Candleburn (17 page)

33

A few minutes earlier Blake had moved silently down the stairs from the twenty-first floor, hugging the wall as he moved.

The
two diagonal lines of bullet holes ran through the door to the twentieth floor, all of them sourced from his P90. He knew from the sounds on the other side that he’d hit at least two of the men guarding the flat. That left at least one henchman and, possibly, one of the higher ups in the organisation – either Aarez or his lieutenant.

Blake
reached the flat concourse.

There
was a four inch gap between the jamb and the fire-proof door. On the floor he saw the bodies of both men he’d shot. One lay dead, slumped on top of the other. The second, lower, man was still twitching.

His
skin was pale. He was clearly in shock. Blake had aimed low when shooting through the ceiling of the lift. He’d hoped to catch at least one of the men in the legs so that he could leave them alive.

He’d
then climbed to the next floor up and pried the lift doors open, planning to take the stairs back down to the right floor and catch the defenders from behind.

Nudging
the fire door slightly wider, he was able to see that he’d misjudged his aim and caught the Somali higher than he’d intended, in the belly.

He
raised an eyebrow.

Oddly,
that was better. Belly wounds bleed heavily but are easier to survive than high velocity rounds to other body parts.

Now,
he just needed to wait for the lights to blow.

Before
coming to the room, he’d emptied the gunpowder from a round and left it heaped under the fuse in the basement for the twentieth floor. To ignite it, and trip the switch, he’d lit a cigarette. That would act as a three to five minute fuse before the powder caught fire and melted the circuitry.

Blake
took an educated guess that Aarez’s lieutenant had left from the fact that there was no egomaniacal gloating coming from Alice’s apartment, or ham-fisted attempt at bargaining for the puzzle box.

But
he needed to be sure. Perhaps they’d booby trapped the room?

On
cue, the floor went dark.

Blake
widened the door and grasped Lameck’s shoulders. He dragged the Somali back into the stairwell. His improvised explosive in the fuse box had also taken out the lights on the higher floors of the building so he picked the man up and started to carry him downstairs.

Whoever
was left in the room was both untrained and afraid. Blake heard three random gunshots ring out. One must have caught the apartment door. There was a loud bang as it slammed shut.

Blake
descended three stories before he laid Lameck on the ground and lifted his shirt. The boy had been caught twice, both shots below the belly button, and was bleeding profusely. He removed Lameck’s tee-shirt and clasped it firmly against the wounds, applying pressure.

The
African opened his eyes.

“What’s
in the room?” Blake asked, tapping Lameck on the face lightly.

Lameck’s
pupils weren’t focusing. Blake tapped him on the cheeks again.

“Come
on,” Blake said. “Come back to me.”

Lameck’s
head rolled but he began to look more awake.

“Is
the girl alive in the room? Is Aarez in there?”

The
explosion rocked the entire building, shaking it to its core. Blake instinctively leaned over the body of the fallen Somali to protect him as plaster from the walls and ceiling tumbled down.

Blake
pulled back to see dust and flames emanating from higher up the staircase. Smoke began to film the air.

“Well,
that answers those questions,” he said. “So, if the room was empty, that means Aarez or his lieutenant is nearby watching.”

He
jumped.

“The
car!”

He
hoisted the Somali over his shoulder and began heading down the stairs.

***

Oassan was becoming increasingly frustrated with the multicoloured wires dangling from the Audi’s steering column.

“German
engineering,” he moaned. “This used to be much easier before they installed all the kill switches and immobilisers.”

He
slapped the dashboard with frustration.

“Not
to worry,” he said after a few moments’ pause. “All I need is the puzzle box.”

His
eyes darted around the interior. They fell on the glove compartment.

“Obvious,
really.”

He
reached out and opened the catch. The small plastic lever clicked and the compartment sprang wide. Inside, the puzzle box sat neatly atop a collection of car manuals, insurance documents and a spare pair of sunglasses.

Oassan
grabbed the device and placed it in his backpack. Next, he took the shades and examined them.

“Bah!”
he flung them into the back. “Cheap Karama fakes.”

Jeffrey
began mowling again as the sunglasses bounced off the top of his box.

Oassan
reached over and liberated the box from the safety buckles.

“Let’s
go find a nice, deep part of the Creek for you,” he said.

He
stepped onto the pavement and checked to see who was watching. There were a few stragglers here and there, phones out, taking photos and videoing the fire. Still, even though their attention was hardly on other pedestrians, he didn’t fancy walking along the main road – a man with a cat box was just too memorable.

In
the distance he could already hear sirens charging closer. Better to take a back route and find a taxi. He walked away from the Audi through a flower bed of daffodils and into the darkness of the communal gardens.

