The Moroccan Girl Read online

  “As long as you don’t mind,” he said. “I’ll just have a quick drink.”

  In the time it took Carradine to consume half a glass of cheap champagne, he worked out the dynamic between the two men. Slick and self-confident, Sebastian Hulse exuded all of the class and education that Ramón doubtless aspired to but would never conceivably attain. The American was charm personified, asking all the right questions through a mist of aftershave and expensive education. Have you been published in the United States? Did you enjoy visiting California? Does the current political situation in America look as bad on the outside as it looks from the inside? At the same time, the two women were vying for his attention. If Ramón was a wallet, Hulse was an ATM. He was solicitous toward them, generous with the flow of champagne, even suggesting to Maryam and Salma that they visit him at his home in New York. Carradine knew that it would be impossible for them to do so: even if they could afford the flights, obtaining visas for the United States would take months. In short, Hulse had ended up cramping Ramón’s style. Carradine noticed that he was wearing a wedding ring on his left hand and suspected that the American surfed from bed to bed on a bow wave of charisma and candlelit dinners. An evangelist for the easy, nodding smile, for the steely eye contact that lasted a beat too long, he was at once utterly charming and completely repulsive.

  “So how are you finding Casablanca?” he asked.

  “He loves it,” Ramón replied on Carradine’s behalf, recovering some of his characteristic bombast. “Our driver take him into the woods. Poor guy thought he was going to get fucked up.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” said Carradine, wondering if “our driver” had been a slip of the tongue. “I wasn’t worried.”

  “And?” said Hulse.

  “And what?” said Carradine.

  “What do you think of the place?”

  It was the second time Hulse had asked the same question. Either he was possessed of a talent for feigning interest in subjects that were of no importance to him, or he was suspicious of Carradine and testing his cover.

  “I like it,” he replied. “More than I expected to. I’m planning to write a book partly set in Morocco. Thought I’d end up writing about Marrakech, Fez and Tangier. Didn’t think I’d be interested in Casablanca.”

  “So why d’you come here?”

  It may have been his hangover, it may have been a consequence of seeing the photographs of Bartok on Yassine’s phone, but Carradine was beginning to feel unsettled. For an almost fatal moment, he could not think of a suitable reply.

  “For the waters,” he said, sure that Hulse would recognize Bogart’s famous line. “I was misinformed.”

  “What’s that? I don’t follow.”

  There was an awkward silence. Carradine explained himself.

  “It’s Casablanca!” he said. “I was quoting the movie. I write spy novels, political thrillers. The city is so famous. It has such an ineluctable quality.…”

  “Ineluctable,” Hulse repeated, slowly shaking his head as if to suggest that Carradine was being pretentious. “What a word. Haven’t heard that since they made me read Ulysses in college…”

  Carradine wondered if he had used it in the correct context.

  “I’m just here for two nights,” he said. “Been strolling around, taking photographs, making notes…”

  “And then I walk in here and find you having dinner with Mohammed Oubakir,” said Hulse, staring at him. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…”

  “So you have seen Casablanca!” Carradine replied, feeling his insides dissolve with anxiety.

  “Yeah. I’ve seen Casablanca. Who hasn’t?”

  Ramón weighed in.

  “What does he do, this friend of yours?”

  “Who?” Carradine replied, trying to buy time.

  “Oubakir,” Hulse answered pointedly.

  Carradine scrambled for a cover story.

  “Mohammed? He’s in the public sector. Friend of a friend. Put me in touch so I could ask him some questions about life in Morocco.”

  “Is that right?” Hulse left a pause long enough to suggest that he knew Carradine was lying. “So what exactly does he do in the public sector?”

  “What does he do?” The American was staring at him. “I’m not one hundred percent sure. Something in politics? Something in finance? Those guys speak a different language. I never know the difference between a hedge fund manager, a mutual trust and a leveraged buyout. Do you?” Hulse appeared to be enjoying the sight of Carradine digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole. “We didn’t really get into his job. We mostly talked about books. About Islamist terror. Resurrection.”

  Ramón flicked his eyes across the table. It was as if Carradine had used a code word for which he was primed to respond. “Resurrection?” he said. “What about it?”

