The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (5 page)

Host
: "So what's burning, over there?"

Foreman
: "Nothing. The fire's out."

Host
: "And the smoke we see?"

Foreman
: "Smoldering TV Guides."

Host
: "Thank you for that. Now, since you obviously know so much, would you be so kind as to tell us what else you know about the building, for the benefit of those newly visiting our fair city?"

Foreman
: "Like what, you mean statistics?"

Host
: "Sure. Whatever you feel is relevant. We don't want people to panic."

Foreman
: "Well, there's no need for that. And it's unlikely anyone died at that level, except maybe an unlucky janitor or two. Okay, then. The tower has an Armani hotel with a hundred-seventy-five rooms and a hundred-forty-four suites. There's also eight hundred luxury apartments, four pools, five restaurants, a spa and a ballroom. There's an observation deck on floor one-twenty-four, with the top floor going up to one-seventy. Then there's an observation deck in the top third, and a private club above that. Where the drone penetrated was a conference area with no current bookings, I've just been told. All the materials used in construction are fire resistant, along with around seventy thousand tons of steel rebar."

Host
: "Seventy. . .thousand
. . .tons?"

Foreman
: "That's right, just for the rebar. The core is concrete, unlike the World Trade Center. And we're talking about an unmanned drone, not a wide body jet with full fuel tanks. You would need a nuclear weapon to bring that building down."

Host
: "What if that's next? What if. . . this was just a trial run?"

Foreman
: "Why are you asking
me?
Because I have no idea who did this, or why."

Host
: "So you don't think it's an accident."

Foreman
: "I thought you didn't want people to panic."

Host
: "I don't. But I have to ask questions I believe people are thinking. Questions they want answers to."

Foreman
: "I think it'd be better to wait until the facts come in."

Host
: "Exactly. Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for your insight."

The station cut to a commercial for Coca-Cola. They watched it to the end before Doug hit the Off button, then retracted the TV up into its cabinet. "Sugar water is about all
we
export, anymore," Doug commented.

"That, and paranoia," David said.

Giving him a quizzical look, Doug finally suppressed a laugh. "Listen, I'll take the couch, you take the guest room. It's where I usually crash, unless
Nasheed
has another guest, in which case it's the Hyatt for me. With him usually picking up the tab, by the way."

"There's a Hyatt here?"

"Of course. There's probably a Days Inn, too. Although nowhere near Business Bay or
Jumeirah
Beach."

"What about
Nasheed's
room, when he's gone?"

"You kidding? I'm not jeopardizing his hospitality. He's got every electronic toy conceivable in that room, too, and I'm guessing one of them monitors what goes on in there. Like with his women."

"How many of those does he have?"

"Quite a few, but none that sleep over much, thank Allah."

David stood and stretched. "I think I may have met one of them. Japanese. Tall, slender, late twenties, with a little dragon tattoo on her ankle? She honed in on me right after you left. Saw me with you. Maybe. . . saw you with
Nasheed
?"

"Like I said, quite a few. Who knows."

He took a walking tour of
Nasheed's
framed photographs, tastefully displayed beneath track lighting along two walls. One was an aerial view of the still uncompleted Universe development below The World. "
Nasheed
thinking of buying a piece of the heavens while he's at it?" he asked. "Maybe one of the rays of the Sun?"

"He's mentioned it."

"You haven't really mentioned your own family situation yet, though."

Etherton coughed. "Yeah? Well, maybe because it's called divorce. And if you're wondering it has to do my coming over here for longer and longer stints, you're probably right." He paused. "Actually, we've been drifting quite a while. No rudder really, except our work." He sighed. “And, yes, she's still a lawyer. Divorce lawyer, ironically. But she didn't crucify me, though. Used kid gloves. Even called me a kid. A
child
, I mean. For doing this. And our son, Ronny? He took her side, too. Can't say I blame him. Guess I had it coming for a long time, what with all the administration overtime I put in on the mountain. Not to mention scope time, when I could."

David stopped in front of the gold framed close-up image of a sunspot, with hundreds of intricately whorled and contiguous convection cells staring up from the photosphere like dark eyes. "You were good," he said, recalling that even the smallest striations within such plasma cells measured a hundred kilometers across. "Enjoyed your work."

"And you didn't?"

David shrugged. "Oh, I did, most aspects of it. While it lasted.”

"You said you. . . reached bottom, though. How was that even possible? Clinical depression, do you mean?"

"I don't know. I couldn't see anything really wrong with my life."
Not in visible wavelengths, anyway.
"I could even have kept working, doing something, if not building spectrometers or spin-casting telescope mirrors." He paused. "Do you remember April Ellis?"

"Sure, she was on an imaging team I consulted at Keck, and had a hand in setting the parameters for the New Horizons survey on Kitt Peak, too. She's at LBT now, I heard. Smart lady."

"Pretty, too."

After a moment of silence, David turned to see that Doug's jaw had gone askew, his tongue moving along the backside of his upper teeth. Finally, he said, "She kinda resembles someone, now that I think of it. You don't. . . have romantic inclinations, do you?"

David returned to the couch, sat, and leaned forward. An odd sudden pressure behind his eyes. He closed them, then rubbed them, taking in and letting out a deep breath. "Not anymore."

"You'll get over your loss, David, trust me."

"I don't know what's wrong with me."

"Sure you do. Isn't it obvious? But hey, the past is past. Look on the bright side. You don't have money worries, like everyone else. Not with that patent you got. No debts, no. . ."

"No," he agreed, “I guess you're right.”

