Exit Wound (7 page)

18

Mall of the Emirates
1450 hrs

The mall felt like Monaco with a roof on, only bigger. All the usual international suspects were there, from a Carrefour hypermarket that took up half the ground floor to Asprey, Rolex and hundreds of others in between. To make Brit tourists feel at home, it even had an indoor funfair a few escalators up, complete with bumper cars and fluffy toys.

Most bizarre of all was the world’s biggest indoor ski slope. A huge steel cocoon towered over the car park and taxi drop-off point on the roof. Inside, I imagined, Arabs were skiing in
dishdash
es under Versace Puffa jackets, but I hadn’t got to see it yet. After the golf game we’d gone to the hotel for a quick shower, then straight out again. Ken and I were now busy keeping up with Dex as he bounced from one perfume shop to another.

We’d had a white Toyota behind us all the way from the hotel to the mall, a good twenty-minute drive. Not unusual on its own, as the mall was one of the city’s major venues. But it was three up, all Arab males in Western dress, and they’d stuck to us like glue. We’d soon see if we’d been pinged, and maybe by whom. It could be UAE internal security – or Spag’s people keeping tabs on us. Right now, it didn’t matter who. What did was confirming that we were targets and then deciding what to do about it.

‘Doesn’t
anyone
here sell Amouage Homage?’

‘They must do – it’s the most expensive perfume on the planet. Nick and me’ll go and ask at McDonald’s.’

I followed Red Ken as Dex disappeared into yet another shop. He shook his head. ‘A whole field of rose petals to produce a teardrop of the stuff. They make it in Oman. I bought Chrissie some and she went crazy about it. I think that’s where Dickhead got the idea. He’s trying to get Cinza back.’ Red Ken smiled at me. ‘Can you see the one with the checked shirt? He still about?’

We headed for the food court.

‘Nope. He could have gone with Dex.’

There had been a young guy, maybe mid-twenties, who hadn’t got past Surveillance 101. He was always getting in our eye-line. Either he was bad, or we just happened to share exactly the same shopping preferences.

‘We’ll soon find out, Nick. Not that it’s going to make a difference to me. Fuck ’em, whoever they are.’ Red Ken led me past the falafel and vegetarian joints. ‘He really is soft in the head, that lad. You can’t just bribe women back – and don’t I know it.’

We reached the counter and ordered Big Macs. We didn’t check for anyone or anything yet. There was no need – we’d soon see if someone had a trigger on us once we sat down. Besides, we didn’t even know for sure we were being followed. And if we were, we didn’t want to look aware.

‘Dex want anything?’

‘He won’t touch any of this shite. I’ll get him an orange juice.’

We carried our trays to the seating area and sat each side of the table to maximize our view of the hall. Three women on the next table were
burqa
’d up in black gear. Each time one of them brought food to her mouth she had to lift the beak and try to post it through without leaving a blob of mayonnaise on the flap of the letterbox.

Beyond them, a table-load of local kids were busier texting than eating. On our other side, two overweight American lads with goatee beards, ball caps and overalls emblazoned with an energy company logo and the Stars and Stripes were making up for them, in supersize.

Women of all races paraded around us in short, strapless dresses. A couple of hours down the road in Saudi it would have been a capital offence. There were a lot of girls down that way with mayo stains round their letterboxes.

I reached for my Pepsi. No Coke here: most of the Middle East seemed to think Coca-Cola was a Jewish company.

As on the aircraft, there was no talking shop while we were around others. ‘What made you get out of here so quick, mate?’ I was thinking about the abandoned vehicle. ‘Just that Chrissie didn’t like it?’

He took the top off his drink and rejected the straw I offered. ‘The whole expat lifestyle. The way they treat these lads—’ He nodded in the direction of the Filipinos sweating at a stir-fry counter. ‘Me and Chrissie, we’re from shite. Our dads were both down the pit. They had principles. Socialism rubs off, you know. Seeing these people treated so badly pissed us both off. She couldn’t handle it.’

He took a bite out of his burger. ‘I said we’d bin it – but maybe just another month or two to get some money together.’ He over-concentrated on the tabletop all of a sudden. ‘She had a breakdown. It wasn’t just the being here . . . it was a culmination of years of me fucking off working. I was just too engrossed in what I was doing to see it coming.’

He raised his paper napkin to his eye, trying to persuade me that he had a bit of grit in it. ‘We left, but it was too late. She binned me. I should have listened to her. I fucked up, mate – forgot there was another life, something more important.’

He looked at his Big Mac and put it down. He’d lost the taste for it. He sat back with his arms on the table, his hands squeezed together. ‘I kidded myself I was doing all my soldiering for them. Creating a family, putting together a nest egg. But guess what? It was all for me, because I loved it. Now it’s make or break. My last job – and this time it’s for Chrissie. No more bullshit. I’m going to get some of the good stuff and give it the big fuck-off to everyone else – including you and Dex. It’s end-ex for me.’

