This is the Night They Come For You, page 24
He extinguishes the cigarette under the tap and screws it up in a tissue. Then he puts the tape back in its box, replaces the stepladder in the hall cupboard and prepares to deliver the pack of birdseed to Ghanem. She can know nothing of the tape. The same goes for everybody, including Hidouchi.
‘Thank you so much for making my life even more complicated than it already is, Razane,’ he mutters under his breath as he heads for the door.
Agent Souad Hidouchi emerges from the lift into the dimly lit cavern of DSS HQ’s underground car park and strides towards the bay where she keeps her motorbike. She is not happy about the diversion to Paris she has been required to take. Briefing the DGSE strikes her as unduly obliging, bordering on the obsequious. She sees no reason why the French have to be kept informed of her activities. She and Taleb should be going to London to question Riad Nedjar, not Paris to ply some DGSE bigwig with intelligence his own organization has done nothing to gather. But orders are orders, however much she chafes against them.
As she approaches her motorbike, the headlights of a car occupying a nearby bay flash twice. She recognizes the vehicle as Deputy Director Meschac Kadri’s sleek black Mercedes. And Kadri is at the wheel, beckoning her to join him. Clearly, he has been waiting for her.
Two possible explanations present themselves to Hidouchi more or less simultaneously. One is that Kadri, who has always believed himself to be irresistible to women, is intent upon renewing the advances Hidouchi subtly rebuffed on a previous occasion. The other, more disturbing in its way, is that he wishes to discuss something with her that could not be broached in his office, where they met earlier to lay the ground for her visit to Paris. She will soon enough know which it is.
Kadri pushes the passenger door open as she approaches. She slides into the seat to be met by an aroma of expensive leather overlaid with an oily cologne that Kadri favours.
‘I wanted to have a last word with you before you fly to Paris tomorrow, Souad,’ says Kadri.
‘Was there something we didn’t cover earlier, Deputy Director?’ Hidouchi asks.
‘Please, we don’t need to be so formal. Call me Meschac. It’s more a case of there being something we didn’t emphasize earlier, Souad. Or rather I didn’t. Do you feel your collaboration with Superintendent Taleb has been successful?’
‘His experience has been useful. And we’ve made quite rapid progress.’
‘His “experience” is what concerns me. It may hamper you at a later stage if he views dealing with Zarbi and Laloul through the prism of the past.’
‘But Zarbi and Laloul are very much of the past.’
‘Indeed. But it’s a past our superiors wish to put behind them, for the sake of the nation’s progress. The youths protesting on our streets earlier this year weren’t interested in scandals dating from la décennie noire. Most of them were born in this century, not the last. So, it would be best if Zarbi and Laloul … did not return.’
‘You made that clear when you gave me this mission … Meschac. Zarbi and Laloul either stay missing … or are terminated.’
‘Quite so.’
A brief silence falls. Hidouchi wonders what point Kadri is trying to make. She understands the government has no wish to see Laloul in court. An unmarked grave, somewhere in Europe, is where she has been explicitly instructed to put him if she is able to track him down. And she has no compunction about that. Nadir Laloul is a traitor to his country as well as a common criminal. She would have no objection to serving as the instrument of his well-merited extinction. It is, after all, her professional duty to carry out such acts.
Thus far in her career, she has not been ordered to kill someone she knows to be innocent. And this is fortunate, because she is well aware of what she would and would not be capable of doing in such circumstances. The DSS has its priorities, which she is required to observe. But she has her principles, which her nature dictates she must also observe.
Kadri sighs and pats Hidouchi’s knee, a gesture she tolerates because she knows she must. ‘I’m thinking of your future, Souad. It could be brighter than that of any woman who has ever joined the service if you manage this affair with the sensitivity I’ve come to expect from you. Taleb was involved in the original investigation of Laloul’s embezzlement of funds from Sonatrach, was he not?’
‘He was.’
‘It’s therefore possible he knows more about Laloul’s activities than we do.’
‘It is possible, yes.’
‘And we don’t know exactly what this man Bahlouli said to him before he jumped off that balcony, do we?’
‘Well, I wasn’t there, certainly.’
‘We don’t even know beyond doubt that Bahlouli did jump off … rather than being pushed.’
Hidouchi is unflappable by nature as well as training. Even so, she’s relieved it’s too dark inside the car for Kadri to see her expression as she registers his suggestion that Taleb may have murdered Bahlouli. ‘I personally have no doubt on the point. Taleb did not murder Bahlouli.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘He had no reason to.’
‘His reasons may date back twenty years, perhaps longer. He presents himself to you as a conscientious police officer. But his relations with people close to this case – Zarbi, Abderrahmane, Bahlouli, not to mention the English bookseller, Dalby – render him suspect. He cannot be allowed to obstruct a clean resolution of the Laloul problem. You cannot allow him to.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Good.’ Kadri turns to look at her. All she can see of his face in the shadows is the pale curve of his smile. ‘That is good.’
‘May I ask …’
‘Yes?’
‘What exactly is the Laloul problem? If I knew more about it, my task might be simpler.’
