by Brad Taylor
“Doing it now. Get your ass moving. According to what I have, he’s either there or en route.”
I made it to the van without issues, seeing all three of my teammates outside arguing.
“What’s the problem? We need to move.”
They all looked at me sheepishly, then Knuckles cracked open the sliding door, allowing me to see inside. One man was trussed on the floor, a bag on his head. It was the guy we had just captured.
“Where the fuck is Lucas?”
I knew the answer even before I asked the question.
Knuckles held up a carbon-fiber knife with a broken blade. “Gone. Like the last time we had him. I knew we shouldn’t have left him alone.”
Jesus Christ. That guy is Houdini. I remembered Jennifer was in his hotel room and immediately dialed her phone. It went to voice mail.
Decoy said, “We already called her. No joy.”
Every fiber in my body was screaming to get back to the Bustan Rotana, to get her to safety. The men were all waiting for a decision, wondering which way I would go after my call in Lebanon.
McMasters was on the way to the Burj Khalifa, and the Ghost was already there. But Jennifer was in real danger. Lucas, while he had apparently told us the truth about his mission, was a psychopath. A threat on the loose.
The mistake in Lebanon surfaced in my mind, when I’d almost compromised the mission because I’d been afraid for her welfare.
She’s trained. She can handle herself. He’s probably not even going back to his hotel.
“Load up. We’re going to the Burj Khalifa. Keep trying to call her while we drive.”
57
S
eeing that Lucas had wiped the history of his Internet usage, Jennifer powered down the laptop and inserted a thumb drive into a USB port. Turning it back on, the forensics device began to troll for random bits of data in the BIOS and hard drive of the computer. Within minutes, she had a list of websites used in the past twenty-four hours. Four were for hotels around the main train station in Frankfurt, Germany. Three were for different travel websites.
She clicked on one, bringing up a search for airlines and flights to
Frankfurt, Germany, from Dubai, all for the following day.
She minimized Explorer and began searching his hard drive, looking for anything related to the envoy’s visit. She found the envoy’s itinerary, then the same passport information for the Ghost that she’d already seen.
Looking at her watch, she decided to simply image the hard drive and study it later, in the TOC. She pulled out the original thumb drive and inserted the same type system she had used in Lebanon. Two clicks later she had a bar saying ten minutes until download complete.
She moved to his luggage and began sorting through his clothes. She found nothing of interest. Lucas apparently had very good operational security, leaving little to be found by a snooping maid.
She found a leather satchel and zipped it open. Inside were small knickknacks that she found odd. A kitchen magnet with the picture of a couple embossed inside. Two separate key chains, one with a bottle opener from a hotel in Reno, the other with the name “Dani” dangling from it. And three driver’s licenses.
Finally. His alias documents.
She looked at the first, seeing it was for a woman of about sixty. No way could he use that.
She looked at the second and felt a shock so great it made her knees weak. She made the connection with Lucas and sat heavily on the bed. She stared at the picture, then the name, making sure she wasn’t wrong. She wasn’t. She slipped the license into her pocket behind her phone and stood up, thinking through the ramifications. She didn’t realize someone had entered the bedroom until he spoke.
“Well, well. Looks like my day isn’t going to be all bad after all.” She whirled around and saw Lucas between her and the door to the living room of the suite, a flex-cuff still attached to one wrist, the other wrist raw and bleeding. She eyed him warily, but he remained where he was.
“Come on. I’m not going to do anything. You can leave. Right through the door there.”
She said nothing, keeping her distance. He shuffled to the left and glanced at the closet. She followed his gaze, and he struck, closing his hands on each of her wrists in a steel grip.
Reacting instantly, she windmilled both arms in a circle, breaking his hold. She slid into his body and hooked her right leg behind the one bearing his weight. She jerked upward with her leg and pushed as hard as she could against his chest, slamming him to the ground.
