At the Casablanca command post, Gabriel watched as Mikhail sat down on one of the couches. A member of the staff appeared, tea was poured. At the right side of the image three human heat signatures were visible inside one of the tents. Two of the signatures were quite obviously female. The other was Christopher Keller. A moment earlier Gabriel had dispatched an encrypted message to Keller’s satellite phone regarding the possible identity of the man behind the wheel of the newly arrived Toyota Land Cruiser. Keller’s hands were now noticeably active, with what Gabriel could not see. Cold metal was not visible via infrared.
Keller placed the object at the small of his back and moved swiftly to the entrance of the tent, where he stood for several seconds, presumably while he surveyed the operational landscape. Then he took up a satellite phone and worked the screen. A few seconds later a message arrived on Gabriel’s computer.
ready when you are . . .
With the aid of the drones, Gabriel surveyed the operational landscape, too. Four men stood watch around the camp in the desert—north, south, east, and west, like points on a compass. All were armed. The men who arrived with Mohammad Bakkar were armed, too. Perhaps Bakkar himself. Mikhail, fearing a search by Bakkar’s men, was not. That meant it would be at least ten against one. The chances were better than even that Keller and the rest of the team would not survive a close-quarters firefight, even one conducted by the man who had achieved the highest score ever recorded in the SAS’s infamous Killing House. Besides, it was possible that Uzi Navot and Langley were mistaken about the identity of the man in the Toyota. Better to let it play out. Better to let him show his face and then take the shot where there was no chance of collateral damage. For the moment, the isolated spot in the darkest corner of southeastern Morocco was their enemy. But not for long. Soon, he thought, the desert would be their ally.
Gabriel ordered Keller to stand down and asked Langley to focus one of the drone cameras on the Land Cruiser at the camp’s edge. The image appeared on his screen a moment later, courtesy of the Predator. A man wearing a hooded djellaba, both hands resting on the wheel, no cigarette. Gabriel reckoned that eventually he would join the others. To do so, he would have to climb out of the vehicle and walk several paces. And then Gabriel would know whether it was him. A man’s physical appearance could be changed in many ways, he thought. Hair could be cut or dyed, a face could be altered with plastic surgery. But a limp like Saladin’s was forever.
56
The Sahara, Morocco
At first, Mohammad Bakkar spoke only Darija, and only to Jean-Luc Martel. It was obvious from his demeanor and tone that he was angry. Mikhail, during his time with Sayeret Matkal, had learned a bit of Palestinian Arabic, enough to function during night raids in Gaza and the West Bank and southern Lebanon. He was by no means fluent or even conversant. Still, he managed to understand the gist of what the Moroccan from the Rif Mountains was saying. It seemed several large shipments of an unspoken product had recently gone missing under unexplained circumstances. The losses incurred by Bakkar’s organization were substantial—hundreds of millions, in fact. Somewhere, he said, there had been a leak of information. It had not occurred at his end. Evidently, he ran a very tight ship. Therefore, the mistake was clearly Martel’s. Bakkar implied it had been intentional. After all, Martel had never approved of the rapid expansion of their shared business to begin with. Amends would have to be made. Otherwise, Bakkar intended to find another distributor for his product and cut Martel out of the picture entirely.
A violent quarrel ensued. Martel, in rapid and fluent Moroccan Arabic, implied that Mohammad Bakkar, not he, was to blame for the recent seizures. He reminded Bakkar that he had opposed scaling up the amount of product flowing into Europe, and for this very reason. By his calculation, they were losing more than a quarter of their product to seizures instead of the usual ten percent, an unsustainable rate in the long term. Caution was the only solution. Smaller shipments, no more container vessels. It was, thought Mikhail, a rather impressive performance on Martel’s part. A trained agent could not have done it any better. By the end of it even Mohammad Bakkar appeared convinced that he and his organization were somehow responsible for the leaks. He resolved to get to the bottom of it. In the meantime, he had twenty metric tons of product sitting in his clandestine production facilities in the Rif, awaiting shipment. He was eager to move forward. New funds were clearly needed.
“I don’t want to bear the costs for the last disaster alone. It isn’t just.”
“Agreed,” said Martel. “What did you have in mind?”
“A fifty percent price increase. One time only.”
“Fifty percent!” Martel waved his hand dismissively. “Madness.”
“It is my final offer. If you wish to remain my distributor, I suggest you take it.”
It was not Mohammad Bakkar’s final offer, not even close. Martel knew this, and so did Bakkar himself. This was Morocco, after all. Passing the bread at dinner was a negotiation.
And on it went for several more minutes, as fifty shrank to forty-five and then forty and finally, with an exasperated glance toward the heavens, thirty. And all the while Mikhail was watching the man who was watching him. The man sitting behind the wheel of the Toyota, with an unobstructed view into the center of the camp. He wore a djellaba with the pointed hood up, and his face was in deep shadow. Even so, Mikhail could feel the leaden weight of his gaze. He could feel, too, the absence of a gun at the small of his back.
“Khalas,” said Bakkar at last, rubbing his hands together. “Twenty-five it is, payable on receipt of the merchandise. It is far too little, but what choice do I have? Would you like the shirt off my back, too, Jean-Luc? I can always find another.”
Martel was smiling. Mohammad Bakkar signed the deal with a handshake and then turned to Mikhail.
“You will forgive me, but Jean-Luc and I had serious business to discuss.”
“So it seemed.”
“You don’t speak Arabic, Monsieur Antonov?”
“No.”
“Not even a little?”
“Even coffee is a challenge.”
Mohammad Bakkar nodded sympathetically. “Different pronunciations for different countries. An Egyptian would say the word differently from a Moroccan or a Jordanian or, say, a Palestinian.”
“Or a Russian,” laughed Mikhail.
“Who lives in France.”
“My French is almost as bad as my Arabic.”
“So we’ll speak English.”
There was a silence.
“How much has Jean-Luc told you about our business together?” asked Bakkar finally.
“Very little.”
“But surely you must have some idea.”