Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (28 page)

To Ian, Philip quickly mouthed the words,
He wants to meet.

“But everything's all right, then?” Philip asked. “Good, I'm glad. Where are you? We'll stop by on our way back to the tender.”

Philip hesitated. “No, we'll be gone long before lunch.”

Ian nodded.

“Just a moment, I'll ask,” Philip said, muting the telephone.

“Fateen wants me to have lunch with him. He assures me there is no problem. I think he wants his hand held.”

“Many people are like that,” Ian said. “I would not have expected Fateen to be one of them, but pressure does strange things to people. Go, steady his nerves. You can call for the tender when you're ready.”

“I'm sure you would be more than welcome.”

“Not in a million years. When a deal is in play, it's in play. Agree to nothing we have not already agreed to.”

“That,” Philip said, “goes without saying.” With the iPhone once again switched on, he said, “One o'clock. I'll find it, don't worry. I'll meet you there.”

On the drive back to the yacht-club quay, Ian seemed resigned. “Just be careful,” he told Philip as he prepared to step out of the car.

“I'm sure it amounts to little more than that he simply doesn't like to eat alone,” Philip suggested with a piteous laugh. “I could almost tell that from his voice.”

“Good,” Ian said.

“You could do me one favor,” Philip said, seemingly on impulse. “If you wouldn't mind taking this box with you? Then I won't have to worry about leaving it behind in a restaurant.”

“Pleasure,” Ian said. “Where is he taking you, by the way? The Minzah?”

“No. Someplace called the Tom Yam.”

“That's too bad,” Ian said. “The Minzah's very salubrious. I'm afraid I don't know Tom Yam.”

“Number five
avenue Youssoufia,” Philip said as offhandedly as he could manage, for the depth of Ian's curiosity had unnerved him. “The best Thai food in Tangier, he said.”

“Well, that's the world today, isn't it? I'm sure there's wonderful couscous in Bangkok.”

As
Surpass
's
tender motored slowly toward the breakwater gulls circled overhead. Philip glanced at his watch. It was 11:59. He quickly found Fateen Al-Dosari's mobile number in his iPhone's address book and rang it. When Fateen answered, Philip said, “Any chance you're free for lunch?”

“This is a surprise,” Fateen told him.

“Ian asked me to stay behind to do a business errand for him. Nothing very important,” Philip explained, “but you know Ian. When he gets something on his mind, no matter how small, there's no getting it off, is there?”

“All too true. Still, I admire a man who clears his in-box every day,” Fateen replied. “As a matter of fact, I
am
free for lunch.”

“How would the Tom Yam at one o'clock suit?”

“Perfectly,” Fateen replied.

Relieved that their conversation had not been interrupted by a query directly from Ian to Fateen, Philip drew a momentary breath. He would not have put such a call beyond Ian in normal circumstances. For it was Ian's nature to either confirm or erase his suspicions. So Philip had erred on the safe side. His alibi was intact.

On sudden impulse Philip instructed his driver to take him to the Hotel El Minzah. Once there, he would walk in the fabled hotel's gardens, perhaps have a drink, then go on to the restaurant. As the Mercedes crossed the railway track that ran along the shore, Philip reached into his jacket pocket and switched off his iPhone. It was important he be incommunicado. From the opposite pocket, he removed a small pay-as-you-go Nokia he'd bought the previous December with a false ID. Careful to hold it low and forward on his lap, thus out of the driver's view, with obsessive care he punched in, then confirmed on the telephone's screen the number of the detonator in the box he had left with Ian. On the near side of the place de la Tannerie, once he judged that they were finally far enough away from the waterfront not to hear an explosion at sea, he pressed the green
CALL
button. With the phone now on speaker, he waited out six unanswered rings. Then, displaying only normal frustration, he pressed the red
STOP
key and immediately wiped the call from the telephone's logs.

