He had to go, he had told her, and that much was true. Two days at most, the last act, the only way to finish it: all true. His lies were in the omissions. He hadn’t mentioned that he was paying for everything himself, or that he hadn’t told Ike he was going, or that he had little idea what he might find when he arrived. Had she known these things, she might have screamed at him, but as it was she did what Elsa did so well: let him spend time with his own faults.
In his tight, narrow seat, surrounded by holidaymakers and Moroccans heading home, Webster totted up what all this was costing, apart from his relationship with his wife. Seven hundred pounds for his ticket. Eighty pounds a night for his hotel, a little riad recommended to him by Constance. At least he hadn’t brought George Black, as he would have liked. Black insisted on a team of five at least for surveillance, and they would all have flown out and stayed at Webster’s expense; three days of that and he’d have been bankrupt.
No, George was unfortunately not a possibility, and in any case would have been hopeless for Marrakech, where five hulking ex-soldiers might have proved a little conspicuous, but Webster couldn’t operate without someone to help him: he had never been to Morocco before, had no understanding of the place, spoke no Arabic, couldn’t rely on his schoolboy French and would hardly blend in himself. So before he had left the office he had gone into Ikertu’s files and found a handful of cases that had touched on Morocco. There weren’t many, but all had used the services of the same woman, Kamila Nouri, who, judging by the correspondence, was an old friend of Hammer; some of her work dated back to the very first days of the company. Webster had called her, hoping to meet shortly after his arrival, but Kamila, insisting that any friend of Ike’s was a dear friend of hers, had told him that she would meet him off his flight. Webster, who had told Hammer that he was taking a day or two off to write the report, hoped sincerely that she was such a good friend that she wouldn’t think to check out his story.
Two days of her time, then, at whatever her rate was: probably another two thousand pounds altogether, or close to that. Say three thousand for the whole escapade, at least. That was money he should have been saving, or spending on the family’s holiday. It was not money he had to throw away. The figures in his head, shifting up and down as he rebalanced his calculations, became a new and powerful symbol of his irresponsibility.
And all that expense was going to prove what, exactly? He wasn’t convinced by any of the theories that coursed through his head. But from the scattered facts available two things were clear: that Qazai’s money was being used for dark ends by some vicious people, and that whoever they were, and whatever their relationship with Qazai, something had gone wrong. The payments through Mehr had dried up in December, or shortly afterward, when the pattern would suggest that a payment had been due; Qazai had traveled to Belgrade early last year, Caracas in November and Tripoli in January; Mehr had died in February. And now Timur.
Webster toyed with the possibilities. Blackmail was one: some ugly secret was costing Qazai millions, and he hadn’t been able to keep up the payments. Or, more plausible, having lost a vast amount in the Gulf and realizing that he had to sell his company, Qazai had decided to cut some old ties—to one of his original investors, say, who made his money in ways that might prove embarrassing.
Could that be this man Chiba, Dean’s latest discovery? There was no way to tell. It was a long journey the money took, from the light to the dark, from the apparent shine of Darius Qazai through Cyrus Mehr and a dozen grubby little companies to crates full of guns and rockets in ships bound for Gaza. Chiba might be a money man, a mere processor along the way like the others, but he was near the end of the trail, and if he hadn’t planned it all he would surely know who had. It was possible that he was the one phoning Qazai, summoning him to Marrakech. Webster allowed himself to imagine the perfect outcome of the next two days: a photograph of the two men together; a copy of Chiba’s passport from the register at his hotel. That was all it would take.
The plane landed on time—no holding patterns, no detours, no delaying of the moment when he would have to put his rudimentary plan into action. Follow Qazai, was how it went: pick him up, in the jargon of surveillance, at the airport, and follow him until he had the meeting that he was surely coming here to have. After that, switch to the people he had met and find out who they were.
He met Kamila, as agreed, by the Hertz desk, but her description of herself had been so good he might have recognized her anywhere. “I am short, gray and one eye points wrong,” she had said, and that indeed summed it up. Her head was uncovered, her hair thick waves of silver-gray cut shortish, and her left eye looked off to the left, just a little, making it hard at a first meeting to know which to focus on. A friendly face, open, but alert with it: the nose sharp, the eyes intense, taking in details.
“Welcome, Mr. Webster,” she said, taking his hand and shaking it with a strong grip, beaming her greeting up at him: she was a head shorter at least. She wore a black canvas jacket and under it a long gray dress that did little to hide a neat paunch. “It is a great pleasure to see you here. My son, Driss.”
Driss was tall, skinny, handsome, with a strong Arab nose and quiet eyes. He must have been twenty, no older, and smiled shyly at Webster as they shook hands. His hair was thick like his mother’s, black and shining.
“How is Ike?” asked Kamila, leading them out of the airport building. Driss insisted on taking Webster’s bag.
“In rude health.”
“Still running?”
“Every day. Too much.”
The glass doors slid back to let them out into Marrakech and the heat came rushing at them. It was more intense even than Dubai, more humid with it, and as they walked to the car Webster felt himself start to sweat. For once, thankfully, he wasn’t wearing a suit.
