The Jackal's Share by Christopher Morgan Jones

privacy. Here, in this most curious of offices, no one knew anything about her, beyond the fact that she was married (she wore a ring) and lived in the countryside near Leighton Buzzard (it had said so on her CV, and the company still paid for her season ticket). She was not a sociable person: she never attended the Christmas party, never drank with her colleagues, never talked to them about anything but work. At her interview with Hammer she had warned him about this, and he had loved her for it ever since. Occasionally, in meetings like this one, Webster would look at her thin face, the slight nose and the pressed mouth, the withdrawn eyes, imagine the different lives she might be leading away from this place and conclude that whatever one she actually lived she might be the most contented person he knew. She felt no need to share any part of herself, and if she was quiet it seemed to be less from shyness than from reserve.
    Klein, on the other hand, was desperate to communicate his enthusiasm and terrified of making a mistake, particularly in front of Hammer. A serious young man, a graduate of the University of Hanover and business school in France, he had been in the job for almost a year and was still finding it difficult to relax. Webster liked him—he spoke countless languages, wrote well in all of them, understood complicated things quickly—but Hammer wasn’t sure, because he saw Klein as unworldly and unformed. “He treats every case like a dissertation,” he had once said to Webster, and that was harsh but true enough. For his part, Klein, wanting nothing more than to impress Hammer, as everyone did, and sensitive enough to see his doubts, was always on the brink of nervousness in his company, and today looked more than usually callow behind his serious glasses and blond beard. He was also slightly in awe of Dobbs.
    Webster’s office was messier than it had been for some time. Documents in scrappy piles covered the desk, and on the walls hung overlapping sheets of flipboard paper on which he was slowly drawing a chart of the world with Darius Qazai at its center.
    For now they were considering basics: Qazai, the sculpture, and connections between the two. Hammer raised his eyebrows and looked expectantly around the table. “So. What have we got?”
    Dobbs slowly and deliberately opened up the folder placed squarely on the table in front of her and began to speak at a measured pace. She didn’t refer to the document once, didn’t even look down, but kept her palm flat on the first page as if drawing out the information.
    “Every detail checks out, but it hasn’t got me very far. Shokhor is an Iraqi by birth but lives in Dubai. He has a company called Calyx that has a single-page website and claims to be in the textile business. The ship that’s meant to have transported the relief is called the
Veronese
and it does a regular circuit of the Gulf. The container was unloaded at Dubai and after that I can’t find any record of it. I spoke to a friend who put me in touch with an old customs investigator. He knows Calyx, and Shokhor, but claimed not to know what he’s bringing in because no one looks. On the manifest the consignment was listed as cotton clothing. I haven’t found anything to say it wasn’t.”
    “Is that as far as it goes?”
    “He’s trying to find out what happened to it. He probably can’t. And singling out a private flight to Switzerland from Dubai around that time? I checked. There are at least three or four a day.”
    For the time being she was done. Webster smiled his approval.
    “Any more?”
    “One thing. I’ve done some work on Qazai’s companies as well. Tabriz is his big one. Dozens of funds, regulated in London, everything gold-plated. But he has another fund that invests his own money. It’s called Shiraz. Shiraz Holding AG.”
    Webster nodded. Qazai had told him as much.
    “Shiraz barely features anywhere. It’s based in Switzerland, unregulated—it can invest in