Key felt lucky to be with one, despite Daniels’s sour expression. The sergeant didn’t like to be out of control. Key patted him on the shoulder and nodded reassuringly as he watched Gonzales talk to an old Arabic man sitting with a sewing machine, surrounded by piles of cloth. The man looked up at the sergeant and corporal with an expression as sour as Daniels’s. Key stepped forward, expecting to be measured, but was amused again when, instead, the man merely nodded, and Gonzales came back between them with his hands on their arms once more.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”
They returned the way they had come, Key acknowledging that he would have been lost without Gonzales guiding them, despite some slight pride that he had a good sense of direction. Once they got back to the lone chocolate and preserved flower stall, they repeated the squeezing between trick. This time they emerged into an entrance for a large, circular, tent similar to a small circus enclosure.
Almost every spot of carpeted ground was covered in pillows, mats, straw, and mattresses on which women sat or lay. Key could tell that most of them were South Asian or African. He followed Daniels, who had already spotted Lailani and Rahal all the way across the enclosure, talking to a woman seated on the other side of a very small cafeteria table.
Once they arrived, Rahal turned to Key. Her eyes were haunted. She opened her mouth to speak, but shook her head and closed it instead. Then, to his surprise, she buried her head on his chest and embraced him.
Key looked over her to the faces or Lailani and the Arabic woman with an expression of “what’s going on?”
“This is my mama-san here,” Lailani told them as Gonzales leaned on the edge of the table, his face blank.
The woman nodded at them, not unkindly. “Call me Hadiyah.”
Before Hadiyah could continue, Lailani looked directly at Daniels. “I come here a couple of times a year to work in the big hotels.”
Daniels looked as if he wanted to crack, “In housekeeping?” but thought better of it.
“She came first as an escort,” Hadiyah said when Lailani chose not to go on. “Every hotel bar is full of escorts. It’s a hidden culture here.”
“My main clients were businessmen from all over the world,” Lailani finally added. “The locals don’t want Filipinos for anything but maids.”
“It was all Filipinos until the recession.” Hadiyah scoffed. “Then they were deemed too expensive. Now it’s also Ethiopians. Either way, they are paid three-quarters less than Europeans, if they’re paid at all.”
Gonzales looked at Key. “Like the construction workers, their passports are taken once they arrive.”
“Wait a minute,” Daniels interrupted. He stared back at Lailani. “You came first as an escort? What do you come as now?”
As her eyes narrowed, Lailani’s smile widened, a smile that seemed to infect Hadiyah as well.
“She comes here now as a dominatrix,” her Dubai mama-san said. “That’s where the real money is.”
Gonzales stood up. Key stepped back. They both stared at Daniels in anticipation. But if they were expecting an explosion, they were disappointed. Lailani’s and Hadiyah’s smiles infected him as well, only his grew even wider and sprouted all his teeth.
“Baby!” he cried, his hand going up. “Now that’s the way you do it. High five!”
Lailani slapped his palm with hers, her smile nearly as joyous.
Finally, Rahal looked up, but she did not release her embrace. Key could see her deep brown eyes were glistening wet. “These are all escaped maids,” she whispered to him. “They have no place to go. They don’t speak Arabic, they don’t know the addresses where they worked, and they are at the mercy of their employers—who have no mercy.”
Key didn’t doubt it. The kind of plastic playground Dubai was would naturally attract people with power issues.
Hadiyah seemed to read his mind. “The government pays for your education up to doctorate level,” she said. “There’s free health care and no taxes. You even get a free house if you marry.”
Lailani’s smile stretched wider, but turned mirthless. “In their own countries, they’re incompetent, but here everyone tells them they’re great. Soon they think they’re better than everyone slaving to serve them.” Her eyes glittered. “I love whipping them.”
Daniels’s smile matched hers, and he opened his arms. She jumped into them like a beloved child, or pet.
“And she does it very well,” Hadiyah advised him.
“I don’t doubt it,” the sergeant replied.
