Shadow of the Burj

by J Jackson Bentley

  “You are well informed, Maxwell,” The Sheikh said, smiling. The pride in his choice of operatives was apparent. “With Miss Jamie’s documents from the Al Muran’s offices in the Freezone, and the account numbers from the Al Futtaim laptop, we should be able to recover the largest part of the monies purloined by Mullah Khaweini from the car thefts and the property frauds.”

  There were more smiles now as the three new friends realised that their little taskforce had almost finished its work. Their keen anticipation was short lived, however.

  “That just leaves us with one more task to complete before you can all go on your way, but please regard my words well. This outstanding task is much more onerous than the two you have successfully undertaken to date.”

  The Sheikh opened a sealed white envelope and handed out copies of an internet page. The writing was in Arabic, and a typewritten translation was attached.

  ‘The Playboy Sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates are the running dogs of the Americans and the Zionists. They betray their Muslim roots. Their towering edifices try to challenge the supremacy of Allah but they will suffer and Djinn will visit them with death and destruction. Their flaming towers will fall!”

  “Strong stuff, but isn’t it just a lot of nutters trying to stir things up as usual?” Todd asked bluntly.

  “We would have assumed so, normally,” the Sheikh agreed, “but our customs investigators stumbled across a container full of explosives which had been destined for delivery to an unused factory in Sharjah. There was enough RDX in that container to flatten Internet City.” There was a collective intake of breath. “What is worse is that the paperwork showed that the container was part of a four container consignment, and we have no idea where the remaining three containers are now!”

  “And you are tying this into the website, why, exactly?” Max enquired.

  “Because Djinn is the Muslim equivalent of your Christian Satan, the devil, who will destroy with fire.” He paused and his face was rigid with tension. “And, because the consignment was addressed to Djinn Industries.”

  Chapter 15

  Fasil Tower, Media City, Dubai:

  22nd February; 9am.

  Max hadn’t slept well. His body was aching all over, and now the threat of huge amounts of explosives in Dubai unsettled him. The place had its quirks, its weaknesses, but overall it was a benign place. Security was relatively lax, probably much the same as any UK city, but the police presence was much less obvious. If someone wanted to attack Dubai they would have relatively free rein.

  With the amount of construction still underway in the city, large numbers of trucks and workers’ buses could be seen in built up areas. Max had also noticed that illegally parked vehicles could stand for hours outside major landmarks without attracting much attention. People of all nationalities enjoyed free access to most buildings, and nobody was searched or had their bags inspected, even in government buildings. If they were to stop this terrorist threat, Max thought, they would have to stop the people involved. Dubai had so many potential targets that not all of them could be adequately guarded.

  Max flicked through a coffee table book filled with glossy photographs of Dubai’s iconic buildings. He saw the twin Emirates Towers, the Burj Al Arab with its sail-like design, the Emirates Mall and the Dubai Mall, the Address hotels and, of course, the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. A strike at any one of them would cause chaos. Westerners would leave in droves, tourism would collapse and the local economy would be severely compromised. This was a small city state with a population of over five million people but only around a million or so of those had permanent ties. The terrorists had to be stopped.

  Max opened the ‘livecam’ window on his laptop and the screen split into two halves. The left half showed a long shot of Al Muran’s head office in Dubai, and beneath it was a white space that would fill with text as the action on the screen exploded. The right half of the screen showed a closer shot of Al Muran’s Djibouti Portakabin-style offices. The pictures flickered and the text box beneath each video feed started spitting out tickertape-style scrolling text.

  “Now, now, now……. all units active…… first strike go now……. second wave stand by….”

  Then, almost simultaneously, black-clad police from Dubai’s Special Tactical Force and brown uniformed soldiers from Djibouti’s Elite Guard stormed the two offices. Although they were all armed, there was no resistance whatsoever, and within five minutes the buildings were secured and the staff were being driven away, those in Dubai in a black bus, and those in Djibouti aboard a camouflaged truck. The white text panels filled with text and scrolled ever downwards as more news was added.

  “Stand down, stand down, stand down, all objectives secured…. Repeat, all objectives secured…”

  Max had seen enough, and closed the window. Returning to his home screen, he quickly typed in the web address for the secure Reuters live news site, available only to registered news organisations who subscribed at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds per year. He clicked through to financial news, and then he selected banking from the drop down menu. Finally he clicked on the green update button and read the latest news in text form.

  Max had interviewed Fergus McLeash in 2008 at the London HQ of Isebanki, the struggling Icelandic Internet bank, and had been surprised to hear no trace of the Scots accent McLeash adopted in TV and radio interviews. “It makes me memorable,” was McLeash’s explanation when Max asked where his accent had gone.

  Max clicked on a still picture of a much greyer McLeash, which had a white play button in the middle of the picture. An arrow appeared and circled, chasing its own tail as the video booted up.

  Looking drawn, and a lot older, McLeash spoke in front of a bank of microphones, the bank logo strategically placed over his shoulder.

