Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

“I’ve lost her, too,” he said at last, addressing no one.

Webster watched him, feeling contempt for his self-absorption and the first traces of pity.

“What happened to Senechal?”

Qazai looked up, his face blank.

“What?”

“Yves. Your faithful retainer. We found the photographs. What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Webster looked hard at him. “I don’t know how it happened.”

“Did you tell them? About the blackmail?”

“Who? No. No, of course not.” Qazai seemed honestly surprised. “You think I would do that?”

“Where did you go?”

“When?”

Webster’s patience was gone. “Stop fucking about. Please. Just tell me where you went this morning.”

Qazai adjusted his tie, out of kilter since Ava pushed him. “I had a meeting.”

“With Rad?”

There was a long pause before he replied.

“With Rad.”

“Why?”

“Everyone has his price.”

“I didn’t.” Webster stared hard at Qazai. “You mean to say that you were going to pay off Rad? To try to avoid this? What, you thought the rest of them would just forget their billions and let you swan around into your old age?” He paused. “Was it a long meeting?”

“That’s not how it was. I offered him a hundred million dollars to leave us alone after the money was paid back. You and me.”

Webster hadn’t been expecting that.

“I wasn’t sure I believed him,” said Qazai. “That it was just bluff. I thought, once they had their money, that would be that. Why draw attention to themselves by killing me? And then… This morning, I came down, and that envelope was on the mat. I knew it was from them. It was early. Before six. And when I opened it… What it said to me was, this is what we do to people when they’re no longer useful to us. This is a spent asset.” His voice became a degree louder. “And in two days, when the money goes through, I will be spent.” He looked up to Webster. “And so will you.”

Webster hadn’t forgotten. He felt a lightness at the base of his throat. “What did Rad say?”

“He laughed, and said he would rather be poor and alive.”

And in that moment Webster knew what he had to do.

THERE WAS VERY LITTLE POINT,as Hammer had explained, in having such a simple, treacherous little plan if no one knew you had made it.

By Friday everything had been done. A Mauritian company, suitably exotic, had been taken from Qazai’s emergency store and injected with twenty million dollars, a figure large enough to be convincing but still within Qazai’s reduced means.

After that, there had been two obstacles: finding Rad’s signature, and securing the services of a lawyer who wouldn’t mind notarizing false documents. Hammer had argued with Webster about the need for the first. If—and this was the great beauty of the idea—the set-up needed only to be plausible, not perfect, surely it didn’t matter whether the signature was accurate or not? The point wasn’t whether the whole fiction would stand up to real investigation, but whether Rad believed it would be investigated at all; and he would assume, as they themselves had, that internal investigations carried out by his superiors in Tehran were unlikely to be thorough and stood no chance of being fair. Justice was vicious in Iran. Rad had administered it for thirty years, and he more than anyone knew how it worked.

For Webster, though, this was flirting with abstractions. The more real the fiction, the less likely Rad was to see opportunities to discredit it. He wanted those documents to bear the signature of Mohamed Ganem, and for Rad to know when he saw it that he was well caught.

The trouble was that Ganem’s signature wasn’t easy to find. Kamila had been back to the hotel where the Iranians had stayed and despite bribing every desk clerk and chambermaid in view had found no credit card slips, no room service bills, nothing. An imprint of the American Express card they had used to pay was in the file, but that was all, and somehow each of the three had managed to check in without having a copy of their passport taken. She had been to the car rental firm as well, but no written contract existed.

So Webster turned to Oliver. Bills for the Amex card went to an address in Dubai: an apartment in a complex built two years before and rented on a short-term lease by a local company, Abbas Real Estate. The incorporation papers for this company were missing, and the letting agency refused, much to Oliver’s irritation, to answer its phone. Much as Webster might harry him, there was little more he could do.

Meanwhile, a much larger amount, from the sale of Tabriz, was making its way east across the world: from the Americans, through Qazai’s account and on, through an intermediary or two, to a bank in Indonesia, all according to Rad’s instructions. It would reach Indonesia on Friday, all being well, and at that point Qazai’s contract with his masters would be void, and a new kind of contract would take its place.

The lawyer proved easy, in the end. A Mr. Holmes, partner at a firm in Mayfair that had once benefited from some penetrating and effective personal advice from Hammer, was happy to oblige, having received reassurances that the chances of his honesty ever being called in to question were extremely remote. Hammer scheduled a meeting for Thursday afternoon to sign all the papers, and halfway through the day the acuteness of the deadline spurred Webster to the breakthrough he needed. Five calls to hotels in Caracas later, Hammer, whose Spanish was still good, had been faxed copies of a passport for one Mohamed Ganem, who had stayed there in November—dictatorships, as Hammer had observed, being sticklers for documentation. There was Rad’s face, just discernible, looking almost vulnerable for the first time.

Mr. Holmes had kept his word, and by four o’clock on Thursday Webster and Hammer had left his office with a set of dependable documents, utterly false and wholly genuine at the same time, showing that Mohamed Ganem, of Dubai, had just become the owner of Burnett Holdings Ltd., which, if one happened to check, was currently holding twenty million dollars in an account in Singapore.

Now all they needed to do was tell Rad what they had done, and what they proposed to do if he started having murderous thoughts. The trouble was, he wasn’t answering his phone; the number he had given Qazai, which had worked just three days earlier, was now dead. He had no intention of communicating, because his job no longer required it. Webster could think of no way to contact him, but Hammer, contrary as ever, had told him not to worry: if you couldn’t tell someone to come to you, you merely had to entice them.

THAT NIGHT, PAST NINE,having laid the last pieces of his plan, Webster called his parents’ house, and after a short talk with his mother asked to speak to Elsa. He heard footsteps fading down the long corridor that led to the sitting room, and during the silence that followed pictured the house he knew so well: the old phone sitting on the counter in the kitchen with its cord hanging down from the wall; the children’s bedroom above, just dark, both windows open behind the striped curtains, and Daniel and Nancy asleep there under thick striped duvets; the living room where Elsa would be sitting with his father, watching television or reading the papers, a warm light reflecting off the deep red walls. He imagined her getting up, and wondered whether she shared that strange mix of hope and fear that he felt when they had these distant conversations.

He heard her footsteps, and then her voice, flat. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He paused, not knowing where to start. “You OK?”