Читать книгу The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018 - Charles Cumming - Страница 18

Carradine had been on the Gatwick Express for only a few minutes when he saw the photograph. He was seated alone at a table in a near-deserted carriage finishing off a cappuccino and a fruit salad from M&S. A passenger had left a copy of the Guardian on a seat across the aisle. Carradine had picked up the paper and begun to read about developments in the Redmond kidnapping. The Transit van, which had been stolen from a North London car park, had been found abandoned and burned out at the edge of a wood not far from Henley-on-Thames. CCTV showed a bearded man wearing a woollen hat filling the van up with diesel in Cricklewood a few hours before Redmond was seized. Resurrection sympathisers had now claimed responsibility for the kidnapping but no images of Redmond in captivity had been released. ‘Experts’ quoted in the article drew comparisons with the kidnapping of Otis Euclidis, pointing out that Resurrection had waited ten days before publishing footage of an apparently healthy and well-rested Euclidis sitting on a bed in an undisclosed location reading a book. The same experts claimed that the police were at a loss to know where Redmond was being held. At the bottom of the story there was a small box directing readers to a longer piece on the history of the Resurrection movement. Carradine had turned to the back of the paper, intending to read it.

Beneath the headline on the article was a layout of four pictures arranged in a square, each of them about the same size as the passport photograph of ‘Maria’ that Mantis had given to Carradine in Lisson Grove. The photograph in the top left-hand corner showed Redmond taking part in a reality television show several years earlier. Beside it was a picture of Euclidis in characteristic Instagram pose, wearing a white, gold-encrusted baseball cap, a gold crucifix medallion and outsized designer sunglasses. The photograph in the bottom left-hand corner showed Nihat Demirel, a pro-government talk-show host in Turkey who had been kneecapped by Resurrection outside his summer house in Izmir in May. It was the fourth picture that rocked Carradine.

He had seen the photograph before. It showed Ivan Simakov, the deceased leader of Resurrection, standing beside the woman who was reported to have been his girlfriend when the movement was conceived: Lara Bartok. Carradine stared at her. She had long, dark hair and slightly crooked front teeth. It was ‘Maria’.

He reached into his wallet. He placed the photograph of Maria alongside the picture of Bartok. There was no question that they were the same woman. He was about to pull up her Wikipedia page on his iPhone when he remembered that the search would flag. A young woman had taken a seat at the far end of the carriage. Carradine considered asking to borrow her phone to make the search but decided against it, instead reading the article for more detail on Bartok’s background. A Hungarian-born lawyer, she had met Simakov in New York and become attached to Occupy Wall Street. Described as ‘a latter-day Ulrike Meinhof’, Bartok was wanted in the United States on charges of armed assault, kidnapping and incitement to violence. She had reportedly become disillusioned with Resurrection and vanished from the couple’s apartment in Brooklyn. Several months later, Simakov was killed in Moscow.

Carradine put the newspaper to one side. The train had come to a halt at a section of track littered with cans and bottles. He stared outside, trying to work out what Mantis was up to. He assumed that the Service had recruited Bartok as an agent, persuading her to inform against Resurrection. But how had they managed to lose track of her? And why was Mantis using an untried and untested support agent to try to find her? In the Lisson Grove flat he had refused even to reveal Bartok’s name, telling Carradine that ‘several officers and support agents’ were searching for her in places as far afield as Mexico, Cuba and Argentina. If that was the case, it was plausible that she was no longer a source for British intelligence, but instead a fugitive from justice. Carradine had learned enough from his father about the workings of the Service to know that they were not a law enforcement agency. There had to be another reason behind Mantis’s search. Carradine recalled the wistfulness with which he had spoken about her beauty, his irritation with the photograph of her surfer boyfriend. As the train began to move away, he wondered if Mantis was romantically involved with her. That might explain the furtiveness with which he had spoken about ‘Maria’.

