Games Traitors Play

10

Marchant had to call London, tell them what he’d seen, but his mobile phone had no signal. Satisfied that the helicopter had been operating on its own, he broke cover and ran back down the path to the motorbike, stumbling and falling as he went. The mountains were quiet now, the Berber goatherds stunned into silence by whatever had just happened. He started up the engine and headed back down the track to the main road and on towards Marrakech.

He couldn’t decide if it was safer to dump the bike and get back to his apartment before he called Fielding, or to ring as soon as he was in range. His mobile phone was encrypted, but the events he had just witnessed made him nervous of talking in the open. The sight of the man being shot had heightened his senses, stirred a primitive survival instinct.

He also felt an irrational sense of loss. He had never met the man, but they had been joined in some way, had listened to the same story in the square, ridden the same route out of town, first on Mobylettes then on more powerful machines. It could have been him in the line of fire. All he wanted to do now was get as far away as possible from the mountains, and the haunting Berber goatherds’ calls that had warned of danger.

It was as he throttled back the engine that he began to rethink his plans. A line of single headlights had appeared a thousand yards ahead, coming up the straight road towards him, fanned across both lanes. He knew at once that it was the group of British bikers, one of whose machines he had stolen. Should he stop, try to explain? They had clearly seen him at the petrol station, and would immediately identify the bike as theirs. It was out of the question. He could never play his employer’s card. It was a last resort, reserved for tight spots with foreign governments. He would have been allowed to tell his immediate family who he worked for, too, except that he didn’t have any. Not any more. Not unless he counted Dhar.

His priority was to get a message to Fielding, tell him he had been right, that someone had taken Dhar away by helicopter. He was convinced that the halaka had relayed a message to Dhar, tried to warn him of a Roc bird rising into the sky. It would explain the recent increased level of chatter about Dhar in the souks. But had time run out? Had the warning come too late?

There was only one option. It had been a few years since he had ridden a motorbike at speed, but he had felt comfortable on the journey out of Marrakech. In his first months at Legoland in Vauxhall, working as a junior reports officer, a few of the new recruits used to take bikes out for test rides at lunchtime. There was a motorcycle dealer opposite the main entrance to Legoland, and the staff there were always obliging — one eye on a government contract, perhaps — without ever acknowledging which building Marchant and his colleagues left and entered each day. Marchant would sometimes play it up, hinting that he lived life in the international fast lane, when the truth of his head-office existence was much more mundane. That was one of the reasons he wanted to stay in Morocco.

He watched the needle move across the dial and adjusted his position in the saddle, wishing he was wearing a helmet. If he approached the bikers fast enough, he reckoned they wouldn’t hold the line. Five hundred yards from them, he turned off his headlight and took the machine up to 90 mph, riding in darkness, his face cooling in the night wind. Not for the first time in his life, he felt liberated rather than scared as death drew near, sensing as he had done before in such moments that he was closer to those he had lost: his father, his brother.

Still the bikers were fanned across the road, no gaps between them. An image of the London Marathon came and went: the police roadblock, trying to find a way through. Then, as the needle nudged passed a hundred, a gap started to appear at one end of the line, in the opposite lane. He headed for it, feeling the surface change beneath him as he crossed the middle of the road. For a moment he thought he had lost control, but the BMW handled well and he accelerated again, touching 110 mph. Fifty yards from the line, all the bikes began to peel away, and then he was through them, the sound of their anger fading in his ears.

He liked the bike, but he didn’t want to steal it. Turning the headlight back on, he glanced in the mirror and saw that no one had decided to give chase. A madman had clearly stolen their bike, and he would be dead quicker than they could catch him. When he looked ahead again, he saw the oncoming lorry’s headlights, but there was no time to think. Instinctively, he swerved inside the vehicle and was almost thrown by the draft as it passed him, horn blaring in the darkness.

He moved back onto the correct side of the road. The petrol station where he had picked up the bike was shut, but he parked it there, flashing the headlight on and off once. A mile back up the road, one of the bikers broke away from the group and started to ride towards him. But Marchant was long gone by the time he had arrived, heading into the heart of Marrakech across rough ground, talking on his mobile to London.