Layover in Dubai (28 page)

Ramesh, still grinning, now straightened to full height, arms akimbo. Then he muttered, “Jambuka”—jackal—just as a clanking sound announced that the personnel elevator was in motion, retreating from the thirty-first floor. Someone must have summoned it from below, cutting off Sam’s only escape route. Ramesh now knew he had mere minutes before others would be joining them. His grin disappeared and he lowered into a crouch, a wrestler ready to spring. Looking around him, he grabbed something from the floor—a crowbar, which he raised like a bludgeon.

He faked left, and before Sam could recover, Ramesh swung the crowbar in a wild arc. Sam raised an arm to fend off the blow as the hooked steel end tore through his jumpsuit and raked the meat of his upper arm, throwing him off balance. Ramesh’s charge took them both down in a violent tackle. The big man locked his arms around Sam’s knees as the crowbar clanged to the concrete.

Sam kicked for all he was worth. A boot heel connected with Ramesh’s chin, and there was a sharp
clack
like a dog snapping its teeth. Ramesh instinctively grabbed for his chin and Sam rolled free. Enraged, the big man bellowed as he sprang back to his feet. Sam ran toward the middle of the building. He then remembered belatedly that at the center there was an empty shaft for the elevators that had yet to be installed. He skidded to a halt, only managing to turn halfway before Ramesh plowed into him. They fell in a heap, the wind knocked out of Sam as Ramesh’s shoulder slammed his chest to the concrete slab. He heard the clank of the personnel elevator as Ramesh tightened his grip and rolled them over—once, then twice, a bear hug with a crushing weight against Sam’s chest and spine. He saw only a blur of concrete and of sky. They were headed for the empty shaft, and Ramesh seemed determined to take them both over the edge.

Sam flailed his arms, clutching for anything that might slow their progress. He felt sudden emptiness beneath his shoulders, then a sickening moment of weightlessness as excited shouts called out from behind. Someone grabbed his boots just as his upper body tumbled downward. His legs were hinged at the knees, with the dangling Ramesh still clinging to his torso, a millstone.

They were upside down now, the blood rushing to his head as Ramesh grunted and cried out, as if unable to comprehend why they weren’t falling free. Sam saw his helmet tumbling toward the ground like a rock down a well, then heard its faint clatter far below. Several people now held tightly to his ankles and boots on the floor above, although his legs were still bent at the knees, which ached as if at any moment they might come loose under the load of Ramesh, who was now screaming in rage.

Sam felt a steel rod rake his chest. Someone had taken a rebar and was poking from above, trying to pry apart the entwined bodies. Ramesh and he were like a pair of doomed acrobats, suspended from the precipice. Ramesh bellowed and flailed for the rebar with his right hand, but in gripping it his left hand slipped from Sam’s waist. Whoever was holding the rebar up above must have then let go, and Ramesh fell free with a great roar. Sam watched him drop like a giant from a beanstalk, the man still crying out in anger all the way to the bottom. The sound of his impact was like that of a huge, heavy sack, punctuated by the pop of his skull.

Sam looked upward, but all the faces gathered at the rim of the shaft were gazing past him to the bottom. Thank God no one had let go in all the excitement. They hauled him back up to the concrete floor.

Other workers were rushing forward, mouths open, just like all those people in Myrtle Beach when he was eleven. Except this time they indeed had a disaster on their hands, and you could see the horror in their eyes.

Vikram was one of the men with a death grip around his ankles.

“Come,” Vikram said. “You must come away from here. Some of his friends may still be around. We must take you to the ground. The slow way, my friend. By elevator.”

He stood on quivering legs, and after a few steps he stopped and heaved up his lunch onto the pale gray floor, a hot, chunky stream that stank of bile and fear. Vikram gently guided him to the elevator. Sam couldn’t bear to look out the side until they had reached the bottom. Nor did he look off to his right, where a handful of men with large flat shovels were wordlessly collecting what remained of Ramesh.

Someone with a depleted first-aid kit hastily cleaned and bandaged the slash across his arm. The foreman glanced at the torn sleeve and reminded Sam that he would have to pay if he wanted a new uniform.

