by Bobby Adair
“How will we find him?”
“Khouri has a contact in Dubai. Khouri told me where Najid is now.”
“Najid is still in Dubai?” Austin had a hard time believing it. “Can we trust Khouri?”
“You got a better idea?”
Austin shook his head.
“It looks like Najid moved from the island where he was hiding to a mansion on Palm Jumeirah.”
“He likes his luxury spots.”
Mitch nodded. “His family is distantly related to Saudi royalty. He’s had money all his life. I doubt he’s the kind of guy who’s going to live in a tent for jihad, no matter how he sells his shit to his followers.”
“Are the Omanis going to help us then? Is that what you’re working out with Khouri?”
Mitch shook his head.
Vijay came in with coffee on a tray and sat the cup on the table. “Would you like another breakfast, sir?”
“No. Thank you, Vijay. Could we have some privacy, please?”
“Of course.” Vijay hurried away.
Mitch lowered his voice a little and leaned over the table. “With the stability concerns, the Omanis won’t do anything. They can’t take the risk. And like we talked about before, we can’t call in an airstrike. Dubai is a sovereign nation and by the time we got permission from whoever is in charge, Almasi could be long gone again.”
“But we bombed Saudi Arabia,” said Austin. “We have tighter relations with them than just about anybody else in the Middle East.”
“And we’re lucky we’re not at war with them right now.” Mitch sipped his coffee. “None of that matters as much as getting this whole thing to happen in time. My guess is that Najid Almasi knows America is onto him. We’ve tried to kill him once, and he got away. I don’t think he’s going to sit still long. Everything is chaotic back in the States. Nobody is sure who is giving orders to whom and the military is being cautious, especially the Navy.”
“But they were going to pick up the samples.”
“Convincing a captain to pick up important samples in the middle of the night is a whole different proposition than calling in a squadron of Hornets to bomb civilians in a sovereign nation.”
Austin finished up his breakfast. “What then?”
“We head out as soon as Khouri finishes the arrangements. We’ll take two cars. He’ll drive us. Once we’re at the border, he’ll leave us with the car and go back with the other. Then we’re on our own.”
“Okay.” Austin told himself he was ready.
Chapter 64
After talking with Najid, Hadi hung up the phone. Najid was pleased, and that boosted Hadi’s confidence. Hadi had done what he thought was beyond his abilities. He’d hauled a fortune in gold bullion across three countries. He’d kept his men focused on the mission. He’d safeguarded the gold. He was on the verge of succeeding.
He’d hired a fishing trawler. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was sufficient for Hadi’s needs. It had plenty of room for him and his men. It had a hold big enough that it could handle the weight of the ten MIRVs, or Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles, a ballistic payload that contained multiple nuclear warheads inside a single Russian missile. That was the trawler’s eventual cargo. As soon as his men finished transferring the gold onto the trawler, the captain would set sail so Hadi could meet the men who would supply him with those weapons.
The captain said the trawler could cruise at thirteen knots. With the rendezvous point roughly half way up the length of the Caspian Sea, Hadi figured they’d meet up right around dawn tomorrow. They’d transfer the gold and the nukes right there on the water, out of sight of land, out of the sight of any nosy spies. That’s when Hadi would feel the power of nuclear invincibility.
After he had the weapons, Hadi and Najid would decide where to take the missiles. Perhaps they’d find a place in the desert to hide a few, keeping them available for future requirements. In the short term, Najid had a list of a half-dozen capitals he wanted to obliterate. Hadi agreed. What’s more, Hadi had no scruples about detonating a nuclear weapon in a Western city. Compared to Ebola, a nuclear weapon was deadly accurate and specific. There’d be no Arabs dying in the Middle East as a result.
Hadi looked at the sky. It was clear over the Caspian Sea all the way to the horizon. The water was calm. The future was bright.
Chapter 65
Austin and Mitch drove out of the mountains headed roughly west as the sun was setting across the desert in front of them. Dubai’s tall buildings stood prickly gray and tiny in the distance along the coast. Khouri was already headed back to Muscat. As far as Austin could tell, they’d crossed a border between Oman and the UAE three times while driving along the highway in the mountains. Not a single soldier or bureaucrat was present to ask questions or detain them. They were alone again in a desert altered by humans but with no humans in it. They hadn’t seen another person or car, abandoned or driving, since Khouri drove left in the other vehicle.
They entered a narrow town of modern structures. Each building and house faced the road. Each had a backyard of unending sand. The sole intersection, a roundabout covered with green grass and lined in tall palms, marked the center of town. As Mitch drove the car out of the town, the houses on both sides of the highway grew sparse and disappeared, leaving only dunes of sand as far as the eye could see.
A few more hamlets passed into the rearview mirror. A collection of irrigated fields sat alone against the sand, the nearby houses and work buildings showing no sign of human life.
When they reached the outskirts of the city, they made a left turn onto a highway that ran parallel to the coast and parallel to the length of the city. The highway was just like any back in the US—wide lanes, wide shoulder, smooth asphalt, clearly marked lanes. They looked new.
