The Desert Run Read online

  Up above, there was a roof terrace, kind of like the ramparts of the castle, and the view from there was awesome. You could see the mountains on one side, and the haze from the city on the other. There were a few other buildings around us, but they were far enough away that no one would see what we were up to. Mostly, we were just surrounded by the beautiful garden. Oh, and the pool.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time we arrived, unwashed after nearly four days driving in a van with no air con. We hadn’t been too worried about the swimming pool when we booked, but now, it was just about the best thing in the whole place, twinkling blue against the orangey red of the landscape.

  We didn’t waste any time. We left the van door open, changed into our shorts, and just jumped right in. It felt amazing. Just to be there felt amazing. I couldn’t help but think about Peter, the asshole guy from the interview. Where would he be now? Sitting in some office somewhere, worrying about spreadsheets and where the stationery cupboard was. And what was I doing? Floating in my own pool in the Moroccan desert, as the sunset lit up the mountains in more shades of red and gold than I even knew existed. I realised then I’d never wanted that job, not really, or not for the right reasons anyway. I still didn’t know exactly what I did want, but it wasn’t that.

  I stayed in the pool that first night for ages. I floated on my back and watched the sky fade from blue to black. I watched the stars appear, one by one, until the whole of the heavens stretched out above me. A billion stars, the eternity of the infinite universe. The water warm and comfortable even though the night air by then was cool. What we were doing was finally beginning to feel real by then.

  20

  We couldn’t get a mobile signal at the house, but it had Wi-Fi, so it was just as easy to get in touch with Ahmed as it had been from home. Ben sent him a message that night, saying we’d arrived and Ahmed replied with the name of a café in the town nearby and a time for us to meet the next day. We ate the rest of the food we had in the van and went to bed. I began to sense then how nervous we both were. I think for different reasons. For Ben, there was so much riding on whether Ahmed was for real or not. I kind of hoped he wasn’t. That way, we’d get out of actually going through with this, but neither of us would lose face. But even with our nerves we didn’t stay awake for long that night; driving takes it out of you.

  The town where we were meeting Ahmed was twenty kilometres away, on a road that cut through a scrubby desert landscape that stretched off to the horizon, flat and featureless in most directions, only the mountains to the north giving any shape to the land. We’d taken the boards off the roof; they were safely stashed in the house, but even so, we felt out of place on the road in Ben’s van, among the trucks and pickups and the old-style Mercedes everywhere. But no one paid us much attention.

  We left the house early, and we had no food, so we stopped along the way at a kind of truck stop restaurant. This wasn’t a tourist area. We were the only westerners there, but apart from a few curious glances we were mostly ignored. For my part, I tried to ignore the dirt and grime everywhere. But I drew the line at drinking from the tin cup that we were given with our plates of food. I stuck to bottled water.

  Ben and I weren’t talking much. We were both properly nervous now, not even trying to hide it from each other, just trying to deal with it. I sometimes wonder, if either one of us had found the courage to say we didn’t want to go through with it at that point, we might have given up. But it took less courage not to think and just to push on with the plan. Just to keep taking the baby steps toward a fate we’d put in place from the safety and distance of England.

  We got to the town where Ahmed had arranged to meet us. It was closer to the mountains, so that they seemed to loom over the dusty buildings and dirty streets. As we drove through the outskirts, it seemed empty. Three-storey apartment blocks set well back from the road, many of them unfinished with steel rods poking out the roof, as if another floor had been planned but never delivered. But they were all lived in, with washing hanging from the windows. There were no gardens here, just a kind of hard-baked wasteland where goats wandered, and rubbish blew on the hot breeze. There were a few cars parked around, battered Renaults and Fiats, but they made Ben’s van look good. As we got closer to the centre of town, still amazingly able to follow our GPS, it got busier. The road filled up with cars and motor scooters. Little gangs of kids stared at us as we drove past, and some waved. Most of them seemed to be wearing Manchester United football shirts, old ones with Eric Cantona on the back. Men in dirty robes watched us too. They sat outside cafés smoking shisha pipes, their faces the colour of leather, their dark eyes following as we drove past. Most of the women we saw were covered up, their faces and bodies hidden beneath the veils they wore.

