The Concierge

by Gerard Gilbert

  ‘Omar’, as he is now, asked to be let down at the central station. Or at least he kept repeating those two words until the men in the balaclavas seemed to understand. He had been angry with them at first for spoiling his mission, the work that he had been taught and that seemed like the most important thing in the world, but he now feels relieved.

  If only there is some way in which he can contact his family back home in Syria. They would be proud of him, he is certain, but he wants to know that they are unharmed. Perhaps he should turn himself in to the police, but that might make big Omar angry, and little Omar respects big Omar. He’s also scared of him, and what he might do to his family.

  The boy goes to the wall where he used to sit with his friend, the other Syrian kid who sold himself to strange men. He’s nowhere to be seen; perhaps he’s with a man now, in one of the cheap hotel rooms round here.

  The sun is hot and little Omar feels thirsty and hungry. His clothes, he notices now, are filthy and he imagines he must smell. He thinks he might go back home and join Isis; they’re never hungry or thirsty, and they don’t sell their bodies to strange men, which is a sin. He now knows that he won’t be afraid to die – he has been through the whimpering and crying, and, as big Omar said, he passed the test.

  If he were told to wear a suicide vest and walk up to a bunch of American soldiers, or, more like, some of Assad’s militiamen, and blow them sky high, he won’t mind. In fact he’ll be happy. He will die and it will be for him like it is for the old men when they ejaculate over his body.

  The sun is hot and he is hungry and thirsty, but he doesn’t mind. He can sense rather than see that he is being watched. Omar turns and there he is – a well-dressed man, with a little dog on a lead. He smiles at Omar and Omar smiles back, and, emboldened, the man picks up his little dog and walks over.

  “Do you like dogs?” the man asks, but Omar doesn’t understand.

  “One hundred euros. Cento euros,” is all he says.

  “Ooh, that’s quite a lot for a little refugee boy, now let me see…” says the man, but Omar doesn’t understand him, and doesn’t care to either.

  “One hundred euros,” he says, before adding in Arabic, “and a hot bath.”

  * * *

  “I don’t know anything about sarin,” says Harry, addressing his lawyer rather than the two detectives – Johns and the female cop from yesterday. “The last I saw of Max was yesterday morning in Verbier. He was alive and so was Kylie, Simon’s girlfriend.”

  “But Simon was dead,” says Johns. “You knew that.”

  “I knew that,” agrees Harry.

  “So what my client is saying,” says Fairbrother, pressing the tips of his fingers together, “and, for the record, he has now repeated four times, is that he has no idea about the existence of any sarin, or a plot to use it in Rome.

  “He has been to Rome... he is not denying that fact...where he and Mr Draycott managed to escape with their lives after the distinct possibility that they were going to be beheaded by an Arab gentleman who is possibly an Isis terrorist, and his associates. He was aided in his escape by an agent of the Saudi security services, now unfortunately deceased, and fled with Mr Draycott and the woman Aafia who had stolen his diamond and thus kick-started this whole escapade in the first place, and made their way to Switzerland, and the chalet belonging to Simon Fellowes. Most regrettably, Simon and his girlfriend of the moment, Kylie McDermott, decided it would be great fun to join them…”

  “I think,” interrupts Johns, “given the serious nature of the situation, that we will have no option but to detain Mr Kimber for a further period of time.”

  “And I will object most strongly to the unnecessary detention of my client, a man who is clearly traumatised by recent events, and a victim of terrorism, I repeat, and who is not himself involved in terrorism.”

  “As you keep saying. Shall we call it a day then?” asks Johns, his hand on the recording device.

  Fairbrother nods, Harry shrugs and Johns turns off the tape recorder.

  * * *

  “Mary? It’s Charlotte here, darling. Great work yesterday. Listen I’ve had a call from my counterpart on the daily. They’d like you to work with their team on this story, which, by the way, just gets bigger by the hour.”

