‘How do you want to do this?’ said Marc. ‘He could be doing anything in there –’
As he spoke, there was a grinding rattle as a chain drive came to life, and the roller doors began to rise, thin lines of shadow appearing at their bases to grow larger with every moment.
‘Cover!’ Lucy shouted, and they sprinted into the shadow of an empty guardhouse facing the roadway.
The warehouse’s interior was dark, but Marc saw a glitter of silver through one of the doors. The SLR was in there, parked askew with the scissor doors folded up like extended wings and the trunk hatch yawning open. The boot was empty.
He held his breath, waiting for someone in the cover of the darkness to start shooting. Instead of gunfire, he heard the high-pitched, nasal snarl of revving motorcycle engines. ‘What the hell?’
The stuttering revs became a scream of acceleration and from out of the shadows, streaming around the stalled Mercedes, came four identical KTM dirt bikes. Each one was ridden by a figure with their face obscured behind a white crash helmet, and all of them had the same kind of brown dishdasha as the man with the rocket launcher. But what made Marc’s heart freeze in his chest was the silver steel case strapped across the handlebars of each of the bikes.
Lucy hesitated, seeing the same thing, before she committed to opening fire, trying to take out at least one of the riders as they sped past. If she hit them, they didn’t let it slow them down. The bikes roared out across the asphalt at full throttle and the pack broke apart, each heading off in a different direction across the sands.
Marc burst from cover in time to see one of them slow as they passed the injured man left behind by the wrecked Veyron. The rider drew a gun and killed the other shooter with a bullet to the head before powering away again.
‘Smart bastard,’ Lucy growled, watching them go. ‘There’s no way we can track all of them!’
Marc swore, glaring around as the motorcycles disappeared into the heat haze off the desert. The Exile weapon and the doppelgangers Jalsa Sood had constructed had slipped through their hands. ‘Ramaas must’ve had this planned from the start. He’s turned it into a bloody shell game –’
A shriek of torn air cut through his words and a wall of concussion hit them both, throwing Marc and Lucy into the dust as the warehouse behind them exploded into a ball of orange flames and black smoke.
The hot stink of combusted petrol washed over them and they both choked. Bits of tin roofing fluttered down out of the skies, scattering all around. Marc was momentarily deafened, and he pulled on Lucy’s arm, trying to drag her away. ‘We have to get out of here,’ he managed.
But a sudden wind was whipping up and when she turned back to him Lucy was pointing toward the highway. A squad of green-and-white police 4x4s were bounding over the road toward them, and above, a helicopter had settled into a menacing hover.
Lucy raised her hands and let her gun drop into the sand at her feet. Marc saw a man in a tan-coloured uniform aiming a rifle at them from the helicopter’s crew bay, and he did the same, feeling all the fatigue held back by his adrenaline come over him in a rush.
*
After a female doctor had dressed the cuts on her head, a woman in a perfectly pressed green hijab and police uniform came to take Lucy’s statement, but as she barely said anything past her name and a demand for a phone call, the conversation was somewhat one-sided. The identification Lucy had on her, under the ‘Lula’ cover, was good enough for a cursory check but it didn’t hold up to an in-depth examination. Instead of giving the locals more information, she decided to play the waiting game. She hoped a solution would present itself before the Dubai cops ran out of patience.
They put Lucy in a clean, modern cell and she passed the hours sleeping and waiting for the police to interrogate her again. A day went by. When they didn’t come, she became concerned. Somebody was going to be punished for all the mayhem that had been unleashed in the city, and if it wasn’t her . . .
She frowned. While Marc Dane had served in the British military and been trained by the security services, he didn’t have the black-ops preparation like Lucy Keyes did. He hadn’t gone through the rigours of SERE the way she had at Fort Bragg, back when Lucy was still wearing army green for Delta Force. The Survival Evasion Resistance Escape programme had taught her how to be ready for anything up to and including ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, but as far as she knew, Marc had never had to face that kind of thing. And here they were in a city that was pretty much a law unto itself.
Lucy pushed away the troubling possibility. The Brit’s tougher than you’re giving him credit for. He’ll be okay.