  Most of the signs were in two languages, the indecipherable Arabic script that we couldn’t read a word of, and a second language that looked like French. And then a few names were written in bad English. Ahmed had sent us to a café called Happy Palms, and we found it just where the GPS said it would be. Ben rolled the van to a stop across the street, and we got out and crossed the road.

  The café didn’t look much different from some of the others we’d passed. Half of it was inside, the other outside, and there was little distinction between the two parts. There were large wooden containers filled with plants, so it felt almost like a garden but the leaves were dirty and dusty from the street. In one corner there was a charcoal burner glowing hot, and a few kids were busy ferrying hot coals and shisha pipes to groups of men who sat around small metal tables, drinking from tiny glasses and puffing out clouds of smoke. It actually smelt really nice, sweet and pungent. I looked at Ben to see what to do, but he seemed uncertain too. Then one of the kids came up to us and said something in rapid Arabic.

  Neither of us knew what to do to. Ben was looking around as if he might spot Ahmed, but no one looked likely. In the end, I pointed to a table and asked the kid if we could sit there. He said something back that I didn’t understand, and then beckoned us angrily to follow him and sit there. He said something else, and I shrugged and made a drinking motion with my hand.

  “Tea,” I said, until I thought the kid understood, and held up two fingers, one for each of us. He still looked confused, but an older guy shouted something to him. I guess he translated, and the kid shouted back, but then ran off. He didn’t bring us anything though. He just hovered near the wall watching us, like he was hoping we’d go away so he didn’t have to deal with us.

  “Now what?” I said to Ben, who’d sat down opposite me.

  “We wait until Ahmed turns up,” Ben said. He was pale and drawn and I could see how much he wanted this to go well. Me, I hoped Ahmed would stand us up. I just wanted to get away from there.

  Still the kid watched us and did nothing. The man who’d helped me with the order shouted something to us, but it was in Arabic, so we still didn’t understand. I smiled back and tried my ‘tea’ mime again, but the guy kept shouting and then stared at us while we sat there, feeling about two thousand miles out of place.

  Then Ahmed arrived.

  “Hey guys! You must be Ben, and Jake, right? Welcome!” A young Moroccan man was walking toward us, his arms open. He was about our age, maybe a little older, dressed in tight jeans and a white shirt. Skinny, hair cropped short, and teeth already stained by something, coffee maybe or just a lack of cleaning. Ben stood up at once, and I did the same. Ahmed reached out his hand like an American rapper might, a fist pump instead of a handshake, his fingernails nearly black with grime.

  “I can’t believe you actually made it! You crazy crazy English boys!” Ahmed motioned us to sit. He looked around until he saw the kid and he shouted at him in Arabic for a minute until he finally scurried around bringing us various things, a shisha pipe for each of us, filled with sweet apple tobacco, and then mint tea, which Ahmed poured for us into small glasses. “You motherfucking crazy boys,” Ahmed kept saying. It was like we’d known him for years.
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  And for me, it actually felt like meeting an old friend—I suppose he was one in a way. Ben had spent hours talking to him, discussing prices and stuff, and I’d played my part in that. What was a little weird was that they didn’t seem to know what to say to each other now. I was doing most of the talking. Ahmed was asking question after question: How the journey had been. How we’d found the café; what we thought of Morocco, the tea, the town we were in now, where we were staying. I was cautious, though. We’d already agreed to not tell Ahmed where we were staying, nor any details about what we were planning on doing once we got hold of the dope. It just seemed a sensible precaution.

  “So, you know my cousin Mo?” Ahmed said to me. I was drawing in a big breath of apple tobacco smoke, and I stopped, then blew out a big cloud before passing the pipe to Ahmed.

