Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

Chapter 16

Sammi was relieved to finally step off the plane at Marrakesh’s Menara International Airport. She was grateful that Michael had put the plane at her disposal; she only wished she could have gotten in sooner. Enough time had passed that she feared she may have lost Gabriel’s trail for good.

Her instructions from Michael were to meet Reza Arif at baggage claim. She had little idea what he looked like, since Michael had given her only a cursory description; and she assumed he’d given a similarly cursory description of her to Arif. Which left her wandering back and forth along the luggage retrieval claim belts, staring questioningly at the solitary men she passed and seeing no sign of recognition from any of them. She was on her fourth pass when she heard a male voice behind her.

“Mademoiselle Ficatier?”

She turned to see a handsome man in his midforties with black hair and a black beard, neatly trimmed. He wore dark sunglasses, and was dressed in well-tailored clothing, a crisp bespoke suit with a crimson triangle of handkerchief showing at his breast pocket. For all that he seemed to be attempting to convey class and sophistication, though, Sammi was instantly struck with a different impression, one of menace. It was something in his eyes, the way he held himself. This was a dangerous man. She was confident she would have thought so even if Michael hadn’t warned her about him.

“Yes?”

“I am Reza Arif. I am most pleased to make your acquaintance.” He bowed slightly and extended his hand. “You must call me Reza.”

“Sammi.” She took the man’s hand and shook it briefly. He clung to her fingers for an instant before letting her go.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “Do you want something to eat or drink?”

“No, thanks. I had something in Cairo.”

“Ah, yes. Fine food in Cairo. Not as fine as we have here, but . . . if you are not hungry, you are not hungry. No luggage?” She held up her carry-on, the small gym bag she’d brought along with her from Nice. He offered to take it from her, but she shook her head. “All right. Follow me please.”

He led her to the parking garage, took out a key fob and pressed a button. A black BMW X6 beeped and flashed its lights.

He removed the sunglasses in the car. His eyes were dark, nicely setting off his swarthy skin. He might be dangerous, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t attractive. “It is not much of a disguise,” he said as he put the glasses away, “but it is sufficient for the baggage claim at the airport.” He didn’t speak again until they were on the highway headed for the city. “I have been looking into this Alliance of the Pharaohs that our mutual friend mentioned.”

“And?”

“It is a very difficult organization about which to uncover any information. I have many contacts in the so-called underworld, and I spent most of last night trying to get one of them to tell me something—anything—about this Alliance. I had very little luck. On the other hand, it has only been one night. Perhaps I will find something yet.”

“Nobody knew anything?”

“The only piece of useful intelligence I obtained so far is that the Alliance is believed to use carpet vendors as a front—here, in Cairo, and elsewhere. Their headquarters is allegedly near the Djemaa el Fna—have you ever been . . . ?”

“I’ve never been to Marrakesh.”

“Ah, such a pity. I only wish you had come sometime when you had less on your mind. It is a beautiful city, and you are a beautiful woman.”

Sammi said nothing. No point in encouraging him—but she also didn’t want to make an enemy of him.

“I would have enjoyed giving you the grand tour. Alas, I can no longer enjoy it as I once did myself. I must remain . . . unnoticed.”

“Why?”

“Surely our friend told you.”

“Told me what?”

He shrugged expressively, his hands briefly lifting off the steering wheel. “I am supposed to be an international criminal. At least that is what I have been branded.” He looked over at her and grinned. “Do not worry,” he said. “I am not the villain they make me out to be. It is what you would call ‘guilt by association.’ I think that is the correct term. I happen to know many criminals. I have done business with them. That does not necessarily make me one, does it?”

“Not necessarily,” Sammi said. “Are you one?”

He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “The truth is beside the point. They would gladly imprison me if they caught me, so whatever I am or am not, I must live as if I were a criminal. I make my home in the mountains now.” He pointed toward the horizon. Sammi could see the ruddy silhouette of the range in the distance. “It is a simple life. I have no complaints.”

“Is it dangerous for you to come into Marrakesh?”

“Only if I am recognized by a policeman.” He laughed. “Don’t worry. I visit the city all the time. I just have to be careful.”

Sammi couldn’t see how driving a car this conspicuous and dressing in an outfit that was the car’s sartorial equivalent counted as being careful. But he apparently knew what he was doing. She didn’t see any police cars in the rearview mirror.

Perhaps, she thought, he paid them off, splitting with them the bounty from the Hunt Foundation.

“We will go to the Djemaa el Fna,” Arif said, “and together we shall visit each carpet store. Of course, searching every carpet store in Marrakesh is a bit like searching every boîte and café in your country. A daunting task, eh? But perhaps we will be lucky and find the right one before our friend’s siblings come to a bad end.”

And he smiled at her, in a way that was clearly meant to be reassuring. Instead, it left her with the distinct sense that this man had something up his handsomely tailored sleeve.

But she needed his help.

