Dark Places

25. Conaissance

Todra Gorge runs for a good twenty miles, roughly east to west, a scar five hundred feet deep carved by the thin river which trickles down to the east. We were at the east and narrowest end, where a half-dozen hotels huddle in the shadow of a group of overhanging crags very popular with rock-climbers. About a half-mile beyond the hotels the river collects into a pond, and a shockingly green wedge of trees and farmland, home to maybe five hundred poor village farmers, sits amid a sea of red rock and blistering heat like a piece of Indonesia dropped into the desert. Between the hotels and the village a road switchbacks up a landslide scar to the top of the gorge, big enough for buses. When we had been here before the river was a good two feet deep where the hotels were, and the buses had to get up a head of steam before splashing through it. But that had been spring. Now it was autumn, and the river was only six inches at its deepest.
   The gorge widened slightly and grew less precipitous as it climbed to the west. At the other end of the gorge was a youth hostel, and the adventure-traveler thing to do was to spend one day trekking up to the youth hostel, and the next trekking back, in the blistering heat of the desert sun. If you have to ask why then you will never understand. The trail followed the riverbed for some time, but then climbed up into the walls of the gorge. Sometimes the gorge widened, and you could climb from top to bottom without using your hands; but inevitably it narrowed again, sometimes for long stretches, where the rocky trail was littered with boulders, with a two-hundred-foot cliff to your right and a sheer two-hundred-foot drop to your left.
   That was why I had selected it. In the back of my mind I had pictured it like this: we wait for Morgan behind a boulder, keeping an eye out with the binoculars; he arrives; we waylay him and throw him over the edge; and by the time the Moroccan police get around to investigating the death of another clumsy traveler, we are back in Gibraltar. I guess we'd all had it in the back of our minds. When I explained this to them they nodded as if I was stating the obvious.
   "Sounds simple," Lawrence said. "Lot of things that could go wrong though."
   "Right. What if he's made friends on the bus, like he did in Indonesia, and he comes up with a crowd?" Nicole asks.
   "Or what if he decides it's too crowded and decides to explore the other way?" Lawrence suggested. "Or what if he's sick and doesn't even come here?"
   "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy," Hallam quoted. "I think the real difficulty here is that we have to keep ourselves hidden. If he sees any of us, the gig might be up. That will make it more difficult than I'd like to stay aware of where he is."
   "He might decide to take one of those extended camel treks into the desert instead of hiking up here," Lawrence said.
   "Or what if he's taken up rock-climbing and he spends the whole day going up those overhangs down at this end?" Hallam asked.
   "We should have thought about this more," Nicole said, shaking her head. "It seemed so simple in London, but now, I mean, no offense, Paul, but this isn't a plan, it's just a hope that he falls into our lap."
   "I know," I said morosely. Hallam and Lawrence nodded. I didn't know what to do.
   Steve cleared his throat noisily and we all turned to him.
   "Christ," he said. "A sadder lot of wet blankets I've never seen. I reckon it's a bloody good plan. I reckon you lot are all forgetting a couple of points here."
   "What's that?" I asked.
   "Well," and here he switched to a Cockney accent, "basically —"
   We all chuckled. It was a truck in-joke.
   "basically, I reckon you're all forgetting that we're not dealing with any kind of mysterious unknown stranger here. It's Morgan. So one, I'm telling you, Morgan's going to come up that gorge. You think he's going to go exploring and kissing babies in that village the other way? Not bloody likely, I'll tell you that. And two, have you all forgotten just how bloody fast that man moves when he's got a will in him? He's fitter than I am, I don't mind admitting. He's not going to slow down for any bloody group of mates he met on the coach last night. Remember how he hated it when anybody slowed him down? He might say 'I'll save you a beer at the top' but I reckon that's the only concession there. And I reckon that's only in the case there's no beer shortage up there."
   For Steve it was an extraordinarily long speech. When he finished the rest of us wore tentative smiles to match Steve's grin. He was right. Morgan knew us, and that might be a problem; but we knew Morgan, and that was our secret weapon.
