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
