The Man Between Page 6

  ‘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.’

  8

  They kept her in the van for the first thirty-six hours. She screamed when they took off the gag, so they put it on again and left her to rage. They offered her water and food, but she refused it. She soiled herself. When she had spent all of her energy, Redmond wept.

  Towards the end of the second day they took her from the van, still blindfolded, and tied her to a chair in the basement of the farmhouse. They played the recording into the room. A loop of Redmond’s words, repeated over and over again. A torture of her own making. The bearded man called it ‘The Two Minutes of Hate’, after Orwell, but the recording lasted for more than twelve hours.

  The immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean are the same insects already swarming over Europe. They choke our schools and hospitals. They dirty our towns and cities. They murder our daughters at rock concerts. They mow down our sons on the streets.

  It went on and on into the night. Whenever Redmond looked as though she was falling asleep, they turned up the volume. She was prevented from sleeping by the words she had written. ‘Sentenced by your own sentences,’ said the man who had knocked down her husband.

  The only answer is to lock up every young Muslim man or woman whose name appears on a terrorist watchlist. How else to protect British citizens from slaughter? If we cannot take the sensible precaution, outlined by the government of the United States, of preventing potential terrorists from entering the United Kingdom from countries that are known sponsors of Islamist terror, then this is the only option remaining to us.

  On the morning of the third day they removed Redmond’s gag and again offered her food and water. This time she accepted. The bearded man asked her, on camera, if she wished to defend her words and actions. She said that she stood by everything she had written. She insisted that, given the chance, she would write and broadcast everything again. She had no regrets for exercising her right to free speech and for articulating views held by millions of people in the West who were too cowed by political correctness to speak their minds.

  The bearded man was standing behind her as she spoke. He lifted her hair clear of her shoulders, held it in a fist above her head, and sliced her throat with a knife. Redmond’s body was dumped at a stretch of waste ground on the outskirts of Coventry. A photograph of her corpse was sent to the editor of the British newspaper who had commissioned her column.

  Somerville switched off the recorder.

  ‘What are your feelings about what happened to Lisa Redmond?’ he said.

  Bartok shrugged.

  ‘I do not know enough about it.’ She stood up and stretched her back, twisting one way, then the other. ‘I know that Kit was upset. He talked about it a lot. I think it haunted him.’

  ‘What about you?’ the American asked. His tone was supercilious. ‘Were you upset by it? Were you haunted, Lara?’

  Bartok picked up one of the biscuits. She turned it over in her fingers. She liked Somerville. She trusted him. She did not like or trust the American.

  ‘As I have said. I did not know Redmond’s writing. I did not have the opportunity to listen to her radio broadcasts wherever I was hiding in the world. She sounded like somebody who we might have gone after.’


  The American seized on this, closing the space between them.

  ‘We?’

  ‘Resurrection.’ Bartok looked at Somerville as if to suggest that the American was starting to annoy her. ‘In the old days. Before the violence and the killing. She was the sort of figure Ivan would have looked at. Redmond, and those like her, men like Otis Euclidis, they gave encouragement to the bigots, to the ignorant. Ivan wanted to teach them a lesson. We all did.’ She bit into the biscuit. It was dry. She could only swallow by taking a sip of water to wash it down. ‘When I see what has happened to Resurrection, I feel nothing but sadness. It began as something remarkable. It began as a phenomenon. Ivan had a conception of a new kind of revolutionary movement, one which harnessed the power of the Internet and social media, one which was fuelled by international outrage among young and old alike. He wanted to take that revolutionary movement out onto the streets, to fight back against those who had corrupted our societies. He knew that Resurrection would catch fire with people, inspire groups and individuals, oblige the masses to mount operations of their own – however small, however apparently insignificant – so that bit by bit and step by step, democracy and fairness would be restored. But all of the hope and the beauty of those ideas, the purity of the early attacks, has been lost.’

  Somerville reached for the recorder. They needed to get the whole story out of Bartok. There was no point letting her talk during the breaks if nobody was keeping a record.

  ‘Would you like to go back to those early months?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course, whatever you want,’ she said.

  ‘Please. Tell us how it all got started.’

  SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE EYES ONLY / STRAP 1

  STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (‘LASZLO’)

  CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H – CHAPEL STREET

  REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE

  FILE: RE2768X

  PART 2 of 5

  ‘Euclidis was our first target. That was the first and most brilliant idea of Ivan’s, to capture this snake, this poison in the bloodstream of public life, and to show the world that decent people were prepared to stand up to hate, to put an end to divisive words, to expose Euclidis for the narcissist that he was. For all his expensive clothes and his clever talk, we showed the world that he was just a self-interested clown. He blogged to make money. He spread lies to get rich. To get laid. He was not interested in changing the system, in making the world a better place. He and his friends – the alt-right, the white supremacists, the anti-Semites, the Holocaust deniers – they had no alternative ideology. They had no ideas. They just wanted to draw attention to themselves. They wanted to make decent citizens feel uncomfortable and frightened. That was their reason for living. They were bullies, high on hate.