Layover in Dubai

by Dan Fesperman

  “It’s Laleh!” he shouted. “My God, the stupid fool! It’s my damned daughter out there!”

  “Shit!” Sam gasped. He, too, saw it now.

  Sharaf reached for the door handle, then thought better of it, his mind moving in five directions at once. A door opened on the police van, and a cop in a khaki uniform stepped onto the street. Not Assad, but Sergeant Habash, for God’s sake. From around the corner at the far end of the block, an ambulance careened into view, red bubble flashing in time with Sharaf’s heartbeat.

  “This isn’t right!” he shouted. “We can’t let this happen!”

  Sharaf unlatched the door just as Sergeant Habash grabbed Laleh and shoved her toward the braking ambulance. For a horrifying moment Sharaf was certain Habash was going to throw his daughter beneath the wheels. Instead there was a screech of tires. Habash reached down and punched something into Laleh’s thigh. She went limp almost immediately.

  Sharaf ran up the street as fast as he could, too winded to even shout her name. Rear doors swung open on the ambulance and Habash bundled Laleh aboard as arms reached out from the inside. The doors slammed shut. She had been swallowed whole. Sharaf was still in flight, footsteps heavy, head throbbing, like in a nightmare when you can barely move. Was this why he had felt so troubled all day? At some level had he known Laleh was planning this, but refused to acknowledge it? He could even imagine how she would have arranged it with Basma, and he was taunted by the sound of Laleh’s voice in his head.

  Let me do this for you, Basma. Just make the phone calls, and I’ll do the rest.

  And now the ambulance was speeding toward him, siren shrieking. All he could do was stop, staring and panting with his arms open wide, as if he might somehow enclose the whole thing with one grasping tackle and wrench his daughter free.

  At the last second the ambulance swerved. The side mirror clipped his shoulder, spinning him to the ground, legs tangling as his rump struck the pavement. He let out a great sob. “Laleh!” Then the police van passed him, too.

  Why were none of Mansour’s vehicles in pursuit? Sharaf looked back toward the villa and saw that Sergeant Habash was manning an impromptu roadblock with a barrier that must have been dumped out of the police van. Two of Mansour’s vehicles had emerged from their hiding places in garages farther down the street, but Habash blocked their way, gun at the ready.

  Sharaf tried to stand, rising so quickly that his head swam. Fifty yards away he saw the BMW make a screeching U-turn to head off in pursuit of the ambulance—Sam Keller at the wheel, taking charge before they lost Laleh altogether. Thank God. Keller was already several blocks behind, but for the moment he was the only one with a chance to keep pace.

  Sharaf reached for his phone, then remembered he had left it on the seat of the BMW. Keep driving, he thought. Stay with them. The young man was his daughter’s only hope. God help us all. Tears of fear and anger streamed down his cheeks. God help us all.

  29

  At first Sam tracked the ambulance by ear, turning left-right-left, then flooring it down a major boulevard as he listened for the urgent wail of the siren. By the time whoever was driving had the gumption to shut off the siren and the flashing red lights, Sam had spotted both the ambulance and the police van. For the first time he felt the stirrings of hope. A shaky hope, granted, but maybe he could keep pace. And when they stopped he could call in their location on Sharaf’s phone, which was there on the seat beside him.

  It then occurred to him that he didn’t know anyone’s number—not Mansour’s, not Ali’s, not anyone’s—and a charge of panic branched out through his body like a lightning strike, from the back of his throat to the tips of his fingers.

  Then, sweet relief. The phone rang. His one chance for reinforcements. He snatched it open, swerving dangerously in his lane as a car horn blasted. The ambulance was several hundred yards ahead and turning right, the police van right on its bumper.

  “Keller! Are you there?” It was Sharaf, sounding just as you’d expect a father to sound when his daughter was being wheeled away to destruction.

  “I’m in pursuit!” What a stupid thing to say, like he was playing at cops. “They’re heading for the expressway.”

  “Sheikh Zayed Road?”

  “Interchange three. They’re on the eastbound ramp toward the city.”

  “We are coming. I am with Mansour. Just keep the line open.”

  “Okay, but I’ve got to put the phone down.”