  “As I said earlier in my written statement, copies are available all around the room.” He looked down at the podium and his notes. “We are cooperating fully with the authorities. As soon as we were made aware of the presence of terrorist funds in our accounts, we secured them until such times as the authorities had the relevant court orders to freeze or sequester the funds. I can say that funds have been frozen in accounts in Europe, the Middle East and in Africa. I am not at liberty to say any more, as it may be deemed sub judice in some jurisdictions. Thank you.”

  The screen reverted to the still picture with the play button. Max shut down the laptop and decided to go for a swim to clear his head and relax his aching bones.

  There was no doubt that Al Qaeda and its sympathisers had lost millions of dollars in funding in a single day, but Max worried that it would serve only to spur on those crazy fundamentalists who already had the explosives they needed and all the time in the world to strike back.

  ***

  By 1pm Max, Jamie and Todd had congregated in the sixth floor conference room and the white boards were covered in numerous scribbles, random names and arrows linking them to Blu-tacked photos of people and places. The very randomness of the data suggested a brainstorming session that had produced very little in the way of tangible results.

  They were frustrated with their lack of progress. The lift chimed its familiar ring, signalling that it had arrived at the sixth floor. They all looked toward the door to see who had arrived. The first person through the door was dressed from head to foot in black, her hijab tastefully embroidered with gold sequins and Swarovski crystals. Sheikha Aara smiled at Todd, and Jamie almost remarked on how much she looked like an Arabic Sandra Bullock. Immediately in her wake came Dominic Lepeudry; this time it was Jamie’s turn to smile.

  All five sat down at the conference table and Max brought soft drinks and sparkling water from the glass fronted fridge. Dominic leaned over and grabbed a banana from the stoneware fruit bowl that was miraculously refilled every time the investigators came back to the room.

  Max opened the discussion. “Sheikha…..”

  “Please call me Aara when my cousins are not present
. The title is honorary and undeserved; when I am here, I am a working woman.”

  “OK. Aara, we are grateful for your attendance here. Your contacts in the Emirates are invaluable to us, and we need your help if we are to stop this threatened attack.

  Aara responded. “I am an optimist, like most Arabic people. We have worked together to close down our largest criminal enterprise in only a few days, and I have faith that you will all be successful in averting this threat, too.” She cast her soft brown eyes around the gathered investigators but her gaze settled on Todd.

  “

  Thanks, Aara,” Max continued. “We’ve made a lot of connections on the white boards, but they are all speculative at this point. I was thinking of a risky strategy that might bring more fruitful results, and I’d like comments.” Max rotated one of the white boards to show the same data but correlated around a single source. The others looked at the spider diagram and saw the pattern that Max had spotted.

  “I was thinking that if we assume Mullah Khaweini is at the centre of this mad scheme, all we would really need to establish is a link between him and Djinn, and we may be able to move forward. I realise it’s a risk and that we might find he has nothing to do with the Djinn plot, but it could be a quick way to find the people behind this plot, and the explosives.” He was expecting a number of objections, but all four of his audience nodded in agreement.

  Dominic was leaning over and rummaging through his briefcase. He sat up, holding a piece of printed paper.

  “This didn’t make any sense before, but I think it could be important. We searched the hard drives of the Al Muran server and Al Futtaim’s laptop for key words and phrases. One was ‘property’ and it threw up several results. We found a list on an Excel spreadsheet which showed a variety of property holdings, including retail, commercial and apartments. All of these are the subject of sequestration orders apart from these three properties.”

  He showed them the paper, and explained the entries.

  “The first is a villa purchased by an offshore company, and it’s currently deserted, but it served as a temporary Madrassa for over a year before the students transferred to a newly built mosque.”

  “I know it,” Aara said. “It was very radical. The authorities tried to close it down several times because it was linked to messages that led to the abuse of Islamic women by their violent husbands and families.”

  “Sadly, there is no evidence that Khaweini ever preached there, but it must be a strong possibility, given that his arrival here coincided with its opening,” Dominic mused. “The second property is a dry cleaning company who lease the property and claim not to know who owns the property. They pay their rent through an agent, whose only contact details are a mobile phone number. They pay the rent in cash.

  The third property was the former home of Gulf Mouldings, who collapsed in 2008 after their property developer clients refused to pay their bills. The building is largely empty now, and the grounds have been reclaimed by the desert, but it’s only a few miles from the border with Dubai.”

  Dominic paused to circle Mullah Khaweini and Djinn Industries on the whiteboard. “If we assume that Khaweini is involved with Djinn, this property could be the link, because Al Nahda is within a hundred yards of so of Sharjah Industrial zone 1, where the third container was headed.”

  “We need to get out there and have a look,” Todd suggested. Everyone agreed, and Todd and Max accepted the assignment, even though their last team effort had ended in near disaster.

  ***

  “We have one more lead that may be worth following up,” Dominic said as the meeting came to an end. “Just two hours ago a message was left in the drafts box of the email address we’ve been monitoring. It reads, ‘Collect keys and take to location, 1900 at the stone horse inside DM.’ We believe that DM is the Dubai Mall, which has three stone horses. One is at the end of the lagoon at the foot of the Downtown Address, and is actually black marble, which could be classed as stone. The two others are at the two entrances of PF Chang’s restaurant. One of those is outside, on the terrace, but the other is located inside the Mall.