Gatwick airport was rammed. Carradine checked the suitcase containing the book and the sealed package into the hold and cleared security without any complications. He was carrying €1,000 of Mantis’s money in his wallet and the other €2,000 inside an envelope in his carry-on bag. The departure gate for the flight with Royal Air Maroc was a twenty-minute walk from security along increasingly deserted corridors leading further and further away from the heart of the terminal. A flight attendant wearing a headscarf and heavy mascara clicked a counter for every passenger that came on board. Carradine was one of the last to take his seat. He glanced at the counter as he passed her. There were fewer than fifty passengers on the plane.

As the flight took off, Carradine had the vivid sensation that he was leaving the old part of his life behind and entering a new phase which would in every way be more challenging and satisfying than the life he had known before. His thoughts again turned to Bartok. Was Mantis using him to try to get a personal message to her? If so, how could he guarantee that Carradine would find her at the festival? Was she a fan of his books? Did the Service think that she was going to show herself at his event? Perhaps she wanted to meet Katherine Paget, the novelist with whom he was due to appear on stage.

The sealed package was somewhere beneath Carradine’s feet in the chill of the baggage hold; he knew that it would contain the answers to his many questions and felt his professional obligation to Mantis dissipating with every passing mile. He did not consider himself to be particularly cynical or suspicious, but neither would he enjoy the feeling of being duped. He needed to know what was inside the envelope. If that meant breaking his promise to the Service, so be it.

About an hour into the flight, Carradine was handed a small tray with a plastic knife and fork and told that alcohol was not served by the airline. Craving a beer, he ate a tiny, vacuum-packed trout fillet with a bread roll and something the flight attendant claimed was chicken casserole. Leaving most of it unfinished, he decided to go for a stroll. As he passed his fellow passengers bent over their in-flight meals, Carradine could hear a man with a deep, resonant voice speaking in Spanish near the toilets at the rear of the plane. He assumed that the man was talking to a friend, but when he reached the galley he saw that he was alone. His back was turned and he was looking out of the window. He was wearing shorts and a black T-shirt. Religious tattoos completely covered his arms and the backs of his hands. There were tufts of black body hair protruding from the neck of his T-shirt. He was holding a mobile phone perpendicular to his mouth and appeared to be dictating notes. Carradine spoke very little Spanish and could not understand what he was saying. The man sensed that Carradine was behind him and turned around.

‘Sorry. You want the bathroom, man?’

The accent was Hispanic, the face about forty-five. He was well-built but not overtly muscular, with long, greasy hair gathered in a topknot. Though not fully bearded, at least three days of dense stubble ran in a continuous black shadow from beneath his eyes to the hollow of his collarbone. He was one of the hairiest people Carradine had ever seen.

‘No thanks. I’m just going for a walk.’

The man lowered the phone. He was smiling with forced sincerity, like a technique he had been taught at a seminar on befriending strangers. Carradine had the bizarre and disorienting sensation that the man knew who he was and had been waiting for him.

‘Out on the wing?’

‘What?’

‘You said you were going for a walk.’

Carradine rolled with the joke. ‘Oh. That’s right. Yes. So if you wouldn’t mind stepping aside I’ll just open the door and head out.’

An eruption of laughter, a roar so loud it might have been audible in the cockpit. An elderly Arabic woman emerged from one of the bathrooms and flinched.

‘Hey! I like you!’ said the man. He leaned a hand against the doorframe and shook out a crick in his neck. ‘Where you from?’

Carradine explained that he was from London. ‘And you?’

‘Me? I’m from everywhere, man.’ He looked like a mid-level drug dealer attached to a Colombian cartel: dishevelled, poorly educated, very possibly violent. ‘Born in Andalucía. Raised in Madrid. Now I live in London. Heading out to Morocco for some R & R.’

They shook hands. The Spaniard’s grip suggested prodigious physical force.

‘Ramón,’ he said. ‘Great to meet you, man.’

‘Kit. You too.’

‘So what you doing in Casablanca?’

Carradine went with the story he had agreed with Mantis.

‘I’m a novelist. Doing some research on my next book.’