Red Ken couldn’t pull off the grit act any more. Tears welled in both eyes. ‘From now on, it’s going to be about her. I’ll go down on my hands and knees at the christening if I have to, if it means she’ll have me back.’

I watched a tear dribble down the crags in his cheek. ‘Is that why you left everything to the Fat Controller?’

He sort of nodded, and at the same time waved his finger in front of his face. He was right: no work talk. ‘Believe me, son, I’m desperate. Without Chrissie, I’ve got nothing. I want her back. I want my kids and grandkids to have a good life. Not a shite one like I’ve given to Chrissie. If this doesn’t work . . .’

I cut away from it a moment to scan for Checked Shirt. ‘What about Dex? Why’s he taking the risk?’

‘Because he’s soft in the head, that’s why. You know him. One minute he’s here for the fucking juice, and the next – who knows? He’s been talking about moving to Scotland and buying a castle, but that was last week.’

Red Ken looked over my shoulder and nodded. I turned to see Dex empty-handed.

‘For all that, I’m glad he’s here. You too, Nick. I just wish Tenny was too, you know?’

Dex bounced in and sat next to me. He studied Red Ken’s face. ‘You OK, chap? Nick here been stealing your chips?’

Red Ken wiped his eyes. ‘No, you soft twat – just the normal thing.’

‘Ah.’ Dex pointed at the carton full of juice. ‘That mine?’

He gulped it back with relish, then leant forward with that ever-bright smile. ‘Guess what? We’re being followed. The checked shirt stayed with me. So, what now?’

Red Ken took a swig of his drink. ‘Fuck ’em. We’re just shopping, aren’t we? So we carry on doing what we’re here to do – show Nick what he needs to see, and carry on as planned. We finish our drinks, get on with our job, and keep our eyes skinned.’

19

Dex had some bits of orange caught in his straw and was trying to blow them out instead of just taking the top off and drinking normally.

Red Ken thumped his watch. ‘We need to go up to the car park.’

Dex gave it some thought. ‘I’ll bring it with – and I see Checked Shirt. He’s sitting to my half-right, outside Starbucks. He’s talking with a white shirt, long-sleeved, buttoned-up, jeans. It’s a trigger.’

We got up and started walking, ignoring the two of them. We passed through the funfair, where Indian and Filipina girls stared out from behind the stalls. They looked as though they were in prison.

It’s best not to look for followers while on the move. It’s too obvious and not necessary. The best way is to check things out once you go static. Who was there the last time you stopped? Who just fucked up by jumping into a shop doorway?

We came to a massive floor-to-ceiling glass screen, the other side of which was Switzerland. Acres of blindingly white snow glittered under a brilliant blue sky. Chairlifts carried skiers over snowmen and tall fir trees. You could almost smell the
glühwein
. We stopped and had a quick look at all the Arab lads wrapped up in their hired cold-weather gear. As usual, the women in
burqa
s had drawn the short straw. They couldn’t get the skiwear on over their other clobber. Their breath hung around them in clouds as they waited at the bottom of the toboggan run for their kids to appear at warp speed. They must have been freezing.

Dex took another suck from his juice container. ‘They’re still with us, chaps. They really need to sharpen their skills.’

We turned to walk away from the skiers. He was right. The two of them were directly in our eye-line, trying to look normal as they window-shopped for women’s clothes.

We took the escalator to the roof and walked out into forty degrees of overwhelming heat. Like any other mall on the planet, a queue of people with shopping bags stretched back from the taxi rank. There must have been space in the car park for at least a thousand cars, but only a third of it was occupied.

‘Recession.’ Dex shook his head as well as his drink. ‘It’s everywhere.’

The sun was low in the sky. Red Ken checked his watch. ‘Ten past six. Last light in about fifty.’

We moved into the shade of the ski slope. It ran up the side of the mall and above the car park to dominate the skyline. We admired all the massed ranks of sparkling 4x4s and Lamborghinis, and tried to look like we were waiting for someone to join us.

Neither of the shirts made an appearance. Red Ken pulled out his cigarettes and I admired the scenery. ‘They can’t be that shite. We’re up here for one of two reasons. To get a taxi, or meet someone with a vehicle. Bet they’ve gone back to the Toyota. They’ll be staking out the exit.’ I turned to the click of a disposable lighter and was met with a cloud of smoke.

‘Good. Fuck ’em. Let them wait. Dex, you keep an eye out for them. Nick, look out there.’

