The Jackal's Share (17 page)

Qazai and Senechal rose from their sofa, offered their hands to shake and then gestured that everybody should sit. No words were spoken. Webster kept his eyes on Qazai, who sat back with his hands neatly on his thighs, staring down at a fixed point ahead of him, the skin under his eyes purple and black like a bruise. Next to him, Senechal looked full of life. It was he who began.

“Gentlemen. I do not want to keep Mr. Qazai any longer than is necessary. So I will come straight to the point. You have had two months and hundreds of thousands of pounds. We need our report. Right now.”

For once Webster didn’t feel the urge to respond. He let Hammer reply.

“We understand. I have a proposal to make that I think will suit everybody.” Senechal nodded that he should proceed; Qazai didn’t lift his eyes. “We’re in a position to write the report. I think you’ll be happy with it. It may not be complete but it should serve your purpose.”

“What do you mean, not complete?”

“Philosophically speaking, these things are never complete. We could go on looking forever.”

“You’ve looked long enough.”

“We feel the same way.”

“What if we do not like your report?”

Hammer paused for a moment, his eyes on Senechal’s. “Then I’m afraid you can lump it. We will only be writing one report on this case.”

Senechal’s expression didn’t change but he stiffened. “That is not what we discussed.”

“Mr. Senechal, you haven’t been the easiest of clients. You haven’t given us all the information we asked for. You offered one of my people a bribe. And some of what we’ve found smells off.” He waited for Senechal’s reaction but there was none. Either he had complete mastery of his emotions or he simply didn’t have any. “For those reasons, you don’t get full marks. The sculpture story we know is nonsense, and we’ll say so. That’ll be the focus. But we can’t say you’re saintly. Because you’re not.”

Senechal drew himself up still further but before he could reply Qazai raised a finger and spoke, and though his voice was cracked it had a cold authority that filled the room.

“When I hired you,” his eyes were fixed on Hammer’s, “I didn’t know that the man you would assign to us—to a job of great delicacy—was a crude hack of low morals who thinks nothing of breaking into offices and bugging people’s phones.” Webster started to respond, but Hammer raised his hand and he kept himself in check. “But now I do, through good fortune, if you can call it that. So here is what I propose. You remove this man from the case. Then you yourself or some more reputable colleague writes a report to our specifications. If you do these things, I will not tell the world that Ikertu employs cheap crooks. And I will not encourage the Italian police to pursue their investigation.”

Webster’s vision seemed to cloud with red; he closed his eyes and tried to shake it away. When he opened them Qazai was staring at him in unblinking challenge, his tired eyes wide. Hammer was saying something but Webster was barely conscious of it and talked across him.

“So what’s the going rate?” he said. “For an Italian policeman? More than you were going to give me? Or does he work it out for you? So that you don’t have to think about it.” He pointed at Senechal but kept his eyes on Qazai. “Tell me. How much was Timur worth? How much did you pay him to live in the desert sitting on your lies? I hope it was a lot. Because it strikes me he gave you his life twice over.”

“Ben, that’s enough.” Hammer brought his arm up to restrain Webster, who was getting out of his seat.

But Qazai hadn’t moved. He sat perfectly still, looking at Webster, his own rage contained. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that in one way or another, he died because of you.”

Qazai pulled himself to the edge of the chair and pointed a finger at Webster, his words slow and filled with the certainty of the inspired.

“Mr. Webster, I have provided for my family for over thirty years. I am a constant man. But you, you have some resentment I do not understand. Perhaps you measure yourself against other men and find yourself wanting. So you do reckless things. You flirt with criminals, with prison. You are vain and weak. You even flirt with my daughter.” The words hit Webster with the force of some shameful but indistinct recognition, like a drunken impropriety remembered the next day. He shook his head and started to speak. “No,” said Qazai, “you will listen to me. Go back to your wife. Go back to your family. And when you have committed yourself to them, when you are a whole man, then we can talk about me. And my son.”

Qazai stood up and looked at Hammer. “In the meantime, I want my report. Tomorrow.”

Webster was standing too now, reaching for something to say or do that would settle this for good, but he was thrown, and nothing came. All he could do was listen impotently to Hammer.

“You’ll have it in a week.”

“Tomorrow. Or I go to the papers.”

