House of Spies (Gabriel Allon #17)(92)
“They are.”
“Who?”
“Tarek and Hamid. They’re trying to drive away the jinns.”
“The what?”
“Jinns,” said Gabriel.
“I prefer mine with a splash of tonic and a lime.”
Gabriel asked Carter about the status of the pair of drones that Morris Payne had committed to the operation. One was a Sentinel stealth surveillance drone. The other was a Predator. Carter explained that the Sentinel had been moved into the theater and could be airborne over Morocco as soon as Gabriel had a target. The Predator, with its two deadly Hellfire missiles, was on a hot standby. The CIA had no authority to launch a strike in Morocco; only the president could. And even then, said Carter, it would have to be a last resort.
“The Moroccans,” he said, “will go ape shit.”
“How long will it take to get the Predator into position to take a shot?”
“Depends on the location of the target. Two hours, bare minimum.”
“Two hours is too long.”
“They’re not the swiftest cats in the jungle. But all this is moot,” said Carter, “unless Mohammad Bakkar summons your boy to a meeting.”
“He’ll call,” said Gabriel, and killed the connection.
Privately, however, he was not so sure. And when noontime came and went with no contact, he succumbed temporarily to the same despair that had taken hold among his partners in Paris and Washington. He distracted himself by tending to his characters—the Antonovs and their friends Jean-Luc Martel and Olivia Watson. He sent Martel and Mikhail into the wilds of Casablanca to view potential sites for a new hotel that JLM Enterprises had no intention of building. Natalie and Olivia he dispatched to the massive Morocco Mall, where, armed with Martel’s credit cards, they pillaged several exclusive boutiques. Afterward, they shared a late lunch with Christopher Keller in the Quartier Gauthier. Keller detected no evidence of surveillance, Moroccan DST or otherwise. Eli Lavon, who tailed Martel and Mikhail during their ersatz search for property, returned with an identical report.
In midafternoon, with Gabriel’s mood darkening, there was another crisis involving the jinns. Hamid had found an open window in one of the bedrooms—in point of fact, it was Dina’s—and feared several new demons had entered the house as a result. With Yaakov, he raised again the idea of an exorcism. He knew a man from his Bidonville who would handle it for a reasonable price, sacrificial goat included. Gabriel overruled him; they would rely on salt, blood, and milk and hope for the best. Hamid was clearly dubious. “As you wish,” he said gravely. “But I fear it will end badly. For all of us.”
By five o’clock even Gabriel was convinced the House of Spies was haunted and that Aisha and her fiery friends were plotting against him. He sent Natalie and Olivia down to the beach to catch the afternoon’s last sun and went for a walk alone—with no bodyguards or weapons—through the dirty arcades of old Casablanca. He wandered aimlessly for a time, across crowded squares, along boulevards thick with evening traffic, until he found a café where most of the patrons wore Western clothing. At a table in the darkest corner sat three Americans: two young men and a girl.
In French he ordered a café noir. Too late, he realized he had no Moroccan currency. It was no matter; the waiter was more than happy to accept euros. Outside, the din of the street was oppressive. It smothered the sound of the television over the bar, and the quiet conversation of the three Americans, and the vibration, at twelve minutes past six o’clock, of Gabriel’s mobile phone. He read the message a moment later and smiled. It seemed Mohammad Bakkar wanted a word with Jean-Luc Martel in Fez the following evening.
Gabriel dispatched a brief message to Adrian Carter at Langley before slipping the phone into his pocket. Then he ordered another coffee and drank it in the manner of a man who had all the time in the world for everything.
49
Fez, Morocco
A few minutes before noon the following day, Christopher Keller stood outside the entrance of the hotel, watching the porters loading the bags into the cars. Martel came along a moment later, followed by Mikhail, Natalie, and Olivia. He was holding a printout of the bill, which he handed to Keller.
“Give it to your people. Tell them I expect to be fully reimbursed.”
“I’ll get right on that.”
Keller dropped the bill into a rubbish bin and slid into the back of the first Mercedes. Martel joined him while the others climbed into the second car. They followed the coastline to Rabat, then headed inland through groves of cork oak to the foothills of the Middle Atlas Mountains. In spring the hills would be green with rain and snowmelt, but now they were brown and dry. Olive trees thrived on the ridges, and in the lowlands were fields of irrigated row crops. Martel stared glumly out the window while Keller monitored the flow of e-mails, text messages, and incoming voice calls on the Frenchman’s phone. With Martel’s help, he dashed off responses to those items requiring immediate attention. The rest he ignored. Even Jean-Luc Martel, he reasoned, needed a holiday now and then.
On Gabriel’s instructions, they stopped for lunch in Meknes, the smallest of Morocco’s four ancient imperial cities. It was there that Eli Lavon determined conclusively that they were being watched by a man, Moroccan in appearance, perhaps late thirties, wearing sunglasses and an American baseball cap. After lunch, the same man followed them to the Roman ruins of Volubilis, which they toured in the afternoon’s fiercest heat. Lavon snapped a photo of the man while he was pretending to admire the triumphal arch, and sent it to Gabriel at the Casablanca safe house. Gabriel then bounced it to Christopher Keller, who showed it to Martel when they were back in the car again.