Dirty Little Secret (32 page)

In front of him, taking centre stage, was an unpainted vessel. It shared the contours of the
Bradstone Challenger
, the powerboat Mousavi had shown him in the TV news footage, but it had none of its glamour or finish. The boat was hanging from a small derrick, and below it big bay doors were set in the floor.

‘I thought the Bradstone was still in Karachi,’ Dhar said.

‘The real one is. We have mocked this one up, based on technical specifications we managed to acquire from a Bladerunner dealership in Dubai. The boats they sell are not as high-spec as the
Bradstone
. Our people are reverse-engineering what they can, but we won’t be able to make proper progress until we have the real thing. Still, it gives you an idea of the size and shape. And inside, the controls are identical, so you can get a feel for them. Take a look, why not?’

Dhar walked over to the hull, climbed up a short ladder propped against it, and slid into the cockpit. There were two big bucket seats at the front, one for the helmsman and one for the navigator. Behind them a long wooden bench ran down one side of the boat to the shell of a galley area. A wooden seat curved around the stern. None of the interior had been finished or upholstered apart from the two seats in the cockpit.

‘This is where their loose women sat,’ Mousavi said, gesturing at the cabin. He was on the top rung of the ladder, looking into the cockpit. ‘When they weren’t lying about naked on the deck.’

Mousavi smiled, but Dhar didn’t want to think of the craft as a place of pleasure for the decadent infidel. As he sat behind the wheel, studying the bank of six monitor screens in front of him, he preferred to concentrate on the boat’s military possibilities, the damage it was capable of causing. In recent days, Mousavi had talked more about the operation that lay ahead. It was not without risk, but the target was so iconic, the global ramifications so immense, that Dhar had struggled to sleep at night, his mind filled with the images that would soon be circulating around the world.

‘Does it actually work?’ he asked.

‘Of course. But it’s not as fast as the real thing. It doesn’t have the thousand-horsepower Caterpillar engines. Or the Arneson surface drives. Later we will lower it into the water for you to practise. It’s easy to operate. You’ll enjoy it.’

‘What about the torpedoes?’ Dhar asked, thinking back to the first time he had sat behind the controls of the SU-25 jet. He had felt daunted then as the Bird, his Russian instructor, had talked him through the flightdeck. This was much simpler.

‘That’s why our engineers have built this one. To work out how and where to install them inside the hull. The plan is to fit the real thing with “hoot” supercavitation torpedoes – our own version of the Russian “shkval” system – as soon as it arrives. During recent tests, they travelled at 200 knots, twice the speed of normal torpedoes and too fast for any American ship.’

Dhar was impressed, but he wondered if he would ever be on the side that wasn’t reverse-engineering others’ technology. Mousavi had talked to him earlier about supercavitation. It was a way of creating a bubble of gas around an object as it moved through water, reducing friction and allowing it to travel at much faster speeds.

‘I need to send a message to my people in Morocco,’ Dhar said, still sitting behind the controls.

‘Every time you contact the outside world it is dangerous – for all of us.’

‘How do you expect me to ask Daniel Marchant about helping in Karachi?’

‘I was not thinking of asking him.’

‘He might not come quietly. It’s better he knows I’m involved.’

Dhar couldn’t explain the real reason he wanted to send a message to Marchant. It wasn’t to reassure him about Karachi, but to honour their private arrangement. Thanks to Marchant he now had his freedom, but Britain was still burning. And that troubled him more perhaps than it should. There were over-zealous brothers in London who needed to be stopped.

‘Let me first send word to him,’ Dhar said. ‘Then your people can liaise with mine and bring him here.’

‘Send word? How will you do this? No one is allowed to leave until the next shift of oil workers arrive – that is why we brought you here. To the outside world, to the Americans, this must appear like a functioning oil platform.’

‘I don’t need anyone to leave. Just give me an internet connection.’

Marchant stepped out of the internet café and glanced up and down the street. Nobody was around. He thanked the owner, who turned the sign on the door back to ‘Open’, and set off towards his
riad
. The call to COBRA had gone well. Denton had been arrested, and the PM, after a private discussion with the Foreign Secretary, had agreed to Fielding’s return. The only surprise was Spiro’s presence. Luckily, no one had been in a mood to listen to his accusations about Marchant and his role in the Bagram jailbreak. Spiro’s influence in Whitehall was clearly waning.

