by Brad Taylor
He came back moments later. “You’re good to go, but I’m claiming this fake watch. Had to buy it to support my reason for being in the stairwell a second time.”
“Let me guess. You got the gold Submariner.”
“Hell no. Omega Seamaster. That’s what James Bond wears.”
Chuckling, Decoy and Knuckles tied up then gagged the unconscious man. I filled a glass with water from the bathroom sink and splashed it in his face. He woke up instantly, whipping his head left and right. Seeing white boys, he attempted to leap to his feet and found he was trussed like a pig for slaughter. His eyes grew wide, the terror clearly evident. His hands began to tremble in the flex-cuffs like a man with Parkinson’s disease. It wasn’t the reaction of a master terrorist.
He’s never been in the arena. Never done any operational acts.
It changed my approach. I had planned on using the information we knew to try to elicit more data from him, tripping him up with my supposed omniscience. I figured there was no way he would freely give me anything, and I would have to outwit him using trickery. He had no idea what I did or didn’t know, and I hoped for him to give me something new because he thought I already had it, as a stalling tactic.
That interrogation plan had been based on a hardened terrorist. Someone who understood the risks and the pain that would come if he were captured. A terrorist like that could resist pressure for a great while. We only had about an hour to figure out what was going on, not nearly enough time for any sort of physical threat or action to sway a man who’s prepared and has the strength of will to resist. Now, seeing the man cower, I decided to go full bore as the mean guy, see if he would crack.
I put on my best Shrek face and leaned in close. “Tell me you don’t speak English and I’ll rip out your tongue. Understand?”
He nodded his head vigorously.
“We’ve been hired by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid to track a man called the Ghost. He’s here to kill an American. We know he’s using the Burj Khalifa for the attack. We’ve watched you for days and know you are also involved.”
Hell, might as well throw a little omniscience in there as well.
He shook his head violently. Time for the bad guy.
“Hand me the pliers.” Knuckles gave me a pair of vise grips he’d found in the back. I held them up to his nose, so close he could smell the grease on them.
“Don’t shake your head again. What I told you is fact. Denying it doesn’t make it go away. I’m first going to crush your toes with these pliers. Then your fingers. Eventually, I’ll work my way to your genitals. The duration is up to you, but I assure you that you have enough appendages to keep me busy for quite a while. Do you understand?”
His eyes grew wet, and a single tear tracked down his cheek. He squeezed them shut and nodded. Success.
To solidify it, I went to good cop. “Tell me what I want to know, and I won’t harm you at all. I have no desire for that. I simply want to stop the attack. You work with me, and you walk away with your life, your limbs intact. Understand?”
He opened his eyes, wanting to believe what I said, but unsure. I could see the walls breaking inside him. He nodded again, with more force.
I returned to bad cop. “Lie to me, even once, and the pain will be immediate. I know quite a bit of what’s been planned. You people have been sloppy. You say something wrong, and I might start with your penis.”
Decoy removed his gag, and the man began talking. A fountain of information that we couldn’t have shut off if we tried. Within six minutes I was sure we had everything the man knew, and the information wasn’t pretty.
After he grew quiet, I said, “You’ve done well. I’m going to untie you now. You’ll be coming with us.”
He looked confused and said, “I thought you would leave if I told you everything?”
“I’ll leave when your information pans out. If it doesn’t, I’ll be your personal nightmare. Hold out your wrists.”
He did so, and I saw his brain working. Wondering why we would uncuff him if we really worked for the sheikh of Dubai.
“I’m setting your hands free because I can’t have anyone talking about this in the souk. I don’t want word to spread that you’ve been taken. You must act naturally all the way to our vehicle. If you don’t, you will disappear. Understand?”
He nodded, I cut his wrist ties, and Decoy pushed him to the door. I said, “Get him to the van. I’m calling Blaine.”
Bundling him out the door, Knuckles said, “You had me convinced he was in for some pain. What were you going to do if he clammed up?”
“Nothing. Just bag him.”
I let them get down the stairs, then dialed the TOC.
“Sir, I’ve got most of what’s going on. The attack’s at the Burj Khalifa, like we thought, but it isn’t any frontal assault. They’re using the elevators. The guy doesn’t know how—he’s really a maintenance man—but he helped the Ghost get access to the elevator shafts. I’m headed there now.”
“Can you defeat it before they get there?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have an accurate itinerary. Just call Kurt and tell him to relay not to use the elevators in the Burj Khalifa.”
“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
Seeing 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 operati
onal 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 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
Jeff 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.
Following the tour guide around the eight-foot plastic scale model in the anteroom, he thought the rattling off of statistics and record-breaking 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.
* * *
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 possi
ble 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.