Christopher Jones - The Jackal's Share

Footsteps crunched on gravel behind him, and he realized with a sting of fear that he wasn’t alone: the two men who had driven him here were walking toward him. There was no one else in sight. As he watched them approach he could hear far off the sound of a car’s engine revving deeply in a low gear.

He moved away from them, backing toward the buildings and the restaurant. But the men didn’t look at him. They reached their car, opened the doors and climbed in; the engine started, and they pulled out, turning at him quickly. Webster, dazed, stepped clumsily backward, waiting to be hit, and took a moment to recognize the shining chrome and black of Constance’s car, which had driven up at speed and was now shielding him from the Iranians. For a second or two the two cars simply sat there, Constance with his arm on the sill staring down the Audi, all of a yard away from him, until it reversed a little and with a burst of acceleration that made the gravel spit under its tires, sped away.

“Good thing they didn’t touch the car.” Constance was looking behind him with his arm across the passenger seat.

Webster ignored him and got in. “Go. Turn around.” Constance didn’t respond. “Let’s go.”

Constance slowly shook his head.

“Qazai was in the first car.”

“You want to give them another chance to kill you?” Constance turned to him, his eyes grave.

“They weren’t going to.”

“Sure.”

“Turn the car around. Fletcher, I mean it.”

“Uh-uh. No. You can’t save that man from his sins. This is his share.”

“They’ll kill him.”

“Maybe that’s what he needs,” said Constance, his arms crossed, his head like marble in the gray light.

THE MOMENT WEBSTER HEARDthat Qazai had died, he sent everything he knew to Constance, with instructions to pass it on immediately to his friends; and because he didn’t wholly trust that it would reach them, he sent a second copy through Hammer to Virginia.

It had been quick, at least; so quick that Webster couldn’t help but believe that the plan had already been in place. Perhaps, perhaps not. He was done with overthinking things.

If the news agencies were right, Qazai’s plane had flown from Dubai to Syria, landing in Damascus some time around midnight. It was thought that he was alone, but no journalist had yet checked the passenger manifest. What was known was that he had booked a suite at the Four Seasons, eaten breakfast there alone on Sunday morning, and then taken a taxi to Bab Touma, in the east of the city. At a little after ten, according to the state news agency, shots were heard inside a carpet shop near the Church of Saint Francis, and when police arrived they had found Qazai in an armchair, shot twice through the head, three cups of tea still warm on the table. The owner of the shop was discovered hiding upstairs, though whether from the gunmen or the police was not clear.

Webster had received the news on the train to Truro: a call from Hammer that he let go to voicemail, and then an e-mail with links to the first agency articles. He read them once, asked Hammer to send the file, switched off his phone and sat with his eyes closed, imagining the strange, late courage required for Qazai to walk knowingly to his death; seeing him being poured his tea as he waited for Rad to arrive, still beautifully dressed, still outwardly the great man. And his mind? Was it full of fear? Contrition? Or some growing sense of peace?

He thought of Ava. If she hadn’t heard, she would soon; there was no need for him to call again. He had tried to speak to her from Constance’s house as he waited for his flight, but had only reached her voicemail, and for an hour or two had worried that Rad had betrayed them, taking another Qazai as his prize. But just before midnight she had rung him, anxious but composed, and wanting to know why he, and not her father, had called so many times. She had known the answer—had feared, in fact, from the moment she was taken, that she was part of an exchange—and had said little in response, reconciled to the news but still not equal to it.

So the sacrifice had been made. He found himself considering the hundred practical questions that Ava would now have to answer. Where to bury the body, if she was given that choice. How to tackle the journalists when they started calling, and how much, eventually, to tell the world. What to do with the money that remained. He would have liked to have helped her, but could not. He was not responsible in the end: not for Qazai, or his daughter.

BY THE TIME HE REACHEDHelford it was late. He told George Black to stand down, watched the four anonymous saloon cars leaving up the track until their lights had stopped glowing red in the gloom, and walked through the quiet and the darkening trees down to his parents’ house. The sky was clear, and the light from the moon shone bright and gray on the estuary.

Only Elsa was still up. What he wanted her to understand more than anything else was that he had never meant to bring danger into their lives, but that once it was there his only choice had been to drive it out again. It had been vanity, he told her, and he was finished with it. Elsa listened with professional detachment, coolly pointing out the inconsistencies in his account, making him feel the weight of his recklessness. But behind her anger she was as relieved to see him as he was to see her; he knew it, and it gave him hope.

After a time their words ran out, and while the house slept they walked through the garden down to the little stone quay where the air was warm and still and the tide high enough for them to bathe their feet in the water, and there they sat in silence, not reconciled but together, until the sky began to lighten in the east.

“With a British appreciation for understatement, Jones elegantly executes the basic elements of the conventional thriller. Take one lone-wolf agent and set him on the trail of an enigmatic big shot with sketchy business associates. Throw in some swanky locales, a few well-placed corpses and brewing trouble in our hero’s marriage. Wrap it all up with a couple of truly tense cliffhangers, and the result is what the great but apologetic thriller writer Graham Greene famously downplayed as ‘an entertainment.’ …Terrific news for fans of first-class thrillers.”

“The novel is as much Raymond Chandler as John le Carré; as much The Big Sleep as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold … Chris Morgan Jones has more than equaled his powerful debut and in Ben Webster has created a flawed (of course), likeable central character. I look forward to getting to know him better.”

“Ambivalent as ever about the ethics of the superrich and his part in solving their problems, Webster proves to be the ethically troubled anti-Bond. A more-than-worthy sequel with deft, complex and believable plotting, tense, gut-wrenching action, and classy literary writing.”

“A surprising plot and deceptively simple prose distinguish Jones’s exceptional thriller, his second after his impressive debut, 2012’s The Silent Oligarch .”

For eleven years CHRIS MORGAN JONES worked at the world’s largest business intelligence agency. He has advised Middle Eastern governments, Russian oligarchs, New York banks, London hedge funds, and African mining companies. He is the author of The Silent Oligarch .

www.chrismorganjones.com

THE PENGUIN PRESS