But when she saw Marc for the first time since they’d been arrested, she knew that her fears had been on the money. Two burly police officers marched her out of the cell and down a series of brightly lit corridors until they emerged in a parking garage where an armoured prisoner-transport van was waiting.
They shoved her inside, and there he was, handcuffed to a rail along the middle of the compartment. He had bruises on his face and a split lip that hadn’t been there after the car crash. ‘Hey,’ offered Marc, his voice scratchy.
There was already a stocky policeman sitting in there with him, and a second man climbed in after Lucy, securing the cuffs around her wrists to the same restraint rail. The other cop sat down with his back to the door and started toying with his iPhone as the van started up and pulled away.
‘You made some friends?’ Lucy glared at the cop, who ignored her.
Marc shrugged. ‘You know how it goes. I fell down the stairs.’
‘Fuck these guys,’ she said, with real heat. Her curse drew the attention of the man with the phone and he gave her a severe look. ‘Yeah,’ she told him, ‘I’m talking about you, needle-dick.’
‘That’s not going to help,’ said Marc. Rays of sunlight came through the slit windows in the top of the van as they turned and picked up speed. He leaned over and she did the same, so they could talk quietly to one another. ‘I ran the same Europol line I gave before, told them Ramaas was a terrorist and we were chasing him down.’ He gave a weak grin. ‘They didn’t buy it. I reckon someone up top in the Dubai police knows who Jalsa Sood really was. I reckon they’re going to try and fit us up for the murders at his place. Gloss over Jalsa’s terrorist past and make it look like it was a high-end car theft gone wrong, or something . . .’
‘Yeah . . .’ Lucy considered that. It wouldn’t do for it to become public knowledge that the city had been home to a notorious bomb-maker for the past decade. ‘And meanwhile, Ramaas has gone dark.’
Marc glanced around. ‘The way I figure it? They’ve already got an inkling who we really are . . . They must have checked us out on the international crimes database. I mean, Europol and me are not exactly on the best of terms after I split from Split and then there’s your reputation with the US government . . .’
She gave him a hard look that prevented Marc from adding any more to that sentence. ‘So. Extradition.’
‘Don’t hold your breath,’ he corrected. ‘I’m willing to bet they’ll keep us around for a while. Foreigners behaving badly always plays well with the locals, right? They’ll take us to the central nick in Al Awir . . . And that’ll be the last we ever see of each other.’
‘If we’re lucky.’ Lucy thought it odd that the pair of them had been put in the same van with two male cops, considering the UAE’s laws about fraternisation between genders. She considered another possibility – that they were being driven to some isolated spot out in the desert where they would be quietly disappeared. The look in Dane’s eyes told her he was thinking along similar lines.
Lucy watched him intently for a moment. ‘What?’ he said.
‘I know you got an idea, Dane. I mean, you’re good at this stuff, right? On the fly?’
He scowled. ‘Most of my ideas involve me being in a better position than chained up in the back of a paddy wagon.’
‘Hey, you already
broke out of one prison this week. How hard is it going to be to do it again?’
‘We got no weapons, no tech, no backup,’ said Marc. ‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate your renewed confidence in me, but I can’t spin straw into gold.’
‘We get to Al Awir, or wherever, and that’s game over,’ she told him. Lucy felt her anger kindling. ‘I had a gutful of the convict life once already. Not doing it again, not here.’ She glared at the cop with the iPhone. ‘I’m already sick of this place and everyone in it.’ She remembered the glittering spires of the rich districts and the crushing inequality they had seen in the concrete dorms of the worker-town. Prison would be little better.
The police officer met her gaze. ‘You both be quiet,’ he said firmly.
‘Or what?’ Marc snarled. ‘You going to slap me around a little more? Of course, there’s only two of you this time. Don’t like those odds, do you?’
For the first time, Lucy noticed that the other cop in the back of the van had a swollen eye hidden underneath the sunglasses he was wearing, and he shifted uncomfortably at Marc’s words. Tougher than you’re giving him credit for, she thought again.