“Sounds like a plan,” Sammi said,

The truck took the better part of a half hour to get out of Marrakesh. As the road became rougher, the trailer rattled and bounced with increasing vigor, troubling the goats into louder and more nearly continuous bleating.

“How much longer do you think?” Lucy asked, keeping her voice low.

Gabriel looked out between the slats. “We’re in the desert,” he reported. “Nothing for miles. We’re not stopping anytime soon.”

“What do you say we get out,” Lucy said. “Just kick open the doors and jump. Every goat for himself.”

“Not here,” Gabriel said. They were in the middle of nowhere, with no landmarks he could recognize. Not a place you wanted to wander on foot.

“Remember the food they gave me,” Lucy said, “that rice and hummus?” Gabriel nodded. “It was terrible,” she said. “Practically inedible. But right about now, I wish I’d eaten more of it.”

“There’re some carrots over there.” Gabriel gestured to a trampled pile in one corner. One of the goats was nosing at it.

“Thanks a whole lot.”

“Salad,” Gabriel said. “I don’t think they’ll mind sharing.”

“Want to bet?”

She settled back into the straw and let her eyes slide shut.

An hour later, they felt the truck turn onto a pitted dirt road. The ride became even bumpier. Gabriel peered outside. After several minutes of bone-jarring bounces, the worst of which threatened to overturn the trailer, Gabriel said, “I see something. Looks like a farm.”

The truck pulled to a stop on a barren driveway next to a farmhouse whose walls and roof were made of lashed-together planks of wood with whitish mortar sealing the cracks in between. An angled roof cast a bit of shadow, just enough to shade one side of the trailer. Chickens wandered freely across the ground, clucking and bobbing their heads. More goats were penned in a wooden corral. A woman wearing a niqab stood beside the corral, tossing feed to the birds. She greeted the driver in a language Gabriel didn’t understand—Berber?—when the man got out of the truck.

“I don’t suppose they’ve got a shower,” Lucy muttered.

The driver and the woman had a brief conversation and then the driver went inside the house.

Lucy took the opportunity to rise to a crouch and press her way to the back of the trailer, shoving goats aside. She raised the metal bar holding the doors closed, swung them to either side and dropped to the ground. Gabriel followed close behind.

The woman let go of her canvas sack of feed and called for the driver in a voice that rang with fear. The driver came running out of the house. He grabbed a long-handled hoe that was leaning against the doorframe.

“It’s all right!” Gabriel said, first in English, then in French, his palms extended outward, open and empty. “We’re friendly.”

Lucy said something as well. Gabriel couldn’t understand a word of it, but the driver’s stance relaxed a bit, and he answered her warily in the same tongue.

“When did you learn Berber?” Gabriel whispered.

“Had some time on my hands a couple of years back,” Lucy said. “My cellmate spoke it.”

“Your cellmate?” Gabriel said, but she was walking away from him, toward the farmer and what he could only guess was the man’s wife.

“I’ve told him we’re not goat thieves,” she called back to Gabriel, in between exchanges in the desert language. “That we’re escaping from a gang of Egyptians who were trying to kill us. They don’t like Egyptians much around here.”

The woman spoke rapidly to the man, who hurried past Gabriel and grabbed hold of a goat that had jumped down from the trailer. He hefted it back up and inside, then shoved the doors closed.

The woman beckoned for them to come inside the house.

“I told her we wanted to get washed, maybe have some food,” Lucy said. “I said we didn’t have much money but that you’d give them what you had.”

“Of course.” Gabriel took Chigaru’s meager store of dirham from his pocket and pressed the crumpled bills into the man’s hands. “If you can get their names, when we get out of this I’ll tell Michael to send them—”

Lucy shook her head. “I told you, I won’t touch that money.”

“You wouldn’t be touching it, they would—” But Gabriel stopped when he saw the look on her face. It was a look he remembered well from when she was a girl, a look that said she wouldn’t be budged.

The woman led them into the farmhouse while her husband unloaded the goats and herded them into the corral. She showed them to a primitive but functional shower, with a pair of tin buckets suspended on a rod and a rope to tip the water out through holes punched in the buckets’ sides. Gabriel saw Lucy’s eyes light up and invited her to use it first. He walked off a bit to get the lay of the land and stretch his tight muscles. By the time he returned, she was bundled up in a coarse towel, her hair dripping and her clothes laid out to dry on a rock in the sun.

“All yours,” she said.

He began unbuttoning his shirt. As he pulled it off, he saw Lucy staring. He looked down. “What?”

She came forward, traced a finger along one of the scars on his arm. It had come from a sword; there was a matching scar on the opposite side where the tip of the blade had come out. “Got that one in Giza,” he said softly. “Inside the Great Sphinx.” She moved on to a puckered knot of flesh on his side, from a bullet wound that had never healed properly. “Botswana,” he said in answer to her unspoken question. She traced a thin line running crookedly from his navel to his hip. “Ninety-third Street,” he said, “and Central Park West.”

