——————— ◆ ———————
Burj al-Arab Hotel
Dubai
The United Arab Emirates
The Arabian Gulf
Ava headed straight for the eighteenth floor.
Turning left out of the elaborately etched gold lift doors, she passed through a small antechamber with four Greek-inspired columns, entered the circular spa area, and headed up a deep red back staircase to its upper level.
Ahead of her, across a short hallway, she immediately spotted what she was looking for.
The two men standing outside a pair of heavy dark wooden double doors were the only clue she needed. As were the two restless chained Doberman Pinschers beside them—not a common sight in a culture where dogs were not welcomed.
The men were wearing the regulation dark suits with coiled-wire earpieces disappearing under their crisp white collars, and handguns tucked obtrusively into under-arm holsters. She knew firearms were illegal in Dubai—but like everywhere in the Middle East, as she had learnt over the years, influential people were afforded a certain leeway.
Arriving in front of them, she held up the mini-disc. Without a word of acknowledgement, they opened the doors wide enough for her to slip through.
She was in the library—a long snug rectangular room, stretching away from her. It gleamed with marble and polished wood—the sides broken up by glistening black columns. The whole effect was unmistakably ancient Egyptian, with blues and golds adorning the columns, walls, alcoves, and bright carpets, and delicate golden metal screens separating the sections with pharaonic lotus motifs.
At the far end she could see an adjoining billiards room, lifted straight from a London gentlemen’s club, filled with deep armchairs and a full-size blue baize billiards table.
The library had obviously been chosen with security in mind. There were no windows in either room, and the only illumination came from carefully recessed lighting and tall sculptured lamps resting on wooden tables in the painted alcoves.
It would have been a tranquil enough scene, except for the pairs of security guards lining the walls every few yards. All were armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. Ava counted sixteen of them, forming a cordon around both rooms.
As she surveyed the scene, her eyes were pulled to the centre, where a space had been cleared, and a large shiny black plinth was set up.
But to her disappointment, there was nothing on it yet.
As the door closed behind her, she looked down at the heavy desk blocking her entry. On it, a sleek electronic disc reader was plugged into a large monitor whose flat-screen display was entirely black, aside from the outlines of the twelve signs of the zodiac arranged in a large circle.
The stocky guard standing behind the desk motioned for her to place her mini-disc in the reader. As she did, it whirred for a moment, then the sign for Leo on the screen changed from glowing dark red to bright green.
She noticed that nine of the other signs were also green, and looking around the room she counted the same number of men sitting reading books from the shelves lining the walls.
There was no conversation.
Taking her cue from the others, she headed over to one of the bookcases, and selected a large illustrated volume of Wilfred Thesiger’s 1940s photographs of the people and landscapes of Arabia’s Empty Quarter. Folding herself into an oversize upholstered chair, she opened the book, and waited.
——————— ◆ ———————
Burj al-Arab Hotel
Dubai
The United Arab Emirates
The Arabian Gulf
Upstairs on the twentieth floor, in his larger-than-average suite, Arkady Sergeyevitch Yevchenko was particularly pleased with life.
He had been furious when he heard Kimbaba and his men had been hit by a jack-knifing lorry. They had been on a flyover crossing the infamous Sheikh Zayed Road—the lethal ten-lane highway that ran like a treacherous artery through the city. The incident report, which Yevchenko had seen, noted that the vast decorated Indian lorry, despite being covered in protective bells, tassels, and multicoloured images of gods, cows, and elephants, had flipped, crushing Kimbaba’s car like plywood, before spitting it out and sending it hurtling over the side of the flyover.
Kimbaba and his entourage had been killed instantly.
Until that moment, Yevchenko had been working on putting together a unique business deal for the militiaman.
A lucrative Iranian opportunity.
Yevchenko was perfectly suited to such work. According to his business card, he was a lawyer. But anyone who engaged his services soon found he was not an ordinary one. He did not do wills and divorces and neighbour disputes. He was specialized—brokering and bringing people together for deals that required unique contacts and maximum discretion. As a result, his clients were not ordinary either.
