Out of the corner of his eye Webster saw the nearest set of elevator doors part and heard the distinctive sound of genial professional conversation, buoyant small talk made by people who know each other and move in the same world. He glanced at Ava, and shifted in his seat. One voice was louder than the rest, richer, full of bonhomie, and as the huddle of suited men stepped out its owner moved into view, ushering his guests into his world as if he had never left it.
Webster watched Qazai cross the lobby, a head taller than the rest, crisp in a silver-gray suit, his white beard neatly trimmed, and doubted that anyone else would see the strain that showed in his tired eyes. As he passed, talking to the Americans, he glanced once at Ava and appeared thrown for the shortest moment, before guiding the group through the glass door toward their meeting.
Ava and Webster looked at each other without saying anything, like people who cannot trust what they have just seen.
• • •
EVERY HOUR THAT PASSED made the outcome more certain, Webster calculated, but that was no reason to relax, just as Qazai’s apparent composure was no guarantee that when the moment arrived he would take his pen from his pocket, uncap it, look around one last time at the business he had created and put that grand, sweeping signature on the necessary line. People would do strange things before parting with what they loved, and Webster was beginning to understand, finally, that while Qazai’s professional genius might lie in a kind of relentless reasoning about the workings of the world, in his life he applied no such logic. He was as bold as he was spineless; as loving of his children as he had been neglectful of their upbringing; as principled in speaking out against the government in Tehran as he was dissolute in sustaining it. But behind all these contradictions, Webster had come to suspect, was a simple fear: that Darius Qazai was not, after all, a great man, but a simple coward whose craven fealty to money he had inherited whole from his father and had failed to subdue. No one understood better than he how money worked, and still it controlled him.
Who could know, then, how this fear was operating on him today? In that room he had bought companies, seduced investors, fired staff, rebuked traders, entertained statesmen. Tabriz was his court, and now he was being asked, in the stateroom no less, to sign it over as he might one of the thousands of assets he had bought and sold in the previous thirty years.
As Webster glanced up at Ava, he saw her attention switch to something happening behind him, and twisting around he saw through a glass screen the Americans walking their way, jackets draped over shoulders, ties loosened, fastening the catches on their briefcases. They looked, as far as one could tell, like people who had achieved something. The most senior of Qazai’s lawyers was seeing them out, and after a minute of goodbyes they were in an elevator and gone.
“Where’s my father?” Ava stopped the lawyer as he passed.
“I’m sorry?”
“Never mind,” she said, and asking the receptionist to open it marched through the glass door. Webster followed, and the lawyer followed him.
Empty glasses, empty cups, half-eaten plates of biscuits and half-a-dozen chrome coffee pots covered the table, where Qazai sat, his back to the window, watching his lawyers tidy up their papers and appearing not to hear their words of congratulation. Behind him the sun was still high in the sky.
“Leave us, please,” said Ava as she walked in.
To a man, the lawyers stopped what they were doing and stared at her; none offered a reply.
“I need to speak to my father.” There was no doubting her seriousness. “All of you. Go.”
Behind her the senior lawyer nodded at his colleagues, who hurried themselves and left, glancing at Ava as she moved swiftly past them toward her father, giving Webster and his black eye a longer look. The door shut behind them.
Qazai, who had stood up as the lawyers left, was now looking out at the city, contemplating his old domain.
“What the fuck did you do?” Ava was by him now, and as he turned to her she pushed him, hard, so that he lost his balance and stepped back. “What the fuck did you do?”
He looked at her in surprise and incomprehension. “I sold it. The company. For you. For us.”
Ava shook her head, her face cold and set. “Not that. You’re incredible. Not that.” Her eyes were locked on his. “I know now. I know. You didn’t lose a son. You sacrificed him.” Qazai did his best to meet her stare, but could not. “You sacrificed him for this. This shining fraud.”
Qazai rested his head on his hand and shut his eyes. He didn’t see Ava turn and go, and when he looked up, she was halfway across the room.
“Ava. Ava, I didn’t know. Come back.”
“Never,” said Ava, her back to him still, and left.
Qazai pulled a chair toward him and slumped onto it, shaking his head in tiny movements back and forth.
“I’ve lost her, too,” he said at last, addressing no one.
Webster watched him, feeling contempt for his self-absorption and the first traces of pity.
“What happened to Senechal?”
Qazai looked up, his face blank.
“What?”
“Yves. Your faithful retainer. We found the photographs. What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Webster looked hard at him. “I don’t know how it happened.”
“Did you tell them? About the blackmail?”
“Who? No. No, of course not.” Qazai seemed honestly surprised. “You think I would do that?”
“Where did you go?”
“When?”
Webster’s patience was gone. “Stop fucking about. Please. Just tell me where you went this morning.”
Qazai adjusted his tie, out of kilter since Ava pushed him. “I had a meeting.”
“With Rad?”
There was a long pause before he replied.
“With Rad.”
“Why?”
“Everyone has his price.”