  Mary has deliberately kept her phone off all day and avoided looking at the news websites. She and Ben had viewed five flats in their price range, and they were both now tired and dispirited. Two-bedroom, ex-local authority flats in need of modernisation, or next door to dogs they could hear barking through paper-thin walls, their owners telling them to “Shut the fuck up, you little fucker!”

  “Let’s go and live in Istanbul,” she said as they left by the staircase because the lift was broken. Even the estate agent looked a bit nervous in this particular block.

  They retire to a pub, where a football match is being shown on a big screen, and a lot of fat white men and their wives and girlfriends are getting smashed. Sunday afternoon in Sidcup.

  “It’s hardly cafe culture, is it?” says Ben, returning with a pint and a glass of white wine to the quietest table they could find. It is at this point that Mary turns her phone back on and notices six missed calls, all of them from Charlotte. She rings her at once.

  “You’ll get full whack for however long it takes,” says Charlotte.

  “I’m a bit out of the loop,” says Mary. “Have there been any developments.”

  “Have there?” laughs Charlotte. “Just a bit, darling. Seems that Max has been arrested by the Italian police, preparing to gas St Peter’s Square with sarin during the Pope’s Easter address.”

  “No seriously,” says Mary. “What’s the latest?”

  “I am being serious, darling! Max was driving a water cannon that was going to spray all those good Catholics with sarin. Crazy, I know. Except that the water cannon has gone missing, Max was abducted by men in masks, and, well, it’s all a bit sketchy from there on in. We’re getting all our information from an Italian stringer with connections in the Ministry of Interior, and I’m pretty certain he’s working with just about every other news outlet in the entire world, so it’s not terribly exclusive.”

  “Fucking hell,” she says, looking at Ben. “I’ve got Ben here. Can I tell him?”

  “Might as well, it’s already been on Sky News, Al Jazeera and the BBC.”

  “What do they want me for?” asks Mary, sipping her wine, something cheap and nasty and not very cold.

  “They want the personal angle, like the stuff you wrote for me. But go a bit deeper. What was Harry like? Did you ever meet Max? Lots of colour.”

  “I see… well…”

  “Smash it, Mary. This could be the making of you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  By late afternoon Pizzuto’s rapidly expanding band of detectives has been joined by two men from Europol and tactical assault teams from the Central Security Operations Service, and they are about to begin their search for Omar’s warehouse when reports start coming in of a large fire at a disused trading estate about eight kilometres from Fiumicino airport.

  “This looks interesting,” Pizzuto tells the leader of the CSOS swat teams, a short wiry man with silver hair and skin like leather. “The blaze was reported two hours ago by a local farmer who went to investigate, but since the estate is in the process of being demolished, it had gone undetected and the flames had done their worst by then. There were also reports of a large explosion.”

  “Right. I’ll send a team over there at once,” says the CSOS leader.

  “And I’ll follow and bring the Englishman with me,” says Pizzuto. “We also need to get forensics down there, if there is anything left to analyse.”

  “And I will go and have another chat with Tariq,” says Maurilio, peeling himself from the wall against which he has been leaning. Having suddenly felt dog tired an hour or so ago, he is perking up again as the investigation resumes.

  * * *

  Having eaten a bowl of pasta
with some sort of tomato sauce, followed by a yoghurt, Max curled up on the bed and drifted off into a doze. He has been asleep for what feels like about five minutes when he is woken by the cell door clanking open.

  “Come,” says a uniformed policeman, beckoning Max to walk past him through the open door. He is led down a corridor and into a room, where Pizzuto and four or five male detectives are standing in front of a window.

  “Come here, Max, please,” says Pizzuto, the first time she used his first name with him. Max takes this as a good sign.

  The window looks into another room, brightly lit and where a line of boys of varying heights are standing. They are all Middle-Eastern-looking and all of them appear shifty and scared – all except a boy on the right end of the line, who is staring ahead, a hardness in his eyes that Max doesn’t recognise from before. He does recognise the boy however.