Iranian work was not his only expertise—but years flying in and out of Dubai meant it was definitely one of his major strengths.
When Kimbaba told him he had the Ark of the Covenant, had shown it to him, and intimated he wanted to sell it to Tehran in a game of cat-and-mouse with the United Nations, Yevchenko had dropped everything to focus on the deal. Normally he would take two-and-a-half per cent for brokering. But this was special. He could smell the money from the first meeting, and Kimbaba had not batted an eyelid when he told him he wanted ten.
However, when no one came forward to claim the Ark after Kimbaba’s sudden and unexpected death, Yevchenko’s anger and frustration turned to excitement as he suddenly saw the chance to convert ten per cent into a hundred. He had provided Kimbaba with the house and guards to look after the Ark while it was in Dubai. So now, with Kimbaba gone, the Ark was his. And no one was any the wiser.
If he had thought about it earlier, he might even have engineered Kimbaba’s accident himself. But he had not. It had been sheer luck.
Now, as the Ark’s undisputed owner, he was not interested in continuing with the Iranian plan. That had been personal and political. With Kimbaba gone, he was free to turn it into a straight cash deal to the highest bidder. Clean. The way he liked it. He did not even need to bother getting the Iranians interested. That was difficult business at the best of times. Lucrative, yes, but only because it attracted a premium for keeping under the radar of the U.S. federal agencies. As there was no need for all that any more, he could just monetize the Ark the good old-fashioned way.
After a day spent on conference calls and in meetings, he had a list of twelve people who would offer him serious money for the Ark. The rest was easy. He just needed to get them to Dubai, have them bid against each other in an auction, then fly out a day later with a lot of new zeros in his main offshore account in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
So far, it had gone perfectly. All that now remained was to pick up some of the security guards from the library, go to the hotel’s strong room, collect the Ark, take it up to the library, and let the previewing begin.
He took a final sip of his coffee. Picking up his Audemars Piguet watch from the table, he slipped it over his wrist and under the cuff of his black silk shirt, and headed for the door.
He never got to it.
The door flew open, and seven men in black jumpsuits charged in.
Their stocky green-eyed leader was the first to reach Yevchenko. He caught him completely off guard, swinging his elbow viciously into the Russian’s surprised face, simultaneously driving his kneecap hard into his groin. Yevchenko dropped to the floor, yelling in pain as the blood spurted from his splintered nose.
But he recovered fast, burying the toecap of his right shoe hard into his attacker’s ankle. The green-eyed man was thrown off balance, stumbling backwards into a glass side-table, which cracked and smashed to the floor, along with the red crystal vase of orchids sitting on it.
Yevchenko tried to stand up, but the rest of the men were on him immediately, raining fists and boots down into the soft flesh of his face, abdomen, and groin.
Through the blows, Yevchenko became aware of a pair of hands holding him by his shirtfront, lifting his head and shoulders off the ground. He opened his swollen eyes to find himself staring into the cold expression of the man who had first attacked him.
“You know what I’ve come for.” He had a German accent. Although he was speaking calmly, Yevchenko could see from his glistening eyes that he was high on a rush of endorphins from the violence.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yevchenko growled. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”
Still holding the Russian by the shirt, the stocky man dragged him upright. As he did so, other pairs of hands grabbed Yevchenko from behind, pinning his arms behind his back.
The leader let go and walked to the large polished wooden dining table covered with the lawyer’s papers and mobile computing equipment. With one deft swipe, he sent it all crashing to the floor. Looking back over to his men, he nodded for them to lay Yevchenko on the table, then motioned for them to drag the table into the kitchen.
With so many pairs of hands holding him down, there was nothing Yevchenko could do to resist as the table was manoeuvred into his suite’s large kitchen, angled so his feet were by the stove.
He watched, wide eyed, as his glossy leather shoes and cashmere socks were pulled off, and one of the men began sloshing cooking oil over his exposed feet. Meanwhile, the green-eyed man walked to the stove and turned on the gas rings.
