“Allez.” And then louder into the night, a thin screech. “Stop! Stop, I have him.”
He gestured with the gun. A car sped by on the road, its headlights for a moment illuminating the scene. Senechal was still wearing his suit, his tie still immaculately in its collar, an apparition somewhere between nightmare and nonsense. Webster felt a bolt of repugnance and fury pass through him and with a cruel, childish certainty knew that this man was weak and brittle and no match for him. Ignoring his pain and a rush of sickness he brought the back of his fist across his body into Senechal’s face, felt it connect with that sharp little nose, saw Senechal lose his balance and topple backward. A shot tore the silence but Webster ignored it and fell on Senechal as he tried to right himself, pinning him to the ground and trapping his right arm and beating his hand against the ground until the gun fell from it. Senechal’s face twisted with shock and fear as he writhed vainly for a moment against Webster’s weight; then he relaxed his muscles, composed his expression and looking right into Webster’s eyes spat, venomously.
In the strange, silent interlude that followed Webster turned his head and wiped the spit away as best he could on his sleeve. Senechal leered up at him, his black teeth like beetles, and suddenly Webster couldn’t bear to look at him anymore. He was filled with disgust. The desert and the pain and the bleak gunshots dropped away and all he knew was Senechal’s gruesome image, hideous, staring up at him in petulant defiance. He released his hold and pulling Senechal’s head up by his hair beat it against the ground, twice, hard. He moved to do it again but checked himself, his heart beating with force against his ribs, a strange giddiness in his throat. Senechal was unconscious, and his body had gone limp. Webster reached under his head and felt blood flowing thick and warm; felt the rock jutting out of the sand. From the darkness came another shot like a burst of light and the sound of another of the car’s windows being blown out.
Webster ducked, involuntarily, and rolled off Senechal’s prone body. On hands and knees Webster shuffled back against the car. He had to go now. There wouldn’t be another chance. Feeling in the sand for the gun he pulled one knee up, set himself unsteadily, as if under starter’s orders for a schoolboy race, took a deep breath and looked down at Senechal, wondering briefly what would happen to him, whether he should leave him here to his fate. He could do nothing else. With one last look at the ashen figure in the dirt he set off into the darkness, his leather soles slipping in the sand, adrenaline dulling the pain in his ribs and his head.
After perhaps fifteen yards he heard a hard crack behind him, a single shot, heard the tiny thin whine of the bullet as it passed, and kept running, changing direction a little, dodging rocks and doing his best to keep upright. Without turning he held his arm out behind him and fired shots into the night. He thought he heard voices shouting but paid them no heed. Two cars drove past along the road, and afterward another shot. This time he didn’t hear the bullet in the air.
Running in almost total darkness now he stumbled up a shallow bank of sand and scrubby plants. At the top he lost his footing, rolled down the other side, and for a moment lay on his back looking up at the stars, panting. His body had had enough punishment. Somewhere behind him, a hundred yards away, perhaps a little more, a car engine started up; he heard it turning over slowly, moving forward into the desert toward him. Over the low ridge a bright light suddenly burst, scanning the night and casting Webster’s refuge into even greater blackness. He lay still for a moment, then at a low crouch moved along the line of the ridge, parallel with the road, heading in the direction they had come. The lights tracked slowly across the sky and as they passed over him he dropped to the ground, the sand cool under his cheek. Ahead of him, ten yards away, was a little hollow, an indentation perhaps a foot deep, like the first workings of a grave. In the darkness behind the headlights he scuttled across the desert, keeping low, and pressed himself into the space.
The car reversed in an arc, and the lights swung back across the night. Webster felt them sweeping over him again, seeking him out, slowly moving away. A car door opened. He raised his head an inch to look. In the beams from the headlights a man in a suit—it looked like the guard from the prison—was standing by Senechal. Putting his foot on his shoulder he rocked the prone body back and forth, three times for good measure, before standing up and looking into the night, making a last search. Webster flattened himself out again. There was no noise but the idling of the engine until the car door slammed and the car crunched away, slowly over the dirt but once on the road accelerating hard.
Still he didn’t dare move. He lay in the night and breathed in the hot air. In one corner of the sky he thought he could just make out the black yielding to midnight blue. Two cars passed together on the road, but otherwise all was silence. Putting his watch to his ear he counted the seconds, trying to settle into the calm rhythm of the ticking, but his head was thick with pain and new fears. He needed to know whether the man lying a hundred yards away on the sand was dead.
When he had counted five minutes he shifted onto his front and gradually eased up the bank on his elbows. By the light of a passing truck he could make out the car that had brought him here but nothing else.
He walked to it with the little gun in his hand, waiting for a shot or a burst of light, his heart refusing to slow. Senechal’s body lay still, blood thickly covering his cheek, and for a few seconds Webster stood over him, not daring to know. Then he knelt, felt under the cuff for a pulse, and found one, faint and slow.
He searched the car but found nothing useful except the water—two small bottles. He drank one in one draft and kept the other.
