The train was half an hour late. In the scramble to board, Carradine found himself at the front of a crush of passengers, each of them rushing forward to grab a seat. It was fiercely hot in the carriage and no quarter was given as people shoved and barged their way through. Carradine was still dogged by a black mood of annoyance and pushed through forcefully until he had managed to sit by the window at a table occupied by a husband and wife and their two small children. The father nodded at Carradine politely as he stowed his luggage overhead. Those passengers who had been unable to find a seat were packed tightly in the aisles, reaching out to steady themselves as the train pulled away.
The carriage was mostly filled with young Moroccans chatting to one another in Arabic and communing with their mobile phones. Across the aisle, a man with a neat mustache had opened a briefcase and was busy flicking through the pages of a file. Carradine succumbed to the paranoid notion that he was under surveillance, yet he could not tell who was watching him nor exactly how many people had been tasked with the job. An attractive woman of about thirty was standing nearby and kept smiling at him, but he could not know if she was a honeytrap set by Moroccan intelligence or just a pretty girl passing the time by flirting with a foreigner. In a fleeting moment of dread, he thought that he saw the face of Hulse at the back of the carriage, but a second look confirmed that it was just his mind playing tricks. Drifting off to sleep in the clogging afternoon heat, Carradine thought it more likely that the Americans would have organized for a team to be waiting for him at the station in Marrakech. After all, he was hardly going to jump off the train en route. The Agency had him exactly where they wanted him.
* * *
A sudden movement of the train woke him more than an hour later. He had been dreaming of Lisa Redmond. Carradine looked across the table and saw that the family of Moroccans had left. In the seat opposite his own was the elderly man who had been standing on the platform at Casablanca wearing a Panama hat. Carradine was surprised to see him; he had assumed that he would have traveled on a first-class ticket. A young, veiled woman had taken the seat beside the window and was listening to music through headphones. The man was reading a paperback book and chewing on the end of a pen. He acknowledged Carradine with a brisk nod. The book was a Lawrence Durrell novel whose title—Nunquam—Carradine did not recognize. He was about sixty-five with sparse white hair that in the heat had become matted to his head. There was a bottle of water in front of him, two overripe bananas and an unopened packet of Bonne Maman biscuits. There had been no food for sale at Gare des Voyageurs save for a snack bar selling nuts and crisps. Carradine had bought a tube of Pringles and a bottle of water, both of which were in his suitcase. He was hungry after his siesta. He was about to stand up and fetch them when the man lowered his book and touched the packet of biscuits.
“Would you like one?”
He looked, for all the world, like a well-educated, retired Englishman of a certain class and background, but the accent was Central European, possibly Czech or Hungarian.
“If you’ve got one spare, thank you.”
The man smiled in a slightly self-satisfied way and prized open the packet of biscuits. He had large, thick hands with incongruously manicured nails. He was wearing an antique wristwatch with a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. Carradine assumed that he was comfortably off: his pale blue cotton shirt and beige linen jacket were of high quality and his shoes—at least the one that Carradine had glimpsed beneath the table—expensive Italian loafers.
“Are you going all the way to Marrakech?” the man asked, holding up the packet. It was noticeable that he did not offer a biscuit to the bearded Moroccan nor to the veiled woman sitting beside Carradine. This minor detail was enough to make the already paranoid Carradine think that he had been singled out for attention and that their encounter was not a coincidence.
“I am,” he replied, taking two. “You?”
“Indeed. We are still two hours away, I think.”
“That far?”
Carradine did not feel like talking yet was pinned beside the window with no chance of escape. It transpired that the price of two biscuits was a conversation of blistering tediousness covering the man’s views on everything from Brexit to the difficulty of obtaining a reasonably priced bottle of French wine in Morocco. Carradine suffered in polite silence, occasionally tuning out to look at a cactus crop at the side of the railway or to follow the progress of a donkey and cart bumping along in a small rural settlement. Only as the train was passing through the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, still forty or fifty miles from Marrakech, did the man—whose name was Karel—begin to ask Carradine about his reasons for traveling to Marrakech.
“I’m a novelist,” he said, expecting at least a modicum of enthusiasm on the subject, given that Karel was reading Lawrence Durrell. Instead he replied: “Really?” in a flat monotone. Carradine might as well have said that he was an Operational Control Center Specialist at a suburban accountancy firm.
“What sort of things do you write about then?”
Carradine was in an indifferent mood, resentful that the elderly man was taking up so much of his time. He was sick of spies and wanted to forget why Mantis had hired him but knew that he could not lie about his cover.
“Espionage.”
“Ah. No better place for that than Casablanca, I suppose.”
“No better place,” Carradine replied.
