Killfile (26 page)

I incline my head toward the girl on the right. Her eyes go wide, but otherwise she manages to keep her composure.

Olivarez doesn't say anything about it to her in front of me. He dismisses them in Spanish.

The woman is worried as she leaves the room. She doesn't know what Olivarez will do to her. Neither does he. Not yet.

I try not to think about it. It's not why I'm here.

“Well, you've earned your drink,” he says. “So now you can tell me what you really want.”

There's something liberating about being able to tell your secrets to someone who's forced to keep them. Olivarez is one of the few people in the world I can trust, because what I know about him is so much more dangerous than what he knows about me.

I explain what has happened as best I can. He listens to the whole tale of woe, asking questions at the right time when he needs clarification. Then he delivers his verdict: “You're fucked.”

I smile at that.

“Sorry, I know you're a psychic ninja and all that, but you're never going to get close to Preston. You probably scared him away from you forever.”

“Not as long as I've got the hard drive. He'll keep coming until he gets it.”

“If what you say about his business is true—if he needs what you've got so badly—he's got maybe six months, tops, before he can't hide his problems anymore. The CIA will dump him. He won't make payroll. Why not just hide out for a while? Let him disintegrate on his own.”

“Is that what you would do?”

He looks at me darkly. “You don't want to know what I'd have to do. I play by different rules.”

I shake my head. “Not this time,” I say. “I am going to end him.”

He sighs and rubs his eyes, but he gets it. He doesn't need any further explanation, not with his life. Once there was a kid from Tucson who believed in justice, but his career, like mine, has taught him better. Justice is too much to ask from primates like us. We're not wired for it. You can talk about abstract concepts and we'll nod and smile, but as a species, we're barely five hundred years from tearing the hearts out of virgins to ensure a good harvest. When it comes down to the limbic system, where our bodies do the thinking for us, all we really understand is an eye for an eye. We try to codify that, farm out the hard work to the cops or soldiers, dress it up with language. It doesn't matter. We need to see the blood in the dirt, or it just doesn't count.

Olivarez knows that there's an economic value to revenge, which is why we always talk about it like we're talking about money. No matter what it costs, the lesson is worth it: here is a line that must not be crossed. Touch me and mine, and this is what will happen to you. You owe me for what you did. And I will make you pay.

“You must already have a plan,” he says.

“Got a computer around here?” I ask.

He opens a drawer in an eighteenth-century desk and pulls out
a laptop. It's slow to boot up—“Took me forever to get the fucking Wi-Fi working here,” he mutters—then he hands it over.

I type in a site address and show it to him.

Preston will be the keynote speaker at the FutureTech conference next week. In Dubai.

“Dubai?” Olivarez looks skeptical. “Come on, Smith. Dubai? If there's one place in the world he could expect to be safe, it would be Dubai.”

“Exactly,” I say.

He snorts. “You think I can get you into the country without anyone else noticing?”

I sigh. It's late, and I'm tired. “Nathan.” I use his real name. Just to tell him I'm serious. “Why do you think I'm here? I already know you can.”

I
'VE GOT A
few days before my transport will be ready. Olivarez keeps me at the hotel, stations a bodyguard nearby, and arranges for a black credit card with a fake name. He sends over a tailor, who cuts me three good suits. I take the sheen off the card in the malls and shops until I look like a respectable traveler again. I accept a brick of cash as well, roughly twice as thick as what I got from the meth dealer, all crisp new hundreds. A bodyguard brings it to my hotel room. He even has me sign a receipt.

We call it a loan. We both know that there's very little chance Olivarez will have to send someone to collect.

If I don't pay him back, it's because I'm already dead.

I arrive
a littl
e
after 5:00
A.M.
local time at Dubai International.

My plane lands with the other cargo flights. I wake up with a jolt as we hit the tarmac. The heat is already pressing down through the steel skin of the aircraft. I undo my straps and finally get out of the battered little seat where I've spent most of the last eighteen hours. It's not exactly business class. The seat is airline surplus, salvaged from a junk heap and bolted down as an afterthought behind the cockpit for the crew on the flight. I exit the plane with the pilots, wearing a coverall. No one looks at me as they start to unload the cargo.

In fact, no one wants to pay much attention to this particular flight at all.

An airport employee waves me over to an electric cart, then drives me to the main terminal.

The last time I was at LAX, there was a TSA agent napping on a stool at the security line, an overflowing toilet in the men's room, and a garden hose coming down through a hole in the ceiling for no apparent reason.

In Dubai, it's like walking into a high-end luxury hotel. There are overstuffed couches. Every surface in the terminal gleams. A flock of
women, wearing hijabs and carrying Coach bags, passes me on the right. In the shops, you can pick up a $10,000 bottle of Cheval Blanc, a Cartier Tank watch, or a solid gold bar to take home to the kids.

It's the same almost everywhere here. Dubai makes Vegas look like a trailer park. They both started as patches of desert. But in 1966, Dubai struck oil. The man who owned the country, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, knew the oil wasn't limitless. He decided to try to create something that would last after the sands ran dry. So he, and later his sons, poured their wealth into creating a center for high-dollar tourism and finance. Their idea was, if you build it, preferably with lots of chrome and marble and tax incentives and underpaid foreign workers, the rest of the world will come.