Following directions given them by Khouri, they meant to get as close as possible to Palm Jumeirah, where Najid Almasi was hiding. Driving through the desert was relatively safe, or so Khouri said. Once among Dubai’s opulent homes and tall buildings, Khouri said he could only guess what might happen. Mostly Dubai was like Muscat—empty. The virus had taken its toll and like many other places, the government was secretive about how much of its population had died. Locals, by their nature of being human, had turned wary and aggressive toward outsiders. Nobody wanted strangers bringing more disease.
Keep the car moving. Keep the tinted windows up. Do your business at night and get out of the city before the sun comes up. That was the balance of Khouri’s advice.
Mitch navigated the SUV past a racetrack, through a series of cloverleaf highway interchanges, and then past a community of spacious houses surrounded by small manmade lakes and lawns of thick green turf. Everything looked just-built. No trash. No weeds. No corpses. Expensive and clean.
Other cars were on the highways by then. Not many, though.
Not a person was visible outside their home.
“This is the cleanest place I’ve ever seen,” said Austin.
“Cheap labor.” Mitch made a left turn. “I’m betting Palm Jumeirah is blocked at the bridge like Khouri’s spy said.”
“I don’t see any reason why they’d let anyone pass.”
“I’m heading for the marina like we talked about. If we can get a boat, we can float it over to the backside of frond B.”
Austin thought about the layout of the Palm Islands; central trunks that jutted perpendicular from the mainland, connected to the shore by bridges now being used to control access to the islands. Up the trunks, peninsulas had been constructed, spreading out into the sea and looking like a palm’s fronds when viewed from above or by satellite. Down the spine of each frond ran a paved road separating houses that all faced a wide, sandy beach.
“Since frond A is shorter than frond B,” said Mitch, “Najid and his men holed up in that mansion at the tip of frond C will never see our boat as long as we round the end of frond A close to shore.”
“Works for me.”
Mitch
looked Austin up and down. “You sure you’re ready for this?”
Austin nodded.
“We could both get killed.”
Austin steeled himself with the confidence of a righteous cause. “Najid needs to be taken care of before he can kill anyone else. Like you said, the weight of all those lives versus mine is not any kind of comparison. This has to be done. You and I are the only ones around at the moment to do it.”
Chapter 66
Marina Walk.
That’s what the sign said.
Mitch turned right onto a street paved in colored, square stones. The tires bumped a rhythm with the texture. Behind manicured palms and squared-off hedges that lined the road, sand-colored, concrete-walled apartment buildings stood twenty or thirty stories tall. Moonlight gleamed off the countless windows and polished steel patio rails.
The road between the towers terminated at a roundabout. Mitch slowed the SUV, looking for a place to park it.
Two men stepped out of a parking garage entrance at the base of the tower. Both wore gloves and facemasks. Neither wore goggles. Both had black hair, dark brown skin, and green coveralls sagging over wiry frames. Both labored with fatigue in the droop of their shoulders that hinted at the number of corpses they’d hauled out of the towers.
They were carrying a body between them, a body dressed in blood-stained, baggy white clothes. It had not been prepared for a funeral. Even in the dark, the agony on the dead man’s face was bloody proof that Ebola was still taking lives in Dubai.
A man in a uniform and better virus protection followed the laborers out of the apartment tower’s garage. His hands rested lazily on a rifle hanging from a sling draped across his chest. He kept looking at Austin and Mitch’s SUV but made no move toward it. He seemed unwilling to take his eyes off the laborers for too long.
The workers came to the back of a flatbed truck on which stood two more men in dirty green coveralls. Most of the delivery truck’s bed was stacked with the dead, leaking and lying with feet protruding and arms cocked at angles in which the rigor mortis had frozen them.
The men on the ground swung their load back and forth. On the third swing, they heaved the corpse onto the bed.
Mitch bumped the SUV’s wheels over a curb and brought it to a stop beside a palm tree.
Austin looked back at the guy with the rifle. He was outside the parking garage, no longer paying attention to the workers. Austin gave the laborers a second look. Were they prisoners? Was the guard protecting them, enforcing rules, or keeping the laborers from escaping?
Mitch swung his door open. “Don’t look at the guard. Don’t look nervous. Get out slowly. Make sure he sees that you’re white. He probably won’t screw with us if we don’t look guilty.”
Austin followed instructions and got out, but hesitated when he reached back in for his weapon.
Mitch was already walking past the front bumper on his way to the marina.
He glanced at the guard who hadn’t moved. Austin took the weapon, careful to keep the barrel pointed down, not hiding it but not brandishing it either. He swung the door shut.
The guard said something authoritative.
Austin turned his back on the guard, waved dismissively, and walked.
The guard called something again, louder. It was a command.
Austin’s stomach fluttered. What was he supposed to do? Shoot the guard? Get arrested again?
The guard’s heels beat a quick pace across the paving stones. He wasn’t running, but he was yelling.
Austin stopped.
Mitch turned, and gave Austin a look of disappointment as he took a few steps back toward the guard.
The guard stopped. Nervous.
In an angry tone, Mitch rattled through a handful of Arabic phrases.
The guard didn’t back down. He said something back at Mitch.
Mitch chastised the guard through another series of curt sentences, looked at Austin and said, “Come on. Now.” He turned and headed for the water.
