Candleburn

by Jack Hayes

  “It seemed like a farm or a zoo,” she said. “Strong smells, lots of animal noises – particularly scratches and mewing: birds.”

  “A falconry?” Blake asked.

  Persephone had said nothing throughout the journey as she lay with unblinking eyes and her head resting across her mother’s jeans.

  “There were falcons and hawks,” She muttered in monotone, lifting a hand for the first time and brushing her hair from her face. “They were all around uncle Zain’s body, eating him.”

  Everybody turned and looked at her.

  Asp’s mouth was open in surprise. Alexandria ran her hand across her daughter’s skin.

  “Shh, shh, my darling,” Alexandria said. “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

  “The man in the dishdasha held me while the fat man spoke to daddy.”

  “What fat man?” Blake asked gently.

  Alexandria curled her lip in anger.

  “Alex – it’s important,” Asp said in a hushed tone. “Lives may be on the line.”

  “The birds kept squawking and eating while the fat man spoke to daddy,” Pepper almost whispered. Her eyes moistened. “He smelt so strong.”

  “Who did? Zain? The fat man?” Blake asked.

  “The fat man,” the girl said.

  She buried her head deep in her mother’s jeans.

  “Pepper,” Asp said, “I know this isn’t easy but daddy wouldn’t ask unless it was very important. The fat man plans to do bad things, like he did to uncle Zain. You wouldn’t want him to do that when you could stop him would you?”

  Pepper kept her head hidden. After a few sobs, she lifted it, red eyes and began to talk more loudly.

  “Daddy, you always say that bad people should be punished,” she said.

  “That’s right. Anything you can tell us will help. You said he smelt strong – did he need to take a bath?”

  She thought carefully before continuing:

  “He smelt like after shaving. But yucky. He smelt like bad flowers and burned wood. He dressed like he was going to work.”

  Blake thought quickly through the possibilities.

  “Was he a local man? Did he wear a dishdasha?”

  “No silly, I said he was going to work,” she replied. “But he looked like an Arab, except in work clothes.”

  “She means he wore a suit and tie,” Asp said to Blake.

  “Arab features as considered by a child but not wearing a kandura means he’s not a Gulf Arab,” Blake replied. “In this country, he’s not going to be Israeli – so that narrows it to countries whose natives might look Arabic to a child but dress Western in public; so we’re talking Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi. That chimes with the aftershave – it sounds like Aoud.”

  Aoud was a perfume popular in parts of the Middle East, made from the dark resin of a local tree. Popular from antiquity for its use in incense, older people tended to enjoy it because of its dual status that indicated both a cultured upbringing and the wealth to afford it.

  “Or he could be Bahraini,” Asp added. “A lot of Bahrainis tend to wear Western clothes.”

  “Did he say anything else?” Blake asked.

  Pepper shook her head.

  “He just gave lots of orders. I don’t remember what he said.”

  “You don’t remember – or you didn’t understand? He spoke Arabic, right?”

  Pepper thought carefully.

  “No,” she said slowly. “He spoke English. Even when he spoke to the other Arab man.”

  Alexandria patted Pepper on the head and kissed her cheek.

  “Good girl,” she said. “That’s enough now. Why don’t you lie back on my lap and get some sleep.”

  Blake was puzzled. That didn’t make any sense. Almost all Emiratis and by extension, the vast majority of Arabs in the country were fluent in English, but when they spoke with one another in the absence of other nationalities, they reverted to their native tongue.

  “Oh my god,” he said loudly.

  “What?” Asp asked.

  “He’s Iranian.”

  Asp ran through what they knew.

  “It fits everything,” Blake explained. “Russian connections, wears a suit, speaks Persian – so they communicate in English.”

  “And if he was Iranian,” Asp said, “the assassination mechanism could be a nuke.”

  Both men exhaled.

  “Now we truly are in fantasy land,” Blake said. “The Iranians may have a program but they don’t have the capacity for a nuke.”

  “Be the perfect place to test one,” Asp replied.

  Blake took out his phone and dialled Mac. The ringtone was halted abruptly.

