The Sand Men (37 page)

‘It’s a few hundred yards past the main entrance to Dream Ranches, maybe a bit further. I think there’s a slip road.’

The steel and glass chopper swung back and forth over the highway like an immense dragonfly, but could not descend because of the power cables. Frustrated, it passed up and down the lanes, finally heading off.

She needed to call Colette and Betty, to warn them of what might happen if they stayed. Her thumb hovered over the speed-dial. They would ridicule her, blame her. She pocketed the phone instead.

She had no idea how long she walked. All she remembered was the noise of the passing traffic, dust and gravel, petrol fumes, the sound of the overhead blades approaching and receding.

The long curve of the neon-lit supermarket occupied the corner of a road she had never paid much attention to before. Displays of shiny crimson tomatoes and lurid green cucumbers stood in ranks before her.

She entered the store and looked about. Her heart was in her mouth as she walked to the ATM. There was a limit on the amount she could withdrew in a single day. She waited and watched while the machine read her Visa card. She punched in a request for the maximum withdrawal, and felt a pang of relief as the money slid into the tray.

The supermarket was as overlit as any garage forecourt. She felt sure someone was checking for her on a bank of TV screens, but there was only the cashier, watching an old Arabic film on his monitor. She studied the locals drifting through a nearby shopping arcade, seemingly without a care in the world, shopping for fruit and vegetables.

She tried to work out her next step, and was still staring at the shoppers indecisively as a blue and white ABC taxi slid to a stop beside her.

Lea instructed the driver to head for the airport and fell back into the seat, feeling the cool air wash over her. As she watched the traffic slide past, she wondered if there was any point in attempting to get out of the country. It was unlikely that she would clear airport security. Her name would already have been relayed to the police on some trumped-up charge by now. Why else would they have sent a helicopter into the compound?

She supposed it was possible to go up to Sharja and fly out from there, at least take a flight to Greece, Turkey, down to Africa even. There had to be a way. But they would stop her credit cards as soon as they realised that she was missing.

As the taxi approached Dubai International Airport she saw a line of squad cars waiting in the drop-off zone’s slip road with their lights off, and her nerve failed. ‘Take the nearest exit,’ she told the driver. ‘I’ve forgotten something.’

The silent driver was not being paid to question her instructions. He deftly turned away from the main highway as Lea checked her phone.

She found what she needed just outside a small town on the edge of the scrubland that led to the desert; a locally-owned garage that rented battered old cars.

Paying off the driver, she headed into the
AYMAN
garage and picked out a sand-covered Jeep with cracked plastic windows and no air-con, renting it with her Visa card. While the forms were being processed, she headed back to the washroom.

She stood looking at herself in the filthy mirror, wondering what she could do to make herself look more presentable. Throwing some cold water on her face, she tried to flatten her hair in place. She had no comb or makeup bag.

Facing terrorist charges and on the run from the police, that’ll be one for the CV
, she thought with bitter amusement.

She wondered what was happening back at Dream Ranches. Her imagination ran wild; troublemakers being rounded up in a single swoop, a frenzy of arrests, the burial of secrets before they tidied everything away and continued exactly as before.
We accept such corruptions as normal now
.
We’ve all been taught to assume the worst. I never thought it would involve the man I married.

It was possible, she supposed, that Cara and her friends might decide to act and survive as agitators, forever changing their IPs, hiding behind a thicket of fluctuating code, staying one step ahead. It
was
possible, wasn’t it? Or would the infinitely-resourced DWG always outpace them?

She tried not to think about what lay in the future. Speed was of the essence. Having decided to run, she had no choice but to go on. She could reach Sharja in a little over an hour. Cleaning the dirt from her jacket as best as she could she left the bathroom, and forced herself to stop thinking about Cara. Back at the beach house her daughter had seemed calm and confident, suddenly mature, yet she was really little more than a child.

Lea had wanted to sweep Cara up and crush her to her chest.
My husband, my daughter
. The sense of loss had barely begun to bite.

