Candleburn

by Jack Hayes

  Alexandria had to work harder to maintain her balance as she shuffled forward. With each step, the sand eased beneath her soles. The girls, struggling too, tugged at her on both sides. She slowed lightly, as much from the difficulty of walking as to catch what the Arab was saying.

  “I’ve done as much as I can,” he said. “This should be the final piece on my side... Yes, I’m aware of... I’m not taking the blame for that!”

  He broke into Arabic as he got angrier – but then, strangely, reverted back to English. Alexandria wished for the first time since arriving in the country that she’d immersed herself more fully in the local culture and learned the language. Perhaps he’d said something important in his tirade.

  A shock.

  She bumped her body against something large.

  “You’re at the car,” a Russian said. “Stand still, while I open the door.”

  “Do you have any water?” Alexandria asked.

  “Da. I will get. Do not move. On foot it is days on all sides to civilization.”

  “We’ll stay right here,” she agreed.

  “Good,” the voice said. “In any case, I doubt you can outrun a Kalashnikov.”

  ***

  Dubai Mall’s car park is larger than entire districts in other cities.

  Blake sped through one of the dozens of entrances and headed straight for the circular system of ramps that led to higher floors.

  “Should I even ask why you’ve decided to come to a shopping centre at five in the morning?” Asp said.

  “Have you ever tried to use this car park?” Blake replied.

  He picked up the pace as the Audi span around the wide spiral ramp, passing the third storey.

  “I have a wife and two daughters,” Asp replied. “And you’re asking if I’ve ever been dragged to the world’s largest shopping centre?”

  The Audi sprung off the ramp onto the fourth floor. Even though the mall was closed and would remain so for several hours, the concrete level was still peppered with vehicles left overnight.

  “Ten levels into the sky and another three into the ground,” Blake said. “Bigger in volume than two Canary Wharfs, with a nightmarish one-way system. It’s easy to get into and hard to find the exits.”

  Asp swivelled in his seat. He briefly had time to see, two floors down, a blue sedan struggling to follow them up the steep, curved incline.

  The Audi raced on.

  Blake snaked across the level, slaloming around the vehicles left overnight and ignoring the marked roads.

  “They told us, they were watching,” Blake said. “For what comes next, we need to be free of eyes.”

  The Audi juddered. There was an unpleasant scraping as it bounced over the low cement blocks designed to separate sections.

  The blue sedan was now on the fourth level with them.

  Too late.

  Blake was already ripping a path up to the next one.

  When he reached the flat tarmac, he opened the throttle.

  He raced diagonally for a ramp leading to yet another floor.

  Once there, he changed levels again, drove swiftly towards a sign marked “To Street”.

  “You seem to know pretty well where you’re going,” Asp observed.

  “Yep,” Blake replied. “This one exit is inaccessible from any other point. It takes you out to the roof by the cinema. From there it’s straight out to the highway.”

  “It’s almost like you’ve pre-scouted the route,” Asp said.

  The Audi bumped again over a new set of low concrete markers. They rushed in the wrong direction down a one-way stretch of road.

  “I did,” Blake replied. “About six months ago.”

  “But you couldn’t possibly have known...”

  “I didn’t have to know I’d need it,” Blake said. “It’s just what I do. I walk into a room and you could blindfold my eyes. I could tell you how many exits there are – not just doors, but windows, air vents – how many lights, I could point to the toilets, the light switches, and even tell you how many electrical sockets there are and their locations.”

  Blake pulled the handbrake. Tyres screeched. Smoke billowed. The car skidded. It accelerated again in a new direction.

  “Even if that little stunt only gains us a few minutes until they realise we’ve left,” Blake grinned. “It’ll take them another five to find a way out and when they do, they’ll be on a completely different part of the street system. We’ll be long, long gone.”

  “I presume all of this was part of your training for whatever military organization you were in: Rubicon, Ron called it?” Asp asked.

  “Rubicon,” Blake said through clenched teeth.

