The Moroccan Girl Read online

  Almost immediately there were copycat attacks. Dozens of politicians and right-wing figures around the world came under threat. My favorite was done by the refugee in Amsterdam. The kitchen porter. A Muslim from Iraq who had been washing dishes in a restaurant so that he could feed his wife and baby daughter. He was no older than twenty-five or twenty-six. Samir. I’ve forgotten his surname. [JWS: Samir Rabou] He learned that Piet Boutmy, the leader of the Dutch far-right party—again, I don’t remember the name of this party [JWS: Partij voor de Vrijheid]—was eating in the restaurant. A waiter, a Syrian, I believe, came into the kitchen and told him Boutmy was there. Samir knew about the kidnapping of Euclidis, he told the police who later interviewed him that he had followed Resurrection from its very first statements and that he greatly admired Ivan Simakov. He took off his washing gloves, kept his apron, walked out of the kitchen and went directly into the restaurant. The security guard protecting Boutmy thought he was a waiter. The table was covered in many dishes, including—perfectly!—a soup prepared with beetroots which was still very hot. Also bottles of water, glasses of red wine, cutlery, a vase of flowers. Shouting “Resurrection!” Samir lifted the whole table on top of this racist animal, soaking him to the bone, also the colleague from the same party who was dining with him. I heard that he faced no charges and soon found another job at a rival restaurant. It was beautiful.

  Everything that Ivan and myself had hoped for came to pass. Ivan was worried that the Resurrection movement would burn out. It did not. He wrote that he wanted Resurrection to have “a seismic effect on public attitudes to the liars and enablers of the alt-right.” This is exactly what happened. The summer homes of criminal bankers were burned to the ground. Cars belonging to producers at Fox News were vandalized and damaged. Those who had attended white supremacist rallies were identified by their peers and targeted for retribution. They paid the price for their hate with the loss of their careers, their friends. All it took was one or two examples for everyone to follow suit.

  But, of course, Resurrection changed. What started as a non-violent movement, symbolic acts targeted against deserving victims, quickly became violent. I was naïve to believe that this would not happen, but what distressed me was Ivan’s willingness to change his position, not only toward nonviolence, but also concerning his own role as a figurehead. He wanted the limelight. He craved adulation. I had not identified these characteristics in him when we first met. His vanity, his stubbornness, his readiness to lose sight of what Resurrection was about and instead to place himself at the heart of what became a hijacked, paramilitary organization. It became impossible to live with him. I could no longer do useful work. I lost my respect for Ivan Simakov and I left him. That is when they began to hunt me down.

  9

  Carradine reached his room and switched on the television.

  Every major news network was carrying the story. The police believed the murder had been carried out by the same members of Resurrection who had kidnapped Redmond five days earlier. Tributes were being paid by friends and colleagues, inevitable expressions of outrage articulated by politicians, fellow journalists and friends.

  Carradine muted the television. He sat on the bed and felt a hollowness inside him close to a feeling of personal responsibility in the death of an innocent woman. Had he done more to help, had he found the courage to cross the street and to confront Redmond’s kidnappers, she might still be alive. He thought of the girl who had been standing beside him, chatting away to her friend. So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like, he needs to get his shit together because I’m, like, just not going through with that bullshit again. Where was she now? How would she react to news of this kind? Would she share Carradine’s remorse or experience nothing but a momentary, fleeting anxiety that Resurrection had again resorted to murder? Would she even be aware that Redmond had been killed?