   "I hear the ring of truth there," Hallam said.
   "I'm convinced," Nicole agreed.
   "Righto," Lawrence said. "Enough of this planning nonsense. I always hated it anyway. Shall we go do a little recco then?"
   We pulled on our hiking boots, bought some water, donned our hats, slathered on sunscreen, shouldered our day packs, and began to hike up the Todra Gorge. We weren't going to go all the way up. Just high enough to find the perfect spot for an ambush. The perfect place to kill a man.
   "Wish I had time to do some climbing," Hallam said wistfully as we set out, looking up at the line of climbers crawling up the cliff face opposite to the hotels. "Precious little of that in England. Some indoor walls, some bouldering, but it's not the same."
   "Maybe you could borrow some gear day after tomorrow when it's all over," I said, but I doubted it. I thought that when it was all over we would all want to simply get the hell out of Dodge and let our memories slowly heal over the mental scars.
   We moved up the riverbed, dry gravel occasionally marked by a pool of water. Most of the gorge-trekkers had already left, and we had the trail to ourselves. The intense Sahara sun beat down on us and we wrapped spare T-shirts around our necks to protect them. An anorexic creek trickled slowly down from the west end of the gorge, and the trail wandered drunkenly from one bank to the other. On either side were five-hundred-foot walls of red rock, scored into layers like rake marks on sand, each layer ten or twenty feet deep, the lines dipping and swaying like waves.
   After about an hour the trail selected the north side of the gorge, stuck with it, and began to rise away from the base. The slopes had changed from sheer to steep but navigable. Goatherds who looked as if they had just stepped out of the fourteenth century coaxed their nimble herds down the sides of the gorge to drink at the river. Another half-hour later we passed an old man with leather skin and black teeth leading a dozen camels to a pool of water. We gave the vile and violent creatures a wide berth.
   A little while after that the edges of the gorge began to close back in towards one another, as if magnetically attracted. The trail was still wide, about twenty feet, but the rock face to the right and plunge to the left gradually became steeper and steeper, and the trail grew littered with boulders. I wondered how the boulders got here. Did they fall from above? Or were they deposited by the flash floods that thundered down the Gorge once or twice each year?
   We moved more slowly now. Steve detached his Walkman. This was it; this was the kill zone. We examined the boulders we passed, the views up and down the trail, the cliff face beneath us. Looking for the perfect spot to take a man by surprise and throw him over the edge.
   We found it about twenty minutes' walk from where the walls grew sheer. About a two-hour walk from the hotel. The trail bent to the left, on a crag which overhung the gorge floor far below, went straight for about fifty feet, and then bent back to the right. The middle of this boomerang-shaped section of trail was decorated by a few enormous boulders. It was ideal. From the ends of that fifty-foot stretch we could see for a long way up and down the trail, but what went on in the middle would be invisible to other trekkers. And it was a hundred sheer feet down to the canyon floor.
   We would keep an eye for Morgan from there and wait for him to arrive. Two or three of us would hide behind one of the boulders as he walked past, and as he reached the middle of that projecting stretch, the others would step out at the other end, and his path would be blocked on both sides. It would all be over with in a hurry.
   That was the plan.

* * *

   We returned to the Hotel des Roches for dinner.
   "They need an extra character in their name," Lawrence said as he joined Steve and I at our table, in a corner distant from the other diners. "Hotel des Roaches. They seem to expect me to support a tribe of thousands while I'm here. I'm not ready for that kind of responsibility. I'm not a family man."
   "Maybe we could set up a Roach Refugee Camp," I suggested. "Rwanda-style. Roaches immigrate — but they don't emigrate!"
   "That's a sick joke," Steve said seriously, and for a moment he had me, but then his smile returned and he said "Don't make me approach the bloody UN High Commission on Roach Refugees. They'll up and form a bloody working subcommittee, see if they don't."
   "They might even issue a strongly worded press release," Hallam added, joining us. "A fact-finding tour sponsored by celebrity American roaches will be announced."
