It was a close call. “That was great too,” Rachel said. “I think any food tastes good when you’ve got time to enjoy it.”
“When you don’t feel like you’re being hunted, you mean?”
“Right.”
Gabriel nodded, as if he agreed, then said, “Oh, we’re being hunted all right. But sometimes the hunter stops for a while, you know? While he figures out his next move.”
Rachel was about to speak, to tell Gabriel that he could always be relied upon to bring her down, when her eye was caught by a movement at the end of the room. She looked up to see Mahmoud standing in the doorway, his eyes darting around anxiously.
“Mahmoud?” He looked at her and began walking slowly towards the table. He was wearing stained camouflage trousers and a dusty, brown leather jacket. Rachel watched him as he got closer, seeing something in his eyes that made her uncomfortable, and remembering the immaculate striped robe and slippers he had been wearing just a minute or two before. “Why did you change?”
He would not meet her eyes. “I did not change.”
“But…” Then Rachel glanced up and saw another Mahmoud – the original Mahmoud – in the striped robe and slippers, at the far end of the room. He looked across at the man in the leather jacket and nodded a little nervously.
“Oh, right,” Rachel said. “Sorry.”
Twins? Why she was even the tiniest bit surprised?
The man in the leather jacket squeezed in next to her without waiting to be asked and began grabbing at the leftover food. Rachel tried to inch away from him without making it too obvious.
“This is Mahmoud’s brother,” Gabriel said. “Ali.”
Ali glanced up at her, then went back to his food, attacking it as though he had not eaten for a week. Rachel moved a little further away. There was a smell coming off him, from his clothes or his skin. Sweat and oil. She noticed the tattoo on his hand.
Gabriel stood up. “Ali is the man we’ve been waiting for,” he said.
“What?”
“He’ll be our guide from now on.” He turned and spoke to the whole table. “You all need to get a good night’s sleep. We have to make an early start in the morning.”
Rachel stared at the newcomer and was embarrassed when he looked up quickly and caught her. She tried to summon up a smile. She felt a small shiver pass through her when a slimy string of gristle fell from the corner of his mouth and he snapped at it, quick and vicious, like a wild dog.
Laura Sullivan had watched Gabriel’s every move since Seville. She had studied every expression on his face, hung on every word he had uttered, trying to find out what made him tick. Having got so close, she was now terrified that she would scare him away; that he would leave before she could ask the questions which had been burning in her mind for years.
Now, with everyone else in bed, Laura knew where she would find him. She climbed the stone stairs up on to the roof.
He stood on the far side of the roof terrace, silhouetted against the night sky. Laura’s knees felt weak as she crossed the tiles to meet him.
“Gabriel?”
He looked over his shoulder at her without saying anything. He smiled. Laura stood nervously beside him, looking out across the satellite dishes that flowered from the roofs, at odds with the ancient houses below.
“Hi. I didn’t want to disturb you, but…”
“There are questions you want to ask me. I know.”
Laura laughed. He was way ahead of her.
“So, ask,” Gabriel said.
Laura had dreamed about this moment, but now she had been given the go-ahead to ask whatever she wanted, she did not know where to begin. She took a deep breath and followed Gabriel’s gaze up into the sky, to the bright star on which he seemed to be focused.
“What’s that star?” she asked. “Is it … home?”
Gabriel spoke without looking at her. “It’s not quite as simple as that. It’s more of a beacon, or a satellite. I use it to get information, to get guidance. I use all the stars like that; to work out where I am, where I’m going. The sun too. It gives us energy; it gives us power.”
“When you say us?” Laura probed.
“People like me. People like you too…”
“Yeah, people on earth worshipped the sun for thousands of years … and got information from the stars. They set up big clocks, stone circles…” Laura realized she was gabbling, excited that his thoughts chimed with things she knew so much about. But she wanted him to do the talking. “I guess we just lost the skill over the years.”
