They made several turns until the limo reached the expressway leading south out of the city. Sammi followed them onto the ramp and picked up speed but kept a steady distance behind them. It wasn’t long until the skyscrapers gave way to low-rises and the urban sprawl grew thinner. Eventually the limo exited the expressway and drove along a stretch of road to an airfield surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Sammi stopped at the edge of the fence. Through the binoculars she watched the limo pull up to the gated entrance. A sign on the fence warned in Arabic and English, PRIVATE! NO TRESPASSING!, and a security camera watched anyone who drove up. After a moment the gate lifted and the limo rolled in. The driver parked just a few yards past the fence, in a small lot next to the control tower. Sammi watched the men get out of the car and go inside the building. She scanned the rest of the property. Beside the tower was a single hangar; a small twin-engine corporate jet sat on the only runway. It appeared to be ready to go—its hatch was open and a staircase attached to the fuselage led down to the tarmac.
Sure enough, it wasn’t three minutes before Gabriel and the other two emerged from the tower, together with a pair of men in flight uniforms. They walked toward the jet and climbed aboard. The staircase automatically withdrew into the fuselage and the hatch closed. Moments later the plane was in the air.
Now what?
Sammi took a deep breath, let it out slowly. She checked in the rearview mirror to make sure her hair was all tucked under the headscarf again, and drove up to the gate. When you didn’t want to be noticed, she’d learned, the best way was sometimes to just walk boldly through the front door. The key was to look like you belonged, like there was no reason to pay attention to you. In this case, the fact that the van she was driving was one of theirs should help—as long as they didn’t take too close a look at her.
She waited, stared straight ahead, and tried not to look directly into the security camera. After a moment she honked the van’s horn.
Come on . . . !
She heard a click beside her and slowly the gate began to rise. With her heart racing, she drove inside and parked next to the tower. She slipped the handgun into her purse and got out. Past a pair of glass doors, she saw a reception desk, unmanned, and a flight of stairs. She climbed them two at a time.
At the top of the stairs was the control room. One man sat in front of a bank of monitors, watching radar sweeps in glowing green. His eyes widened at the sight of her and he reached for a telephone.
“Don’t move!” Sammi shouted, pointing the gun at him.
The man cautiously raised his hands.
“The plane that just left, where was it going?”
He shook his head.
She pointed the gun at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The acoustic tiles splintered and rained down on the man and his monitors. He flinched.
“Answer me!”
“M-M-Marrakesh . . .”
She approached him, the gun extended before her.
“Please . . . don’t shoot me . . .”
“I’ll only shoot you if you make me,” Sammi said. “Now: What other planes do you have at this airstrip that can make it to Marrakesh?”
“None,” the man said. “That was the only plane here.”
She’d had a bad feeling he was going to say that. Without lowering the gun, she dug her cell phone out of her purse and jabbed at the screen with her thumb.
“Hello?” The voice on the other end of the phone was reedy and nasal.
“Michael Hunt?”
“Yes? Who is this?”
“I’m a friend of your sister’s. And your brother’s. They’re both in trouble and I’m trying to help them.”
“What? Who are you? Where are you calling from? What’s the—”
“I’ll answer all your questions later,” Sammi said. “But right now I need you to get me on a plane to Marrakesh.”
Chapter 10
The Hawker 400 landed at another private airstrip near the foothills of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The sun cast an orange glow over a landscape that was already reddish to begin with; it wasn’t for nothing that Marrakesh was known as the Red City.
Back in his misspent youth, Marrakesh had been one of Gabriel’s favorite places in Africa. It was too bad that his first time back in years had to be under such undesirable circumstances.
As he was escorted down the steps to the tarmac, Gabriel felt the knife still pressing against his calf. It had been a gamble, not attempting to use it in the limo—a gamble that they’d be taking him to a private runway rather than a commercial airport with metal detectors. But he figured they had weapons of their own they wouldn’t want detected; if nothing else, Kemnebi was still carrying Gabriel’s Colt. And the prospect of a fight in the back of a moving car against two men bigger than he was had not greatly appealed. Besides, if Lucy was in Marrakesh, Marrakesh was where he needed to be.
Another limousine, this one blindingly white, waited at the foot of the steps. Gabriel was ushered inside. He saw two men already there, seated on the long padded bench behind the driver’s seat.
One of them, a thin man sporting a tidy pencil mustache, extended a hand. Gabriel ignored it. “Have you been to Marrakesh before, Mister Hunt?”
“Once or twice,” he said drily.
The limo pulled out of the airfield and onto a highway.
“It is a beautiful city,” the man said. “Not like Cairo, of course. But it has many pleasures.”
Gabriel merely stared, and the man, having run out of small talk for the moment, fell silent.
After half an hour they came to the famed Djemaa el Fna, the central square in the medina. It was the largest of its type in Africa. Gabriel saw the traditional water sellers, the snake charmers, the acrobats and jugglers performing for the hordes of tourists who were gathered about, snapping pictures. He saw a group of Chleuh dancing boys and beside them an old man leading a troupe of trained Barbary apes through a comic routine. And then there were the peddlers, of course, vendors of everything from souvenirs to dubious medicines, and the food stalls offering every sort of edible. The smells drifted into the limousine through the air vents, as did the muffled sounds of traditional Berber music and the clamor of the crowd.
The driver circled the square and went down a relatively empty side street. They stopped a block away and parked near what appeared to be an abandoned building made of sandstone and stucco. It was four stories tall, and the windows and front door were boarded up. Signs in Arabic looked to Gabriel like warnings to trespassers to keep out.
Gabriel got out of the car with the other men. Amun pointed back toward the Djemaa el Fna. “This way.”
“We’re going to buy souvenirs?” Gabriel asked. “I could use a pit viper or two.”
They walked the block back, entered the square, and moved to the right along the perimeter. Gabriel knew that if he was going to make a break for it, now was the time to do it. He could easily lose himself in the crowd, or at least cause enough of a diversion to get away. But that wouldn’t help Lucy. In fact, it might put her in greater danger. So he kept walking.
Kemnebi led the way around a wooden cabin with a striped fabric roof; under the fabric a fat man worked the lever of an ancient orange reamer, spilling an endless stream of juice into cups, which a boy who looked like his son sold to a line of thirsty tourists. Next to the cabin, a water seller insistently argued for the superiority of his beverage, shouting in thickly accented English, “Juice make you more thirsty! Clean water!” Looking at the man’s swollen leather pouch and the clattering tin cups he made his customers use, Gabriel questioned the truth of his claims. Even if the water was clean when it went into the cup . . .