The Man Between. Чарльз Камминг

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СКАЧАТЬ of the hotel was a vast marble atrium dominated by palm trees and wide marble columns. A mezzanine balcony overlooked the ground floor. A cleaning woman was polishing a vase near a window on the street side of the hotel. Carradine was aware that Ramón might be nursing a pre-prandial mojito or cup of coffee in one of the nooks and crannies of the lobby. He did not want to be spotted by the Spaniard and then engaged in conversation. He did not trust him and was sure that Ramón’s ebullient good cheer was a front disguising a volatile, possibly even violent personality. It occurred to him that he was now involved in precisely the sort of scenario he had written about many times in his fiction. The spy – amateur or otherwise – was always at risk of running into a friend or acquaintance in the field. Carradine quickly prepared a cover story, on the off-chance that he was identified, and walked towards the reception desk.

      Had he dramatised the scene in one of his novels, he would have made more of the sense of trepidation his protagonist felt as he set about completing his first mission on behalf of the Service. In reality, Carradine found the task almost embarrassingly easy. He approached the youngest – and therefore potentially the least experienced – of three female members of staff, smiled at her warmly, explained that he wanted to leave a package for one of the hotel guests and handed her the envelope. The receptionist recognised ‘Abdullah Aziz’ as the name of a guest, placed the envelope in a pigeonhole beneath the desk and did not ask Carradine for his name. At no point did he spot Ramón, nor any individual who might conceivably have been the waiting Aziz. It was all very straightforward.

      Within ten minutes Carradine was back on the tenth floor of his hotel, basking in the cool of the air-conditioning, sending a message to Mantis informing him that ‘the meeting had been a success’. A short time later Mantis responded, telling Carradine that ‘everybody was happy with the way things went’. Despite completing the task successfully, Carradine experienced an unexpected stab of disappointment and irritation that he had not been tested more thoroughly. Perhaps it was the nagging sense that all was not quite as it seemed. He did not fully trust Mantis. He was profoundly suspicious of Ramón. Having read the note inside the package, he was concerned that there was a plot to kidnap Lara Bartok, perhaps even to kill her. If that was the case, was he being used as an unwitting pawn?

      He took a second shower, went down to the bar, ordered a vodka martini and tried to convince himself that his doubts were just the flights of fancy of a novelist with an overactive imagination. A man sitting two stools away was wearing an aftershave so overpowering that it began to affect the taste of the martini. Carradine ordered a second, carrying it to a table a safe distance from the bar. As he walked across the lounge, a vodka martini in one hand, a packet of cigarettes in the other, he realised that he was casting himself as the central character in a spy story no different to the ones he had written in the pages of his books or seen a hundred times at the movies.

      He sat down and tried to work out the link between Mantis, Ramón and Bartok. Carradine acknowledged that he was a need-to-know support agent, not a fully-fledged spy cognisant of all the intelligence about ‘LASZLO’. In this respect, Mantis was not obliged to tell him everything he knew. By the same token, the Service was under no obligation to inform Carradine that Ramón had been sent to keep an eye on him. Besides, there was every reason to believe that Ramón was just an overly friendly passenger Carradine just happened to have bumped into on the plane. He had been shown no evidence to suggest that Ramón was ‘Abdullah Aziz’, nor was it credible that Mantis would have wanted him to pay Ramón for his services. The only thing that Carradine knew for certain was that Bartok was on the run. Mantis wanted to protect her, for reasons that were not yet clear, but had not been in a position to leave London in order to do so. As a result, he had hired Carradine to assist in the search for her.

      Carradine stared at the pitted olive at the bottom of the glass. None of it made sense. The vodka had blunted, not sharpened his wits. He had been active as a support agent for less than twenty-four hours and already felt lost in the wilderness of mirrors.

      He settled the bill and walked outside. There was a taxi idling in front of the hotel. Carradine climbed in and asked to be taken to the Corniche. He offered a cigarette to the driver who placed it, unlit, in a recess behind the gearstick. Sated by alcohol, Carradine sat in the back seat texting his father, trying to forget about his responsibilities to the Service and to set aside his doubts about Mantis and Ramón. He enjoyed the sepia light of the Moroccan evening and the movement of the taxi as it weaved from street to street. He wanted to convince himself that there was no deeper meaning to the information he had gleaned from the letter, no dark conspiracy playing out on the streets of Casablanca. But it was impossible. He knew, in the way that you know that a friendship is doomed or a love affair coming to an end, that something was not quite right. He was sure that he was being manipulated. He was certain that he had been sent to Morocco for a purpose that had not yet been made clear to him. The chances of finding Bartok were so remote that the words of warning contained in Mantis’s letter – ‘IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THEY FIND YOU’ – seemed to Carradine as vague and yet as terrifying as lines from a work of fiction. So why had he been handed such a task?

      The taxi stopped at a set of lights. An elderly beggar came to the window, pressing his face against the glass. The driver swore in Arabic as the beggar knocked on the window, imploring Carradine to give him money. He dug around in his trouser pocket for some loose change and was about to roll down the window and pass the money to the beggar when the taxi accelerated down the street.

      Carradine turned to see that the man had fallen over.

      ‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Problème! Arrêtez!’

      The driver ignored him, made a right-hand turn and headed north towards the sea. Through the back window, Carradine could see the beggar being helped to his feet.

      ‘He fell,’ he said in French, thinking of Redmond and his failure to act.

      ‘They all fall,’ the driver replied. Ils tombent tous.

      ‘Pull over!’

      Again Carradine’s request was ignored. ‘I want to go back,’ he said, lamenting the fact that his French was not good enough to make himself properly understood. ‘Take me back to the old man.’

      ‘Non,’ the driver replied. He wanted his fare, he wanted to take the tourist to the Corniche. ‘You don’t go back, mister,’ he said, now speaking in English. ‘You can never go back.’

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