I've got no idea if it will last, but right now it's Disneyland for billionaires. The country's economy stalled badly during the global financial crash, but now it's humming along again as if the meltdown never happened. Everything is larger than life, all beginning with the words “the biggest,” “the best,” or “the most expensive.” There's an underwater hotel out in the Persian Gulf, right next to the custom-built islands. The airport just passed Heathrow as the busiest on the planet. They're putting up five hundred new skyscrapers to keep pace with the demand for office space, and construction just started on an entire indoor city, complete with replica versions of New York, London, and Paris. The conference where Preston is speaking will take place in the Burj Khalifa, the tallest skyscraper on earth. Even the police drive Ferraris and Bentleys.

And even though Dubai sits at the edge of four or five different war zones, violent crime is almost unheard of, at least in public. Islamic jihad checks its suicide vests at the border. The current ruler of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the previous
sheikh's son, goes out in public without bodyguards and drives his own Mercedes G-class everywhere.

All of which proves, once again, my golden rule: Nobody screws with serious money. Nobody wants to upset the cash flow. It's like the entire country is a VIP lounge and the bouncer at the velvet rope keeps out anything unpleasant.

There's a rumor that half the world's arms sales go through Dubai airport, but nobody would think of bringing a gun off one of those planes. That's why Olivarez wouldn't let me bring my gun with me, even though he put me in a cargo flight stuffed with illegal drugs. I'm okay with that. It means that Preston's bodyguards won't be carrying either. I'm walking onto a level playing field.

I can see why Preston thinks he's safe here.

He's wrong, but it's an easy mistake to make.

I
DON'T BOTHER
with customs. Instead, I find one of the travelers' lounges. The man at the door makes a face at my coveralls, but I pay the fee with the black card, which eases his mind considerably.

My changing room includes a full-size shower and bath. The coveralls go into a trash bin. I open my bag and get to work. Twenty minutes later, I emerge freshly showered and shaved, wearing an Armani suit. Then I exit the terminal into the 120-degree heat.

I spot my contact immediately. It would be hard to miss her. She's over six feet tall in her heels, with masses of blond hair. She looks even better than her picture from the website.

She goes by Katya, but that's not her name. She's a prostitute.

Dubai is Islamic, but unlike, say, Saudi Arabia, it's not medieval. There are thousands of unattached men here, from the foreign
workers actually building all the new construction to the first-class passengers and tourists looking for temporary companionship. Most of them are willing to pay, and the authorities are willing to look the other way on all manner of sins—including the kind that Olivarez is importing. That means in the tourist and expat zones, anything goes.

Within reason, of course. I suspect not even Allah would help you if you tried to form a labor union or started bad-mouthing the sheikh. Report a rape to the police and you could be the one who ends up in jail, or, at best, on the next plane back home. And failure to pay your debts can still get you thrown in prison here. Again, it's all about keeping the money flowing, and anyone who might disrupt that is ejected from the country so fast they leave vapor trails.

That's why I'm keeping as low a profile as possible. I know that Preston will have people looking for me. I might have crippled his operations in the States, but I'm sure he still has all kinds of clever programs watching for my name or picture on a passport or a hotel registry.

So I figured out a way to sidestep the whole process. I went on the Net, Googled “Dubai escorts,” and found someone willing to offer me a full package—tour guide, girlfriend, transportation, and, included in her fee, her apartment near the Burj Khalifa.

Katya is one of a small army of professionals—mostly Russian—who live in Dubai and service the high-end clients. She linked to a page full of reviews that described her as professional, reliable, and discreet. Among many other, more colorful terms.

I tell myself I'm not interested in her other talents as long as she provides cover and a place to stay. Then she greets me like a boyfriend gone for too long, with both arms wrapped around me and a long, lingering kiss.

There's disapproval from some of the men and women nearby, envy from others.

Screw them. I'm a rich foreigner, and this is how I blend in.

I let her guide me to her car. We have trouble finding it at first. Only in Dubai would a Mercedes SLK be as generic as a Toyota Corolla. Katya presses the button on her keys until one of the cars finally beeps and flashes its lights. I throw my bag in the trunk, and we blast off for a week of impossibly expensive decadence.

I'm only partially faking it when I grin like an idiot.

W
E GET TO
Katya's apartment, and she handles the exchange of cash like everything else: professionally and elegantly. The envelope I hand her disappears in an instant.

That's the only moment I get any anxiety from her. She had to clear her schedule for a week to accommodate me, and there's always a chance that a john will try to rip her off, or worse. She has been lucky so far—she's twenty-three—and she's smart. But lurking in her mind, always, are the possibilities of what could happen to her, what she has seen happen to other women in her line of work. Her smile never wavers, but her mind turns hard as stone. It's impressive. I've had people shoot at me, cut me, and try to beat me to death, but I don't think I'll ever be able to imagine what it takes to be a woman forced to trust a man.

