Swindler & Son

by Ted Krever

  I let out the clutch, the 917 jumps forward and we roll toward the airport gate, popping the throttle just enough to keep her from stalling. Yusuf raises his door and waves at the guards.

  As the pylon begins to rise, I see our real escort—four police speedsters, a pair of Lamborghini’s and a pair of Bugatti’s, with flashing lights and sirens on top, the cherries on a sundae. They swiftly race down to the eight-lane expressway below, two cars stopping traffic behind us and two racing ahead, moving the plebes out of the two left lanes, giving us room.

  Room to race. I’ve seen enough of Yusuf’s vlogs to know that’s what’s about to happen.

  The bar rises out of sight. I put my foot down and the 917 takes off. I didn’t think to ask Larry for earplugs and this mother is LOUD! Not to mention, with the lack of air conditioning (RACING CAR), fixed windows (ditto) and the outside heat (how’s 114°F strike you? Thank God, it’s December!), it’s a broiler inside.

  Surrounded by million-dollar cars fifty years newer, the glory of 21st Century computer design, we are just maintaining our lead. Yusuf pumps his fist against the tiny plastic side windows as the world’s most entitled kids give chase, determined to pass and show up this 1970 museum piece.

  In the meantime—omigod, this is a race car. The road looks glass-smooth but the car’s scrabbling about, following invisible grooves and imperfections in the roadbed. The engine is lumpy, out-of-time, the steering heavy as concrete. Every tiny kink in what looked like a straight road is now a major turn, requiring careful setup and throttle manipulation (which, so far, seems well-nigh impossible). The space-frame chassis (tubes filled with gas so the engineers could check mid-race to see if they’d cracked) is flexing like it’s made of rubber. It’s all I can do to stay on the road, much less compete with Amani driving the 917’s domesticated great-grandchild.

  And of course, she’s the closest contender. The only reason Yusuf’s lived down his sister being faster than him is that she beats his friends just as handily. Her Veyron actually has a higher top speed than the 917 but somehow I’m maintaining my tiny lead. To validate Prince Rahim’s purchase, I can’t let her catch me.

  This is, after all, maybe the most fabled racing car of all. It damn well better beat his niece.

  All at once, I remember a documentary I watched a few years ago, around the time of the first client request for a 917. One of the race drivers remembered Porsche’s chief engineer telling him the throttle only had two settings—all the way up or all the way down, foot up or to the floor.

  “Wave to your sister!” I scream at Yusuf.

  “What?”

  “WAVE TO YOUR SISTER! SHOW HER THE CAMERA!”

  Yusuf waves, lens pressed to the window and Amani lets off the gas just a tiny bit, just reactively, to wave back politely, like the supportive (and photogenic) sister she is. In the split-second she does, I mash the pedal to the floor. Already doing about 140, the twelve-cylinder engine screams like a chorus of banshees, the car squirms a bit, settles on her haunches and leaps forward, gaining speed at a dizzying rate. “HOOOO-EEEE!!!” Yusuf revs his arms across the window. I can hear him—how fucking loud can this kid yell?

  The frame still squirms but suddenly the car is planted on the road and the acceleration is Wile E Coyote-like. I may not hear again for a week and it don’t bother me—this is FUN! We pull handily away from the Bugatti and the rest of the crowd. I hold my advantage just long enough to make it official, then throttle back to a mere 130. I can now afford to let Amani catch me, successfully having obscured the fact that she would have eventually anyway.

  And just ahead, I see the towers to the right of the highway—two dark copper scimitar-shaped skyscrapers curving toward each other, with a gleaming gold center section joining the two somewhere around the thirtieth floor. I coast into the sweeping exit ramp and the caravan follows.

  “What’re you doing, dog? We’re supposed to go to Colonel Qadir’s!”

  “I want lunch. There’s a good place here—I read about it on the plane.”

  “There are lots of good places. I got to deliver you. Rahim said—”

  “Did he tell you about my situation?” I yell, watching Yusuf’s reaction carefully.

  -Are you sure you want this conversation on the record?

  You said there was no record—I’m just telling my story the way it happened.

