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The Man Between
‘Chaos back there,’ he said. ‘Thanks for helping me out.’
‘No problem.’ The driver popped the boot. ‘Where you headed, man? I drop you off.’
Carradine was staying at a Sofitel in the centre of town. It transpired that Ramón was staying in a hotel less than five hundred metres away.
‘No way! I’m at the Sheraton! Literally like no distance from where you are.’ A part of Carradine died inside. ‘We can meet up later, go for a drink. You know any good places?’
‘Somebody recommended Blaine’s to me.’
The words were out of his mouth before Carradine had time to realise what he had said. He was due to meet Yassine at Blaine’s the following evening. What if Ramón showed up during their dinner?
‘Blaine’s? I know it! Full of chicks, man. You’re gonna love it.’
He could feel his carefully arranged schedule being quickly and efficiently unpicked by the Spaniard’s suffocating camaraderie. He didn’t want to be put into a position where he had to work his cover, lying to Ramón about phantom meetings with phantom friends just to avoid seeing him. Why the hell hadn’t he taken a separate taxi?
‘Sofitel,’ Ramón told the driver, speaking in accentless French. ‘Près du port. Et après le Sheraton, s’il vous plaît.’
Somewhere between the aircraft and the Mercedes the Spaniard had developed a case of volcanic body odour. The car was quickly filled with the smell of his stale sweat. It was hot in the back seat, with no air conditioning, and Carradine sat with both windows down, listening to the driver muttering to himself in Arabic as they settled into a queue of traffic. Ramón offered Carradine a cigarette, which he gladly accepted, taking the smoke deep into his lungs as he gazed out onto lines of parked cars and half-finished breezeblock apartments, wondering how long it would take to get into town.
‘I never asked,’ he said. ‘What do you do for a living?’
Ramón appeared to hesitate before turning around to answer. His eyes were cold and pitiless. Carradine was reminded of the sudden change in his expression when the flight attendant had walked into the galley. It was like looking at an actor who had momentarily dropped out of character.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘I’m just a businessman. Came out here to do a friend a favour.’
‘I thought you said you were here for the rest and recreation?’
‘That too.’ Ramón touched his mouth in a way that made Carradine suspect him of lying. ‘R & R everywhere I go. That’s how I like to roll.’
‘What’s the favour?’ he asked.
The Spaniard cut him a look, turned to face the oncoming traffic and said: ‘I don’t like to talk too much about work.’
Another five minutes passed before they spoke again. The taxi had finally emerged from the traffic jam and reached what appeared to be the main highway into Casablanca. Ramón had been talking to the driver in rapid, aggressive French, only some of which Carradine was able to understand. He began to think that the two men were already acquainted and wondered again if Ramón had deliberately waited for him to come out of the airport.
‘You’ve met before?’ he asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘Your driver? You’ve used him before?’
The Spaniard flinched, as if to suggest that Carradine was asking too many questions.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, nothing. It just sounded like this wasn’t the first time you’d met.’
At that moment the driver – who had not yet looked at Carradine nor acknowledged him in any way – turned off the highway onto a dirt track leading into a forest.
‘What’s going on?’ Carradine looked back at the main road. Paranoia had settled on him like the slowly clinging sweat under his shirt. ‘Where are we going?’
‘No idea.’ Ramón sounded disconcertingly relaxed. ‘Probably has to visit his mother or something.’
The Mercedes bumped along the track, heading further and further into the woods.
‘Seriously,’ said Carradine. ‘Where are we going?’
The driver pulled the Mercedes to the side of the track, switched off the engine and stepped out. The heat of the afternoon sun was overwhelming. Carradine opened the door to give himself an option to run if the situation should turn against him. There was a small wooden hut about ten metres from the road, occupied by a woman whose face he could not see. The driver approached the hut, held out a piece of paper and passed it to her. Ramón put a tattooed arm across the seat.
‘You look tense, man. Relax.’