The Spaniard again exploded with enthusiasm. ‘A writer! Holy shit, man! You write books?’ Carradine thought back to his first encounter with Mantis. There was something similarly inauthentic about Ramón. ‘You get any of them published?’

‘A few, yeah.’

‘Wow! So cool!’

A flight attendant came into the galley, obliging Carradine to step to one side. She was slim and attractive. Ramón stared at her as she bent down to retrieve a bottle of water from one of the catering boxes. He gazed open-mouthed at the outline of her uniform, all of the liveliness and energy in his face momentarily extinguished. He looked up, pursed his lips and shot Carradine a locker-room leer.

‘Nice, huh?’

Carradine changed the subject.

‘What do you do for R & R in Casablanca?’

It turned out to be the wrong question.

‘Oh man! The chicks in Morocco. You don’t know?!’ The flight attendant stood up, stared at Ramón with undisguised contempt and made her way back down the aisle. ‘Last time I was there, I meet this girl in a bar on the Corniche. She takes me to this apartment, we open a bottle of whisky and then – bang! Oh Kit, man! One of the great nights of my life. This chick, she was …’

Ramón’s recollection tailed off as a young child, accompanied by his father, was led to the bathroom. Carradine seized his chance to get away.

‘Well, it was interesting to meet you,’ he said.

‘You heading off?’

Ramón sounded distraught, almost as if he had been tasked with befriending Carradine and been judged to have failed.

‘Yeah. I’ve got stuff to read. Work to do. Just wanted to stretch my legs.’

‘Oh. OK. Sure. Great to meet you. You’re a cool cat, Kit. I like you. Good luck with those books!’

Carradine returned to his seat, oddly unsettled by the encounter. He remained there for the rest of the flight. He thought that he had seen the last of the Spaniard but, having landed and cleared passport control in Casablanca, found himself standing next to him in the baggage hall. As they waited for their respective suitcases, some of the last remaining passengers to be doing so, Ramón continued to grill Carradine on his life and career, to the point at which he began to wonder if he was testing his cover.

‘So, what? You’re writing a kind of spy story set in Morocco? Like a Jason Bourne thing?’

Carradine had always thought that his novels occupied a literary space equidistant between the kiss-kiss-bang-bang of Ludlum and the slow-burn chess games of le Carré. For reasons of intellectual vanity, he would ordinarily have tried to distance himself from Ramón’s description, but he was keen to stop talking about his work. As a consequence, he readily conceded that his ‘Moroccan thriller’ was going to be ‘full of guns and explosions and beautiful women’.

‘Like The Man Who Knew Too Much?’

Carradine thought of his father the night before munching naan bread and drinking claret. He didn’t think the comparison was accurate, but couldn’t be bothered to enter into a debate about it.

‘Exactly,’ he replied.

Ramón had spotted his bag moving along the carousel. He stepped forward, picked it up, slung the bag across his shoulder and turned around.

‘You wanna share a cab into town, man?’

Had this been his plan all along? To get alongside Carradine and to accompany him into Casablanca? Or was he merely an over-familiar tourist trying to do a fellow passenger a favour? Out of the corner of his eye Carradine saw his suitcase jerking along the carousel.

‘My bag will probably be a while longer,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry. The food on the flight was terrible. I’m going to grab something to eat in the terminal. You go ahead. Have a great trip.’

Ramón looked at the carousel. Three suitcases remained, two of which had passed them several times. Betraying an apparent suspicion, he shook Carradine’s hand, reiterated how ‘truly fantastic’ it had been to meet him and walked towards the customs area. Relieved to be shot of him, Carradine sent a WhatsApp to Mantis telling him that he had arrived, checked that the novel and the sealed package were still inside his case and walked out into the broiling Moroccan afternoon.

