‘Dear Natalya, how pleasant to be escorting the most beautiful woman in Marrakech to the best restaurant in Marrakech,’ said Claude Zender. ‘It would bring joy to the hardest heart – and I, as you know, am soft as a fresh madeleine.’
Nat drew her shawl around her shoulders and took his proffered arm. Its girth made her feel tiny, like a sprite in a fairy tale. She saw that in his free hand he was carrying a folded copy of Jane’s Defence Weekly.
‘Catching up on the trade gossip, Claude? Anything about me?’ she asked, as they walked into the souk.
‘You have won the Most Beautiful Woman in the Industry Award for the fifth year running. And there’s a small ad you might want to follow up. . . ’ He paused in order to suppress a surge of hilarity. ‘A special offer on a used IPD400. One careful owner, instruction manual not included!’ He bellowed with laughter. ‘Oh dear, there’s no need to look so solemn, Natalya. I don’t mean to mock. We’ll have Champagne at Adela’s – they’ll crucify us on the price, but there is no substitute for lifting the spirits.’
They turned a dark corner and the medley of shouts, yelps and laughter from the Djemaa died away behind them. They were passing through an area given over to butchers’ shops, and the smooth, clammy tang of fresh meat lingered from the day’s business. Nat heard a scuffle ahead of them and simultaneously felt Zender release her arm and pirouette sideways. A sharp crack punctured the air. She saw Claude’s huge frame recoil. She stared into the gloom. A man, down on one knee thirty yards away, arm held out. For a moment she thought he’d been shot and was summoning her to help. Then the darkness was pierced by a spearhead of orange flame and she heard a snap at her feet. Why was she just standing here! A flat boom thumped in her ears. She ran to the edge of the alley and dropped down into the gutter. Claude was sitting opposite, aiming a large silver handgun down the alley.
She saw his finger close on the trigger twice in succession: the heavy blasts walloped off the walls and made her ears sing. The crouching man fired once in reply, the bullet spat off the cobbles between them. Then he turned and ran back round the corner.
‘Merde!’ said Zender. ‘I was once a better shot, but in this light. . . ’
Nat pulled herself up and ran over to him.
‘Claude, you’ve been hit.’
‘I have, yes.’ He shifted his weight and put an exploratory hand to his left side. ‘Their incompetence is astonishing,’ he muttered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They missed. Happily, though there is plenty to aim at, little is of vital importance.’ He produced a huge white linen handkerchief and wiped the damp folds of skin at his neck.
Natalya flipped her phone and started to dial. Claude’s fist reached out and closed over it. ‘No need. The bullet did not lodge.’
‘Claude, don’t be stupid. You must go to hospital. Please let me. You may be bleeding inside.’
He thought for a moment. ‘You can take me to Saint Jerome’s, in the Palmerie.’
Zender levered himself up onto one knee, then laced his fingers into the steel lattice of the shutters over the shopfront behind him and heaved himself upright. Natalya pushed at his arm in a futile attempt to help. A first-floor window just down the street had been opened a crack. Someone she could not see was staring at them.
‘The gun, Natalya.’
‘I must call the police,’ she said, looking around at her feet. The gun was propped in the angle of the wall and pavement: a Desert Eagle, a massive gas-operated semi-automatic. She passed it up to Claude, who quickly inspected the safety – leaving it off, Natalya noticed – and stuffed it into his pocket.
‘The police,’ she said again.
‘I should not be carrying a gun.’ His breathing was snatched, uneven. ‘It would cost me a fortune.’
‘Let me look,’ she said, and reached tentatively for his jacket. There was a patch of wet crimson just above the waistband of his trousers.
‘Leave it. We must get back to the Djemaa.’
The souk suddenly seemed a savage place, its putrid, meaty breath swirling in the grey fluorescent light reaching in from the Djemaa. A small crowd had gathered round the arched entrance, and now peered at them as they made their way back round the corner. Zender walked steadily, but Natalya had never before felt so powerful an urge to run, and for the thirty or forty paces to the square she felt like a bird trapped in a narrow tunnel, her heart flapping in terror. She kept looking back for the kneeling gunman, expecting to hear the crack-snap as he fired at them again.