‘I’m fine,’ Carradine told him.
He was anything but fine. The stench of sweat was overwhelming. He was convinced that he had walked into a trap. He looked in the opposite direction, deeper into the woods. He could see only trees and the forest floor. He used the wing mirror on the driver’s side to check if there was anybody on the road behind them, but saw no sign of anyone. Through the woods beyond the hut he could make out a small clearing dotted with plastic toys and a children’s slide. The driver was coming back to the car.
‘Que faisiez-vous?’ Ramón asked him.
‘Parking,’ the driver replied. Carradine smiled and shook his head. His lack of experience had got the better of him. He looked back at the hut. The veiled woman was marking the piece of paper with an ink stamp. She slammed it onto a metal spike.
‘Crazy!’ Ramón produced a delighted grin. ‘In Casablanca they pay their parking tickets in the middle of the fucking woods. Never saw this before, man.’
‘Me neither,’ Carradine replied.
It was another forty-five minutes to the hotel. Carradine sat in the heat of the back seat, smoking another of Ramón’s cigarettes. On the edge of the city the Mercedes became jammed in three-lane traffic that inched along wide colonial boulevards packed with cars and motorbikes. Ramón grew increasingly agitated, berating the driver for taking the wrong route in order to extract more money for the journey. The swings in his mood, from back-slapping bonhomie to cold, aggressive impatience, were as unexpected as they were unsettling. Carradine followed the progress of the journey on his iPhone, trying to orientate himself in the new city, the street names – Boulevard de La Mecque, Avenue Tetouan, Rue des Racines – evoking all the antiquity and mystique of French colonial Africa. Mopeds buzzed past his door as the Mercedes edged from block to block. Men hawking drinks and newspapers approached the car and were shooed away by the driver, who switched on the windscreen wipers to deter them. Several times Carradine saw cars and scooters running red lights or deliberately going the wrong way around roundabouts in order to beat the jam. Stalled in the rivers of traffic he thought of home and cursed the heat, calling his father to tell him that he had arrived. He was busy playing backgammon with a friend and had no time to talk, their brief exchange leaving Carradine with a sense of isolation that he found perversely enjoyable. It was exhilarating to be alone in a strange city, a place about which he knew so little, at the start of a mission for which he had received no training and no detailed preparation. He knew that his father had been posted to Egypt by the Service in the early years of his marriage and thought of the life he must have led as a young spy, running agents in Cairo, taking his mother on romantic trips to Sinai, Luxor and Aswan. Ramón offered him yet another cigarette and he took it, observing that the smog outside was likely to do more damage to his lungs. Ramón went to the trouble of translating the joke for the benefit of the driver who turned in his seat and smiled, acknowledging Carradine for the first time.
‘Vrai!’ he said. ‘C’est vrai!’
That was when Ramón showed him his phone.
‘Jesus Christ, man. You see this?’
Carradine pitched the cigarette out of the window and leaned forward. The headline on the screen was in Spanish. He could see the words REDMOND and MUERTA.
‘What happened?’
‘They killed the Redmond bitch,’ Ramón replied. ‘Resurrection fucking killed her.’
8
They kept her in the van for the first thirty-six hours. She screamed when they took off the gag, so they put it on again and left her to rage. They offered her water and food, but she refused it. She soiled herself. When she had spent all of her energy, Redmond wept.
Towards the end of the second day they took her from the van, still blindfolded, and tied her to a chair in the basement of the farmhouse. They played the recording into the room. A loop of Redmond’s words, repeated over and over again. A torture of her own making. The bearded man called it ‘The Two Minutes of Hate’, after Orwell, but the recording lasted for more than twelve hours.
The immigrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean are the same insects already swarming over Europe. They choke our schools and hospitals. They dirty our towns and cities. They murder our daughters at rock concerts. They mow down our sons on the streets.