Very deliberately, Marc met Lucy’s gaze and then shot a sideways look at the cop who had spoken. Marc’s eyes flicked to the man and then down to his phone. He cocked his head. The gesture said, Get me?
She did. Lucy looked at Marc, at the police officer with the black eye and then gave an imperceptible nod.
So that was how they were going to do it, the brute-force approach. Crude, but neither of them could afford to be choosy right now. She smiled thinly. That was fine with her. A bit of rage-work would do a lot to even out her foul mood.
Lucy was subtly adjusting herself when the van came to a sudden halt, braking with a lurch that rocked the prisoners in their seats. The cop’s iPhone gave off a soft ping and he made a disgusted face.
Lucy hesitated, thinking about how she might take him down. With the cuffs, there was only so far she could move.
The last thing she expected was for the transport’s back doors to swing open. Lucy smelled seawater and rust, and she heard the calling of gulls. Without a word, the two cops got up and climbed out of the vehicle, but not before one of them tossed the keys for the cuffs on the floor between Marc and Lucy’s feet. Puzzled, they both watched the police officers disappear out of sight through the open doors.
She shot Marc a wary look. ‘How did you do that?’
‘Do what?
‘Was it the phone, or something? You send him a message?’
‘With what?’ Marc clutched at the keys and opened his cuffs. ‘Happy thoughts?’ He did the same for Lucy and she shook off the steel bracelets, massaging her wrists.
She stood up and took a step toward the door, but Marc’s hand shot out to grab her arm. ‘Wait a second. What if this is a set-up? Could be they’re letting us go so they can shoot us while we’re trying to escape.’
Lucy mulled that over. ‘Possible,’ she admitted, ‘but I am damned if I’m going back to jail again. I’ll take my chances.’
Warily, they scrambled down out of the back of the van and onto a concrete dock. Marc scanned their surroundings. ‘We’re on the coast.’
Off to one side there was the vast construct of the Palm, an artificial island growing out of the Dubai waterfront, and in the other direction there were the numerous slips and moorings of a massive yacht club.
The two cops returned and climbed back into the rear of the prisoner transport, closing the doors behind them. The van’s engine had been idling all the while, and now it rumbled again as it drove away, leaving Lucy and Marc alone – and quite free – beneath the harsh sun of the day.
‘I honestly have no idea how or why that happened,’ said Marc, after a moment.
‘It did not come cheaply,’ said a voice from behind them. Henri Delancort leaned out from beneath a sunshade over a motor launch tethered to the dock. As they approached, Malte Riis climbed out of the boat, his pale face impassive beneath a straw hat. He gave Lucy a brief nod and walked on past her, in the direction of the city.
‘Where’s he going?’ said Marc.
‘Malte has the admirable task of containing any blowback from your little escapade in the desert,’ said Delancort, and he beckoned them impatiently. ‘Well, come on. Vite, vite. Before the locals have a change of heart.’
Lucy climbed into the launch and Marc followed suit. ‘Rubicon sent us a boat?’ added the Brit.
‘This isn’t Mr Solomon’s boat.’ Delancort shook his head and pointed to a mooring out past the artificial island, where a sleek gigayacht in silver and sky blue lay at anchor. ‘That is Mr Solomon’s boat,’ he corrected.
*
The rain was hammering down so hard on the plastic cowling around the payphone that Horvat had to jam the blocky pink handset into his ear, so he could hear the voice on the other end of the line. ‘Listen to me, Franko. As your lawyer, I have to tell you that this is the only card you have left to play. You’ve got to come in and surrender yourself to the police. They have the city sealed up tight!’
‘Piss off,’ he spat back. ‘Turn myself in? Those bastards all hate me!’
‘I don’t disagree,’ came the weary reply. ‘But if you come in, we can play it by the book. Cut a deal.’ There was a pause. ‘I’ve heard some things. It’s not just the cops who are looking for you. You’ve made a lot of enemies over the years, you know that. I’m told people are asking questions. Not locals.’
Horvat grimaced through the rain at the frontage of the bank across the street, finding the ornate clock above the door. He watched the sweep of the minute hand, knowing exactly how long it would take to run a trace on the location he was calling from.