A thought occurred to him. He had no money, no phone, no resources whatever. Dragging himself across the dust he patted Senechal’s jacket, dipped his hand inside its pockets. There was a wallet, with euros, pounds and dirham in it. He took some dirham, a few notes. He left the French passport and a BlackBerry, which was in any case locked. But a second phone, a cheap Samsung, he put in his pocket.
For a moment he stood and looked at the gun, trying to decide how many shots he had fired and whether it was any use to him, before wiping it thoroughly on his shirt tails and leaving it by Senechal’s side.
The phone had power but no signal. He looked through its recently dialed numbers, through its address book: there was only one number recorded there, a Dubai phone, probably a cell phone. Four calls made, seven received, every conversation with the same phone. Maybe Senechal had made his own arrangements after all.
Webster walked, east, toward the dawn, a bottle of water in one hand, the other ready to flag down the first car that passed.
• • •
KAMILA RINSED THE CLOTH once more in the water, now a dirty brown with Webster’s blood, carefully wiped the wound, gently pulling the hair apart, and turned to Driss.
“Take this. Get me some clean water and a fresh cloth.” She looked down at Webster, who was sitting on a stool with his shirt off. A dark purple bruise, lively with greens and yellows, had spread out from the ribs on his left side, up to his armpit and down to his waist; he expected to find another where he had been kneed in the thigh. His breathing was still tight and his head felt like it was wrapped with bands of spikes. Kamila had given him sweet mint tea and he sipped at it using his good arm.
“You provide a comprehensive service,” he said, looking up at her and smiling, with effort.
“You need to go to the hospital.”
“It’s a cracked rib. I’ve had one before. Someone drove into the side of our car when I was twelve. There’s nothing you can do about them. They just hurt.”
Kamila snorted. “There could be internal bleeding.”
Webster watched Driss return carrying the bowl of water and smiling a canny smile that seemed to say you don’t know who you’re dealing with.
“Sorry I woke you,” he said.
“I’m always up at dawn,” said K
amila. And then, pointedly, “How was Ike?”
“Awake. Not particularly happy.” That hadn’t been an easy call, not least because there was so much he hadn’t said and so much he still simply didn’t understand. By the time he had persuaded a car to stop, had reached the outskirts of the city and had found a phone signal, dawn had broken over Marrakech; in London the sun would have been up for at least an hour. He had expected a furious response, not at being roused but at being misled, or left uninformed—even, perhaps, at being wrong; but what he hadn’t banked on was that Ike’s love of a secret on the verge of being revealed was greater than everything else. In the end he had been stiff, but increasingly concerned, and when Webster had finished giving him the fractured outline of events had told him to call Kamila on her home number and to call him again when he had slept and eaten.
Kamila didn’t reply, but her silence meant something. She put the cloth back in the bowl, took a large glass jar, opened it, and into the palm of her hand poured some white powder, which she began to sprinkle from her fingertips onto the wound. It stung keenly and Webster winced.
“He didn’t know I was here.” He looked up at her.
“Keep still. This is alum. It will keep the wound clean.” She sprinkled more powder. “I did wonder.” Inspecting his head closely she gave a small grunt of satisfaction and screwed the lid back on the jar. “There was something you weren’t telling us. And you seemed alone somehow. There,” she stepped back. “We’ll leave that open to the air. I’ll put a dressing on it later. Now Driss will make us eggs and you can tell me what exactly you have got us involved in.”
Throughout all this Webster hadn’t really stopped to consider how his preoccupations might affect these people, and the realization that he had put them at risk made him feel ashamed.
“Sorry,” he said. “It was thoughtless of me.”
“Don’t worry.” She wasn’t smiling but her eyes were lenient. “If I wanted security I would have become an accountant. But I want to know what to expect.”
Webster was surprised by how hungry he was. While they sat in Kamila’s kitchen, Driss brought them flatbread and fruit and eggs, and Webster told them everything he knew, and everything he didn’t.
“But what I don’t get,” he concluded, “is why he’s involved. He’s not an arms dealer. The money he’d make is a pittance to him. I thought for a while he’d sold his soul to the wrong people, early on. Taken the devil’s money. But he’s in a different league now. He could have bought them out ten times over.”
“Maybe they won’t let him.”
“Maybe. But why persecute him now?”
Kamila nodded, thinking. “Maybe he has always done it.”
“What do you mean?”
“How a man makes his first million is always the most interesting story. Has he explained that to you?”
Webster thought back to those inadequate conversations in Mount Street and Como. “No. No, he hasn’t.”
“A lot of people got rich at that time. After the Shah went. Everybody wanted weapons. The diaspora. The revolutionaries. Maybe Darius Qazai was in the right place at the right time. Maybe he has just kept on doing it.”
Webster considered this for a moment. “All I know,” he said, “is that he owes them a lot, and they won’t kill him until they get it. And then they will.”
“They seem happy killing everyone else.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds. Kamila spoke first.
“What are you going to do now?”
Webster rested his head on his hand and pinched his temples. He thought about the various components. Senechal would have been found: Kamila had called an ambulance for him as soon as Webster had contacted her. Qazai might already have left the country.
