The Jackal's Share (18 page)

But before Oliver could respond, Qazai appeared. He was dressed in the clothes of a rich man at play—loafers, a jacket of light-blue linen—and at first glance looked fresh, comfortable. His hair had been cut and his beard was particularly trim. His gait, though, seemed slightly impeded, slightly heavy, as if he were walking on sand, and because he wore sunglasses Webster realized for the first time how much of his authority came from the clear imperious blue of his eyes.

He had a single case, of deep brown leather, which he carried. Ten yards into the hall he stopped and looked around at the two dozen or so drivers and their signs; not seeing what he wanted he paused, put his bag down, and made another survey. This time something seemed to click and shaking his head he made his way to a short man in a black suit, who took his bag and led him out of the hall. From his position Webster couldn’t see the name on the driver’s sign; he watched them go, and once they were level with him motioned to Driss to follow him outside. But as he did so, some movement in his peripheral vision registered as familiar, and focusing on it he realized that it was the strange floating walk of Yves Senechal, looking as he always did, pulling after him a metal case.

Webster turned around, walked away behind a thick column, took his phone from his pocket and found Kamila’s number. He pressed the key, held the phone to his ear and waited. It took an age to connect.

Through the window he could see the driver holding open the door of a black Mercedes saloon for Qazai who, with a look around him, climbed in. The phone was still dead; cursing, Webster tried to cancel the call and at that moment a message from Oliver flashed onto his screen: “you are ok.” A minute ago that would have been accurate. Driss appeared at his side.

“That’s Senechal,” said Webster. “Behind me now. In the gray suit with the metal suitcase. I can’t get this fucking thing to work. That”—he pointed through the huge smoked glass window—“is Qazai. In the Mercedes. Get your mother to follow him, and then come back here.”

He turned and watched as Driss ran to the exit, past Senechal and along the outside of the window. The Mercedes was indicating and waiting for another car to pass, and while it did so Webster made a note of the number on its plate. As it pulled away Driss was still running toward his mother’s car, perhaps fifty yards away, so that by the time Webster himself made it out of the terminal she was just receiving the message. The little Peugeot turned into the road, was forced to wait for an endless moment while another car inched across its nose with extraordinary slowness into a small space, and then finally drove off. Webster looked for the Mercedes. It had disappeared from sight.

Trusting, or praying, that Kamila was good enough to make up the gap he looked around him for Senechal. He was no longer there. A moment before, he had been by a crowd of people, talking to a taxi tout, and now he had gone. He had to be in one of the dusty old yellow cabs that were queueing up yards away, but Webster couldn’t risk peering in through the window—he was already nervous about Senechal peering out at him. Turning to face the airport building he waited for Driss to arrive, out of breath, by his side.

“Do you see the man in the gray suit in any of those taxis?” A half-dozen of them were pulling away, waiting for traffic to clear. “I’m going to text your mother that license plate number.”

Driss looked, but saw nothing. He walked back, shrugging, as the cars rolled away, and stood for a moment looking anxiously at Webster, who had taken off his sunglasses and was pinching the bridge of his nose.

“What do you think?” said Webster, squinting in the sunlight.

“There are traffic lights at the bottom of the ramp. A hundred meters. If he was through before her . . .”

Webster nodded, and ran a hand slowly through his hair. Thirty seconds later his phone rang; it was Kamila, and he knew what she was going to say. He was reminded of the phrase George Black always used when reporting a cock-up of this kind. “We’ve had a loss, Ben.” A loss was exactly how it felt.

He shook his head and answered it. “Meet us back here,” he said, and hung up. “How long does it take to trace a number plate?”

“On Friday, a long time.”

Of course. It was almost the weekend. And what better place to spend it, with time on your hands, than Marrakech?

“But I saw the name,” said Driss.

“What name?”

“The passenger name on the sign. The driver’s sign.”

Webster felt his heart give a little kick.

•   •   •

T
HERE WERE TWO “
M
R.
R
OBINSONS”
staying in the city’s finer hotels, but only one of them had checked in that day. He was due to stay a single night in one of the private villas in the grounds, and a call from Kamila to the room to inquire after his comfort had confirmed that he was there.