At the Hotel El Minzah, having time to spare, he told the driver to meet him exactly where he had before, in the Petit Socco. In the meantime he would walk, both because his body craved the exercise and because it was easier to get to know a city on foot. In the Minzah's lush garden, the sun felt warm against his face. As he paused before a stand of cedar and bay trees, his thoughts suddenly wafted back to school holidays on which his father had sometimes taken him when he was a boy. In those days, immediately following his post at the United Nations, his father had been based in London as a partner of a travel agency that specialized in high-end excursions, often through the byways of more libertine cultures. He had received large discounts, sometimes even complimentary rooms at luxurious hotels on every coast of the Mediterranean, and it had been on their holidays together that Philip had first tasted the seductive North African climate in which desert and sea air merged. How long ago that was, Philip thought now! His father had been shot, accidentally, on safari in Kenya when Philip was just shy of fourteen. He could not help but wonder if the seed of a man who could kill with such impressive ease had been within him from birth or planted later in the course of his life. At Le Rosey, like many of his schoolmates, he had become accustomed to a measure of parental neglect, to being loved from a distance, but this had left him not so much desperate as on his own. In those days, although he had charged exuberantly onto playing fields and ski slopes and shown a precocious flair for mathematics, he had been invariably more careful than the children of rich and powerful men who surrounded him, many of whom had seemed to float above the world, buoyed by a charm so instinctive they could neither recognize nor repress it. Unlike Luke Claussen, Philip had recognized even then that he was bound for a different, more serious fate. Thoughts of murder had not yet surfaced as he studied beside the shores of Lake Leman, fifty kilometers north of Geneva, and on the school's alpine winter campus in Gstaad.

No, he reflected, he had developed the capacity if not the instinct to kill incrementally. It was the logical extension of the first lesson he'd imbibed from Ian. Nothing mattered more than success, and success was achieved by capitalizing upon every moment, every person and every opportunity. Over his years in the City of London, under his mentor's tutelage, step by step he had abandoned whatever morality he'd once had—first, innocently enough, by canceling obligations to friends in favor of clients; then by assisting raiders and their hedge-fund backers as they stripped bare the assets of firms that had required decades to build and saddled the resulting corporate skeletons with plainly unsustainable levels of debt; by profiting, always surreptitiously, from confidential information that should not have been acted upon; eventually by early-stage algo trading against his own customers, excusing his actions as if the very nature of markets required it. It had been a short enough journey from destroying a person's livelihood to destroying his life. He was not bloodthirsty, merely pragmatic. Philip did not enjoy killing any more than he recoiled from it and, with a certain wistfulness, appreciated the irony of his having just had to eliminate the very man who had set him on his way.

The Minzah's bar had not yet opened for the day, but, a distant memory having been triggered by Ian's mere mention of the hotel, Philip entered it and stood alone before Lavery's legendary portrait of Caid Sir Harry MacLean, the early-twentieth-century British army officer and adviser to the Sultan of Morocco, who had been kidnapped and ransomed.

From the hotel he headed on foot toward the place de France. Once he had made a circuit of it, he retreated in the direction of the Medina, where several minutes later he happened upon a courtyard textile market in one upstairs room of which men of several generations had gathered for prayer. Their shoes and sandals had been left, carefully arranged, at the entrance, and Philip made note of both its location and the time.

He walked the streets of the bazaar spontaneously but before long began to feel himself on familiar ground. A moment later he was approached by a young boy with a balsa ukulele for sale.

“Sir,” the boy said. “You buy for your son?”

Philip shook his head. After a few seconds, he recognized the boy from the shop in which he had purchased his box.

“I give you good price.”

“Not interested.”

“Eight euros.”

“No. I told you.”

“Your son will like very much this gift. It is beautiful instrument.”

“For Christ's sake,” Philip said. “I don't have a son.”

“One day very soon,” the boy said, “you wait. Until then, six euros.”

The remark disturbed Philip. “I'll say this,” he said. “You are a better bargainer than your father.”

“No,” the boy told him. “Come on, six euros is cheap.”

“It's not, and you know it's not, but I don't want your damned ukulele at any price. Understand?”

“Five euros?”

“Get lost.”

“You give me two euros?” the boy asked. He seemed to be dancing around Philip suddenly, with the speed and directional improbability of a fly.

“For what?” Philip asked over his shoulder. “Why should I give you two euros?”

“I can be your guide.”

“I've no need of a guide.”

“Please, sir, just two. What's two?”

Philip gestured with the back of his hand. “I'll give you nothing but trouble if you don't stop bothering me. You get the hell away from me this instant! Go on!”

“Sorry,” the boy said, retreating at last, “but you make a big mistake, sir. What I offer is very fine.”

“Somehow I doubt it.”

