35
The Medina
Tangier, Morocco
1241 Local Time
Gunther Klaus rushed through the souk with his head on a swivel. He wasn’t exactly running. Bounding was more like it. He moved with frenzied imprecision, pinballing between human bumpers, lurching left and right. The market was what it had been for a thousand years, a baffling sprawl of people, spice stalls, and food carts.
Klaus only hoped he could vanish in the madness.
His one advantage was familiarity. He had been to this market many times. He knew its channels by heart, although the individual stalls and storefronts were amorphic, a shape-shifting maze that altered day by day. The sweet smells of cinnamon and jasmine blended with the tang of sizzling fat. He felt sweat trickle down his spine beneath his loose cotton shirt. The heat had nothing to do with it.
Surrounded by a sea of faces, he scanned each for an anxious instant. Most were locals, dark Berber features and wiry black hair. He also saw tourists: Europeans, Americans, a smattering ofAsians. Thankfully, there was no sign of the faces he hoped not to see: three men whose distinctly Slavic features were emblazoned in his mind.
He collided with an old man in a fez, a grizzled merchant who gave him a nasty look.
“Pardon,” Klaus said reflexively, spinning a full turn before rushing away.
He’d come here in desperation, hoping the crowd would be in his favor. The fact that he wasn’t already in the back seat of a sedan with a boot on his neck validated that he’d made the right move. The chaos around him, however, was a prison of its own. Escape and evasion was not his forte. He was a banker, not a spy. A man who ran spreadsheets and created shell companies. The problem, which admittedly he had long seen coming, had to do with his client list. The bankers at UBS and Credit Suisse didn’t find themselves darting through spice markets with assassins on their tail. No, he thought breathlessly, they worked for a far more refined breed of crook.
Klaus skidded around a corner, his heart rate spiking as he scanned the crowd ahead. He saw none of the three men. But they were here, somewhere.
He knew he should have been more prepared. Turning to the Americans was a decision he could not take back, and it had almost worked. After receiving the note he’d transferred through the old beggar in Algiers, they’d gotten in touch immediately. Klaus had been assigned a CIA handler and an escape from Tangier was arranged on a diplomatic flight. He had thought it a brilliant plan…that is, until he’d shown up at the executive terminal and encountered a man he knew. The name escaped him in that terrible moment, but the face was one he would never forget—probably why the man had been chosen for the encounter. He wasa Czech national who had once employed Klaus to arrange funding for a large load of Semtex.
As the Czech approached Klaus that night, he’d frozen near the terminal entrance. Then fate had intervened. A Moroccan policeman blocked the man’s path and pointed to the car he’d left parked on the curb. Klaus didn’t wait to see the outcome.
On pure impulse he’d run into the terminal and bolted toward the security station. The security men regarded him suspiciously, and when Klaus saw no sign of his CIA handler, full-blown panic kicked in. Was the whole scheme a setup? Was there even an American jet outside? Was he minutes away from being bundled onto a flight to Moscow, a one-way ticket to hell?
Seeing nothing but threats, his thoughts had stuttered and tumbled until there seemed only one way out. He’d bolted toward a side door and run through a mazelike corridor that spilled into a parking lot. A cab, a wad of cash, a spare key. Thirty minutes later, he had successfully escaped.
In the days since, Klaus’s life had been on a constant downward trajectory. He had initially gone back to his apartment, but quickly had second thoughts. The Russians surely knew where he lived. Instead of remaining in his own flat, he’d moved to a neighbor’s unit—his friend was out of town, and he’d given Klaus a key so that he could feed the parakeets. With his getaway from Tangier ruined, the fear that had gripped him in recent weeks turned to paralysis. He was afraid to go outside and kept the curtains drawn tight. Then this morning, as he’d been sitting in his neighbor’s living room eating canned beans, his world had inverted once again. The closed-circuit security feed of his building’s streetside entrance, displayed on his neighbor’s computer, showed three big men bustling in off the street. None of their faces werefamiliar to Klaus, but he’d done enough work for the Russians to recognize them for what they were—a gaggle of GRU thugs.
He’d hurried to the door and monitored the peephole. The apartment with the birds was on the second floor, and soon he heard three sets of boots thundering up the stairs. Klaus held his breath behind the viewing port, willing the men to continue upward toward his fourth-floor unit. When they did, his knees nearly buckled from relief. But he knew he couldn’t stay where he was. The Russians suspected he was in the building, and if he didn’t turn up in his own unit, they might start searching the others.
Klaus waited thirty seconds. He threw a cup of seed into the birdcage. Then, with nothing more than his phone and wallet, he’d bolted out the door and run for the stairs. Outside, he turned toward the souk, which seemed like the best place to disappear. Moments later, however, he had looked back and seen the Russians in pursuit.
For ten minutes now Klaus had been running, turning, hiding. How long could he keep it up? He weaved amid shelves of cumin and ginger, rounded tables full of clothing. How had they tracked him to his building?
Then, suddenly, it dawned on him.
He pulled his phone from his pocket. That had to be it. Phones could be located. He considered simply turning it off. Would that be enough? Since the handset was obviously compromised, he decided he would never use it again anyway.
Just get rid of it!
He eyed a fruit stall and considered depositing it beneath a pile of dates.No, they’ll only find it. I should give them a moving target.
He saw the answer in a corner, idling behind a smoking grill. A young boy stood in the shadows. He was roughly ten years old,a stick figure in baggy pants and a knock-off Real Madrid jersey. His body was motionless, but his eyes were active, flicking across the crowds. He had to be a pickpocket, or some variation. Klaus knew there was an army of such street urchins here, kids who were hungry and desperate.
He checked over his shoulder. Seeing no immediate threat, he hurried toward the boy.
“Parlez-vous français?” he asked breathlessly. In this part of Africa, French was spoken more widely than English.
“Oui,” the boy replied, his face suddenly young and innocent.
“I want to hire you for an errand.” Klaus took out his wallet and removed a one-hundred euro note. “I want you to deliver this phone to an apartment.” He gave the address of his shoreside condo. “Knock on the door and my wife will answer. Give her the phone and she will give you another hundred euros.”
The boy looked at him warily, trying to decipher the scam. He would be weighing the odds of getting the second hundred euros. Estimating the black-market rate for a late-model iPhone.
