The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018. Charles Cumming
the hollow of his collarbone. He was one of the hairiest people Carradine had ever seen.
‘No thanks. I’m just going for a walk.’
The man lowered the phone. He was smiling with forced sincerity, like a technique he had been taught at a seminar on befriending strangers. Carradine had the bizarre and disorienting sensation that the man knew who he was and had been waiting for him.
‘Out on the wing?’
‘What?’
‘You said you were going for a walk.’
Carradine rolled with the joke. ‘Oh. That’s right. Yes. So if you wouldn’t mind stepping aside I’ll just open the door and head out.’
An eruption of laughter, a roar so loud it might have been audible in the cockpit. An elderly Arabic woman emerged from one of the bathrooms and flinched.
‘Hey! I like you!’ said the man. He leaned a hand against the doorframe and shook out a crick in his neck. ‘Where you from?’
Carradine explained that he was from London. ‘And you?’
‘Me? I’m from everywhere, man.’ He looked like a mid-level drug dealer attached to a Colombian cartel: dishevelled, poorly educated, very possibly violent. ‘Born in Andalucía. Raised in Madrid. Now I live in London. Heading out to Morocco for some R & R.’
They shook hands. The Spaniard’s grip suggested prodigious physical force.
‘Ramón,’ he said. ‘Great to meet you, man.’
‘Kit. You too.’
‘So what you doing in Casablanca?’
Carradine went with the story he had agreed with Mantis.
‘I’m a novelist. Doing some research on my next book.’
The Spaniard again exploded with enthusiasm. ‘A writer! Holy shit, man! You write books?’ Carradine thought back to his first encounter with Mantis. There was something similarly inauthentic about Ramón. ‘You get any of them published?’
‘A few, yeah.’
‘Wow! So cool!’
A flight attendant came into the galley, obliging Carradine to step to one side. She was slim and attractive. Ramón stared at her as she bent down to retrieve a bottle of water from one of the catering boxes. He gazed open-mouthed at the outline of her uniform, all of the liveliness and energy in his face momentarily extinguished. He looked up, pursed his lips and shot Carradine a locker-room leer.
‘Nice, huh?’
Carradine changed the subject.
‘What do you do for R & R in Casablanca?’
It turned out to be the wrong question.
‘Oh man! The chicks in Morocco. You don’t know?!’ The flight attendant stood up, stared at Ramón with undisguised contempt and made her way back down the aisle. ‘Last time I was there, I meet this girl in a bar on the Corniche. She takes me to this apartment, we open a bottle of whisky and then – bang! Oh Kit, man! One of the great nights of my life. This chick, she was …’
Ramón’s recollection tailed off as a young child, accompanied by his father, was led to the bathroom. Carradine seized his chance to get away.
‘Well, it was interesting to meet you,’ he said.
‘You heading off?’
Ramón sounded distraught, almost as if he had been tasked with befriending Carradine and been judged to have failed.
‘Yeah. I’ve got stuff to read. Work to do. Just wanted to stretch my legs.’
‘Oh. OK. Sure. Great to meet you. You’re a cool cat, Kit. I like you. Good luck with those books!’
Carradine returned to his seat, oddly unsettled by the encounter. He remained there for the rest of the flight. He thought that he had seen the last of the Spaniard but, having landed and cleared passport control in Casablanca, found himself standing next to him in the baggage hall. As they waited for their respective suitcases, some of the last remaining passengers to be doing so, Ramón continued to grill Carradine on his life and career, to the point at which he began to wonder if he was testing his cover.
‘So, what? You’re writing a kind of spy story set in Morocco? Like a Jason Bourne thing?’
Carradine had always thought that his novels occupied a literary space equidistant between the kiss-kiss-bang-bang of Ludlum and the slow-burn chess games of le Carré. For reasons of intellectual vanity, he would ordinarily have tried to distance himself from Ramón’s description, but he was keen to stop talking about his work. As a consequence, he readily conceded that his ‘Moroccan thriller’ was going to be ‘full of guns and explosions and beautiful women’.
‘Like The Man Who Knew Too Much?’
Carradine thought of his father the night before munching naan bread and drinking claret. He didn’t think the comparison was accurate, but couldn’t be bothered to enter into a debate about it.
‘Exactly,’ he replied.
Ramón had spotted his bag moving along the carousel. He stepped forward, picked it up, slung the bag across his shoulder and turned around.
‘You wanna share a cab into town, man?’
Had this been his plan all along? To get alongside Carradine and to accompany him into Casablanca? Or was he merely an over-familiar tourist trying to do a fellow passenger a favour? Out of the corner of his eye Carradine saw his suitcase jerking along the carousel.
‘My bag will probably be a while longer,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry. The food on the flight was terrible. I’m going to grab something to eat in the terminal. You go ahead. Have a great trip.’
Ramón looked at the carousel. Three suitcases remained, two of which had passed them several times. Betraying an apparent suspicion, he shook Carradine’s hand, reiterated how ‘truly fantastic’ it had been to meet him and walked towards the customs area. Relieved to be shot of him, Carradine sent a WhatsApp to Mantis telling him that he had arrived, checked that the novel and the sealed package were still inside his case and walked out into the broiling Moroccan afternoon.
He had expected the chaos and clamour of a typical African airport, but all was relatively quiet as he emerged from the terminal. A hot desert wind was blowing in from the east, bending the tops of the palm trees and sending swirls of leaves and dust across the deserted concourse. Men in jeans and Polo shirts were perched on concrete blocks smoking in the shade of the terminal building. When they saw Carradine, they popped up and moved forwards, crowding him like paparazzi, repeating the phrase ‘Taxi mister, taxi’ as he tried to move between them. Carradine could see Ramón less than fifty metres away at the top of the rank standing next to a pranged beige Mercedes. He was negotiating a price with the driver. The Spaniard looked up, waving Carradine forward shouting: ‘Get in, man! Join me!’ Carradine was already uncomfortably hot. He was irritated by the drivers trying to force him towards their cars and intrigued enough by Ramón to want to know why he had taken such an interest in him. Was he working for the Service? Had Mantis sent him with instructions to keep an eye on the new kid on the block? Carradine raised a hand in acknowledgement as Ramón continued to gesture him forward. Should he stay or should he go? His curiosity began to tip the balance. Where was the harm in sharing a ride into town? He might even learn something. He duly rolled his suitcase towards the Mercedes and greeted Ramón for the third time.
‘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