Then the mama-san leaned over to speak to Key and Rahal. “Much of the money she earns whipping them goes into helping them.” She nodded at the women huddled on the floor.
“If it’s any consolation,” Gonzales said sardonically, “the construction workers have it worse.”
They all turned toward him, seeing that Faisal had returned, carrying some blue coveralls and white hard hats. He laid them across the table as the mama-san motioned them to take up positions around it. Rahal seemed reluctant to let go of Key, but she managed to. She stood next to him, with the sergeant and the dominatrix on the other side. Gonzales stood with Hadiyah on one end, across from Faisal.
“What are these?” Key asked, motioning at the overalls.
“The uniform of the migrant workers,” Gonzales told him. “They are ubiquitous throughout the city.”
“Mostly from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and the Philippines,” Hadiyah informed them sarcastically. “Many are recruited under what you could call laughingly false pretenses. They pay their recruiter a large fee for the privilege of getting a Dubai job, then find their promises, shall we say, exaggerated?”
Gonzales shrugged. “In the worst cases, passports taken, living conditions ridiculously squalid, working conditions in terrible heat less than ideal.”
It was Lailani’s turn to shrug. “Things have improved a bit since the economic crash.”
“But not so much that when a dark-skinned man puts on this thing, he becomes an invisible man to nearly everyone.”
Key nodded, his smile widening. “Just like, I’d imagine, when a white man puts on a thousand-dollar suit, he also, in his own way, becomes invisible too, right?”
Gonzales nodded. “Si, señor,” he said. “This is a town where women must cover all but the extremities of their arms and legs, extramarital sex is illegal, even if you’re engaged—”
Lailani snorted at that.
“Being gay is outlawed,” Gonzales continued, “and even PDAs are not allowed.”
Rahal looked with confusion at Key.
“Public displays of affection,” he explained to her. “Kissing, snuggling—”
“Holding hands,” Gonzales added. He pointed at Faisal and the overalls. “But if we put these on, and you put on the suits I just ordered for you, we could move freely throughout the city without anyone raising an eyebrow.”
“Even around the Weapons Show exhibition hall,” Daniel piped up, “and all its meeting rooms?”
Gonzales beamed at him like a prize student.
“Okay, alright,” the sergeant complained. “I get it, I get it. So what do you geniuses have in mind?”
Chapter 21
“This is freakin’ ridiculous,” Daniels said.
Key thought his companion was referring to the sheer scope of what they were attempting to do, and he may have been, but the way the sergeant stared out the SUV’s windows clued the corporal that his comment had at least a double meaning.
They had driven along Mina Road, parallel to the Persian Gulf, past mall after mosque after monument, from the Dubai Museum through the Dubai Zoo to even the Emirates hospital—all of the sights so absurdly pumped-up, over-inflated, and extravagantly accessorized that even the hardened sergeant seemed to be going into sugar shock.
“This place,” Daniels stammered on, t
rying to find a way to comprehend it all. “This place is like Vegas, Disneyland, and a thousand dollar-a-night whore all smooshed together, then drowned in gold.”
“When did you ever have a thousand dollar-a-night escort?” Key asked.
“I’ve heard tell,” Daniels shot back.
Gonzales snorted from the front seat. “Si,” he answered Daniels. “About forty percent of the world’s gold is traded in this place. You can even find gold bar vending machines. You see that thing out in the gulf? The one that looks like a giant boat sail?”
“Burj Al Arab hotel,” Key said.
“Right,” Gonzales continued. “It’s got almost two thousand square meters of twenty-four carat gold leaf covering its innards.”
“What are you, Speedy?” Daniels complained. “A tour guide—?”
“Yes, and a good one,” Key interrupted. “One we really need and are happy to have. Right?”
Daniels grumbled, “To the point of swooning, chief,” and turned his eyes back to the passing, pimped-out parade.
Gonzales chuckled. “It’s all connected, Morty, I promise you. The tour and the mission. That sailboat-shaped thing showed up in 1999. It’s a thousand feet from Jumeirah beach and is connected to the Dubai mainland by its own bridge.”