  Yusuf puffs up while his cheeks go red, dying to boast about something he’s not supposed to know. “You brought the bomb to Paris!” he bursts. He’s excited about it!

  “Rahim met Arafat once,” he continues. “All they did was eat lunch. But they picked him up in a convoy and blindfolded him, like ten guys with Kalashnikovs, y’dig? And they drove him around Beirut for an hour to make sure nobody was following them and then he finds himself in the room with Arafat and twenty guards. They have hummus—not even good hummus—talk for twenty minutes and have a picture taken and Rahim’s set for life! Nobody can diss him, dog, y’know? He’s not a checkbook prince anymore! I’m never going to meet Arafat but I’m gonna deliver you!”

  “You’re a believer in terrorism?”

  -I would be very careful here.

  Please—we’re talking about Yusuf! He defers for just a moment. “Not really—no offense—but it’s solidarity, dog! I am so gonna get laid!”

  It’s weird, moments where the long pendulum of history is poised to swing one direction or the other come in the oddest giftwrap. RULE THREE: TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR. What does Yusuf really want to hear?

  “That’s why I’m so glad you showed up,” I tell him, screaming precise enunciation over the engine roar. “You can help me so much more than Rahim.”

  To say the kid’s eyes light up is a gross understatement. He’s been waiting to hear those exact words his entire life.

  “I just can’t disappear, not yet, Yusuf. When it’s time, I’ll go quietly—but right now, I’m on a mission.”

  If the car was foreplay, we’re now into heavy petting. A mission!

  “Your phone’s off, right?” I arch an eyebrow and he skitters like a pinball turning it off. “Take out the battery. They have ways of turning it on remotely, without you knowing,” I confide and the kid nearly oozes out of his seat. Battery removed, I continue. “Rahim is as reliable a friend as I could ask for but he’s…a bit conventional, know what I mean? I need someone bold to help me. Someone who…thinks outside the box! Colors outside the lines!” Yes, they’re cliches. I’ve had three hours sleep in the last three days. I’m fucking exhausted.

  “What can I do?” Yusuf asks.

  “An important operative of mine is here in Qumrahdi—to put it plainly, he’s been kidnapped here.”

  Yusuf’s face goes dark. “That’s no good, dog. No kidnappings allowed here except by the police. And then only—”

  “—the unprotected, I bet.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But once in a while, just randomly, something slips by, maybe?”

  “I don’t think so. We’re pretty strict about that.”

  A new thought pops into my head. “Is it worse or better to kidnap infidels? Is there a special punishment for that?” He stares into space. “You don’t know?”

  “You know all the French punishments?”

  “You guys cut things off! If the French did that, I’d know the penal code by heart!”

  “Well, this is disturbing,” he admits.

  “That’s why I need you!” I say. “We have a pretty good idea where he is—but we have to get him out ourselves, without the police, without Rahim. The whole idea is to protect Rahim, not involve him. Besides, Rahim wouldn’t know how to help us—he does everything by the book. But you? You’re an outlaw!”

  I know my princes. Yusuf sucks up this smoke so deeply, his eyes begin to water.

  -You could have confided in Ah—uh, Prince Rahim—in the first place.

  Sure. He controls the kingdom, he could surely have located the kidnappers eventually, couldn’t h
e?

  But again, remember our history, Harry’s and mine. I don’t know who’s got Harry or why. I’m not sure what else we’re going to find when we get there. Maybe an angry Wadiiran ex-customer, maybe someone in the royal family he’d feel obligated to favor.

  -We don’t have such problems with the royal family.

  Or maybe we did something ourselves—unintentionally, of course—that had unpleasant repercussions after we pulled out. I’m not going to pretend that’s never happened.

  And—if I’m being entirely transparent, which is what you want—

  -Probably.

  —well then, I don’t trust Rahim because he’s too smart, too shrewd and too subtle by half for me. If we truly offended him, he could disappear us without a mote of dust in evidence. Whereas, I’m pretty confident I can outplay Yusuf to the last move. At the moment, that’s the only angle we’ve got, so I’m playing it for all it’s worth.