  “What is it?” the judge’s voice was dour with his heavy Scot’s accent.

  “Is the signing still going ahead?” Blake asked.

  “It is,” Mac replied, “your ludicrous tales notwithstanding. I felt a complete idiot talking to the prince’s security detail today. They agreed reluctantly to talk with their local counterparts, who denied any of the events you talked about – apart from the fire at an apartment block in the Marina, which apparently was caused by a careless smoker and a gas leak.”

  Blake closed his eyes. Ron had been a little too efficient in hushing things up.

  “Okay, there’s no way I can get you to reconsider?” Blake asked.

  “None at all,” Mac said bluntly. “The prince’s security is tight. There are snipers on the rooftops. He’s surrounded by guards. The Burj Khalifa is sealed off for 300 metres in all directions. He’s safe even if there were an outlandish attempt made on his life.”

  “What if it was a small nuclear bomb that they planned to use for the assassination?” Blake said.

  “For Christ’s sake, Blake,” Mac shouted. “This is ridiculous. They’re not idiots. There have been sweeps with Geiger counters. There is no bomb, in fact, there’s no plot here at all – don’t call me again, I’m up to my neck in the diplomacy of this conference.”

  He hung up.

  The Audi reached the side of the road and pulled to a halt.

  Asp and Blake climbed out and went to the boot. The back of the car was in bad shape, riddled with bullet holes. They removed the automatic air pump and checked to ensure it worked. Although the pressure gauge was shattered and they had to exchange the hosing, which had a chunk taken out of the middle, it otherwise seemed to be serviceable.

  As Asp began reinflating the tyres, Blake paced back and forth.

  “No nuke, then,” he said.

  “Maybe we were wrong,” Asp replied, his fingers fiddling with the cap on the second aluminium wheel as he moved around the vehicle. “We were making a lot of suppositions.”

  Blake kicked at the earth.

  A large jet of sand lifted up and blew along the road, shimmering wraithlike as it snaked along the tarmac.

  “Everything speaks to these guys being under time pressure,” Blake said. “They have a deadline. I can’t see any reason to go to all this trouble, today of all days, unless you plan an assassination.”

  Asp moved to another tyre.

  “Alright, let’s say you’re right,” he agreed. “How would you do it?”

  “If there’s a 300 metre exclusion zone,” Blake said, “I’d need a long range sniper.”

  “Let’s rule that out,” Asp said firmly. “The prince’s security is good. A self-respecting terrorist can’t chance that their shooter wouldn’t be picked off.”

  “Then I’d want a bomb with a blast radius bigger than 300 metres,” Blake put his hands on his hips. “Say, 500 metres, just to be safe and ensure that the building they were in – in this case, the Burj Khalifa – got obliterated.”

  “Which you can’t have,” Asp replied. “A nuclear bomb is out. They’ve tested for it and there’s no radiation indicating its presence. If you wanted a conventional bomb blast that big, it would require so much fertilizer, or chemicals that it would set off detectors, as well as being obvious as it was taken
into the zone.”

  Blake tapped his foot.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we just give up.”

  51

  The next fifteen minutes of the journey were spent in an uneasy silence. Blake’s mind was a jumble as he tried to think his way through the logical impasses they faced. There had to be a way around the problem – something he and Asp were missing.

  He pulled out his phone again.

  “Hello?” Ron Casabian answered.

  “Ron, it’s Blake.”

  “Did the exchange go as planned?” Ron asked. “You’re alive, so assume something went right.”

  “Something, yes,” Blake replied. “We got Nate’s family. Aarez escaped.”

  A low rumble from the other end of the phone.

  “That is unfortunate,” Ron said, deliberating over each syllable.

  “We’re now trying to think of ways the assassination could proceed,” Blake said. “Specs are tough: they’ve a 300 metre cordon, the prince has a guard detail and snipers positioned on the nearby roofs. His security has swept for radiation, so a nuclear bomb is out.”

  “Why would you need a nuke?” Ron asked with surprise.