Daniels sniffed a wordless, “Who cares?”
“I care,” Key clued him. “Just shut up and listen.”
“Mouth shut, bowels open, and never volunteer,” he said, quoting an old British military saying.
Gonzales nodded back toward the structure he’d been describing. “To make it happen, migrant workers speared hundred and thirty-foot-long concrete pylons into the sand, then surrounded it with seven million tons of rocks and concrete. Two years later, the Palm Islands started to appear miles down the coast.” Gonzales pointed past Faisal, who was, as usual, in the driver’s seat—only this time wearing a thin robe rather than his chauffeur livery. “That’s a migrant worker–made artificial archipelago laboriously tortured into the shape of a gigantic palm tree, complete with a trunk and sixteen frond leaves.”
Daniels peered in the direction Gonzales was looking. Off in the distance he could make out some sort of hazy wharf amidst the glittering, seemingly gem-coated, freak shows surrounding it.
“I don’t see it,” he said. “Anyway, what’s an archipelago?”
“A bunch of islands,” Key told him.
“And you can only see the palm tree shape from above,” Gonzales said. “Way above. The thing took more than five years, millions of rocks, and reportedly a lot of migrant lives.”
“So?” Daniels said, not willing to give up his over-stimulated petulance quite yet.
“So,” Gonzales replied patiently, “that excited a lot of developers, hot to pump money out of all-too-willing creditors, to start a game of Can You Top This?”
Key raised a finger warningly beside Daniels’s frowning face, but that only encouraged the man. “Look, okay. I’m not a statesman and never will be. I’m really trying hard to understand what we’re getting into here and why I should care about these things.” He looked back at Gonzales. “So I repeat: why?”
Key lowered his finger and just shook his head. Gonzales closed his mouth, smiled, and pointed out the windshield. They all looked to see that Faisal was approaching Wollongong Beach, which looked like a Sim City videogame come to life. The relatively normal sand-scape was crawling with fully dressed people and watercraft of every imaginable variety.
“What are we looking at?” Key inquired.
“Glad you asked,” Gonzales replied. “Two years after The Palm came the plan for migrant workers to create The World, three hundred islands plopped two and a half miles out that looks, from way above, like”—Gonzales was about to have them guess, but decided against it since even he didn’t fully believe it himself—“a map of the entire planet.”
The interior of the vehicle was silent for a second, until Daniels said the inevitable. “You have got to be shitting me.”
“I wish I were,” Gonzales answered. “But wait, it gets better. “A year ago, this place was a relative ghost town because ‘The World’ project had hit a snag.”
“That was back in 2008, right?” Key asked.
“Right. The big financial meltdown. Even Dubai wasn’t immune. Only two of the planned islands were developed, while the rest of them seemed to be shifting, merging, or even sinking. But now, a decade later, things seem on the uptick, so some genius decided to have migrants make a jumbo jet-shaped island for the next Dubai Air Show.”
Daniels perked up. “Now that I’ve heard of,” he said, looking at Key. “When was the last one of those?”
“Two years,” Key said, leaning toward the front seat, as they got ever closer to the beach. “It’s biennial. In 2013, it took in two hundred billion dollars.”
“But in 2015,” Gonzales reminded him, “that went down to only thirty-seven billion.” By his expression, Daniels obviously wondered why. Gonzales shrugged. “Things change.”
Their nattering was just buzzing in Key’s ears as the rampant activity on the beach came increasingly into focus. “It’s kind of genius, really,” he said. “If you want to get the world to your first major weapons exhibition, why not use 298 artificial, empty, islands to do it?”
“They’re only using the lowest, widest, South Pole island, the one nearest the beach,” Gonzales reminded him, “but they’re still building like crazy to make sure it’s suitable for the show, even at this late date.” He craned his neck to check out the airspace. “Hadiyah said that it looked like D day for a month with all the ships, planes, and helicopters dropping off and ferrying out stuff.”
