Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

“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.

THREE HOURS TO AFRICA,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?