“No, thanks.” Mike rang off.
The first part of her plan hadn’t worked; although she had eliminated twenty-four of the rooms, that left forty-eight or so to check. However, the buzz inside her was almost uncontrollable as it registered that Randy really was staying in this hotel. She walked through an enclosed corridor to the next courtyard and sat on a daybed covered with cushions of every shade of pink and green imaginable. She was considering phoning Wazz and getting him to fax an innocent message to the riad, asking them to put it under Randy’s door for his return when a maid in a black dress came out of a room nearby.
“Hello,” Mike asked in her most friendly tone of voice, “maybe you can help me? I’m looking for my friend’s room. He’s Randy Ramirez. I have an urgent message for him.”
The maid indicated for Mike to follow her.
They walked only a short distance, through a couple of corridors and up some narrow stairs to the furthest courtyard. She pointed to a temporary wooden door made from an eight feet by four feet piece of chipboard. It had “KEEP OUT” scrawled on it in yellow paint, along with something in Arabic. The maid smiled and retraced her steps. Mike looked around to check there was no one watching and no CCTV. She pulled gently at the piece of board that was acting as a crude door. It barely moved as it was secured by several plastic tags and a small padlock. There was no way she could see anything beyond it, even when pulling at the edge of the board.
She walked back to her room, where she had a selection of specialist miniature tools inherited from Dylan. They were often disguised as something harmless, and she had distributed them throughout her luggage so as not to draw the attention of anyone. She sat on the bed playing with them and remembering how Dylan had told her of his exploits. And now they’re going to help find your brother, she thought to herself as she tried to hold back some unexpected tears.
She wiped her eyes and, on the way out, checked herself in a mirror whose surround was made in a rather rustic style using pewter or gunmetal. How many mirrors does a room need?
Distant voices echoed around each courtyard as she made her way back towards Randy’s room. The expectation of what was inside built as she cut through the plastic ties and picked the small padlock. She breathed in as she lifted the board with both hands. She was mentally preparing herself for finding, well, anything. With adrenaline pumping she said to herself, Here goes.
Moving the board to allow access and closing it behind her had made more noise than she expected – the scraping sounds echoed around the atrium. Fortunately, most of the guests were tourists and away during the daytime. It was Hassan, his friends and, possibly, Karolina who were bothering her.
Disappointingly, she found herself not in Randy’s room but in another corridor with no light except at the far end. It gave out onto yet another open-air courtyard, but this had not been viewed by a tourist’s eyes for a very long time. It was filled below by a dying lemon tree, stacked dusty furniture and an air of decay. It was, as any estate agent might say, ripe for redevelopment. She moved purposefully around the four sides, checking the doors to each room. They were mostly full of old furniture or unopened carboard boxes of crockery or electrical equipment, according to the labelling.
Having moved around each side of the atrium and almost back to where she had begun, she pushed open a glazed door into a bedroom that was clearly in use. She pulled back the long, dusty curtains in preference to turning on the light. There didn’t seem to be any movement detectors or cameras, but she couldn’t be sure. She tried to work methodically, beginning to the right of the door and moving anticlockwise. She noticed that the TV, lights and kettle were all plugged into the wall. Opening a wardrobe revealed shirts, trousers and one summer jacket. They looked like Randy’s size. At the bottom of the wardrobe was a bag, which she unzipped; it was full of rock samples, some fossils and a geological hammer. This all began to look promising.
The bed had been made, but not by hotel staff. There was nothing under the bed or under the pillows. She opened the matching wardrobe on the other side of the bed to find a suitcase, but this appeared to be newish and barely used. Certainly, it had no luggage labels or tags, and it was empty. A small flight of steps led to a bathroom. These riads were, after all, just a collection of rambling Moroccan town houses of random design, sharing only the one common feature: a narrow central courtyard into which everything faced. There was a bath, toilet, basin and, sitting incongruously in the corner, a free-standing, large, black safe that was at least three feet high. She checked the spinning arms in the centre of the door, but it was locked firmly. After walking over to the corner, she looked in the small waste bin, but it contained only one item: a screwed-up luggage label in the name of Ramon Ramirez. A warm feeling washed over her.
