Алистер Маклин - Prime Target

She climbed the stairs, feeling them move with her weight. At the top was a room with no door. A heavy curtain was slung across the gap. She pushed it aside. The room beyond was clean and bright. The floor was tiled and shiny, with a rug at the centre. And Lucy was there, sitting in a winged cane armchair facing the window.

‘Surprise, surprise!’

Sabrina took three steps into the room and knew everything was wrong. Lucy continued to stare out of the window. No living person was ever that still.

‘Oh God, oh God, my poor Lucy…’

They had not known each other well, but they had got on. That was closeness enough to put a pang through Sabrina’s heart. She stepped close to the chair. Lucy’s hands were tied in front of her. Her throat had been opened. Flies clustered on the edge of the wound and across the caked blood in her lap.

Sabrina looked around the room. If there had been anything there belonging to Lucy it had been taken. Her body was all they had left.

Sabrina looked at the filmed, half-lidded eyes. Lucy had died some hours ago. Already the tan of her skin was turning deeper brown at the hairline; the sweetish smell of early decay hung in the room. She put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder briefly, as a farewell gesture, then slipped out of the room. If whoever had done this was coming back, she didn’t want to be there when they did.

Sabrina went quickly back down to the alley. She walked to the far end and found a quiet, private space. She fished out her mobile and tapped three digits. C.W. Whitlock came on the line. She told him what had happened in a calm voice that didn’t betray her churning emotions.

‘Go back to your hotel and have a strong drink,’ he told her. ‘The proper authorities will be alerted. They’ll deal with it.’

‘Do you think this had anything to do with Yaqub Hisham and my investigation? This would be a fairly strong signal that they don’t want anyone poking around.’

‘No. This was the boys from Peru, I’d say. She believed they were on to her. She also believed she could handle it. She obviously got it wrong.’

‘Are they holed up in this area?’

‘Never you mind, Sabrina. This isn’t your turf. It’s a matter for Task Force Six.’

‘Sure.’

‘Sabrina? You listening?’

‘It’s all right, I got the message. You can’t blame me for feeling enraged.’

‘Don’t you mean vengeful? That particular itch will be scratched. We’ll bring them to justice, I promise. Now listen, Sabrina, wait for back-up if the situation heats up too much. I would rather have you slow and alive, than quick and dead. Take care out there, OK?’

‘If I don’t, it won’t be for want of warnings.’

‘Keep in touch.’

‘Right.’

It had happened before and – God help me, she thought – it would happen again. At the hotel she bathed, changed her clothes and put Lucy Dow firmly from her mind. Then she set out to find Yaqub Hisham’s cronies on her own.

She took the map that had been provided with the briefing docket. Her destination, the place where Mossad believed Emily Selby’s killer had lived, was called Rouelle Nador. She memorized the name and pictured the words in her head, ready and waiting for a match. But after two hours of tramping the narrow streets, retracing her steps at several points, she admitted that she was lost.

Part of the problem was that only some of the streets had names, so there was no logical way to progress from one to the other, in spite of what the map appeared to suggest. Another snag was that some names were duplicated, because little signs with pointers had been tacked up to help tourists find certain locations, and in many cases the pointers had fallen off and now only the names remained, misleading anybody trying to use names as a guide.

On top of that, she was making people curious about her. Once again she had tried to dress down, in a dark bronze-and-mustard ankle-length skirt and a matching peasant top, but she was American and she was blonde and that undid most of the effort. People were watching as she passed, and they were muttering.

Towards noon Sabrina considered giving up and going back to the hotel to rethink her tactics. She had assumed that Lucy would take her to within spitting distance of the place she wanted to go. Bereft of that guidance, she had trudged through streets crammed with mosques and townhouses – some of them highly elegant – and had bowed her head to pass through countless arches and follow the alleys beyond. Around the walled perimeter of the old town were dozens of gates, some of them locked, most of them imposingly built from oak with iron and copper banding. They seemed not to lead outside of the old town, but into other shadowy areas not shown on her map. As an experience, that part of Tetuán was unforgettable. But trying to find an address was hell.

She asked no one the way. An American woman visiting that area with a destination in mind would go beyond being a curiosity and become an object of suspicion. She simply kept wandering, sure that by now she looked lost and faintly dazed without having to strain for the effect.

Outside a café she stopped, took a deep breath of the coffee aroma and dropped into a chair. The street was no more than 3 metres wide and an overhanging balcony cast an oblong of shade where she sat. The scent of coffee was delicious but she ordered iced tea. For the moment it was sheer pleasure just to sit there dabbing her face and neck with a handkerchief, feeling a gentle draught from a passageway opposite.

She looked up as the tea was brought. Over the waiter’s shoulder she saw a sign: Rouelle Nador.

‘Goddamn it!’

‘Mam’selle?’ The waiter looked startled.

‘That looks wonderful,’ she said, switching on a bright smile. She picked up the tall glass in its silver holder. ‘Really wonderful.’

The waiter went away, confused.

Sabrina took her time over the tea, watching the pedestrian traffic to and from Rouelle Nador. It was a long street, narrower than most of the others and very drab. Raucous Arab music blared from a couple of upstairs windows, and that was unusual. Most of the music playing from shops and from the open doorways of houses was subdued and melodious, western in tone with a distinct French bias.

The people going down Rouelle Nador and those coming out were unmistakably a ghetto breed, she decided. They had the look of the community’s bad guys. They displayed a sullen, automatic dislike of the scene around them, just like the thugs of the esquadrones muertes, the death-squad men she had seen hanging around the beach bars of La Libertad in El Salvador.

There was no sense in trying to kid herself; the people around Rouelle Nador made her nervous. She took a deep breath and silently admitted it. She knew why it was happening, too: she associated these characters with what had happened to Lucy Dow.

Abruptly, like a dose of the right medicine at precisely the right moment, she had a sudden recollection of Mike Graham offering to take this job and let her go to Germany.

That shifted her focus. She straightened her shoulders, threw back her head and drained the glass. She put a handful of Moroccan francs on the table, got up and made her way into Rouelle Nador.

There were no shops or cafés, no mosques or elegant houses. None of the odours escaping on to the street inspired exotic sensations. Mostly it was staleness and decay she smelled, with the occasional whiff of hashish. Definitely a ghetto, a concentration of self-segregated nastiness at the centre of other people’s domestic lives.

A man standing in a doorway stared at her as she went past. He was dressed in flip-flops, cutoff jeans and a green Day-Glo undershirt. His eyes followed her and as she turned to stare back at him he stopped chewing the matchstick jutting from the side of his mouth.