“In one week. Or on the front of tomorrow’s
FT
will be a big fat story about how no one wants to buy your company because you might be an art thief. And whatever you’ve started in Italy needs to stop or I’ll leak that too.”

“I haven’t started anything, Mr. Hammer.”

“Well you can stop it anyway.”

Qazai straightened himself. He was almost a head taller than Hammer and he did his best to look down on him from the greatest possible height.

“I’m beginning to understand the ethics of your industry, Mr. Hammer.”

Hammer returned his gaze, a trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “And I yours.”

•   •   •

O
UTSIDE,
Mount Street was reassuringly sane. The sun shone, taxis rolled past, people strolled about. Webster felt like he had been in some infernal show, a diabolical entertainment, and even though he had been released into the light his thoughts still whirled in confusion.

“Unbelievable,” said Hammer, looking up the street. “Un-fucking-believable.”

“I told you. He’s a piece of work.”

“Not him, you. We have it all neatly wrapped, ready to go, and you can’t see it through. Can’t just fucking take it.”

He started walking toward Berkeley Square, one arm raised behind him telling Webster to stay where he was, not to talk to him. Then he turned, fury in his face.

“I don’t know who’s worse. You’re a pair of babies. Do me a favor. Stop fucking squabbling, and finish this awful fucking case.”

•   •   •

T
HE REPORT WAS HARDER WORK,
not because Webster didn’t know what to write but because each sentence was a provocation. Every phrase had to be forced from his fingers. The calm he had felt after Timur’s funeral had gone, and above the words struggling onto the screen he could still hear Qazai’s stinging condemnation of him, potent with both lies and truth.

His anger growing, his concentration lost, he let his mind wander over the facts of the case in the hope that he might finally find the design behind them, but it was still deeply buried, and try as he might he couldn’t reach it. Mehr had been murdered, not by bandits but by someone who knew what he was really doing for Qazai. That was a fair assumption. His death had been organized, or at least condoned by someone within the Iranian government—the intelligence services, or the Revolutionary Guard. That was another. An unwelcome thought struck Webster. Perhaps the money that Mehr had been channeling had been destined to fund opposition groups in Iran. Perhaps Qazai’s secret was a noble one, and the death of Timur the terrible price of some quiet heroism.

No. That might fit together, but it didn’t explain why Qazai was so desperate to raise money that he had scarcely paused to mourn his son, or why he was summoned to clandestine meetings every six months, or why he had thought it necessary to threaten Webster’s freedom.

What should have taken a day, then, was dragging into a second and evermore uncertainly into a third when, as Webster was trying to find some agile language for the summary, Oliver called. He looked at the number, let it ring four times, saw it go to voicemail and continued to watch the screen until an alert told him he had a new message.

“Ben, it’s Dean. You never call anymore. Guess what I’ve found? Call me back.”

Webster put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. He should let it go. He couldn’t let it go.

“I knew you couldn’t resist,” said Oliver.

“I told you to stop.”

“I had some inquiries outstanding. About Mehr’s money. They came back.” He paused. “Do you want the long version?”

“Just the highlights.”

“I can do that. Last May, about seven million U.S. goes through Mehr’s accounts, then on a tour of the world’s most discreet little islands, before ending up with a company that finally spent some of it—on chartering a ship from Odessa to Dubai. With an interesting cargo. Customs got a tip-off, and when they had a look they found twelve containers full of machine guns and old Russian rockets.”

Webster sat back in his chair. “You’re serious.”

“They denied all knowledge, of course, but no, it happened. I found two articles about it. Then nothing.”

Christ. If only Oliver had found this a week earlier, or not at all.

“You’re saying the money that went through Mehr was used to buy weapons?”

“Looks that way.”

“Jesus. Where were they going? After Dubai?”

“Syria.”

“Syria?”

“Correct. With an onward ticket to Lebanon, I dare say.”

“Sorry. Qazai’s money is buying rockets for Hizbollah?”

“We don’t know for sure it’s his money. I’ve found out where it ends up but not where it comes from.” Oliver sniffed. “Are we on again?”

Webster considered it, and through his scrambling thoughts all he could see was Qazai’s righteous face, full of pride and fury, taunting him with his weaknesses.

“What about the rest of it? Where does that go?”

“I don’t know yet. Give me a chance. In all, I’ve found five groups of payments into Mehr’s company. Forty-three million in total. This is the only batch I’ve traced to the end. But on the way they all go through the same place.”