34

Blake threw the airline bag containing the P90 into the boot. He then ran around to the driver’s door. Through the windows he could see Oassan’s handiwork on the steering column. He checked the back seat.

The
cat was gone.

Immediately
he looked up and down the pavement. Nothing. There were no crowds of pedestrians here; they were gawping closer to the fire. That gave him a clear view half-a-kilometre in both directions.

A
thought struck him. He paced towards the road and once again checked both ways. There was very little traffic of any kind. He scanned the street for empty car parking spaces.

There
were no empty spots.

Blake
estimated he could only be one or two minutes behind the thief and his cat.

He
ran back around the car.

“I
can’t see him walking, there’s a lack of empty car spaces, implying he didn’t drive away and it doesn’t seem likely that he got the only cab on the streets,” he said.

Blake
scratched his head with irritation.

An
idea.

“Maybe,”
he thought, “just maybe, I might be lucky.”

His
pen-light torch was already between his fingers. He ran its powder-white beam through the soil of the flower beds.

“There!”

The unmistakeable sandal prints of a man in local dress were heavily indented in the loam.

Blake sprinted into the unlit parkland.

***

The Cassiopeia hotel bar was called “Dubrovnik’s” and was popular with only three kinds of people: industry analysts, international businessmen staying in its upscale rooms and journalists from the nearby Media City district.

Even
the prostitutes gave it a wide berth.

Although
it was certainly seedy enough and contained many of their clientele, it was universally acknowledged by some unwritten rule that this was a place of work rather than pleasure.

“Gin
and tonic for me,” Asp said, leaning over the bar with the local equivalent of a hundred dollar bill in his hand. “And a double whiskey for my friend.”

He
wouldn’t expect much in the way of change.

“Why
thank you,” Ron Casabian said.

“Anything
for an old friend,” Asp replied.

He
genuinely liked Ron, a rarity in his relationships with people. The man had the mixed air of a long-lost outdoorsman uncle and a kindly professor, with his lumberjack shirts, denim jeans and collection of leather elbow-padded jackets.

Ron
was also a walking sexual harassment lawsuit.

Asp
had always felt this was a principle part of the reason the Nashville-born, lover of an easy life had recused himself from a tenured position at Harbinger-Watford University in Memphis and moved to the Gulf. That, and a need for the kind of high-salaried, tax-free employment Dubai offered so that he could meet his many alimony payments.

Ron
had been married five times and divorced four (his third wife died in a car crash in Mexico).

Nominally,
he was a defence analyst for an international risk control specialist, a company called Fox-Knightly. He was also the world’s most cunning double bluff. So obviously a spy that he couldn’t possibly be a spy, he talked incessantly on any Middle Eastern subject from the current status of tribal rivalries in Yemen to the winners of the latest Iranian oil contracts.

Somehow,
he’d perfected an impossible art.

He
never seemed to stop speaking, yet he pulled out of you far more information than he gave. The depth of his knowledge astounded Asp every time they talked, and was probably a big part of his attraction to the man.

Yet
Asp was acutely aware of Ron’s innate brilliance. For all the talk, the bluster, the joshing and japes: Ron spoke only 2% of what he knew.

The
bartender slapped the two drinks on the counter. Asp looked at Ron, who lifted his glass up in both hands and admired its facets. The barman hovered. Ron flashed him a hard stare. The barman nodded curtly and scuttled off to the far end of the establishment.

“I
presume this isn’t a social visit.” Ron said calmly. “What brings you to me?”

His
eyes never left his whiskey. He rotated it between his fingers, savouring it as though it were the finest single-malt rather than the standard Jim Beam that Dubai hotels routinely stock.

"What
do you know of Ash-Shumu’a?” Asp asked.

“Officially?”
Ron replied. “They don’t exist. They’re a hoax, a legend that superstitious mobsters in this town tell one another to make themselves feel honourable by comparison.”

“And
unofficially?”

Ron
brought the drink to his nose, sampled its aroma and downed it in a single gulp.

“In
the 1830s in London,” Ron replied. “There was a murderer-rapist who stalked the streets dressed in a cloaked costume with a devil’s mask. He could perform the most amazing physical feats – leaping tall walls in a single bound, shooting blue and green flames from his mouth.”

Ron
spoke in hushed tones as though telling a scary campfire story. Asp leaned back on his bar stool and sipped his drink.

“Spring-heeled
Jack,” Asp said. “I don’t see the connection.”

“He,
like Ash-Shumu’a, was never caught,” Ron continued. “He became a legend. Newspaper reports put him in Manchester, Leeds, London, Sheffield. He was everywhere. There was no evidence, beyond the first hand reports of victims who managed to escape with their lives.”

