Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

Webster picked up Senechal’s phone from the table and looked at it for a moment. Now there were two numbers stored on it: Kamila’s, and the anonymous number. He called it, and it rang twice.

“ Oui .” A quiet, harsh voice.

“This is Ben Webster.”

“You have wrong number.”

“We need to meet.”

“I don’t know you. Good-bye.”

“If you don’t meet me my friends in the CIA are going to learn all about Chiba, Kurus and your relationship with Mr. Qazai. That doesn’t have to happen. I will be by the Air Maroc ticket office in the arrivals hall of Menara airport at ten o’clock. Come alone.”

The line went dead. Kamila and Driss were looking at him across the table, their expressions somewhere between concern and incredulity.

“You should be going home,” said Kamila.

“Never show a bully you’re weak. And, besides, I don’t have my passport.”

DRISS AND WEBSTER DROVEto the airport together, Webster in one of Youssef’s suits: dark gray, about half an inch too short in the limbs, tight under the armpits and around his waist. Kamila had put a discreet bandage on his head wound and after breakfast he had showered, inspecting his battered body in the mirror with a sense of curious detachment. On his thigh was a bright red patch of burst blood vessels and around them a growing storm of purple bruise. Dark bags hung under his eyes and when he walked it was with a heavy limp in his damaged leg.

They made one stop. Just short of his hotel, Webster ducked down in his seat, and a hundred yards further on Driss pulled over and turned to him for instructions.

“In the wardrobe there’s a safe. My passport is taped under that. My credit cards are there too. You’ll have to slide the whole thing out of its hole. If you can, get me a shirt.” Youssef’s was at least two sizes too small. “Here’s the key. Room fourteen.”

“How many rooms?”

“It’s quite big. About thirty. Go straight up the stairs and turn left. No one will notice you.”

In the wing mirror Webster watched Driss walk back up the street, cross and go into the hotel through its only entrance, a gate that opened onto a small garden and the studded front door. Webster’s room was on the first floor, no more than a minute inside, and he calculated that Driss should be out in three minutes at most.

In the distance he could hear the lazy sawing drone of two sirens and thought at first it was the beginning of the call to prayer. He looked at his watch. Driss had been gone for two minutes.

Rounding a corner at the end of the street came two police cars with their green and red lights flashing. In the car’s mirror Webster watched them drive at speed in his direction and stop abruptly outside the hotel. Two men got out of one of the cars and went inside; the others stayed where they were. A minute passed, and another, before Driss came out, maintaining a nonchalant pace all the way, a bundle of blue cloth in his hand.

“Are they for me?” said Webster as he got in.

“They won’t find much.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your room has already been searched.” He handed Webster a crumpled shirt. “Your clothes are on the floor. Your suitcase has been cut open.”

“My passport?”

“Not there.”

“Fuck’s sake. Did they say anything?”

“The police? No. They asked for room fourteen. They wanted to know about the Englishman staying there.”

“Can you find out what they want?”

“I can call someone.”

“Let’s go.”

“Doesn’t this change things?”

“I have no idea.”

Someone had called the police. His captors from last night didn’t seem the sort, unless they wanted him in custody, where they could find him. Qazai hardly stood to gain. Perhaps Senechal. He tried to think it through. The ambulance would have come for him, and the police, at some point, would have become involved. Would he have told them who had beaten him? Surely not. There was too much at stake elsewhere, and no advantage to making himself more conspicuous than he already was. With a cold shock a further possibility struck him. Senechal had died.

A stifling dread took hold of him then, and as Driss drove through the widening streets, hot already under the morning sun, alive with color and motion, all he saw was Senechal’s gray face, lifeless in the desert.

BY THE TIME THEY REACHEDMenara airport the day was full, the sun high and blazing, and the car’s air conditioning struggled against the heat. It would be hotter than yesterday, said Driss, and Webster found that hard to believe; hard, too, to register that in the twenty-four hours since he had last been here his life might have irrevocably changed.

Logic told him that Senechal was still alive. He hadn’t hit him that hard and the wound had not seemed deep. Surely it took more than that to kill a man? Surely someone you had left breathing steadily, calmly almost, didn’t simply die in the course of an hour lying peacefully enough in the desert? Logic, though, couldn’t control Webster’s memory of that moment, and each time it played out the blow seemed to grow in force and Senechal’s otherworldly form became more frail and defenseless. An acid mix of fear and guilt rose in his throat. Perhaps that’s all it took. A strong loathing and a second’s loss of control.

They parked, Driss went ahead, and on the hot walk to the terminal Webster smoked a cigarette and tried to rid his mind of everything but the conversation he was about to have. What did he want from it? For this man to leave him alone: to make him understand that he was no threat now but might become one. That was all.

He was early: it was five to ten. He loitered to smoke the cigarette until it was tarry and hot in his fingers, exhaled the last drag, felt a strong urge to cross himself, and let the glass doors usher him into the arrivals hall, which was ice cool and humming busily—more busily, if anything, than the day before. Planeloads of tourists wandered in a gradual stream into the light, slowing their trolleys to read signs or locate drivers or reprimand children. Webster remembered his own holiday in a fortnight’s time: two weeks in Cornwall to try to repair the cracks he’d made in his family. How he wished, for a hundred reasons, he had never left them.

Resisting the urge to glance up or to check the voice recorder in his top pocket, he took up his position by the Royal Air Maroc office, leaning his back against the booth. Above him, in a gallery of shops over the main hall, Kamila and Youssef were already in position, their job to photograph Chiba—they had taken to calling him that for want of anything better—and to follow him once the meeting was done. Driss was on this level, somewhere nearby, watching Webster and making sure Chiba’s people didn’t try anything bold.

An unexpected sense of composure settled on Webster as he watched the crowds. He was working on the assumption that the man who had dealt him such pain the night before was the man he had called, but scanning the faces all around him he realized that needn’t be the case. The real leader could be any one of these people: the bearded man who caught his eye, the sweaty one who didn’t, the lanky one in sunglasses and a djellaba who loitered close by. By five past, he began to believe that none of these people was the man he wanted, that whoever he was he had been insufficiently troubled by Webster’s phone call to think a meeting worth the effort, that he was confident this problem could be dealt with by other means.

And then he was there. The man from last night: short, vigorous, firmly set in front of Webster now with his hands clasped in front of him and his feet slightly apart, chewing something with his lips closed. Webster felt his body tighten, an involuntary response to the sense memories of the night before that caused a streak of pain to run right through him. The man was still in yesterday’s suit, crumpled around the crotch, and his white shirt was grubby with sweat and dirt around its open collar. Tufts of graying hair poked out at the base of his powerful neck. As he had last night, he seemed ready to spring and to savage, like a dog bred for attack.