiled as the Englishwoman instinctively sipped at her own and winced at its bitterness. Somehow tourists never seemed to understand that mint tea was meant to be sweet and sticky.

  “You like this?”

  Hammou watched the man discard the fake Cartier without a second glance and turn over the Rolex to examine a cheap crown stamped into the clip of its metal strap. He was shaking his head.

  “I tell you what,” Hammou said, “for you I get something better.” He waved in the general direction of the group outside. “My cousins. You have a look round here, while I find you something special. It’s all right, I trust you. But if someone else comes in, you make sure you make a sale, okay?”

  The English couple laughed dutifully and Hammou let himself out, heading straight for a shop across the passageway. As if on cue, those waiting outside followed him in.

  “Okay,” Hammou said, “where is he?”

  “In a petite taxi headed towards the gardens.”

  “So why haven’t you got him?”

  “He’s got company.”

  “The blond American.” Hammou nodded like this was obvious. “We expected that,” he said. “I still don’t see the problem.”

  “Abbas.” The boy who spoke was thin-faced, his teeth bad and his gaze turned inwards to something dark and lonely. The boy on the bike was his brother, both boys from a family that owed Caid Hammou a serious and hitherto unpayable debt. Glancing uncertainly towards a thickset, rather dapper middle-aged man, he waited for the man to expand on this explanation.

  “Brigadier Abbas is driving the taxi himself,” said Hammou’s nephew. “We didn’t know what to—”

  “Okay,” Hammou said, voice tight. “I understand.” He wanted to add, let me think, but to do so would reveal weakness. So instead he told the youngest to make mint tea and began to sort through a tray of Hong Kong replicas, all of them stamped “Swiss Made.”

  The downing of the helicopter would result in arrests, beatings and probably swift and violent bouts of illegal, unauthorized torture. America would demand results, and even without their demands Sécurité would rip apart the Medina if that was what it took to find answers. This was to be expected.

  To kill any member of Sécurité was something else again. Direct challenges were answered by direct action, this was the North African way. And killing the city’s Head of Sécurité, to target the Brigadier, was asking for Marrakech to be locked down. It had happened before.

  Glancing up from the tray, Hammou realized they were all watching him, their faces expectant but less worried than earlier. His mere presence absolved them of responsibility for what came next.

  The choice was his, such as it was…

  “This one is automatic,” said Caid Hammou. “Look, you can see inside.” The old man, who had no need to work in any shop, even one of his own, handed over a replica of a Patek Philippe. The crocodile strap was actually plastic and the view glass at the back was Perspex, but through it could be seen a working mechanism.

  “You move it from side to side,” Hammou said, matching a gesture to his words, “and the watch winds itself, no batteries needed. And it keeps perfect time. Well…” Hammou paused, as if to think about that. “Almost perfect,” he amended. “Maybe you need to adjust it by a few seconds every week or so.”

  He smiled and nodded as the Englishman examined the dial and then turned the watch over to look at the tiny gilt hairspring, beating like a heart. “Is good, no?”

  The man nodded and then the bargaining began, but not before Hammou called to a passing boy for another tray of mint tea.

  “Show them your pass,” suggested Charlie Bilberg and Brigadier Abbas tried not to sigh. He knew Langley liked the fresh-faced look but still wished the CIA would stop recruiting children.

  “If I show them my pass,” he said heavily, “then they’ll know we’re not really a petite taxi…And so will everyone else.” His nod took in those crowding a sidewalk, itself something of a novelty in that part of the Medina, where many streets were surfaced with little more than cracked blacktop over beaten earth and passing taxis or donkey carts forced those on foot to retreat into doorways rather than get crushed against crumbling walls.

  “Take a look,” the Brigadier suggested.

  Agent Bilberg did. Seeing old men in jellabas and young men in T-shirts, teenage girls with their hair hidden beneath scarves and a few, better dressed, with their hair tied back and gazes defiantly bare. Small boys stood in a huddle around a slightly larger boy who clutched a radio.

  “What do you notice?”

  “The lack of small girls…?”

  The Brigadier sucked his teeth. Maybe the CIA man was not as stupid as he’d thought. “You’re right,” he said, “they’re at home helping, but that wasn’t what I meant. What else?”

