Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

He told her that he was interested in a man called Darius Qazai, who was coming here the following day. He wanted to know everything about the people Qazai met: who they were, where they had come from, where they went afterward, how they had paid for their trip. But in the first place all he wanted to know was where Qazai and his lawyer were staying.

“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” said Kamila, leaning over the front seat and grinning at Webster, who smiled back.

WEBSTER, COLD AND STIFFfrom the air conditioning in his room, was woken by the call to prayer at dawn the next day. He pulled the sheets about him and lay for a moment listening to the muezzin.

His first thought was Elsa. He had called her before dinner and she had asked him to make a vow: that his return be the end of all this, no matter what the result of his intemperate dash to Africa. He had promised, and that had been the end of their short conversation. One more reason to make the day count. He tried to imagine how it would play out, but only its beginning was clear: it would start at the airport, him in Driss’s car waiting for Qazai, and Kamila with Youssef waiting for Senechal. Beyond that it was an anxious blank.

Qazai’s flight was due at noon; Oliver had established that Senechal was coming from Paris, and would land at eleven fifteen. Webster, Kamila and her sons had spent the afternoon and much of the evening trying to find out where the two men would be staying, but with no luck. There were over four hundred hotels in Marrakech and they must have called half of them; the other half were not places someone like Qazai would consider. Chances were they had booked an apartment or were using false names, and while this wasn’t a disaster it did make the whole operation especially precarious, because if they lost Qazai he would almost certainly stay lost. At nine, admitting defeat, Kamila had taken Webster to dinner.

It was now quarter past five, and still dark. Webster took the hotel’s handbook from his bedside table; they didn’t start serving breakfast for two hours. He reached for his book but put it down again without opening it, far too restless to read.

So he got up, showered, neglected to shave, put on his jeans and a light-gray shirt and left his room, stepping out into the cool morning shadows of the medina. The sun was taking its time to rise, and in the narrow alleys the only light came from the occasional street lamp bracketed to a coral pink wall. What a place this was for intrigue: every turning suggested a surprise, every door a secret. For twenty minutes Webster saw no one, as he threaded his way through the maze, and until the call to prayer began the only noise he heard was birdsong.

What was he expecting to find in Marrakech? The people who controlled Qazai, he hoped. The people he owed money, the people who were blackmailing him, the people he had perhaps betrayed. They were to be found somewhere along that trail of money that Oliver had been so patiently following, and in his imagination that’s where they still lived, dry and theoretical, refusing to come alive. They could be one man or many, from anywhere on earth, with anything in mind.

Somehow, though, he knew that they were here in Marrakech, waking up for a day that meant as much to them as it did to him, waiting as he was for Qazai.

WEBSTER HATED SURVEILLANCE.For something so simple it required such huge quantities of thought and concentration.

Kamila, dressed today in a full length djellaba and headscarf—“because no one sees you in one of these”—came for him at nine and together they made their way to the airport, where Driss and Youssef were already in place. Webster had given everyone photographs of Qazai, taken from interviews and news stories, but had no image of Senechal, and although a five-word description would probably be enough—surely there was no one else in Marrakech who looked quite like that—he agreed with Kamila that he should wait inside the terminal and point him out as he appeared.

Both men would be coming through the same door, thankfully: passengers on private flights still had their passports checked in the main terminal in a separate queue. Senechal was due to land first, and would either take a taxi or have a car waiting for him; there was no railway station at the airport and he was hardly likely to take a bus. Kamila and Youssef would be waiting in her car, a decrepit Peugeot 205, at the far end of the concourse, ready for Webster to point out their target. When Qazai arrived, Webster would be waiting in the back of Driss’s car at the same position on the concourse, ready to identify him. There was no reason why this shouldn’t work, but similar plans, better resourced and more deeply thought through, had gone wrong before.

Air France flight 378 from Paris arrived exactly on time and Webster, wearing a cap and sunglasses that Driss had lent him for the purpose, took up his position by the rail and watched the taxi touts barracking the new arrivals. Some more sober drivers, most of them from the big hotels, waited patiently with signs bearing the names of their charges. None of them was waiting for a Mr. Senechal, but then that was no surprise.

A steady flow of people was passing through the arrivals gate, but there was no way of knowing when passengers from the French flight would start appearing. Senechal would in any case be one of the first through. Webster kept half an eye on the luggage tags, and at eleven forty the first Air France passengers emerged, wheeling their executive cases. There was no sign of him. A few minutes later the crew passed through, wheeling theirs. Maybe he’d had to bring some large piece of luggage. Documents, perhaps. But by five past twelve the stream of people had slowed and after another five minutes it stopped altogether.

This was why surveillance was so exasperating. So many impossible variables. Perhaps Senechal had been stopped by immigration or customs; perhaps he had some special arrangement that allowed him to bypass all the formalities and leave the airport from another exit; perhaps he simply hadn’t come. But then if Webster had had the power to know any of these things he wouldn’t have needed to follow the man in the first place: as Hammer was fond of saying, watching someone’s back was a very crude way of finding out what was on his mind.

After a brief consultation with Driss, Webster called Kamila and told her that she could now switch her attention to Qazai; to be sure of picking him up, Webster would again endeavor to point him out. Then he called Oliver and asked him if he could think of some way to confirm that Qazai’s flight had indeed left, and spent an anxious few minutes waiting for a response. It was possible, he now realized, that the whole thing had been a blind, and that in fact the two men were now in Beirut, or Belgrade, perfectly secure.

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.