On the drive into town Webster quizzed Kamila about her work for Ikertu and her relationship with Hammer. They had met in Paris fifteen years before, when he had been trying to find evidence that a Russian businessman was part of a growing scandal involving the illegal sale of arms to Africa. Kamila, then a young officer with the DGSE, the French intelligence agency, had met him and told him a number of highly diverting lies. Five years later, when she had left France with her new husband to return to Morocco, the land of her blood but not her birth, she had got in touch with Hammer and told him about her new business, a consultancy that aimed to help foreign companies understand the opaque politics of North Africa. Since then she had worked on half-a-dozen cases for Ikertu, not all of them distinguished: the last one had required her to locate the mistress of a Moroccan politician, which was not what she had imagined herself doing when she arrived here. But she was happy to do that sort of work for Ike—and few others—and when she did she called on the services of her sons, Driss and Youssef, who could do certain things that as a woman she could not. Not that there were many of those. Now: what did Webster have in mind?
He told her that he was interested in a man called Darius Qazai, who was coming here the following day. He wanted to know everything about the people Qazai met: who they were, where they had come from, where they went afterward, how they had paid for their trip. But in the first place all he wanted to know was where Qazai and his lawyer were staying.
“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” said Kamila, leaning over the front seat and grinning at Webster, who smiled back.
• • •
WEBSTER, COLD AND STIFF from the air conditioning in his room, was woken by the call to prayer at dawn the next day. He pulled the sheets about him and lay for a moment listening to the muezzin.
His first thought was Elsa. He had called her before dinner and she had asked him to make a vow: that his return be the end of all this, no matter what the result of his intemperate dash to Africa. He had promised, and that had been the end of their short conversation. One more reason to make the day count. He tried to imagine how it would p
lay out, but only its beginning was clear: it would start at the airport, him in Driss’s car waiting for Qazai, and Kamila with Youssef waiting for Senechal. Beyond that it was an anxious blank.
Qazai’s flight was due at noon; Oliver had established that Senechal was coming from Paris, and would land at eleven fifteen. Webster, Kamila and her sons had spent the afternoon and much of the evening trying to find out where the two men would be staying, but with no luck. There were over four hundred hotels in Marrakech and they must have called half of them; the other half were not places someone like Qazai would consider. Chances were they had booked an apartment or were using false names, and while this wasn’t a disaster it did make the whole operation especially precarious, because if they lost Qazai he would almost certainly stay lost. At nine, admitting defeat, Kamila had taken Webster to dinner.
It was now quarter past five, and still dark. Webster took the hotel’s handbook from his bedside table; they didn’t start serving breakfast for two hours. He reached for his book but put it down again without opening it, far too restless to read.
So he got up, showered, neglected to shave, put on his jeans and a light-gray shirt and left his room, stepping out into the cool morning shadows of the medina. The sun was taking its time to rise, and in the narrow alleys the only light came from the occasional street lamp bracketed to a coral pink wall. What a place this was for intrigue: every turning suggested a surprise, every door a secret. For twenty minutes Webster saw no one, as he threaded his way through the maze, and until the call to prayer began the only noise he heard was birdsong.
What was he expecting to find in Marrakech? The people who controlled Qazai, he hoped. The people he owed money, the people who were blackmailing him, the people he had perhaps betrayed. They were to be found somewhere along that trail of money that Oliver had been so patiently following, and in his imagination that’s where they still lived, dry and theoretical, refusing to come alive. They could be one man or many, from anywhere on earth, with anything in mind.
Somehow, though, he knew that they were here in Marrakech, waking up for a day that meant as much to them as it did to him, waiting as he was for Qazai.
• • •
WEBSTER HATED SURVEILLANCE. For something so simple it required such huge quantities of thought and concentration.
Kamila, dressed today in a full length djellaba and headscarf—“because no one sees you in one of these”—came for him at nine and together they made their way to the airport, where Driss and Youssef were already in place. Webster had given everyone photographs of Qazai, taken from interviews and news stories, but had no image of Senechal, and although a five-word description would probably be enough—surely there was no one else in Marrakech who looked quite like that—he agreed with Kamila that he should wait inside the terminal and point him out as he appeared.
Both men would be coming through the same door, thankfully: passengers on private flights still had their passports checked in the main terminal in a separate queue. Senechal was due to land first, and would either take a taxi or have a car waiting for him; there was no railway station at the airport and he was hardly likely to take a bus. Kamila and Youssef would be waiting in her car, a decrepit Peugeot 205, at the far end of the concourse, ready for Webster to point out their target. When Qazai arrived, Webster would be waiting in the back of Driss’s car at the same position on the concourse, ready to identify him. There was no reason why this shouldn’t work, but similar plans, better resourced and more deeply thought through, had gone wrong before.
Air France flight 378 from Paris arrived exactly on time and Webster, wearing a cap and sunglasses that Driss had lent him for the purpose, took up his position by the rail and watched the taxi touts barracking the new arrivals. Some more sober drivers, most of them from the big hotels, waited patiently with signs bearing the names of their charges. None of them was waiting for a Mr. Senechal, but then that was no surprise.