Back in the bedroom cum living room, she looked at the desk and at the bookshelf above it. There were more paperbacks by authors such as Jeffrey Deaver and Michael Connelly. This seemed to confirm that the Málaga apartment was his, at least in part. She was lifting some newspapers in French from the bin when she spotted another copy of Gavin Menzies’s lengthy book on the shelf. Was Randy really that interested in the Chinese maritime exploration of Africa in the fifteenth century? She took it down, but no handy scraps of paper giving her a pointer fell out.
The phone on the desk trilled, frightening her.
She was torn between answering it and making a hasty exit. She chose the latter, but not before standing in the two rooms and quickly taking a few pictures on her phone.
On the way back to her room, however much she lifted the piece of chipboard, it made a scraping noise on the tiled floor. She clicked the padlock shut and checked that it all looked passably the same as before. She began to move back through the labyrinthine hotel corridors and alleyways to her room. Why is Randy’s room behind a barricaded and padlocked entrance? she wondered. I must be careful.
She leapt as Hassan stepped out of a recess. Her burglar’s tools suddenly weighed heavy in the small bag hanging from her shoulder. “Oh … Hi, you scared me.”
“So sorry. Are you lost?” His slightly hooded eyes managed to look menacing while his voice sounded friendly.
“No, I was taking some photographs of your riad. The courtyards are beautiful.”
“We are about to start a major redevelopment. We will have another twenty-four rooms next year around another courtyard. You must come back and visit us.”
“That sounds exciting.”
“Let me know if you would like us to arrange a guide or a driver? Marrakech is also very beautiful.”
“I will.”
He gave her an extra wide smile and disappeared down a stairwell.
She entered her unlocked room, leaving the long drapes closed to prying eyes. She turned on the lights and walked over to the small fridge to grab a bottle of water. Her heart rate slowed as she drank half of it. Sitting in an armchair, she took stock. Randy’s room, beyond the barricade, was still connected to the hotel telephone system. Why? Had the barricade gone up after Randy had ‘disappeared’? Or, she thought to herself suddenly, is there another entrance? Actually, there must be another entrance to the original townhouse, but there wasn’t another door onto the dusty alley outside, she remembered. This meant that any access was via the tiny shops at the front; the clothes shop, perhaps?
She wavered between thinking that she should have answered the phone in case it gave her a new lead to thinking that she did the right thing by not alerting anyone, including Hassan, to the fact she was in there. The wig was making her itch, so she lifted it, rubbed her scalp and replaced it; stress didn’t seem to help her skin condition.
Presumably, Randy hadn’t found this room and riad himself? Yet it didn’t fit the usual criteria for a safe house in a foreign country. There must have been alternative accommodation that the CIA would have organised. Or was it chosen precisely because it was relevant to whatever he was up to?
Thinking of the CIA and safe houses made her wonder why Leonard hadn’t asked the local CIA desk in Rabat to find Randy. They would have been involved in sorting out the accommodation, surely? She would ask Leonard the next time they spoke. Knowing Leonard, Randy was probably working in Morocco without the local CIA desk knowing he was in-country. That would possibly explain why Leonard needed this tidied up.
Had Randy chosen the riad because it was the centre of something? Or because he wanted to monitor someone like Hassan? Or because it was a well-located base that was well hidden in plain sight, to use one of Dylan’s phrases.
Mike had finished her bottle of water. She was still thirsty, but the only thing now available to her was a single tea bag that had the words “Moroccan Mint” on the little label, but it smelt of absolutely nothing. She decided against it.
Fortunately, her phone rang, and she was temporarily distracted from her thirst. “Hello, Wazz.”
“I hope that you’re going to bring me back a fez?” he asked.
“I thought that they came from Egypt or Turkey or … somewhere. Anyway, I haven’t been out of the damned riad yet.”
“Have you made progress?”
“I’ve found his room here. It’s in an unused bit of the hotel.”
“How is the hotel?”
“It gives me the creeps.”
“Is the shower curtain torn?”
“No … that would be an improvement. If Mrs Bates is in the room next to Randy’s, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Have you got any new leads?” Wazz had a calm and reassuring voice.