He was early: it was five to ten. He loitered to smoke the cigarette until it was tarry and hot in his fingers, exhaled the last drag, felt a strong urge to cross himself, and let the glass doors usher him into the arrivals hall, which was ice cool and humming busily—more busily, if anything, than the day before. Planeloads of tourists wandered in a gradual stream into the light, slowing their trolleys to read signs or locate drivers or reprimand children. Webster remembered his own holiday in a fortnight’s time: two weeks in Cornwall to try to repair the cracks he’d made in his family. How he wished, for a hundred reasons, he had never left them.
Resisting the urge to glance up or to check the voice recorder in his top pocket, he took up his position by the Royal Air Maroc office, leaning his back against the booth. Above him, in a gallery of shops over the main hall, Kamila and Youssef were already in position, their job to photograph Chiba—they had taken to calling him that for want of anything better—and to follow him once the meeting was done. Driss was on this level, somewhere nearby, watching Webster and making sure Chiba’s people didn’t try anything bold.
An unexpected sense of composure settled on Webster as he watched the crowds. He was working on the assumption that the man who had dealt him such pain the night before was the man he had called, but scanning the faces all around him he realized that needn’t be the case. The real leader could be any one of these people: the bearded man who caught his eye, the sweaty one who didn’t, the lanky one in sunglasses and a djellaba who loitered close by. By five past, he began to believe that none of these people was the man he wanted, that whoever he was he had been insufficiently troubled by Webster’s phone call to think a meeting worth the effort, that he was confident this problem could be dealt with by other means.
And then he was there. The man from last night: short, vigorous, firmly set in front of Webster now with his hands clasped in front of him and his feet slightly apart, chewing something with his lips closed. Webster felt his body tighten, an involuntary response to the sense memories of the night before that caused a streak of pain to run right through him. The man was still in yesterday’s suit, crumpled around the crotch, and his white shirt was grubby with sweat and dirt around its open collar. Tufts of graying hair poked out at the base of his powerful neck. As he had last night, he seemed ready to spring and to savage, like a dog bred for attack.
Another man was with him, someone Webster hadn’t seen before: thickset, jowly, with drooping shoulders. He was carrying a laptop bag.
“I said alone.” Webster stared as steadily as he could into Chiba’s mirrored sunglasses and wondered what lay behind them.
The man cocked his head slightly on one side and said nothing.
“You need to take those off,” said Webster. “I won’t talk to you like this.”
Rather to Webster’s surprise, he reached up and slowly brought the glasses down his nose and away from his face, his eyes on Webster’s all the time. They were almost sky blue, the irises flecked with light, the pupils sharp and bottomless, and they caught Webster off balance: he had expected them to be flat, thuggish, any intelligence to be found there base at best, but these were vividly alive and quick, and they seemed to look at him with utter confidence that they owned him outright.
Perfectly still, his expression blank, he continued to challenge Webster to begin.
“Do you know who I am?” Webster said at last.
Chiba remained silent.
“You seem to think I’m a friend of Darius Qazai. I’m not. He hired me to do a job. The job is over. That’s all.”
Again, nothing.
“So what I want to know is, why you think I’m worth killing.”
Chiba looked down, scratched the back of his head, and looking up held Webster’s eye again.
“I said to you. You know nothing. Not about me. Not about Qazai.” He paused, his eyes fixed. “I want, you die. Understand. That is all.”
Webster shook his head. “No. You understand. How much does Qazai owe you?”
He didn’t expect a response, and he got none.
“Tens of millions? Hundreds? He has no money. Not until he sells his company. And when I send this to the CIA, MI6, and the editor of the Wall Street Journal in London, who happens to be a friend of mine, he won’t be able to sell it.” He reached inside his jacket and from a pocket pulled a thin sheaf of A4 paper, fifteen sheets perhaps, folded into three. “And then you don’t get your money. Read it. It’s yours.”
The man took the paper and started to read. Oliver had e-mailed it that morning. It was rough, but it had substance, and more importantly, detail: every transaction they had found between Qazai and Kurus and along the chain in both directions; everything that could be found on Chiba, all the odd correspondences and coincidences; not quite proof but nearly proof, and in the right hands surely enough, Webster thought, to cause this man problems.
When he had finished reading he passed the pages to his friend and said, with a caustic smile, something unintelligible that contained the word “Chiba.” The friend laughed, and made a show of leafing through the document.
The man chewed for a moment, watching Webster. He had something in his front teeth, in his incisors, and each time he bit on it a vein on his temple stood out. “It is bad you do not know me. Who I am. Bad for you. You are not scared.” He paused. “You should be scared. If you knew.”
It was Webster’s turn not to reply. He tried to remember that this man was just a gangster, a modern-day hoodlum, a piece of nothing. He wasn’t worthy of his fear. This was what he told himself.
The man turned his head and nodded to his friend, who unzipped his bag, put Webster’s file inside it and took out a black, spiral-bound report. Webster felt a strange lightness in his chest, some new sense of foreboding that he couldn’t explain.
“Please,” he said, passing Webster the document. “Read.”