He had expected the chaos and clamour of a typical African airport, but all was relatively quiet as he emerged from the terminal. A hot desert wind was blowing in from the east, bending the tops of the palm trees and sending swirls of leaves and dust across the deserted concourse. Men in jeans and Polo shirts were perched on concrete blocks smoking in the shade of the terminal building. When they saw Carradine, they popped up and moved forwards, crowding him like paparazzi, repeating the phrase ‘Taxi mister, taxi’ as he tried to move between them. Carradine could see Ramón less than fifty metres away at the top of the rank standing next to a pranged beige Mercedes. He was negotiating a price with the driver. The Spaniard looked up, waving Carradine forward shouting: ‘Get in, man! Join me!’ Carradine was already uncomfortably hot. He was irritated by the drivers trying to force him towards their cars and intrigued enough by Ramón to want to know why he had taken such an interest in him. Was he working for the Service? Had Mantis sent him with instructions to keep an eye on the new kid on the block? Carradine raised a hand in acknowledgement as Ramón continued to gesture him forward. Should he stay or should he go? His curiosity began to tip the balance. Where was the harm in sharing a ride into town? He might even learn something. He duly rolled his suitcase towards the Mercedes and greeted Ramón for the third time.

‘Chaos back there,’ he said. ‘Thanks for helping me out.’

‘No problem.’ The driver popped the boot. ‘Where you headed, man? I drop you off.’

Carradine was staying at a Sofitel in the centre of town. It transpired that Ramón was staying in a hotel less than five hundred metres away.

‘No way! I’m at the Sheraton! Literally like no distance from where you are.’ A part of Carradine died inside. ‘We can meet up later, go for a drink. You know any good places?’

‘Somebody recommended Blaine’s to me.’

The words were out of his mouth before Carradine had time to realise what he had said. He was due to meet Yassine at Blaine’s the following evening. What if Ramón showed up during their dinner?

‘Blaine’s? I know it! Full of chicks, man. You’re gonna love it.’

He could feel his carefully arranged schedule being quickly and efficiently unpicked by the Spaniard’s suffocating camaraderie. He didn’t want to be put into a position where he had to work his cover, lying to Ramón about phantom meetings with phantom friends just to avoid seeing him. Why the hell hadn’t he taken a separate taxi?

‘Sofitel,’ Ramón told the driver, speaking in accentless French. ‘Près du port. Et après le Sheraton, s’il vous plaît.’

Somewhere between the aircraft and the Mercedes the Spaniard had developed a case of volcanic body odour. The car was quickly filled with the smell of his stale sweat. It was hot in the back seat, with no air conditioning, and Carradine sat with both windows down, listening to the driver muttering to himself in Arabic as they settled into a queue of traffic. Ramón offered Carradine a cigarette, which he gladly accepted, taking the smoke deep into his lungs as he gazed out onto lines of parked cars and half-finished breezeblock apartments, wondering how long it would take to get into town.

‘I never asked,’ he said. ‘What do you do for a living?’

Ramón appeared to hesitate before turning around to answer. His eyes were cold and pitiless. Carradine was reminded of the sudden change in his expression when the flight attendant had walked into the galley. It was like looking at an actor who had momentarily dropped out of character.

‘Me?’ he said. ‘I’m just a businessman. Came out here to do a friend a favour.’

‘I thought you said you were here for the rest and rec-reation?’

‘That too.’ Ramón touched his mouth in a way that made Carradine suspect him of lying. ‘R & R everywhere I go. That’s how I like to roll.’

‘What’s the favour?’ he asked.

The Spaniard cut him a look, turned to face the oncoming traffic and said: ‘I don’t like to talk too much about work.’

Another five minutes passed before they spoke again. The taxi had finally emerged from the traffic jam and reached what appeared to be the main highway into Casablanca. Ramón had been talking to the driver in rapid, aggressive French, only some of which Carradine was able to understand. He began to think that the two men were already acquainted and wondered again if Ramón had deliberately waited for him to come out of the airport.

‘You’ve met before?’ he asked.

‘What’s that?’

‘Your driver? You’ve used him before?’

The Spaniard flinched, as if to suggest that Carradine was asking too many questions.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Oh, nothing. It just sounded like this wasn’t the first time you’d met.’