Chapter Forty-Seven

The Return

S
HE NEEDED TO
avoid the main freeway but was not sure of the route via the back-roads.

Many of the signs were only in Arabic. The lanes were abnormally busy because of the influx of tourists to the state. She kept the rental car just below the speed limit, and allowed herself the luxury of thinking that things were going to be all right, that Cara and the others might find safety, that the helicopter had been searching for someone else, that it was all some kind of absurdist nightmare that might yet dissolve and disappear.

A green and white signpost indicated the old road to Sharjah, so she took it. On this alternative route, the traffic was lighter and slower. Rusting trucks laden with wooden crates of vegetables, ironwork and coils of cable trundled back and forth through the night.

As she reached the approach road to the airport, she saw more police cars waiting on the hard shoulder. She only just managed to turn off in time. The next town was little more than a dusty strip of neon-lit shops and a single road of unfinished houses, their first floors consisting of concrete pillars and ferruled rods. She pulled into the forecourt of an electrical store and disturbed some local men watching a football match on an immense lurid screen. The brilliant pitch turned everyone’s faces green. Nobody bothered to look at her.

She bought things she had forgotten in the darkened compound; soap, a T-shirt, cigarettes. The shopkeeper gave her directions to a hotel that was owned by his cousin.

When she arrived outside the Desert Orchid Lodge, Lea saw that it was little more than an ordinary house with a piece of yellow plastic strip-lighting nailed to the front, the electricity supplied by lethal-looking loops of untethered cable.

The owner offered her what appeared to be his only guest room, on the ground floor, behind a café that had been constructed by removing a wall and adding a corrugated plastic roof.

The room had no air-conditioning and no curtains, but at least there was hot water. The night passed in a sweat of horrific dreams. The men in the vault, the bodies in the creek.

The next morning, she was awoken at dawn by the blazing golden slant of the sun. She showered and dressed, then went outside for a cigarette. On the dusty forecourt the temperature was already in the high thirties. She turned on her phone and found four missed calls from Roy. She had turned off her phone’s GPS. Hiding herself behind dark glasses, she looked at the vast emptiness of sky, the flat bare landscape, and saw only its disfiguring blankness.

There was nothing else for it. Despite the risk involved, she had to go back to Dubai. She had to find Cara and get her away somehow.

She checked out of her room, settling the bill in cash, and set off. As soon as she hit the freeway, she took a deep breath and called Roy.

‘Lea, where the hell are you? I thought you were going to be here. The Renault’s gone. What’s going on?’

‘I’m sorry—I ran out of petrol and had a terrible time getting back to the car, so I checked into a hotel and fell asleep.’ Lying was easy now.

‘Everything’s been kind of crazy here. Cara hasn’t turned up yet but I’ll find her. She can’t be far.’

I’ll make sure you never find her,
she thought. ‘I’m on my way home now. Is the power back on?’

‘Yeah, it’s been fixed. We think it was sabotaged. I had to come to work for a security meeting. Have you heard anything?’

‘No, nothing.’
Say anything to keep him from suspecting. Lie and lie again.

‘I have to attend a last-minute session with the directors. I’ll try to come home immediately afterwards. How long will it be before you get back?’

‘I don’t know. The traffic looks bad. Maybe an hour.’

‘Okay, I’ll be there soon after you. Don’t go anywhere else, okay?’

‘Of course not.’

Dubai was going to work. The resort was due to be officially opened an hour after sunset, and cars were streaming into the city. In the sidewalk cafés the women in
abayas
and
hijabs
and gold sandals and smart black suits were eating muffins and ordering hot chocolate. The men in sharp white
dishdashas
and
thobes
and Prada sunglasses were meeting on street corners, hailing taxis, heading into offices, and reading newspapers. There was nothing in the day’s news to indicate that there was anything unusual. Nothing about stolen children, bomb threats, communications blackouts, security alerts. Nothing about the raping and killing and disposing of bodies. Nothing about lies and bribes and infinite degrees of complicity and silence, nothing about smiles hiding fears, heads turned, eyes unseeing.