  “Yeah, we met at a job interview,” I replied.

  “And you just ask him for somewhere to buy hashish?” He shook his head again in amazement. It was the first time he’d mentioned the subject of why we were meeting, and his voice dropped so that there was no danger of anyone nearby overhearing. Even so, I noticed Ben stiffen.

  “Yeah,” I said. I felt I should say something else, but there wasn’t anything more to say.

  Ahmed waited and then nodded, as if he understood.

  “I have some here. For you to see the quality.” Ahmed reached into the pocket of his denim jacket and pulled out a foil-wrapped rectangle. He placed it on the table, keeping it hidden with the palm of his hand until Ben put his hand over it too, and Ahmed took his away. Ben pulled the dope into his lap, but did nothing more, not even looking at it, his eyes roaming the café to see if anyone had noticed. If they had, no one cared.

  “It’s very good quality. When you asked for so much, I don’t know at first if I can get it?” Ahmed said, smiling. “But for a friend of my cousin, I have to try. And in the end, I get it. Go have a look. Have a smell. Is good. Very, very good.”

  I watched Ben as he unwrapped it. He was keeping it under the table and out of sight, so it was only his face I could see. He put it up to his nose, still hidden in his hand, and he breathed in, then rewrapped it again. He pushed it into his jeans pocket then glanced at me. He gave a tiny nod.

  “You take it away, you have a little smoke, you see if you like it. You see if Ahmed do a good job. Tomorrow, we do the deal, huh?” He flashed a huge smile at Ben.

  “Where are we going to meet? We can’t do it here,” Ben said.

  “No.” Ahmed kept smiling and leaned forward to top up Ben’s tea. “You stop out of town. You meet my friend there. He will bring the hashish. You will bring the money. No more than five minutes. There is no risk that way of people who don’t understand, seeing.” He leaned back again and reached into his pocket for a scrap of paper on which he’d drawn a map. He placed it on the table facing Ben and stabbed a finger where he’d drawn a black cross.

  “Here. You take the road out of town and there is a car wreck. You turn here.” The map was basic but clear enough—as far as we could see there were only two roads in and out of town, and we’d both seen the wreck as we drove in.

  “You go up there and stop where there is an old truck. OK?”

  We nodded, and Ben folded the map and put it in his pocket.

  “Now, I am hungry,” Ahmed said. “I want to show you that Moroccan food is the best in the world!” He shouted again at the kid waiting the tables and when he ran over Ahmed gave him a handful of dirhams, the notes so used and dirty the paper was almost falling to pieces.

  “Come, come. Crazy English boys. Are you hungry?”

  We had goat, cooked in a clay tagine pot, which we all sat around on carpets on the floor, dipping bread in to wipe up the sauce. I’d never had goat before; it’s like lamb really, it’s pretty good. We actually ran out of things to say quite quickly since there were so many topics that we couldn’t discuss, and Ahmed seemed to understand this and didn’t press to know more than we were comfortable telling him. The restaurant we were in was a little more private than the Happy Palm café, and at one point, Ben handed me the dope that Ahmed had given him, and I had a good look at it. It was soft and crumbly—the stuff we got back home was never such good quality. Never this fresh. I was excited. I was buzzing.

  But along with the excitement there was also fear. The next bit, the part where we had to do the actual deal, was always the part I’d been most scared about. It just seemed likely that if anything was going to go wrong, it was here. And by “going wrong,” I meant I thought there was a significant chance we were going to get shot. Or if not shot, then just robbed. Or failing that, then set up so that the police would descend on us and put us in a Moroccan jail for the next forty years. I liked Ahmed, I wanted to trust him, but there seemed no way to eliminate all the risk from this part.

  And actually, despite his bravado he seemed a little nervous about it all too. I could see a tremor in his hands as he ate. I didn’t know if that was a good sign or not. I didn’t even know if it was a sign, for all I knew the guy just had shaky hands.

