The Moroccan Girl

by Charles Cumming

  “Your research, your characters, your descriptions. All first class.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The tradecraft. The technology. Rings absolutely true.”

  “I really appreciate you saying that.”

  “I should know. I work in that world.” Carradine was suddenly in a different conversation altogether. His father had worked for British Intelligence in the 1960s. Though he had told Carradine very little about his life as a spy, his career had fired his son’s interest in the secret world. “You must have, too, judging by your inside knowledge. You seem to understand espionage extraordinarily well.”

  The opportunist in Carradine, the writer hungry for contacts and inspiration, took a half step forward.

  “No. I roamed around in my twenties. Met a few spies along the way, but never got the tap on the shoulder.”

  The bearded man stared with his beady eyes. “I see. Well, that surprises me.” He had a polished English accent, unashamedly upper-class. “So you haven’t always been a writer?”

  “No.”

  Given that he was such a fan, Carradine was intrigued that the man hadn’t known this. His biography was all over the books: Born in Bristol, C. K. Carradine was educated at the University of Manchester. After working as a teacher in Istanbul, he joined the BBC as a graduate trainee. His first novel, Equal and Opposite, became an international bestseller. C. K. Carradine lives in London. Perhaps people didn’t bother reading the jacket blurbs.

  “And do you live around here?”

  “I do.” Four years earlier, he had sold the film rights to his first novel to a Hollywood studio. The film had been made, the film had bombed, but the money he had earned had allowed him to buy a small flat in Lancaster Gate. Carradine didn’t anticipate being able to pay off the mortgage until sometime around his eighty-fifth birthday, but at least it was home. “And you?” he said. “Are you private sector? HMG?”

  The bearded man stepped to one side as a pedestrian walked past. A brief moment of eye contact suggested that he was not in a position to answer Carradine’s question with any degree of candor. Instead he said: “I’m working in London at present” and allowed the noise from a passing bus to take the inquiry away down the street.

  “Robert,” he said, raising his voice slightly as a second bus applied air brakes on the opposite side of the road. “You go by ‘Kit’ in the real world, is that correct?”

  “That’s right,” Carradine replied, shaking his hand.

  “Tell you what. Take my card.”

  Somewhat unexpectedly, the man lifted up his briefcase, balanced it precariously on a raised knee, rolled his thumb over the three-digit combination locks and opened it. As he reached inside, lowering his head and searching for a card, Carradine caught sight of a pair of swimming goggles. By force of habit he took notes with his eyes: flecks of gray hair in the beard; bitten fingernails; the suit jacket slightly frayed at the neck. It was hard to get a sense of Robert’s personality; he was like a foreigner’s idea of an eccentric Englishman.

  “Here you are,” he said, withdrawing his hand with the flourish of an amateur magician. The card, like the man, was slightly creased and worn, but the authenticity of the die-stamped government logo was unmistakable:

  FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE

  ROBERT MANTIS

  OPERATIONAL CONTROL CENTER SPECIALIST

  A mobile phone number and email address were printed in the bottom left-hand corner. Carradine knew better than to ask how an “Operational Control Center Specialist” passed his time; it was obviously a cover job. As, surely, was the surname: “Mantis” sounded like a pseudonym.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’d offer you one of my own but I’m afraid writers don’t carry business cards.”

  “They should,” said Mantis quickly, slamming the briefcase shut. Carradine caught a sudden glimpse of impatience in his character.

  “You’re right,” he said. He made a private vow to go to Ryman’s and have five hundred cards printed up. “So how did you come across my books?”

  The question appeared to catch Mantis off guard.

  “Oh, those.” He set the briefcase down on the pavement. “I can’t remember. My wife, possibly? She may have recommended you. Are you married?”

  “No.” Carradine had lived with two women in his life—one a little older, one a little younger—but the relationships hadn’t worked out. He wondered why Mantis was inquiring about his personal life but added “I haven’t met the right person yet” because it seemed necessary to elaborate on his answer.

  “Oh, you will,” said Mantis wistfully. “You will.”

  They had reached a natural break in the conversation. Carradine looked along the street in the direction of Notting Hill Gate, trying to suggest with his body language that he was running late for an important meeting. Mantis, sensing this, picked up the briefcase.

  “Well, it was very nice to meet the famous author,” he gushed. “I really am a huge fan.” Something in the way he said this caused Carradine suddenly to doubt that Mantis was telling the truth. “Do stay in touch,” he added. “You have my details.”

  Carradine touched the pocket where he had placed the business card. “Why don’t I phone you?” he suggested. “That way you’ll have my number.”

  Mantis snuffed the idea out as quickly and as efficiently as he had snapped shut his briefcase.

  “Perhaps not,” he said. “Do you use WhatsApp?”

  “I do.”

  Of course. End-to-end encryption. No prying eyes at the Service establishing a link between an active intelligence officer and a spy novelist hungry for ideas.

  “Then let’s do it that way.” A family of jabbering Spanish tourists bustled past pulling a huge number of wheeled suitcases. “I’d love to carry on our conversation. Perhaps we can have a pint one of these days?”

  “I’d like that,” Carradine replied.