‘I sympathize. I would tell you more if I were able to. As it is, I know no more than I have told you. Laloul is a smouldering fire that must be extinguished. And Taleb … may need to be extinguished also.’
‘That would be … a drastic step.’
‘The DSS exists to take drastic steps when they are necessary, Souad. And in this case they are deemed to be necessary. If and when the moment comes, you will recognize it and act accordingly, I’m sure.’ He is no longer smiling. ‘You are equal to this task, aren’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then see it through. To the end.’
Taleb returns to his apartment weighed down by anxiety. He has a vital piece of evidence in his possession, but no way of learning what it signifies. He also has obligations to report this discovery to both Bouras and, arguably, Hidouchi. But his every instinct tells him not to breathe a word to either of them until he has heard what is on the tape himself. It could amount to nothing. Or it could amount to everything. While the tape remains unplayed, it is an open question – as open as a chasm yawning beneath his feet.
His apartment is furnished and decorated in a style thirty years behind the times, for the very good reason that nothing has been changed in all that time. The rugs are frayed and faded, the originally orange velvet three-piece suite has turned beige with age and, atop the ancient Sonelec push-button-controlled television, there still stands the silverplate oasis scene of a camel and two palm trees. He has not actively sought to preserve the apartment as a shrine to Serene and Lili’s memory, though he does find it comforting to reflect that they would recognize more or less everything if they were to walk back in.
This they are not about to do, of course. The finality of death has long since cut him off from them. It has also cut him off from the consolations of religion. He secretly renounced God the day after their funerals and he and the Almighty have not been reconciled since. Oddly, he did not blame God for what happened to them. But his repugnance for so many of the humans he was required to worship God with – humans who were capable of the kind of unimaginable violence that claimed his loved ones – drove him to renounce their beliefs. And in that renunciation he has found a form of peace.
He prepares a frugal supper and mulls over his options as he eats. Neither the eating nor the mulling takes long. He will have to take the tape with him to Paris and create an opportunity while he is there to beg, borrow or steal a machine on which to play it. How he is to manage that he cannot imagine, but it will have to be done. Until he knows what is on the tape, he is perilously placed, though it’s quite possible he’ll be even more perilously placed when he’s listened to it. Ignorance is dangerous. But knowledge may be still more dangerous.
He packs his suitcase with clothes for a few days, though how long he’s to be away is just another of the uncertainties he’s beset by. He swathes the box containing the tape in assorted papers and crams the whole lot in a dog-eared folder, which he stows in his shoulder bag. Now he’s just about ready for an early departure in the morning.
He turns out all the lights, opens the blinds and sits down in his favourite armchair, facing the window and the night beyond. He lights a cigarette and studies the velvety blackness of the sky that looms over the city. It occurs to him that it’s possible this is his last night in Algiers, considering the many unknown hazards that are surely waiting for him on the journey that will begin tomorrow. All the thousands of nights he’s passed in the city of his birth – and this could feasibly be the very last.
It hardly seems possible. But death never seems possible, as he knows from his own experience – until it becomes a fact.
Hidouchi returns to her apartment also weighed down by anxiety. A mission she initially saw as an opportunity to impress her superiors and enhance her prospects within the DSS has now become something wreathed in so many sinister possibilities she’s aware it may become a battle for her own survival.
She is paid well by Algerian standards and enjoys the material trappings of a privileged existence. Her apartment is large, stylishly decorated in tasteful hues of grey and silver, with a balconied lounge commanding a broad view of the harbour and a kitchen absurdly over-equipped with hobs, ovens, freezers and storage units. It all came as a package with the latest technological extravagances, including smartphone-controlled air conditioning and music of her choosing to follow her from room to room.
She sheds her clothes with relief and gazes out at the lights of the harbour as she drinks a chilled passionfruit juice from a tall glass in which cubes of ice clunk at every tilt. Then she takes a long bath, listening to her favourite Souad Massi album and trying not to think about the choice laid before her by Kadri. Death is nothing less than a predatory schemer like Laloul deserves. Taleb, on the other hand, is an honest and diligent detective. And she’s grown fond of him. She likes his self-deprecating humour. Extinguishing him – Kadri’s chosen euphemism for killing – is something she finds it hard to believe she will be capable of.
Unless Taleb isn’t as honest and diligent as she thinks. Perhaps Kadri is right. Taleb may have a hidden agenda, wrapped up in the murder of his wife and daughter by Islamist terrorists and his strange dealings with Stephen Gray and Nigel Dalby. Is it possible – is it conceivable – that he threw Bahlouli off Abderrahmane’s balcony? If he did, then she has misjudged him completely. And in her profession misjudgements can have fatal consequences.
But Taleb is not the only one in all this who may have a hidden agenda. Kadri was far more explicit about what he required of her when they spoke in his car than when they met earlier in his office. Clearly, he didn’t want there to be any record of their discussion. Whose objectives is he serving? His own, or those of nameless power brokers above him? It is impossible for her to say. She simply doesn’t know enough about the many secrets buried in Zarbi and Laloul’s past to grasp what is at stake.