  “Nothing,” Hulse replied. He didn’t want Ramón interrupting.

  “Nothing,” Carradine repeated, and smiled at Hulse in an effort to take some of the sting out of their exchange.

  “So you know people out here? You have contacts?” the American asked.

  “A few.” Carradine seized on the opportunity to talk about the literary festival, sketching out what he knew of the event’s history and trying to draw Hulse into a conversation about literature. It transpired that he had read a book by Katherine Paget, with whom Carradine was due to share a panel two days later. Carradine offered to arrange some free tickets if Hulse felt like making the trip to Marrakech.

  “I might just do that,” he said. “I might just do that.”

  There was a sudden flutter of activity on the other side of the table. Salma was taking a selfie with Maryam. They were adding Snapchat butterflies to their faces and giggling at the results. Carradine hit on an idea. If he could somehow get a picture of Ramón and Hulse, he could send it to Mantis and have London run a check on them. But how to do so without raising suspicion?

  “We should join them,” he said, taking out his own phone, activating the camera and looking at Hulse. Seeing that no objection was raised, Carradine reversed the lens, held the phone at arm’s length and grinned. “Say cheese.”

  To his surprise, Hulse allowed Carradine to fire off several shots while beaming a matinee idol smile at the camera. Encouraged by this, Carradine turned it on the girls and took several photographs of Ramón sitting between them.

  “Do I look nice?” Maryam asked in French.

  “You look beautiful,” Carradine replied and received a wink for his troubles. “Why does nobody want a picture of me?”

  “I want a picture of you,” Salma exclaimed, adjusting the pink jilaba as she raised her phone. A septuagenarian Moroccan businessman at the next table lit up a Cuban cigar the size of a cruise missile. The smell of the tobacco drifted across the room as Salma took a photograph of Carradine and Hulse, their glasses raised, their smiles fixed.

  “Man, isn’t it great to smell that cigar?” Ramón exclaimed. “Beautiful! What is it? A Romeo y Julieta? Montecristo? Makes me wanna smoke one. I’d risk getting cancer for that shit.”

  Nobody laughed. Carradine was busy watching Salma take the photographs. He placed an arm around Hulse’s back. There were years of gym weights in his shoulders.

  “Are we done?” the American asked, a sudden edge in his voice. “That’s enough now.”

  It was difficult to discern if the source of Hulse’s irritation was Salma’s flirtatiousness or the fact that Carradine had taken his photograph.

  “Don’t put those on social media, OK?” he said to the girls in terse, fluent French.

  “Bien sûr,” Salma replied.

  Ramón also seemed concerned by the sudden shift in Hulse’s mood. As though wary of upsetting him further, he offered the American a cigarette—which he declined—and ordered another bottle of champagne. Carradine sensed an opportunity to leave. He was strung out and wanted to get back to his hotel. Taking the photographs constituted a good night’s work.
>
  “Don’t get any for me,” he said. “I’m going to take off.”

  This time there were no objections. As Carradine stood up, Hulse placed a territorial hand on Salma’s thigh. Light bounced off his wedding ring. Taking his jacket from the back of the chair, Carradine offered to leave some money for the drinks but was waved away by Ramón.

  “Next time, man,” he said. “Get us next time. And thanks for recommending this place.”

  The memory stick was pressing into Carradine’s leg as he stepped away from the table. Thanking Ramón for his generosity, he kissed both women on the cheek and shook Hulse’s hand.

  “You got a card?” the American asked.

  It was the same question Mantis had put to him a week earlier. Carradine had been to Ryman’s and had five hundred printed up. He passed one to Hulse.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “Me?” The man from the Agency smiled at Carradine as though he was being too trusting. “Don’t have one with me tonight. Must have left them back at my hotel.”

  There was nothing for it but to leave. Carradine went downstairs, tipped the doorman fifty dirhams and made his way out onto the street.