  “Of course. Keep driving. Don’t lose them.” Sam pressed the speakerphone button and tossed the phone on the seat.

  “Can you still hear me?”

  “Yes. Good.” Sharaf’s voice was tinny and crackling, windblown. “Stay on them.”

  Sam floored the accelerator up the ramp, merging onto the expressway. In a few hundred yards the dashboard alarm began scolding him in its mechanical monotone:

  “Ping. You are speeding. Please slow down. Ping. You are speeding. Please slow down.”

  He kept sight of the ambulance and van about a quarter mile ahead, gaining a little ground as they cruised past the next interchange. For a while he thought they might be heading for the Shangri-La, but they kept moving as the traffic got heavier, and within another mile Sam was at a standstill in a massive backup, maybe thirty car lengths behind. Heat shimmered from the stalled rooftops of the vehicles between them. The gold light of dusk had begun to fade. The ambulance put its flashers back on, and the sea of metal grudgingly parted as it slid forward, car by car. Sam still couldn’t budge, and he pounded the steering wheel as he watched the ambulance easing into the clear.

  “Shit!”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Traffic jam. They’re getting through by flashing their emergency lights.”

  “We see them. You’re maybe a mile ahead of us now. Try to stay on them.”

  Sam popped the clutch and tapped the rear fender of the car just ahead, setting off an angry blast of its horn. The driver lurched the car forward, then thrust his head out the window to shout in a language Sam didn’t understand. But Sam now had just enough room to slide into the right lane. He then squeezed over one more and finally onto the shoulder, where he floored it past a cement truck. This being Dubai, dozens of other drivers had already had the same idea, and Sam was soon locked into a hurtling caravan of Jaguars and Mercedes, surging forward on the shoulder within inches of a scarred Jersey wall. They skirted the smoking wreckage of the accident that had caused the backup, defying an angry cop who was trying to flag everyone down. Sam then eased into the clear as he searched the horizon for the ambulance.

  He spotted it, well ahead. The van was still in its wake, and they were approaching the big traffic circle at the end of the expressway. Sam nearly collided with a dump truck, which blasted its air horn as he swerved in front.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Traffic circle, end of the line. It looks like they’re going off to the right. Yes! I see them now, definitely turning right. I think they’re heading for the Trade Centre. The U.S. Consulate, it’s gotta be.”

  He immediately saw the logic of their choice. By being merely a consular office, and not an embassy, it offered a secure location after hours, meaning they’d have the place to themselves. But he also saw its limitations, and apparently so did Sharaf, who shouted back:

  “If the Tsar’s people are along, or Hedayat’s, they won’t be able to take their guns upstairs through security.”

  “What about Assad?”

  “He’ll be allowed, as long as he’s in uniform.”

  But how would they slip an unconscious woman past security? On a stretcher, Sam supposed, straight out the back of the ambulance. Unorthodox, but possibly workable. By the time the security people in the downstairs lobby began questioning the logic of taking a medical patient into a building instead of out of it, the elevator would be halfway to its destination.

  Sam wheeled into the lot. The ambulance was double-parked alongside the police van next to
the building. Both looked empty, doors shut. Everyone must already be on their way upstairs.

  “I’m there. I’m going in,” Sam shouted. The Beretta bulged heavily in his pocket. Somehow he would have to get it through security.

  “What floor?” Sharaf asked, voice strangled with desperation.

  “Twenty-first. There’s a punch code on the elevator. You’ll need it for access.”

  “Do you know it?”

  Sam remembered it easily. In his mind’s eye he could still see Nanette punching in the number that evoked a national disaster, a date any American couldn’t help but remember, which is probably why some lazy consular officer had chosen it.

  “Nine-one-one. Two-thousand-one.”

  “You’d better wait for—no, never mind. Do what you can. We are a few minutes behind you. Good luck.”

  Sam figured Sharaf had been about to tell him to wait for backup, as any policeman would, especially with a civilian leading the charge. But it was Sharaf’s daughter up there. Caution was a luxury, and so were the usual rules of engagement.