“You should sleep,” said Kamila. “And then you should leave. Go back to England. Get rid of these people. You don’t need them in your life.”
Webster looked up at her and shook his head. “Sadly they’re already in it. And I’m in theirs. I need to see that man again.”
Kamila frowned. “Why?”
“So he stops trying to kill me. He thinks I know too much.”
“You probably do.”
“I do and I don’t.”
Webster picked up Senechal’s phone from the table and looked at it for a moment. Now there were two numbers stored on it: Kamila’s, and the anonymous number. He called it, and it rang twice.
“Oui.” A quiet, harsh voice.
“This is Ben Webster.”
“You have wrong number.”
“We need to meet.”
“I don’t know you. Good-bye.”
“If you don’t meet me my friends in the CIA are going to learn all about Chiba, Kurus and your relationship with Mr. Qazai. That doesn’t have to happen. I will be by the Air Maroc ticket office in the arrivals hall of Menara airport at ten o’clock. Come alone.”
The line went dead. Kamila and Driss were looking at him across the table, their expressions somewhere between concern and incredulity.
“You should be going home,” said Kamila.
“Never show a bully you’re weak. And, besides, I don’t have my passport.”
20.
DRISS AND WEBSTER DROVE to the airport together, Webster in one of Youssef’s suits: dark gray, about half an inch too short in the limbs, tight under the armpits and around his waist. Kamila had put a discreet bandage on his head wound and after breakfast he had showered, inspecting his battered body in the mirror with a sense of curious detachment. On his thigh was a bright red patch of burst blood vessels and around them a growing storm of purple bruise. Dark bags hung under his eyes and when he walked it was with a heavy limp in his damaged leg.
They made one stop. Just short of his hotel, Webster ducked down in his seat, and a hundred yards further on Driss pulled over and turned to him for instructions.
“In the wardrobe there’s a safe. My passport is taped under that. My credit cards are there too. You’ll have to slide the whole thing out of its hole. If you can, get me a shirt.” Youssef’s was at least two sizes too small. “Here’s the key. Room fourteen.”
“How many rooms?”
“It’s quite big. About thirty. Go straight up the stairs and turn left. No one will notice you.”
In the wing mirror Webster watched Driss walk back up the street, cross and go into the hotel through its only entrance, a gate that opened onto a small garden and the studded front door. Webster’s room was on the first floor, no more than a minute inside, and he calculated that Driss should be out in three minutes at most.
In the distance he could hear the lazy sawing drone of two sirens and thought at first it was the beginning of the call to prayer. He looked at his watch. Driss had been gone for two minutes.
Rounding a corner at the end of the street came two police cars with their green and red lights flashing. In the car’s mirror Webster watched them drive at speed in his direction and stop abruptly outside the hotel. Two men got out of one of the cars and went inside; the others stayed where they were. A minute passed, and another, before Driss came out, maintaining a nonchalant pace all the way, a bundle of blue cloth in his hand.
“Are they for me?” said Webster as he got in.
“They won’t find much.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your room has already been searched.” He handed Webster a crumpled shirt. “Your clothes are on the floor. Your suitcase has been cut open.”
“My passport?”
“Not there.”
“Fuck’s sake. Did they say anything?”
“The police? No. They asked for room fourteen. They wanted to know about the Englishman staying there.”
“Can you find out what they want?”
“I can call someone.”
“Let’s go.”
&nb
sp; “Doesn’t this change things?”
“I have no idea.”
Someone had called the police. His captors from last night didn’t seem the sort, unless they wanted him in custody, where they could find him. Qazai hardly stood to gain. Perhaps Senechal. He tried to think it through. The ambulance would have come for him, and the police, at some point, would have become involved. Would he have told them who had beaten him? Surely not. There was too much at stake elsewhere, and no advantage to making himself more conspicuous than he already was. With a cold shock a further possibility struck him. Senechal had died.
A stifling dread took hold of him then, and as Driss drove through the widening streets, hot already under the morning sun, alive with color and motion, all he saw was Senechal’s gray face, lifeless in the desert.
• • •
BY THE TIME THEY REACHED Menara airport the day was full, the sun high and blazing, and the car’s air conditioning struggled against the heat. It would be hotter than yesterday, said Driss, and Webster found that hard to believe; hard, too, to register that in the twenty-four hours since he had last been here his life might have irrevocably changed.
Logic told him that Senechal was still alive. He hadn’t hit him that hard and the wound had not seemed deep. Surely it took more than that to kill a man? Surely someone you had left breathing steadily, calmly almost, didn’t simply die in the course of an hour lying peacefully enough in the desert? Logic, though, couldn’t control Webster’s memory of that moment, and each time it played out the blow seemed to grow in force and Senechal’s otherworldly form became more frail and defenseless. An acid mix of fear and guilt rose in his throat. Perhaps that’s all it took. A strong loathing and a second’s loss of control.
They parked, Driss went ahead, and on the hot walk to the terminal Webster smoked a cigarette and tried to rid his mind of everything but the conversation he was about to have. What did he want from it? For this man to leave him alone: to make him understand that he was no threat now but might become one. That was all.
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