  Mantis was already several feet away when he turned around.

  “You must tell me how you do it,” he called out.

  “Do what?”

  “Make it all up. Out of thin air. You must tell me the secret.”

  * * *

  Writers have a lot of time on their hands. Time to brood. Time to ponder. Time to waste. In the years since he had given up his job at the BBC, Carradine had become a master of procrastination. Faced with a blank page at nine o’clock in the morning, he could find half a dozen ways of deferring the moment at which he had to start work. A quick game of FIFA on the Xbox; a run in the park; a couple of sets of darts on Sky Sports 3. These were the standard—and, as far as Carradine was concerned, entirely legitimate—tactics he employed in order to avoid his desk. There wasn’t an Emmy Award–winning box set or classic movie on Netflix that he hadn’t watched when he should have been trying to reach his target of a thousand words per day.

  “It’s a miracle you get any work done,” his father had said when Carradine unwisely confessed to the techniques he had mastered for circumventing deadlines. “Are you bored or something? Sounds as though you’re going out of your tree.”

  He wasn’t bored, exactly. He had tried to explain to his father that the feeling was more akin to restlessness, to curiosity, a sense that he had unfinished business with the world.

  “I’m stalled,” he said. “I’ve been very lucky with the books so far, but it turns out being a writer is a strange business. We’re outliers. Solitude is forced on us. If I was a book, I’d be stuck at the halfway stage.”

  “It’s perfectly normal,” his father had replied. “You’re still young. There are bits of you that have not yet been written. What you need is an adventure, something to get you out of the office.”

  He was right. Although Carradine managed to work quickly and effectively when he put his mind to it, he had come to realize that each day of his professional life was almost exactly the same as the last. He was often nostalgic for Istanbul and the slightly chaotic life of his twenties, for the possibili
ty that something surprising could happen at any given moment. He missed his old colleagues at the BBC: the camaraderie, the feuds, the gossip. Although writing had been good to him, he had not expected it to become his full-time career at such a comparatively early stage in his life. In his twenties Carradine had worked in a vast, monolithic corporation with thousands of employees, frequently traveling overseas to make programs and documentaries. In his thirties, he had lived and worked mostly alone, existing for the most part within a five-hundred-meter radius of his flat in Lancaster Gate. He had yet fully to adjust to the change or to accept that the rest of his professional life would likely be spent in the company of a keyboard, a mouse and a Dell Inspiron 3000. To the outside world, the life of a writer was romantic and liberating; to Carradine it sometimes resembled a gilded cage.

  All of which made the encounter with Mantis that much more intriguing. Their conversation had been a welcome distraction from the established rhythms and responsibilities of his day-to-day life. At frequent moments over the next twenty-four hours, Carradine found himself thinking about their chat on Bayswater Road. Had it been prearranged? Did the “Foreign and Commonwealth Office”—surely a euphemism for the Service—know that C. K. Carradine lived and worked in the area? Had Mantis been sent to feel him out about something? Had the plot of one of his books come too close to a real-world operation? Or was he acting in a private capacity, looking for a writer who might tell a sensitive story using the screen of fiction? An aficionado of conspiracy thrillers, Carradine didn’t want to believe that their meeting had been merely a chance encounter. He wondered why Mantis had declared himself an avid fan of his books without being able to say where or how he had come across them. And surely he was aware of his father’s career in the Service?

  He wanted to know the truth about the man from the FCO. To that end he took out Mantis’s business card, tapped the number into his phone and sent a message on WhatsApp.

  Very good to meet you. Glad you’ve enjoyed the books. This is my number. Let’s have that pint.

  Carradine saw that Mantis had come online. The message he had sent quickly acquired two blue ticks. Mantis was “typing.”

  Likewise, delighted to run into you. Lunch Wednesday?

  Carradine replied immediately.

  Sounds good. My neck of the woods or yours?

  Two blue ticks.

  Mine.

  2

  “Mine” turned out to be a small, one-bedroom flat in Marylebone. Carradine had expected to be invited to lunch at Wheelers or White’s; that was how he had written similar scenes in his books. Spook meeting spook at the Travellers Club, talking sotto voce about “the threat from Russia” over Chablis and fish cakes. Instead Mantis sent him an address on Lisson Grove. He was very precise about the timing and character of the meeting.

  Please don’t be late. It goes without saying that this is a private matter, not for wider circulation.

  Carradine was about halfway through writing his latest book, still four months from deadline, so on the day of the meeting he took the morning off. He went for a dawn run in Hyde Park, had a shower back at his flat and ate breakfast at the Italian Gardens Cafe. He was excited by the prospect of seeing Mantis for the second time and wondered what the meeting would hold. The possibility of some sort of involvement with the Service? A scoop that he could fictionalize in a book? Perhaps the whole thing would turn out to be a waste of time. By ten o’clock Carradine was walking east along Sussex Gardens, planning to catch a train from Edgware Road to Angel. With a couple of hours to spare before he was due to meet Mantis, he wanted to rummage around in his favorite record store on Essex Road looking for a rare vinyl for a friend’s birthday.

