Lucy scowled. ‘You’ve committed us to this. We’re working without a net, and now Aleph and the Central Intelligence Agency are both pouring on the gas to track us down. Good job. I guess you must have missed being a wanted fugitive, because you sure as hell are one now. And so are the rest of us.’
‘I made the right call,’ he insisted. ‘We’ve got Amarah in our pocket. Once he leads us to Sood, we can send that nasty little bastard right back where we found him.’
Lucy let out a sigh. ‘You understand how dangerous this is? We can’t afford a single mistake. If Amarah suspects we’re not actually working for the Combine, there’s no telling what he’ll do.’
‘We can make this work,’ Marc assured her. ‘And speaking of which, aren’t you taking a huge risk even being in the same building as him? What if he recognises you?’
‘Please.’ She gave a cold smile. ‘He looked right at me and didn’t know it.’ Lucy indicated the hijab and her plain clothes. ‘Sexist throwback assholes like Jadeed Amarah only really look at women when they want something from them. In this outfit, I’m practically invisible to him.’
‘Still,’ Marc continued. ‘You need to be careful.’
‘Oh, you’re just now getting that?’ Lucy jabbed a finger at him. ‘Should have considered it when you went rogue on us back in Poland!’
He bristled at her tone. ‘The way I hear it, you’re no better. Isn’t that exactly what you did last year, back in London?’ Lucy had ignored orders during a surveillance operation, and it had been a sore point between her and Solomon.
‘You’d be dead if I hadn’t,’ she said flatly. ‘Starting to regret it now.’
‘Jeez, you two . . .’ Kara approached them, toting her laptop. ‘Get a room or something.’ She sat down between them and put the computer on the table. ‘While Amarah’s out of earshot, I figured you both ought to see this. New intel feed from Delancort.’ The laptop screen showed a map of the Adriatic, with a set of latitude and longitude coordinates highlighted in crimson. ‘An Italian Guardia Costiera boat posted a report about the Salina, a Greek tramp freighter, one of the ships we were tracking out of Split. It missed a couple of scheduled call-ins and a day later it was spotted way off course, adrift and not answering radio hails.’
She flicked to a series of blurry photos of the vessel. Marc saw that the ship’s decks were awash and even from a distance there were signs of damage on board.
‘Broken windows,’ noted Lucy. ‘Maybe bullet holes there?’
‘Someone tried to scuttle the ship, but they didn’t do it right.’ Marc thought aloud. ‘Five’ll get you ten that the crew either abandoned ship –’
‘Or they were iced.’ Lucy tapped the screen. ‘Bullet holes,’ she repeated.
‘The coastguard will board the Salina when the weather calms down,’ added Kara. ‘Rubicon can probably get to it once it’s been towed into dock.’
‘If that was the ship Ramaas used, he’s long gone and so is the device,’ said Marc. He nodded toward the other door. ‘We’ve gotta work the lead we have.’
‘And quick,’ said Kara. ‘Delancort says encrypted traffic between Aleph’s HQ in Berlin and their European assets has jumped. We’re gonna need to move tonight before they close the net on us.’
Lucy gave a weary nod. ‘Copy that. So, we’ll follow Amarah’s lead into the UAE, see where it takes us.’
‘He’s going to try to stab us in the back,’ said Marc, after a moment.
‘Of course he is,’ she replied.
FOURTEEN
Stepping outside, one moment Marc was being slow-chilled by the relentless air conditioning inside the airport terminal building, and the next he was engulfed in an arid inferno that hit him like a wall.
He stumbled and blinked into the midday glare, finding his sunglasses and rearranging the thin shemagh scarf around his throat to keep the sun off his neck. The heat was murderous and he had to resist the automatic reaction to retreat into the shade.
Amarah snorted and pushed past him, throwing the Englishman a withering look. ‘Follow me,’ he demanded, setting off across the roadway toward a parking area far from the lines of idling limousines and polished taxis that served the well-heeled visitors.
Marc trailed after him, careful to stay back a little, wary of everything around him and trying to take it all in at once. He glanced over his shoulder as Lucy fell in a few steps behind. She had changed into darker, shapeless robes beneath a black headscarf, her only break with the diffident ‘Lula’ cover identity being those expensive sunglasses he’d seen her wearing back in Monaco.