  Boulevard d’Anfa was deserted. There was a strong smell of urine as he walked along the road. Carradine knew what would now happen. Hulse would have his phone soaked, his emails analyzed, every call and message Carradine had made and sent in the past six months cross-checked for evidence of a relationship with the Service. The basic invasion of his personal life was irritating, but whatever privacy he had once enjoyed was now a thing of the past. Carradine had nothing to fear in terms of Hulse learning about his relationship with Mantis; their communications on WhatsApp had been en clair and encrypted. Furthermore, there was nothing in his online behavior to suggest an interest in Bartok. What worried him was Oubakir. If “Yassine” was a source not only for Mantis but also for the Americans, Carradine would inevitably fall under suspicion. He felt for the memory stick, moving it into the side pocket of his jacket, wondering why the hell Mantis hadn’t warned him that he was going to have to act as a courier.

  Carradine lit a cigarette, trying to gather his thoughts. He stopped beside a branch of Starbucks about twenty meters from Blaine’s. The doorman was staring at him. A cab drove past but it was occupied. Carradine opened Uber and booked a ride in a Mercedes six minutes away on Avenue de Nice. Seconds later a taxi turned into Boulevard d’Anfa with its light on. Carradine swore and let it go past, walking farther down the street so that he was out of sight of the doorman. He checked Uber to discover that his own car was still six minutes away, the icon turning in 360-degree circles on Rue Ahfir. He was about to cancel the ride when the car straightened out and began to move. He used the time to check the photos he had taken of Ramón and Sebastian, cropping out Salma and Maryam. He sent three of them to Mantis on WhatsApp with the message: “Fun tonight at Blaine’s. Do you recognize any of these people?” but only a single gray tick appeared beside the message, indicating that it had not yet reached Mantis’s phone. Moments later the Mercedes pulled up alongside him and he rode back to his hotel.

  Carradine had been lying in the darkness of his room for more than half an hour, wired and unable to sleep, when the screen on his phone lit up, filling the room with a pale blue light. He sat up in bed.

  Mantis’s message was as straightforward as it was ominous.

  You’ve taken on too much. Thanks for tonight but don’t worry about Maria. Other people can handle that side of things. Just enjoy the festival, have a break, come home refreshed and finish your book! Interesting to meet you. All the best for the future, R.

  14

  Carradine did not know whether he should respond to Mantis’s message or even if there would be much point in doing so. It was clear that he had been fired. Sending the photographs had been a grave mistake. Either the Service now wanted to protect him because they knew he was out of his depth or, more likely, were concerned that he was about to jeopardize an operation in which Ramón and Hulse were somehow involved.

  Carradine felt an anger and humiliation as intense as any he had known in his working life. The Service had put their faith in him and he had shown himself to be a reckless amateur. He began to compose a reply asking what he should do with the memory stick and the package for Maria but knew that such a message would be pointless. As soon as he returned to London, he would most likely be picked up, taken to Mantis and asked to explain himself. The Service would want the items returned. The fact that he had already opened the package only made the situation worse.

  He was exhausted. The long night of drinking, the confusion of finding photographs of Bartok on Oubakir’s phone, as well as his subsequent encounter with Hulse and Ramón, had compounded this. Carradine opened his laptop and tried to access the contents of the memory stick, but it was encrypted and would not open. He took a sleeping pill and waited to pass out. There was nothing to be done except to leave for Marrakech, to take part in the festival and to head home. His career as a support agent, a counterpart to Maugham and Greene, and his attempt to live up to the example set by his father, had ended in ignominy.

  15

  Otis Euclidis was moved three times.

  He spent the first two months of captivity in a cabin in the Flathead National Forest, about two hundred miles north of Missoula. He was driven there by Ivan Simakov, Lara Bartok and Zack Curtis and watched by a rotating team of two Resurrection volunteers who were given responsibility for feeding him, making sure that he did not try to escape and filming him for the purposes of propaganda.