The text was in Arabic, possibly Farsi. Webster turned to the back and found a full page of writing that he couldn’t understand, bar his own name in Roman script at the bottom and other words dotted among the text: Ikertu, Isaac Hammer, Cursitor Street. He turned back a page and saw four photographs: one showed Ikertu’s offices; another, grainy, taken from a distance with a zoom, showed him arriving at work one morning; the third was of him leaving Qazai’s house; the last of him and Hammer leaving Timur’s funeral. Webster, his heart pounding, glanced up and turned the page.
He took it in before he was fully conscious of what was there. A cold pulse of fear spread through him and a sharp pain drove into his temple. He forced himself to concentrate.
There were more pictures: one of the Websters’ house on Hiley Road; one of Elsa leaving for work; two of Webster taking the children to school and nursery, their hands in his. On the next page, Silke coming out of school with Nancy and Daniel and alongside that a single shot of the three of them in the playground around the corner from their house. All the photographs were dated and timed.
Webster stared at them for a long time. He couldn’t bring himself to look up because he didn’t want to betray his terror.
“Same deal for you as Qazai,” the man said. “One week, he pays me the money, I hurt only you. Longer, I hurt your family.”
Webster raised his head and did his best to appear unmoved.
“I’m not with him.”
“Here you were with him.”
“No.” Webster shook his head. “No. If anything happens to me, you will be exposed. Your name will be everywhere. When you get your money, it’s over.”
The man looked at him and smiled. “You say one word and your family is not safe.”
For a moment Webster felt as he had last night in the desert with Senechal’s head in his hand: he wanted to smash this man’s skull until it crumbled. To strangle him until those blue eyes started from his head.
The man leaned in, his voice lower
ed and strangely intimate. “You do not know me. You do not even know my name. Do not try. It will be bad. For your family.”
He took the report back from Webster.
“Qazai understand this. Do you understand?”
His eyes, adamantine, scoured Websters,’ a search as brutal and invasive as the punishment he had administered the night before, and with that he turned, nodded to his goon and left, replacing his sunglasses and walking with a compact, muscular stride into the crowds. Webster, watching him go, felt like his body had been hollowed out.
21.
IN HAMMER’S OFFICE, hanging on the wall behind his desk among the other trophies of his career, was a framed quotation in Chinese that he had received from a Mexican client on successfully completing some particularly difficult job. The Mexican, to hear Hammer tell it, was somewhere between eccentric and dangerous: he kept Samurai swords on the wall of his office, tigers for pets at his country home, and a vast library of texts on the nature of combat and war. The Art of War was his favorite, and the quotation, in just four characters, said that to know your enemy you must become your enemy. Hammer, intellectually sympathetic to that sort of thing, liked to refer to it often—not least, Webster knew from his own experience, because it was true. But what Webster wanted to know was what Sun Tzu would have to say when you had no idea who you were fighting.
His thoughts were scattered. What he needed more than anything else was to collect them, rank them, lock some away as dangerous or irrelevant, but they tore around his head, ungovernable. But in among them, most insistent of all, were those words: you do not even know my name. And that made his enemy not only impossible to defeat, but impossible to defend against.
Back in the car he played Driss the recording of the meeting and silently prayed that Kamila might track the man down; it seemed unimaginable, however, that he would leave any trace. Driss listened, but couldn’t make out what the man had said to his friend on reading Webster’s report. It wasn’t Arabic, he was sure; it sounded like Farsi.
Webster lit a cigarette—four left now—closed his eyes and took a deep drag, letting the smoke hit the back of his throat like a small act of self-mortification. For a while he just sat in the heat, head back and one elbow out of the car’s open window, keeping the smoke in his lungs a moment before letting it out, forcing himself to relax into its rhythm until slowly the storm in his head began to abate. When he finally opened his eyes he knew three things. One, that he should be at home to protect his family. Two, that this man had to get his money. Three, that Qazai was the key to both.
He took the pay-as-you-go phone that Kamila had given him that morning and dialed Qazai’s cell. It was switched off, but his next call established that he had not yet checked out of his hotel, and he asked Driss to drive him there as fast as he could.
“Is that a good idea?” said Driss.
“Why?”
“The police.”
“When will you hear from your friends?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could we ring the hospitals?”
“If the Frenchman is dead he will not be in hospital.”
“But if he isn’t he will.”
Driss shrugged. “My mother and Youssef are following your man. I am here.”
“I know. It’s OK. Then I have no choice. Let’s go.”
There was every chance, of course, that the police would be wanting to speak to Qazai, or were speaking to him already, but he had to see him; there was no other way.
He and Driss made a plan. They would drive past the hotel, make sure there were no police cars in the area, and then Driss would go in to make his reconnaissance. If all was clear, Webster would find Qazai while Driss, having tea in the lobby, would call him the moment anything happened.
• • •
THERE WERE NO POLICE in the hotel, Driss called from the lobby to report, and as far as anyone knew Mr. Qazai was in his room—at least it had not yet been made up. Webster thanked him, locked the car, left the keys in the exhaust, and crossed the street to the hotel gates, looking about him at every car, every driver, every passerby. The heat was so strong he could feel it bouncing back off the sticky tarmac.