‘Welcome to Dubai,’ she said, quietly enough so her voice didn’t carry. ‘Hot enough for ya?’
‘Yeah,’ he offered, pulling a bottle of water from his bag and taking a swig. ‘In more ways than one.’
Like it or not, Amarah was calling the shots now they were in the Emirates, and even though Rubicon had an office in downtown Dubai, reaching out to them would be an act of last resort. Marc and Lucy were effectively on their own from here. Kara and Malte had split off from the group after they left Sweden, deliberately leaving a false trail for Aleph’s hunters to follow, and that meant Marc and Lucy were now operating as a cell with Amarah as their direct responsibility. Putting their trust in a known terrorist wasn’t an easy call, and Marc’s thoughts kept wandering back to the additional $3-million fee Amarah had demanded for his promised ‘introduction’ to Jalsa Sood. Solomon would never let him keep it, of course, but the issue right now was making sure that their erstwhile guide didn’t figure out they were going to renege on the deal.
‘That’s gotta be his buddy,’ said Lucy.
Up ahead, Marc saw Amarah embrace a pudgy Arab with all the gusto of long-lost brothers. Straight away they were laughing and joking, and it was strange to see the man crack a happy smile. Like a normal, ordinary guy, he thought. For a moment, he could almost forget that Amarah had wilfully suborned and killed innocents for his cadre’s bloody and barbaric ends.
The Arab stood in front of a line of sun-bleached white busses and a crowd of wary-looking men of South Asian extraction, all of them migrant workers who had arrived in Dubai on the guarantee of lucrative employment contracts. He paused now and then to briskly direct a gang of thuggish-looking underlings up and down the lines of the new arrivals. The Arab’s men barked at them with all the delicacy of drill sergeants, kicking at their bags of meagre possessions or shoving them around. As Marc approached, he saw one of the thugs wander up to the Arab, holding a wad of green Bangladeshi and Pakistani passports forcibly confiscated from the workers. One of the men tried to step out of line, hands out as he reached to take back his papers, but he was met with a hard slap that sent him reeling.
Marc had heard the stories about luckless workers being promised fat paydays in the endless cycle of Dubai’s construction industry, but the reality was more like what he was seeing now – a racket that was barely more than people trafficking and indentured servitude, in a nation where progress came from the steady stream of oil money and the blind eye that was turned to employee abuses.
The Arab thumbed through the passports and handed them off to someone else. He gave Marc a severe look, his smile ebbing briefly, but then it returned in a leer as he caught sight of Lucy. She looked away, her expression turning blank again. ‘What have you brought with you, Jadeed?’ he asked.
‘Tourists, Mahmud. Just some tourists.’ Amarah gestured toward Lucy. ‘Don’t touch. This is my cousin’s wife.’
‘And him?’ The Arab waved at Marc, then closed the fingers of his right hand into a point and tapped them with the index finger of his other hand. ‘He looks like he’s going to die of sunstroke!’
Despite the sweat pouring off him, Marc stepped closer to Mahmud and showed him a nasty smile, nodding down at the other man’s hands. ‘I know what that means, mate.’ The Arab’s gesture was a grave insult; five fingers meant five fathers, as in dubious parentage, and he clearly assumed it would slip pa
st a Westerner’s notice. Marc rolled the water bottle in his hand, squaring up to him. ‘Where I come from, a man who says that kinda thing gets glassed, yeah?’ It would have been a simple matter to play dumb, but that could have caused problems down the road. Better to go through the macho alpha-dog bullshit now rather than later, he thought.
Mahmud blinked, seeing the flash of real anger in Marc’s eyes, and then in the next second he blew out a racous laugh, defusing the tension. ‘Ah, he’s a sharp one! Forgive me, I meant nothing by it!’ He waved toward the nearest bus. ‘Come, come! We should go!’
The vehicle was already loaded with sullen, silent men who didn’t meet the gaze of any of them as they boarded. Marc scanned their faces, seeing only fatigue and fear there. Lucy took a seat on her own and kept her head down, while Marc dropped into a place across from the driver. As the bus pulled away, he saw the rest of the migrants trooping aboard the other vehicles and glanced at Mahmud. ‘So you handle these people, do you?’