“Where?”

“Cyprus. A company called Kurus. Shareholders are obscure but one of them is a guy called Chiba. God knows what it does.”

“Who is he?”

“Low-key. Very. According to the filings he’s Lebanese, but there’s nothing else on him anywhere. At all. He could be anything.”

Webster thought for a minute, trying to make out the logic. Whatever was happening, it was serious, and sustained, and Qazai was involved. “Find out if the money really is his. Qazai’s. I’ll look at the shipment, see where it came from. Where it went.”

“You could do that. Or you could see what he’s up to in Marrakech.”

“Excuse me?”

“Qazai’s going on one of his little trips. Flight’s due to leave on Friday. All logged in with the airfield.”

Webster didn’t say anything.

“That cell phone that keeps calling him? He got a call from it yesterday. Lasted forty-five seconds. Half an hour later he filed his flight plan with Farnborough.”

Webster thanked Oliver and hung up. For a minute, perhaps two, he stared at the words on the screen in front of him until they were just black marks on the white. Then he picked up the phone.

16.

T
HREE HOURS TO
A
FRICA,
that was all, but Webster wished it was longer. He would have liked to sleep. He had spent the night in the spare room, as he sometimes did before early flights, and with the short, terse argument he had had with Elsa still repeating in his head had passed a wakeful night.

He had to go, he had told her, and that much was true. Two days at most, the last act, the only way to finish it: all true. His lies were in the omissions. He hadn’t mentioned that he was paying for everything himself, or that he hadn’t told Ike he was going, or that he had little idea what he might find when he arrived. Had she known these things, she might have screamed at him, but as it was she did what Elsa did so well: let him spend time with his own faults.

In his tight, narrow seat, surrounded by holidaymakers and Moroccans heading home, Webster totted up what all this was costing, apart from his relationship with his wife. Seven hundred pounds for his ticket. Eighty pounds a night for his hotel, a little riad recommended to him by Constance. At least he hadn’t brought George Black, as he would have liked. Black insisted on a team of five at least for surveillance, and they would all have flown out and stayed at Webster’s expense; three days of that and he’d have been bankrupt.

No, George was unfortunately not a possibility, and in any case would have been hopeless for Marrakech, where five hulking ex-soldiers might have proved a little conspicuous, but Webster couldn’t operate without someone to help him: he had never been to Morocco before, had no understanding of the place, spoke no Arabic, couldn’t rely on his schoolboy French and would hardly blend in himself. So before he had left the office he had gone into Ikertu’s files and found a handful of cases that had touched on Morocco. There weren’t many, but all had used the services of the same woman, Kamila Nouri, who, judging by the correspondence, was an old friend of Hammer; some of her work dated back to the very first days of the company. Webster had called her, hoping to meet shortly after his arrival, but Kamila, insisting that any friend of Ike’s was a dear friend of hers, had told him that she would meet him off his flight. Webster, who had told Hammer that he was taking a day or two off to write the report, hoped sincerely that she was such a good friend that she wouldn’t think to check out his story.

Two days of her time, then, at whatever her rate was: probably another two thousand pounds altogether, or close to that. Say three thousand for the whole escapade, at least. That was money he should have been saving, or spending on the family’s holiday. It was not money he had to throw away. The figures in his head, shifting up and down as he rebalanced his calculations, became a new and powerful symbol of his irresponsibility.

And all that expense was going to prove what, exactly? He wasn’t convinced by any of the theories that coursed through his head. But from the scattered facts available two things were clear: that Qazai’s money was being used for dark ends by some vicious people, and that whoever they were, and whatever their relationship with Qazai, something had gone wrong. The payments through Mehr had dried up in December, or shortly afterward, when the pattern would suggest that a payment had been due; Qazai had traveled to Belgrade early last year, Caracas in November and Tripoli in January; Mehr had died in February. And now Timur.

Webster toyed with the possibilities. Blackmail was one: some ugly secret was costing Qazai millions, and he hadn’t been able to keep up the payments. Or, more plausible, having lost a vast amount in the Gulf and realizing that he had to sell his company, Qazai had decided to cut some old ties—to one of his original investors, say, who made his money in ways that might prove embarrassing.

