The Jackal's Share (22 page)

He searched the car but found nothing useful except the water—two small bottles. He drank one in one draft and kept the other.

A thought occurred to him. He had no money, no phone, no resources whatever. Dragging himself across the dust he patted Senechal’s jacket, dipped his hand inside its pockets. There was a wallet, with euros, pounds and dirham in it. He took some dirham, a few notes. He left the French passport and a BlackBerry, which was in any case locked. But a second phone, a cheap Samsung, he put in his pocket.

For a moment he stood and looked at the gun, trying to decide how many shots he had fired and whether it was any use to him, before wiping it thoroughly on his shirt tails and leaving it by Senechal’s side.

The phone had power but no signal. He looked through its recently dialed numbers, through its address book: there was only one number recorded there, a Dubai phone, probably a cell phone. Four calls made, seven received, every conversation with the same phone. Maybe Senechal had made his own arrangements after all.

Webster walked, east, toward the dawn, a bottle of water in one hand, the other ready to flag down the first car that passed.

•   •   •

K
AMILA RINSED THE CLOTH
once more in the water, now a dirty brown with Webster’s blood, carefully wiped the wound, gently pulling the hair apart, and turned to Driss.

“Take this. Get me some clean water and a fresh cloth.” She looked down at Webster, who was sitting on a stool with his shirt off. A dark purple bruise, lively with greens and yellows, had spread out from the ribs on his left side, up to his armpit and down to his waist; he expected to find another where he had been kneed in the thigh. His breathing was still tight and his head felt like it was wrapped with bands of spikes. Kamila had given him sweet mint tea and he sipped at it using his good arm.

“You provide a comprehensive service,” he said, looking up at her and smiling, with effort.

“You need to go to the hospital.”

“It’s a cracked rib. I’ve had one before. Someone drove into the side of our car when I was twelve. There’s nothing you can do about them. They just hurt.”

Kamila snorted. “There could be internal bleeding.”

Webster watched Driss return carrying the bowl of water and smiling a canny smile that seemed to say you don’t know who you’re dealing with.

“Sorry I woke you,” he said.

“I’m always up at dawn,” said Kamila. And then, pointedly, “How was Ike?”

“Awake. Not particularly happy.” That hadn’t been an easy call, not least because there was so much he hadn’t said and so much he still simply didn’t understand. By the time he had persuaded a car to stop, had reached the outskirts of the city and had found a phone signal, dawn had broken over Marrakech; in London the sun would have been up for at least an hour. He had expected a furious response, not at being roused but at being misled, or left uninformed—even, perhaps, at being wrong; but what he hadn’t banked on was that Ike’s love of a secret on the verge of being revealed was greater than everything else. In the end he had been stiff, but increasingly concerned, and when Webster had finished giving him the fractured outline of events had told him to call Kamila on her home number and to call him again when he had slept and eaten.

Kamila didn’t reply, but her silence meant something. She put the cloth back in the bowl, took a large glass jar, opened it, and into the palm of her hand poured some white powder, which she began to sprinkle from her fingertips onto the wound. It stung keenly and Webster winced.

“He didn’t know I was here.” He looked up at her.

“Keep still. This is alum. It will keep the wound clean.” She sprinkled more powder. “I did wonder.” Inspecting his head closely she gave a small grunt of satisfaction and screwed the lid back on the jar. “There was something you weren’t telling us. And you seemed alone somehow. There,” she stepped back. “We’ll leave that open to the air. I’ll put a dressing on it later. Now Driss will make us eggs and you can tell me what exactly you have got us involved in.”

Throughout all this Webster hadn’t really stopped to consider how his preoccupations might affect these people, and the realization that he had put them at risk made him feel ashamed.

“Sorry,” he said. “It was thoughtless of me.”

“Don’t worry.” She wasn’t smiling but her eyes were lenient. “If I wanted security I would have become an accountant. But I want to know what to expect.”

Webster was surprised by how hungry he was. While they sat in Kamila’s kitchen, Driss brought them flatbread and fruit and eggs, and Webster told them everything he knew, and everything he didn’t.

“But what I don’t get,” he concluded, “is why he’s involved. He’s not an arms dealer. The money he’d make is a pittance to him. I thought for a while he’d sold his soul to the wrong people, early on. Taken the devil’s money. But he’s in a different league now. He could have bought them out ten times over.”

“Maybe they won’t let him.”

“Maybe. But why persecute him now?”

Kamila nodded, thinking. “Maybe he has always done it.”

“What do you mean?”

“How a man makes his first million is always the most interesting story. Has he explained that to you?”

Webster thought back to those inadequate conversations in Mount Street and Como. “No. No, he hasn’t.”

“A lot of people got rich at that time. After the Shah went. Everybody wanted weapons. The diaspora. The revolutionaries. Maybe Darius Qazai was in the right place at the right time. Maybe he has just kept on doing it.”

Webster considered this for a moment. “All I know,” he said, “is that he owes them a lot, and they won’t kill him until they get it. And then they will.”

“They seem happy killing everyone else.”

They sat in silence for a few seconds. Kamila spoke first.

“What are you going to do now?”

Webster rested his head on his hand and pinched his temples. He thought about the various components. Senechal would have been found: Kamila had called an ambulance for him as soon as Webster had contacted her. Qazai might already have left the country.

