When another twenty minutes passed with no call or text, Martel stood abruptly. “I need a drink.”
“Order something from room service.”
“There’s a bar upstairs,” said Martel, and before Keller could object, he was headed toward the door. Outside in the foyer he pressed the call button for the elevator, and when it didn’t appear instantly he mounted the stairs instead. The bar was on the top floor, small and dark, with a view across the rooftops of the medina. Martel ordered the most expensive bottle of Chablis on the wine list. Keller asked for a café noir.
“You sure you won’t have some?” asked Martel, holding a glass of the wine approvingly up to the light.
Keller indicated he was fine with just coffee.
“No drinking on duty?”
“Something like that.”
“I don’t know how you do it. You haven’t slept for days. I suppose you get used to it in your line of work,” added Martel thoughtfully. “Spying, that is.”
Keller glanced at the barman. The room was otherwise empty.
“Have you always been a spy?” asked Martel.
“Have you always been a drug dealer?”
“I was never a drug dealer.”
“Ah, yes,” said Keller. “Oranges.”
Martel studied him carefully over the rim of his wineglass. “It looks to me as though you spent some time in the military.”
“I’m not the soldiering type. Never been one to follow orders. Don’t play nicely with others.”
“So maybe you were a special kind of soldier. SAS, for example. Or should I call it the Regiment? Isn’t that how you and your comrades refer to it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Bullshit,” said Martel evenly.
Smiling for the benefit of the Moroccan barman, Keller looked out the window. Darkness was settling on the ancient medina, but there was still a bit of pink sunlight on the highest peaks of the mountains.
“You should watch your language, Jean-Luc. The lad behind the bar might take offense.”
“I know Moroccans better than you do. And I know a former SAS man when I see one. Every night in my hotels and restaurants, some rich Brit arrives with a private security detail. And they’re always ex-SAS. I suppose it’s better to be a spy than an errand boy for some British bond trader who wants to look important.”
Just then, Yossi Gavish and Rimona Stern entered the bar and sat down at a table on the other side of the room.
“Your friends from Saint-Tropez,” said Martel. “Shall we invite them to join us?”
“Let’s take the bottle downstairs.”
“Not yet,” said Martel. “I’ve always liked the view from here at sunset. It’s a World Heritage Site—did you know that? And yet most of the people who live down there would gladly unload their crumbling old riad or dar to some Westerner so they can get a nice clean apartment in the Ville Nouvelle. It’s a shame, really. They don’t know how good they’ve got it. Sometimes the old ways are better than the new.”
“Spare me the café philosophizing,” said Keller wearily.
Rimona was laughing at something Yossi had said. Keller checked Martel’s incoming texts and e-mails while Martel contemplated the darkening medina.
“You speak French very well,” he said after a moment.
“I can’t tell you how much that means to me, Jean-Luc.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“My mother was French. I spent a lot of time there when I was young.”
“Where?”
“Normandy, mainly, but Paris and the south, too.”
“Everywhere but Corsica.”
There was a silence. It was Martel who broke it.
“Many years ago, while I was still in Marseilles, there was a rumor going around about an Englishman who was working as a contract killer for the Orsati clan. He was ex-SAS, or so they said. Apparently, he was a deserter.” Martel paused, then added, “A coward.”
“Sounds like the stuff of a spy novel.”
“Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.” Martel held Keller’s steady gaze. “How did you know about René Devereaux?”
“Everyone knows about Devereaux.”
“It was your voice on that tape.”
“Was it?”
“I can only imagine the things you must have done to make him talk. But you must have had another source,” Martel added. “Someone who knew about my ties to René. Someone close to me.”
“We didn’t need a source. We were listening to your phone calls and reading your e-mails.”
“There were no phone calls or e-mails.” Martel smiled coldly. “I suppose all it took was a bit of money. That’s how I got her, too. Olivia loves money.”
“She had nothing to do with it.”
Martel was clearly dubious. “Does she get to keep it?”
“What’s that?”
“The fifty million you gave her for those paintings. The fifty million you paid her to betray me.”
“Drink your wine, Jean-Luc. Enjoy the view.”
“Fifty million is a lot of money,” said Martel. “He must be very important, this Iraqi who calls himself Khalil.”
“He is.”
“And if he shows his face? What happens then?”
“The same thing,” said Keller quietly, “that will happen to you if you ever lay a hand on Olivia.”
Martel was unmoved by the threat. “Maybe someone should get that,” he said.
Keller looked down at the phone, which was shivering on the low table between them. He checked the number of the incoming call and then handed the device to Martel. The conversation was brief, a mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic. Then Martel rang off and surrendered the phone.
“Well?” asked Keller.
“Mohammad changed the plan.”
“When are you meeting him?”
“Tomorrow night. And it’s not just me,” said Martel. “We’re all invited.”
50
Casablanca, Morocco
Christopher Keller was not the only one monitoring Jean-Luc Martel’s phone. At the Casablanca safe house, Gabriel was keeping watch over it, too. He had listened to the steady stream of voice calls throughout the long afternoon, and read the many text messages and e-mails. And at seven fifteen that evening he eavesdropped on the brief exchange between Martel and a man who didn’t bother to introduce himself. He listened to the recording of the conversation three times from beginning to end. Then he adjusted the time code to 19:16:13 and clicked the play icon.
“Mohammad and his partner would like to meet your friends. One friend in particular.”
“Which one?”
“The tall one. The one with the pretty French wife and lots of money. He’s Russian, yes? An arms dealer?”
“Where did you hear a thing like that?”
“It’s not important.”
“Why do they want to meet him?”
“A business proposition. Do you think your friend would be interested? Tell him it will be well worth his while.”
Gabriel clicked pause and looked at Yaakov Rossman. “How do you suppose Mohammad Bakkar and his partner figured out how Dmitri Antonov really makes his money?”
“Maybe he heard the same rumors Jean-Luc Martel heard. The rumors we spread like chicken feed from London to New York to the south of France.”
“And the business proposition?”
“I doubt it involves hashish.”