“I didn’t.” Webster stared hard at Qazai. “You mean to say that you were going to pay off Rad? To try to avoid this? What, you thought the rest of them would just forget their billions and let you swan around into your old age?” He paused. “Was it a long meeting?”
“That’s not how it was. I offered him a hundred million dollars to leave us alone after the money was paid back. You and me.”
Webster hadn’t been expecting that.
“I wasn’t sure I believed him,” said Qazai. “That it was just bluff. I thought, once they had their money, that would be that. Why draw attention to themselves by killing me? And then . . . This morning, I came down, and that envelope was on the mat. I knew it was from them. It was early. Before six. And when I opened it . . . What it said to me was, this is what we do to people when they’re no longer useful to us. This is a spent asset.” His voice became a degree louder. “And in two days, when the money goes through, I will be spent.” He looked up to Webster. “And so will you.”
Webster hadn’t forgotten. He felt a lightness at the base of his throat. “What did Rad say?”
“He laughed, and said he would rather be poor and alive.”
And in that moment Webster knew what he had to do.
27.
THERE WAS VERY LITTLE POINT, as Hammer had explained, in having such a simple, treacherous little plan if no one knew you had made it.
By Friday everything had been done. A Mauritian company, suitably exotic, had been taken from Qazai’s emergency store and injected with twenty million dollars, a figure large enough to be convincing but still within Qazai’s reduced means.
After that, there had been two obstacles: finding Rad’s signature, and securing the services of a lawyer who wouldn’t mind notarizing false documents. Hammer had argued with Webster about the need for the first. If—and this was the great beauty of the idea—the set-up needed only to be plausible, not per
fect, surely it didn’t matter whether the signature was accurate or not? The point wasn’t whether the whole fiction would stand up to real investigation, but whether Rad believed it would be investigated at all; and he would assume, as they themselves had, that internal investigations carried out by his superiors in Tehran were unlikely to be thorough and stood no chance of being fair. Justice was vicious in Iran. Rad had administered it for thirty years, and he more than anyone knew how it worked.
For Webster, though, this was flirting with abstractions. The more real the fiction, the less likely Rad was to see opportunities to discredit it. He wanted those documents to bear the signature of Mohamed Ganem, and for Rad to know when he saw it that he was well caught.
The trouble was that Ganem’s signature wasn’t easy to find. Kamila had been back to the hotel where the Iranians had stayed and despite bribing every desk clerk and chambermaid in view had found no credit card slips, no room service bills, nothing. An imprint of the American Express card they had used to pay was in the file, but that was all, and somehow each of the three had managed to check in without having a copy of their passport taken. She had been to the car rental firm as well, but no written contract existed.
So Webster turned to Oliver. Bills for the Amex card went to an address in Dubai: an apartment in a complex built two years before and rented on a short-term lease by a local company, Abbas Real Estate. The incorporation papers for this company were missing, and the letting agency refused, much to Oliver’s irritation, to answer its phone. Much as Webster might harry him, there was little more he could do.
Meanwhile, a much larger amount, from the sale of Tabriz, was making its way east across the world: from the Americans, through Qazai’s account and on, through an intermediary or two, to a bank in Indonesia, all according to Rad’s instructions. It would reach Indonesia on Friday, all being well, and at that point Qazai’s contract with his masters would be void, and a new kind of contract would take its place.
The lawyer proved easy, in the end. A Mr. Holmes, partner at a firm in Mayfair that had once benefited from some penetrating and effective personal advice from Hammer, was happy to oblige, having received reassurances that the chances of his honesty ever being called in to question were extremely remote. Hammer scheduled a meeting for Thursday afternoon to sign all the papers, and halfway through the day the acuteness of the deadline spurred Webster to the breakthrough he needed. Five calls to hotels in Caracas later, Hammer, whose Spanish was still good, had been faxed copies of a passport for one Mohamed Ganem, who had stayed there in November—dictatorships, as Hammer had observed, being sticklers for documentation. There was Rad’s face, just discernible, looking almost vulnerable for the first time.
Mr. Holmes had kept his word, and by four o’clock on Thursday Webster and Hammer had left his office with a set of dependable documents, utterly false and wholly genuine at the same time, showing that Mohamed Ganem, of Dubai, had just become the owner of Burnett Holdings Ltd., which, if one happened to check, was currently holding twenty million dollars in an account in Singapore.
Now all they needed to do was tell Rad what they had done, and what they proposed to do if he started having murderous thoughts. The trouble was, he wasn’t answering his phone; the number he had given Qazai, which had worked just three days earlier, was now dead. He had no intention of communicating, because his job no longer required it. Webster could think of no way to contact him, but Hammer, contrary as ever, had told him not to worry: if you couldn’t tell someone to come to you, you merely had to entice them.
• • •
THAT NIGHT, PAST NINE, having laid the last pieces of his plan, Webster called his parents’ house, and after a short talk with his mother asked to speak to Elsa. He heard footsteps fading down the long corridor that led to the sitting room, and during the silence that followed pictured the house he knew so well: the old phone sitting on the counter in the kitchen with its cord hanging down from the wall; the children’s bedroom above, just dark, both windows open behind the striped curtains, and Daniel and Nancy asleep there under thick striped duvets; the living room where Elsa would be sitting with his father, watching television or reading the papers, a warm light reflecting off the deep red walls. He imagined her getting up, and wondered whether she shared that strange mix of hope and fear that he felt when they had these distant conversations.