The Arab grinned. ‘This city is opportunity, it says so on every billboard. New constructions each month, sprouting up like weeds! Someone has to build them . . .’ He glanced back at the workers. ‘And here they are!’
Marc gave a sage nod, and looked at Amarah. ‘Your pal, he must be an important bloke. Generous too, I bet.’
Mahmud sensed the hidden accusation in his words. ‘I pay my men well enough. They have a place to live and food to eat, you’ll see.’ He leaned over. ‘You English and all the rest, you should be glad Dubai is here! This is a bulwark of freedom and democracy! Without it we’d be drowning in Islamists . . .’ He choked off and showed Amarah a sheepish grin. ‘Well, you know. The bad kind.’
‘What do you care?’ Amarah glared at Marc. ‘The Combine has its hands in half the corporations that own this city. So what if it is built on the back of slave labour?’
‘They’re not slaves,’ Mahmud interrupted hotly. ‘They get their wages . . . Eventually, after they’ve worked out their contracts, in a couple of years.’
Marc looked back at the desperate faces of the migrants. None of them gave any sign of understanding the conversation going on about them, all of them looking mournfully at the glittering metropolis that flashed past the windows of the bus. ‘Is that when you give them back their passports? If they live that long?’
‘We have to keep them in line somehow,’ Mahmud explained. ‘After all, these Indians . . . They’re undisciplined.’
The convoy of busses drove out across the city and through a series of massive building sites. The bare concrete spines of unfinished luxury hotels, condominium towers and office complexes grew up out of giant plastic-clad marquees, in grey pillars of sheetrock and rust-red fingers of naked steel rebar. Each was swarmed by figures in hard hats and dusty blue overalls, working to forge the next tier of the desert’s miracle beneath the high sun’s killer heat.
Finally, beyond the unfinished construction zones the cityscape closed in to become tight streets, bordered by identical blockhouses where the workers were billeted after nightfall. The bus juddered to a halt and they disembarked.
The dirty, ramshackle worker-town was a million miles away from the airstream dreamland of the city proper. Marc had seen the same kind of class-clash disparity in places like Los Angeles or even back in his native London, but here the difference was so stark it was hard to believe these extremes of rich and poor could coexist in such close proximity.
He cast around, keeping one eye on Lucy and the other on Amarah. The buildings resembled military barracks or prison blocks, over-packed with humans and the mingled odours of cooked meat, sewage and diesel fuel. From the upper balconies of the nearest quarters, workers moving out for later shifts dithered to look over the new intake and several of them turned their attentions toward Lucy. As the only woman for miles around, even in her dark robes she suddenly had a lot of eyes on her.
Mahmud walked away to pass out orders to his men, and Marc orbited closer to Amarah, still keeping watch on Lucy in his peripheral vision. He knew full well she could take care of herself if circumstances demanded it, but to do so would be out of character for ‘Lula’ and risked blowing her cover.
‘Hey.’ He turned to Amarah. ‘You told me Jalsa Sood is with the rich set. This doesn’t look like the better part of town. Why are we here?’
‘This is how we get to Sood, unseen. The Baker and his family have many connections in the city. He will be told if strangers are seeking him out.’ Amarah pointed at a line of workers boarding the bus they had just left. ‘Coming through here makes us like them. Invisible.’ He sneered. ‘Mahmud and his friends shipped these fools around in cattle trucks, until the Emiratis started to complain that they didn’t like looking at them. Now the white buses go everywhere and no-one pays any attention to them.’
‘I get it. Good cover.’ Marc mulled that over. With no security to speak of and management who were open to financial compensation to look the other way, staying with the city’s workforce was the ideal method for anyone who wanted to move around Dubai without being noticed. ‘But what if someone runs their mouth to the authorities?’
‘They won’t.’ Amarah glared at the workers with harsh antipathy. ‘These men are gutless and broken. They take beatings like whipped dogs.’ He nodded in the direction of the city proper. ‘If they wanted a better life, they could take it by force. There’s an army of them here, but they’re too weak-willed to shed blood.’ He shook his head. ‘They get what they deserve. They came here because they wanted wealth and now the wealthy have made them slaves.’