  “A conventional bomb wouldn’t be big enough to take out the Burj Khalifa from outside the 300 metre cordon,” Blake replied. “We’re assuming the bomb isn’t inside that radius or they’d have found it.”

  “Why couldn’t you use a thermobaric?”

  “Where the hell would an Iranian get their hands on one of those?” Blake exclaimed.

  “I’m sorry,” Asp said. “What’s a thermobaric?”

  “Thermobaric is the technical name,” Blake stated. “The colloquial phrase, which describes it better, is a ‘fuel-air bomb’.”

  “Thermobarics 101,” Ron said. “A normal explosive is explosive because it contains its own oxygen, enough to make it burn incredibly quickly. Speed is the key. If the combustion was slow it wouldn’t go boom, it would just burn like a flame – a fire isn’t explosive because it relies on atmospheric oxygen. Back in the 60s and 70s when they were investigating tactical nuclear weapons – what you and I would call suitcase nukes – someone hit upon an idea for making a bomb that burned using atmospheric oxygen but it it quickly so it went bang rather than fizzle. Now, if the explosive doesn’t have to contain its own oxygen, for a given amount of ‘boom’ the bomb itself could be smaller.”

  “How did they do that, if you just said they couldn’t?” Nate asked.

  “The Great Fire of London started in a bakery,” Blake said. “Flour, when it’s thrown in the air, becomes an explosive mixture. The flour is a fuel and the atmospheric oxygen is, well, the oxygen. So, if you could aerosolize a cloud of something highly combustible, like flour – only even more so, say a mixture of fine aluminium and magnesium powders – then set fire to it under pressure, you can reduce the weight and size of the bomb hugely. To give you an idea of how big a problem containing all the oxygen for an explosion is, in gunpowder only a quarter of the mass is fuel – three-quarters is oxidiser.”

  “In practice, a thermobaric is really two bombs,” Ron said. “The first is small and vaporises the fuel. The second ignites it once it’s a fine misty cloud. The result is something like a small nuclear bomb in explosive size.”

  “Of course,” Blake said, “it has major drawbacks. You can’t use it underwater because there’s no oxygen. And you can’t use it at altitude – same problem.”

  “And most importantly,” Ron added, “you can’t use it in bad weather. Rain dramatically reduces the explosion for obvious reasons: the cloud can’t form.”

  “Okay, I understand,” Asp said. “Is it feasible in this case?”

  “Not really,” Blake said. “A Thermobaric, while small relative to the size of the giant blast it produces doesn’t make a big enough bang for our purposes. The blast would be around 200 metres across. That’s well outside the limit of the cordon and, as I said, I think we have to assume the British have security in place to check inside their perimeter.”

  “That’s assuming it’s an American thermobaric,” Ron said.

  “Of course,” Blake realised. His eyes widened. “That’s why the Russian mobsters are so up to their necks in this mess. They’ve got a FOAB.”

  “This is getting really tiring, guys,” Asp said. “FOAB?”

  “Father of All Bombs,” Ron said. “Whatever we Yanks do, the Russkies have to do one better. In 2007, they made an even larger fuel-air bomb. It weighs at the top end about 10 tons and has a blast radius of something like 300-400 metres. And that’s assuming they haven’t made improvements since.”

  “Imagine,” Blake said, “everything within an 800 metre across circle, obliterated – just gone from existence. And if the blast doesn’t get you, because the bomb consumes all the atmospheric oxygen, you’d just suffocate. It’s perfect.”

  “How do we find it?” Nate asked.

  “Well, we know what we’re looking for now,” Blake replied. “It would have to have been put in place weeks ago to avoid suspicion and be outside the cordon – but close enough to it to destroy the target. We need an Iranian owned business outside 300 metres away from the Burj Khalifa, but inside 400 metres.”

  “That’s easy,” Asp said.

  “What?” Blake and Ron exclaimed in unison.

  “It’s the headquarters of Rasoul Kaskhar,” Asp said. “I was there yesterday.”

  “If the British won’t raid his office because they don’t think there’s a threat,” Blake said, “Ron, could you lean on the Dubai police or the Ceebies to search it?”