“Wait—you’ve got the wrong guy … ,” Yevchenko whispered, terror rising in his voice.
——————— ◆ ———————
Burj al-Arab Hotel
Dubai
The United Arab Emirates
The Arabian Gulf
Something was clearly wrong.
The two remaining buyers had arrived, and the flat screen zodiac display on the security desk now showed all twelve astrological signs glowing bright green.
Ava had lost count of the number of times she had checked her watch. It was 12:45 p.m., three-quarters of an hour after the preview was due to start, and there was still no sign of the Ark.
The other buyers were showing signs of impatience, with a number speaking anxiously into their mobile telephones.
Ava slipped the book she was reading back into the row of volumes behind her, and walked over to the security desk. “Is there a problem?” she asked the guard standing behind it, who was drumming his fingers quietly on the polished wooden surface.
He shook his head.
Sensing he had no more information than she did, Ava opened the heavy library doors. The two security guards and their Dobermans made no effort to stop her. Their orders clearly only covered who could enter the room.
Needing time to think, she headed back to the seventeenth floor, past the butler at his desk guarding access to the suites.
She walked down the left-hand aisle wrapping around the hotel’s great atrium—the tallest in the world, she had read in one of the brochures—before stopping to look down over the balcony’s wavy edge. The light was soft and almost dreamlike, and she felt much higher than seventeen floors up, until she realized, from looking at the honeycombed rainbow of differently coloured balconies beneath her, that every suite in the hotel was a duplex. She was therefore thirty-four floors up.
An idea forming, she headed for the bank of elevators. On arrival at the lower lobby and main entrance, she spotted a gold desk on either side of the atrium, each housed inside a giant gold shell. She knew from her arrival the previous night that they were not check-in desks. But even if they had been, she was aware that the staff behind them, like hotel staff the world over, would be under strict orders not to give out the type of information she wanted.
It had been one of the tests the Firm had set her class while going through MI6’s intelligence officers’ new entry course. She and her fellow trainees on the IONEC had been tasked to enter a hotel and find out the room number of a specified guest. On that occasion it had been a small hotel in Portsmouth, near the Firm’s training centre, and Ava had succeeded by jamming the revolving front doors so the lone receptionist left the counter long enough for Ava to check the hotel’s computer.
But this was a much more complicated proposition.
Thinking fast, she headed out of the main doors, and made straight for the unobtrusive white desk offering bellboy and valet parking services.
The midday sun was already hot, but a fine cooling spray was drifting off a large round fountain at the centre of the drop-off bay.
As she approached the desk, she caught the eye of an attendant in a long embroidered robe. Pulling out her wallet, she flashed her Baghdad museum identity card at him. It had an imposing looking crest, her photograph, and a few lines of Arabic writing. She was taking a gamble, praying the Filipino man could not read Arabic.
“UAE Federal Customs Authority,” she said, holding the card up so the man could see it.
He straightened up instantly with a small glint of fear in his eyes, reminding Ava of the power of government officials in the Middle East.
Without pausing, she continued. “A Russian guest recently arrived with a very large and heavy flight case. It would have taken at least four people to carry it.”
The attendant nodded. She could see from the vast number of suitcases being unloaded out of a recently arrived gas-guzzler that the hotel was used to dealing with travellers bringing back-breaking quantities of luggage. But she suspected the size and weight of the Ark must have been unusual—even for the kind of patron who visited the Burj al-Arab.
“Yes, ma’am,” he nodded, speaking hurriedly, running his eye expertly down the list on his desk, flipping several pages backwards. “Mr Arkady Yevchenko, room 2004.”
Ava passed him a twenty dirham note. She doubted officials from the Federal Customs Authority tipped hotel staff when on duty, but she figured he could probably use the money.
Heading back into the hotel, she made straight for the upper lobby and elevators, slipping into one just as it was closing.