There was still a risk, though, that the Americans could make trouble for him. They hadn’t forgotten his role in the downing of an F-22, and they would try to blame him for Lakshmi’s death. At no point in his video conference with COBRA had Marchant discussed his own return or a possible amnesty. For the time being he wanted to remain abroad, unaccountable. There was work to do. Dhar was out there somewhere and had promised to protect Britain. Marchant just hoped his half-brother had detected his hand in the jailbreak. That had always been the deal: Dhar’s freedom in return for Britain’s safety.

As he reached rue Sidi Mohamed ben Abdullah, Marchant heard a noise behind him. He turned to see a group of fifteen, maybe twenty, street children surge around a corner and run towards him as a pack. They were laughing and playing, one of them scuffing a deflated football along. Marchant tried to move to one side to let them pass, but they were already around him, streaming past on either side. The children were all smiles and there was no menace, but none of them acknowledged him, which struck Marchant as odd.

Then something touched his hand. Was he being naïve? Had they fleeced him like a swarm of locusts? He felt for his money, and a scrap of paper, screwed up in a tight ball, fell to the ground. It must have been pressed into his palm. He looked up to see the last of the children disappearing around the corner. The child turned back, catching his eye, and was gone.

Marchant didn’t unfold the paper at once. After doubling back on himself, he walked past the internet café and turned into a small side street before cutting back to rue Sidi Mohamed ben Abdullah. Somebody had known he was at the café, which meant he had been careless. He was certain no one had followed him, but they might be watching now.

He put the paper in his pocket, unfolded it with his fingers and then brought it out, glancing at it briefly. One word was written on it: ‘Abdul’. He balled the paper and threw it down an open drain.

Dhar had told him at Tarlton that he would make contact through the camel herders of Essaouira. The most obvious place was on the main beach, at the far end of which he had seen herders standing around in the wind and surf with their camels, waiting for tourists. He hadn’t been over there yet, but he set off now, assuming that Abdul was in some way connected to Dhar.

Essaouira felt different as he left through the south-eastern gate of the medina and headed towards the beach. He was no longer a visitor, he was a target, the focus of someone’s surveillance. No one was who they seemed any more. Women on the promenade wall were selling henna designs for hands and feet. One of them glanced up at him as he passed. A row of laminated cards showing different patterns was laid out on the pavement in front of the women. Some were complex, like matrix barcodes. Relax, he told himself. The women were just trying to earn a living.

The beach was shrouded in a heavy sea mist but it was still busy, a riot of football matches. This was no casual Sunday knockabout, Marchant thought. Proper pitches had been marked out in the sand. Players, mostly young men in their teens and twenties, were wearing formal strips, the refs dressed in black and brandishing whistles.

Marchant walked down to the water’s edge, kicking a ball back to a player as he went. Two runners jogged past, listening to iPods. A few people were swimming. Stray dogs roamed the foreshore, searching for food. Up ahead, a man appeared out of the mist and headed across the sand towards him, hood up, his arms dripping with watches. Marchant was firmly in his sights.

‘Rolex?’ he asked. Marchant smiled but said nothing, walking on. ‘Breitling?’ His time in Marrakech had taught him not to be drawn into dialogue. ‘Sunglasses?’ he heard behind him.

The kite-surfers were further down the beach, on the far side of the bay, away from the swimmers. Nobody was on the water yet. The mist was slowly lifting, the sun breaking through in patches like dim torchlight. In front of him, a group of French beginners was being given a lesson by an instructor. Their kites and strings were laid out like giant jellyfish.

An ephemeral layer of sand rippled across the beach towards Marchant as he walked on towards the camels. Some stood in the mist, others were lying down, the occasional grunt carried in the wind. One pair necked like lovers – anything to attract the tourists. Competition for business was fierce, the modern world undermining the camels’ ancient draw. Beyond them, a column of quad bikes snaked through the sand dunes, ridden by a family of tourists. In the far distance, Marchant could make out a rider on a solitary Arab horse, galloping through the shallow surf.

One of the herders broke away from a group and approached him, pulling on a reluctant camel.