It went on and on into the night. Whenever Redmond looked as though she was falling asleep, they turned up the volume. She was prevented from sleeping by the words she had written. ‘Sentenced by your own sentences,’ said the man who had knocked down her husband.
The only answer is to lock up every young Muslim man or woman whose name appears on a terrorist watchlist. How else to protect British citizens from slaughter? If we cannot take the sensible precaution, outlined by the government of the United States, of preventing potential terrorists from entering the United Kingdom from countries that are known sponsors of Islamist terror, then this is the only option remaining to us.
On the morning of the third day they removed Redmond’s gag and again offered her food and water. This time she accepted. The bearded man asked her, on camera, if she wished to defend her words and actions. She said that she stood by everything she had written. She insisted that, given the chance, she would write and broadcast everything again. She had no regrets for exercising her right to free speech and for articulating views held by millions of people in the West who were too cowed by political correctness to speak their minds.
The bearded man was standing behind her as she spoke. He lifted her hair clear of her shoulders, held it in a fist above her head, and sliced her throat with a knife. Redmond’s body was dumped at a stretch of waste ground on the outskirts of Coventry. A photograph of her corpse was sent to the editor of the British newspaper who had commissioned her column.
Somerville switched off the recorder.
‘What are your feelings about what happened to Lisa Redmond?’ he said.
Bartok shrugged.
‘I do not know enough about it.’ She stood up and stretched her back, twisting one way, then the other. ‘I know that Kit was upset. He talked about it a lot. I think it haunted him.’
‘What about you?’ the American asked. His tone was supercilious. ‘Were you upset by it? Were you haunted, Lara?’
Bartok picked up one of the biscuits. She turned it over in her fingers. She liked Somerville. She trusted him. She did not like or trust the American.
‘As I have said. I did not know Redmond’s writing. I did not have the opportunity to listen to her radio broadcasts wherever I was hiding in the world. She sounded like somebody who we might have gone after.’
The American seized on this, closing the space between them.
‘We?’
‘Resurrection.’ Bartok looked at Somerville as if to suggest that the American was starting to annoy her. ‘In the old days. Before the violence and the killing. She was the sort of figure Ivan would have looked at. Redmond, and those like her, men like Otis Euclidis, they gave encouragement to the bigots, to the ignorant. Ivan wanted to teach them a lesson. We all did.’ She bit into the biscuit. It was dry. She could only swallow by taking a sip of water to wash it down. ‘When I see what has happened to Resurrection, I feel nothing but sadness. It began as something remarkable. It began as a phenomenon. Ivan had a conception of a new kind of revolutionary movement, one which harnessed the power of the Internet and social media, one which was fuelled by international outrage among young and old alike. He wanted to take that revolutionary movement out onto the streets, to fight back against those who had corrupted our societies. He knew that Resurrection would catch fire with people, inspire groups and individuals, oblige the masses to mount operations of their own – however small, however apparently insignificant – so that bit by bit and step by step, democracy and fairness would be restored. But all of the hope and the beauty of those ideas, the purity of the early attacks, has been lost.’
Somerville reached for the recorder. They needed to get the whole story out of Bartok. There was no point letting her talk during the breaks if nobody was keeping a record.
‘Would you like to go back to those early months?’ he asked.
‘Of course, whatever you want,’ she said.
‘Please. Tell us how it all got started.’
SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE EYES ONLY / STRAP 1
STATEMENT BY LARA BARTOK (‘LASZLO’)
CASE OFFICERS: J.W.S./S.T.H – CHAPEL STREET
REF: RESURRECTION/SIMAKOV/CARRADINE
FILE: RE2768X
PART 2 of 5
‘Euclidis was our first target. That was the first and most brilliant idea of Ivan’s, to capture this snake, this poison in the bloodstream of public life, and to show the world that decent people were prepared to stand up to hate, to put an end to divisive words, to expose Euclidis for the narcissist that he was. For all his expensive clothes and his clever talk, we showed the world that he was just a self-interested clown. He blogged to make money. He spread lies to get rich. To get laid. He was not interested in changing the system, in making the world a better place. He and his friends – the alt-right, the white supremacists, the anti-Semites, the Holocaust deniers – they had no alternative ideology. They had no ideas. They just wanted to draw attention to themselves. They wanted to make decent citizens feel uncomfortable and frightened. That was their reason for living. They were bullies, high on hate.