The discussion was abruptly interrupted by an announcement, in French and Arabic, on the public address system. The train would be arriving in Marrakech in half an hour. Carradine took the opportunity to get up from the table and to walk to the back of the train where he smoked a cigarette with some students from Tangier. When he came back, the veiled woman had left and the seat next to his own was empty. Karel was reading a newspaper. As Carradine sat down he saw that it was a copy of Le Monde. There was a photograph of Lisa Redmond on the front page and a headline suggesting that Resurrection had “crossed the line in the United Kingdom.” Karel folded the paper over and looked at Carradine.
“Ah. You’re back.”
“Just went for a cigarette.”
“Terrible outcome with this journalist.”
Carradine had the sudden, lurching intuition that their entire conversation up to this point had been manufactured. Karel’s sole purpose in sitting with him had been to draw Carradine out about the Redmond kidnapping. He had no evidence for this theory save for his own burgeoning paranoia and the deliberation with which Karel had set about talking to him. But under whose orders was he working? Hulse? Mantis? Or someone else entirely?
“Yes,” he managed to reply. “Awful.”
“There will be repercussions.”
“What do you mean?”
“They will find whoever did it and they will go after their families.”
Carradine was astounded. He looked around the carriage to ascertain if anybody had picked up the remark.
“Excuse me? You’re saying the British government is going to start killing people?”
“I said no such thing.”
“I must have misunderstood.”
“Not the British government. The Russians. It is well understood among people who know such things.”
“Know what things?”
“That Moscow is systematically murdering the families and loved ones of known members of Resurrection.”
It was not the first time that Carradine had heard such an accusation. The Russian government had a reputation for threatening—even for killing—the parents and siblings of slain Islamist terrorists. He had not considered the possibility that the policy extended to Resurrection.
“Why would Moscow care about Redmond?” he asked.
“That’s hardly the point.” Karel placed the newspaper on the table. “I assume you know what happened to Ivan Simakov?”
It was as if a ghost had passed through the carriage. Carradine was conscious of Karel studying his face with great intensity.
The mention of Simakov’s name was surely intentional; whoever had sent Karel knew that Carradine was searching for Lara Bartok.
“What about him?”
“Blown up by the Russians. The explosion in Moscow was made to look like human error, but they knew exactly what they were doing.…”
“Agreed,” said Carradine. He had always believed that Simakov had been murdered by Russian intelligence.
“Well, the same applies to his parents.”
“What do you mean?”
A warm breeze was blowing through the carriage. Karel had eaten one of the disintegrating bananas. He used the discarded skin to weigh down the pages of his newspaper.
“I am retired,” he said. “I speak Hungarian, German, English, French and Russian. I use my time to educate myself. I have met intriguing people in the course of my life—politicians, journalists, civil servants, academics—and these people tell me intriguing things.” The old man had a bland, smug manner that almost short-circuited Carradine’s desire to delve deeper. “They also send articles to me. Books, links to websites, this kind of thing.”
“But what if—”
Carradine began to ask a question but Karel raised his hand, silencing him with an extended index finger. He looked like a cricket umpire giving a batsman out caught behind.
“You merely have to look at the evidence. The parents of Ivan Simakov were killed in a car crash on the outskirts of Moscow. No other vehicles were involved. Mechanical failure was blamed, despite the fact that their Renault was less than two years out of the factory.”
Carradine had known that Simakov’s parents had died in a car crash. He did not think that this constituted evidence of a criminal conspiracy.
“You are aware of the name Godfrey Milne?”
Carradine said that he was not.
“I am surprised by this.” Karel employed his customary tone of condescension. “Milne was a British intelligence officer who lost the faith. Joined Resurrection. Found a new faith in degrading those on the Right with whom he disagreed politically. It is said that he threatened to shoot dead the infant grandson of a senior figure in the NRA. That he waterboarded a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Alleged member, I should probably say. Charming fellow. Some people believe the Americans went after Milne’s family as a result.”
The train jolted suddenly to one side at a set of points. Carradine was briefly thrown toward the window. He grabbed the armrest to steady himself.
“The Americans are involved in this, too?”
Karel shrugged. “Milne was responsible for orchestrating an attack in Washington, D.C., in which acid was thrown into the face of a lawyer working on behalf of a Republican Congressman accused of taking kickbacks from big pharma. Four weeks later Milne’s brother was taken from his apartment—in Salcombe or Padstow, I think, one of those English seaside towns—and murdered.”
Carradine looked out of the window. He did not believe what Karel was telling him. The man was likely a fantasist, a spinner of tall tales and conspiracy theories. The American intelligence community would no more embrace a policy of state-sponsored assassinations against the families of suspected Resurrection activists than they would relocate Langley to the Gobi Desert. It would be political and moral suicide.
“If this is a policy to deter people from joining Resurrection, how come more hasn’t been heard about it?” he asked.