  When the Montana winter became too severe, Euclidis was driven south to an isolated house outside Round Rock, Texas, where he was kept in a soundproofed attic room for four weeks. Footage of Euclidis denouncing his political views and disparaging his followers as “clowns” and “losers” had been widely broadcast. By then, Simakov and Bartok had left him in the hands of Thomas Frattura and two married Resurrection activists who had provided the house. They quickly came to realize that Euclidis had been lying in his filmed statements and still adhered closely to the prejudices that had so enraged Resurrection. Euclidis developed a reputation among his captors for being charming and intelligent. It was obvious that he was quicker on his feet than Frattura and enjoyed puncturing what he described as his “high-minded left-liberal self-congratulation.” On several occasions, Resurrection volunteers videotaped conversations between Euclidis and Frattura which were later destroyed when Simakov concluded that Frattura had been made to look a fool.

  “How can you call yourself a feminist when you defend the right of Muslim men to wrap their wives up in black bedsheets when they walk down the street?” Frattura had been unable to frame a response. “What’s ‘modern’ about that? I’m a gay man with a black boyfriend but your precious gender and racial signifiers are so fucked up you think it’s OK to kidnap me on the street with an assault weapon and keep me in captivity for six months just because we disagree on abortion and climate change. Who’s really the dangerous person here, Thomas? You or me?”

  Frattura eventually left Euclidis in the hands of Raymond Powers, a former British civil servant with links to Momentum who had contacted Simakov on the dark net and traveled to the United States as a volunteer. Powers transported Euclidis to his Brazilian girlfriend’s rented house in suburban Indianapolis where the basement had been converted into a small, soundproofed prison with minimum ventilation. The room was too low for Euclidis to stand up in and he was chained to a radiator twenty-four hours a day.

  Approximately three weeks after Euclidis’s arrival at the house, he developed a kidney infection. Rather than risk taking him to a hospital or leaving him out on the street to be cared for by a passerby, Powers and his girlfriend, Barbara Salgado, took the decision to leave him in the basement with a supply of food and water and some antibiotics. His health deteriorating, they packed their few belongings into a GMC Yukon and drove to Indianapolis International Airport where they caugh
t a flight to London via Newark.

  A fortnight later, in the same week that Ivan Simakov was killed in Moscow, Raymond Powers was arrested by British police on charges of premeditated grievous bodily harm. He was sentenced to three years’ custody in HMP Pentonville. Salgado, who had been subjected to physical abuse throughout their relationship, recovered from her injuries and moved back to Brazil. She did not tell the British authorities about the whereabouts of Otis Euclidis. The house in Indianapolis remained empty for more than a year.

  16

  Carradine woke up at nine with a heavy head, went down to the pool, swam thirty laps and sat in the sauna thinking about Lara Bartok. He still had her photograph. He still had the Rodriguez passport and credit card. Mantis did not know that Carradine had identified her as Ivan Simakov’s estranged girlfriend. Nor did he know that he had seen photographs of Bartok on Oubakir’s phone.

  During breakfast he resolved to keep looking for her. Screw Mantis and screw his WhatsApp message. The idea became a fixation. Should Carradine find her and be able to pass her the documents given to him by the Service, Bartok would be saved and his reputation restored. He did not want to return to the mundanity of his working life, the same groundhog routine day after day, without at least putting up the semblance of a fight.

  He went back to his room and packed his bags. He took the items out of the safe, wondering why Mantis had not sent any further messages. Surely he knew about the memory stick and was expecting Carradine to deliver it? Perhaps he was taking on trust the fact that Carradine would fly home from Marrakech and hand it over. After all, what other course of action was available to him?

  He took a cab the short distance to Gare des Voyageurs. The first-class carriages were full so Carradine bought a second-class ticket, sitting on his suitcase in the shade of the platform as the passengers for Marrakech began to crowd around him. He was one of only half a dozen foreigners in the station. Two French girls in their twenties were taking giggling selfies a few feet from where he was seated. A Spanish couple, closer to his own age, were waiting on the southern side of the platform, both engrossed in books. At the opposite end, where Carradine expected the first-class carriages to pull in, an elderly man in a Panama hat was engaged in conversation with a member of the station staff. Carradine picked at the idea that he was a British or American official sent to watch him, but knew from his understanding of overseas surveillance operations that locals would have been hired for such a job. On that basis, he had no chance of knowing whether or not he was being tailed. With another fifteen minutes before the train was due to arrive, there were already at least seventy Moroccans on the platform, any one of whom could be keeping an eye on him.