Emerging on the twentieth floor, she could see straight ahead of her the butler at his circular desk guarding access to the floor’s suites. She waved her room key at the smartly dressed duty butler, and strode past him along the balcony of even-numbered rooms.
She had learned long ago that confidence was everything.
Arriving at the heavy door, she realized she need not have bothered thinking up an excuse for ringing Yevchenko’s bell.
The door was slightly ajar.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed it open, slipping quietly into the room.
It was chaos inside.
Furniture, lamps, and glassware lay smashed and scattered. There had evidently been a struggle—but the room had also been professionally ransacked. The fabric of the furniture had been slashed, the insides ripped out, and the contents of drawers and cupboards strewn all over the floor.
It was a war zone.
On high alert now, she listened intently, straining to hear if there was anyone still in the room.
She did not want any surprises—especially as she was unarmed.
She could hear nothing, and no one seemed to be around. From the faint lingering odour of cooking coming from the kitchen, she assumed Yevchenko’s butler had recently prepared him an early lunch before he left.
She looked through a sheaf of papers lying scattered on the floor, but it did not seem to contain anything of value—just travel arrangements and bills.
As she put them back, her eye was caught by a laptop which was hidden underneath the mess. She pressed the power button to boot it up, but froze instantly on hearing a faint sound coming from the kitchen.
Her heart beating faster, she stood up silently, and slowly edged closer to the kitchen doorway, stooping to pick up the heavy wooden leg of a smashed chair.
She held her breath, her back flat against the wall next to the open kitchen doorway.
She waited for several minutes, but there was no further sound.
As she began to relax, she heard it again, barely audible this time.
It was a low moan—little more than a sigh.
Steeling herself for a confrontation, she swung into the kitchen, the chair leg raised high.
Of all the things she was expecting to see, she was completely unprepared for the scene in front of her, and overwhelmed by the sudden urge to retch.
Putting a hand out to steady herself, she looked away, but the image was already burned into her mind.
The dining table had been dragged into the kitchen, and was pushed up close against the cooker. A man was lying on the table, with his feet and ankles stripped bare of shoes and socks, his lower legs resting on the cooker. The gas fire rings were now off, but they had clearly been on very recently.
She felt momentarily lightheaded as she looked at where his feet had once been. All that remained were blistered charred stumps.
Looking at the rest of the body, the man’s black silk shirt had been ripped open, and she could clearly make out the telltale ragged puncture marks and bruises to his chest from repeated injections directly into his heart.
The injuries were among the worst she had ever seen.
Bending down, she picked up a handful of the discarded medical phials littering the floor, and saw what they were—ephedrine and epinephrine.
She knew exactly what that meant.
Both substances were used by combatants the world over as stimulants to keep their bodies functioning when they had pushed themselves too far. The combination was, in effect, a cocktail of amphetamines and adrenaline. Whoever had done this to Yevchenko had been pumping him full of the alkaloid and hormone to revive him repeatedly for interrogation each time he passed out from the agony of the torture.
Steeling herself, she stepped towards Yevchenko and put her ear directly over his mouth.
His breathing was feeble and shallow, only just audible.
Putting the chair leg down on the floor, she took his wrist and felt for a pulse—it was weak and erratic. She doubted he would last much longer.
“Who did this to you?” she asked him gently.
She could see the effort on his face as he tried to reply. But the only sound that came out was a low wet rasping noise.
Holding her ear over his mouth to make out any words, she heard the unmistakeable sound of the front door clicking shut.
Looking about rapidly, she reached down and silently picked up the heavy chair leg again, before tucking herself in behind the far side of the tallboy fridge, where she would be invisible to anyone entering the room.
As she held her breath, a man stalked into the kitchen and made straight for Yevchenko. He was average height, slim, with close-cropped dark hair, dressed in a black jumpsuit and combat boots.
Pulling a Walther PPK from a hip pocket, he advanced towards the table, and held the end of the small steel barrel to the bridge of Yevchenko’s nose, directly between his eyes.