  Either way I was glad when we finished and said our goodbyes. Ahmed left reminding us not to be late and there were more gangster style handshakes before he disappeared down a dusty side street. Then we made our way back to the van and drove slowly out of town, noting where we had to turn off the road the next day as we went back to the house.

  When we arrived Ben rolled up a joint to test the dope, and we sat up on the roof terrace overlooking the mountains. It was good. It was better than good. We got so stoned we could hardly get downstairs.

  21

  That night, I dreamt of my death. We were waiting in Ben’s van, by the side of the road where Ahmed had asked us to wait. No traffic, no noise, nothing in sight, just an empty horizon. Then, across the desert, we saw them coming. Three shiny black Range Rovers. Identical. Blacked-out windows, plumes of yellow dust flaring out behind them, roaring across the landscape toward us. I had the money at my feet, packed into a sports bag. Bundles of euro notes, counted and recounted so we were sure it was the correct amount. The cars came closer and closer. Even if we wanted to escape now, we could never outrun them, not in our shitty van. And then they were here. They circled us now, driving around and around so that we were like fish caught in a ever-shrinking net. Then all together, they jerked to a halt. There was silence. The dust began to thin on the light breeze. A door opened. Then several more. Black-clad men got out, armed with automatic weapons, all pointed at us. One of the men opened the rear door of the middle car, and another man got out. By the gold-plated gleam of his Bond-villain smile, I could tell he was the leader. He puffed a cigar, then flicked it to the ground and crushed it under his heel. He shouted an order, and his men snapped to attention, all the guns now pointing at us, the men shouting angrily.

  The tension rose as they shouted at us. We didn’t understand—it was all in Arabic, but they were getting anxious. I sensed that at any moment, they were going to open fire, rake our car with gunfire. Then one shouted in English:

  “Get out now, or we kill!”

  Ben and I exchanged a look that seemed to contemplate all our options but conclude we had none left. Breathing fast we fumbled with the handles, my hands shaking almost too much to operate the lever, but my door cracked open, and the hot desert air leaked in. I pushed the door open wide, and on legs that didn’t feel like my own, I climbed out, for every second I expected to feel the bullets tearing into me. But they didn’t. Instead a man came running up to me, gun aimed at my chest. He turned me around. I could feel pain in my lower back where he pushed the muzzle hard against me. Even though I knew I was asleep, I could feel that pain, and I wanted to cry out but didn’t dare. The man with the gold teeth walked toward me. He inspected me for a long while, then sucked his teeth and spat on the ground.

  “So, you have the money?” he said to me. Across his cheek was a long, ragged scar. When I nodded and pointed to the bag I’d pulled with me, he smiled. I fancied the
cut was so deep it was actually a hole. I could see inside his mouth through his cheek.

  “Do you have the product?” It was Ben’s voice. Somehow he’d found a new wave of confidence and he sounded almost in control. The man snapped his attention away from me and onto Ben. Ben took a step forward to come to the other side of the van, and all the armed guards raised their guns at once. There was shouting. Ben stopped and the boss man raised his arm to his soldiers, commanding them to back off without needing to speak.

  “First the money, my friend. First the money.”

  I kicked the bag forward with my foot, toward where the boss was standing, only it wasn’t a bag. Now, it was a briefcase, leather, with twin catches on the front. One of the armed men picked it up and hefted it onto the bonnet of one of the Range Rovers. He snapped the catches off and lifted the lid. It was filled with stacks of American dollars. He picked one stack out and strummed his finger against the ends of the notes. He sniffed it suspiciously.

  “It all there?” his boss asked him.

  “One million dollars,” the man said. How the hell he counted it so fast, I didn’t know. It took me an hour to be sure our pile of euros was right.

  The boss gave a slight inclination of his head, and another of his men understood the signal at once. He went to the back of the last Range Rover and lifted the boot. Inside, I could see packs of cellophane-wrapped white powder. Cocaine, heroin, I didn’t know. But this wasn’t going to plan.