“Trust me, you will be sorry you did not buy it for your son. Just wait.”

Chapter Thirty-three

Isabella studied her watch.
“I'd better ring Ian,” she said.

“What time is it?” Ty asked.

“Not quite a quarter past eleven.”

“Go ahead. He'll know we've gone ashore. Why should he object? Actually, I think the Prajaptis were flattered we came along.”

“People like to be seen in the company of film stars. Anyway, to be honest, it isn't Ian's reaction that worries me.”

“I can handle Philip,” Ty assured her, “when the time comes.”

“What if you're wrong?” Isabella asked. “About that and about this whole damned business?”

“I'll apologize,” Ty said. “Here comes Oliver now.”

Isabella looked across the natural rockery, in which the last of the candytuft flowers were still in bloom, and focused on the rugged figure approaching them. They had taken the cable car to Top Station and begun their partial descent from there along the steep Mediterranean Steps. High above Europa Point, these afforded spectacular views but had to be navigated with care and complete concentration. A few steps down, pausing to steady herself, Isabella grabbed hold of a large iron ring that had been embedded in a rock and awaited Oliver Molyneux. “Sorry not to meet you halfway,” she told him as he drew near, “but this comes in handy.”

“I can see that,” Oliver said. “You know, in another time they would thread chains through those rings and use them to manhandle cannon.”

“How reassuring!”

“This is Commander Oliver Molyneux,” Ty said, “a very old friend of mine.”

“How do you do?” Isabella said. After a second's hesitation, as she shook his hand and regarded him carefully, she added, “I know you. You're Laura Molyneux's cousin?”

“Is she a friend of yours?” Oliver inquired.

“She was a year ahead of me at school.”

“I'll be damned.”

“We were great mates then, but we seem to have lost track of each other over the years. How is she?”

“She's very well, married with two children, an impish little boy and a very pretty girl, so no complaints!”

Isabella smiled. “Tell her I asked after her, please, and send her my love.”

“I will,” Oliver said. “So, Ty, where do things stand?”

“It feels like a kettle is about to boil, but that's purely intuition. All sorts of people come and go, but it's hard to pin down who's who. Ian has many more than one ball in the air at any given moment.”

“That's an understatement,” Isabella added.

“I'm glad you two have found a connection,” Ty said. “Maybe that will make it easier.”

“Make what easier?” Isabella asked. “I haven't agreed to anything as yet, only to you hear you out.”

“That's all I meant,” Ty said. “If you know who Oliver is, that should make things easier.”

“Oh, I know who he is, all right. He was already in the navy, the Special Boat Service, I think. He came to Founders' Day at our school in his uniform the year Laura was head girl. We all just about died.”

“Back to the matter at hand,” Oliver said. “If I need further vouching for, you can ring Admiral Cotton. I believe you know him.”

“I've met him. That won't be necessary. Let's get on with it, then, shall we?”

“All right,” Oliver said. “Straight to the point: If there are warheads, we've lost track of them.”

“You think they may have been offloaded in Naples?” Ty asked, for Isabella's benefit.

“It's a distinct possibility.”

“Do you know anything about Ian's connections in Naples?”

Isabella squinted. “Nothing at all,” she said.

“Never mind,” Oliver said. “You can see where this is headed. We are going to have to figure out their destination and work back from there, and the only clues to that will be aboard
Surpass.
”

“As I've told Ty,” Isabella said, “I don't have any idea what those might be. If they exist, they will doubtless be somewhere on Ian's deck, which is effectively—and I do mean
effectively
—off-limits to anyone but him, including Philip. Beyond that, I wouldn't know where to start. Who is involved and who isn't? It's all smoke and mirrors, isn't it?”

“Your words, not mine,” Oliver said.

“No, but it
is
smoke and mirrors,” Isabella explained, “and that's the wonderful thing about Ian. He creates this air of mystery, and that mystery then empowers him. It gives him all sorts of leverage he wouldn't otherwise have.”

“You wouldn't hazard a guess as to his customer?” Ty asked.

“Mine would be no better than yours. It could be anyone, or none of the people you've met since you've been here. It could a king or group of kings. What it could not be is a terrorist. Ian wouldn't have a hand in that.”

“A group of kings is an interesting concept,” Ty said.

“Isn't it?” Oliver agreed.