Perhaps sensing the need for a change of subject, Doug finally coaxed from him sentiments about the American dream shifting overseas while its source dissolved into illusion. He said something, in reply, about reaching for dwindling fruit, as though in the Garden of Eden. What he didn't say was what he couldn't. Like how much was really left for someone who'd saved both money and time all his adult life, out of fear. Indicating the photographs he'd been examining, Doug changed the subject again by asking, "Did you notice that there's no photos of his family over there? His mother, his father?"

"No, I didn't."

"Oh, right. I forgot. Both your parents are. . ." Etherton paused. "I mean it's odd, isn't it, his fascination with solar astronomy? Like the sun is his father now, and he's on this elliptical orbit, feeling mostly distant, yet constantly pulled back by his father's influence."

"Right," David said. Remembering some of the nights he'd stared up at the sky, he felt a hint of the same inexplicable emptiness, the dwarfing vastness. He opened his mouth, hoping to explain the real reason for his retirement, his near suicide, but the words still weren't there yet. The silence was eclipsed by an explosion in the distance, which sounded like the rumble of thunder, except there were no clouds anymore, he knew. It was a clear night, full of relatively close or otherwise high magnitude stars.

Etherton rushed to the window to confirm the worst. "Oh my God," he said, staring, "it really
wasn't
an accident, after all."

At dawn, as they both stared up at the overhead television monitor from
Nasheed's
entertainment pit, the screen displayed a close-up of the smoke still rising from a hole blasted out across three floors in the side of the new Dynamic Tower. Panic had replaced fury and chagrin, as the reported body count stood at seven, although judging by the public flight away from city center, a tourist might have guessed seven
hundred
. When a news anchor claimed one of the damaged floors was still turning, David confirmed the assertion from the window, utilizing the tripod-mounted refractor still positioned there. Only a thin wisp of gray vapor still rose from the
Burj
Khalifa
, he saw, but the Dynamic Tower was partly obscured by it, and any residents within two miles of the building were either on the move, stuck in traffic, or long gone.

"Sure enough, the Pentagon's disavowing any complicity," Doug announced after flipping through channels with his hand held remote. "President is due for a comment shortly, once the CIA has prepped him."

David noticed that a beer had somehow magically sprouted from Doug's free hand. "Or dressed him, you mean," he said.

"What's that?"

Turning back to the scope, David looked through the eyepiece once more. There were no survivors waving rags from broken windows, or preparing to jump from the roof. No flames that he could see, either. The upper floor of those three affected had once again rotated away from the other two, and smoke had begun to dissipate, spreading out across a wider area. Despite himself, he tracked the scope to the left, and then to the right, half expecting to witness another pilotless drone vectoring in on another landmark.

"Why are we doing this?" he asked.

"We?"
Doug said. "I don't think it's us, my friend. Although Al-Jazeera certainly does."

"Who, then? And why?"

"If I had to guess? Somebody who's got it in for billionaires having fun while the rest of the world can't pay their mortgages or fill their gas tanks."

"Not al-Qaeda?"

"With stolen U.S. military craft? Not likely. Dubai is a free zone used by a lot of western corporations, it's true, but al-Qaeda also gets financed by money coming through here, too."

"What about revenge from someone State-side?"

"For nine-eleven, or those cargo bombs that shipped though Dubai? That's a stretch. Could figure into it, though, as motive. Along with anger about oil prices and partnerships. What I can't figure is means and opportunity. How would an American terrorist cell, if there is such a thing operating here. . . how could they pull
this
off? And where would they be staging this from? The Empty Quarter? Because--"

"Are we safe here?" David interrupted.

Doug hit the Mute button on his remote. "Say again."

"Shouldn't we be leaving too?"

At this, Doug tilted the beer to his lips, considering it. "No, we'll be okay," he concluded. "There's at least two dozen more strategic hits to be made, if they have the birds to do it. Besides, it's gridlock out there."

"But it's Friday. I thought. . ."

"What? Hey, all bets are off, buddy, if you're going to believe what they're saying on TV."

"What
are
they saying?"

"Well, you said it, too. Sunday it'll be nine-eleven again. Only Sheik Mohammed isn't talking. He's got some military adviser as a mouthpiece."

Host
: "Please, your Excellency, do you wish to ask anything of the American President?"

Emir
: "Only that he end this outrage immediately!"

Host
: "Thank you, your Excellency. And what would you ask of the citizens of Dubai?"

Emir
: "That they return to their homes and their lives, Allah be praised."

Host
: "Thank you. Is there any other matter you wish to discuss?"

An amateur video of the Dynamic Tower crash was shown next, taken from a distance of about a mile and a half. Chillingly, the nearly silent drone aircraft had first drawn the attention of the cam-toting tourist when it appeared almost directly overhead, side-lit by reflection and flying right past the
Burj
Khalifa
, over the fronting lake, at a height of roughly four hundred feet. Imaging on the night video became less sharp as a zoom lens was deployed in tracking the drone to its target. But then, upon impact, a pressure wave could be seen rippling outward across the buckling glass of the illuminated building an instant before a fireball filled the frame with its exploded shower of debris. A moment later the sound wave arrived at the camera, echoing like a sonic boom.

"Holy horsehead," Doug said.

Next up, the building's own video surveillance camera revealed the same impact, but with clearer and more dramatic focus, the angle taken from the roof, aiming down to the courtyard below. The nose of the drone was shown penetrating the glass in slow motion, deforming it and the framing steel around it an instant before detonation. Then even the camera shook with the blast, and went dark.