Could that be this man Chiba, Dean’s latest discovery? There was no way to tell. It was a long journey the money took, from the light to the dark, from the apparent shine of Darius Qazai through Cyrus Mehr and a dozen grubby little companies to crates full of guns and rockets in ships bound for Gaza. Chiba might be a money man, a mere processor along the way like the others, but he was near the end of the trail, and if he hadn’t planned it all he would surely know who had. It was possible that he was the one phoning Qazai, summoning him to Marrakech. Webster allowed himself to imagine the perfect outcome of the next two days: a photograph of the two men together; a copy of Chiba’s passport from the register at his hotel. That was all it would take.

The plane landed on time—no holding patterns, no detours, no delaying of the moment when he would have to put his rudimentary plan into action. Follow Qazai, was how it went: pick him up, in the jargon of surveillance, at the airport, and follow him until he had the meeting that he was surely coming here to have. After that, switch to the people he had met and find out who they were.

He met Kamila, as agreed, by the Hertz desk, but her description of herself had been so good he might have recognized her anywhere. “I am short, gray and one eye points wrong,” she had said, and that indeed summed it up. Her head was uncovered, her hair thick waves of silver-gray cut shortish, and her left eye looked off to the left, just a little, making it hard at a first meeting to know which to focus on. A friendly face, open, but alert with it: the nose sharp, the eyes intense, taking in details.

“Welcome, Mr. Webster,” she said, taking his hand and shaking it with a strong grip, beaming her greeting up at him: she was a head shorter at least. She wore a black canvas jacket and under it a long gray dress that did little to hide a neat paunch. “It is a great pleasure to see you here. My son, Driss.”

Driss was tall, skinny, handsome, with a strong Arab nose and quiet eyes. He must have been twenty, no older, and smiled shyly at Webster as they shook hands. His hair was thick like his mother’s, black and shining.

“How is Ike?” asked Kamila, leading them out of the airport building. Driss insisted on taking Webster’s bag.

“In rude health.”

“Still running?”

“Every day. Too much.”

The glass doors slid back to let them out into Marrakech and the heat came rushing at them. It was more intense even than Dubai, more humid with it, and as they walked to the car Webster felt himself start to sweat. For once, thankfully, he wasn’t wearing a suit.

On the drive into town Webster quizzed Kamila about her work for Ikertu and her relationship with Hammer. They had met in Paris fifteen years before, when he had been trying to find evidence that a Russian businessman was part of a growing scandal involving the illegal sale of arms to Africa. Kamila, then a young officer with the DGSE, the French intelligence agency, had met him and told him a number of highly diverting lies. Five years later, when she had left France with her new husband to return to Morocco, the land of her blood but not her birth, she had got in touch with Hammer and told him about her new business, a consultancy that aimed to help foreign companies understand the opaque politics of North Africa. Since then she had worked on half-a-dozen cases for Ikertu, not all of them distinguished: the last one had required her to locate the mistress of a Moroccan politician, which was not what she had imagined herself doing when she arrived here. But she was happy to do that sort of work for Ike—and few others—and when she did she called on the services of her sons, Driss and Youssef, who could do certain things that as a woman she could not. Not that there were many of those. Now: what did Webster have in mind?

He told her that he was interested in a man called Darius Qazai, who was coming here the following day. He wanted to know everything about the people Qazai met: who they were, where they had come from, where they went afterward, how they had paid for their trip. But in the first place all he wanted to know was where Qazai and his lawyer were staying.

“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” said Kamila, leaning over the front seat and grinning at Webster, who smiled back.

•   •   •

W
EBSTER, COLD AND STIFF
from the air conditioning in his room, was woken by the call to prayer at dawn the next day. He pulled the sheets about him and lay for a moment listening to the muezzin.

His first thought was Elsa. He had called her before dinner and she had asked him to make a vow: that his return be the end of all this, no matter what the result of his intemperate dash to Africa. He had promised, and that had been the end of their short conversation. One more reason to make the day count. He tried to imagine how it would play out, but only its beginning was clear: it would start at the airport, him in Driss’s car waiting for Qazai, and Kamila with Youssef waiting for Senechal. Beyond that it was an anxious blank.