  The Audi left the ground as it zoomed onto a new downward ramp that led directly to the motorway.

  Asp’s heart leapt to his mouth while the car was airborne. His spine crunched as the Audi hit the ground.

  “Not military,” Blake corrected. “It was the bastard child of a fight between the CIA’s Special Operations Group, an organization called ‘The Activity’ and other units within USSOCOM – the Special Operations Command. The bits of that you’ve heard of are the Delta Force and the Navy Seals but there are many, many more.”

  The speedometer climbed higher.

  50 mph.

  Traffic lights at the bottom turned from green to yellow. 60 mph. Asp began to feel he was on a deadly roller coaster. 70 mph. He started scanning the road for traffic. 80 mph. His hands reached up unconsciously and clutched the strap dangling from the ceiling above the door.

  “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus...” Nate whispered.

  A cannonball, the Audi hit the bottom of the ramp and rocketed across three lanes. A van swerved honking. A truck roared into the space they’d occupied just seconds earlier.

  Another handbrake turn.

  The Audi bolted along the highway.

  “I know that spies and special forces tend to hate one another,” Asp said. “It’s the nature of the game. After all, special forces rely on intelligence from groups like the CIA, so they tend to mistrust them – dodgy intel getting people killed.”

  “Yes, in part,” Blake said. “But it’s not that simple. The CIA also operates bespoke missions behind enemy lines. The split between the two is rough but works something like this: if the job is in a city and involves information gathering – true spying – over wet work, it tends on average to be CIA. If it’s in the field, say outside a town, somewhere in the savannah of Africa or steppes of the ‘stans – or it requires an assassination, or has a military target – then you’d expect that it’s taken on by special forces. Except where the mission is covert. Then, supposedly, someone else does it... but in practice...”

  With Dubai Mall far in the distance, the Audi slowed to the natural speed of the traffic. Blake checked his mirrors to ensure they’d lost their tail. He changed lanes and settled in to blend with the other road users.

  “Okay,” Asp broke in, “it sounds complicated. So why make it more so with another agency. What was Rubicon?”

  “That, it would probably be unwise for me to tell you,” Blake said. “All of what you’ve been told is classified – so, for your own safety we’ll draw the line there.”

  Blake took the car through one of Dubai’s many four-leaf clover junctions and onto a new motorway that led towards the Rub’ Al Khali – the ‘Empty Quarter’.

  At 250,000 square miles, Rub’ Al Khali was the largest sand desert in the world. It stretched in a crescent from Yemen in the south, across Oman and Saudi Arabia and all the way through to the United Arab Emirates in the north. When people imagined the Middle East, replete with camels and Lawrence of Arabia backdrops, it was the Rub’ Al Khali they pictured.

  “Do you remember how we met?” Asp said after a few minutes.

  “I do,” Blake replied. “I was ordering a drink from the bar at that dull, dull British Consular party. You tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was Blake Helliker of the Journal.”

  “And you r
emember what I said next?” Nate nodded in agreement.

  “You asked me if I worked with a lady called Alice Thorne,” Blake said.

  The mention of her name caused him to shudder; even though he knew she was dead – a carbonised cadaver, now probably cold on some mortuary slab. The ghost of her torment during the last eighteen months haunted him.

  “You then proceeded to tell me,” Blake continued, “that you’d been to many parties in Dubai, as all expats do, and that I needed ‘to be careful of her because if I wasn’t aware already, I should know that she was going from event to event blackening my name to anyone who would listen’.”

  “Which is why I feel I have to ask: given your particular skill set and background, why did you end up a journalist and allow yourself to be treated like that for so long?”

  “Why a journalist?” Blake took his eyes from the road briefly and looked at Asp. “That one’s easy. Aside from the capacity for violence, the skills required to do the job complimented those I’d been trained in: observation, research, finding information others wanted hidden and understanding people.”

  Blake returned his attention to driving.