  “The ‘ragazzo’… the boy in the truck… is he here?” asks Pizzuto.

  “Yes,” says Max at once. “The one on the right.”

  Pizzuto nods, leans forward and says something into a microphone, and the boys are led off – all except the one that Max has identified, who continues to stare straight ahead.

  A uniformed policeman comes into the room and hands Pizzuto a slip of paper, a smile slowly spreading across her lips as she reads it.

  “He was picked up near the central station, seemingly working as – how you say? – prostituto,” she says in heavily accented English. “He had 100 euros in his pocket. If we can locate the truck, or anything is left of this warehouse, we’ll check for fingerprints and DNA. It still is possible to extract fingerprints even after a fire. By the way, do you know what he’s calling himself, the regazzo?”

  Max shakes his head.

  “He says his name is Omar.”

  * * *

  Wearing rubber gardening gloves, Omar starts with the utensils – the knives, forks, spoons and plates, which he places in the bucket of bleach. He then pours on the food remains, and finally the dustbin bin liner they had been thrown into. He then drags the mattress and all the furniture and piles them into a great heap in the middle of the warehouse, and sets light to them.

  The fire is slow to get going but that suits Omar, who picks up the various rags and ropes that he used to tie up and gag the Englishman and throws them into the gently licking flames. Finally he peels off his gloves and throws them on to the steadily strengthening blaze

  He makes one last check for any odds and ends, before rolling the barrels of petrol so that they surround the bonfire at a distance of about two metres. Next to two of these barrels are IEDs of the type he used to use in Iraq, the ones the Americans called ‘spiders’. Omar had felt almost nostalgic while building them last week.

  He doesn’t look back, but puts the Fiat into gear, lowers the handbrake and moves off. Only when he reaches the exit to this particular section of the trading estate does Omar slow down and lower his window. In his hand is a small black plastic fob, of the type used for opening garage doors.

  A split second after pressing the device there is the muffled sound of an explosion, immediately followed by a flash and a louder bang, and a fireball rips into the air. He pulls away quickly and heads for the main road, only turning to look back briefly once. Black smoke is billowing into the cloudless sky.

  There’s a pair of leather gloves on the passenger seat, which Omar now slips on, and a packet of antiseptic wipes, which he uses to clean the steering wheel and gearstick as he drives. The shoes are deliberately two sizes too big.

  About halfway to the airport he pulls in beside a wide drainage ditch that is full of weed and rubbish-choked water, and which he had scouted the previous week. Omar gets out and walks round to the boot, where the guns are stacked. He waits for a lorry and a car to pass before pulling them out carrying them to the ditch, dropping them one by one into the dark green ooze.

  He drives to the car hire drop-off at Fuimicino, a young woman giving the Fiat’s bodywork a quick inspection, before checking the fuel level and asking whether Omar had enjoyed his stay.

  “Business, I’m afraid,” says Omar, and the woman shrugs. He can see that she’s not happy to be working on Easter Sunday.

  “Thank you,” says Omar. “Which way to departures please?”

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Tariq is out of bed and resting in an armchair when Maurilio arrives at his hospital room. The window has even been opened slightly and the lightest of spring breezes is wafting into the room, along with the distant rumble and tooting of traffic.

  “Glad to see you up,” he says to the Libyan.

  “You stopped him then?” Tariq asks as Maurilio perches on the end of the bed.

  “Yes, we stopped him,” says Maurilio. “Thank God.”

  “They had the television on in the nurses’ room,” says Tariq. “I see you’re looking for the two Englishmen.”

  “Found them both,” says Maurilio. “What can you tell me about them?”

  “Quite a lot actually,” says Tariq, Maurilio trying hard not to betray his excitement. He waits, as the Libyan seems to collect his thoughts.