She turned to run to the door, only to have him kick it closed from the ground. She whirled around and moved into a fighting crouch as he leapt to his feet. He grinned at the stance, then swung a slap at her face. She parried it with her left arm and lashed out in a jab, popping his head back.
When he returned her gaze, he was no longer grinning. He touched
286 ⁄ BRAD TAYLOR
his nose, wiping a wisp of blood with his finger. “A fighter. I like that in a woman.”
He launched into her, throwing a flurry of combinations in an attempt to knock her down. For several seconds, the only noises were the slapping of skin and the panting of the combatants, Jennifer furiously protecting herself against every blow. Lucas backed off, having failed to harm her.
Jennifer reached behind her, blindly trying to find the door handle. Lucas saw the move and came in again. This time, having gotten a feel for his technique, Jennifer not only stopped his attack, but she landed two more jabs to his face.
Lucas backed off again, breathing hard. “You fucking bitch. You’re just making this hard on yourself.”
She said nothing, reaching behind her again for the door handle. Lucas feinted in, and she returned to a crouch. Instead of closing the distance, he grabbed a lamp and hurled it at her head. She ducked, feeling the porcelain shatter against the door above her. Lucas was on her before she could recover, slamming his shin into her thigh, drawing a cry.
He followed the kick with a left cross to her head. She raised her arms and took the blow harmlessly, but opened up her left side in the process. He shot a right hook to her kidney, causing a blinding pain to radiate beneath her rib cage. She felt him close his hands around the back of her neck, controlling her head, and knew she was in trouble. She threw her arms down low to ward off what was coming, but it had little effect.
Lucas speared his knee through her feeble attempts at protection, hitting her in the solar plexus and driving the air from her lungs. She threw jabs at a body she couldn’t see, connecting in one way or another, but doing little damage.
Maintaining control of her head, Lucas placed her back against the wall and drove his knee into her stomach two more times, the wall itself increasing the force of each blow. She screamed, the pain causing her to double over. Lucas let go of her neck and she fell to the ground, gasping in a shallow pant in an attempt to draw in air.
She felt Lucas loop the lamp cord over her wrists and jerk it tight, her strength to resist gone.
“That little bit of work is going to cost you some foreplay,” he said.
58
J
eff McMasters pasted on an interested smile and ignored the man droning on and on about all of the wonders of the Burj Khalifa.
Could you cram one more record in there? Tallest building, highest observation deck, longest elevator, highest swimming pool . . . My God, give it a rest.
He’d relinquished his ambassadorship in 2009, at the crest of Dubai’s heady days of expansion. Months later, the world financial crisis had left Dubai facing epic debts that threatened the very stability of the state. Its neighbor, the oil rich state of Abu Dhabi, had ridden to the rescue, providing an infusion of much-needed cash. The very building he was standing in highlighted Dubai’s meteoric rise and subsequent rapid descent: An architectural marvel unrivaled in the world, its name had been changed from Burj Dubai to Burj Khalifa after the bailout, in deference to the ruling sheikh of Abu Dhabi, Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
&
nbsp; Following the tour guide around the eight-foot plastic scale model in the anteroom, he thought the rattling off of statistics and recordbreaking feats sounded a little desperate, as if the tour guide was trying to convince him of the building’s greatness—and by extension Dubai’s worth.
McMasters let the voice fade into the background, the ever-present mission in Qatar creeping forward to his conscious mind. He was due to arrive at the peace conference the following day, and the closer it got, the more he thought about what could go wrong.
He’d agreed to become the new Middle East envoy before they’d told him what that entailed, namely a covert action involving passing money to the Palestinian Authority. As an ambassador, he’d been privy to various covert actions conducted by the CIA, but none had involved his embassy, and he’d certainly never participated in one as a player. In truth, as a diplomat, he found the whole notion of covert action distasteful. Lying and sneaking around simply wasn’t in his makeup. Or so he had thought.