  “I could have done what most people who leave Rubicon do and move to another special operations unit or go private. You can earn a six-figure salary providing protection to some commodities baron or Singaporean businessman. But that would have defeated the point of leaving.”

  “You left because you met Cathy and fell in love, I’m assuming?” Asp said.

  “Yes,” Blake replied. “It was no life for a man about to get married. But my reasons ran deeper. That was the trigger. However, I’d been in Rubicon for nearly a decade by that point. It is not the sort of agency people retire from. The mortality rate was ridiculous. Probably half the people I’d worked with died in the field. Those of us that survived were different from the idealistic, gung-ho youths who joined.”

  A sign for a petrol station whipped past the car. Blake eased across to the inside lane in preparation for the forecourt a mile down the road.

  “It is trite – perhaps almost cliché – to say that every time you kill a person, you lose something of yourself,” Blake said. “When you live through it, it is anything but a cliché. You physically – and I mean viscerally – feel your soul leaching away. After ten years, I was hollow.”

  “That’s why you allowed yourself to be treated so badly,” Asp said quietly. “It was a self-imposed penance.”

  Blake suppressed a huffed laugh.

  “Not a conscious one,” he said. “If my training has taught me anything, it is that the subconscious part of the mind is very much more powerful than we ever admit. All pretty stupid, huh?”

  “It doesn’t seem stupid at all,” Asp said. “It seems entirely understandable – if a little misguided.”

  The Audi decelerated as it slipped onto a side road that led to the petrol station, a gleaming modern oasis surrounded by the dunes that marked the beginning of the Empty Quarter.

  Like all outlying stations, it had a small set of shops attached, complete with fast food outlets and a miniature supermarket. Blake pulled up next to the pump and an Indian attendant began to fill the car with fuel. He then jogged to the front and slopped a soapy sponge across the windscreen.

  Nate turned to say something. Blake put a finger to his lips for silence and with hand signals he indicated to get out of the car. Both men climbed into the already cloggy desert air.

  They closed their doors and stepped away from the Audi.

  “I don’t want to take any chances with these people, so from now on, let’s assume the car is bugged,” Blake said.

  “Agreed.”

  “How much cash do you have on you?” Blake asked.

  “There will be a cash machine inside,” Asp replied.

  “Like I said, no chances,” Blake shrugged. “If they have access to the banking system...”

  “Then using the cash machine will mean they’ll know where we are and might be able to track back to see what you buy,” Asp completed the sentence.

  He opened his wallet. It brimmed with more money than a counterfeiter’s stash.

  “Christ!” Blake’s eyes widened.

  “I’m the regional director of a corporate spying agency,” Asp said. “When I need money...”

  “Right,” Blake agreed. “Are you okay with driving for a while?”

  “What are you planning on buying?”

  “I need a brick, 12 bottles of water and an automatic tyre pump,” Blake said. “And maybe a remote controlled car.”

  “I understand the tyre pressure pump and water – but what about the brick and toy car?” Asp asked.

  “I’ll also need a few household chemicals, mixed in the right proportions,” Blake winked.

  46

  Fifty minutes later, the road had thinned down to a simple two lane tarmac strip that rippled across the untamed desert. Banks of low, artificially irrigated bushes and saplings ran parallel ten metres away, a vain attempt to keep the encroaching sand from clogging this artery to the outlying southern villages.

  “Pull to the side here,” Blake said.

  He hopped out and opened the boot. He removed the house brick.

  “I haven’t done much wadi bashing,” Asp said.

  Blake placed the brick a centimetre from each tyre and let the air out until the sagging rubber bowed and touched the clay.

  “I can take over,” Blake replied. “I haven’t been dune driving here; however, I did get some experience in Iraq.”

  With the car prepared to cross the desert, Blake pulled the P90 out of the airline bag. He checked it over thoroughly and reloaded it with a fresh ammunition clip.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Do you have a plan?” Asp asked.

  Blake grinned.

  “What am I saying? Of course you have a plan,” Asp shook his head. “Is it a good plan?”