She resents, on behalf of her whole generation, the way in which their lives are still governed by conflicts and power struggles that took place before they were even born. The War of Independence is a piece of dusty history to her. Yet those legendary freedom fighters who expelled the French sixty years ago have become the grandfathers of a fractured present. And their determination to deny the Algerian people the freedom they claimed they were fighting for has soured every decade since. Le pouvoir still keeps its foot clamped on the citizens’ necks. And she, however she cares to pretend otherwise, is a servant of that system.
But her service comes with conditions attached. And Kadri, though he may not know it, has violated one of those conditions. Hidouchi is not prepared to allow herself to be pushed around. And she will not be a slave to anyone’s hidden agenda.
Who is there who knows what she needs to know and might be willing to tell her? And who can she trust? There seems to be only one man who qualifies, which is better, she supposes, than none. And Kadri wants that man dead.
She toes the plug from the horizontal to the vertical and rises from the bath as the water begins to drain out. Reaching for her towel, she sees a condensation-blurred reflection of herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror.
She steps out of the bath and moves across the room in leisurely strides, enjoying the looseness of her limbs and the sensation of the water drying on her skin. She wipes just enough of the condensation from the mirror to meet her own gaze clearly in the glass.
The eyes of the woman who looks at her project strength and confidence. Only if you know her better than anyone else in the world does or can is a tiny trace of fear also evident. Strength can be overborne, confidence misplaced. The immediate future for Souad Hidouchi has become a treacherous place.
TWENTY-TWO
THE HOLLOW-EYED REFLECTION THAT GREETS STEPHEN GRAY IN THE bathroom mirror in his room at the Premier Inn, Basingstoke, early the following morning, is a grim sight. He washes his face and smears some toothpaste round his teeth, the closest he can come to brushing them after forgetting to buy a toothbrush yesterday. He rinses his mouth under the tap, grateful at least to have banished the lingering taste of the half-bottle of whisky he drank last night. Then he returns to the bedroom and opens the curtains as wide as his eyes can bear.
His throat is like sandpaper. His head aches. He can’t go on like this. That much is obvious. He has to do something to retrieve the situation. He is homeless, Suzette has departed with the confession and he has managed to fall out seriously with his only surviving sibling. He can’t simply wait for Suzette to decide what she’s going to do. He has to act. He remembers reaching that conclusion before the Scotch kicked in last night.
He locates his B phone in the jumble of clothes draped over the chair by the table, sits down on the bed and punches in Riad Nedjar’s number.
No answer. He leaves the briefest of messages. ‘It’s me. Call me as soon as you can.’
In Algiers, Akram is just opening the gate of the garage when Taleb arrives, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. It is uncommonly early – but not too early for Akram to proffer some badinage.
‘They are working you too hard, Inspector.’
‘You may be right. But what about you? Where’s that idle brother of yours?’
‘Still in bed, I expect. Are you going away?’ Akram nods at the suitcase Taleb is carrying.
‘For a day or two, yes.’
‘Business or pleasure?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you should go carefully. It’s a mad world out there.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that.’
‘Oh, I’m not telling you, Inspector. You already know it, I’m sure. I’m just reminding you.’ Akram smiles. ‘It’s part of the service.’
Gray is still sitting on the bed in his hotel room, trying to summon the energy to get dressed, when the phone rings.
‘Hi, Riad. Thanks for calling back.’
‘You sound rough, my friend.’
‘Do I really?’
‘What can I do for you at this hour?’
‘It’s early, I know. Sorry if I’ve woken you.’
‘You haven’t. A shopkeeper’s day begins before dawn.’
‘I need to ask you a favour.’
‘What is it?’
‘When Suzette and you parted on Tuesday evening, she gave you her address in France, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. So that we could stay in touch.’
‘Can you give it to me?’
‘Why would you want her address, Stephen? Are you proposing to write to her?’
‘No.’
‘To visit, then?’
‘I can’t let it end like this, Riad. I’ve worked too long and too hard to punish Laloul to allow the plan just to fall apart.’
‘Do you have a choice?’
‘I can try to persuade Suzette, now we’ve both been able to reflect on the situation, that we should … go on.’
‘But she no longer trusts you, Stephen. And she’s frightened of Laloul. For good reason. You will surely fail.’
‘I have to try.’
‘Call her, then. You’ll know from her reaction whether you stand a chance.’
‘You warned me yourself her phone might have been hacked. It has to be face to face.’
‘That’s a neat argument. But it does not convince me.’
‘OK. But will you give me her address anyway?’
‘This is a mistake, my friend.’
‘Maybe. But it’s my mistake to make.’
Little is said between Hidouchi and Taleb during the flight from Blida to Paris, partly because of noise levels in the transport plane, on which they are the only passengers, and partly because Taleb, overtaken by exhaustion after his largely sleepless night, falls into a deep slumber shortly after take-off. Turbulence over the Mediterranean rouses him only briefly.
On landing at Vélizy-Villacoublay Air Base in Paris, Hidouchi welcomes him back to the wide awake world. ‘When were you last in Paris, Taleb?’
‘A conference twelve years ago,’ he replies, rubbing his eyes and squinting out at the runway. ‘I barely left the hotel.’
