Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

And he had not been stabbed; at least not at first. There had been no postmortem, but someone in the Isfahan police department had noted that the three wounds in Mehr’s stomach hadn’t bled onto his clothes as one might expect, and that the marks on his neck, described in the report as livid, indicated that he had in fact been strangled. That was the most inspired moment of the investigation, it seemed: since then only three people had been interviewed, no evidence had been taken from the street where Mehr had been abducted, and the last sentence of the report merely stated that as far as anyone could tell, the policemen in charge showed no signs of wanting to make any progress.

Webster read the report three times, and when he was done he walked across the office and photocopied it, twice, before taking a copy to Hammer, who had been in for an hour but was still in his running clothes. The cap he always wore to run was on his desk by his newspapers.

Webster waited until Hammer had finished reading. “Do you think Qazai knows all this?”

“How’d you get it?”

“An anonymous benefactor. It came in the post.”

“Who was it?”

“I’ve called a bunch of people. Journalists, Foreign Office. No one told me anything. It could have been the lawyer. Mehr’s lawyer.” He didn’t mention his widow.

Hammer read it again, and when he looked up there was a challenge in his face. “I didn’t realize this was a murder investigation.”

“I thought it was worth following up. I’d say I was right.”

Hammer settled himself with a long breath, his forearms on the desk. “You going to sit down?” Webster sat in one of the two chairs facing him. “Have you had breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“Shame. I guess I’ll have to do this on an empty stomach. So what’s your theory? Qazai had him killed? He was mixed up in something big?”

Webster ignored the sarcasm. “I don’t have a theory. But he’s Qazai’s man, and he died in Iran, which is already odd, and for whatever reason the Iranians lied about what happened. Isn’t that enough?”

Hammer pushed out his lower lip and thought for a moment. “I’m finding it hard to imagine what the conspiracy theory is. This is Qazai’s guy. Say he’s doing something terrible in Iran. Say he’s into drugs or arms or some shit. You think the Iranians aren’t going to crow about that?” His eyes were on Webster, waiting for a response. “Look. This is interesting, no question. My money, what it’s worth, is on some fucker in the government or the police milking this situation. The original articles, out of Iran, they said that not all the pieces had been recovered, right? Where do you think they might be? On their way to a collector, I bet. I think we can assume that at some point someone there is taking advantage of this situation. Either the Iranians had him killed or they made the most of it when someone else did.”

Webster started to speak.

“Hold on.” Hammer checked him. “That’s part of it. The other part is, this isn’t our job. It’s too big. If I thought you could ever find out what really happened I might say go ahead. But we can’t do work like this there. It’s too difficult. This is great,” he picked up the piece of paper, “but what are you going to do next? Fly to Tehran? Get a bus to Isfahan? Ask a few questions? Can’t be done. Even if you got a visa they’d arrest you at the airport as a spy. Which you sort of are. And our sources there are feeble. Fletcher’s about as close as we get, through the Americans, and they don’t know shit. So.” He raised his hand. “Wait a second, I’m nearly done. With regret—and you know I’d always rather know things than not know them—we can’t get into this. You need to concentrate on what we’ve been asked to do.”

Webster hadn’t been expecting this. From the start he had wanted to know what had happened to Mehr, and he had assumed everyone would share his interest—naively, of course, because it was like Ike to decide with cool logic which battles not to fight. A talent he would do well to acquire himself.

“All right,” he said. “So you’re happy if in a year’s time we’ve written our report, Qazai’s been waving it around, and it all comes out that his employee was up to no good on his behalf? You don’t mind that?”

Hammer shook his head deliberately. “Not at all. Look. If you find that out, whatever it is, by doing the work we’ve agreed to do, great. I’ll be delighted. But in a year’s time I’ll be quite happy to explain to whoever’s listening that we don’t do murder investigations. Not in Iran, anyway.”

Webster nodded and suppressed a sigh. Ike, like Elsa, was impossible to argue with because he was usually right.

“You want that?”

Hammer put his palm on the document. “I’ll hang on to it.” He watched Webster get up to leave. “When are you flying out?”

“Sunday.”

“Where you staying?”

“Timur’s sending someone to pick me up from the airport. Fletcher offered but I opted for peace and quiet.”

Hammer laughed. “Send the old bastard my love.”

THE HEAT IN DUBAIcame in short, thick blocks: the walk from the arrivals hall to the car, from the car to the hotel. Webster, with his northern blood, felt it like a substance, a dense, invisible haze that offered a sly welcome and then held you in a burning grasp. Like the cold in Russia that could make your clothes as stiff as a board this deadly weather was exciting, somehow, but no one chose to endure it for long, not even the tourists, and the only people who did—the guest workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, suspended against the sky on impossibly rickety scaffolding, so far up that they were almost lost in a cloud of heat, slowly building the shiny miracle of Dubai—had no choice. On the road to the city from the airport, crossing the bridge over the creek, there was a huge screen that gave the official temperature in square red figures. When it reached 50 degrees Celsius, all construction work, by law, had to stop; Webster remembered Constance telling him on his first visit here that during the summer it could spend weeks on an uncanny, unchanging 49, so that progress was never interrupted. Today, halfway through what must even here have counted as spring, it was a mere 41.

He was met at the airport by a young Indian man in a dark-gray suit and peaked cap holding a clipboard with his name on it. Webster let him take his luggage and followed him across the marble hall, through the slowly revolving doors and out into the dry heat of the evening. There was perhaps an hour before the sun disappeared. In his thin wool suit, a staple of trips to warm climates, he felt dehydrated, sweaty and decidedly unpressed.

A little way from the terminal his driver put his bag down and asked him to wait for a moment before disappearing into a concrete parking lot. Webster watched the cars driving past: a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Porsche. A lowly Mercedes taxi. He thought about calling Elsa, took his phone from his pocket and remembered that it was early afternoon in London and that she would still be at work. There were e-mails, though, and he started to go through them: one from Constance suggesting they meet for dinner the next day; several from Ike.

Something brilliantly white distracted his eye in the growing gloom, and when he glanced up he saw a Rolls-Royce, glisteningly new and looking like it had just arrived from the rich man’s afterlife. It was obscenely massive, with great square headlights and a brutish expression, as if to say that this was Dubai and ostentation not merely normal but required. He moved back a couple of steps, giving it room, and then with a flush of real embarrassment saw the door open and his driver get out.