How did Euclidis draw so many admirers? By making stupid people feel better about their stupidity. By allowing bigots to think they were justified in making anti-Semitic statements, saying that it was OK to hate women, to be aggrieved about people of colour, about immigrants. The sad truth is that there were enough trolls buying his books, reading his articles, attending his talks to make him a rich man. They gave him the fame he craved. Euclidis was a junkie for attention. And if they didn’t give it to him in public, they gave it to him on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook. We had to take him down.
So Ivan, with my help, and with the assistance of Zack Curtis and
We filmed him in secret, as the world now knows. We were able to show on camera that Otis Euclidis was a charlatan, a fraud. He confessed that he had done it all to make money. He had never meant anything he had said or written to be taken seriously. His followers were ‘clowns’ and ‘losers’. When he had said in interviews that black lives ‘did not matter’, he had been ‘joking’. When he had written that feminism was ‘the worst invention since gunpowder’, he had only been ‘fooling around’. He showed himself to be a fraud who believed in nothing but fame. When we screened the film, when we put it out on the Internet for the world to see, and we saw the reaction, well, it was a beautiful moment.
Almost immediately there were copycat attacks. Dozens of politicians and right-wing figures around the world came under threat. My favourite was done by the refugee in Amsterdam. The kitchen porter. A Muslim from Iraq who had been washing dishes in a restaurant so that he could feed his wife and baby daughter. He was no older than twenty-five or twenty-six. Samir. I’ve forgotten his surname. [JWS: Samir Rabou] He learned that Piet Boutmy, the leader of the Dutch far-right party – again, I don’t remember the name of this party [JWS: Partij voor de Vrijheid] – was eating in the restaurant. A waiter, a Syrian, I believe, came into the kitchen and told him Boutmy was there. Samir knew about the kidnapping of Euclidis, he told the police who later interviewed him that he had followed Resurrection from its very first statements and that he greatly admired Ivan Simakov. He took off his washing gloves, kept his apron, walked out of the kitchen and went directly into the restaurant. The security guard protecting Boutmy thought he was a waiter. The table was covered in many dishes, including – perfectly! – a soup prepared with beetroots which was still very hot. Also bottles of water, glasses of red wine, cutlery, a vase of flowers. Shouting ‘Resurrection!’ Samir lifted the whole table on top of this racist animal, soaking him to the bone, also the colleague from the same party who was dining with him. I heard that he faced no charges and soon found another job at a rival restaurant. It was beautiful.
Everything that Ivan and myself had hoped for came to pass. Ivan was worried that the Resurrection movement would burn out. It didn’t. He wrote that he wanted Resurrection to have ‘a seismic effect on public attitudes to the liars and enablers of the Right’. This is exactly what happened. The summer homes of criminal bankers were burned to the ground. Cars belonging to producers at Fox News were vandalised and damaged. Those who had attended white supremacist rallies were identified by their peers and targeted for retribution. They paid the price for their hate with the loss of their careers, their friends. All it took was one or two examples for everyone to follow suit.
But, of course, Resurrection changed. What started as a non-violent movement, symbolic acts targeted against deserving victims, quickly became violent. I was naive to believe that this would not happen, but what distressed me was Ivan’s willingness to change his position, not only towards non-violence, but also concerning his own role as a figurehead. He wanted the limelight. He craved adulation. I had not identified these characteristics in him when we first met. His vanity, his stubbornness, his readiness to lose sight of what Resurrection was about and instead to place himself at the heart of what became a hijacked, paramilitary organisation. It became impossible to live with him. I could no longer do useful work. I lost my respect for Ivan Simakov and I left him. That is when they began to hunt me down.