She patted him gently on his side. “Take your shower,” she said. “I’ll get us some food.”

They sat in the modest farmhouse at a table that appeared to be made from a single cross-section cut from a huge tree, sharing a platter of dense Moroccan bread and bowls of thick vegetable soup. Lucy scarfed down three bowls.

“They don’t have a telephone,” she said between spoonfuls. “But they can drive us to the airport.”

Gabriel dug into his pocket and took out the piece of paper onto which he’d copied the Arabic word he had seen underlined on the map in Amun’s office. “Can you ask them if they know what this means?”

Lucy passed it to the man and spoke to him. The man nodded, uttered a few words. “Darif says it’s Arabic. It means ‘the web.’ Why? Is it important?”

Gabriel took the slip of paper back. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just trying to figure out what we’re dealing with.”

The man—Darif—stood and gestured toward the door.

“He wants to know if you’re ready to go,” Lucy said.

Gabriel hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the dull pain in his legs, his side, his chest. “Always,” he said.

Reza Arif parked the BMW near the Djemaa el Fna and came around to Sammi’s side to open the door for her. It struck her as an exaggerated gesture, a caricature of Middle Eastern courtliness, but she let him indulge himelf. Anything that kept her on his good side.

Arif led her to the heart of the busy square, pointing out buildings and regaling her with their history as they went. She tried to keep her eyes out for Gabriel or for either of the men she’d seen hustling him into the black car back in Cairo, but the crowd was too dense, too constantly in motion—a sea of heads and bodies and outstretched arms, every third one attempting to press something into her hands: a brass cup, a folded shawl, a painted vase. She shook her head at each offer and kept moving.

“There, do you see?” Arif said, pointing. “In that very building the famous British film director Alfred Hitchcock stood while making—” He turned in place, noticing that Sammi was no longer beside him. An old man with a yellowish beard trailing down the front of his robe had seized her wrist and, with his other hand, had begun to inscribe the outlines of a henna tattoo on her forearm.

“I don’t want—” Sammi was saying, but the man was shaking his head and intently ignoring her.

“The lady said she does not want,” Arif said, his voice suddenly cold, and the old man, looking to the side, saw the narrow blade of a stiletto by his throat. He dropped Sammi’s wrist and backed off. The stiletto vanished again into Arif’s sleeve.

“Stay close,” he said. “Not every old man is harmless here.”

Nor every young man, Sammi wanted to say. But she held her tongue and stayed by Arif’s side.

They spent the next hour entering carpet shops, of which there were any number in and around the square. The eighth—or was it the ninth?—had a sign identifying the proprietor as Nizan. The couple entered and was greeted warmly by the owner himself, who took note of Reza Arif’s expensive suit and immediately turned on the hard-sell reserved for tourists he believed to be wealthy. Arif answered him in Arabic while Sammi wandered around the shop, looking for any sign that Gabriel might have been here. She saw nothing to indicate one way or the other. The other seven—or was it eight?—shops had been the same. Sammi was starting to wonder if she’d even recognize a sign if she saw one. But she’d have ample opportunity to find out—there were half a dozen more shops to go.

Unseen by her, a man with a badly bruised jaw peered through a partly closed curtain and watched as Sammi walked the aisles. He smiled to himself, but it was a bitter smile with nothing of pleasure to it.

It was her—the French woman, the one who had shot his brother in cold blood. His fist clenched around the fabric of the curtain. He would have his revenge. He turned to the man beside him and explained in a few words who he’d seen.

“But, Naeem,” the other man said, his voice low, “Amun clearly said we are not to kill this one if we should see her—”

“Kill her?” Naeem stroked the bruise along his jaw. “I said nothing about killing her.”

“Let’s go,” Sammi said, taking hold of Arif’s sleeve. Through the fabric she could feel the handle of the stiletto. “I don’t see anything I like here.”

Arif shrugged at Nizan, as if to apologize. “My brother’s wife,” he said. “She has very particular tastes.”

“Of course,” Nizan said, his face not betraying a hint of disappointment as he bowed them out.

“Nothing,” Sammi said, once they were out in the street once more.

“Are you certain?”

“Of course not. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. But whatever it is, I didn’t see it.”

Arif looked at his wristwatch, a Patek Philippe boasting separate dials for the times in various cities around the world. In Marrakesh, the afternoon was waning, something Sammi hardly needed an expensive watch to tell her. “Maybe we should split up,” Arif said. “It will be faster. You do three, I do three.”

“All right. Point me in the right direction.”

Arif pulled out a map and showed her three locations on it.

As he did so, Naeem and his cohort appeared behind them in the doorway of Nizan’s shop. Amun joined them a moment later. The three of them watched as Arif headed off to the east, Sammi to the northwest.

“Follow the woman,” Amun ordered. “She will lead us to Gabriel Hunt.”