  He ran to the glass doors and shoved through. The main lobby was empty, its café closed. At the far end, by the security station leading to the consular elevators, a bored man in uniform waited at the walkthrough metal detector. Sam tried to play it cool, although he was soaked in sweat. Four other countries had consular offices upstairs, and he might plausibly be headed to any of them, but he wondered how many visitors arrived dressed like him, more like a skateboarder than an off-duty diplomat.

  As Sam approached, two big fellows stood up from a bank of chairs along the wall—a pair of goons, one Russian, one Iranian. Fortunately they didn’t seem to recognize him. The challenge now was to make it through to the elevators without giving up his gun. In a gray plastic tray by the security station were two ugly weapons that had been confiscated from the earlier arrivals.

  Sam smiled and nodded at the security man like they were old pals. The fellow nodded back, keeping his seat as Sam breezed through the metal detector. The alarm blared shrilly. Sam shrugged and held up his cell phone with another smile, as if to explain away the alarm, but he didn’t break stride.

  “Sir, you’ll have to put that in the tray and go back through. Sir!”

  Sam kept smiling, nodded again, and kept on walking. He was five steps from a waiting elevator, doors open.

  “Sir!”

  The man stood, a newspaper sliding from his lap. There was a flurry of motion and metallic clicks as the two goons also leaped to their feet and plunged hands into their jackets. Sam leaped aboard as a deafening gunshot slammed the wall to the left of the UP button. Ducking out of harm’s way, he punched the CLOSE DOORS button as two more shots bounced loudly around the lobby. Footsteps clattered toward him as the door slid shut. He fumbled for a second with the keypad, then jammed in the right numbers and hit the button for twenty-one. There was shouting from the other side of the door, followed by the muffled bangs of two more shots. His stomach lurched as the car shuddered and rose, gaining speed, leaving behind all the noise and bother.

  He was on his way.

  The door opened with a sharp ping onto a view of two clones of the fellows he had left behind downstairs. They stood by the closed door to the conference room. One was just pocketing his cell phone and already stepping toward the elevator. Both instinctively reached inside their jackets before they realized, with matching expressions of dismay, that their weapons were still downstairs. Sam pulled the Beretta from his pocket, heavy and cool, and held it forward at gut level. The first fellow kept coming anyway until Sam shouted.

  “Stop or you’re dead!”

  His voice was high and tight, but for the moment it did the trick. The Russian was still eight feet away as Sam stepped off the elevator.

  “Back up!”

  They obliged. Terrified as he was, there was a certain giddiness to this brand of power. “Drop to the floor and give me fifty!” he felt like shouting, like one of his old gym teachers. But he knew that soon enough they would figure out he was clueless unless he came up with a way to get rid of them.

  “Get on the elevator!” he said, in a burst of inspiration. He backed off to give them passage. “Now! Or I’ll blow your fucking heads off!” An adrenaline punch in every word.

  They obeyed, nodding carefully to the whacked-out novice, perhaps as fearful of his hair-trigger nerves as he was.

  “Back up, into the corner!”

  They complied. He reached inside just far enough to hit the button for the ground floor. The doors slid shut, and he listened to the cables groan as the car descended. Unless they knew the security code, which he doubted, they wouldn’t bother him anytime soon.

  Sam put his ear to the conference room door, but the oak was too thick and sturdy to make out anything but muffled voices. Just as well, or they would have heard all the commotion out here. Should he just burst in, gun raised? Or should he wait for help?

  Then he remembered from the earlier meeting that there was a second entrance, a door at the opposite end, probably from the consul’s office. Sam worked his way through a suite of offices, heading back around to the left until he saw that, sure enough, an entrance to the conference room was at the end and the door was open. From this vantage point he could see only the end of the long room. As he edged forward, the conference table came into view. Laleh was seated at the head of the table, slumped forward in a chair, her head resting on the oak surface. Three or four voices were conversing casually in Russian, as if everyone was waiting for the real business to begin. Or maybe they were just waiting for the guest of honor to come to her senses.

  Lieutenant Assad’s voice called out in English. “You said this would wear off quickly.”

  “Don’t worry.” It was Nanette, cool and commanding. “We have a little something to speed her along. When she gets a jolt of it, she’ll be instantly alert. Then we’ll get what we need and take care of her.”