Austin followed. Behind them, the guard didn’t come but he had plenty more to say.
At the sidewalk along the seawall, Mitch took a right turn. Austin jogged to catch up, purposefully not looking back at the chattering guard.
They walked down to the square corner of the marina and started up the other side toward a pier that connected the sea wall with the network of docks and boat slips. Most of the slips where large yachts had been were empty.
Austin pointed to one of the gaps. “You think the owners headed out to sea to get away from the virus?”
Mitch cast a glance in the direction where they’d left the guard. “Wouldn’t you?”
“If I owned one, I guess I would.”
“To be honest,” Mitch smiled, “if there was a big seaworthy yacht with a full tank of gas, I’d be tempted to get on it and go float around a peaceful island somewhere until all of this was over.”
“After Najid.”
Mitch nodded. “After. Sure.”
They stepped onto the dock’s pristine white boards.
“Dubai is a nice place.” Austin looked back at the residential tower they’d parked beside. “Except for the bodies, you know.”
Mitch turned down another dock, and they passed by a line of small speedboats each twenty or so feet long.
The chatty guard was coming with two others. They weren’t running, not exactly, but they weren’t walking either. “That guard has some friends.”
“I got one.” Mitch pointed at a white boat with sparkly red stripes.
“Why that one?”
“I’ve started that type of boat before without the key. Let’s hope it’s got some gas.” Mitch laughed. “I think things are going to get interesting in a moment.” In long strides, Mitch crossed the gap to the boat he’d selected and jumped in.
Before Austin made the jump, Mitch said, “Loose those lines and push us off.” Mitch seated himself at the helm.
Looking at the guards who were running now, Austin hurried to get the stern line unwrapped from a cleat. He threw the rope into the boat, gave it a nudge with his foot, and hurried to the bow. “They’ll be on the dock in a second.”
Mitch leaned over to put his hand under the instrument panel.
Austin got the bowline untied just as the guards’ feet tromped onto the dock’s white boards. He pushed the boat hard, stood up, and made the jump across the widening gap. He landed, slipped a foot, and tumbled—thankfully—into the boat.
“Leave your weapon on the deck, out of sight.”
Austin was up on his knees. “But—”
“On the deck.” Mitch didn’t look up from what he was doing.
Austin stood up and saw the guards round the corner on the length of the dock they’d just untied from.
“Go stand in the stern and yell at them.”
“What?”
“Doesn’t matter what you say. Tell them it’s your brother’s boat just in case one of them speaks English. Definitely be angry and make sure they know it.”
The boat had drifted about twenty feet away from the dock and would soon be halfway across the expanse of water between the dock and the seawall. The guards came to a stop. One of them, the guy with the most shiny gold ornaments on his shirt yelled through his gas mask.
Austin yelled back, faking all the anger he could find. He told them the boat belonged to his brother. He told them his mother willed it to them. He told them he owned so many oil wells he could pay to have them all put into an experimental moon rocket with a troop of monkeys. His imagination ran dry, and he started quoting lines from old movies as he raised his voice and shook his finger.
The engine cranked, sputtered, and roared.
“Grab something.” Mitch didn’t look back to see whether Austin had. He gassed the engine, and the bow angled up as the boat accelerated through the water.
All the guards were yelling, but not one raised a rifle.
Mitch made a hard turn past the end of the dock and sped the
boat out of the marina.
Chapter 67
Paul sat in his clinic staring as the machines whirred, separating platelets from plasma as blood flowed in through a plastic tube where it was spun around in the machine and then flowed back out again. He still had only two machines. The broken one was still waiting on Vince to repair it.
Paul was preoccupied. Not an unusual state for Paul to be in. He wanted to understand the dull spot of numbness at the center of his thoughts, the place where a faceless, voiceless, dead Jimmy lay. Millie had unexpectedly given Paul the news the night before.
While Paul had contracted with Rafael to do just that—kill Jimmy—he hadn’t expected anything to happen quickly, certainly not by Millie’s next visit. In many ways, he didn’t expect anything at all. Bartering Jimmy’s death was an abstract exercise to produce a result that something in Paul’s vindictive heart required. It was an explainable thing. What man wouldn’t want to kill the thugs who’d murdered his wife? But Paul wasn’t that kind of man, an eye-for-an-eye type.
Before Ebola came, that was true.
There was what he did to Larry.
It was difficult reconciling the man he used to be with the man he was now.
Morals—easy to show off in a civilized world of easy choices where death only came to the very old, accidentally ill, or exceedingly unlucky—were truly hard to hold onto in a world where people died by the billions, where people wrapped the bodies of family members and left them on the porch or hauled the corpses to a soccer field to wait in line at a mass grave, where police were no longer on the other end of the phone, ready to protect life and property. Morals were easy in a world where there were no hard choices to make.
Hard choices.
Paul had made plenty of those. He pondered his blob of nothing-emotions and wondered if his lack of remorse over Jimmy made him an immoral man. Had his bad choice and his bad actions turned him into a bad man? Or was the numbness a psychological trick played by his ego on his self-perceptive higher brain to preserve his sanity?