Feeling sweaty and thoroughly conspicuous, with his trouser legs flapping above his shoes, Webster limped through the lobby and tried to look like he belonged. A few people were sitting here, drinking tea, leaning forward to have quiet conversations. Despite the loud clack of his leather soles none of the receptionists looked up as he passed, and soon he was in the garden, walking through the shade of the cedars, barely noticing that the racket of the city had given way to the swish of sprinklers and the chattering whistles of unseen birds. To his right, fat orange fish played in the apple-green water of a shallow pond and for a moment Webster longed to join them, to feel the cold on his face and on his side.
He passed half-a-dozen villas before he reached Qazai’s. He unlatched the low gate marked Sultan’s Villa and followed a brick path bordered with flowers until he reached a large private lawn, and standing in it a modern stone structure that was at least three times the size of his house. A portico the width of the building jutted into its own swimming pool; palm trees and cypresses shaded the water and the entrance, which was by way of a tall glass double door. Curtains inside were drawn across it.
Webster paused for a moment, then knocked. Nothing. He knocked again. After half a minute he took off his jacket, draped it over one of the sunloungers, unbuttoned the cuff of Youssef’s shirt and pulled his arm up the sleeve so that his hand was covered. Then he tried the door handle, and found it locked. Once upon a time his favorite private detective back in London had shown him how to open certain locks with a credit card, but he didn’t have his cards anymore. He made a circuit of the building. All the windows were closed and the door he had tried was the only one. There were no small panes of glass to break, no way up to the roof, no obvious way in.
He knocked, harder this time, using the metal of his lighter against the glass, then the heel of his hand, banging as hard as he could.
“Open the door,” he said, leaning in to the glass. “Open the fucking door.” He banged again, and shouted now. “Darius, open this fucking door.”
Behind the glass the curtains parted an inch. Webster couldn’t see in. Then a hand reached through them, the lock turned, and the hand withdrew.
Webster opened the door and slipped through the curtains. It was like walking into a crypt: almost completely dark, its air stale and so cool he felt he must be hundreds of feet underground. He could just make out a low table surrounded by armchairs but otherwise all was in gloom, and as he shut the door behind him he opened the curtains, filling the room with sun.
The light showed Qazai sitting with his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead of him like a drunk in a station waiting room. In front of him was an empty bottle of brandy, a bottle of whisky nearly half gone, and an ashtray full of cigar ends and long ash trails that gave off a decaying, dead smell. He was still in yesterday’s clothes, still wearing his shoes and his crumpled jacket, as if he had made it back here from the desert, sat down with his bottles and not moved since. Occasionally his eyelids drooped and his head lolled before jerking back into place. Christ, thought Webster. What a pair we make.
He looked around the room, at the freshly plastered walls distressed to look centuries old, and saw in one corner a cabinet with glasses arranged on it. Inside it was a fridge full of bottles. Webster took two of them, and a glass, and went to sit by Qazai, watching him for a moment before he spoke and wondering what, if anything, was going on in his head.
He opened one of the bottles and poured.
“Here. Drink this. You need water.”
Qazai looked at him as if seeing him for the first time and reached for the glass, taking only a sip before putting it back on the table. As he sat back a shiver ran through him. His eyes were blo
odshot and his forehead was creased in an expression of perpetual pain.
“Have you heard from Senechal?” Webster shook him, desperately hoping that he had. But Qazai simply looked blank. “From Yves? Have you heard from Yves?”
Qazai glanced at him, failing to meet his eye, then looked down at the ground as if considering something, and shook his head. Webster passed him the glass and he drank.
“Are you.” Qazai paused and frowned, as if remembering. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Qazai nodded slowly and reaching up began to scratch his jawline, absently at first and then with more and more energy, like a dog finding a flea.
“And Yves? What did they do to Yves?”
“We need to leave,” said Webster. “Marrakech. We need to go and make a plan. We’ve been given a week. Do you understand? One week. We have to move.” Webster put his hand under Qazai’s arm and started to pull. “And then you can tell me what the fuck you’ve done to my life.”
Qazai turned to look at him, as if for the first time.
“He took my son.” He shook his head again and tears started in his eyes. “He took my son.” Qazai brought his hands up to cover his face, shaking his head harder and harder, pushing his palms into his eyes and clawing at his scalp. “My son,” he moaned, and his voice was thick from crying.
Webster had to get him out of here. The police might turn up at any minute; might already be drawing up outside the hotel.
He reached out and put his hand on Qazai’s shoulder, finding from somewhere a final reserve of patience. “Look at me. Please.” Slowly Qazai took his hands away from his eyes, then drew his sleeve across his face to wipe them. “Very soon I won’t be able to leave here. You need to fly me back to London, and together we need to deal with this. Do you understand? If we do, there’s no reason for anyone else to get hurt. Not Ava. Not your grandchildren. But we have to go. Right now.”
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