  I suggest Jamie and I take that one. Aara, could you be there to keep an eye on the other two horses, just in case? You can see both from the edge of the lagoon.”

  “It has been my dream to be a secret agent always, since a child,” Aara said, smiling. The others laughed, until they saw that she was deadly serious. Then she laughed, too.

  Chapter 16

  Fasil Tower, Media City, Dubai:

  22nd February; 2:30pm.

  Max insisted on driving this time, and they took the less conspicuous Toyota Camry with them. The traffic was heavy, and feeding onto Sheikh Zayed Road was a matter of pushing in and avoiding eye contact with the driver of the car in the next lane who was jostling for the same space. Just as they filtered onto the main road they heard a furore behind them as car horns blared at a taxi forcing its way onto the main road.

  For the next three miles the traffic moved at a snail’s pace; first one lane would move a hundred yards and cars would be eager to join it, and then as it came to a stop the lane inside would move a hundred yards and all of the cars would want to be back in that lane again. Todd watched the shenanigans from the passenger seat with great amusement.

  Fifty minutes later the traffic was behind them and they were motoring along on a virtually empty highway, shown on the map as the E11. They were approaching Al Nahda when they were obliged to stop at a set of traffic lights. As they did so, a yellow-roofed Dubai taxi pulled up alongside them on the passenger side.

  The uniformed taxi driver rolled down his window and beckoned for Todd to do likewise. The man in the taxi had strong Arabic features and was carrying two passengers; a man and woman in the back, in full Arab attire, one clad entirely in white and one in black.

  Todd reached down and then pressed the button to lower the window. The smiling Arab taxi driver leaned across as if to ask Todd a question, and without warning Todd lifted his Sig Sauer P226 and shot the man between the eyes.

  ***

  The look of shock permanently etched onto the taxi driver’s features was more than matched by the horror and outrage showing on Max’s face. Max tried to speak but couldn’t say anything except, “You just killed an innocent taxi driver!”

  Todd turned to Max and said, “Pull in front of him and reverse back until we’re touching his bumper. Make it look as though he rear-ended us.”

  Max was still in shock at the apparently random killing of a taxi driver, but did as he was asked. There were no other cars in the queue, and no signs of violence other than the taxi driver’s forehead, which now had a penny sized hole in it.

  “What possessed you to kill an innocent man?” Max demanded as he reversed back into the taxi. “He was probably only going to ask for directions.”

  “Max, the passengers seem pretty calm for a couple who have just seen their driver killed, don’t you think?” Todd said patiently. Max looked over his shoulder. It was true. The rear seat passengers hadn’t moved an inch. Todd climbed out of the car without any further explanation, and Max followed. They both stood at the taxi driver’s door and looked in. The uniformed man was holding a machine pistol of indeterminate make in his right hand.

  “Oh, shit!” Max blurted out as he looked into the back seat to see the plastic mannequin faces of the supposed passengers. “How did you know?”

  Todd unfastened the taxi driver’s seatbelt and shoved him across into the passenger seat. “We can talk about it when we get to the factory.” He slid into the taxi and waited for Max to drive off so that he could follow.

  ***

  “Max, in all the time I’ve been in Dubai I’ve probably seen two or three Arabic taxi drivers. All the rest are Indian or Pakistani or other incomers. So, when we left Barsha and a yellow-roofed taxi driven by an Arab pushed in close behind us with horns blaring, I took notice.

  Then, as we were stuck in the stop-start traffic, I kept an
eye open for the taxi and there it was - taxi number 584, with two passengers who weren’t moving a muscle. I admit, I didn’t give it too much thought until we got onto the E11. The traffic thinned out at that point, and there was our friend again. By the time he pulled up beside us I was ready for him. I kept my eyes on him as he motioned for me to wind down my window, which he did rather unnaturally with his left hand, when his right hand should have been free. It was then I noticed that, in spite of his fixed smile, he was scanning the cabin of the car to make sure that a sweep of the machine pistol would get us both and not all of his load would be absorbed by my thick head.”

  “Why did he wait until you wound the window down?” Max asked.

  “Two reasons; first off, visibility; from where he was sitting there would have been a lot of reflection. Second, certainty; he had no way of knowing whether this car was protected with armoured glass. He was being careful - too careful.” He paused. “And then there was his uniform. He wore a red tie and epaulettes.”

  Max looked puzzled, so Todd explained. “National Taxis have yellow roofs, and the brand carries through to the ties and epaulettes in the uniform. Dubai Taxis are red. He was driving a Yellow National Taxi, but he was wearing a red Dubai Taxi uniform.”

  Max stared at him, blinking. “Bloody hell, Todd! I thought you were another thick Aussie!”

  Todd drove the taxi into the abandoned factory and parked it behind a large rusty oil tank to obscure it from the road and casual observers. They would get the Sheikh’s boys to recover it later, and find out who the driver was, but for now they could see what they came looking for. The factory had been closed for over two years and it looked as though it had lain empty for decades, yet there were fresh tyre marks in the sand and they were from a heavy lorry of some kind.