the aura of holiness was somewhat diminished by a lingerie shop, its window filled with mannequins dressed in gauzy items you never would have seen on the streets of Persia, ancient or modern.
Sam forged onward through India until he finally spied the China Starbucks near a massive replica of a shipwrecked junk with a split hull and red sails. The ship appeared to have run aground by the food court.
Sharaf lurked at a table near the back, watching carefully. Sam almost didn’t recognize him at first because he was wearing gray slacks, a navy sport coat, and a button-down blue shirt, and everything was a few sizes too small. Not that Sam had room to criticize, since he was still wearing the oversized clothes borrowed from Sharaf’s son.
“Interesting place,” he remarked, taking a seat.
“Do not get comfortable. We will be heading straight back to Laleh’s car, but by a different route. I just had to make sure there was no surveillance.”
“Where’d you get the clothes?”
“They are Ali’s.”
“We make quite a pair. Good thing we’re not worried about standing out.”
“Would you have preferred I wore my police uniform?”
“It was a joke. Sorry.”
“Jokes were not what I was hoping for when I agreed to let you help me.”
“Then how about some information?”
“You have some?”
Sam told him first about what he had learned from his coworker Plevy about the phone Nanette had given him, with its GPS tracking device.
“Didn’t you say you turned it off for a while?”
“Then I switched it back on, just before the Russians showed up at the York.”
“No wonder Arzhanov panicked. He must have realized where you’d gone and felt like he had to act immediately. Anything else?”
He told Sharaf about how Nanette’s and Liffey’s careers had crossed paths in Moscow, and the press release that linked them both to RusSiberian Metals and Investment, the company providing cover for Rybakov in Dubai. He mentioned the dates of Nanette’s most recent trips to Moscow and Dubai, and her cooperation with police on the anti-counterfeiting task force.
“Now if we just knew what was going to happen on the fourteenth,” Sharaf said.
“What are Rybakov’s rackets?”
“The usual. Drugs, gambling, money laundering. Through real estate, of course, or this wouldn’t be Dubai. But being a former KGB man, his first love has always been porn and prostitution. The business of choice for ex-Soviet spies, or so I heard from an old hotel man in Bur Dubai. Years ago when there was still a Soviet Union, he did lots of business with Rybakov, renting him conference rooms for visiting Soviet commercial delegations. It was long before anyone had even heard of the words ‘Russian Mafia.’”
“Conference rooms? I thought Rybakov was KGB?”
“There was very little here for those kinds of people to do back then. No one from the West to spy on but a few oilmen, or the occasional banker. So Rybakov would help out the commercial attache in his spare time. Part of his cover, I suppose. And then, of course, the whole Soviet system collapsed. Poor fellows like the Tsar weren’t even getting their paychecks on time. And that was when my hotel friend first caught him stepping out of bounds. Rybakov rented a suite of rooms, supposedly for some visiting oil and gas engineers. But when my friend happened to drop by to make sure everything was to the customer’s satisfaction, he found a film crew and three naked women, with Rybakov directing.”
“He was making a porn movie?”
“He’d been doing it for weeks, apparently, in hotels all over town. It was the only way he could get paid. So by the time all those construction workers began flying in, the Tsar must have seen them as a ready-made market for the naked women he was procuring.”
“The perfect capitalist, adapting his product to the market.”
Sharaf nodded. Then he slowly stood up from his chair, looking a bit wobbly.
“Where to?” Sam asked. They began walking, easing back through China toward Persia.
“Our first stop is an address in Deira, to see our doorman and bouncer from the Palace Hotel. I know a route that will allow us to elude anyone in pursuit. Next stop, the Beacon of Light women’s center. The director returned my call while I was in prison. I finally reached her an hour ago, but when I asked about this Basma character from your friend’s datebook she refused to say anything over the phone. I decided to take it as a promising sign, if only because nothing else seems very promising right now. In fact, we may run out of time even before we run out of leads.”
“Monday the fourteenth, you mean?”
Sharaf nodded.
“It gives us less than forty-eight hours. And even that may be optimistic. The Minister, who has been backing me, is losing patience. I kept him from shutting me down only by convincing him that you are dead. Meaning we will have to hide from our friends as well as our enemies.”
“Dead? Wasn’t that a little extreme?”
“There were moments when I believed it. It is why I am pleased to see you in one piece, even if you did spend the night with my daughter.”