9
Carradine reached his room and switched on the television.
Every major news network was carrying the story. The police believed the murder had been carried out by the same members of Resurrection who had kidnapped Redmond five days earlier. Tributes were being paid by friends and colleagues, inevitable expressions of outrage articulated by politicians, fellow journalists and friends.
Carradine muted the television. He sat on the bed and felt a hollowness inside him close to a feeling of personal responsibility in the death of an innocent woman. Had he done more to help, had he found the courage to cross the street and to confront Redmond’s kidnappers, she might still be alive. He thought of the girl who had been standing beside him, chatting away to her friend. So I says to him, I’m like, no way is that happening, yeah? I’m like he needs to get his shit together because I’m like just not going through with that bullshit again. Where was she now? How would she react to news of this kind? Would she share Carradine’s remorse or experience nothing but a momentary, fleeting anxiety that Resurrection had again resorted to murder? Would she even be aware that Redmond had been killed?
He went to the window and looked down at the vast city. Low whitewashed buildings stretched in a broad semi-circle to the Atlantic coast. At the sea’s edge the vast Hassan II Mosque dominated the skyline; to the north-west, the cranes and wharves of the port were blocks of shadow partly obscured by a high-rise hotel. Carradine had detested Redmond. He had abhorred her character and public style. She had weaved deliberate ignorance into casual prejudice with the sole purpose of inciting outrage, hysteria and fear. She had craved the spotlight of notoriety. In the wake of an Islamist suicide bombing on the streets of London, she had called for ‘internment’ for male Muslims under the age of forty. Handed a column in a tabloid newspaper with which to disseminate her toxic views, she had advocated the use of naval warships to prevent refugees – many of them fleeing the horrors of Syria and Yemen – from crossing the Mediterranean. When her rhetoric became too vile even for the leather-skinned editors of the Fourth Estate, Redmond merely had to look across the Pond to find any number of right-wing media outlets in the United States eager to beam her prejudices into the homes of the ignorant and the dispossessed. Indeed, Redmond had been only days from moving to the United States to work for Fox News when she had been seized by Resurrection. Carradine knew that if he opened Twitter, or switched to Fox itself, he would be swamped in partisan bile and hate. For every person shocked by Redmond’s murder there would be another openly celebrating; for every person applauding Resurrection for taking the fight to the goons and trolls of the alt-Right, there would be another – like Carradine himself – who knew that violence only made the situation far worse.
He turned from the window and began to unpack. The sealed envelope was at the top of his suitcase. He took it out and placed it on the bed. To try to clear his head he did fifty press-ups, took a shower and changed into a fresh set of clothes. Whatever was in the package, he knew that he could now be incriminating himself by passing documents to a suspected member of a terrorist organisation. The Redmond murder had changed the game. He had been transformed – without prior agreement – into a foot soldier in the global struggle against Resurrection. To hell with the Service; Carradine needed to do what he had to do. He picked up the package and felt it in his hands. He could make out the edges of the passport, the outline of the document.
He hesitated momentarily – then cut at the Sellotape using the knife on a bottle opener from the minibar. He reached inside the package.
It was a British passport, just as Mantis had said it would be. Carradine opened it to the back. A photograph of Bartok, identical to the one he was carrying in his wallet, looked out at him from the identity page. Bartok was identified as ‘Maria Consuela Rodriguez’, a British citizen, born 8 June 1983. A Santander credit card fell out of the passport and dropped onto the floor. The name MS M RODRIGUEZ was stamped across the bottom. The back of the card was unsigned.
Carradine reached into the package and pulled out a smaller rectangular envelope. The envelope was sealed. No name or address had been written on it, only the word ‘LASZLO’ in block capitals. This time he did not bother using the knife. He tore the envelope open with his hands.