At last they reached the sanctuary of the square. The crowd drew back to inspect them. Nat looked round for Zender’s Mercedes, but it had gone.
‘Taxi, taxi, toute suite,’ she ordered. Fear lapped at her throat and her voice was weak. The boys in the crowd, any number of whom would usually have hared off to find a driver, stared back at her. She saw on their faces the dull-eyed, vindictive look of those to whom the vulnerability of people they are taught to revere has suddenly been revealed.
‘Trois cent dirhams pour nous conduire à la Palmerie,’ she said, forcing herself to shout. It was an absurd fare for a fifteen-minute drive. After a pause, one of the boys raced off, followed by two others. Claude was breathing badly, head down. She led him over to the taxi rank, and soon a car drew up and the driver hopped out.
‘Vous me payez avant que je vous conduis— ’ He stopped abruptly when he saw Zender. ‘Je m’excuse. Je n’avais pas compris que mon passager. . . I did not know,’ he said, his face quivering with fear. He seemed paralysed by the huge presence of the wounded arms dealer. Nat pulled open the passenger door.
‘Push the seat back as far as it will go,’ she ordered.
Zender squeezed in, wincing. The thick flesh of his cheeks was ashy and sunken, and sweat trickled from his scalp. An odour of over-ripe melon mingled with the smell of dirty vinyl inside the car. The driver leaned on his horn and sent the Mercedes surging forward. Once clear of the Djemaa, he glanced sideways, clearly horrified at the state of his passenger. They passed through the gates into the Palmerie and soon after drew up in front of Saint Jerome’s. The low, off-white building hovered over an oasis of clipped desert grass set with miniature palms and low-set lamps that threw out fans of eerie green light. Nat ran up the path to the main entrance and twin doors whispered open to receive her. Inside, a thin woman in spotless white cotton asked in a self-consciously formal manner whether she had an appointment.
‘It’s an emergency.’
‘I am sorry, Madame, we do not cater for emergencies,’ she said, and reached for a photocopied sheet showing the route to the public hospital.
Natalya placed her American Express card on the counter. ‘Get four orderlies and a stretcher to the taxi at the front. Have two nurses on standby and call in the best surgeon on your books. I have a very important person in the car and he’s been shot. If you turn him away, you may be responsible for his death, and even your lovely white uniform won’t save you then. Do you understand?’
The receptionist looked suitably awed and did what she was told. It was twenty minutes before they had manoeuvred their patient into a treatment room and uncovered the wound. Nat stood in the corner and watched. It was an ugly gash four or five inches long, clean enough at the front, where the bullet had started to cut its channel, but where the lead had tumbled out the flesh was mashed and flayed. Was this the opening exchange in the impending downfall of Claude Zender, she wondered. Complicated was the word al Hamra had used to describe the state of Zender’s affairs. Wasn’t this just the sort of thing you could expect if you complicated your life by consorting with terrorists?
The doctor was a sour-faced man in late middle age who didn’t seem to know who Zender was. He maintained a stubborn silence as he assessed the damage and recorded the details on a form handed to him by one of the nurses. When asked for his name, Zender replied, ‘Vianney Malthus’, and gave the Riad des Ombres as his address. The doctor stitched him up, while Zender sucked gas and
air through a rubber mask. His spirits soon recovered sufficiently for him to demand, between lusty inhalations, that they send for a bottle of Cognac from La Mamounia: he was very specific about the brand.
‘Don’t let them pretend they haven’t any – I drank a glass two nights ago,’ he informed the bewildered orderly.
‘I am sorry that our evening has come to such a pitiful end,’ he said to Natalya when, half an hour later, the doctor had finished. ‘But see, the clouds are lifting and the silver lining is revealed: our Cognac has arrived.’
Zender watched eagerly while Nat poured the brandy.
‘A generous glass is in order,’ said the thirsty patient. ‘The bartender who usually serves it is a dreadful miser.’