  “Trust me, I’m a spy,” Blake’s said, his grin widening.

  ***

  Peroxide-blonde dunes surrounded them in undulating banks, some as high as twenty metres. The rolling waves of the stormiest sea disappeared in all directions into the distance.

  They were the smallest of rowing boats adrift in midst of a sandy Atlantic.

  The wind blew gusty at this height above the surrounding land, lifting a fine layer from the top of each crest. In their most silent moments Blake and Nate could hear the song of the desert; the fine, raspy whistle – lips blowing gently across an open bottle top – as the individual grains resonated while lifting into the sky.

  Blake returned to the car, brushing his hands vigorously against one another.

  “That’s the last of them buried,” he said.

  His neck, face and hands we already red from the sun. He panted as he grabbed one of the four water bottles that remained and glugged half of it down in a single breath.

  “How many IEDs did you bury?” Asp asked.

  “Eight,” Blake replied. “Four on each side. We’re at the crest of the highest dune here. They’ll pull alongside so that we don’t have the advantage of height and, unless they’re stupid, they’ll stop a respectable distance away. I can’t say which side they’ll be, so I’ve mined both. A reasonable estimate is 30 metres.”

  “What then?”

  “You’ll walk out to make the exchange,” Blake continued. “Hopefully there will be no problems. He’ll check the box, you’ll need to pad the girls down – that’s important because he may have put bombs on them. Check even for anything that looks like surgery. Terrorists in the region have been known to imbed IEDs inside people.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “Covering you, using the P90,” Blake said. “I’ll be behind the front wheel of the car, using the engine block for cover. It’s the only part with enough mass to stop a high velocity round.”

  Nate stroked his beard and squinted. He pulled a reflective pair of Ray Bans out and planted them on his nose.


  “Hopefully that’s everything,” he said. “So, what now?”

  “We get out of this heat and wait,” Blake said. “You watch front and left side. I watch right and back. They know where we are.”

  Climbing hot and sweaty into the Audi, Blake was invigorated by the cool draft of the air conditioning on his face. Asp flipped the radio on. A classic riff from a Beatles track pounded over the speakers.

  Blake instantly switched it off.

  “We need all senses alert,” he said. “The music will lull you.”

  Asp’s head swivelled as he watched the horizon for any sign of movement.

  “Besides,” Blake continued. “It’ll remind me again of that awful party. Did you get stuck with the idiot passport clerk?”

  “Chandler,” Nate said. “I took great pains to avoid him at every shindig I attended. He was MI6, you know. He was the idiot that got Chrome mixed up in this mess.”

  “Figures,” Blake replied. “That’s the way six likes its operatives – so magnolia dull that you look straight over them and don’t even notice they exist. All he kept doing was cornering people and asking that stupid question: ‘so – are you a Beatle or a Rolling Stone’.”

  “That’s because he’s a big Rolling Stones junkie,” Asp replied. “You can tell a Stones fan instantly. They’re the only ones who care how you answer.”

  Blake took another two deep mouthfuls of water before offering the bottle. Asp accepted it and sipped gently, his eyes never leaving the wing mirrors.

  “How did you answer, out of interest?” Blake asked.

  Asp puffed as he screwed the cap back on the bottle.

  “The same way I always do,” he replied wearily. “I told him it was a stupid question. The answer isn’t even open for debate. It’s quite obviously: ‘The Kinks’.”

  Blake snorted. Before he could respond, Asp pointed with his finger.

  “There! A big dust cloud behind us!”

  Blake saw the approaching plume and swore loudly. He leapt out with the rifle.

  “What?” Asp called out.

  “There’re three cars – two Jeeps and a Land Cruiser,” Blake shouted. “It’s brilliant, why didn’t I think of it? They’re going to park two alongside us and one on the dune opposite this one. They’ll want the exchange in the middle, between the two dunes. That will force us to walk down into the valley. We’ll be flanked and on lower ground than the two back up cars.”