Candleburn (25 page)

50

“We’ll never catch him,” Asp said. “We’d be faster across flat road but on sand, he has the advantage.”

Blake
played with an unlit cigarette in his hand. He pulled open the ashtray and extracted a lighter from the well underneath the handbrake.

“We
don’t need to catch him here,” he said. “When he gets to the street, he’ll take twenty minutes to reinflate his tyres, even if he has an automatic pump like we do. Provided we follow his tracks, we can intercept him at that point.”

“Unless
he has multipurpose tyres,” Asp added.

“Unless
he has multipurpose tyres,” Blake agreed.

“What
then?” Alexandria asked.

Blake
said nothing. He simply tapped the P90 that rested across his lap. Alexandria sat back in her seat and tended to the girls.

Blake
rolled down the passenger-side window and flicked the lighter. He pursed his lips, lifting the cigarette horizontal and brought the small, orange flame towards its end.

“What
are you planning to do with that?” Alex asked, alarm in her voice. “You can’t smoke with my babies in here!”

Blake
lit the end and blew as much of the noxious cloud as he could through the open window.

“Alexandria,
my petal,” Asp said, his vision firmly fixed on following Aarez’s tracks across the dunes. “You know that I love you very much and I’m extremely grateful to have you back safe and sound. However, this man has just risked his life and mine to save yours. It’s his car, so shut the fuck up. He’s earned the right to smoke.”

Alexandria
looked as though she’d been slapped.

“Well,”
she harrumphed. “I don’t think you’ve ever spoken to me in quite such a...”

“And
I think that’s been a problem,” Asp said flatly. “I love you – literally – more than life itself, but I think it’s time for me to be a little more assertive when I’m at home. This is a discussion for another day, though. In the meantime, Blake, if you don’t mind, I think I’ve earned the right to a fag myself, too.”

The
Audi see-sawed as it rocked over the crest of another dune, then accelerated down the far side. It hit the bottom and growled as it raced up the next sandbank.

“Here,”
Blake said. “Have mine.”

Blake
placed his cigarette directly into Nate’s mouth and took a second fresh one for himself. Nate took two puffs and tapped the ash out of his shattered window.

“Menthol?”
he asked, surprised.

“Yeah,”
Blake replied.

“Jessie,”
Asp said.

The
rolling waves of sand were beginning to lessen in height as they moved out of the Rub’ Al Khali.

“I’ve
lost his route,” Asp said. “The tyre tracks have dried up or been blown away.”

Blake
swore loudly.

“Want
to double back?”

“No,”
Blake replied. “Make straight for the road and we’ll try to catch him on the tarmac.”

“If
all this is about is the puzzle box,” Alexandria said, “why do you need to catch him? Let him have the contents and be damned.”

“The
puzzle box was only part of the story,” Asp replied. “We couldn’t figure out more than that section of his plan, though we reasoned he might well be trying to assassinate Prince William.”

“We need to interrogate him,” Blake agreed. “But, if that weren’t reason enough, he’s still the leader of an international terrorist organization. If he’s not stopped now, who knows what damage he’s got lined up for the future?”

Alexandria
looked down and mumbled.

“I’m
not sure he was the leader.”

“That’s
ridiculous,” Blake said. “Even his name – Aarez – it means: ‘leader’.”

“When
they had us captive,” she disagreed, “he was on the phone and seemed very – I don’t know, servile is the wrong word... supine. He seemed supine. The Russians clearly took orders from him, yet he seemed to be taking them from someone else.”

Mounting
the last humps of sand, the lines of trees that marked the border of the road became visible, jutting from the desert a few miles ahead.

“Where
did they hold you?” Nate asked.

“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.”