Jon Grimwood - Stamping Butterflies

Charlie Bilberg sighed. A Pentagon official was on record as insisting the prisoner spoke English, French and Berber, as well as Arabic, but so far there was no sign that this shell of a man retained the ability to speak any languages at all.

Mind you, the same Pentagon official also had him down as a brilliant strategist, terrorist banker and crack shot. Slightly begging the question why, if he was so brilliant, he'd tried to shoot the President from too far away with a broken-down antique.

"We could still cut a deal, you know," said Charlie. "You give us the Chosen of Heaven network and the CIA will do what it can do to get your sentence commuted. Maybe you could serve your time here, in Morocco."

"Agent Bilberg..."

The gaze of the man in front flicked towards the driving mirror, frown lines blossoming around his dark eyes. Silence was in order and no one was to speak, behave oddly or draw attention to themselves. All this had already been agreed. In fact, Rabat had insisted on it.

But escorting Prisoner Zero from a Marrakech jail to an already secured landing site beyond Jardin Aguedal, while the van headed for a duplicate site in the huge groves of Oliveraie de Bab Jedid, was Charlie's first really big job. Getting information on the network which ran Prisoner Zero would make Charlie with the Agency for life.

"Talk to me," Charlie insisted, ignoring the scowl in the mirror. "Let's see if we can't work something out..." Beside him the prisoner nodded, the movement so slight as to be instinctive. And just as Charlie got ready to feel elated, he realized that Prisoner Zero was actually nodding to a small dirt bike which drew alongside and then surged past the petite taxis in a trail of oily smoke, horn blasting.

Weaving round a donkey cart, the rider dodged between a grande taxi and a younger boy on a bike, slid himself between two old men frozen in the act of trying to cross the road, accelerating right up to the point he slammed his bike straight into the back of the prison van.

Thirty-two pounds of Soviet C4 ripped apart the bike, finishing off not just its thirteen-year-old rider but a dozen of those who'd been hammering angrily on the sides and rear of the van.

The van itself was flipped over and tossed onto a police outrider, crushing man and bike utterly. Unable to escape from his buckled cab, the van's driver burned up in front of a suddenly frozen crowd. Those in the back were already dead, flame withering their corpses as surely as it stripped paint from the twisted carcass of the prison van.

" Merde, " said the Brigadier.

Charlie glanced from the burning van to his driver, then realized the Brigadier was actually watching vapour trails rip towards the Apache helicopter overhead. The Peugeot's roof stopped Charlie seeing which one connected with the AH-64's tail but he felt the impact, the whole of the Medina felt the impact, and then the combat helicopter was tumbling over itself on the way down.

Given that the Apache had been hovering almost directly over the prison van, it was perhaps inevitable that it should hit one of the palm trees lining the route, about a hundred paces from the site of the bomb.

"We leave," said the Brigadier, and spun his wheel, the petite taxi splintering a donkey cart as the Peugeot slammed into reverse, executed a quick turn and raced away from the screaming crowd. A loud thud said that a pedestrian hadn't got out of the way in time. After that, everyone stepped well back.

"Where are you taking us?"

"Back to the prison."

"No." Charlie Bilberg was adamant. "We take him to the landing site. The area's already secure. There's a 'copter waiting."

"If that's what you want." The Brigadier had just seen a $17.5 million AH-64 attack helicopter brought down by a handful of ex-Soviet ground-to-airs. If the young CIA man couldn't see the flaw in his own logic, then too bad. Anything that got Prisoner Zero out of Morocco was fine with the Moroccan authorities.

Plus, and this was what mattered, anyone watching would believe Prisoner Zero dead, ripped apart by the bomb, and within an hour most of the world would have joined them.

All the Brigadier had to do was drive his vehicle into the Medina, out through the gate at Bab Agnaou, run it round a short section of Marrakech's famous red walls and drive calmly to the Jardin Aguedal.

"Okay," he said. "Let's do it your way."

Caid Hammou flicked shut his Nokia and frowned. What the immaculately suited old man wanted to do was stand up, stamp over to a small group eyeing him anxiously through the doorway of his shop and slap them silly for unbelievable stupidity. Instead he sipped slowly at a glass of mint tea and smiled at a tourist couple sitting opposite, revealing one gold tooth.

The English were pink and wide eyed. Slightly anxious to find themselves sat on a bench discussing prices when they'd only intended to browse.

"My wife," said Hammou, putting down his cell phone, "always wants to talk. Now. You like this one? Very beautiful. Made in Switzerland. It says so on the back." The replica Rolex was assembled in mainland China, had a dial printed directly onto white metal and used a cheap quartz movement held in place by a white plastic ring.

Hammou watched the Englishman scowl, then peer at a narrow second hand which jerked forward, second by second, instead of sweeping cleanly as it would if the watch were really automatic.

"That's quartz," the Englishman said.

"Or maybe this?" said Hammou smoothly, pulling out a watch at random to find himself holding a garish copy of a small Cartier dress watch, the bezel decorated with twelve "diamonds" too cheap even to be cubic zircon. "For your beautiful wife... Buy two watches and I can give you a better price."

Sipping again at his tea, which he'd sweetened with a block of sugar the size of his thumb, the elderly man smiled as the Englishwoman instinctively sipped at her own and winced at its bitterness. Somehow tourists never seemed to understand that mint tea was meant to be sweet and sticky.

"You like this?"

Hammou watched the man discard the fake Cartier without a second glance and turn over the Rolex to examine a cheap crown stamped into the clip of its metal strap. He was shaking his head.

"I tell you what," Hammou said, "for you I get something better." He waved in the general direction of the group outside. "My cousins. You have a look round here, while I find you something special. It's all right, I trust you. But if someone else comes in, you make sure you make a sale, okay?"

The English couple laughed dutifully and Hammou let himself out, heading straight for a shop across the passageway. As if on cue, those waiting outside followed him in.

"Okay," Hammou said, "where is he?"

"In a petite taxi headed towards the gardens."

"So why haven't you got him?"

"He's got company."

"The blond American." Hammou nodded like this was obvious. "We expected that," he said. "I still don't see the problem."

"Abbas." The boy who spoke was thin-faced, his teeth bad and his gaze turned inwards to something dark and lonely. The boy on the bike was his brother, both boys from a family that owed Caid Hammou a serious and hitherto unpayable debt. Glancing uncertainly towards a thickset, rather dapper middle-aged man, he waited for the man to expand on this explanation.

"Brigadier Abbas is driving the taxi himself," said Hammou's nephew. "We didn't know what to--"

"Okay," Hammou said, voice tight. "I understand." He wanted to add, let me think, but to do so would reveal weakness. So instead he told the youngest to make mint tea and began to sort through a tray of Hong Kong replicas, all of them stamped "Swiss Made."

The downing of the helicopter would result in arrests, beatings and probably swift and violent bouts of illegal, unauthorized torture. America would demand results, and even without their demands Sécurité would rip apart the Medina if that was what it took to find answers. This was to be expected.