Gabriel nodded. “That’s kind of why I’m here,” he said.
“Have you been here before?”
He nodded again, then fell silent.
Laura felt he was switching off. She tried another angle. “Listen, I have this … theory.”
“I know about your theory. You’re on the right track.”
Laura had no idea how he knew about her work, but could not contain a grin.
“Who else knows about it?” Gabriel asked. He fixed her with a stare. “How much do the people you work for know?”
“Only as much as I’ve told them,” Laura said. “But they’re not dumb; they can work stuff out.”
Gabriel was still.
“Who are you?” Laura asked. “No, wait, that sounds stupid. Are there any more of you … any more coming, I mean?”
Gabriel smiled. “We have to get away early tomorrow. We’ll talk some more, but for now…”
Laura realized that the conversation was over for the time being. She could not push too hard and risk blowing everything. She held out her hand to Gabriel, who shook it gently.
Then she went to bed.
When he was as sure as he could be that the guests were in their rooms, the Moroccan slipped into a passageway at the back of the building and made the phone call.
He cleared his throat before the call was answered. He did not want to sound unsure of himself.
“Tomorrow morning, first thing,” he said.
There was no response.
“But I will try and delay them. To give you time to get here.”
The old man pushed the barrow that contained their bags across the main square. Mahmoud and his brother led the party. Mahmoud pointed out items of interest, while Ali looked suspiciously left and right.
The Djemaa el-Fna was a vast, open area at the centre of the city which only a hundred years before had been used for the trading of slaves. Although you could no longer buy people there, Rachel thought that it looked as though you could buy almost anything else. Smoke and steam from a hundred food stalls hung in the air, offering everything from boiled snails to devilish-looking roasted goats’ heads. The square was bordered by market stalls which branched out in every direction into the alleys of the souk.
In front of the stalls, herbalists and witch doctors set out their wares on carpets. They offered cures and charms and curses in the form of ostrich feet, hedgehog skins and live chameleons locked in bamboo cages. Lagging behind at the rear of the group, Rachel and the Spanish girls stopped to look at snake-charmers with cobras in baskets and monkeys tethered by chains.
“Photo! Monkey!” An unshaven man in a filthy djellaba stepped out in front of Rachel, Inez and Carmen. “English? Françaises?” he asked. The Spanish girls tried to wave him away, but Rachel was simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the monkey chained to the man’s umbrella and wearing a nappy in an attempt to make it look cute.
“You like snake? Photo?” Grinning a toothless smile, the man pulled a long green snake from inside a sack and tried to drape it round Carmen’s neck. Both Spanish girls squealed.
“Get it off!” Inez screamed. “We hate snakes!”
“Leave us alone!” Rachel shouted at the man. He held up a hand and backed away as Gabriel turned to look at him. The girls thanked Rachel and they hurried off after the rest of the group across the square.
By the time the girls reached the battered old coach that was parked on th
e far side of the Djemaa el-Fna, Mahmoud and Ali were already arguing. The vehicle which Ali had procured had obviously been used, many years before, as a tour bus for a holiday company. Spelled out on the side of the bus in ornate red script was the word:
Faded palm trees, along with some words in Arabic, flanked the lettering. Some of the rear windows were broken and patched up with packing tape. Others were hung with scraps of towel to ward off the sun, and none of the coach’s wheels looked as if they matched.
“It was working last night when I parked it, I swear,” Ali shouted at his brother, casting nervous glances at the rest of the group, who were already gathered around the open bonnet of the coach. “I drove it here.”
Mahmoud looked ready to explode with rage. “I said to get something reliable, you idiot. Where did you get this heap of junk? I gave you money! This is really bad. We need to get them away quickly. Time is against us!”
Mahmoud and his brother continued to argue loudly in Arabic, pushing and shoving each other and waving their arms in the air.
Jean-Bernard removed his head from under the bonnet, where he and his twin had been fiddling, and pulled out a fistful of wires.
