Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

Webster turned around, walked away behind a thick column, took his phone from his pocket and found Kamila’s number. He pressed the key, held the phone to his ear and waited. It took an age to connect.

Through the window he could see the driver holding open the door of a black Mercedes saloon for Qazai who, with a look around him, climbed in. The phone was still dead; cursing, Webster tried to cancel the call and at that moment a message from Oliver flashed onto his screen: “you are ok.” A minute ago that would have been accurate. Driss appeared at his side.

“That’s Senechal,” said Webster. “Behind me now. In the gray suit with the metal suitcase. I can’t get this fucking thing to work. That”—he pointed through the huge smoked glass window—“is Qazai. In the Mercedes. Get your mother to follow him, and then come back here.”

He turned and watched as Driss ran to the exit, past Senechal and along the outside of the window. The Mercedes was indicating and waiting for another car to pass, and while it did so Webster made a note of the number on its plate. As it pulled away Driss was still running toward his mother’s car, perhaps fifty yards away, so that by the time Webster himself made it out of the terminal she was just receiving the message. The little Peugeot turned into the road, was forced to wait for an endless moment while another car inched across its nose with extraordinary slowness into a small space, and then finally drove off. Webster looked for the Mercedes. It had disappeared from sight.

Trusting, or praying, that Kamila was good enough to make up the gap he looked around him for Senechal. He was no longer there. A moment before, he had been by a crowd of people, talking to a taxi tout, and now he had gone. He had to be in one of the dusty old yellow cabs that were queueing up yards away, but Webster couldn’t risk peering in through the window—he was already nervous about Senechal peering out at him. Turning to face the airport building he waited for Driss to arrive, out of breath, by his side.

“Do you see the man in the gray suit in any of those taxis?” A half-dozen of them were pulling away, waiting for traffic to clear. “I’m going to text your mother that license plate number.”

Driss looked, but saw nothing. He walked back, shrugging, as the cars rolled away, and stood for a moment looking anxiously at Webster, who had taken off his sunglasses and was pinching the bridge of his nose.

“What do you think?” said Webster, squinting in the sunlight.

“There are traffic lights at the bottom of the ramp. A hundred meters. If he was through before her…”

Webster nodded, and ran a hand slowly through his hair. Thirty seconds later his phone rang; it was Kamila, and he knew what she was going to say. He was reminded of the phrase George Black always used when reporting a cock-up of this kind. “We’ve had a loss, Ben.” A loss was exactly how it felt.

He shook his head and answered it. “Meet us back here,” he said, and hung up. “How long does it take to trace a number plate?”

“On Friday, a long time.”

Of course. It was almost the weekend. And what better place to spend it, with time on your hands, than Marrakech?

“But I saw the name,” said Driss.

“What name?”

“The passenger name on the sign. The driver’s sign.”

Webster felt his heart give a little kick.

THERE WERE TWO “MR. ROBINSONS”staying in the city’s finer hotels, but only one of them had checked in that day. He was due to stay a single night in one of the private villas in the grounds, and a call from Kamila to the room to inquire after his comfort had confirmed that he was there.

It was Kamila who had found him, in the eleventh hotel they had tried. Webster thanked God for making Qazai too grand to slum it even for a single night, and checked out the hotel on its Web site. It had immense gardens, and dotted around them, away from the main building, where the only moderately rich were forced to stay, was a handful of secluded villas. Qazai was in the Sultan’s Residence.

Despite their size, the hotel grounds had only one entrance. Outside, Webster and Driss sat in one Peugeot, Youssef in another, on opposite sides of the road, fifty yards away from the hotel gates, while Kamila, who had changed into a light summer suit, had lunch in the hotel lobby and waited to alert the team by phone the moment Qazai appeared.

Their vigil started at two, with the full heat of the sun pressing down on the roofs of the cars. The sky was a blue Webster hadn’t seen before, pristine and deep, set off at its edges by the spiky green of the palm trees and the sandy pink of the brick.

By three Webster had finished his small bottle of water and was growing hungry. He quizzed Driss about his plans to finish his degree and move back to Paris as a postgraduate, about life in Morocco with such an unorthodox mother, about growing up in France and moving here when he was small. About Moroccan food and French food, which was a mistake. To dull his appetite Webster smoked the cigarettes he had bought the night before.

At four, just as Driss was offering to walk to buy food, his phone rang; he answered it, listened, and hung up.

“The same car,” he said to Webster, starting his engine as the Mercedes pulled across one lane of traffic and drove away toward the center of the city. Driss followed at a distance, Youssef and Kamila twenty yards behind him.

After no more than a mile, at the entrance to the medina, where the streets narrowed to an arm span, the car stopped and Qazai got out. Webster turned his face away as Driss drove past and parked the car on the verge of road beyond some trees.

“We could follow in this,” he said. “But not for long.”

A moment later Kamila drew up in front of them and got out of her car. Through the back windscreen Webster saw Qazai look around him, a perfunctory check, and then move quickly through the broad gate into the old city. He was carrying a thin leather briefcase, and was alone.

Webster opened his door and was starting for the gate when he felt Kamila’s hand on his arm.

“I go first. Keep as far behind me as you can. It’s not easy in there.” She set off with a quick walk.

Since his early morning walk the medina had filled with people, and as he walked through the gate he had to look hard to catch sight of Qazai, who was some twenty-five yards ahead trying to pass a slow-moving group of tourists. In among their khaki slacks and white sun hats Qazai looked elegant, patrician, aloof. An old man on a skinny old scooter snaked between them.

Qazai seemed to know where he was going—though how, Webster was at a loss to understand. Had he not had Kamila in his sights the whole time, he would have lost his bearings immediately: there were no landmarks. Some of the alleyways were so narrow that the only constant in view was the sky above, at its highest point still a fine cornflower blue, and the walls of the buildings all ran together in a continuous band of color, from rosy ochre to sandstone with now and then a clean block of white or blue as relief. Shops occupied the broader streets: tin buckets of yellow saffron and luminous red paprika set out on the ground, pastel gowns hanging from awnings, endless rows of pointed shoes, rugs strung across great expanses of wall in rough imitation of Qazai’s house in London, and in the odd space in between a heavy studded door that opened into the private world of the city.

They were in quieter, closer passages now and Qazai was making a turn every ten yards; there were no crowds to hide behind and Webster, trying to keep only Kamila in view, was finding it harder and harder to stay in touch with her and at the same time keep out of sight. Shade now covered the ground, the buildings seemed taller, and he had the sense of going slowly down into ever darker, tighter circles. The walls around him were the color of redwood and the air thick and still.