“You wouldn’t be touching it, they would—” But Gabriel stopped when he saw the look on her face. It was a look he remembered well from when she was a girl, a look that said she wouldn’t be budged.
The woman led them into the farmhouse while her husband unloaded the goats and herded them into the corral. She showed them to a primitive but functional shower, with a pair of tin buckets suspended on a rod and a rope to tip the water out through holes punched in the buckets’ sides. Gabriel saw Lucy’s eyes light up and invited her to use it first. He walked off a bit to get the lay of the land and stretch his tight muscles. By the time he returned, she was bundled up in a coarse towel, her hair dripping and her clothes laid out to dry on a rock in the sun.
“All yours,” she said.
He began unbuttoning his shirt. As he pulled it off, he saw Lucy staring. He looked down. “What?”
She came forward, traced a finger along one of the scars on his arm. It had come from a sword; there was a matching scar on the opposite side where the tip of the blade had come out. “Got that one in Giza,” he said softly. “Inside the Great Sphinx.” She moved on to a puckered knot of flesh on his side, from a bullet wound that had never healed properly. “Botswana,” he said in answer to her unspoken question. She traced a thin line running crookedly from his navel to his hip. “Ninety-third Street,” he said, “and Central Park West.”
She patted him gently on his side. “Take your shower,” she said. “I’ll get us some food.”
They sat in the modest farmhouse at a table that appeared to be made from a single cross-section cut from a huge tree, sharing a platter of dense Moroccan bread and bowls of thick vegetable soup. Lucy scarfed down three bowls.
“They don’t have a telephone,” she said between spoonfuls. “But they can drive us to the airport.”
Gabriel dug into his pocket and took out the piece of paper onto which he’d copied the Arabic word he had seen underlined on the map in Amun’s office. “Can you ask them if they know what this means?”
Lucy passed it to the man and spoke to him. The man nodded, uttered a few words. “Darif says it’s Arabic. It means ‘the web.’ Why? Is it important?”
Gabriel took the slip of paper back. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just trying to figure out what we’re dealing with.”
The man—Darif—stood and gestured toward the door.
“He wants to know if you’re ready to go,” Lucy said.
Gabriel hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the dull pain in his legs, his side, his chest. “Always,” he said.
Reza Arif parked the BMW near the Djemaa el Fna and came around to Sammi’s side to open the door for her. It struck her as an exaggerated gesture, a caricature of Middle Eastern courtliness, but she let him indulge himelf. Anything that kept her on his good side.
Arif led her to the heart of the busy square, pointing out buildings and regaling her with their history as they went. She tried to keep her eyes out for Gabriel or for either of the men she’d seen hustling him into the black car back in Cairo, but the crowd was too dense, too constantly in motion—a sea of heads and bodies and outstretched arms, every third one attempting to press something into her hands: a brass cup, a folded shawl, a painted vase. She shook her head at each offer and kept moving.
“There, do you see?” Arif said, pointing. “In that very building the famous British film director Alfred Hitchcock stood while making—” He turned in place, noticing that Sammi was no longer beside him. An old man with a yellowish beard trailing down the front of his robe had seized her wrist and, with his other hand, had begun to inscribe the outlines of a henna tattoo on her forearm.
“I don’t want—” Sammi was saying, but the man was shaking his head and intently ignoring her.
“The lady said she does not want,” Arif said, his voice suddenly cold, and the old man, looking to the side, saw the narrow blade of a stiletto by his throat. He dropped Sammi’s wrist and backed off. The stiletto vanished again into Arif’s sleeve.
“Stay close,” he said. “Not every old man is harmless here.”
Nor every young man, Sammi wanted to say. But she held her tongue and stayed by Arif’s side.
They spent the next hour entering carpet shops, of which there were any number in and around the square. The eighth—or was it the ninth?—had a sign identifying the proprietor as Nizan. The couple entered and was greeted warmly by the owner himself, who took note of Reza Arif’s expensive suit and immediately turned on the hard-sell reserved for tourists he believed to be wealthy. Arif answered him in Arabic while Sammi wandered around the shop, looking for any sign that Gabriel might have been here. She saw nothing to indicate one way or the other. The other seven—or was it eight?—shops had been the same. Sammi was starting to wonder if she’d even recognize a sign if she saw one. But she’d have ample opportunity to find out—there were half a dozen more shops to go.
Unseen by her, a man with a badly bruised jaw peered through a partly closed curtain and watched as Sammi walked the aisles. He smiled to himself, but it was a bitter smile with nothing of pleasure to it.
It was her—the French woman, the one who had shot his brother in cold blood. His fist clenched around the fabric of the curtain. He would have his revenge. He turned to the man beside him and explained in a few words who he’d seen.
“But, Naeem,” the other man said, his voice low, “Amun clearly said we are not to kill this one if we should see her—”
“Kill her?” Naeem stroked the bruise along his jaw. “I said nothing about killing her.”
“Let’s go,” Sammi said, taking hold of Arif’s sleeve. Through the fabric she could feel the handle of the stiletto. “I don’t see anything I like here.”
Arif shrugged at Nizan, as if to apologize. “My brother’s wife,” he said. “She has very particular tastes.”
“Of course,” Nizan said, his face not betraying a hint of disappointment as he bowed them out.
“Nothing,” Sammi said, once they were out in the street once more.
“Are you certain?”
“Of course not. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. But whatever it is, I didn’t see it.”
Arif looked at his wristwatch, a Patek Philippe boasting separate dials for the times in various cities around the world. In Marrakesh, the afternoon was waning, something Sammi hardly needed an expensive watch to tell her. “Maybe we should split up,” Arif said. “It will be faster. You do three, I do three.”
“All right. Point me in the right direction.”
Arif pulled out a map and showed her three locations on it.
As he did so, Naeem and his cohort appeared behind them in the doorway of Nizan’s shop. Amun joined them a moment later. The three of them watched as Arif headed off to the east, Sammi to the northwest.
“Follow the woman,” Amun ordered. “She will lead us to Gabriel Hunt.”
Chapter 17
Darif drove Gabriel and Lucy the thirty miles to Menara International. It was a long drive, made longer by an overturned truck that snarled traffic in both directions on the N8 highway—but at least this time they got to ride in the cab rather than in the trailer. Gabriel even managed a brief catnap on the way.
Lucy accepted Darif’s profuse farewells and followed Gabriel to the airport’s courtesy desk, where a young woman nodded sympathetically while Gabriel explained the situation. She turned the heavy black-painted telephone on the counter around to face him and he lost no time in putting a collect call through to New York.
“Let’s get you a ride back home,” he said to Lucy while he waited for Michael to answer.