Now that he was a primary actor, he found it exciting. True, he was just the catalyst and not the agent who would actually transfer the money, but it was still a thrill. When first told of the mission, he had balked, asking how he was going to travel from country to country toting around a suitcase full of cash. He’d been told that the money would be coming separately, brought by two members of the CIA during the conference, and that it wouldn’t be dollar bills, but diamonds. Much smaller to haul around.
The actual transfer plan had been withheld from him, using sources and methods known only to the CIA. He’d toyed with the idea of demanding the information, since it would be his head on the chopping block if something went wrong. He knew it was simply because he wanted to satisfy his curiosity. Wanted to feel more a part of the mission.
He was brought out of his thoughts by the tour guide walking toward a long hallway, past an incongruous picture of Tom Cruise hanging on the outside of the Burj Khalifa for some movie.
He nodded at the aides with him and followed, finally reaching two double-decker elevators after several minutes. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid pointed at the one to the right, leaving the remainder of the straphangers to ride up in the elevator to the left.
* * *
290 ⁄ BRAD TAYLOR
The Ghost exited the elevator’s maintenance room on the 125th floor and saw two females dressed in Burj Khalifa uniforms scurrying down the hallway, animatedly talking. When they were abreast, he asked what the excitement was about.
“They’re here. His Highness is here with the American. They’ll be on top shortly.”
He thanked them and headed in the opposite direction, toward the service elevator. Four minutes later, he exited in the basement. He paused for a second, listening for anyone else working. Hearing nothing, he jogged to the radar brake array for the observation elevators.
He used a stepladder to place the WiFi repeater as high as possible into the left elevator shaft, giving it the greatest possible chance of hitting the network. He turned it on, watched the lights go from red to green, and returned to the bottom.
He placed a WiFi sniffer he’d purchased near the detonator. He smiled when he saw four out of six bars. He turned on the detonator, holding his breath. The light flashed red, then went to green. It was armed.
He moved to the right elevator shaft and powered its detonator. It flashed red, then began to blink red and green over and over again. He was unsure what that meant, but knew it wasn’t good. He placed the sniffer next to the detonator and saw he had no WiFi signal.
So much for the advertisement on the box about the repeater range. The shaft itself was blocking the signal.
He held the sniffer at eye level and walked slowly toward the repeater, feeling the press of time. In three steps he had a single bar. Five more steps and it went to three bars. When he reached the wall between the two elevators he saw four bars. Good enough to trigger. He somehow needed to get the detonator to this wall.
He glanced around the room, looking for loose wire. He saw paint buckets, spare pieces of crown molding, and a tarp, but nothing remotely that he could use. Frustrated, he ran to the keypad for the door leading outside. It was encased in metal, with the wiring running up the wall inside a pipe.
No good. He wondered where the entourage was located. If they were already on the observation deck. If they weren’t about to trigger the explosives, with him standing next to them.
To the left of the keypad was a speaker. Presumably an intercom that allowed communication to other maintenance personnel inside the building. It had no apparent wiring leading to it, meaning the wiring was behind the speaker and ran inside the wall. He found a flat piece of scrap metal and jammed it under the plate. He levered the speaker away from the wall, pulling out a mess of spaghetti.
Not wanting to shock himself, he identified the power line, then the wire used to transmit from the speaker. He separated the two, then gave a hard yank to the speaker wire, drawing out three feet. He began pulling hand over hand until he had no slack.
He glanced back at the elevator shaft. Still not enough.
He looped the wire around his hands and jerked with all of his might, the wire slicing into the fleshy part of his palm. He tried a second time and fell backward as the anchor gave way.
Several minutes later, he had the detonator separated from the explosives by about thirty meters of speaker wire. He affixed the detonator to the wall between the elevators and powered it up. He saw the flash of red, then a steady green. He wiped his brow and hurried to the exit door.