  “Are you kidding?” Ron asked. “He’s in the top ten most powerful non-Emerati businessmen in the country and you want to see if I can get someone to kick in the door to his office based on no evidence? Let’s just file that idea under ‘things that aren’t going to happen’.”

  “Then it’ll have to be your own men you send, Ron,” Asp stated. “We’re talking international incident here. That’s got to be worthy of your resources.”

  “Again,” Ron said, “no way. Kaskhar is a renowned businessman. He’s worth $150 million or more. I see no reason to think he’d allow – or even plan – a terrorist act to kill members of the British Royal family.”

  “You think it’s thin?” Asp said.

  “I don’t think,” Ron replied. “It is thin. You two go poking around there, see what you can find. You see something that looks like a ten-ton bomb, you let me know. Then I’ll act.”

  “By then it may be too late,” Blake said. “When’s the signing of this historic deal?”

  “It’s at one this afternoon.”

  “Four hours? That leaves things tight if we do find a weapon,” Blake said. “I may have many skills – and I’m sure Nate has some too – but disarming superbombs isn’t on the list.”

  “Call me if you find evidence,” Ron said.

  “One last thing, Ron,” Blake added. “Do you have enough swing to get us through the security perimeter around the Burj Khalifa? My Audi’s pretty shot up and on this schedule, we don’t have time to hire something different or pick up another from Asp’s house.”

  “I won’t be able to get you into the Burj complex itself,” Ron said. “That’s controlled by the locals and the British; we’re not exactly on good terms with one another at the moment. The wider cordon at 300 metres... I can probably swing that – if you’re going to Kaskhar’s office, you can probably use the Al Manzil Hotel, so say you’re checking in there. I’ll make arrangements.”

  The steady tone of a dead line buzzed through the phone speakers.

  “Everyone’s hanging up on us today,” Asp said.

  “Welcome to the world of journalism,” Blake replied.

  “So, what’s next?” Alexandria asked from the back of the car.

  “Next?” Blake said. “Next, Nate will call whoever is still left alive in his office and get them to swing by your house and pick up passports for you and the kids. We’ll drive y
ou to the airport and as soon as he arrives with your documents, you’ll buy a ticket for you and the kids to the first destination you can in Europe. From there, you’ll fly to London.”

  “I know I want to leave the country but this all seems a little fast,” Alexandria said.

  “I don’t want you here if that bomb goes off,” Nate said. “And if it doesn’t, I’m going to have to skip the country anyway because of the mounting body count. I suspect Blake will be hightailing it out of here too.”

  “Exactly,” Blake agreed. “And who knows what this town will be like a few hours from now if a bomb really does go off. For all we know this is the opening move on an Iranian invasion.”

  52

  In Dubai all cars are spotlessly clean.

  It is a social faux-pas to drive a vehicle with anything more than a light coat of dust on it. As Asp pulled up to the road block on the ring of streets near the Burj Khalifa, he could feel the stares of disapproval from the policeman manning the checkpoint.

  The Yemeni stared disdainfully from behind his mirrored sunglasses as he walked around the front of the Audi, then to the sides and finally around the back. He stopped by the smashed driver’s side window and smirked. His eyes fell on the broken glass that littered the floor like freshly cut diamonds.

  Before he could speak, Asp quickly said:

  “As-salamu alaykum.”

  Roughly translated as ‘peace be upon you’, it was more accurately described as ‘hello’ in Gulf countries. It was the most important of seven handshake phrases that even if you didn’t speak Arabic you could use to smooth your path over in difficult situations. Such was the power of making just this small effort at learning their language, and so strong the generosity that Emiratis bestowed on Westerners that displayed even modest attempts at indicating deference to their culture, that its use could mean the difference between getting a speeding ticket and being let off with a warning.

  The policeman’s smirk extended into a smile.

  “Wa ‘alakyum assalam,” he replied.

  He then said something very fast that Asp didn’t catch. Usually it was something to the effect of ‘are you having a good day?’