  “What I need for the next hour,” I tell him, “is for you to be a spoiled, entitled Master of the Universe. I need you to throw your weight around to the point that people don’t question, don’t dare argue. I need a self-centered dick who knows the world exists to give him whatever he wants—until he wants something else, two minutes later.”

  Yusuf’s eyes gleam like marbles.

  “I won’t even have to raise my voice,” he says.

  Real Estate

  The hotel complex sits on an island in a lagoon scooped out of the northern coast of Qumrahdi. Our garish caravan circles a courtyard of deep pink marble and onyx flagstone, engines revving like a swarm of gigantic bees. A mall bustles at ground level while four stories of garages, including a high-security, climate-controlled block for the most valuable cars, sit below-ground. This is where Diamante has leased a space for the 917.

  Management sends out a flunky in a chic suit, either to quiet down the roar of our convoy or make us pay for the privilege. I recognize his officious look, the one that assumes You all want to help me help you, now don’t you?

  Yusuf rises from the passenger seat of the 917 and Flunky goes weak in the knees.

  It’s the family face. The whole royal family—father, two brothers, five sons and thirty-five cousins—all look a whole lot like each other and there’s a portrait of one or two of them—the King, the Crown Prince, Prince Rahim (the Chief of Staff Prince), the Prime Minister Prince, the Junior Transport Minister Prince and sometimes the Commissioner of Housing Prince, thirty-five feet tall, on every other block and every other billboard all over Qumrahdi. The family face is branded on the national consciousness like Mickey Mouse, Colonel Sanders or Elvis.

  Yusuf’s got the family face and Flunky, confronted by this royalist nightmare, stops dead in his tracks.

  “A secure garage has been arranged for this car, the property of Prince Rahim!” Yusuf proclaims.

  Flunky checks his iPad. “We have nothing on our records—”

  “It’s under my name, ‘Nicholas Marsh’,” I explain. “A gift to the Prince from an old friend.”

  “A token of appreciation,” Yusuf lays it on thick, making sure everyone understands he’s an emissary of Rahim. Driving Rahim’s car! Sitting in the passenger seat, at least.

  “Partition 27!” Flunky calls to the attendants, who appear from nowhere and push the 917 into the elevator (!) to the car penthouse below.

  “We require at least one floor, possibly two or three, of your hotel,” Yusuf continues, “where the feng shui is positive. I must sign off on the location personally. These are spiritual goals at work here—you see me, son?”

  Flunky might be a little shaky, feng shui-speaking, but he understands hierarchy. He nods staccato and backs into the lobby, promising Yusuf the best of everything.

  Yusuf’s sidekick Hassan—I know him from the vlogs—arranges parking for the posse while Diamante works his way across the front of the building, feigning glamor shots of the cars while monitoring Harry’s phone signal.

  “He’s a way’s up.”

  “Middle? High? Which wing?”

  “Can’t tell.”

  “That’s no good. We can’t search all those floors.”

  “Whoever’s kidnapped him,” Sara injects, reading from her phone, “is not stupid. This place has twenty-five elevators, each one programmed for specific floors only. The elevator doors won’t open unless your key has the right access.”

  Yusuf pops over.

  “Sara!” I say. “Yusuf was impressed that Rahim got to meet Arafat. How many times did you interview Arafat?”

  She grimaces. “Three. Ask me how often he told me something worth writing.”

  Yusuf’s eyes glaze over and he does what men have done to women like Sara for ten thousand years—he changes the subject.

  “Where’s your friend?”

  “We’re trying to get readings on our homing device—”

  “Looks like a phone.”

  “Doesn’t it? They’re clever that way. Anyhow, we’re not getting clear info so far. He’s up there but we don’t know how far or which side of the building.”

  “You need more detail.”

  “Tell me about it,” I grumble and his face sets, as though I’ve just given him really serious instructions.

  The lobby is a jumble of glass and gold plate. You could get lost in the reflections. Flunky approaches Yusuf as we sweep inside. “I’ve reserved the entire twenty-third floor for your party,” he offers. In three minutes, his body language has morphed from arrogant snot to I-live-to-suffer-for-you.