Once that's over, however, she's back on familiar ground. She shows me around the apartment—beautiful, tasteful, and impersonal, as devoid of any real identifying touches as a catalog photo. It pops into my head that she doesn't actually live here. This is just for work, and she splits the rent with another couple of escorts. Her real life is safely contained in a much smaller place a little farther from the tourist zone.

There's a computer, with high-speed Net access. Katya takes my bag and offers to unpack once she sees me zero in on the machine.

I sit down before the screen and go to the conference's official site. The main page comes up: FUTURETECH DUBAI—THE SILICON DESERT.

Someone in the sheikh's brain trust, or the sheikh himself, must have decided that Dubai needed its own version of Silicon Valley, and this is their attempt to jump-start a digital economy. Aside from the speeches, Preston and the other up-and-coming CEOs will judge entries from hopeful start-ups. If they give their approval, it could mean millions of dollars in venture funding.

According to the schedule, Preston is supposed to give his big talk on Wednesday, two days from now. He's staying at the Burj Al Arab, away from the conference. But he'll have to make a few appearances in public, for photo ops. I can't imagine the conference would let him get away with ordering room service and watching pay-per-view.

I need to get over to the Burj and do recon. But first I need sleep. Jet lag has landed on me like a sack of dry cement.

Katya is rubbing my shoulders. I must be tired. I didn't even hear her, let alone sense her thoughts. She's had a lot of practice at being unobtrusive, fading into her surroundings until she's ready to be noticed. It's a survival skill.

“So what brings you to the conference?” she asks.

“You don't really want to know.”

She laughs. “You're right.”

She really doesn't. It's almost refreshing, after all the fear and anxiety, after all the caring and concern. I don't use those emotions much, and now they feel like atrophied muscles, sore from a sad, middle-aged return to the gym.

“I should sleep,” I tell her. I turn off the computer. She keeps kneading my back, then her lips are at my ear.

“You're not just paying for the room, you know,” she says. She doesn't care about me. I know it for a fact. This is her job. Her calm, professional indifference is like standing in front of an open refrigerator on a hot summer day.

I can't help but think of Kelsey, who's still in a hospital bed right now.

It doesn't stop me.

C
AMOUFLAGE.

After sixteen hours of sleep—with some exercise in between—I'm ready to hit the conference. Which means looking the part.

I unroll a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from my bag. They're brand-new, but the kind of expensive that looks cheap from a distance. Frayed and faded. Wearing them, I'm indistinguishable from every other brogrammer here for his shot at greatness.

Katya's seated at the breakfast nook in a robe, drinking a cup of black coffee so slowly that it seems she's absorbing it by osmosis. She flares her nostrils in an elegant display of distaste when she sees me.

“I'm trying to fit in,” I say.

“You succeed,” she says, and shifts her attention away. I think I've disappointed her.

I leave the condo and catch a ride to the conference in a hired car. In this part of the city, it looks like the future showed up a century too soon. Everything shines like polished chrome. Even the cement looks vacuumed. There's not a single person walking—just a steady stream of gleaming cars moving in clockwork precision.

When I get out of the car, the death-ray heat of the sun is cut by a strong wind. This is not a good sign. There was a warning earlier in the conference weather report about a shamal—a sandstorm with winds as high as fifty miles per hour.

I remember a shamal from Iraq. Air traffic was completely shut down. Being outside was like walking into a sandblaster. All you could do was sit tight and let it blow over. When it was gone, you discovered sand in crevices you didn't know you had.

But the relentlessly optimistic conference website assured me the winds will probably blow right past the tip of Dubai, out into the Gulf, so no one will be inconvenienced by a high-speed sandstorm.

I don't have any of the proper badges or cards to get me into FutureTech Dubai. Fortunately, the Burj Khalifa is also a tourist attraction—tallest building in the world, remember—and my prepaid ticket to the observation deck gets me past the red-scarfed security guards. Once I'm inside, it's fairly easy to wander away from the tour group and join a group of tech nerds clustered together. The elevator takes me a half mile into the sky, and the doors open into the conference center.

This is where the illusion of the future breaks down. Despite the water of the Persian Gulf visible through the windows, this could be an insurance convention in Reno. The space is filled with row after row of stalls, fronted by booth babes—models for hire wearing company logos on tight T-shirts. They draw in the men wearing dishdasha. Then the nerds get up from behind the tables and do their best to convince the Arabs that Bazoomercom or TwitWit will completely revolutionize cloud-based social-media integration. Or something.

Ordinarily, I'd find clients in a place like this. Dollar signs are dancing in the eyes of everyone here, and anyone willing to drop a few million on a tech start-up is usually my target demographic.

Instead, I blend into the background again. No one sees me. One guy walks into me and bounces off. He looks a little confused and annoyed, as if he tripped over a power cord. But he never says a word, just keeps going, with barely a pause.

I cruise the exhibition hall for almost an hour before a buzz of
excitement rises. I feel the shift in the mood as everyone turns and looks at a group that's just arrived at the main entrance.