“What do you think?” said Webster, squinting in the sunlight.
“There are traffic lights at the bottom of the ramp. A hundred meters. If he was through before her…”
Webster nodded, and ran a hand slowly through his hair. Thirty seconds later his phone rang; it was Kamila, and he knew what she was going to say. He was reminded of the phrase George Black always used when reporting a cock-up of this kind. “We’ve had a loss, Ben.” A loss was exactly how it felt.
He shook his head and answered it. “Meet us back here,” he said, and hung up. “How long does it take to trace a number plate?”
“On Friday, a long time.”
Of course. It was almost the weekend. And what better place to spend it, with time on your hands, than Marrakech?
“But I saw the name,” said Driss.
“What name?”
“The passenger name on the sign. The driver’s sign.”
Webster felt his heart give a little kick.
THERE WERE TWO “MR. ROBINSONS” staying in the city’s finer hotels, but only one of them had checked in that day. He was due to stay a single night in one of the private villas in the grounds, and a call from Kamila to the room to inquire after his comfort had confirmed that he was there.
It was Kamila who had found him, in the eleventh hotel they had tried. Webster thanked God for making Qazai too grand to slum it even for a single night, and checked out the hotel on its Web site. It had immense gardens, and dotted around them, away from the main building, where the only moderately rich were forced to stay, was a handful of secluded villas. Qazai was in the Sultan’s Residence.
Despite their size, the hotel grounds had only one entrance. Outside, Webster and Driss sat in one Peugeot, Youssef in another, on opposite sides of the road, fifty yards away from the hotel gates, while Kamila, who had changed into a light summer suit, had lunch in the hotel lobby and waited to alert the team by phone the moment Qazai appeared.
Their vigil started at two, with the full heat of the sun pressing down on the roofs of the cars. The sky was a blue Webster hadn’t seen before, pristine and deep, set off at its edges by the spiky green of the palm trees and the sandy pink of the brick.
By three Webster had finished his small bottle of water and was growing hungry. He quizzed Driss about his plans to finish his degree and move back to Paris as a postgraduate, about life in Morocco with such an unorthodox mother, about growing up in France and moving here when he was small. About Moroccan food and French food, which was a mistake. To dull his appetite Webster smoked the cigarettes he had bought the night before.
At four, just as Driss was offering to walk to buy food, his phone rang; he answered it, listened, and hung up.
“The same car,” he said to Webster, starting his engine as the Mercedes pulled across one lane of traffic and drove away toward the center of the city. Driss followed at a distance, Youssef and Kamila twenty yards behind him.
After no more than a mile, at the entrance to the medina, where the streets narrowed to an arm span, the car stopped and Qazai got out. Webster turned his face away as Driss drove past and parked the car on the verge of road beyond some trees.
“We could follow in this,” he said. “But not for long.”
A moment later Kamila drew up in front of them and got out of her car. Through the back windscreen Webster saw Qazai look around him, a perfunctory check, and then move quickly through the broad gate into the old city. He was carrying a thin leather briefcase, and was alone.
Webster opened his door and was starting for the gate when he felt Kamila’s hand on his arm.
“I go first. Keep as far behind me as you can. It’s not easy in there.” She set off with a quick walk.
Since his early morning walk the medina had filled with people, and as he walked through the gate he had to look hard to catch sight of Qazai, who was some twenty-five yards ahead trying to pass a slow-moving group of tourists. In among their khaki slacks and white sun hats Qazai looked elegant, patrician, aloof. An old man on a skinny old scooter snaked between them.
Qazai seemed to know where he was going—though how, Webster was at a loss to understand. Had he not had Kamila in his sights the whole time, he would have lost his bearings immediately: there were no landmarks. Some of the alleyways were so narrow that the only constant in view was the sky above, at its highest point still a fine cornflower blue, and the walls of the buildings all ran together in a continuous band of color, from rosy ochre to sandstone with now and then a clean block of white or blue as relief. Shops occupied the broader streets: tin buckets of yellow saffron and luminous red paprika set out on the ground, pastel gowns hanging from awnings, endless rows of pointed shoes, rugs strung across great expanses of wall in rough imitation of Qazai’s house in London, and in the odd space in between a heavy studded door that opened into the private world of the city.
They were in quieter, closer passages now and Qazai was making a turn every ten yards; there were no crowds to hide behind and Webster, trying to keep only Kamila in view, was finding it harder and harder to stay in touch with her and at the same time keep out of sight. Shade now covered the ground, the buildings seemed taller, and he had the sense of going slowly down into ever darker, tighter circles. The walls around him were the color of redwood and the air thick and still.
He rounded one corner to find Kamila, all of six feet away, peering cautiously around another, her palm up behind her to tell him to stop. He stood as still as he could, hearing his own breathing in the silence. She continued to watch, her body tensed, and then, satisfied that she had seen enough, turned and pressed her back to the wall.
“He stopped at a house about five meters down there.” She was whispering. “Knocked once, quietly. Then again. He’s just gone in.”
“What happens now?”
“Wait here.”
She disappeared around the corner, and was gone for a minute.
“OK,” she said. “It could be worse. There’s one man on the door. When they come out they either have to come back around here, or the other way into a long alley with only one turning off it. Three people can cover it. You can’t. Not like that.”
She took her phone from her handbag, dialed, said a few words in French and hung up.
“They’ll be with us in ten minutes. You shouldn’t wait here. Go back the way we came: left, second right, left again. On your right you will see an entrance to a courtyard. A doorway. Hide in there.”
Webster did as he was told, repeating her instructions as he went. He was feeling highly visible and not a little redundant, and found himself imagining what George Black and his people would have made of all this. Most of the time surveillance was carried out in a car on the wide streets of expansive cities, where it was possible to believe that it was a serious discipline; here it resembled nothing so much as a child’s game, a scrappy version of hide and seek.
Hidden, then, he smoked a cigarette, breathing in the smell of raisins in the pack before he took one out and lit it. The smoke drifted around the courtyard, which was calm and clear of people and clutter, and from which three doors led into houses whose windows were all shuttered. When he arrived he could feel his heart beating in his throat, but it soon slowed, and for a time he felt strangely peaceful.
It was Driss who came to get him. He had a bag over his shoulder, and from it pulled a large piece of maroon fabric which he handed to Webster.
“Put this on. Over your clothes.”
As Webster unfolded it he saw it was a robe, with a pointed hood. A djellaba, like Kamila’s. The fabric was coarse in his hands.