Nat tasted the brandy and thought back to the scene in the alley – the man kneeling with arm outstretched, the jet of grey-orange flame. . . But the precise sequence of events was a blur. She couldn’t recall when the second bullet had been fired, or which was the one she’d heard striking the cobbles at her feet, or even how many shots there had been.
She put down her glass and stood up.
‘Claude, I’m going back to the Riad.’
‘Of course, how thoughtless of me.’ He extracted his phone from the jacket laid over the back of the chair by his bed and called a taxi. ‘Five minutes. We’ll go together.’
‘We? Claude, don’t be ridiculous. You must stay here tonight, so they can look after you.’
‘I will not remain in this house of death a moment longer. There is nothing more they can do, besides which, they will be hoovering every dollar of credit from my cards even as I speak. Where is my wallet. . . Oh, here it is, quite unmolested. Excellent. We will leave without paying, hah!’
‘I left my card at reception when we arrived.’
‘Florence Nightingale is a hideous old hussy beside you, my dear Natalya. I owe you a deep debt of gratitude, which I propose to repay at an exorbitant rate of interest.’
‘I won’t hold my breath,’ Natalya retorted.
‘Nor I, for I am almost out of it.’
The taxi arrived. Zender waved away a disclaimer presented by the woman at reception and they drove back into town. When they reached the Riad, Zender started to clamber out after her. ‘I feel rejuvenated by my fortunate escape. Let us see if the Riad can find a bottle to match this joie de vivre that has filled me despite everything we have endured. I predict we will yet finish off the evening in style!’
She turned to face him and saw something sorrowful in his eyes, his big, restless eyes in their oyster pouches of baggy skin. She had seen it before, the momentary lapse of his affable façade, to reveal a seam of sadness that she had always found touching in a man so powerful. It lay there in the thick folds of his broad forehead, in the uneven line of follicles with their sparse outcrop of bristly black hairs, in his freak’s body, mired in its surfeit of flesh.
‘Claude,’ Nat said, ‘there’s a bullet hole in your side. Go home!’
Clive Silk was in his study, ostensibly to review the day’s events and work out how best to save himself from the circling vultures; but so far he’d done nothing but stare out of the window at a misshapen blob of smoke-grey moon lurking behind the horse chestnut tree at the entrance to his driveway. It was 2.30 a.m. A pair of stone-faced men bearing SIS IDs had visited his house early in the afternoon and ‘checked’ his computer, then insisted on examining Claire’s and his daughter’s also. He’d arrived home to find the pair of them in a state of indignation that was not much mollified by his protestations about such things being a routine annoyance for MI6 staff.
This was not routine. They were squeezing him, prodding him, trying to trip him up. He’d drunk two glasses of whisky, but rather than making him feel calm and decisive, the alcohol sent a giddy parade of images reeling through his mind: de la Mere kneeling beside him in the lobby outside the MI6 conference room, up to his hips in purple-upholstered foam; Sir Iain Strang gripping the table with his butcher’s hands; the large, smooth knees of Caroline Hampshire. . . How much had Strang enjoyed having a go at him while the others watched. Like being held down and bitten.
Did he want to speak to Claude Zender? He’d been toying with the idea all day. Zender wouldn’t tell him anything, but perhaps he could glean something from the obfuscations and denials. He went downstairs, pulled a coat over his pyjamas and put on a pair of trainers he wore for gardening, then went out to the shed and took a pre-paid mobile from a collection he kept in a fertiliser box. He got out the Range Rover and drove for twenty minutes, up into the Surrey Hills, to a parking area where he and Claire sometimes came for a Sunday walk. He took out the phone and dialled Zender’s number. To his surprise the arms dealer answered.
‘Mon cher Monsieur Soie, you are calling me once again. I feel a certain frisson, like a young girl with an attentive beau,’ said Claude Zender, who had done honour to the wound in his side with a cocktail of narcotics and was now enjoying a near euphoric sense of his own inviolability.
‘What game are you playing with Palatine?’
‘Where are you, I wonder? In a remote car park, with your cloak and dagger?’
‘Did Palatine pay you to get hold of the IPD400?’