Lea felt dirty and exhausted. She was sure she smelled of sweat and fear. As she pulled off the freeway in the nondescript Jeep, she tried to imagine how she could confront Roy.

She entered via the tunnel once more, slightly surprised that the police had still failed to find it. They wouldn’t have been searching for a new way onto the compound. Right now they had more confounding problems.

The streets of Dream Ranches were as deserted as the canyons of the moon. Telecoms engineers were replacing the phone mast. The old pylon had been dragged away and disposed of. Only the splintered branches of a hibiscus bush attested to the removal.

It was strange to turn into the street and find everything normal. She alighted from the Jeep and dug out her keys. The rooms were cool and shadowed. There was no sign of Lastri or Roy.

The house felt marked now that she knew the children had gone and would not be coming back. There would be no more 11:00am coffee calls, no more pointless social visits, no more complacent amiability. There would only be blame and fear and pain.

The imported yellow tulips in the vase on the kitchen table had collapsed. The brackish smell of ullage filled the room. Lea emptied them into the bin and ran the vase under the tap.

She threw away a pile of magazines, washed some cups, then turned on the news. She half-hoped to see footage of a bombing campaign; blackened concrete, collapsed walls, punched-out windows, a broad scattering of glass shards on the emerald grass like a crystalline aurora, police cordons and workmen sweeping up debris. Instead she saw a piece about a jet-ski race held at Jumeira Beach, and a Versace fashion show attended by Sharon Stone.

The natural order of Dream World had already re-exerted itself.

Chapter Forty-Eight

The Nightmare

S
HE NEEDED TO
stay calm. Plugging in her iPod, she put on Lakme’s
The Pearl Fishers
and went out to the porch. The sprinkler system had ceased to function altogether now, and the lawn had turned brown. Digging out her last pack of Davidoffs, she sat on the deck, smoking.

As the aria came to an end and she finished her cigarette, she went inside and changed the track to Maria Callas singing as Elvira in
I Puritani.
Slowly she raised the volume until it reverberated throughout the villa. She allowed the sound to wash over her, until there was nothing else but the purity of the music. Gradually her fury ebbed, but the tension refused to leave her temples.

She became aware that there was someone standing outside the patio windows. Colette was slapping on the glass with the flat of her hand, flushed and angry.

‘What are you doing?’ she shouted as Lea opened the door. ‘You can hear that right across the neighbourhood.’

‘I’m sorry, Colette. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’ She went to the iPod dock and turned the music down. ‘Have you spoken to Norah?’

‘No—did you find Cara? The police told everyone to stay in their houses while the power was out. There was no answer from your house. They were worried.’ Judging by her unsteadiness in her voice, she had been drinking.

‘Cara will call me in her own time.’ She couldn’t let anyone know what she was about to do. ‘Are you and Ben okay?’

‘No,’ said Colette, shaking her head violently. ‘He had a fight with one of the nurses. She had to sedate him. He kept saying he should have done something. Do you have any idea what he means?’

‘Colette, he’s trying to tell you that you’re in danger. They will find our children and take them, and they will come for you.’

‘But why us? Why is this happening?’ Colette reminded her of the women who emerged from the rubble and dust of the World Trade Center:
Why us? Why do they hate us?

‘Because it’s our children who’ve been sabotaging the resort,’ she said. ‘I have to go.’

‘Wait, what did you do to them?’

‘I didn’t do anything.’ Lea tried to keep calmness in her voice. ‘But they won’t come back.’

‘They’re minors. They’re our responsibility.’

‘People go missing here. There’s nothing we can do.’

Colette was not listening. ‘I hope the police pick them up. They won’t detain them, they’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘We did something wrong,’ said Lea vaguely. ‘We ignored what was right in front of us.’

‘Why did you have to keep digging and pestering everyone?’ Colette all but shouted. ‘Just because you were bored and dissatisfied with your own life, you had to infect your daughter with the same irresponsible attitude. They’re only children.’