“Kaput,” Jean-Luc said.
Mahmoud and Ali stopped squabbling. Ali looked puzzled.
“This is terrible,” Mahmoud said despairingly. “What can we do?”
“It’s OK; we can fix it,” Jean-Bernard said.
Jean-Luc nodded. “One hour, perhaps.”
Mahmoud apologized profusely for his brother’s stupidity and inefficiency. Gabriel just nodded, watching Ali out of the corner of his eye as the Moroccan ducked beneath the bonnet and attempted to help the French boys. Mahmoud offered to take the rest of the group to the terrace of a nearby cafe. Kate accepted and said she would take care of Duncan and Morag. Seeing the steely look on Kate’s face, Laura hesitated, but then she decided to grasp the nettle and tag along.
Rachel, Inez and Carmen asked if they could go and look at some of the stalls on the other side of the square instead, promising they would be back within the hour.
Carmen and Inez laughed as Rachel haggled for the orange pointed slippers that were already on her feet. She was running rings around the trader who was happy to be doing business with what he believed to be a very special customer.
“One hundred fifty dirhams. Good price.”
“Two hundred!” Rachel said, confounding his expectations.
“Take them … please,” the man said. “I would be honoured, Your Majesty!” He watched the girls turn away with the slippers and immediately began telling the stallholder next to him about the gift he believed he had just given the Queen of England. Inez and Carmen giggled and clapped at Rachel’s developing powers of suggestion.
The girls walked into an alley where all the stalls were selling brightly coloured blankets. They turned into another where everything seemed to be made of tanned leather and then a third where ornate lamps twinkled at the front of every stall.
Inez and Carmen stopped to look at some silver jewellery. Rachel tried to look interested, but it was not really her thing. She wandered on a few paces, then turned into a small square. Looking around, she was lured by the intensely coloured spices stacked in barrels and intrigued by the skins of pythons and leopards that hung from the shopfronts.
She was a long way from the Mall of America.
On the terrace in front of the cafe, Laura and Kate sat sipping mint tea while Mahmoud joked with Morag and Duncan. Laura decided to break the silence. To try again.
“Listen, how many times can I say ‘I’m sorry’, Kate?”
Kate shrugged.
“I just want to say … you know, everything you think about me is probably true. I was working solely for the project, yes. I did only have my own research and my own interests at heart. But, in my defence – if I have one – this time they spun me a line. They double-crossed me too. I didn’t know they’d take Adam.”
Laura took a deep breath. She was telling the truth, but Kate wasn’t buying it. “Look, Kate, if I hadn’t bargained with them to let your kids ‘escape’ from Hope in the first place, I think they’d be in a worse situation than they are now.”
Kate’s curiosity was momentarily piqued. “Worse? How much worse exactly? OK, Rachel’s with us, but we’re all on a one-way ticket to God knows where. Oh and if you remember, my son has been abducted. Does it get any worse?”
Laura couldn’t tell Kate what she really thought: that if she had left Rachel and Adam at the Hope Project, they might be dead now, like specimens in a jar. Or that if Kate had stayed, she might be dead too; things might have been a whole lot worse.
“I will get Adam back,” Laura said. She looked Kate straight in the eye, hoping that she could actually deliver. “I promise I will do my very best to get him released. The only problem is … I might have to make contact with the big boys at Hope.”
“Whatever it takes,” Kate said.
Laura looked up and realized that Mahmoud was hanging on her every word. He looked flustered.
“What is it, Mahmoud?” Laura said. “You look worried.”
“I was just thinking, we must get back soon. We really need to get going.”
Kate thanked Mahmoud for the tea and they all set off back towards the coach.
Inez looked at her watch. “We’d better head back.”
The time had flown, and both sisters were now laden with shopping bags. They drew every eye as they strolled through the souk, heads held high, dressed in identical silk djellebas and rattling with bangles and rows of coloured beads.