‘Five hundred dhirams, half an hour,’ he said. His heart wasn’t in it, Marchant thought. Had he given up on tourists, or was he Dhar’s man?

‘Not now. Maybe later,’ Marchant said.

‘OK, my friend. If you want camel ride, my name is Saif. Here’s my card.’

Marchant took it and walked on towards a row of beach cafés and water-sports shops, where rival flags billowed in the wind like tribal standards. At the first café, a man in a tattered blue overcoat moved between orange sun loungers, a bulging plastic bag in his hand.

‘
Cacahuete! Cacahuete!
’ he shrieked, bursting into a toothless, gummy song. ‘
Bom-be-bom-be-bom-be-bom-be-bom. Cacahuete! Cacahuete!
’ He was selling roasted peanuts and almonds.

A group of chic French students in bikinis called him over to their sun lounger, where they were crowded around smooth-chested teenage boys in swim shorts. Music played on a mobile phone while they smoked. Empty beer bottles were stacked on the table. Marchant thought the almond seller was about to be given a hard time, but he was greeted like an old friend.

‘Camel ride?’ a voice said beside him. The man had approached with the stealth of a professional.

‘How much?’ Marchant asked.

He knew at once that this was Dhar’s man. There was something about him: a fierceness in the eyes.

‘Four hundred and fifty dhirams, half an hour. No haggle.’

‘I haven’t come all this way not to haggle,’ Marchant said, detecting the beginnings of a smile on the man’s weatherbeaten face.

‘Nobody haggles with Abdul,’ he said. ‘Would you like to walk with me?’

Two minutes later, they were far enough away from the beach cafés to talk. Abdul was showing off his camels, giving Marchant an assessment of each one: ‘… dull eyes … shiny hair … nervous … firm ears … broad cheeks … strong straight legs.’ For a moment, Marchant thought he had been mistaken for a camel buyer.

Then Abdul’s tone changed as he fastened a strap on a saddle. ‘I have an address for you,’ he said. ‘In London.’ He barked a command and the camel collapsed to its knees, as if it was deflating.

Marchant tried to concentrate on the camel, to look as if he was sizing it up for a ride, but Abdul’s words threw him. He had been expecting coded instructions of some sort, a way to meet up with Dhar or at least make contact with him. Dhar would never return to Britain, even if he had been on the vodka again. So why had he been given an address in London?

‘If you care for your country, you must pass it on,’ Abdul continued, the camel now fully seated on the sand. ‘Time is running out.’

‘I’m not naïve, Jim,’ Linda said. ‘But somehow it was easier when you were in the Marines, fighting a war.’

‘We’re at war now, just on a different battlefield, with different weapons and a different enemy.’

Spiro and his wife were walking beside the Thames, past the Globe Theatre. When they had met outside the South Bank Centre, she had let him kiss her on the cheek, but pulled away when he tried to hug her. She was looking tired after her flight from Beirut, and had done her hair in a different way, but otherwise Spiro thought she seemed OK.

‘Jason’s taught me to see the world differently,’ she said.

Spiro had told himself not to react when Jason’s name cropped up, as he knew it would. But try as he might, he bristled at the thought of her spending time with the doughnut puncher he’d met in Busboys and Poets.

‘Oh come on, Linda, don’t bring him into this.’

‘Excuse me? You and I don’t have a future if we can’t talk about Jason.’

‘Is that so? Is he the reason you went away?’

They stopped to look at each other. Spiro had always thought it odd when couples argued in public seemingly unself-consciously, but right now he didn’t give a damn what the people passing by thought.

‘Jason’s gay, OK?’ Linda said, her voice quieter. ‘I thought that was fairly obvious.’

Spiro had suspected as much, but the idea of Jason teaching his wife ‘to see the world differently’ still made him mad. He knew his jealousy made no sense, but that was how it was. He was tired, and was already feeling humiliated by Denton’s demise.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as they walked on. ‘It’s been a bad day.’

‘And you can’t talk about it.’

‘How long have we been married? Thirty years? Not a bad run. What I don’t get is, why now?’

‘Why not?’

‘Where did you go, Linda?’ He needed to ask, in case Dhar had been lying. ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls?’