“But I saw the name,” said Driss.
“What name?”
“The passenger name on the sign. The driver’s sign.”
Webster felt his heart give a little kick.
• • •
THERE WERE TWO “MR. ROBINSONS” staying in the city’s finer hotels, but only one of them had checked in that day. He was due to stay a single night in one of the private villas in the grounds, and a call from Kamila to the room to inquire after his comfort had confirmed that he was there.
It was Kamila who had found him, in the eleventh hotel they had tried. Webster thanked God for making Qazai too grand to slum it even for a single night, and checked out the hotel on its Web site. It had immense gardens, and dotted around them, away from the main building, where the only moderately rich were forced to stay, was a handful of secluded villas. Qazai was in the Sultan’s Residence.
Despite their size, the hotel grounds had only one entrance. Outside, Webster and Driss sat in one Peugeot, Youssef in another, on opposite sides of the road, fifty yards away from the hotel gates, while Kamila, who had changed into a light summer suit, had lunch in the hotel lobby and waited to alert the team by phone the moment Qazai appeared.
Their vigil started at two, with the full heat of the sun pressing down on the roofs of the cars. The sky was a blue Webster hadn’t seen before, pristine and deep, set off at its edges by the spiky green of the palm trees and the sandy pink of the brick.
By three Webster had finished his small bottle of water and was growing hungry. He quizzed Driss about his plans to finish his degree and move back to Paris as a postgraduate, about life in Morocco with such an unorthodox mother, about growing up in France and moving here when he was small. About Moroccan food and French food, which was a mistake. To dull his appetite Webster smoked the cigarettes he had bought the night before.
At four, just as Driss was offering to walk to buy food, his phone rang; he answered it, listened, and hung up.
“The same car,” he said to Webster, starting his engine as the Mercedes pulled across one lane of traffic and drove away toward the center of the city. Driss followed at a distance, Youssef and Kamila twenty yards behind him.
After no more than a mile, at the entrance to the medina, where the streets narrowed to an arm span, the car stopped and Qazai got out. Webster turned his face away as Driss drove past and parked the car on the verge of road beyond some trees.
“We could follow in this,” he said. “But not for long.”
A moment later Kamila drew up in front of them and got out of her car. Through the back windscreen Webster saw Qazai look around him, a perfunctory check, and then move quickly through the broad gate into the old city. He was carrying a thin leather briefcase, and was alone.
Webster opened his door and was starting for the gate when he felt Kamila’s hand on his arm.
“I go first. Keep as far behind me as you can. It’s not easy in there.” She set off with a quick walk.
Since his early morning walk the medina had filled with people, and as he walked through the gate he had to look hard to catch sight of Qazai, who was some twenty-five yards ahead trying to pass a slow-moving group of tourists. In among their khaki slacks and white sun hats Qazai looked elegant, patrician, aloof. An old man on a skinny old scooter snaked between them.
Qazai seemed to know where he was going—though how, Webster was at a loss to understand. Had he not had Kamila in his sights the whole time, he would have lost his bearings immediately: there were no landmarks. Some of the alleyways were so narrow that the only constant in view was the sky above, at its highest point still a fine cornflower blue, and the walls of the buildings all ran together in a continuous band of color, from rosy ochre to sandstone with now and then a clean block of white or blue as relief. Shops occupied the broader streets: tin buckets of yellow saffron and luminous red paprika set out on the ground, pastel gowns hanging from awnings, endless rows of pointed shoes, rugs strung across great expanses of wall in rough imitation of Qazai’s house in London, and in the odd space in between a heavy studded door that opened into the private world of the city.
They were in quieter, closer passages now and Qazai was making a turn every ten yards; there were no crowds to hide behind and Webster, trying to keep only Kamila in view, was finding it harder and harder to stay in touch with her and at the same time keep out of sight. Shade now covered the ground, the buildings seemed taller, and he had the sense of going slowly down into ever darker, tighter circles. The walls around him were the color of redwood and the air thick and still.