  He went to the window and looked down at the vast city. Low whitewashed buildings stretched in a broad semicircle to the Atlantic coast. At the sea’s edge the vast Hassan II Mosque dominated the skyline; to the northwest, the cranes and wharves of the port were blocks of shadow partly obscured by a high-rise hotel. Carradine had detested Redmond. He had abhorred her character and public style. She had weaved deliberate ignorance into casual prejudice with the sole purpose of inciting outrage, hysteria and fear. She had craved the spotlight of notoriety. In the wake of an Islamist suicide bombing on the streets of London, she had called for “internment” for male Muslims under the age of forty. Handed a column in a tabloid newspaper with which to disseminate her toxic views, she had advocated the use of naval warships to prevent refugees—many of them fleeing the horrors of Syria and Yemen—from crossing the Mediterranean. When her rhetoric became too vile even for the leather-skinned editors of the Fourth Estate, Redmond merely had to look across the Pond to find any number of right-wing media outlets in the United States eager to beam her prejudices into the homes of the ignorant and the dispossessed. Indeed, Redmond had been only days from moving to the United States to work for Fox News when she had been seized by Resurrection. Carradine knew that if he opened Twitter, or switched to Fox itself, he would be swamped in partisan bile and hate. For every person shocked by Redmond’s murder there would be another openly celebrating; for every person applauding Resurrection for taking the fight to the goons and trolls of the alt-right, there would be another—like Carradine himself—who knew that violence only made the situation far worse.

  He turned from the window and began to unpack. The sealed envelope was at the top of his suitcase. He took it out and placed it on the bed. To try to clear his head he did fifty press-ups, took a shower and changed into a fresh set of clothes. Whatever was in the package, he knew that he could now be incriminating himself by passing documents to a suspected member of a terrorist organization. The Redmond murder had changed the game. He had been transformed—without prior agreement—into a foot soldier in the global struggle against Resurrection. To hell with the Service; Carradine needed to do what he had to do. He picked up the package and felt it in his hands. He could make out the edges of the passport, the outline of the document.

  He hesitated momentarily—then cut at the Sellotape using the knife on a bottle opener from the minibar. He reached inside the package.

  It was a British passport, just as Mantis had said it would be. Carradine opened it to the back. A photograph of Bartok, identical to the one he was carrying in his wallet, looked out at him from the identity page. Bartok was identified as “Maria Consuela Rodriguez,” a British citizen, born 8 June 1983. A Santander credit card fell out of the passport and dropped onto the floor. The name MS. M RODRIGUEZ was stamped across the bottom. The back of the card was unsigned.

  Carradine reached into the package and pulled out a smaller rectangular envelope. The envelope was sealed. No name or address had been written on it, only the word LASZLO in block capitals. This time he did not bother using the knife. He tore the envelope open with his hands.

  Inside was a single piece of white A4 paper, folded twice. The letter was typed.

  IF THIS MESSAGE FINDS YOU IT IS A MIRACLE. TRUST THE PERSON WHO GIVES IT TO YOU.

  YOU ARE NOT SAFE. THEY HAVE WORKED OUT WHERE YOU ARE. IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THEY FIND YOU.

  I CANNOT HELP YOU EXCEPT BY GIVING YOU THESE GIFTS. USE THEM WISELY. THE NUMBER IS 0812.

  I AM THE MAN WHO TOOK YOU TO THE SEA.

  10

  Carradine read the message several times trying to decipher what was behind Mantis’s language. He assumed that 0812 was the PIN number for the credit card though he doubted that Bartok, should he ever find her, would risk using it more than once; to do so would be to pinpoint her location to anyone tracking the account. “The man who took you to the sea” sounded romantic, but Carradine was wary of leaping to that conclusion without stronger evidence. Yet the tone of the letter was unquestionably personal. Mantis seemed to be distancing himself from the Service in order t
o send the warning. Who were “THEY”? The Service? The Agency? The Russians? Almost every law enforcement and intelligence service in the world was hunting Resurrection activists; all of them would have liked to get their hands on Lara Bartok. The only section that seemed unequivocal to him was the opening paragraph, which reinforced the idea that Mantis had employed Carradine in good faith and had been honest about the difficulty of finding “LASZLO.”

  There was a safe in his room. Carradine asked for some Sellotape to be sent up from reception. He sealed the letter, the credit card and the passport back inside the package and put it in the safe. Just as he was finishing he heard his phone ping. Mantis had finally replied.

  Glad you’ve arrived safely. Meeting is at the Four Seasons later this evening. Let me know how it goes.