It was Kamila who had found him, in the eleventh hotel they had tried. Webster thanked God for making Qazai too grand to slum it even for a single night, and checked out the hotel on its Web site. It had immense gardens, and dotted around them, away from the main building, where the only moderately rich were forced to stay, was a handful of secluded villas. Qazai was in the Sultan’s Residence.

Despite their size, the hotel grounds had only one entrance. Outside, Webster and Driss sat in one Peugeot, Youssef in another, on opposite sides of the road, fifty yards away from the hotel gates, while Kamila, who had changed into a light summer suit, had lunch in the hotel lobby and waited to alert the team by phone the moment Qazai appeared.

Their vigil started at two, with the full heat of the sun pressing down on the roofs of the cars. The sky was a blue Webster hadn’t seen before, pristine and deep, set off at its edges by the spiky green of the palm trees and the sandy pink of the brick.

By three Webster had finished his small bottle of water and was growing hungry. He quizzed Driss about his plans to finish his degree and move back to Paris as a postgraduate, about life in Morocco with such an unorthodox mother, about growing up in France and moving here when he was small. About Moroccan food and French food, which was a mistake. To dull his appetite Webster smoked the cigarettes he had bought the night before.

At four, just as Driss was offering to walk to buy food, his phone rang; he answered it, listened, and hung up.

“The same car,” he said to Webster, starting his engine as the Mercedes pulled across one lane of traffic and drove away toward the center of the city. Driss followed at a distance, Youssef and Kamila twenty yards behind him.

After no more than a mile, at the entrance to the medina, where the streets narrowed to an arm span, the car stopped and Qazai got out. Webster turned his face away as Driss drove past and parked the car on the verge of road beyond some trees.

“We could follow in this,” he said. “But not for long.”

A moment later Kamila drew up in front of them and got out of her car. Through the back windscreen Webster saw Qazai look around him, a perfunctory check, and then move quickly through the broad gate into the old city. He was carrying a thin leather briefcase, and was alone.

Webster opened his door and was starting for the gate when he felt Kamila’s hand on his arm.

“I go first. Keep as far behind me as you can. It’s not easy in there.” She set off with a quick walk.

Since his early morning walk the medina had filled with people, and as he walked through the gate he had to look hard to catch sight of Qazai, who was some twenty-five yards ahead trying to pass a slow-moving group of tourists. In among their khaki slacks and white sun hats Qazai looked elegant, patrician, aloof. An old man on a skinny old scooter snaked between them.

Qazai seemed to know where he was going—though how, Webster was at a loss to understand. Had he not had Kamila in his sights the whole time, he would have lost his bearings immediately: there were no landmarks. Some of the alleyways were so narrow that the only constant in view was the sky above, at its highest point still a fine cornflower blue, and the walls of the buildings all ran together in a continuous band of color, from rosy ochre to sandstone with now and then a clean block of white or blue as relief. Shops occupied the broader streets: tin buckets of yellow saffron and luminous red paprika set out on the ground, pastel gowns hanging from awnings, endless rows of pointed shoes, rugs strung across great expanses of wall in rough imitation of Qazai’s house in London, and in the odd space in between a heavy studded door that opened into the private world of the city.

They were in quieter, closer passages now and Qazai was making a turn every ten yards; there were no crowds to hide behind and Webster, trying to keep only Kamila in view, was finding it harder and harder to stay in touch with her and at the same time keep out of sight. Shade now covered the ground, the buildings seemed taller, and he had the sense of going slowly down into ever darker, tighter circles. The walls around him were the color of redwood and the air thick and still.

He rounded one corner to find Kamila, all of six feet away, peering cautiously around another, her palm up behind her to tell him to stop. He stood as still as he could, hearing his own breathing in the silence. She continued to watch, her body tensed, and then, satisfied that she had seen enough, turned and pressed her back to the wall.

“He stopped at a house about five meters down there.” She was whispering. “Knocked once, quietly. Then again. He’s just gone in.”

“What happens now?”

“Wait here.”

She disappeared around the corner, and was gone for a minute.