“Maybe not just a group of
kings
but a syndicate of sorts,” Ty continued, “that would allow Ian to justify his action to himself. It would also conform to his widely espoused theory that safety results from standoff. If such a syndicate does exist, who would its members be and who would be in charge?”

Ty did not lift his stare from Isabella.

“If, and only if it did,” she said, “Philip would have to be someplace very near the head. He's the only one Ian trusts enough. And much as it pains me to say it, Sheik al-Awad would probably be involved, too.”

“Why al-Awad particularly?” Oliver wondered.

“Well, for one thing, he's spending a fortune on gems he doesn't appreciate. He doesn't know a ruby from a piece of stained glass.”

“So,” Oliver said, “either the man's mad as a hatter or the gems are simply a way of funneling money, a device for Santal to skim, perhaps.”

Isabella frowned. “That's not exactly his style.”

“Assuming your guess is a good one,” Ty said, “who are the natural bedfellows for Sheik al-Awad?”

Isabella laughed. “You're asking the wrong person. I'm not in that loop.”

“Tim and Celia Foo?”

“Definitely not! She's a gossip. That bores Ian. He's a prude—about business. I've heard Ian say as much. That bores him even more. I think they are only still on Ian's list for old times' sake.”

“All right then, what about Harry Kosmopoulos?”

“It's a possibility, but despite the hail-fellow-well-met façade, he's timid by nature. He's one of those a-little-here, a-little-there, don't-bet-the-estate types.”

“Okay, we'll put him to the side for a moment. What about Rahim Kakar and Aurelien Strigoi?”

“Both candidates, I suppose. I don't really know them. I only met them when you did.”

“But not the Prajaptis?”

“Absolutely not. The Prajaptis are . . . well, they're the Prajaptis. They have every reason to be more than satisfied with the status quo.”

“Finally,” Ty said, “the Al-Dosari twins?”

Isabella laughed out loud. “They present the biggest question marks, don't they? I mean, if one accepts your narrative, Wazir and Fateen have to be implicated in whatever conspiracy might exist. They have hired Philip. They run an enormous fund. They move money all over the world every day. Or at least that's what I'm told. On the other hand, the raison d'être of their fund is to bring civilizations together, not force them apart.”

“Allegedly. Do you trust them?”

“I've never thought about it one way or the other.”

“Is it your impression that they are especially greedy or just good, clever businessmen? In other words, would they risk their legitimacy in honest markets in order to operate and score a big win in the most dishonest one there is?”

“You'd have to ask Philip,” Isabella replied.

“That's the problem,” Ty told her. “I can't do that until I know the answer. Oliver, have the SIGINT guys spotted anything?”

“Not even a flurry of innocent wire transfers.”

“Who's looking?”

“The best geeks we've got.”

“I'll take your word for it.”

“They'd better be. You know how much they're paid, don't you?” Oliver asked.

“No idea,” Ty said.

“A lot more than any of us.”

“Not possible.”

“We'll, maybe not more than
you
are. Excuse me. I'd forgot for a moment just what a dish of cream you'd fallen into, but more than the President or Prime Minister. Geeks of their sort are the highest-paid employees of either of our governments. Of course, they're not formally employees. I believe the correct term is ‘contractors.'”

As this thread of conversation hung in the air, Isabella's mobile rang. She glanced at it, then at Ty and Oliver. Both men grew silent.

“Hello,” Isabella answered.

“Hello, darling,” Ian said with characteristic enthusiasm, yet against a background of engine roar. “Where are you?”

“On Gib,” Isabella said. “We brought Ajay and Akshar over in the chopper. Ty had never seen the place, so . . . well, naturally . . .”

For an instant, Ian did not respond. Then he said only, “Yes indeed, that's nice.”

“I can barely hear you,” Isabella said.

“I'm on the tender. What time will you be returning?”

“Soon, I should think. What time do you want us?”

“I don't know. Whenever you wish, really. What time is it now?”

“Just past noon,” Isabella told him.

“So it is,” Ian said. “I didn't realize it was that late already.”

Before Isabella could respond, the unanticipated thunder of an explosion tore at her ear, with such volcanic ferocity that she dropped her phone. Ty caught it in midair and handed it back to her. “Ian!” she cried out, frightened but at last raising the speaker to her lips. “Ian! Ian . . . what's happened? Talk to me!”