He heard her footsteps, and then her voice, flat. “Hi.”
“Hi.” He paused, not knowing where to start. “You OK?”
“I’m fine.”
“The children?”
“Fine. Asleep.” He could see her clearly. She would be standing with the phone in her left hand, looking down, with her right hand clasping the back of her neck. He could see her lips slightly pursed, holding in the words.
“What have they been up to?”
Elsa was silent for a moment, and he knew he had asked the wrong thing. This wasn’t a normal conversation. “This and that. What we always do.”
Through the scratched glass of the phone box he looked around him. The sun had just gone down behind the black trees of the park, and the sky was a sprawling pink. It would be beautiful again tomorrow. “I miss you,” he said.
“I imagine you do.”
He sighed, moving the receiver from his mouth so that she wouldn’t hear him. How he wanted her to thaw. He would have given Rad’s phantom payoff ten times over to know that he would one day get his family back. But Elsa wasn’t the sort to give reassurance, and he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. And what he was about to say wouldn’t change that.
“Tomorrow . . .” He hesitated. Closed his eyes tight and opened them. “Tomorrow, I need you to move. Just for two days . . .”
“What do you mean, move?”
“Some friends of mine are going to come . . .”
“What the fuck do you mean? What have you done?”
“Nothing. It’s just . . . For a day or two things are going to be difficult. Then they won’t be. For two days, I need you to go somewhere else.”
Silence. He could see her shaking her head. “Christ. Christ, Ben. How can we not be safe here? I thought we weren’t safe in our own home. Because of you. I didn’t realize we were on the fucking run.”
“You’re not . . .”
“Wait. I’m talking. Do you mean to say that there are people who might come here and hurt us? Hurt our children? Is that it?” His silence told her that it was. “What the fuck have you done? To put them in danger. What the . . .” Her voice trailed off in anger and sorrow.
Webster rested his elbow on the phone and cradled his forehead in his free hand, scratching at his scalp so hard that he could feel the nails digging in. He had nothing to say. Just instructions to give.
“Listen to me,” he said at last. “Wait. Listen. I have fucked up. I know that. You know I know. But right now, I am making it better. I’ve dealt with the Italian thing. That’s over. And I’m making it so that in three days’ time, we won’t have to worry about anything. At all. Do you understand? But in the meantime I need you to be somewhere completely safe. Not probably safe. Completely safe. After that, there will be no risk to any of us. And definitely not to you.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just that.”
“Sorry—are you planning some heroic gesture to save us all? Because I’m already wondering how to explain to the children that their father’s work is more important than they are. I don’t think I’m ready to tell them that he sacrificed himself in the line of duty, or whatever it is that drives you on.”
“I’m going to be fine. I’ll be fine.”
Elsa paused, challenging him to say more. “You’re not going to tell me what you’re doing?”
“No. I’m not. I can’t.”
“Right. OK. Obviously we can’t be trusted. So you know what? I don’t want to be part of your plan. We’re n
ot going anywhere. If it makes you feel better, send in the troops. Surround the fucking house.”
The line went dead in Webster’s ear. Outside the phone booth Kensal Rise was still and quiet: no cars, no people in sight. On the other side of the little park Webster could see his house, a dark gap in the middle of its terrace, the windows either side shining warmly in the twilight. He took another handful of coins from his pocket and slotted them deliberately into the phone, waiting for each to drop, watching his credit rack up, his head full of noise. He closed his eyes and collected himself; reached into his jacket and pulled out a pack of Camel. Fletcher first. Then George.
The phone rang six or seven times while he lit a cigarette, a long lazy tone, and then rang out. He dialed again, and on the fourth ring Constance’s voice, low and irritable, came on the line.
“Bit fucking late for a personal call.”
“I did say.”
“Yes, yes. You said. You said a lot. Although not why it couldn’t wait till morning.”
Webster blew out a lungful of smoke and opened the door of the phone box to let it out into the dusk. “Sorry. Thanks for the e-mails. That should do it.”
“I still think you’re crazy.” He paused. “How can you be sure they’ll see them?”
“I forwarded them to Qazai.”
“Oh good. So now the traitor of Tehran has my name as well.”
“Your name won’t be on them. You’re just my friend. Your friends are your friends, who have agreed to debrief me and Qazai in Dubai and see about some sort of protection.”
Constance grunted. “I wish I had your confidence.”
“It’ll be fine. All they’re going to see is e-mails from me to a Google account that if they check originated in Dubai. There’s no trace to you.”
Constance gave another grunt and Webster heard the click of his lighter. “I am too fucking old”—he drew on his cigarette—“to be fucking about in Internet cafes. Do you know how many bearded sixty-year-olds there are in those places? You call that tradecraft?”
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