‘I can probably get you a reduced sentence,’ the lawyer went on, ‘but you’ll need to come clean about everything.’
‘I am not going to prison!’ Horvat snapped. ‘I won’t last a day! Too many people in there I put away want a piece of me.’
‘Just talk to –’
A jolt of paranoia ran through him. ‘You’re trying to keep me on the line, aren’t you? Are they there with you right now?’
‘No, Franko, no –’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll make my own deal. You’re fired!’ Horvat slammed the phone down. He turned up his collar before jogging out across the rainy street and into the bank’s main entrance.
He gave the duty manager a false name and got rid of her as soon as the woman gave him access to the safety deposit vault in the basement, where his box was waiting. There was hardly anyone around at this time of the morning, and Horvat dragged the metal container into a private booth off the vault. He dropped it onto a table and blew out a breath.
His comfortable life as a corrupt cop was now in tatters, and that meant Horvat could trust no-one and take nothing for granted. He could only go back to what he knew would work – blackmail.
Inside the box was a stash of money, an untraceable gun as well as more fake IDs and blank credit cards – a ‘parachute’ package that he had gathered up over the years for just such a turn of events. But the real riches were a shopping bag filled with stolen files, compromising photographs and old tape cassettes that contained enough dirt to ruin the lives of a lot of high-profile people. Horvat upended the box onto the table and began to transfer the contents to a sling bag he had brought with him.
The annexe’s privacy curtain slid back and Horvat whirled angrily around, furious at this disturbance, his hand snatching at the pistol.
A round-faced oriental man in a black jacket and trousers stood there, holding a silenced gun of his own. ‘Good morning, Detective Inspector Horvat,’ he began, his words careful and firm. ‘Step away from the table.’
Horvat released his grip on the pistol and did as he was told. ‘Who the fuck sent you?’
‘My name is Saito,’ he replied. ‘I was not sent to find you specifically, per se. But we have crossed paths because you are a node in my investigation.�
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‘A what?’ Horvat bristled at the man’s lecturing tone. ‘I am a police officer. You can’t threaten me!’
‘Technically, you are not,’ said Saito. ‘There is a warrant for your arrest.’ He glanced at the blackmail files. ‘You stole the security monitor hard drive from the Queen’s High casino. Where is it?’
‘How do you know –?’
‘Where?’ repeated Saito, taking a step closer. His gun never wavered.
Carefully, Horvat reached into his bag and removed the book-sized computer component, and put it on top of the pile. ‘Listen to me. There’s a lot of stuff here. It’s worth hundreds of thousands of euros, millions maybe. How about I walk away and you get to keep it all, eh?’
Saito gave a brief shake of the head. ‘I have a counter-offer,’ he said. ‘As I stated, I am not specifically interested in you. But you are the only person I have been able to locate who can tell me about the man that Neven and Bojan Kurjak were dealing with, before the former vanished and the latter was killed.’
‘The African?’ Horvat’s brow furrowed. This line of questioning was not what he had been expecting. ‘You’re talking about that pirate with the dead eye . . .’
‘Tell me everything you know about him and you can walk out of this building.’ Saito let the gun muzzle drop away as a gesture of good faith.
Horvat chewed on it for a moment. He had nothing to lose. Bojan might be dead, but the Serbs and their new friend were ultimately responsible for all of his woes, and if he could do something to ruin their lives, the venal and spiteful part of Horvat’s nature demanded that he do so.
He dredged up every minor detail he could recall about the pirate and the Kurjaks, everything he’d ever overheard or seen in recent days or before. Saito recorded him speaking on a slim digital device the size of a pen, prompting him for clarifications now and then, but mostly staying silent.
‘Ramaas,’ he said, when Horvat was done. ‘The man’s name is Ramaas?’
Horvat nodded. ‘So I can go now?’
Saito approached the table and separated the pile atop it into two. He pushed one half – the money, the gun and the IDs – toward Horvat, and the other – the blackmail files and the hard drive – he patted with his hand. ‘I will keep these. My employer might find them useful.’
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