He swiped Hamid’s key card, opened the door, and took the stairs up two at a time. He slowed as his head crested the top of the stairwell. He surveyed the drive to the mall parking garage and froze, his stomach clenching.
The black man he had tried to kill was walking toward him, another man at his side.
59
K
nuckles shut off the van and pointed at the hooded man from the souk. “We going to leave him behind like we did Lucas?”
Getting Jennifer’s voice mail one more time, I stabbed the keypad and hung up. “No. You’re going back to the hotel. I can’t get Jennifer. Something’s wrong. Get over to the hotel and find her.”
He started to say something, and my phone rang. I stabbed the call button and heard Blaine. Dammit. Where is she? I listened, then said, “We’re there now, and I can see limos roped off. What the hell’s going on? Why did they come here?”
On the other end of the phone, Blaine said, “Pike, we didn’t get to them in time. We had too many layers to go through to get the phone number. We have it now, but it goes straight to voice mail.”
“Call someone else. There are three limousines here. Someone’s got their phone on.”
“They all go to voice mail. We don’t know why. Maybe the building is shielding the signal or something, but the bottom line is we didn’t get the warning to them.”
So much for doing this slow and methodical.
“How long are they going to be in there?”
“Less than ten minutes on the upper deck. The clock’s ticking right now. What’re your courses of action?”
“Shit, sir, I have no idea what trap he’s built. He’s been all over the damn building planting explosives. It’s going to take time to get to the maintenance room on the upper floors. It’s above the observation deck. On top of that, he apparently placed explosives in the basement as well.”
Blaine said, “What can I do? What do you need?”
“I need someone to tell them to stay out of the damn elevators!”
I calmed down and continued. “I’d like to target the Ghost because I’m sure he’s going to command detonate whatever he’s got, but we don’t know where he is. I have no doubt he’s around here, but I can’t waste the time looking. Second COA is to enter the building and see if we can render safe whatever trap he’s laid, but it’s the basement only. I have no idea if that’ll be enough. Brett and Decoy are headed there right now.”
“What’s the risk to the force? Can you protect them?”
I watched Brett and Decoy cross the street, both carrying a small duffel bag full of tools. “No,” I said, “there’s no way I can mitigate the risk without the Ghost.”
Blaine said something else, but I was no longer listening. A man with a Burj Khalifa maintenance uniform had just popped out of the bushes. Wearing thick glasses. Right next to the basement entrance.
The Ghost ducked back into the stairwell, considering his options. Clearly, it was no coincidence that the black man was here. It was because of the envoy. The only mystery was how they’d penetrated his plan. They hadn’t followed him here, or he would have been interrupted installing the phone numbers and arming the detonators.
It must be the building itself. They don’t know I’m here. They weren’t looking for him. They were looking for his trap. He couldn’t let them explore for any length of time. He hadn’t placed any booby traps around his explosives, and they could be disarmed fairly easily.
He thought about hiding in the basement and attacking them, but didn’t like the odds. Two on one would be hard to pull off. Somehow, he had to prevent them from entering the basement. But he had nothing. No way to distract them. No means of pulling them from their goal.
Except for myself.
It hit home that he would be irresistible bait. They were following me earlier. They know what I look like. He could prevent them from stopping the attack, but he would be caught. Chained and tortured, then killed. He wouldn’t be able to utilize his false jihadi website group to claim credit. Wouldn’t be able to put the Palestinian cause on the world stage. He would be walking to his death.
He peeked over the top and saw the men were less than seventy meters away. If he waited any longer, he would be trapped anyway. He jumped up and grabbed the railing on the left side of the stairwell. Swiftly scrambling over it, he hid in the shrubbery beyond.
He thought again about his options, but came up blank. It was either him or failure. He felt a sadness seep inside. He steeled himself, shaking off the melancholy. He would need to remain out of their grasp for several minutes, leading them on a chase. From there, it would be up to Allah. Maybe he could get them to kill him here, before they started in on the torture.