   "Richard Gere will appear on the Oscars asking us all for a moment of silence for the roaches all over the world… " I said. "Where's Nicole?"
   "Taking another shower." He shrugged. "What's for dinner?"
   "Depends on how many of the menu items are actually available," Lawrence said.
   "Cor, we're not in bloody Togo here," Steve said. "Morocco's nearly halfway civilized. I reckon the goods are pretty much as advertised."
   "Your optimism does you credit," Lawrence said. "Unfortunately your judgement does the reverse. Hey, that's not just you, that's Australia as a whole. I've got myself a defining proverb there."
   "Looks like eight different varieties of couscous," Hallam said, putting down the menu. "No camel though. Had rather a hankering for it."
   "We don't eat camels," I said. "Camels eat us. I think they're the dominant species."
   The waiter came by and we all ordered vegetable stew on couscous with bread and Cokes. Hallam ordered one for Nicole as well. None of us was vegetarian but we all shied away from meat when traveling in the Third World. Across the room a small group of fresh-faced young backpackers dined on lamb and goat, risking a tomorrow spent sweating and huddling within thirty feet of a toilet instead of trekking up the gorge. Ironically the five of us were probably more impervious to salmonella or whatever the meat might carry, as we were all heavily traveled, armed with cast-iron stomachs full of veteran kill-all-intruders bacteria recruited from at least five continents. But along with resistance to sickness came an increased reluctance to risk suffering it again.
   We chatted and smoked for maybe twenty minutes. Nicole didn't arrive. She was still absent when the food came. "I'll go get her," Hallam said. "Probably fell asleep in the tub or something." But he didn't sound entirely convinced — that wasn't like her — and he left the room more quickly than was absolutely necessary. We began to eat.
   Hallam came back about a minute later and after one look at his distraught face I forgot all about eating. He rushed up to us and dropped the scrap of paper held in his hand on to the table. He tried to say something but no words came out, just a yelp, like a dog that has been stepped on. I'd never seen him like this. Cool, competent, calm Hallam had been replaced by animal panic.
   I looked at the paper even though I already knew in my gut what had happened. A familiar scrawl.

HALLAM OLD BOY
YOUR WIFE LOOKS VERY PRETTY NAKED
WANT TO SEE HER AGAIN?
COME TO THAT PLACE IN THE GORGE
YOU KNOW
THE ONE YOU PICKED OUT FOR ME TODAY
RIGHT NOW, NO WAITING
BRING YOUR FRIENDS
TA

   "He's here," Hallam managed at last. "He's got her. We have to go."
   "Oh, no," Lawrence breathed, reading the note, and he stood up. As did Steve.
   I remained in my chair. I needed to think. There was no time to think but I needed to. Sometimes don't think, dois exactly what the situation calls for. But this time, I could tell, it called for don't do, think.
   "Paul, get up, he's only fifteen minutes ahead of us, we can catch him," Steve urged.
   "Not so fast," I said, forcing my voice to remain calm, dispassionate.
   "What the fuck?" There was a dangerous note of hysteria in Hallam's voice.
   "It's a trap," I said, thinking as I spoke. "Or a trick. One of the two."
   "Paul, he has Nicole," Hallam said desperately, as if that justified walking into certain death. Of course for him it did. By taking Nicole, Morgan had effectively neutralized Hallam. Smart. Demonically smart.
   "He's right," Lawrence said. "We have to think this through."
   "We haven't got time," Steve said.
   "It's a two-hour walk up the gorge," I said sharply. "Do you want to get there in two hours and be dead five minutes later, or do you want to get there in two hours five minutes ready for what's going to happen?"
   "We can talk on the way," Hallam urged.
   "If we go there," I said.
   "If?"
   "How do we know he's taken her there?"
   "It's in the note!" Steve exclaimed, as if it were the Ten Commandments.
   "Exactly," I said. "So all we know is that that's exactly what Morgan wants us to believe. Which is a long fucking way from making it the truth."
