Games Traitors Play

14

Lakshmi Meena didn’t know what to expect as her car pulled up short of the police cordon on the side of the mountain. She parked beside two army lorries and a Jeep and stepped out into the cool night, pulling a scarf over her head. The area beyond the cordon was swarming with uniformed men, one of whom Meena recognised as Dr Abdul Aziz, a senior intelligence officer from Rabat who had left a message on her cell phone half an hour earlier. She had been leaving the bar anglais at the time, wondering what she had said to so upset Marchant. She didn’t like Aziz, disapproved of his methods, his unctuous manner, but he had been the first person on her list of people to meet when she had arrived in Morocco.

Two floodlights had been rigged up on stands, illuminating a patch of rugged terrain where a handful of personnel in forensic boilersuits were searching the ground. Meena talked to a policeman on the edge of the cordon, nodding in the direction of Aziz, who saw her and came over.

‘I got your message,’ she said.

‘Lakshmi, our goddess of wealth,’ Aziz said, smiling. ‘Morocco needs your help.’ He lit a local cigarette as he steered her away from the lights, his hand hovering above her shoulders.

Meena was always surprised by Aziz’s displays of warmth and charm, so at odds with his professional reputation. He had run a black site in Morocco in the aftermath of 9/11, interviewing a steady stream of America’s enemy combatants on behalf of James Spiro, who had dubbed him the Dentist. It was before Meena’s time in the Agency, but she knew enough about Aziz to show respect to a man whose interrogation techniques made the tooth-extractors in Djemaâ el Fna look humane. And Meena hated herself for it, the cheap expedience of her chosen profession.

‘What happened here?’ she asked. ‘The Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group? Last I heard, you had them on the back foot.’

Aziz laughed. His teeth were a brilliant white. ‘Since when did they fly Mi-8s?’

‘Who said anything about helicopters?’

‘The Berbers.’ Aziz nodded to a group of goatherds sitting on the ground in a circle, smoking, djellaba hoods up.

‘Oh really?’

‘Our national airspace was violated tonight, and we’d like to know who by.’

‘Forgive me, but isn’t that what your air force is for?’

‘The country’s radar defences were knocked out. It was a sophisticated system. At least that’s what your sales people told us when we bought it from America last year. Our Algerian brothers don’t have the ability to do that.’

‘Not many people do.’

‘The Berbers are saying the helicopter was white.’

‘Any markings?’

‘None.’

Meena had been down in Darfur the previous year, and had seen the same trick pulled with a white Antonov used for a military raid. But the Sudanese government had gone one step further, painting it in UN markings.

She looked at Aziz, who was lost in thought, drawing hard on his cigarette. She remembered the cocktail party in Rabat when he had enquired about her health. A month earlier, she had checked in to hospital for a small operation, something she had kept from even her closest colleagues. Perhaps his question had been a coincidence, but it had disquieted her.

‘Is that why you called me?’

‘There’s something else. An Englishman was seen heading up here this evening.’

Aziz handed Meena a grainy photograph taken from a CCTV camera. It was of the gas-station forecourt on the road out of Marrakech. Someone who could have been Daniel Marchant was in the foreground, arriving on a moped. The date and time was wrong, but otherwise Meena thought the image looked authentic. It was too much of a coincidence, an odd place to be heading on a bike. Marchant had gone off-piste, and Meena should have known about it. No wonder he had left the bar early. He hadn’t been honest with her.

‘Marchant’s booked on the first flight to London tomorrow,’ Aziz said.

‘I know.’ Meena looked at him. Neither of them wanted to say anything, but each knew the other was thinking the same. The only reason Marchant would have gone to the mountains was if it had something to do with Salim Dhar. And Dhar was meant to be dead.

‘What do you think he was up to?’ Aziz asked.

‘I thought you were watching him.’

‘Both our jobs might be on the line, Lakshmi. Please tell me if you want Marchant delayed.’

Aziz smiled, his teeth glinting in the beam of a passing flashlight.