At that moment the driver – who had not yet looked at Carradine nor acknowledged him in any way – turned off the highway onto a dirt track leading into a forest.

‘What’s going on?’ Carradine looked back at the main road. Paranoia had settled on him like the slowly clinging sweat under his shirt. ‘Where are we going?’

‘No idea.’ Ramón sounded disconcertingly relaxed. ‘Probably has to visit his mother or something.’

The Mercedes bumped along the track, heading further and further into the woods.

‘Seriously,’ said Carradine. ‘Where are we going?’

The driver pulled the Mercedes to the side of the track, switched off the engine and stepped out. The heat of the afternoon sun was overwhelming. Carradine opened the door to give himself an option to run if the situation should turn against him. There was a small wooden hut about ten metres from the road, occupied by a woman whose face he could not see. The driver approached the hut, held out a piece of paper and passed it to her. Ramón put a tattooed arm across the seat.

‘You look tense, man. Relax.’

‘I’m fine,’ Carradine told him.

He was anything but fine. The stench of sweat was overwhelming. He was convinced that he had walked into a trap. He looked in the opposite direction, deeper into the woods. He could see only trees and the forest floor. He used the wing mirror on the driver’s side to check if there was anybody on the road behind them, but saw no sign of anyone. Through the woods beyond the hut he could make out a small clearing dotted with plastic toys and a children’s slide. The driver was coming back to the car.

‘Que faisiez-vous?’ Ramón asked him.

‘Parking,’ the driver replied. Carradine smiled and shook his head. His lack of experience had got the better of him. He looked back at the hut. The veiled woman was marking the piece of paper with an ink stamp. She slammed it onto a metal spike.

‘Crazy!’ Ramón produced a delighted grin. ‘In Casablanca they pay their parking tickets in the middle of the fucking woods. Never saw this before, man.’

‘Me neither,’ Carradine replied.

It was another forty-five minutes to the hotel. Carradine sat in the heat of the back seat, smoking another of Ramón’s cigarettes. On the edge of the city the Mercedes became jammed in three-lane traffic that inched along wide colonial boulevards packed with cars and motorbikes. Ramón grew increasingly agitated, berating the driver for taking the wrong route in order to extract more money for the journey. The swings in his mood, from back-slapping bonhomie to cold, aggressive impatience, were as unexpected as they were unsettling. Carradine followed the progress of the journey on his iPhone, trying to orientate himself in the new city, the street names – Boulevard de La Mecque, Avenue Tetouan, Rue des Racines – evoking all the antiquity and mystique of French colonial Africa. Mopeds buzzed past his door as the Mercedes edged from block to block. Men hawking drinks and newspapers approached the car and were shooed away by the driver, who switched on the windscreen wipers to deter them. Several times Carradine saw cars and scooters running red lights or deliberately going the wrong way around roundabouts in order to beat the jam. Stalled in the rivers of traffic he thought of home and cursed the heat, calling his father to tell him that he had arrived. He was busy playing backgammon with a friend and had no time to talk, their brief exchange leaving Carradine with a sense of isolation that he found perversely enjoyable. It was exhilarating to be alone in a strange city, a place about which he knew so little, at the start of a mission for which he had received no training and no detailed preparation. He knew that his father had been posted to Egypt by the Service in the early years of his marriage and thought of the life he must have led as a young spy, running agents in Cairo, taking his mother on romantic trips to Sinai, Luxor and Aswan. Ramón offered him yet another cigarette and he took it, observing that the smog outside was likely to do more damage to his lungs. Ramón went to the trouble of translating the joke for the benefit of the driver who turned in his seat and smiled, acknowledging Carradine for the first time.

‘Vrai!’ he said. ‘C’est vrai!’

That was when Ramón showed him his phone.

‘Jesus Christ, man. You see this?’

Carradine pitched the cigarette out of the window and leaned forward. The headline on the screen was in Spanish. He could see the words REDMOND and MUERTA.

‘What happened?’

‘They killed the Redmond bitch,’ Ramón replied. ‘Resurrection fucking killed her.’