Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

After a minute’s effort he was half up, supported by his good arm. He moved his legs forward carefully, pleased to find them working, and was wracked afresh as his feet slipped off into the blackness. So he was on a ledge, or a bed, and by working his legs off the edge he managed to swing the rest of his body upright and sat for several moments, hunched, exhausted, taking shallow breaths of the hot, bad air.

He patted his pockets, looking for his phone, and found that he was still wearing the robe. In the heat he longed to take it off but knew he could not. The phone had gone, but there was something else in there, and by leaning backward and straining, his stomach muscles in agony, he managed to force his hand through the opening in the djellaba and into the unobliging pocket of his jeans, where it finally discovered, next to a crushed pack of cigarettes, the smooth plastic casing of the cheap lighter he had bought the night before.

Lit up, the room was less encouraging than the pitiless dark. It was a cell, perhaps eight feet by eight feet, whose pitted gray walls, sweating in the heat, were broken only by a rusted metal door. But for the thin concrete slab he was sitting on, and another across from him that left a three-foot channel in between, the space was unbroken, and there was something pure about its single-minded commitment to its grim purpose. Nothing was scratched on the walls, and Webster wondered whether he could possibly be the first person to be brought here. Warily he checked his head and side for blood, but found nothing more than a long, deepish graze that ran from his forehead across his temple.

The wheel of the lighter had grown too hot to hold. Bending down in the dark, with effort, he untied his shoe and took it off before collecting himself and standing up in a single agonizing motion, his hand against the wall behind him for support. He shuffled forward and with the shoe in his left hand began to beat the iron door with its heel, hard and loud, with a slow, steady rhythm. He noticed that no light at all showed around the door frame.

The dull banging pounded in his head and made thinking difficult, but he tried to relax and imagine what could have happened to him. He had been hit by a car, or by a truck. That he knew, and he could remember knowing it the moment he landed on the ground. Then why wasn’t he in hospital? People had seen that he was injured and would have called an ambulance, surely? He could hear the shouting, see them clustering around him, see someone pull a cell phone out and make the call.

Someone had arranged the accident, or someone had taken advantage of it, that much was certain. Call him Chiba. He needed a name. Perhaps Chiba’s men had seen him following Qazai; perhaps they had seen him waiting in his djellaba for their meeting to finish. However it had happened, they had seen him, he was sure; sure, too, that soon he was about to meet the man he had been so blindly pursuing.

The clanging slowed a little as his arm began to tire, and he wondered how long he had been keeping it up. Ten minutes? Two? He clicked the lighter on again and looked at his watch, thankfully unbroken, which showed that it was half past ten, almost four hours since Qazai and Senechal had passed him in the passage. He continued for a minute or two, but his good arm now hurt almost as much as the rest of him, and he reluctantly conceded that he had to stop. Faint from standing, having had no water for several hours and no food for longer, he leaned his head against the door and finally gave in to the rushing stream of fear that this mindless activity, his one source of hope, had kept in check. How, he asked himself, had it come to this? Slowly, staggering a little and feeling profoundly sick, he dragged his feet over to the ledge where he had started, lay down, and fell at length into a shifting, churning half-sleep.

AS HE CAME INand out of consciousness he grasped at a series of jagged, fractured dreams. Children, not his own, played in unknown landscapes where the heat of the sun and its blinding light were so strong that they filled each scene with silent menace.

The grating of a key turning in the door brought him up from sleep, and a second later a flash of bluish white light woke him fully. A black figure was in the doorway, saying something he didn’t understand. All he could do was blink at the brightness.

“Up,” said the figure. “Now.”

Webster pushed himself up on his elbow, but before he could sit he had been grabbed by his other arm and pulled erect. He could smell stale tobacco and old meat on the man’s breath, and on the edges of his silhouette there was the fuzzy outline of a beard.

“Come.”

The man’s hand took strong hold of his upper arm and led him out of the cell, down a corridor whose bare cement walls were lit by a single fluorescent tube. There were no details, no features that might suggest the building’s function. Nor was there any noise, but for their footsteps, harsh on the concrete floor. They passed three other doors—wooden, he noticed, with no locks—on the same side as the cell, before the man turned down a second corridor, knocked firmly at a door on the right and without waiting for a reply went in.

This room was whitewashed, unbearably bright under another single strip light, and smelled of heat and mildew. As Webster entered, hobbling and squinting, he could make out one man sitting behind a desk and another standing against the wall opposite the door, both wearing suits—one black, one gray—and white shirts with no tie. They were only superficially alike. One was lanky, all thin limbs improbably long, and he sat at the table like a crab trying to fit itself into too small a space. His suit was rumpled and in patches gray with dust, his face elongated and hollow.

The other man was shorter, taut with muscle, the skin on his face tight against the bone and his posture sprung, suggesting great energy barely contained and waiting impatiently for release. Black and gray hairs showed at the base of his neck, which was flexed and unyielding, like thick cable, and there was three days’ beard on his face. He held his hands by his sides, tightening them slowly into fists and then releasing them, his knuckles white. Webster’s body registered a fear of him at once, a physical knowledge of his viciousness. A pair of metal-framed sunglasses covered his eyes, and Webster knew from the moment he came into the room that he was the one in charge.

The guard shoved him onto a chair, and with a nod from the lanky man was dismissed. For a minute no one said anything. Against every message sent by the insistent aching in his head and the violent pain in his side Webster tried to breathe regularly, as deeply as he could, and to establish some sense of calm.

“Why are you in Morocco?” The thin man spoke. His accent was heavy but unplaceable, his voice languid, almost quiet, and while waiting for the answer he cocked his head on one side, staring at a point on the desk.

“I’m here on business.”

There was a long pause. The thin man stared at his finger as it made an endless figure-of-eight over the wood. He hadn’t yet looked Webster in the eye.

“What business?”

The best lie was as close as you could make it to the truth. “Research.”

“Of what?”

“A businessman. In Marrakech.”

“Name?”

“My name?”

“His name. You are Webster.”

How did they know it? His passport was at his hotel, carefully hidden. He had no credit cards on him. They had his phone, but his phone was locked. Unless they had found Driss as well. That unpleasant thought had not struck him before.

“I can’t tell you that.”

The thin man’s finger stopped circling. Out of the corner of his eye Webster sensed movement and turned stiffly, too slowly to see the flat of the other man’s hand connect with the side of his head with improbable force. A rush of air broke into his ear with the noise of a thunderclap and he fell from the chair onto the floor.