“Still
not seeing the connection,” Asp replied.

“Was
he one man?” Ron said. “Was he many? Did he exist – or was he also a myth? It didn’t matter. Spring-heeled Jack was arguably the precursor that inspired Jack the Ripper. Also, at the other end of the scale, Zorro and Batman.”

“So
you don’t think Ash-Shumu’a are real?”

“I’m
telling you it’s irrelevant if they’re real or not,” Ron stated. “Stories are dangerous. They have consequences beyond whether or not they are true. These tales of a new terrorist cell devoted to no specific cause, that makes no sense, will have a ripple through effect – even if only discussions like the one you and I are having.”

Ron’s
pocket began buzzing. He tapped his jacket down and pulled his mobile out.

“Interesting,”
he mumbled.

He
typed a few buttons and sent a text. The phone went dark and he placed it next to the cardboard coaster that supported his drink.

“That
in itself costs time, money and resources, even if we have no hard evidence that the reports are true,” Ron said. “It also acts as inspiration for others to follow suit. If we don’t have a group acting like Ash-Shumu’a already, the mere talk of the existence of one, will lead to it popping into reality. It’s inevitable.”

Asp
sighed.

He
put his drink back on the wooden counter, picked up a thin, plastic straw from the dispensers spaced at intervals along the bar and stirred the ice vigorously with annoyance.

“I’d
hoped for more than a lesson from history,” he said.

Ron’s
phone lit up again.

A
nother text appeared. Nate couldn’t read the contents from where he sat. Ron frowned. Pudgy fingers began typing out a quick reply.

“Do you have any hard information on them?” Asp asked.

“I
think you need to be a little less cryptic,” Ron said, placing a hand on his friend’s arm. “What’s really going on?”

“What
I’m going to tell you is more than I would under ideal circumstances,” Asp replied. “I’m in trouble – a lot of trouble. A little over two weeks ago, Chrome was employed by a contact in UK intelligence to start tracking a parcel that they believed was being couriered through Dubai. I don’t know why they farmed it out to us. The price was right and we had a good relationship with the contact, the person who took it didn’t ask for details.”

“Wow.
Big mistake,” Ron said. “What was in the package?”

“We
weren’t told,” Nate said.

Ron
held his hands up in horror.

“Jesus
Asp,” Ron exclaimed. “How stupid do you have to be? You know what a backstabbing bunch of bitchy little girls UK Intel are. They’d kill everyone involved in an op if a manager on the programme thought it would help him get a promotion. The least you can say of all the other agencies is that they look after their own, unless there’s a total screw up.”

“I
was not the idiot that took the contract,” Asp said. “I was on holiday in Sri Lanka. I was up against a wall – the wife threatened me with divorce unless we took a two week vacation and I cut myself off from the office completely.”

“Been
there, done that,” Ron said, ordering two more drinks. “Take it from a far more experienced man than yourself that divorce is the easier option. By the time you get to the spot you’re in, it’s merely a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’. Bite the bullet.”

A
third time, Ron’s mobile began to vibrate. He looked more troubled. He swiped the screen to remove the message from view.

The
smokey air of the bar was beginning to scrape on the back of Asp’s throat. He finished his gin and crunched on an ice cube to soothe it as he took in the rest of the room.

Two
young secretaries were dancing provocatively with bar regulars on a table by the stairs. Everyone else, suited men, ties pulled loose from their necks, were in deep conversations in huddled groups.

Crucially,
no-one was listening to him and Ron.

“Go on,” Ron said, still looking at the phone even after it went black.

“Long
story short,” Asp continued. “I’d left Jim Howell in charge.”

“Good
man,” Ron gestured with approval. “He’s capable – a little callow, but capable. Okay, I can see how you’d think he’d be able to hold the fort for two weeks.”

“By
all accounts, it was a simple job,” Asp said. “Jim sent a colleague, Dan, to distract an Algerian United Nations peacekeeper coming back through Fujairah Airport from Kabul. Then, he had to steal a package from his pockets or his kit bag – wherever it was hidden. It was to be handed to the British Intelligence contact and that was it. Simple task, high pay off.”

“So
what happened?” Ron asked. “This Dan bungled the lift?”

“Nope,”
Asp replied. “By all accounts, it went without a hitch. Dan took the package, he got in his car and drove back to Dubai. No-one else got a look at it except him.”

“Where
was the problem?” Ron asked.

“
The next time anyone saw him, he was a naked corpse in a bathtub with his fingers and toes burned off.”

“That’s
a big problem,” Ron said flatly.