Marc’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re a real man of the people, aren’t you?’
Amarah shrugged. ‘The weak die first. Why waste time on them?’
Marc was going to say something more, but then he became aware of Lucy approaching. She held out her smartphone to him like an offering. He took it and walked away with her trailing dutifully at his heels.
‘Don’t antagonise him,’ Lucy said softly. ‘He needs to believe he’s in charge.’
‘Right now, he is,’ Marc replied, glancing at the phone as the device’s encryption software opened a line. Making sure they couldn’t be overheard, he put the phone on speaker and held it up. ‘We’re here,’ he said.
‘Indeed you are.’ Henri Delancort’s voice issued out of the device. ‘Tracking is active. I know we said that this operation would proceed under a reduced communications protocol, but information has come to light that Mr Solomon felt had to be passed on immediately. There is good news and bad news.’
‘I really hate it when you say things like that,’ Lucy muttered. ‘Cheer me up. Good news first.’
‘Aleph are looking in the wrong places for you. Signal traffic analysis indicates that the CIA have allowed them to take the weight of the hunt for Amarah, and thanks to Malte and Kara, that search is currently centred on Southern Spain.’
‘Bad news?’ Marc didn’t want to ask the question.
‘The body of a middle-aged white male was pulled out of the Dubai Marina yesterday evening. Cause of death was blunt-force trauma consistent with a fall from a great height. It’s not an uncommon end for people in that city, apparently. Too much wine and too many penthouses with balconies. But identification of this particular gentleman raised a red flag with Europol.’
‘Don’t tell me.’ Marc felt his gut twist, and he said the name as the thought crystallised in his mind. ‘Neven Kurjak.’
‘It would appear so. Which means that he had reached the end of his usefulness in this matter.’
‘Shit.’ Lucy shook her head. ‘Neven was the weak link, he was our exploit. Without him in play, our options are narrowing.’
She was right, but Marc was already thinking beyond that. ‘If Kurjak was here . . . and he was ditched . . . that means there’s a good chance Ramaas or his posse are in Dubai as well.’
‘How do you want to proceed?’ Delancort asked, after a moment.
Marc and Lucy exchanged
glances. ‘Stick to the plan,’ she said. ‘We use Amarah to take us to Sood, and try to intercept him before Ramaas does.’
‘And if that isn’t feasible?’
When Marc replied, his answer earned him a grim nod from Lucy. ‘Then the guns are going to come out.’
*
Off the dingy entrance hall of the nearest blockhouse was a narrow room that stank of sweat and spoiled food, with every available metre of space filled by decade-old personal computers, dirty monitors and grubby keyboards. Half the stools in the makeshift Internet café were already being used, but Mahmud’s arrival took care of that in short order. He didn’t even need to give an order; the workers saw him and stopped what they were doing, filing out onto the street where they struck up wary conversations and smoked.
‘What is to be done with the foreigners?’ Mahmud licked his lips. ‘I can find a use for the woman . . .’
Amarah shook his head. ‘Do nothing for now. I need them alive to pay me.’ He eyed the computers. ‘What is all this? You actually expect me to believe that any of these machines are secure?’ He glared at the nearest monitor, seeing a screen cluttered with random icons and pop-up windows generated by whatever accreted malware lurked inside.
‘This is the best I have to offer,’ Mahmud replied, passing him a small zip-case. Inside was a voice-over-Internet phone handset, a Caracal semi-automatic pistol and a spare ammunition magazine. ‘Forgive me, brother, but –’
‘It will have to do.’ Amarah waved him away, concealing the gun in the folds of his robe. ‘Wait outside.’
Mahmud blinked, unhappy at being ordered around inside his own kingdom, but then he relented, pulling closed a thin folding door across the entrance to the room.
Amarah chose another computer and plugged the handset into a dirt-clogged USB socket. The two devices synchronised and a link across the World Wide Web immediately allowed him to make a point-to-point call without the need to route it through the UAE’s telephone network.
Exile Page 25