“It still looks like D-Day…plus one hour,” Daniels said, pointing.
As Faisal slowed the vehicle, they all stared at the beach, where mobs of white, black, and blue-covered figures were milling around in organized chaos.
“Shit,” Daniels said. “It doesn’t look like D-Day. It looks like a gigantic ant, beetle, and maggot farm.”
It really did. The blue-wearing workers ran to and from a fleet of smaller boats, as the white-wearing sheikhs chaperoned dark-suited visitors to far fancier vessels. The only thing missing was military uniforms, but Key knew the soldiers were smarter than to make themselves targets.
Even so, everyone was hemmed in by what looked like a fleet of cars that had escaped from a showroom. There were Aston Martins, Bentleys, BMWs, Bugattis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens, and Mercedes strewn about the sand, all in a vaguely crescent shape dividing the street from the beach.
“What the eff,” Daniels continued. “They having a car show too?”
Gonzales snorted again. “Nope. Those are police cars, Morty. Those are what pass for patrol cars in Dubai.”
The sergeant gave a low, hollow, reedy whistle. “I’m not trying any vehicular escape around here anytime soon.” He thought a moment then added, “Unless I really have to.”
Key blocked all the chatter out to concentrate on the task before them. “At least they’re still setting up,” he said, regret growing in him as Faisal pulled into the parking lot of a glorified mini-mall that bore a Beach Centre sign. “At least the security won’t be impossible yet, since the heavy hitters won’t be showing up until later. Even so, it’s not like we can just waltz in.”
“You can’t, maybe,” Gonzales said as he and Faisal pulled off their robes to reveal blue worker outfits beneath. They picked up their white hard hats and got out of the car, the morning sun hitting them like a heat lamp.
“Last check,” Key suggested, holding up an ancient, handheld, palm-sized walkie-talkie. He clicked its side button. The one in Gonzales’s pocket hummed.
Both men wished they could have used more sophisticated communication devices, but, if they were spotted, it would blow the infiltrators’ cover. Since they had already seen many a blue-garbed
worker carrying the same thing, they thought best to do as the locals did. Especially since they all saw how all the non-blue-wearing pedestrians had acted as if the workers weren’t even there.
As Gonzales and Faisal prepared to embark on the risky, but necessary, infiltration, Key felt the urge to say something stupid or stereotypical, but resisted it. Daniels had no such compunction.
“Good luck, suckers,” he said. “Better hope everything goes right, because if it doesn’t, there’s shit-all we can do about it from here.”
Gonzales laughed so hard he had to bend over and prop his hands on his thighs. Key laughed too, realizing that was just what was needed to cut the tension. Faisal looked quizzical until Gonzales translated. Then Faisal laughed as well, shaking his head.
The Caucasians watched the Hispanic and Arab walk quickly down to the edge of the largest group of blue-covered men. Neither said anything as they saw Faisal and Gonzales manage to join a group on a boat. The silence continued as that boat started toward what was now deemed SADE Island—and stayed that way until Key brought up small, but very powerful, binoculars.
Through it he saw the new Exhibition Center, which looked like a giant, gleaming, Plexiglas tortoise squatting on SADE island. He exhaled helplessly, and handed the field glasses to the sergeant.
“Shit,” Daniels exclaimed. “It looks like Gamera!”
Daniels might well be right, but Key actually rolled his eyes at the mention of the Japanese movie monster, an enormous prehistoric turtle who spit fire from his shell and flew. He wondered if the man were developmentally stunted or just enthusiastic about everything. Key looked back at the Beach Centre’s shops and restaurants. “Might as well get something to drink while we’re waiting.”
Daniels threw up his hands. “At last!” he said. “A beer!”
“This is Dubai,” Key reminded him. “Alcohol strictly forbidden. I’ll buy you a frosty shake, though. Your choice of flavors.”
“What, like Creamy Camel and Frothy Palm Frond?”
Arachnosaur Page 15