A steady flow of people was passing through the arrivals gate, but there was no way of knowing when passengers from the French flight would start appearing. Senechal would in any case be one of the first through. Webster kept half an eye on the luggage tags, and at eleven forty the first Air France passengers emerged, wheeling their executive cases. There was no sign of him. A few minutes later the crew passed through, wheeling theirs. Maybe he’d had to bring some large piece of luggage. Documents, perhaps. But by five past twelve the stream of people had slowed and after another five minutes it stopped altogether.
This was why surveillance was so exasperating. So many impossible variables. Perhaps Senechal had been stopped by immigration or customs; perhaps he had some special arrangement that allowed him to bypass all the formalities and leave the airport from another exit; perhaps he simply hadn’t come. But then if Webster had had the power to know any of these things he wouldn’t have needed to follow the man in the first place: as Hammer was fond of saying, watching someone’s back was a very crude way of finding out what was on his mind.
After a brief consultation with Driss, Webster called Kamila and told her that she could now switch her attention to Qazai; to be sure of picking him up, Webster would again endeavor to point him out. Then he called Oliver and asked him if he could think of some way to confirm that Qazai’s flight had indeed left, and spent an anxious few minutes waiting for a response. It was possible, he now realized, that the whole thing had been a blind, and that in fact the two men were now in Beirut, or Belgrade, perfectly secure.
But before Oliver could respond, Qazai appeared. He was dressed in the clothes of a rich man at play—loafers, a jacket of light-blue linen—and at first glance looked fresh, comfortable. His hair had been cut and his beard was particularly trim. His gait, though, seemed slightly impeded, slightly heavy, as if he were walking on sand, and because he wore sunglasses Webster realized for the first time how much of his authority came from the clear imperious blue of his eyes.
He had a single case, of deep brown leather, which he carried. Ten yards into the hall he stopped and looked around at the two dozen or so drivers and their signs; not seeing what he wanted he paused, put his bag down, and made another survey. This time something seemed to click and shaking his head he made his way to a short man in a black suit, who took his bag and led him out of the hall. From his position Webster couldn’t see the name on the driver’s sign; he watched them go, and once they were level with him motioned to Driss to follow him outside. But as he did so, some movement in his peripheral vision registered as familiar, and focusing on it he realized that it was the strange floating walk of Yves Senechal, looking as he always did, pulling after him a metal case.
Webster turned around, walked away behind a thick column, took his phone from his pocket and found Kamila’s number. He pressed the key, held the phone to his ear and waited. It took an age to connect.
Through the window he could see the driver holding open the door of a black Mercedes saloon for Qazai who, with a look around him, climbed in. The phone was still dead; cursing, Webster tried to cancel the call and at that moment a message from Oliver flashed onto his screen: “you are ok.” A minute ago that would have been accurate. Driss appeared at his side.
“That’s Senechal,” said Webster. “Behind me now. In the gray suit with the metal suitcase. I can’t get this fucking thing to work. That”—he pointed through the huge smoked glass window—“is Qazai. In the Mercedes. Get your mother to follow him, and then come back here.”
He turned and watched as Driss ran to the exit, past Senechal and along the outside of the window. The Mercedes was indicating and waiting for another car to pass, and while it did so Webster made a note of the number on its plate. As it pulled away Driss was still running toward his mother’s car, perhaps fifty yards away, so that by the time Webster himself made it out of the terminal she was just receiving the message. The little Peugeot turned into the road, was forced to wait for an endless moment while
another car inched across its nose with extraordinary slowness into a small space, and then finally drove off. Webster looked for the Mercedes. It had disappeared from sight.
Trusting, or praying, that Kamila was good enough to make up the gap he looked around him for Senechal. He was no longer there. A moment before, he had been by a crowd of people, talking to a taxi tout, and now he had gone. He had to be in one of the dusty old yellow cabs that were queueing up yards away, but Webster couldn’t risk peering in through the window—he was already nervous about Senechal peering out at him. Turning to face the airport building he waited for Driss to arrive, out of breath, by his side.
“Do you see the man in the gray suit in any of those taxis?” A half-dozen of them were pulling away, waiting for traffic to clear. “I’m going to text your mother that license plate number.”
Driss looked, but saw nothing. He walked back, shrugging, as the cars rolled away, and stood for a moment looking anxiously at Webster, who had taken off his sunglasses and was pinching the bridge of his nose.
“What do you think?” said Webster, squinting in the sunlight.
“There are traffic lights at the bottom of the ramp. A hundred meters. If he was through before her . . .”
Webster nodded, and ran a hand slowly through his hair. Thirty seconds later his phone rang; it was Kamila, and he knew what she was going to say. He was reminded of the phrase George Black always used when reporting a cock-up of this kind. “We’ve had a loss, Ben.” A loss was exactly how it felt.
He shook his head and answered it. “Meet us back here,” he said, and hung up. “How long does it take to trace a number plate?”
“On Friday, a long time.”
Of course. It was almost the weekend. And what better place to spend it, with time on your hands, than Marrakech?
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