It was getting dark, and there was no light bulb in the holder hanging limply from the ceiling. The walls appeared to be rough concrete or, possibly, rock. Daylight came in from a hole where a pipe used to exit and from around the huge wooden door that fitted rather badly in its frame. It was unbearably hot and stank of a mixture of sweat and the contents of the bucket that he kept at arm’s length but within reach. He was tethered by about six feet of chain to a large iron ring fixed securely to a wall spattered with unsightly, brown stains. His white linen shirt was now permanently damp, and his white trousers were torn badly and bloodstained. This was strange as he couldn’t find any obvious wounds apart from superficial cuts and bruises.
The chewed bone from his meal of goat and rice was still on a plate, attracting flies. He didn’t know how long he had been held in this place – almost a month? His cunning plan to save one grain of rice for each day he was incarcerated had worked for a week, until a rat had discovered his makeshift calendar. It took the rat about ten seconds to make his precious record disappear.
However long he had been here, he couldn’t remember arriving. His mind was a blank. He could be anywhere in the Maghreb, having been transported five or 500 miles. His clothes stank of camel, but whether this meant he had been carried on a camel or wrapped in a Berber camel blanket and stuffed into the back of a pickup truck, he didn’t know. He could hear distant traffic and had heard goats occasionally. There had been a dog outside, but he had heard no camels or voices or much birdsong. Surprisingly, he had heard no call to prayer, so he presumed he was in the desert, away from human habitation.
His jailers wore dark-brown djellabas, which he thought meant that they were unmarried, and had their heads and faces wrapped in a single piece of cloth to keep out the sun and sand. Did that make them Berbers, Tuareg, or desert nomads from Mali or Mauritania? The few times that they had spoken to him, they had used broken Spanish. They had presumed he only spoke Spanish and didn’t know that he had a reasonable grasp of Arabic, but this proved pretty useless as they mostly spoke to each other in a local language or dialect. Whenever he asked what was happening, their reply was mañana, delivered with smiling, dark-brown eyes, which was all he could see of them apart from their hands and their feet in leather sandals.
The fact that they had held him for so long and were feeding him was giving him some hope. His people would be looking for him, but in a million square miles of nondescript desert, how they would find him, he had no idea. He had spent hours and hours thinking of how he might make his rescuers task easier, but to no avail. Throwing a bucket at the wall would be the most noise that he could make, and this would not be heard by anyone beside his jailers whether he was near an oasis in Mali or a mountain village high in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains.
He looked on the positives, as they had taught him to do during his training in Texas and in Oman with the British. His captors hadn’t really been violent or angry. They had made no demands except to tell him that, if he tried to escape, he would be shot. They weren’t after information, or he would have been tortured immediately, and they weren’t using him as a bargaining chip or for ransom, otherwise they would have cut off his ear and sent it to his family via DHL. They were also not using him as propaganda, or they would have videoed him. So why were they keeping him alive?
A grey US Air Force C-17 Globemaster landed at Marrakech airport and proceeded to taxi to an apron where the pilot was keen to avoid stranding his very heavy, $340-million aircraft in the surrounding sand. It was met by a small group of military jeeps and lorries. With the ramp lowered, about a dozen cargo containers and pallets were unloaded, together with various armoured vehicles and two ‘Beasts’, as the President’s bomb-proof Cadillacs are called.
Airports always look more romantic at night given their stark geometry and their colour-coordinated illumination. Yellow signs flashed “Runway Ahead”, and a network of red and green lights sparkled in the cool desert night. There was an air of unhurried efficiency.
It was one week until POTUS would arrive, and the whole preparatory protocol was being rolled out. The programme for this visit was so tight that it hadn’t been possible to include an early morning round on the beautiful Royal Marrakech Golf Course, much to the frustration of the President. He would have to settle for a group dinner under the stars while being entertained by snake charmers, with their reedy pipes, and a colourful dance troupe. There would also be a group photograph taken in the Jardin Majorelle surrounding the Marrakech villa of the late Yves Saint Laurent.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Hey, how are you doing on this fine September morning?” Leonard’s beaming face filled most of the screen.
“Well, not great.” Mike had just returned from filling up the motorbike with petrol, which had really been an excuse to go out for a spin. She had then decided to call Leonard.
“How may I help you?”
“It’s not about Randy. Do you remember Charles Yelland, the Petronello boss whose daughter was kidnapped? Well, he phoned me yesterday to say he had been warned about a threat to his life and could I check it out. The thing is that he was phoned by a junior member of the British Embassy in Paris.”
“Well, the Brits in France sure have enough to deal with at the moment.”
“What do you mean?”
“The British Minister of Energy was poisoned near Strasbourg a few days back. It’s not public knowledge yet, but it looks like it might have been our friends, the Russkies.”
“Why?”
“We’re all still checking, but yesterday a junior assistant from their embassy in Paris who was with this minister was shot; he survived – just – but is in intensive care.”
Mike, like everyone in the secret-squirrel world, did not like coincidences. “What was his name?”
“Give me a second.” Leonard’s large face exited stage right to the sound of slow tapping on a keyboard. “Flushing, Walter Flushing. Sheesh, who calls their kid Walter C. Flushing?”
Mike took one breath while she collected her thoughts. “That’s who rang Charles Yelland.”
“Really?” It was Leonard’s time to reflect for a moment.
“I’m wondering if the minister and Walter were targeted for the same reason that Charles’s life is in danger. Were they all involved in something dodgy?”
“I doubt the kid was. He was just in the wrong place and may have seen something. The Russkies only poison people in the West to send a message to a government. They probably went back and shot the kid as a tidying-up exercise.”
“Charles and the minister must have been involved in something the Russians didn’t like, presumably.”
“Possibly. The minister was what the Brits call a ‘colourful character’, which basically means that he couldn’t keep it in his pants and he liked to breathe in heavily whenever he saw any white powder.”
“I’ll ask Charles what he was doing with the minister. Thanks for your help.”
“How are you doing on finding Randy?”
“I’m getting nowhere fast. I’ve found his flat in Spain and a likely address in Marrakech, but there’s no sign of him; he has just disappeared.”
“Keep at it.” With that, he rang off.
Two hours later, Mike was back in Charles Yelland’s kitchen for the first time in twelve months, leaning against the units with her legs crossed at the ankle; it was a red-wig day. The journey over to his estate had fulfilled her need to ride the motorbike in a way that the short trip earlier to fill up with petrol had not. She stared around the enormous kitchen and produced what looked like a dark-brown cigarette – this no longer shocked Charles – and she began to chew on the liquorice stick.
“Some things don’t change,” he said, pouring boiling water from the tap into a mug.
“Yes, I think you were wearing that cardigan the first time I came here.”
He smiled at her in a slightly patrician, rather than patronising, way. “You’ve probably hacked into my phone and computer, so I’m intrigued why you felt the need to ride over here.”
He pressed the teabag with a spoon, removed it and handed her the mug. She sipped it, but it was too hot, which was just as well as it was undrinkable: strong Earl Grey did not pair happily with her liquorice.
“The person who called to warn you, this Walter Flushing, was connected to the FCO at a very junior level; did you know him?” She was watching his expression intently.