   There was a pause as Steve and Hallam absorbed this.
   "So where do you think she is?" Steve asked.
   "I think there's three possibilities," I said. I'd thought this through now, to something that made a kind of sense. "One. He told the total truth and he's taking her there right now because he's setting some kind of trap there and he's sure he'll be able to deal with us all. Two. It's a total lie and he's taking her the other way, towards the village, and trying to send us on a wild-goose chase." I nearly continued so he has time to finish her off, but feared it might send Hallam over the edge of sanity. The thought shook me to the core — not Nicole, please, not her. "Three. He's being really fucking fancy and he hasn't taken her anywhere. She's right here in his room in one of the hotels and he's counting on us running around like headless chickens and going everywhere else."
   "So which one?" Hallam asked.
   That was the proverbial sixty-four-megabyte question, wasn't it? What would Morgan do? What was he after? We didn't know anything.
   No; scratch that. We knew he was here, and that he'd followed us up the gorge today. (Unless one of us was in cahoots with him and had told him everything?… no.) We knew he had taken Nicole not more than half an hour ago, when she had gone to take a shower. Not an easy thing to do, even if he was twice her size; Nicole was stubborn as hell and wouldn't stop fighting unless there was no alternative.
   And we knew who he was. Morgan Jackson. We knew him well.
   "I think he told us the truth," I said. "I'm pretty sure. But I can't be totally sure. I think we should split up. One group goes down the trail. The other group stays here, checks the hotels and checks the road towards the village. But I don't think they'll find anything. I think I've got a pretty good idea what he's up to."
   "What's that?" Lawrence asked.
   "I think he's got a gun," I said. That explained a lot. It explained how he had spirited Nicole away without a scream or a loud battle. I couldn't see him ambushing her, clubbing her over the head, and carrying her away from the hotel — then he would have a hundred pounds of deadweight to carry, and if he doesn't judge the blow just right he only stuns her or he hits her too hard and she's got blood streaming from her head, and we are in a fairly populated tourist zone, it's just too risky for him. And I couldn't see Nicole meekly giving in to him if he only had a knife, she would have screamed or kneed him in the balls or run for it or something, she knew we were only steps away. But a gun, that was different, that was a trump card. No sense screaming and getting us all killed right then and there.
   "And he's just planning to lure us up there and shoot us all," Lawrence said.
   "The simplest plan is most likely to be correct," I said. "And it doesn't get any simpler than that. Which is another good reason to split up, so that he doesn't just off us all."
   "So he has a gun," Steve said. He sat down. So did Lawrence, and then Hallam. Hallam looked a little better. I think now that we had defined the terms of the engagement, had reduced some of the uncertainty, it was easier for him. And if I was right, he still needed Nicole alive as bait, alive and ambulatory, and wouldn't have time to do anything awful to her. All good things.
   "I think so," I said.
   "And Nicole," Steve continued.
   I nodded.
   "And we don't."
   I nodded again.
   "Bit of a bloody problem, isn't it?" Steve said, and scratched his head.
   "I don't think there was any struggle," Hallam said all of a sudden. "The note was in our room. I expect he got her coming in or out of the shower and took her back to our room to get dressed."
   "So what do we do?" Lawrence asked me.
   What am I, the Answer Man? I wanted to shoot back. I wanted to defer to Hallam. But he was too rattled to think clearly. And maybe I was the right man to ask. I felt that fury rising inside me again. Since we'd entered Morocco I'd thought of facing Morgan with trepidation, thought of it as some kind of unspeakably awful chore that had to be performed, best done and finished and never thought of again. But now that it was at hand I felt very differently. Now I welcomed it. Now I relished the chance.
   "We have to decide who stays back here," I said. "And then, then I have got a plan. It's not a very good plan but it's all I've got. If anyone has a better idea, believe me, I would so much love to hear it right now."
   "What's your plan?" Hallam asked.
   I told them.
   Everybody agreed it wasn't a good plan. But nobody had a better.