  Scanning the crowd waiting to pass through a roadblock, Charlie Bilberg thought about it. He’d been trained to look for anxiety and for a certain tightness around the eyes or studied blankness of expression. An otherness, but no one looked out of place. There were a few elderly men standing alone, but none who looked as if he were an outsider to himself or this society.

  “Nothing,” he told the Brigadier, when the silence stretched too thin. And that was the truth. Charlie Bilberg could see nothing remotely out of the ordinary. It was like finding himself in a killing house where every pop-up was civilian.

  “Exactly,” said the Brigadier. “Ninety-five per cent of people in Marrakech are happy with the way things are run. Well, their bosses, heads of family and caids are happy, which is the same. The other five per cent look like everyone else…We wait in this queue.”

  The roadblock was perfunctory. From the top of Bab er Robb a single stork watched two uniforms on the road below halt cars and demand papers. When the taxi containing Prisoner Zero drew close, Charlie Bilberg realized the men weren’t even Sécurité. They were traffic cops or maybe gendarmes, bussed in from outside, something local.

  A quick glance assessed the suited foreigner, the Arab driver at the wheel and the silent man with a greying beard, a copy of that week’s Al Sahifa open on his lap. Only the driver got asked for his papers, which he gave willingly and took back with a respectful nod.

  According to these he was a taxi driver called Hamid, who had a room in a house near Place du Moukef on the other side of the Medina.

  “Okay.”

  Slipping the Peugeot into gear, Brigadier Abbas passed through the Agnaou Gate and out of the Old City. A long way behind him a plume of grey still billowed into the hot summer sky and sirens still sounded, though it was hard to tell if these were ambulances or police cars. Maybe they were both.

  “Try the radio,” Charlie Bilberg suggested.

  The death toll was currently thirty-one, including the outrider on the leading police bike and the three occupants of the prison van, two guards and Prisoner Zero. That Prisoner Zero was dead the news flash took for granted.

  “Interesting,” Charlie Bilberg said.

  “Not really.” The Brigadier’s voice was dismissive, his demand for silence either forgotten or no longer relevant. Steering his vehicle between the edge of the road and a donkey cart turning right, he headed around the walls towards a distant grove of palms and the beginning of a track.

  Ornamental shrubs lined both sides of the track, but these were brown and shrunken, victims of a drought that had lasted for five years.

  “That’s an official station,” the Brigadier explained. “It says what we need it to say. You want to find out what’s really happening, try this…” Spinning the dial, he located a burst of something hard-edged and thrashy, in pointed contrast to the al-Ala featured on the previous channel. Calculator-cheap beeps took over when the Rai ended, signifying a news flash.

  Brigadier Abbas knew the young CIA agent spoke little Arabic but still made the man wait for a translation until the DJ signed off, frenzied words giving way to a t
hrash of Casablanca nuRai. Even from his seat in the back, Charlie Bilberg could tell that the Brigadier was amused about something.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “The bomb,” said Brigadier Abbas. “You ordered it.”

  “I ordered—”

  “The CIA.”

  “Believe me,” said Charlie Bilberg, “we don’t do stuff like that. Not anymore.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Brigadier Abbas said smoothly. “It seems you persuaded an elite force from Israeli intelligence to do it for you.” The Brigadier’s laugh was as sharp as a dog’s bark. “This is good,” he added, “very good.”

  “What’s good about it?”

  “First, it’s absurd, so we can dismiss it easily. And second…” A jerk of the Brigadier’s head indicated Prisoner Zero sitting silently behind him. “This one is already dead, think about that. No trial, no fuss, no media. You just take him somewhere and extract every last piece of information. With pliers if necessary, and if you don’t have the stomach I know people who do.”

  For a second, as the Brigadier slowed at the sight of a roadblock up ahead, he considered suggesting that he join Agent Bilberg in the helicopter, then the Brigadier had a better idea.

  “Leave him with me,” he said. “We’ll share anything he knows. Who’d object?”

  “My bosses,” said Charlie Bilberg, shaking his head. “They know he wasn’t in that van for a start.” And then the agent’s eyes flicked to the soldier approaching their car and the pump-action shotgun in his hand.

  “Hey,” Charlie said. “Those aren’t—”

  He was right. They weren’t.

  Exploding glass sandblasted flesh from the Brigadier’s face. And by the time Agent Bilberg understood he too had been hit by flying glass, one of the Brigadier’s eyes was sliding like broken yolk from beneath his fingers.