  He was halfway to the station when it began to rain. Carradine had no umbrella and quickened his pace toward Edgware Road. What happened in the next few minutes was an anomaly, a moment that might, in different circumstances, have been designed by Mantis as a test of Carradine’s temperament under pressure. Certainly, in the context of what followed over the next two weeks, it was a chance encounter so extraordinary that Carradine came to wonder whether it had been staged solely for his benefit. Had he written such a scene in one of his novels, it would have been dismissed as a freak coincidence.

  He had reached the southwest corner of the busy intersection between Sussex Gardens and Edgware Road. He was waiting to cross at the lights. A teenage girl beside him was nattering away to a friend about boyfriend trouble. “So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like, he needs to get his shit together because I’m, like, just not going through with that bullshit again.” A stooped old man standing to Carradine’s left was holding an umbrella in his right hand. Water was dripping from the umbrella onto the shoulders of Carradine’s jacket; he could feel droplets of rain on the back of his neck. In the next instant he became aware of shouting on the opposite corner of the street, about twenty meters from where he was standing. A well-built man wearing a motorcycle helmet was raining punches through the passenger door of a black BMW. The driver—a blond woman in her forties—was being dragged from the vehicle by a second man wearing an identical helmet and torn blue jeans. The woman was screaming and swearing. Carradine thought that he recognized her as a public figure but could not put a name to the face. Her assailant, who was at least six feet tall, was dragging her by the hair shouting, “Move, you fucking bitch,” and wielding what looked like a hammer.

  Carradine had the sense of a moment suspended in time. There seemed to be at least twenty people standing within a few feet of the car. None of them moved. The rest of the traffic at the intersection had come to a standstill. A large white Transit van was parked in front of the BMW. The first man opened a side panel in the van and helped his accomplice to drag the woman inside. Carradine was aware of somebody shouting “Stop them! Somebody fucking stop them!” and of the teenage girl beside him muttering “Fucking hell, what the fuck is this, this is bad” as the door of the van slammed shut. The middle-aged man who had been seated on the driver’s side of the BMW now stumbled out of the car, his hair matted with blood, his face bruised and bleeding, hands raised in the air, imploring his attackers to release the woman. Instead, the man in the torn jeans walked back toward him and swung a single, merciless punch that knocked him out cold. Somebody screamed as he slumped to the ground.

  Carradine stepped off the pavement. He had been taking boxing lessons for the past eighteen months: he was tall and fit and wanted to help. He was not sure precisely what he intended to do but recognized that he had to act. Then, as he moved forward, he saw a pedestrian, standing much closer to the van, approach one of the two assailants. Carradine heard him cry: “Stop! Enough!”

  “Hey!” Carradine added his own voice to the confrontation. “Let her go!”

  Things then happened very quickly. Carradine felt a hand on his arm, holding him back. He turned to see the girl looking at him, shaking her head, imploring him not to get involved. Carradine would have ignored her had it not been for what came next. A third man suddenly emerged from the Transit van. He was wearing a black balaclava and carrying what looked like a short metal pole. He was much larger than the others, slower in his movements, but went toward the pedestrian and swung the pole first into his knees and then across his shoulders. The pedestrian screamed out in pain and fell onto the street.

  At that moment Carradine’s courage deserted him. The man in the balaclava entered the van via the side door and slammed it shut. His two helmeted accomplices also climbed inside and drove quickly away. By the time Carradine could hear a police siren in the distance, the van was already out of sight, accelerating north along Edgware Road.

  There was a momentary silence. Several onlookers moved toward the middle-aged man who had been knocked out. He was soon surrounded by the very people who, moments earlier, might have defended him against attack and prevented the abduction of his companion. Through the mêlée, Carradine could see a woman kneeling on the damp street, raising th
e victim’s head onto a balled-up jacket. For every bystander who was talking on their phone—presumably having called the police—there was another filming the scene, most of them as emotionally detached as a group of tourists photographing a sunset. With the traffic still not moving, Carradine walked across the intersection and tried to reach the BMW. His route was blocked. Car horns were sounding in the distance as a police vehicle appeared at the eastern end of Sussex Gardens. Two uniformed officers jogged toward the fallen men. Carradine realized that he could do nothing other than gawp and stare; it was pointless to hang around, just another passerby rubbernecking the incident. He was beginning to feel the first quiet thuds of shame that he had failed to act when he heard the word “Resurrection” muttered in the crowd. A woman standing next to him said: “Did you see who it was? That journalist from the Express, wasn’t it? Whatserface?” and Carradine found that he could provide the answer.

  “Lisa Redmond.”

  “That’s right. Poor cow.”

  Carradine walked away. It was clear that activists associated with Resurrection had staged the kidnapping. Redmond was a hate figure for the Left, frequently identified as a potential target for the group. So many right-wing journalists and broadcasters had been attacked around the world that it was a miracle she had not been confronted before. Carradine felt wretched that he had not done more. He had witnessed street brawls in the past but never the nerveless brutality displayed by the men who had taken Redmond. He was not due to meet Mantis for another hour and a half. He thought about canceling the meeting and going home. Carradine told himself that it would have been rash to try to take on three armed men on his own, but wished that he had acted more decisively; his instinct for survival had been stronger than his desire to help.