  “Straight to the desert, with her pimp.”

  “I was hoping this time you might find a less conspicuous location.”

  Sam had to resist an urge to shout back. But at least now he knew he had some time to work with. And they still thought the woman in custody was Basma.

  Another Mafia goon moved into view, holding a hypodermic needle in his raised right hand. Sam eased out of sight to the right of the door, but he was still able to see the needle jab Laleh’s thigh, right through her abaya. The man paused a second, then moved away as Laleh’s right hand twitched on the table. She raised her head, shook it slowly, side to side, then reflexively pulled her abaya off over her head, as if coming up for air.

  She shook out her hair and opened her eyes, then gasped and put a hand to her mouth, seemingly astonished to find an audience.

  Lieutenant Assad broke into laughter.

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “What is it?” Nanette asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’ve been had! This isn’t the whore. Although she’s no better than one, the way she conducts herself. Except this time her own father is pimping her. This is Sharaf’s daughter, Laleh.”

  “What do we do, then?”

  “Cancel our delivery, of course. Instruct them not to even unload.”

  “But what about her?”

  “Kill her, before she becomes an even bigger problem.”

  “Not here!” Liffey protested.

  “All right, then. Choose some other place. But do it quickly. Sharaf will be looking for us for sure.”

  Sam tensed at the door. His grip on the gun was slippery with sweat. Should he keep waiting or go now? As if to answer the question for him, Sharaf’s cell phone rang loudly in his pocket.

  “Who’s there?” Nanette called out from the conference room.

  “Boris?” a Russian voice said.

  Sam stepped through the doorway and turned his gun on the others as he sidled toward Laleh. Sharaf’s prediction proved true. The Tsar, Hedayat, and the lone goon merely looked p
uzzled, even annoyed, but the other three—Liffey, Assad, and especially Nanette—stared in openmouthed shock. The dead man walked.

  “Sam?” Nanette exclaimed. “But …?”

  Assad reached for his holster. Sam’s nerve failed him just long enough for the man to pull the gun free, but he finally squeezed the trigger as Assad was leveling the weapon to fire. As he did, someone grabbed him from behind, and he felt them both tumbling backward as two blasts rang in his ear, deafening. He felt a powerful blow to the back of his head, as if someone had torn open the base of his skull, and his last fleeting thought was to wonder how Assad had managed to hit him at such a poor angle, and with such a devastating exit wound.

  Then, for the second time in as many days, he was out, oblivious, erased from the moment.

  30

  Anwar Sharaf watched in agony as the numbered lights flickered in sequence, floor by floor, as the elevator rose to twenty-one.

  “Stay behind me when the doors open,” Mansour said to his left.

  “Are you crazy? I’ll be the first one in if I have to kill you.”

  The elevator slowed. Sharaf raised himself up on the balls of his feet. Just as the doors began sliding apart, two gunshots echoed sharply, and he cried out in anguish. He shoved through, banging his shoulders. The Tsar and Hedayat were stumbling toward him in an open doorway, looking confused and disoriented. Some goon was coming through in their wake. Sharaf didn’t even pause. He ran past them, gun raised as he looked wildly about him, trying to take in the whole scene at once.

  Laleh lay on her back to his right, her eyes open. Keller was on top of her, faceup, eyes also open but horribly fixed and glazed. Assad was sprawled across a chair at the far end, blood gouting onto the long wooden table. He groaned, clutching his chest. The redhead, Miss Weaver, stood next to Hal Liffey by the windows in a far corner. Their hands were raised. Mansour rushed around the table to detain them. Sharaf dropped to one knee and grabbed Laleh’s hand.

  “Laleh! Are you—?”

  She pulled her hand free and struggled from beneath Keller, then raised herself onto her knees, gasping like an exhausted runner. Her clothes were bloody, but Sharaf realized joyously that the blood wasn’t hers. Then his relief turned instantly to shame as he saw that the blood was Keller’s. The young man still wasn’t moving a muscle. Mouth slack, eyes locked. Sharaf dropped his gun, but Laleh was a step ahead of him as she checked the American’s pulse.