“Where’s Rachel?” Carmen looked around. They were somewhere inside a maze packed with booths, dead ends and dark corners, and both realized that they hadn’t seen Rachel for the last quarter of an hour.
“We should head for the square. That’s where she’ll go if she’s lost us.” Inez looked around too. She had no idea which way the central square was.
A young Moroccan boy who had obviously overheard their conversation grinned at them. “Djemaa el-Fna? Main square? I take you.” He winked, and the girls, grateful for a little guidance, followed him. Five minutes later, having pressed a few coins into the boy’s hand, they found themselves back in the hubbub of the square.
They walked briskly back in the direction they had taken an hour earlier, worried that they were going to be late. They hurried past the cages of reptiles and walked diagonally towards the spot where the coach was parked.
“Hey! Photo! Monkey?”
A familiar man stepped out in front of them, grinning his toothless smile and holding the monkey on a chain. Other men were starting to surround them, some with monkeys, and others – they saw to their horror – with snakes.
A circle began to form as other hawkers saw their opportunity. Sunglasses, toy serpents, wooden drums, fake watches were all thrust under the girls’ noses. Suddenly, the crowd was three deep around them, and Inez and Carmen began to panic; their fear bouncing from one to the other and escalating by the second.
“Photo! Monkey!” The first man shouted in Carmen’s face, holding the Barbary ape so close to her that the scabby animal was able to put a long arm round her neck and tug at her beads.
“I don’t want your … monkey!” Carmen shouted. “It’s wrong; it’s cruel,” she bawled, adding a very rude phrase which she only knew in English, but which was universally recognized.
Suddenly the crowd went quiet. The toothless man in the filthy djellaba looked offended by Carmen’s words and, spitting on the ground at her feet, he uttered a curse of his own.
Somewhere in the crowd a huge dog began to bark. The monkey grabbed hold of Carmen again, looking straight into her face and baring his yellow teeth.
Inez reached into her handbag. “We’ll give you money,” she said. “Just let us go.”
Carmen shrieked as the monkey pulled her hair, but Inez screamed louder when she saw several long black snakes slithering from their baskets and moving quickly across
the ground towards her feet…
Rachel made her way slowly through the crowded, narrow alleyways. Many of the stalls that pressed in on her from either side sold almost identical goods, so it took longer than it might normally have done for her to realize that she had walked past the same ones several times: she was lost.
And she had no idea where Carmen and Inez had got to.
She had heard a few different languages as she’d moved through the lattice of small streets and alleys: Arabic, French, a smattering of Spanish. She’d been able to understand them all, so decided to ask for directions. She stopped at a stall selling leather goods. The stallholder moved quickly across to her and began pointing at bags.
“These are top quality. Finest leather. You English? American?”
Rachel told him that she was American, that she did not need a new handbag, then asked, in perfect Arabic, for directions back to the main square. The stallholder looked taken aback. He raised an arm and pointed, seeming eager to be rid of her.
Rachel smiled and thanked him, “Shukran bezzaf.”
Walking back across the main square, Rachel tried to reach out to Carmen and Inez with her mind. She knew straight away that something was terribly wrong. She could sense their panic and confusion; the ragged pattern of distorted thoughts could only mean one thing.
Fear.
She turned at the scream coming from somewhere behind her and began pushing people aside, hurrying towards the far corner of the square where a small crowd had gathered.
Now, through the white noise of dread and helplessness, a simple message was coming through. Two words battering at the sides of Rachel’s skull as she picked up speed.
Help us…
She smelled the animals before she saw them; something pungent came from each one that made her very afraid. They were ready to attack; to kill. It was in every creature’s eyes too: a naked aggression that Rachel saw as the last onlooker stepped to one side, revealing the terrible trouble that Carmen and Inez were in.
The girls caught sight of Rachel and began to shout for help, their voices all but drowned out by the barking of the dogs, the terrible shrieking of the apes and the noise of the crowd.
The Burning Page 23