“Hello again, Arkady.” He spoke with an east London accent. “I hope you’ve had some time to think about your priorities. We need to go now, so it’s
do svidaniya, tovarishch
.”
Ava watched as the intruder slowly began to squeeze the trigger.
Moving with lightning speed, she leapt from behind the fridge and brought the finely turned but heavy column of wood down on the back of his head with all her force.
The intruder barely had time to register the blur of movement before the sickening crunching noise of wood on bone indicated it was all over. His finger relaxed on the trigger, and he sagged to the floor.
Bending down quickly, she went through his pockets. But they were empty apart from a spare clip of ammunition and a slim metal walkie-talkie.
There was nothing to identify him or the group he was with.
She looked back at the dying lawyer on the table. He was waxy and pale—his breathing now coming in shallow bursts.
She repeated her question. “Arkady, tell me—who did this to you?”
He did not respond. His bruised eyes were swollen and closed, and there was now a pale sheen of greenish sweat covering his face and chest.
She was running out of ideas, and time. She could see he would not last much longer.
Quickly filling a cup from the water cooler, she poured a few soothing dribbles onto his lips and put her ear close to his mouth again. “Arkady, tell me.”
Visibly summoning all his remaining strength, she distinctly heard the word “insurance”—but it was otherwise lost in his rattling breathing.
“What insurance?” she asked, more urgently. “What do you mean, Arkady?”
But she knew from the long slow wheeze escaping from his blue lips that there was no point.
He was dead.
She looked down at the motionless body—anger rising.
The Ark was proving to be a dangerous companion.
First the murder of the monk at Aksum. Then Kimbaba’s attempt on her and Ferguson’s lives. And now the brutal murder of Yevchenko.
The usual dangers in archaeology were exposure to the elements, unclean water and, occasionally, mould or bacteria in long-sealed rooms, caves, or tombs. But so far the injuries surrounding the Ark were all very manmade, and the body count was mounting.
She turned with a start as the intruder’s walkie-talkie on the floor crackled into life. Against a whine of background engine noise, she could hear the command, “Exfil in two minutes.”
So the rest of the team were still around.
She did not have much time.
Thinking quickly, she knew they could not have gone far.
Just as importantly, she had to assume that if they were leaving, it was because they already had the Ark.
She forced herself to focus.
The noise on the walkie-talkie had been engine noise. She was sure of that. Very loud engine noise. But not a car—it was bigger. More like an aeroplane.
She struggled to think.
There was no airport nearby.
Then it hit her.
Of course.
She spurred herself into action.
Grabbing the walkie-talkie, she sprinted for the door, then out onto the twentieth floor.
The route she had taken earlier that morning to the helipad was complex, via the ballroom on the twenty-seventh floor.
She had no time for that now. She would have to go directly. And she could not afford to lose valuable seconds waiting for an elevator.
Throwing herself up the back stairs, she sprinted up to the twenty-eighth floor.
Her lungs were burning as she burst through the sliding doors at the top.
Exiting into the harsh sunlight, she found herself on a platform built out six hundred feet above the sea. There was a strong wind, and the view down to the blue water below caused her to sway for a moment, unnerved by the height of the sheer drop.
Squinting against the wind, she could see a set of white-painted metal steps leading up to the helipad about twenty yards away.
Resting on it was the source of the noise—the unmistakable shape of a Bell Huey helicopter, its rotors whining deafeningly. It was painted a dull green with no identifying markings, but was unambiguously military.
She counted two men in the chopper and four loading a large matt silver flight case into its cabin. All were dressed in black jumpsuits and boots identical to those worn by the man who had come back to execute Yevchenko.
As the men climbed aboard and the helicopter’s side door slid shut, she sprinted for the steps.
Flinging herself up the stairs, she arrived on the circular platform just as the helicopter was lifting into the air.
Shielding herself from the rotor wash as the blades angrily sliced the air, she peered into the helicopter’s windows, trying to catch a glimpse of the men’s faces inside, hoping it would give a clue to their identity.