Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

Another man was with him, someone Webster hadn’t seen before: thickset, jowly, with drooping shoulders. He was carrying a laptop bag.

“I said alone.” Webster stared as steadily as he could into Chiba’s mirrored sunglasses and wondered what lay behind them.

The man cocked his head slightly on one side and said nothing.

“You need to take those off,” said Webster. “I won’t talk to you like this.”

Rather to Webster’s surprise, he reached up and slowly brought the glasses down his nose and away from his face, his eyes on Webster’s all the time. They were almost sky blue, the irises flecked with light, the pupils sharp and bottomless, and they caught Webster off balance: he had expected them to be flat, thuggish, any intelligence to be found there base at best, but these were vividly alive and quick, and they seemed to look at him with utter confidence that they owned him outright.

Perfectly still, his expression blank, he continued to challenge Webster to begin.

“Do you know who I am?” Webster said at last.

Chiba remained silent.

“You seem to think I’m a friend of Darius Qazai. I’m not. He hired me to do a job. The job is over. That’s all.”

Again, nothing.

“So what I want to know is, why you think I’m worth killing.”

Chiba looked down, scratched the back of his head, and looking up held Webster’s eye again.

“I said to you. You know nothing. Not about me. Not about Qazai.” He paused, his eyes fixed. “I want, you die. Understand. That is all.”

Webster shook his head. “No. You understand. How much does Qazai owe you?”

He didn’t expect a response, and he got none.

“Tens of millions? Hundreds? He has no money. Not until he sells his company. And when I send this to the CIA, MI6, and the editor of the Wall Street Journal in London, who happens to be a friend of mine, he won’t be able to sell it.” He reached inside his jacket and from a pocket pulled a thin sheaf of A4 paper, fifteen sheets perhaps, folded into three. “And then you don’t get your money. Read it. It’s yours.”

The man took the paper and started to read. Oliver had e-mailed it that morning. It was rough, but it had substance, and more importantly, detail: every transaction they had found between Qazai and Kurus and along the chain in both directions; everything that could be found on Chiba, all the odd correspondences and coincidences; not quite proof but nearly proof, and in the right hands surely enough, Webster thought, to cause this man problems.

When he had finished reading he passed the pages to his friend and said, with a caustic smile, something unintelligible that contained the word “Chiba.” The friend laughed, and made a show of leafing through the document.

The man chewed for a moment, watching Webster. He had something in his front teeth, in his incisors, and each time he bit on it a vein on his temple stood out. “It is bad you do not know me. Who I am. Bad for you. You are not scared.” He paused. “You should be scared. If you knew.”

It was Webster’s turn not to reply. He tried to remember that this man was just a gangster, a modern-day hoodlum, a piece of nothing. He wasn’t worthy of his fear. This was what he told himself.

The man turned his head and nodded to his friend, who unzipped his bag, put Webster’s file inside it and took out a black, spiral-bound report. Webster felt a strange lightness in his chest, some new sense of foreboding that he couldn’t explain.

“Please,” he said, passing Webster the document. “Read.”

The text was in Arabic, possibly Farsi. Webster turned to the back and found a full page of writing that he couldn’t understand, bar his own name in Roman script at the bottom and other words dotted among the text: Ikertu, Isaac Hammer, Cursitor Street. He turned back a page and saw four photographs: one showed Ikertu’s offices; another, grainy, taken from a distance with a zoom, showed him arriving at work one morning; the third was of him leaving Qazai’s house; the last of him and Hammer leaving Timur’s funeral. Webster, his heart pounding, glanced up and turned the page.

He took it in before he was fully conscious of what was there. A cold pulse of fear spread through him and a sharp pain drove into his temple. He forced himself to concentrate.

There were more pictures: one of the Websters’ house on Hiley Road; one of Elsa leaving for work; two of Webster taking the children to school and nursery, their hands in his. On the next page, Silke coming out of school with Nancy and Daniel and alongside that a single shot of the three of them in the playground around the corner from their house. All the photographs were dated and timed.

Webster stared at them for a long time. He couldn’t bring himself to look up because he didn’t want to betray his terror.

“Same deal for you as Qazai,” the man said. “One week, he pays me the money, I hurt only you. Longer, I hurt your family.”

Webster raised his head and did his best to appear unmoved.

“I’m not with him.”

“Here you were with him.”

“No.” Webster shook his head. “No. If anything happens to me, you will be exposed. Your name will be everywhere. When you get your money, it’s over.”

The man looked at him and smiled. “You say one word and your family is not safe.”

For a moment Webster felt as he had last night in the desert with Senechal’s head in his hand: he wanted to smash this man’s skull until it crumbled. To strangle him until those blue eyes started from his head.

The man leaned in, his voice lowered and strangely intimate. “You do not know me. You do not even know my name. Do not try. It will be bad. For your family.”

He took the report back from Webster.

“Qazai understand this. Do you understand?”

His eyes, adamantine, scoured Websters,’ a search as brutal and invasive as the punishment he had administered the night before, and with that he turned, nodded to his goon and left, replacing his sunglasses and walking with a compact, muscular stride into the crowds. Webster, watching him go, felt like his body had been hollowed out.

IN HAMMER’S OFFICE,hanging on the wall behind his desk among the other trophies of his career, was a framed quotation in Chinese that he had received from a Mexican client on successfully completing some particularly difficult job. The Mexican, to hear Hammer tell it, was somewhere between eccentric and dangerous: he kept Samurai swords on the wall of his office, tigers for pets at his country home, and a vast library of texts on the nature of combat and war. The Art of War was his favorite, and the quotation, in just four characters, said that to know your enemy you must become your enemy. Hammer, intellectually sympathetic to that sort of thing, liked to refer to it often—not least, Webster knew from his own experience, because it was true. But what Webster wanted to know was what Sun Tzu would have to say when you had no idea who you were fighting.

His thoughts were scattered. What he needed more than anything else was to collect them, rank them, lock some away as dangerous or irrelevant, but they tore around his head, ungovernable. But in among them, most insistent of all, were those words: you do not even know my name. And that made his enemy not only impossible to defeat, but impossible to defend against.

Back in the car he played Driss the recording of the meeting and silently prayed that Kamila might track the man down; it seemed unimaginable, however, that he would leave any trace. Driss listened, but couldn’t make out what the man had said to his friend on reading Webster’s report. It wasn’t Arabic, he was sure; it sounded like Farsi.