  “They were sent by Aafia’s father,” he says at length. “They had been trying to get the diamond back that Aafia supposedly stole, and her father told them he’d pay them its value if they went to Rome and persuaded her to come back to the UK.”

  “I see,” says Maurilio. “And was that likely?”

  “No, not at all, and I don’t know what his little game was,” says Tariq. “He was sending the Englishmen to an almost certain death. Why would he do that?”

  “I can’t think,” says Maurilio. “Have you given it any thought?”

  “Maybe he wanted to create some sort of crisis,” says Tariq. “He didn’t approve of what Aafia was doing and he thought she was putting her life at risk. She’s his favourite, you see. Perhaps he thought this would, as the British say, put the cat among the pigeons. Although in this case it was putting the pigeons among the cats. But, no, I don’t know what he was thinking.”

  “What happened after they arrived?”

  “Well, Aafia’s father must have given them the details of the cafe where Aafia and I hung out, pretending to be thrusting young entrepreneurs. The owner loved us – we spent so much money there. We asked her to keep an eye out for any strange-looking foreigners who turned up, and she did. They turned up there last week – Max and Harry, and she tipped us the wink.”

  Maurilio isn’t sure what ‘tipped us the wink’ means, but lets it pass.

  “You must have known that you were leading them into an incredibly dangerous situation,” he says. “Why didn’t you just tell them to get lost and leave it like that?”

  “Ah yes, and I regret that now,” says Tariq, who lapses into silence. “You see…” he continues, before resuming his silence.

  Maurilio waits, looking at the motes of dust that are dancing in the sunlight that is now glancing into the room, falling in a rectangle at his feet.

  “There were two problems,” Tariq resumes at length. “The first is that we were getting so close to finding out what the terrorists had planned. Or we knew in general terms what they had planned, we just didn’t know exactly where and when. We were terrified of them getting cold feet, or changing their plans at this point, before we had more details.

  “The other is that Omar was watching us. He didn’t really trust Aafia and me from the start and had taken to following us and observing us covertly. We pretended we didn’t notice him, but we got used to him shadowing us when we were out and about, and he was there that morning.

  “We didn’t give it too much thought, I’m afraid. We just acted instinctively. He would have seen us with the Englishmen and Aafia thought that if she took them back to the compound and told Omar that they had come to get their diamond back, then perhaps… I don’t know.”

  “Did Omar know about the diamond?”

  “Not at that stage, no.”

  “What happened next?�
�

  Tariq sighs. What did happen before Omar caught him and nearly killed him with those hammer fist-blows to the temple? As if his body senses the approach of this event, he shivers and a feeling of nausea passes through him.

  “We had a big argument about what to do with the Englishmen,” says Tariq, after the feeling of sickness has subsided. “The Daesh wanted to kill them straight away, and we said that it would complicate matters to do that. We were just trying to buy time. There were plenty of places where we could hold them prisoner until after the event.

  “Then Omar got really excited about not only killing them, but executing them on video – the video to be posted online immediately after the attack on Rome. He was the leader and so the others fell behind him and helped set it up. Actually, I think they rather enjoy this sort of thing.

  “Anyway, it was then that Aafia went to talk to the guy from the Saudi secret services. They had to do something quickly. And I remember Aafia telling me to get out quickly, to involve the Italian authorities, and running down the staircase. But that, I’m afraid, is all that I remember.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  “And now for the tricky bit,” says Fairbrother. A CID officer had shown them round to a back door that opens on to the police car park. The lawyer has been allowed to leave his BMW here this morning.

  “What is going to be tricky?” asks Harry, dressed in the clothes he had bought in that boutique in Martigny, and which he now feels look rather absurd. The weight of the Rolex rubs on wrists still sore from being bound in that place in Rome. Jesus, was that really only five days ago?

  “Well you might like to know that you and your friend Max have been headline news since Easter Saturday,” Fairbrother is saying. “The ladies and gentlemen of the fourth estate are currently congregated in an unseemly huddle in front of the police station.”