The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018. Charles Cumming
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Who were ‘THEY’? The Service? The Agency? The Russians? Almost every law enforcement and intelligence service in the world was hunting Resurrection activists; all of them would have liked to get their hands on Lara Bartok. The only section that seemed unequivocal to him was the opening paragraph, which reinforced the idea that Mantis had employed Carradine in good faith and had been honest about the difficulty of finding ‘LASZLO’.
There was a safe in his room. Carradine asked for some Sellotape to be sent up from reception. He sealed the letter, the credit card and the passport back inside the package and put it in the safe. Just as he was finishing he heard his phone ping. Mantis had finally replied.
Glad you’ve arrived safely. Meeting is at the Four Seasons later this evening. Let me know how it goes.
Carradine understood that he was to go to the Four Seasons and to leave the money for ‘Abdullah Aziz’ at the reception desk. It was a simple enough task, yet he was apprehensive. He took the €2,000 from his satchel, adding a thousand more from his wallet, and wrote Aziz’s name on the envelope.
He looked at the map of Casablanca. The Four Seasons was on the eastern side of the city, close to a cluster of bars and restaurants on the Corniche. It was too far to walk but Carradine set out on foot, intending to catch a taxi en route. He took nothing with him except his wallet, his phone and the envelope containing the money. He was wearing a dark blue linen jacket and walked with both the wallet and the envelope buttoned into the inside pockets. It was still very hot but he did not want to have to take the jacket off and run the risk of it being snatched by an opportunistic thief.
He quickly found himself in a maze of narrow, dilapidated streets in the old medina to the west of the port. This was Morocco as he had imagined it: low brick houses painted in blocks of pale greens, blues and yellows with shuttered windows and crumbling plasterwork. He took out his phone and began to take photographs in the fading evening light, the writer in him aware that the details of what he saw – the wooden carts laden with fresh fruits and spices; the old women fanning themselves in shaded doorways; the raggedy children kicking a football in the street – might one day be useful to him. At the same time he was working his cover. On the small chance that he was being followed, C.K. Carradine had carte blanche to snoop around, to be seen taking photographs and scribbling notes, to loiter in the lobbies of five-star hotels or to meet a contact in a fashionable restaurant. If asked to explain why he was carrying €3,000 in cash, he could say that he did not fully trust the safe in his hotel and preferred to carry his personal belongings with him. His legend was foolproof. This was, after all, why Mantis had hired him.
Carradine was lining up a photograph of a rusting truck laden with watermelons when he saw a WhatsApp message from Mantis drop down onto the screen.
Change of plan. Meeting at Sheraton, not 4 Seasons. Sorry for inconvenience.
He wondered if he was the victim of an elaborate practical joke. Ramón was staying at the Sheraton. Was the Spaniard Mantis’s contact? Carradine hoped that the location was a bizarre coincidence, a consequence of the meagre number of top-class hotels in Casablanca, but could not shake off a sixth sense that Ramón and Mantis were somehow involved with one another. Perhaps Mantis had arranged for them to catch the same flight so that Ramón could keep an eye on him? It was impossible to know.
Carradine looked along the street. He was standing at the edge of a busy market square, a smell of mint and burning charcoal on the air. The narrow switchback streets of the old city had spun him around; he had no idea if he was facing north, south, east or west. He used his phone to pinpoint his position and began to walk in the general direction of the Sheraton, eventually finding an exit from the souk through the old walls of the Medina. Twenty minutes later Carradine was standing on the steps of the hotel. It was just before eight o’clock. A bored, uniformed guard indicated that he should pass through a metal detector. Carradine did so. Despite the fact that an alarm sounded as he walked through, the guard – who was wearing gloves and holding a plastic security wand – waved him on.
The lobby 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