He rounded one corner to find Kamila, all of six feet away, peering cautiously around another, her palm up behind her to tell him to stop. He stood as still as he could, hearing his own breathing in the silence. She continued to watch, her body tensed, and then, satisfied that she had seen enough, turned and pressed her back to the wall.
“He stopped at a house about five meters down there.” She was whispering. “Knocked once, quietly. Then again. He’s just gone in.”
“What happens now?”
“Wait here.”
She disappeared around the corner, and was gone for a minute.
“OK,” she said. “It could be worse. There’s one man on the door. When they come out they either have to come back around here, or the other way into a long alley with only one turning off it. Three people can cover it. You can’t. Not like that.”
She took her phone from her handbag, dialed, said a few words in French and hung up.
“They’ll be with us in ten minutes. You shouldn’t wait here. Go back the way we came: left, second right, left again. On your right you will see an entrance to a courtyard. A doorway. Hide in there.”
Webster did as he was told, repeating her instructions as he went. He was feeling highly visible and not a little redundant, and found himself imagining what George Black and his people would have made of all this. Most of the time surveillance was carried out in a car on the wide streets of expansive cities, where it was possible to believe that it was a serious discipline; here it resembled nothing so much as a child’s game, a scrappy version of hide and seek.
Hidden, then, he smoked a cigarette, breathing in the smell of raisins in the pack before he took one out and lit it. The smoke drifted around the courtyard, which was calm and clear of people and clutter, and from which three doors led into houses whose windows were all shuttered. When he arrived he could feel his heart beating in his throat, but it soon slowed, and for a time he felt strangely peaceful.
It was Driss who came to get him. He had a bag over his shoulder, and from it pulled a large piece of maroon fabric which he handed to Webster.
“Put this on. Over your clothes.”
As Webster unfolded it he saw it was a robe, with a pointed hood. A djellaba, like Kamila’s. The fabric was coarse in his hands.
“Pull the hood low and no one will know you. Forget your sunglasses.”
It had been a long time since Webster had dressed up, and after a second’s hesitation—more surprise than reluctance—he drew the robe over his head, his arms upright into the sleeves, a movement that he hadn’t made since donning a surplice at school. It was lighter than he had expected and smelled of old books. He drew up the hood with both hands and instantly felt detached from the world, invisible; he might wander off through this endless warren of alleyways and never resume his old life again. The change complete, he followed his guide out of the courtyard.
Killing time is easier in a car, with company, than it is in a featureless passage on your own. For the first half-hour, Webster stood, until he realized that he might save his back and sit cross-legged on the ground, since that was an acceptable thing for a man in a djellaba to do. He tried as best he could to cover his shoes, leather and too English. Except for the call to prayer, which made him feel briefly conspicuous, there was no noise here, and ha
rdly anyone passed: an old man pushing a bicycle, a tall man in a dusty black suit, several men and women dressed as he was. All he could do was watch the wall in front of him, stuccoed like coral, and wait for Kamila to walk past the entrance to his alleyway, which would mean that the meeting had broken up and he was to follow the next person he saw. Driss had brought him a bottle of water, and by sipping it slowly he made it last until six, when the heat was tailing off a little and the sky beginning to turn a cobalt blue. Under his robe his shirt was now wet and cool with sweat.
His phone sat shaming him in his back pocket: he should send Elsa a message. He had called the previous day and she hadn’t answered. Wasn’t he simply protecting his name and his family’s future? And what would Elsa have thought of him if he had simply rolled over for Qazai? He wondered whether she really prized their security over his principles, and whether she would have been so happy to compromise her own.
He became so involved in this one-sided internal argument that when Kamila finally appeared he only noticed her when she whispered “now” at him as she passed. The passage behind her was clear but he could hear footsteps about to round the corner; he bent his head low and stayed still. Two pairs of feet came into view and passed, one in black leather lace-ups, the other in brown suede. Senechal and Qazai. Webster’s heart skipped high in his chest. He and Driss would follow them; Kamila and Youssef would remain in place ready to shadow whoever else came out of that house. He waited for his quarry to round a corner, then moved off. Somewhere behind him, Driss fell into line.