‘Palatine, Palatine. Remind me. . . ’
‘Have you still got it? You said you’d moved it on.’
‘You wish to be informed of every little wrinkle in my affairs?’
‘This is not a little wrinkle. People here know that Palatine is holed up with his box and running live tests.’
‘A fantastic notion. How do they know it?’
‘What does it matter? Our networks have some code that alerts the duty officer when it tries to break in.’
‘Technology is so flighty, don’t you think?’
‘Did you pay someone to corrupt the Grosvenor database?’
‘What an excitable frame of mind you are in, Clive. I prescribe a milky drink and a good night’s rest.’
‘I’m up to my neck in it here, Zender. You can’t take our money with one hand and piss all over us with the other.’
Zender laughed mightily. ‘What a superbly maladroit metaphor, mon soie! I do urge you to confine yourself to the argot of the administrative office before some unspeakable embarrassment occurs.’ He paused, and when he next spoke, the bantering tone was cut with menace. ‘What would His Holiness Sir Iain Strang do if he knew you were making untraceable calls to Marrakech at three in the morning?’
‘Sell the thing back to Grosvenor. Natalya Kocharian can make the arrangements. And do it quickly.’
‘You wish me to arrange the return of a piece of equipment that inspires such acquisitive hysteria? The shame would haunt me for all eternity.’
‘Then get the next flight to Geneva and hide in the fucking lake.’
Chapter Thirteen
James rested for an hour before dawn. As soon as the sky started to lighten, he finished the water in the bottle, ate another brittle disc of bread, and scoured the desert ahead. Something odd: a strip of smooth, muddy yellow between the horizon and the desert floor, as if someone had drawn a line along the foot of the sky with a dirty felt-tipped pen. Five or six miles away, he thought, though distances were hard to judge. It must be a trick of the light. It will go when the sun gets higher.
The sun got higher but the muddy line thickened. Tarmac? Don’t clutch at straws. Not out here. Hunger was sapping his legs, tiredness lapping at his heels.
An hour later he found vehicle tracks, faint patterns embedded in the flattened dirt. Like the nomad’s trail he’d seen the previous day, this track ran north–south. He crossed and went on west, still watching the horizon, fixated in spite of himself.
His foot made sharp contact with a fist-sized rock. He watched it go bouncing away in front of him. The rock hit a ridge and gave a little hop. He traced its gentle arc, saw where it would land. . .
He got his feet out from underneath him just in time to duck the main force of the blast. Then a splinter
of pain seared up his shin and stabbed into his knee. He felt the patter of hot debris on his back, smelled the fierce, gritty reek of explosive. His mouth was full of dirt.
Landmine. He was in a minefield.
No wonder the tracks went north–south.
Smoke and dust drifted over his head. He lay still, trying to gauge how badly his leg was injured. Even through the haze of endorphins, it felt like there was a skewer scratching at the nerves beneath his kneecap. The road was seventy or eighty yards behind him and he could retrace his steps. That would get him to the dirt track. Then what? He spat sand from his mouth and drank from one of the pipes at his waist. How far north to. . . to anywhere? He lay for ten minutes, fighting the urge to roar at the sky.
Nat woke up and checked her messages. Nothing from Nikolai. Nothing about Nikolai. No bad news, from the police or the hospitals. No good news, either. A girlfriend back home who didn’t even know she was away. Sir Peter Beddoes: Call urgently.
She was about to do so when her phone trembled in a dire attempt to render Nessun Dorma as a ringtone: Zender.
‘I have good news for you,’ said the arms broker, ‘with caveats. It seems that my clients may be willing to deal.’
‘That’s a change from the line you spun me last night. Maybe I should arrange to have you shot more often.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You were wounded, remember?’ said Nat, thinking it was unlike Claude to be nonplussed by a joke.
‘I recall the event both as indistinctly as can be and yet with quite horrible precision,’ he replied. ‘Alors, regarding my client, I was able – most skilfully, should you ask – to turn things to your advantage, an act of chivalry that risks destroying my career, but I remain devoted to your interests, to the point of obsession, one might say—’
Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel) Page 19