Qazai’s flight was due at noon; Oliver had established that Senechal was coming from Paris, and would land at eleven fifteen. Webster, Kamila and her sons had spent the afternoon and much of the evening trying to find out where the two men would be staying, but with no luck. There were over four hundred hotels in Marrakech and they must have called half of them; the other half were not places someone like Qazai would consider. Chances were they had booked an apartment or were using false names, and while this wasn’t a disaster it did make the whole operation especially precarious, because if they lost Qazai he would almost certainly stay lost. At nine, admitting defeat, Kamila had taken Webster to dinner.

It was now quarter past five, and still dark. Webster took the hotel’s handbook from his bedside table; they didn’t start serving breakfast for two hours. He reached for his book but put it down again without opening it, far too restless to read.

So he got up, showered, neglected to shave, put on his jeans and a light-gray shirt and left his room, stepping out into the cool morning shadows of the medina. The sun was taking its time to rise, and in the narrow alleys the only light came from the occasional street lamp bracketed to a coral pink wall. What a place this was for intrigue: every turning suggested a surprise, every door a secret. For twenty minutes Webster saw no one, as he threaded his way through the maze, and until the call to prayer began the only noise he heard was birdsong.

What was he expecting to find in Marrakech? The people who controlled Qazai, he hoped. The people he owed money, the people who were blackmailing him, the people he had perhaps betrayed. They were to be found somewhere along that trail of money that Oliver had been so patiently following, and in his imagination that’s where they still lived, dry and theoretical, refusing to come alive. They could be one man or many, from anywhere on earth, with anything in mind.

Somehow, though, he knew that they were here in Marrakech, waking up for a day that meant as much to them as it did to him, waiting as he was for Qazai.

•   •   •

W
EBSTER HATED SURVEILLANCE.
For something so simple it required such huge quantities of thought and concentration.

Kamila, dressed today in a full length djellaba and headscarf—“because no one sees you in one of these”—came for him at nine and together they made their way to the airport, where Driss and Youssef were already in place. Webster had given everyone photographs of Qazai, taken from interviews and news stories, but had no image of Senechal, and although a five-word description would probably be enough—surely there was no one else in Marrakech who looked quite like that—he agreed with Kamila that he should wait inside the terminal and point him out as he appeared.

Both men would be coming through the same door, thankfully: passengers on private flights still had their passports checked in the main terminal in a separate queue. Senechal was due to land first, and would either take a taxi or have a car waiting for him; there was no railway station at the airport and he was hardly likely to take a bus. Kamila and Youssef would be waiting in her car, a decrepit Peugeot 205, at the far end of the concourse, ready for Webster to point out their target. When Qazai arrived, Webster would be waiting in the back of Driss’s car at the same position on the concourse, ready to identify him. There was no reason why this shouldn’t work, but similar plans, better resourced and more deeply thought through, had gone wrong before.

Air France flight 378 from Paris arrived exactly on time and Webster, wearing a cap and sunglasses that Driss had lent him for the purpose, took up his position by the rail and watched the taxi touts barracking the new arrivals. Some more sober drivers, most of them from the big hotels, waited patiently with signs bearing the names of their charges. None of them was waiting for a Mr. Senechal, but then that was no surprise.

A steady flow of people was passing through the arrivals gate, but there was no way of knowing when passengers from the French flight would start appearing. Senechal would in any case be one of the first through. Webster kept half an eye on the luggage tags, and at eleven forty the first Air France passengers emerged, wheeling their executive cases. There was no sign of him. A few minutes later the crew passed through, wheeling theirs. Maybe he’d had to bring some large piece of luggage. Documents, perhaps. But by five past twelve the stream of people had slowed and after another five minutes it stopped altogether.

This was why surveillance was so exasperating. So many impossible variables. Perhaps Senechal had been stopped by immigration or customs; perhaps he had some special arrangement that allowed him to bypass all the formalities and leave the airport from another exit; perhaps he simply hadn’t come. But then if Webster had had the power to know any of these things he wouldn’t have needed to follow the man in the first place: as Hammer was fond of saying, watching someone’s back was a very crude way of finding out what was on his mind.

After a brief consultation with Driss, Webster called Kamila and told her that she could now switch her attention to Qazai; to be sure of picking him up, Webster would again endeavor to point him out. Then he called Oliver and asked him if he could think of some way to confirm that Qazai’s flight had indeed left, and spent an anxious few minutes waiting for a response. It was possible, he now realized, that the whole thing had been a blind, and that in fact the two men were now in Beirut, or Belgrade, perfectly secure.