  Yusuf pulls him up short.

  “Did I choose the twenty-third floor?” Yusuf whispers and Flunky nearly shrivels into the corner. The threat in Yusuf’s voice is the terrifying self-assurance of someone who knows he will get exactly what he wants. “You did hear me say I would choose?”

  “Yes, Your Highness.”

  “So I will choose—the floor or floors—in due time. For now, we go to the Skylounge.”

  He points upward, to the fancy smoked-glass bubble lounge straddling the two towers. Flunky’s skin passes quickly from suntan-umber to stroke-green.

  “The—the Skylounge is reserved for a corporate affair,” he sputters.

  Yusuf just stares. No retort, no words, no change of expression, no blinking, no letup. It’s amazing how quickly this becomes unendurable, even for me just watching. Flunky attempts a response but it ends in a strangled squeak.

  “We go to the Skylounge,” Yusuf repeats, in exactly the same tone of voice and Flunky trots to corral elevators for our party of twelve.

  ~~~~

  As we walk to the lifts, Yusuf tells Diamante, “Read your meter as we go up. If you can narrow the strongest signal to three floors, I’ll find your man.” He flashes me his on-camera smile. “I’ve got that app,” he offers. “Great for locating stray girlfriends.”

  Yesterday, I wouldn’t have taken Yusuf’s word if he said cancer was bad for me. Now he’s making suggestions and we’re taking them. When you’re standing on the Pole, everything looks like a compass.

  We’re so close to Harry now. Find out where he is, figure out how to get inside, figure out how to get him out. This trip is a Russian nesting doll of troubles.

  Diamante stations himself near the control panel, so he can read his app and the floor display at a glance. The smoked-glass cupola bobs upward like a cork, the skyline rearranging itself, fountains, construction cranes and licorice-stick towers preening as we rise.

  The Skylounge is packed. The corporate party is raging, a mixed group from the Godzilla of Wall Street banks kicking back against a wall of tinted windows, the Saudi industrial seascape to the North merging into Qumrahdi’s skyline and the endless Gulf stretching eastward unto infinity. Flunky has a word with the bank managers and Yusuf joins in, emphasizing the royal nature of our intrusion on their bar. Three minutes later, attendants drag a rolling partition through the center of the room, separating the two parties. Hassan coordinates the drink order while food appears on shiny
stainless-steel carts.

  Yusuf huddles with us, soaking up the spy game. “So what do we know?”

  Diamante looks conflicted. “The signal was at its strongest just before we stopped. So he might be right below us.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “Sure? No. Let me do some more readings.”

  Yusuf’s posse have spread onto the window seats, drinks are flowing and the aisles are clogged with showcases on rolling carts—watches, cellphones, videogame consoles, fancy laptops, 4K televisions in multi-monitor displays. And suddenly we’re swarming in women—tall, mostly blond and, from their accents, Eastern European. Everything has its price and these guys are the market.

  -Is this relevant to—?

  I told you before—it’s my story. You need to know what I would say in court.

  -You will never appear in court.

  Maybe not here. I’m an American citizen. Maybe I’d rather be tried in the US.

  -We have influence. You could get a long sentence.

  They don’t cut shit off though, do they?

  So Diamante wanders absent-mindedly into the center of the room, reading signal strength but it’s bad timing. Hassan rises off the couch to meet him and I can read the ominous look in his eyes. I reach them just before Hassan’s outstretched hand can slap the phone from Diamante’s.

  “Hold on, brother,” I say. “Everything’s cool.”

  “NO phones,” Hassan says. Diamante is shaken, letting me take the lead. I hold his phone up to Hassan’s face, showing him the most recent photos Diamante took—Paris street scenes, a computer screen shot and one of the flight deck of the C5A. Nothing from tonight.

  “No pictures,” I tell him. “We’re measuring emissions for everyone’s safety, okay? We’re friends to Prince Yusuf—and the family.” I lean on the last few words and watch him stand down from alert.

  “What the hell was that?” Diamante asks, after we’re back at our table.

  Yusuf shakes his head. “Pictures are dangerous.”

  “Pictures of what?”