“OK,” she said. “It could be worse. There’s one man on the door. When they come out they either have to come back around here, or the other way into a long alley with only one turning off it. Three people can cover it. You can’t. Not like that.”

She took her phone from her handbag, dialed, said a few words in French and hung up.

“They’ll be with us in ten minutes. You shouldn’t wait here. Go back the way we came: left, second right, left again. On your right you will see an entrance to a courtyard. A doorway. Hide in there.”

Webster did as he was told, repeating her instructions as he went. He was feeling highly visible and not a little redundant, and found himself imagining what George Black and his people would have made of all this. Most of the time surveillance was carried out in a car on the wide streets of expansive cities, where it was possible to believe that it was a serious discipline; here it resembled nothing so much as a child’s game, a scrappy version of hide and seek.

Hidden, then, he smoked a cigarette, breathing in the smell of raisins in the pack before he took one out and lit it. The smoke drifted around the courtyard, which was calm and clear of people and clutter, and from which three doors led into houses whose windows were all shuttered. When he arrived he could feel his heart beating in his throat, but it soon slowed, and for a time he felt strangely peaceful.

It was Driss who came to get him. He had a bag over his shoulder, and from it pulled a large piece of maroon fabric which he handed to Webster.

“Put this on. Over your clothes.”

As Webster unfolded it he saw it was a robe, with a pointed hood. A djellaba, like Kamila’s. The fabric was coarse in his hands.

“Pull the hood low and no one will know you. Forget your sunglasses.”

It had been a long time since Webster had dressed up, and after a second’s hesitation—more surprise than reluctance—he drew the robe over his head, his arms upright into the sleeves, a movement that he hadn’t made since donning a surplice at school. It was lighter than he had expected and smelled of old books. He drew up the hood with both hands and instantly felt detached from the world, invisible; he might wander off through this endless warren of alleyways and never resume his old life again. The change complete, he followed his guide out of the courtyard.

Killing time is easier in a car, with company, than it is in a featureless passage on your own. For the first half-hour, Webster stood, until he realized that he might save his back and sit cross-legged on the ground, since that was an acceptable thing for a man in a djellaba to do. He tried as best he could to cover his shoes, leather and too English. Except for the call to prayer, which made him feel briefly conspicuous, there was no noise here, and hardly anyone passed: an old man pushing a bicycle, a tall man in a dusty black suit, several men and women dressed as he was. All he could do was watch the wall in front of him, stuccoed like coral, and wait for Kamila to walk past the entrance to his alleyway, which would mean that the meeting had broken up and he was to follow the next person he saw. Driss had brought him a bottle of water, and by sipping it slowly he made it last until six, when the heat was tailing off a little and the sky beginning to turn a cobalt blue. Under his robe his shirt was now wet and cool with sweat.

His phone sat shaming him in his back pocket: he should send Elsa a message. He had called the previous day and she hadn’t answered. Wasn’t he simply protecting his name and his family’s future? And what would Elsa have thought of him if he had simply rolled over for Qazai? He wondered whether she really prized their security over his principles, and whether she would have been so happy to compromise her own.

He became so involved in this one-sided internal argument that when Kamila finally appeared he only noticed her when she whispered “now” at him as she passed. The passage behind her was clear but he could hear footsteps about to round the corner; he bent his head low and stayed still. Two pairs of feet came into view and passed, one in black leather lace-ups, the other in brown suede. Senechal and Qazai. Webster’s heart skipped high in his chest. He and Driss would follow them; Kamila and Youssef would remain in place ready to shadow whoever else came out of that house. He waited for his quarry to round a corner, then moved off. Somewhere behind him, Driss fell into line.

Senechal had a map, and from time to time slowed to refer to it, Qazai, curiously slumped, giving him no assistance and appearing to take no interest. Webster hung back, expecting Driss to appear alongside him; but he never did, and as Senechal moved on he would resume his pursuit. Slowly the alleys grew into streets and the noise of traffic and shouting returned. Webster guessed they were on the edge of the medina now and began to ask himself what he would do if his prey were suddenly to hail a little Peugeot taxi and speed off. Pick them up again at Qazai’s hotel, with any luck, and hope that Kamila and Youssef did better with their end of the job.