The train was passing through the suburbs of Marrakech. In his romantic imagination Carradine had expected mud huts and camels, mosques and souks, but the outskirts of the city were wastelands of concrete housing and roads cluttered with litter. Karel shrugged a second time. He had the self-important man’s habit of suggesting that society was beset by depths of ignorance and sloth which caused him great anguish; that his own personal philosophy was the One True Way; and that it was only a matter of time before mankind realized this and came to share Karel’s worldview.
“There has been plenty said about it,” he replied. “Plenty written. But perhaps it is not in the British media’s best interests to accuse their governments of targeted killings against their own civilians.”
“Hang on,” said Carradine, with a tone that he hoped would convey his contempt for Karel’s theory. “Are you suggesting the British are involved as well?”
“I never said there was British involvement.” Karel fixed him with a sharp gaze. “But how would I know? Certainly there have been Agency plans to torture or kill the family members of anybody who carries out a Resurrection attack on American soil. It will be very interesting to see what happens to young Otis Euclidis, if he suffered the same fate as…” Karel unfolded the newspaper, turning to the photograph on the front page so that he could remind himself of the name. “… the same fate as this poor woman, Lisa Redmond, whose only offense, as far as I can tell, was to write a few immature, reactionary articles about Islam and Brexit and occasionally to be critical of the regime in Moscow. If Euclidis is found dead, you can guarantee they will go after the kidnappers. They probably already know who took him. After all, these people are not amateurs.”
As was always the case when listening to fantasists and provocateurs, Carradine experienced a creeping self-doubt. There was something about Karel’s demeanor that convinced him that he should probe more deeply into the accusations he was making.
“Is everything all right?” Karel asked.
“Absolutely,” Carradine replied.
He wished that he had the means to contact Oubakir, to ask him outright what he knew about Sebastian Hulse. Why had the Moroccan warned him as he left Blaine’s? What did he know about the American? The other passengers had begun to gather up their belongings and to stand in the aisle. Carradine found himself muttering, “No, they’re not stupid,” as Karel stood up, leaving his newspaper and banana skin on the table.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing,” Carradine replied.
Karel looked nonplussed. “Well, enjoy your visit to Marrakech.”
“I will. You, too.” Carradine wondered if they should swap numbers. “Do you have a card?” he asked. He took one of his own from his wallet and handed it to Karel. He wanted to take the old man’s photograph but could not think of a natural way of doing so.
“I do,” Karel replied. He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a die-stamped business card. The name KAREL M. TRAPP was printed on the front. Carradine thought of Mantis and assumed that “Trapp” was a pseudonym in the same style. He turned the card over. There was a black-and-white photograph of what looked like a lotus leaf on the reverse side.
“Thank you,” he said. “It would be good to keep in touch.”
“Indeed.”
Karel retrieved his Panama hat from the luggage rack and placed it on his head. He smiled courteously and made his way toward the door on the platform side. Carradine reached up for his bags, lowered them onto the table and sat down. The train moved slowly along the platform, eventually coming to a juddering halt. A woman close to Carradine was knocked off balance. He caught her by the arm. She thanked him in French and smiled gratefully.
Stepping out into the heat of the afternoon, Carradine could not shake off the possibility that Karel was onto something. Simakov. Milne. Redmond. The names were like a roll call of the dead. Bartok could be next on the list. If that was the case, was Carradine being used as a patsy? What if Mantis was not who he had pretended to be? What if the Service had sent C. K. Carradine to Morocco not to save Lara Bartok, but to assist in her assassination?
“I don’t like your American friend. I don’t trust him. What is his name?”
“Hulse,” said Somerville. “Sebastian Hulse. He’s with the Agency.”
“Tell me something I didn’t already know.”
“He was the one trailing Carradine in Morocco.”
“I knew that, too.”
They were walking near the safe house. Bartok was wearing sunglasses with a hat pulled down low over her head. Somerville hadn’t eate
n in over six hours and was cranky for a cigarette.
“What happened to Kit after he left the boat?” Bartok asked.
“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t yet know all the facts.”
Bartok took off the sunglasses. She wanted him to be able to see the despair she was feeling.
“I don’t believe you. You know exactly what happened to him. You have all the facts, all the information, but you refuse to tell me.”
“Lara…”
“Where is he? What happened to him?”
“Let’s go back to the flat.”
She tucked the sunglasses into the pocket of her coat and turned away. Somerville’s willpower broke and he finally succumbed to the desire for a cigarette, only to reach into his jacket and realize that he had left the packet at home.
“Let’s finish the interview, get it done,” he said. “Afterward I can tell you everything you need to know about Carradine.”
“Everything I want to know, not just need to know,” she said. “You don’t control that.”
He was astonished to see a tear in her eye. Bartok wiped it away and turned in the direction of the safe house.
“Fine,” he replied. “I’ll answer all your questions.”
The Moroccan Girl Page 11