Senechal had a map, and from time to time slowed to refer to it, Qazai, curiously slumped, giving him no assistance and appearing to take no interest. Webster hung back, expecting Driss to appear alongside him; but he never did, and as Senechal moved on he would resume his pursuit. Slowly the alleys grew into streets and the noise of traffic and shouting returned. Webster guessed they were on the edge of the medina now and began to ask himself what he would do if his prey were suddenly to hail a little Peugeot taxi and speed off. Pick them up again at Qazai’s hotel, with any luck, and hope that Kamila and Youssef did better with their end of the job.
After five minutes walking Qazai and Senechal passed through a pointed arch into a broad square that jostled with life. Bicycles and cars zipped across it dodging carts and donkeys in their way, and around its sides the shops were beginning to close, taking their goods down and leaving blank walls behind them. The smell of wood and charcoal burning was in the air. Webster watched the two men head for the far corner, hung back for longer than he would have liked and then cautiously followed, now a good thirty yards behind and trying his best to keep them in sight while negotiating the traffic buzzing around him. Just short of the street that led out of the square Senechal stopped and got out his map. Qazai stood beside him and turned a quarter turn, looking over his shoulder in Webster’s direction.
It was the last thing Webster saw that made any sense. A great weight struck him; he was conscious of feeling helplessly light, of skittering across the dusty ground, of coming to a stop with his face in the dirt. He could see a donkey’s hoof up close, the horn gray and cracked, but he couldn’t raise his head to see more. And then he couldn’t see anything at all.
17.
THE FIRST THING HE was conscious of, before the pain and the utter dark, was the smell: an invasive mix of mold and urine and ammonia that sat inside his head and produced a sensation of intense nausea throughout his body. Pain coursed up and down his right side as if unable to find a place to settle. His mouth was dry as dust.
For a long time he lay on his side, the better one, trying to make out some trace of light. A sudden fear took him that he couldn’t see, but after a while he knew that there was a different quality to the dark when his eyes were open: it had space, somehow; it gave a sense of extent. He had no desire to move into it but knew that he couldn’t simply lie where he was and wait for the light to come, so by slow degrees he tried to sit up, pushing himself off the hard surface with his elbow bent under him. Immediately his ribs contracted in pain and a flood of sickness rose up through him. He tried again, prepared now for the worst of it, trying to roll forward to give his arm greater purchase and, with the exertion, finding that each breath caused a new release of pain. His right arm could do nothing.
After a minute’s effort he was half up, supported by his good arm. He moved his legs forward carefully, pleased to find them working, and was wracked afresh as his feet slipped off into the blackness. So he was on a ledge, or a bed, and by working his legs off the edge he managed to swing the rest of his body upright and sat for several moments, hunched, exhausted, taking shallow breaths of the hot, bad air.
He patted his pockets, looking for his phone, and found that he was still wearing the robe. In the heat he longed to take it off but knew he could not. The phone had gone, but there was something else in there, and by leaning backward and straining, his stomach muscles in agony, he managed to force his hand through the opening in the djellaba and into the unobliging pocket of his jeans, where it finally discovered, next to a crushed pack of cigarettes, the smooth plastic casing of the cheap lighter he had bought the night before.
Lit up, the room was less encouraging than the pitiless dark. It was a cell, perhaps eight feet by eight feet, whose pitted gray walls, sweating in the heat, were broken only by a rusted metal door. But for the thin concrete slab he was sitting on, and another across from him that left a three-foot channel in between, the space was unbroken, and there was something pure about its single-minded commitment to its grim purpose. Nothing was scratched on the walls, and Webster wondered whether he could possibly be the first person to be brought here. Warily he checked his head and side for blood, but found nothing more than a long, deepish graze that ran from his forehead across his temple.