Back at the camp that night a friend of Vikram’s undid the bandage and applied a wet cotton rag with a warm poultice of salt, turmeric, and lemon juice. Vikram assured him that this was the best possible remedy. The cut was painful but superficial.

“You should not shower tonight,” Vikram added.

“To keep the bandage dry?”

Vikram shook his head.

“Ramesh’s friends. They will be waiting. To their minds you have now killed two of them. Your legend as the white jackal will only grow. You should talk to Zafar. Perhaps he can move you to another camp.”

But Zafar was not in the blockhouse. Apparently he was out for the entire evening, and the sullen Charbak, whose English wasn’t good to begin with, didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned when Sam explained his situation.

“It is for Zafar to decide,” he said quietly, turning the page of a newspaper.

Sam washed up as well as he could at the outdoor spigot, escorted by several men from his room, who had taken up his cause after seeing firsthand the madness of Ramesh. Throughout it he was aware of a huddle of large fellows eyeing him from the entrance to the showers.

“This cannot continue,” Vikram muttered.

“I need to send a message after dinner,” Sam said. “Maybe some of you could walk with me to the camera store so I can use the Internet.”

He pooled his food with Vikram and two other men, and they shared a dinner of fish and okra, stir-fried in a large skillet. One of the others added some spices. It was his best meal in days.

“Let us go now to the camera store,” Vikram said. “We should not return until just before lights-out.”

There were no further messages from Plevy—not that Sam expected any—but he was thrilled to find a reply from Laleh, sweet in its concern. It made him vaguely hopeful, although for exactly what he couldn’t have said. He answered by briefly describing the day’s events and his current predicament.

“Please tell Ali,” he wrote, “Zafar is no help.”

He wondered if Nanette had posted any new alerts. Ansen’s password offered the only possibility of finding out, but he wasn’t at all surprised by the response.

Access denied. Password invalid
.

What
was
surprising was that he was then unable to exit the page. Either the dial-up connection was getting even slower or something else was happening. He tried various escapes, but nothing worked. Only a reboot would do the trick, and even that seemed slow in coming. He had to press the OFF button for several seconds before the machine finally gasped and the screen went blank. This, of course, sent the shopkeeper into a rage.

“No turn off! No turn off! You pay ten dirhams, please, for losing connection.”

He paid it, scowling, and left the store, but couldn’t shake the sense that he’d blundered. And even with his impromptu bodyguards, he felt like a marked man.

They got to the room with only a few minutes to spare. All was quiet. To no one’s surprise except Sam’s, Ramesh’s empty bed had already been filled by a replacement worker, who was tucking in the corners on a fresh set of sheets. Maybe the angry Bengalis would come up with a conspiracy theory for him as well.

Everyone settled in for the night. Vikram nodded reassuringly from his bunk. Then the lights went out. Sam lay awake for a while, startled by every noise and creak. He kept expecting the door to fly open, and Ramesh’s friends to barge in with belts and kitchen knives, or whatever else they used around here. But he was so exhausted that he soon gave way to the rhythms of the night, and was sleeping soundly. Not even the mice and the bugs that scampered across his legs in the dark could rouse him.

He came awake only when a strong hand clamped firmly and moistly onto his mouth. He kicked out with both legs, and struggled to raise himself, or cry out, but to no avail. From a rush of night air he knew that someone had opened the door, and in the distance he heard the sound of police sirens, moving closer. Some sort of scuffle was in progress around him, and there were angry voices. He kicked again in an absolute panic, and wrenched a hand free.

Then a rag came down across his nostrils, smelling strongly yet sweetly of chemicals, and within seconds he was fading from consciousness just as more hands were lifting him into the air. Next came a dreamlike sensation of falling, the air so thick that it arrested the speed of his plunge. The concrete floors of the building in the Marina area flashed past him, one by one. He tried to grab at them, but the fumes kept pushing him downward, with a host of shadows in pursuit.

His last thought was to wonder if he would ever reach the bottom.

