‘Her throat was cut.’
Azoulay gasped for air. ‘This has nothing to do with me, I swear it!’
‘When did you see her?’
‘No, no. I don’t know her. Please, believe me…’
Dan stalked across the room and picked up one of the bronze candlesticks. Swung it from side to side. It was the size of a baseball bat but three times as heavy.
‘If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I am going to get one of your children and break their feet. Do you know how many bones are in a foot?’
‘P-please…’ The Commandant started to weep. ‘No.’
‘Twenty-eight. Which means I’ll be smashing fifty-six bones in total. They’ll never walk without a limp again.’
Azoulay’s trembling increased. Tears ran down his cheeks.
‘When did you see her?’
‘N-no… I c-can’t…’
Dan looked at Mohammed. ‘Get one of the kids.’
29
Mohammed looked at Dan, appalled.
Dan looked back.
This hadn’t been part of the plan but Azoulay was obviously more terrified of someone else. Dan had to make the retired Commandant more terrified of him to get any leverage.
‘Now!’ Dan snapped.
Steps uncertain, Mohammed headed for the door. He was turning the handle when a little girl called out.
‘Baba, Baba!’ Daddy, Daddy!
Footsteps scampered up the corridor.
Dan raised his eyebrows at Azoulay.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ Azoulay begged. ‘Not Salma…’
‘Get her,’ Dan commanded Mohammed.
As Mohammed began to open the door, Azoulay cracked.
‘Okay, okay.’ He began to sob. ‘I’ll tell you, but please don’t hurt her…’
Mohammed closed the door in a flash. Sweat beaded his forehead and trickled down the sides of his cheeks.
‘Tell me,’ commanded Dan.
‘The woman in the photograph,’ Azoulay gasped. ‘She came here last Saturday… she accused me…’
‘Of selling fake bomb detecting equipment.’
He nodded. He was panting as though he’d run a marathon.
‘Where did you get the equipment?’
‘I took delivery of it a long time ago.’
‘How long?’
He closed his eyes. When he spoke, it was in a whisper. ‘Seventeen years.’
Dan held his eyes as he said, ‘I was on flight EG220.’
‘Iilhi aleaziz,’ Azoulay whispered. Dear Lord.
As he looked at Dan, something seemed to collapse inside him. He stopped gasping. He closed his eyes briefly, took a deep breath. He stumbled to a chair. Sank into it. Head hanging, he began to speak.
‘We didn’t know they didn’t work. We thought the BSS184 was a highly advanced system. Innovative. Pioneering. When the flight was bombed, and we arrested the two men responsible – airport employees – I had my suspicions. One man was a ramp agent. The other a baggage loader. They should never have been able to bring explosives into the airport with the detectors in use. We scan everyone.’
Dan stared. ‘You’re saying the right people were arrested?’
‘Yes.’
‘There were rumours they were scapegoats…’
Azoulay looked weary. ‘They were terrorists. They’d already bombed Marrakech. They wanted a bigger target.’
A car door slammed outside. Dan flicked a look through the window to see a woman in a djellaba walking away from an SUV, bags of shopping in both hands.
‘I tested twenty machines myself. I didn’t tell anyone. Not a single one worked.’
He was staring at the floor, eyes focused nowhere. ‘I took one apart to find it contained no electronics whatsoever. It was nothing but an empty plastic box. The antenna on the outside of the box wasn’t attached to anything, nor were the wires. I wanted to run away. I wanted to pretend I knew nothing about this, but soldiers and police officers were using these machines all over the country at checkpoints, to detect ammunition, roadside bombs…’
He gulped.
‘What did you do?’
‘I made a report. I went over my boss’s head. I was risking my career, my family… but I took it in person to the Général de division. I could tell he was very disturbed by my revelations. He promised to investigate. Immediately, I felt better. I knew I had done the right thing. But then, five days later, the Général was dead. Killed in a car accident.’
He was shuddering with the memory.
‘The next day I was called to my boss’s office. Inside was a man I didn’t recognise. A junior civil servant called Jibran Bouzid, from the Defence Department. When my boss left us alone, Bouzid casually asked me how the brakes were on my car. Whether it was mechanically sound. He didn’t want me to suffer the same fate as the Général. It was at that point I knew my life was in the balance.
‘Bouzid told me that the BSS184 had been used at dozens of military checkpoints across the country and had managed to prevent and detect more than two thousand bombs that could have killed many people, and that a hundred and fifty-four car bombs had been defused. I wanted to shout at him that he was a liar, but I couldn’t. He made it clear he could have me disposed of as easily as he would a cigarette butt.
‘Then he asked how many of the devices were still in store. I told him there were four hundred. He said, “Do you know how much they cost?” I said no. He said, “A hundred and twenty-five thousand dirhams. Each.”’
Dan did the maths: twenty-four thousand pounds per machine.
‘He said the purchase price had been sixty-two thousand and that the balance went on training and middlemen. I was now one of those middlemen, and I would receive twenty-six thousand dirhams per machine.’
Dan blinked. Which made a total of around four hundred thousand pounds. It was a massive bribe.
‘He told me I was to keep the machines absolutely safe, in a place where nobody could damage them. If any were requested, I was to make sure the job it was assigned to offered good value for money, and if I didn’t think it was, to refuse to supply them.’
‘You were told to lose them.’
‘Yes. I put them at the back of an old warehouse full of disused and defunct military equipment. This is where they sat, undisturbed, until the service had a shake-up.’
Dan waited.
‘Bouzid came to me once again. He was now the Defence Minister, one of