The wheel of the lighter had grown too hot to hold. Bending down in the dark, with effort, he untied his shoe and took it off before collecting himself and standing up in a single agonizing motion, his hand against the wall behind him for support. He shuffled forward and with the shoe in his left hand began to beat the iron door with its heel, hard and loud, with a slow, steady rhythm. He noticed that no light at all showed around the door frame.
The dull banging pounded in his head and made thinking difficult, but he tried to relax and imagine what could have happened to him. He had been hit by a car, or by a truck. That he knew, and he could remember knowing it the moment he landed on the ground. Then why wasn’t he in hospital? People had seen that he was injured and would have called an ambulance, surely? He could hear the shouting, see them clustering around him, see someone pull a cell phone out and make the call.
Someone had arranged the accident, or someone had taken advantage of it, that much was certain. Call him Chiba. He needed a name. Perhaps Chiba’s men had seen him following Qazai; perhaps they had seen him waiting in his djellaba for their meeting to finish. However it had happened, they had seen him, he was sure; sure, too, that soon he was about to meet the man he had been so blindly pursuing.
The clanging slowed a little as his arm began to tire, and he wondered how long he had been keeping it up. Ten minutes? Two? He clicked the lighter on again and looked at his watch, thankfully unbroken, which showed that it was half past ten, almost four hours since Qazai and Senechal had passed him in the passage. He continued for a minute or two, but his good arm now hurt almost as much as the rest of him, and he reluctantly conceded that he had to stop. Faint from standing, having had no water for several hours and no food for longer, he leaned his head against the door and finally gave in to the rushing stream of fear that this mindless activity, his one source of hope, had kept in check. How, he asked himself, had it come to this? Slowly, staggering a little and feeling profoundly sick, he dragged his feet over to the ledge where he had started, lay down, and fell at length into a shifting, churning half-sleep.
• • •
AS HE CAME IN and ou
t of consciousness he grasped at a series of jagged, fractured dreams. Children, not his own, played in unknown landscapes where the heat of the sun and its blinding light were so strong that they filled each scene with silent menace.
The grating of a key turning in the door brought him up from sleep, and a second later a flash of bluish white light woke him fully. A black figure was in the doorway, saying something he didn’t understand. All he could do was blink at the brightness.
“Up,” said the figure. “Now.”
Webster pushed himself up on his elbow, but before he could sit he had been grabbed by his other arm and pulled erect. He could smell stale tobacco and old meat on the man’s breath, and on the edges of his silhouette there was the fuzzy outline of a beard.
“Come.”
The man’s hand took strong hold of his upper arm and led him out of the cell, down a corridor whose bare cement walls were lit by a single fluorescent tube. There were no details, no features that might suggest the building’s function. Nor was there any noise, but for their footsteps, harsh on the concrete floor. They passed three other doors—wooden, he noticed, with no locks—on the same side as the cell, before the man turned down a second corridor, knocked firmly at a door on the right and without waiting for a reply went in.
This room was whitewashed, unbearably bright under another single strip light, and smelled of heat and mildew. As Webster entered, hobbling and squinting, he could make out one man sitting behind a desk and another standing against the wall opposite the door, both wearing suits—one black, one gray—and white shirts with no tie. They were only superficially alike. One was lanky, all thin limbs improbably long, and he sat at the table like a crab trying to fit itself into too small a space. His suit was rumpled and in patches gray with dust, his face elongated and hollow.
The other man was shorter, taut with muscle, the skin on his face tight against the bone and his posture sprung, suggesting great energy barely contained and waiting impatiently for release. Black and gray hairs showed at the base of his neck, which was flexed and unyielding, like thick cable, and there was three days’ beard on his face. He held his hands by his sides, tightening them slowly into fists and then releasing them, his knuckles white. Webster’s body registered a fear of him at once, a physical knowledge of his viciousness. A pair of metal-framed sunglasses covered his eyes, and Webster knew from the moment he came into the room that he was the one in charge.
The Jackal's Share Page 21