The first thing Sharaf saw was the Minister, bending over his face to place a cool washcloth against the lump on his forehead. It stung. Sharaf winced.

“You’re conscious!”

“Where is everyone? What are you doing at the prison?”

“You’re at my villa, free and safe. For now, anyway.”

Sharaf tried to sit up but his head swam so he lay back on the pillow.

“I should phone the doctor, fetch him back here,” the Minister said. “He predicted you might soon be up and about. He advised that you stay put for a while.”

“How long have I been out?”

“Almost five hours.” He checked his watch. “Yes, five.”

The Minister wore an elegant and spotless
kandoura
. The room was like something in a top-notch hotel. Sharaf had never been in the man’s house—in fact, their only face-to-face meeting had occurred in an anteroom of Zabeel Palace—but he had seen it from the outside. Just about everyone in Dubai had, either in person or in a photograph. The huge, modernistic three-story villa, with its curved walls of stone and reflecting glass, stood out even among the other ostentatious homes in Jumeirah’s wealthiest corner.

Sharaf realized he was no longer wearing his prison garb. Someone had dressed him in a freshly laundered
kandoura
. The sheets were soft, lightly scented. He could easily have shut his eyes and slept all day, but too many questions were already on the prowl, and still more were lining up to join them as his life slowly regained focus.

“There was a riot,” he said, remembering. “The guards went crazy. I found a potential witness in there.”

“A riot? The warden only mentioned a small fight. You and some lifer with a red stripe.”

“The warden’s lying. He’s covering for his thugs.”

Sharaf gently removed the damp cloth from his forehead, then touched the tender lump at his hairline. It felt like a coconut was trying to force its way out of his skull. He again tried to sit up, and this time was able to prop against the headboard with minimal dizziness, although the lump throbbed violently.

“Easy, Sharaf. Easy.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

The Minister shrugged.

“You know how our hospitals are. The best that money can buy, but somehow never quite good enough when something bad happens. Why else would the royal family always seek treatment overseas anytime one of them sneezes?”

“The Iranian hospital isn’t so bad.”

“It’s first-rate. But considering some of the enemies you’ve made recently, well, I couldn’t be sure of your safety.”

“Ah, yes. Thank you.”

“You see? Your powers of judgment are still clouded. My personal physician predicted it. He is a German, trained in Boston, and he advises you to go slow for a while. I agree, of course. But I also have some advice.”

“And what would that be?”

“You must tell me where the American is. Assad is a lying fox, but I believe he knows something that you’ve been hiding from me.”

Sharaf had no way of knowing what the Minister might have heard or learned while he was unconscious, but as the fog continued to lift he tried to gauge what he might say without tripping himself up. Evasiveness was one approach, and his injury offered possible cover.

“What do you mean, sir? You’re confusing me.”

“Well, obviously no one has found him yet. But I’m guessing you have known all along where he is.”

“Look me in the eye, sir, because I am going to tell you the absolute truth.” To his surprise, the Minister actually leaned forward over the bed, gazing intently. “I haven’t the faintest idea where Mr. Keller might be. For all I know he might even have left the country.”

The beauty of it was that Sharaf hadn’t had to lie, not technically, which made his deception all the more convincing. He
didn’t
know where Keller was, not at the moment. The Minister eyed him a few seconds longer, then pronounced his judgment.

“I believe you. Up to now, I’ll admit, I wasn’t so sure. But just now, looking you in the eye, man to man, I am convinced you are being honest with me. But where do you think he has gone? Surely you must have an opinion?”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“I believe he is dead. Or will be soon. Either by the hand of his own people, or Assad’s.”

“And where does that leave your case?”

“It complicates it, of course. That would mean five murders so far, counting the woman in the desert and the two Russian thugs. And I still don’t know what the rest of them are up to.”

Unfortunately, Sharaf believed his dire assessment of Keller’s prospects might actually be true. Unless the young man had managed to cross the border or put to sea during the past few days, his hopes for survival were slim. It saddened him, because he liked the fellow. But perhaps Ali had been able to pull something together.