“You should sleep,” said Kamila. “And then you should leave. Go back to England. Get rid of these people. You don’t need them in your life.”

Webster looked up at her and shook his head. “Sadly they’re already in it. And I’m in theirs. I need to see that man again.”

Kamila frowned. “Why?”

“So he stops trying to kill me. He thinks I know too much.”

“You probably do.”

“I do and I don’t.”

Webster picked up Senechal’s phone from the table and looked at it for a moment. Now there were two numbers stored on it: Kamila’s, and the anonymous number. He called it, and it rang twice.

“
Oui
.” A quiet, harsh voice.

“This is Ben Webster.”

“You have wrong number.”

“We need to meet.”

“I don’t know you. Good-bye.”

“If you don’t meet me my friends in the CIA are going to learn all about Chiba, Kurus and your relationship with Mr. Qazai. That doesn’t have to happen. I will be by the Air Maroc ticket office in the arrivals hall of Menara airport at ten o’clock. Come alone.”

The line went dead. Kamila and Driss were looking at him across the table, their expressions somewhere between concern and incredulity.

“You should be going home,” said Kamila.

“Never show a bully you’re weak. And, besides, I don’t have my passport.”

20.

D
RISS AND
W
EBSTER DROVE
to the airport together, Webster in one of Youssef’s suits: dark gray, about half an inch too short in the limbs, tight under the armpits and around his waist. Kamila had put a discreet bandage on his head wound and after breakfast he had showered, inspecting his battered body in the mirror with a sense of curious detachment. On his thigh was a bright red patch of burst blood vessels and around them a growing storm of purple bruise. Dark bags hung under his eyes and when he walked it was with a heavy limp in his damaged leg.

They made one stop. Just short of his hotel, Webster ducked down in his seat, and a hundred yards further on Driss pulled over and turned to him for instructions.

“In the wardrobe there’s a safe. My passport is taped under that. My credit cards are there too. You’ll have to slide the whole thing out of its hole. If you can, get me a shirt.” Youssef’s was at least two sizes too small. “Here’s the key. Room fourteen.”

“How many rooms?”

“It’s quite big. About thirty. Go straight up the stairs and turn left. No one will notice you.”

In the wing mirror Webster watched Driss walk back up the street, cross and go into the hotel through its only entrance, a gate that opened onto a small garden and the studded front door. Webster’s room was on the first floor, no more than a minute inside, and he calculated that Driss should be out in three minutes at most.

In the distance he could hear the lazy sawing drone of two sirens and thought at first it was the beginning of the call to prayer. He looked at his watch. Driss had been gone for two minutes.

Rounding a corner at the end of the street came two police cars with their green and red lights flashing. In the car’s mirror Webster watched them drive at speed in his direction and stop abruptly outside the hotel. Two men got out of one of the cars and went inside; the others stayed where they were. A minute passed, and another, before Driss came out, maintaining a nonchalant pace all the way, a bundle of blue cloth in his hand.

“Are they for me?” said Webster as he got in.

“They won’t find much.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your room has already been searched.” He handed Webster a crumpled shirt. “Your clothes are on the floor. Your suitcase has been cut open.”

“My passport?”

“Not there.”

“Fuck’s sake. Did they say anything?”

“The police? No. They asked for room fourteen. They wanted to know about the Englishman staying there.”

“Can you find out what they want?”

“I can call someone.”

“Let’s go.”

“Doesn’t this change things?”

“I have no idea.”

Someone had called the police. His captors from last night didn’t seem the sort, unless they wanted him in custody, where they could find him. Qazai hardly stood to gain. Perhaps Senechal. He tried to think it through. The ambulance would have come for him, and the police, at some point, would have become involved. Would he have told them who had beaten him? Surely not. There was too much at stake elsewhere, and no advantage to making himself more conspicuous than he already was. With a cold shock a further possibility struck him. Senechal had died.

A stifling dread took hold of him then, and as Driss drove through the widening streets, hot already under the morning sun, alive with color and motion, all he saw was Senechal’s gray face, lifeless in the desert.

•   •   •

B
Y THE TIME THEY REACHED
Menara airport the day was full, the sun high and blazing, and the car’s air conditioning struggled against the heat. It would be hotter than yesterday, said Driss, and Webster found that hard to believe; hard, too, to register that in the twenty-four hours since he had last been here his life might have irrevocably changed.

Logic told him that Senechal was still alive. He hadn’t hit him that hard and the wound had not seemed deep. Surely it took more than that to kill a man? Surely someone you had left breathing steadily, calmly almost, didn’t simply die in the course of an hour lying peacefully enough in the desert? Logic, though, couldn’t control Webster’s memory of that moment, and each time it played out the blow seemed to grow in force and Senechal’s otherworldly form became more frail and defenseless. An acid mix of fear and guilt rose in his throat. Perhaps that’s all it took. A strong loathing and a second’s loss of control.

They parked, Driss went ahead, and on the hot walk to the terminal Webster smoked a cigarette and tried to rid his mind of everything but the conversation he was about to have. What did he want from it? For this man to leave him alone: to make him understand that he was no threat now but might become one. That was all.

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 lowered 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.