From our vantage-point, the area round the mall was littered with patches of barren ground and half-finished buildings draped in scaffolding. Over the constant background rumble of traffic came the rhythmic thud of pile drivers. Little ant-like bodies scurried about in yellow or blue hard hats. It must have been a fucker labouring in Gas Mark Ten.

The whole city was criss-crossed with highways that looked like giant concrete flumes. A monorail was also under construction. We had seen the elevated strip of concrete heading towards the city centre from the airport. The partly built stations looked like golden cocoons wrapped around the track. Red Ken, of course, thought they were shite. I quite liked them.

We could see all the way to the sea. The Burj Al-Arab hotel looked like a giant sail a couple of K away on the coast. The needle-like Burj Dubai was well on its way to being the world’s tallest building. In all directions, the rows of dominoes gleamed in the sun. But we weren’t there for the view.

He leant against one of the concrete supports for the ski slope and sucked hard on his B&H. ‘Dunes. You got it?’

The hotel, like a black glass pyramid, would have looked at home in Las Vegas.

‘Got that.’

‘OK, that’s your axis. Go half right. Five hundred.’ He was using a fire-control order format to get me onto the target. I looked half right, scanning the five-hundred area.

‘You’ve got a ten-storey building with an all-black ground floor. Seen?’

‘Seen.’ The boring ten-storey cube’s shop fronts were all black marble.

‘OK, go left of the building, into the wasteground, at about a K. You’ve got a one-storey flat-concrete-roofed building – rectangular, with a wall surrounding it. Seen?’

‘Seen.’

‘That’s the target. The surrounding wall is five metres away from the building. The wall is three metres high and the wall gate and building shutters are facing us. All the damage we do must be within the wall, inside the compound. That way it’ll be months, maybe years, before anyone gets to see our handiwork. And when they do, they won’t even know what was in the building. The outside wall will not be touched.’

I couldn’t see much detail from this distance but I had a visual on what Red Ken and Dex had described to me. We couldn’t do a walk-past to soak up more detail. No one walked in this city.

20

The perimeter gate, the only way in and out of the compound, directly faced a doorway set into rolled-steel shutters wide enough to admit a vehicle into the building. Either side of the shutters was a window, the one on the right larger than the one on the left. I couldn’t see from this distance, but Red Ken said they were iron-barred. He and Dex had been on-target during their last recce. There were no other entrances or exits.

There was no electricity or water running into the building. It had been left to decay for the past nine years, waiting for Saddam to defeat the Americans and then get down to a bit of DIY on his palace.

‘Nick, make a note of the main drag between us and the target. That’s our route out. Going left, as we look at it now, it takes us south-west out of the city, following the coast towards Abu Dhabi and the RV. Going right, we take the tunnel under the Creek into the old quarter, the gold souk and markets. You got it?’

‘Yep.’

The job was kicking off at last light tomorrow. For Red Ken and me, it would start in a block of public toilets in the old quarter. Dex was going to go local and steal a Tata truck in the same area they’d pinged with a crane attached, much like the ones Jewson’s used to deliver bricks and stuff in the UK.

Red Ken and I would keep out of sight as we moved to the target. We’d lift the crates, load them onto the truck, then take a swift detour to Dex’s GMC Suburban, parked about six K west of the target. After transferring our little insurance policy, we’d take the Tata and the Suburban back to the airport before catching up with Spag at the strip.

Bingo.

It was perfectly simple. Too fucking simple by half.

I reckoned it was time for one or two awkward questions. ‘So, these Gucci gold doors have just been sitting there since the second Gulf War – and nobody knows?’

‘They will when the developers move in. Five years ago this was the Empty Quarter. Now look at it.’

A flood of tourists spilt out of the mall, designer bags bulging with stuff they could have bought back home, and probably for less.

‘Spag said he found out about the doors just after the war.’

‘Yeah, he told me.’

‘Did he also tell you he found the lads who made them?’

‘No, he fucked me off on questions. Told me to ask you.’

Red Ken nearly choked on his next mouthful of nicotine. ‘The guy in charge locked the crates in that building for Saddam to collect as soon as he’d sorted out the Americans.’

‘And the others?’

‘Two of them, apparently. Spag reckons he binned them – permanently – in case they confused the gold with their pension scheme.’

‘Then Spag binned him, and it’s been sitting there ever since?’

Red Ken nodded. ‘Just waiting for the right time.’

‘The right time for Spag, or for some other fucker?’

‘Who knows?’ He checked his watch again. ‘You OK, Nick? Seen enough?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We’ll follow the route backwards to the gold market. See where the weapons are and where Dex will lift the truck.’

We wandered over to the cab rank. Dex jumped into the front of the first available and greeted the driver like an old cricketing companion. We headed down the ramp to meet the white Toyota, three up.