  Carradine understood that he was to go to the Four Seasons and to leave the money for “Abdullah Aziz” at the reception desk. It was a simple enough task, yet he was apprehensive. He took the €2,000 from his satchel, adding a thousand more from his wallet, and wrote Aziz’s name on the envelope.

  He looked at the map of Casablanca. The Four Seasons was on the eastern side of the city, close to a cluster of bars and restaurants on the Corniche. It was too far to walk but Carradine set out on foot, intending to catch a taxi en route. He took nothing with him except his wallet, his phone and the envelope containing the money. He was wearing a dark blue linen jacket and walked with both the wallet and the envelope buttoned into the inside pockets. It was still very hot but he did not want to have to take the jacket off and run the risk of it being snatched by an opportunistic thief.

  He quickly found himself in a maze of narrow, dilapidated streets in the old medina to the west of the port. This was Morocco as he had imagined it: low brick houses painted in blocks of pale greens, blues and yellows with shuttered windows and crumbling plasterwork. He took out his phone and began to take photographs in the fading evening light, the writer in him aware that the details of what he saw—the wooden carts laden with fresh fruits and spices; the old women fanning themselves in shaded doorways; the raggedy children kicking a football in the street—might one day be useful to him. At the same time he was working his cover. On the small chance that he was being followed, C. K. Carradine had carte blanche to snoop around, to be seen taking photographs and scribbling notes, to loiter in the lobbies of five-star hotels or to meet a contact in a fashionable restaurant. If asked to explain why he was carrying €3,000 in cash, he could say that he did not fully trust the safe in his hotel and preferred to carry his personal belongings with him. His legend was foolproof. This was, after all, why Mantis had hired him.

  Carradine was lining up a photograph of a rusting truck laden with watermelons when he saw a WhatsApp message from Mantis drop down onto the screen.

  Change of plan. Meeting at Sheraton, not 4 Seasons. Sorry for inconvenience.

  He wondered if he was the victim of an elaborate practical joke. Ramón was staying at the Sheraton. Was the Spaniard Mantis’s contact? Carradine hoped that the location was a bizarre coincidence, a consequence of the meager number of top-class hotels in Casablanca, but could not shake off a sixth sense that Ramón and Mantis were somehow involved with each other. Perhaps Mantis had arranged for them to catch the same flight so that Ramón could keep an eye on him? It was impossible to know.

  Carradine looked along the street. He was standing at the edge of a busy market square, a smell of mint and burning charcoal on the air. The narrow switchback streets of the old city had spun him around; he had no idea if he was facing north, south, east or west. He used his phone to pinpoint his position and began to walk in the general direction of the Sheraton, eventually finding an exit from the souk through the old walls of the Medina. Twenty minutes later Carradine was standing on the steps of the hotel. It was just before eight o’clock. A bored, uniformed guard indicated that he should pass through a metal detector. Carradine did so. Despite the fact that an alarm sounded as he walked through, the guard—who was wearing gloves and holding a plastic security wand—waved him on.

  The lobby of the hotel was a vast marble atrium dominated by palm trees and wide marble columns. A mezzanine balcony overlooked the ground floor. A cleaning woman was polishing a vase near a window on the street side of the hotel. Carradine was aware that Ramón might be nursing a preprandial mojito or cup of coffee in one of the nooks and crannies of the lobby. He did not want to be spotted by the Spaniard and engaged in conversation. He did not trust him and was sure that Ramón’s ebullient good cheer was a front disguising a volatile, possibly even violent personality. It occurred to him that he was now involved in precisely the sort of scenario he had written about many times in his fiction. The spy—amateur or otherwise—was always at risk of running into a friend or acquaintance in the field. Carradine quickly prepared a cover story, on the off chance that he was identified, and walked toward the reception desk.

  Had he dramatized the scene in one of his novels, he would have made more of the sense of trepidation his protagonist felt as he set about completing his first mission on behalf of the Service. In reality, Carradine found the task almost embarrassingly easy. He approached the youngest—and therefore potentially the least experienced—of three female members of staff, smiled at her warmly, explained that he wanted to leave a package for one of the hotel guests and handed her the envelope. The receptionist recognized “Abdullah Aziz” as the name of a guest, placed the envelope in a pigeonhole beneath the desk and did not ask Carradine for his name. At no point did he spot Ramón, nor any individual who might conceivably have been the waiting Aziz. It was all very straightforward.

  Within ten minutes Carradine was back on the tenth floor of his hotel, basking in the cool of the air-conditioning, sending a message to Mantis informing him that “the meeting had been a success.” A short time later Mantis responded, telling Carradine that “everybody was happy with the way things went.” Despite completing the task successfully, Carradine experienced an unexpected stab of disappointment and irritation that he had not been tested more thoroughly. Perhaps it was the nagging sense that all was not quite as it seemed. He did not fully trust Mantis. He was profoundly suspicious of Ramón. Having read the note inside the package, he was concerned that there was a plot to kidnap Lara Bartok, perhaps even to kill her. If that was the case, was he being used as an unwitting pawn?

  He took a second shower, went down to the bar, ordered a vodka martini and tried to convince himself that his doubts were just the flights of fancy of a novelist with an overactive imagination. A man sitting two stools away was wearing an aftershave so overpowering that it began to affect the taste of the martini. Carradine ordered a second, carrying it to a table a safe distance from the bar. As he walked across the lounge, a vodka martini in one hand, a packet of cigarettes in the other, he realized that he was casting himself as the central character in a spy story no different to the ones he had written in the pages of his books or seen a hundred times at the movies.

  He sat down and tried to work out the link between Mantis, Ramón and Bartok. Carradine acknowledged that he was a need-to-know support agent, not a fully-fledged spy cognizant of all the intelligence about “LASZLO.” In this respect, Mantis was not obliged to tell him everything he knew. By the same token, the Service was under no obligation to inform Carradine that Ramón had been sent to keep an eye on him. Besides, there was every reason to believe that Ramón was just an overly friendly passenger Carradine just happened to have bumped into on the plane. He had been shown no evidence to suggest that Ramón was “Abdullah Aziz,” nor was it credible that Mantis would have wanted him to pay Ramón for his services. The only thing that Carradine knew for certain was that Bartok was on the run. Mantis wanted to protect her, for reasons that were not yet clear, but had not been in a position to leave London in order to do so. As a result, he had hired Carradine to assist in the search for her.

  Carradine stared at the pitted olive at the bottom of the glass. None of it mad
e sense. The vodka had blunted, not sharpened his wits. He had been active as a support agent for less than twenty-four hours and already felt lost in the wilderness of mirrors.

  He settled the bill and walked outside. There was a taxi idling in front of the hotel. Carradine climbed in and asked to be taken to the Corniche. He offered a cigarette to the driver who placed it, unlit, in a recess behind the gearstick. Sated by alcohol, Carradine sat in the backseat texting his father, trying to forget about his responsibilities to the Service and to set aside his doubts about Mantis and Ramón. He enjoyed the sepia light of the Moroccan evening and the movement of the taxi as it weaved from street to street. He wanted to convince himself that there was no deeper meaning to the information he had gleaned from the letter, no dark conspiracy playing out on the streets of Casablanca. But it was impossible. He knew, in the way that you know that a friendship is doomed or a love affair coming to an end, that something was not quite right. He was sure that he was being manipulated. He was certain that he had been sent to Morocco for a purpose that had not yet been made clear to him. The chances of finding Bartok were so remote that the words of warning contained in Mantis’s letter—“IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THEY FIND YOU”—seemed to Carradine as vague and yet as terrifying as lines from a work of fiction. So why had he been handed such a task?

  The taxi stopped at a set of lights. An elderly beggar came to the window, pressing his face against the glass. The driver swore in Arabic as the beggar knocked on the window, imploring Carradine to give him money. He dug around in his trouser pocket for some loose change and was about to roll down the window and pass the money to the beggar when the taxi accelerated down the street.